Nature breaks the news to behaviorists – and this is more important than it might seem – that fish don’t really think mirrors are uninvited strangers:
“There’s been a very long history of using a mirror as it’s just so handy,” says Robert Elwood, an animal-behaviour researcher at Queen’s University in Belfast, UK. Using a mirror radically simplifies aggression experiments, cutting down the number of animals required and providing the animal being observed with an ‘opponent’ perfectly matched in terms of size and weight.
But in a study just published in Animal Behaviour, Elwood and his team add to evidence that many mirror studies are flawed. The researchers looked at how convict cichlid fish (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) reacted both to mirrors and to real fish of their own species.
This species prefers to display their right side in aggression displays, which means that they end up alongside each other in a head-to-tail configuration. It is impossible for a fish to achieve this with their own reflection, but Elwood reasoned that fish faced with a mirror would attempt it, and flip from side to side as they tried to present an aggressive display. On the other hand, if the reflection did not trigger an aggressive reaction, the fish would not display such behaviour as much or as frequently.
What the researchers actually observed was the latter.
So… a lot of what we “know” about aggression might be all upside down and backwards.