This is a review of “What a Fish Knows” by Jonathan Balcombe (Scientific American/FSG, 2016, 288 pp., $27). The review originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, July 16-17, 2016.
Some groupers hunt cooperatively with other species, including moray eels and octopuses, an example of the surprising complexity of fish behavior. Photo by Leonard Low from Australia (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
The WWF’s statistics entailed the demise of trillions of individual fish, but that fact was not really a topic of discussion. Hardly anyone seemed concerned about the deaths of the fish themselves.
That kind of reaction is typical. We treat fish, even more than other vertebrates, almost purely as resources to be exploited. We catch all sorts of fish for the sport of it; we keep them in aquaria as ornaments; and, of course, we support commercial fisheries that haul them in by the boatload, to be eaten by people, pigs, chicken and other fish (on fish farms) and to be used in making cosmetics, linoleum, insecticides and paint. We do all this with hardly a thought for the individual fish. We might show a small measure of concern by fishing with barbless hooks, or burying the pet goldfish in the backyard instead of flushing it down the toilet, but we are likely to follow such actions by grilling up some salmon fillets, happily anticipating the intake of healthy omega-3 fatty acids.
With “What a Fish Knows,” Jonathan Balcombe, who works at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy, wants to change this exploitative attitude. Mr. Balcombe believes that fish are sentient beings with rich inner lives. He wants people to care about fish as individuals, to think of them much as we would a pet cat or dog. He wants us to place fish in “our circle of moral concern.”
This might sound like a fool’s errand. To most people, it probably seems doubtful that a fish has any sort of inner life, much less a rich one. But Mr. Balcombe builds a persuasive argument. Writing in a straightforward, somewhat breezy style, he makes his case partly through a compendium of fascinating anecdotes and scientific findings that illustrate the complexity and creativity of fish behavior. Dozens of startling revelations emerge, including playful marine fish riding bubbles to the top of an aquarium, elephantfish “singing” courtship duets using electric pulses, and parasite-picking cleaner fish engaging in convoluted “economic” interactions with their “clients.” The cleaner-client relationship, in particular, involves remarkable subtleties, such as client fish punishing cleaners who do shoddy work and cleaners treating first-time clients with special care, like a shopkeeper cultivating the business of a new customer.
An especially eye-opening discovery places certain fishes in exclusive company, behaviorally speaking. Some groupers hunt cooperatively with other fish (and, bizarrely, even with octopuses), dividing up tasks based on their different abilities, which is perhaps itself an indication of intelligence. Beyond this, however, at least two kinds of groupers recruit hunting partners by aiming their heads down in the direction of hidden prey—in other words, groupers communicate by pointing. Outside of humans, pointing has been verified only in great apes and ravens, which, Mr. Balcombe notes, are “known to be Einsteins of the animal world.”
Collectively these various descriptions give a strong sense that at least certain fishes act much more like birds and mammals than most of us appreciate. For some people, that might be reason enough to treat fish ethically. But Mr. Balcombe hinges his argument for fish welfare on a further assertion that is more difficult to prove—specifically, that fish are sentient in the sense of feeling pleasure and pain. If this is true, then hurting a fish is akin to hurting a person and is wrong for the same reason.
To back up this claim, Mr. Balcombe points to observations of fish acting in ways that suggest joy or suffering. For instance, on the pleasure side, many fish seek out physical strokes from other fish or even from humans, a choice that has no obvious utilitarian purpose. On the pain side, a key study showed that trout injected with vinegar become oblivious to objects they would normally avoid, which Mr. Balcombe interprets as the fish being distracted by pain.
A skeptic might say that such findings do not prove sentience; a fish might act as if it can feel pleasure or pain without having the corresponding conscious experience. Maybe fish are like sophisticated robots, capable of amazing feats and apparent emotion but without any real feeling. (The same, of course, might be said of dogs, monkeys or even of other people, for none of us can truly experience what another being feels.)
Mr. Balcombe perhaps places too much emphasis on the controversial issue of feeling pleasure and pain. One wonders if inclusion in “our circle of moral concern” has to be based on that ability. Might it be enough that a creature displays intricate, problem-solving behavior, as some fishes do? Can we at least put fish in an intermediate category reserved for beings that show obvious signs of complex cognition, and some indications of feeling pain and pleasure, even if these qualities seem less likely in them than in, say, a parrot or a dog? And have we avoided pondering the inner lives and welfare of fish in part because of our long, exploitative relationship with them?
Mr. Balcombe does not explicitly address these questions, but the fact that a reader might ask them and truly wonder about the answers indicates that his book has done its job. In the epilogue, Mr. Balcombe sets up a final, hopeful plea for the better treatment of fish by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It is a mark of the book’s effect that these words, which might initially have seemed presumptuous or even silly when applied to fish, come across as natural and relevant.
—Mr. de Queiroz is the author of “The Monkey’s Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life.”
The Monkey's Voyage 