What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins

What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe          Audio Book:  8 hours, 15 mins     Hardback Book:  304 pages         

An in-depth but very reader friendly book on fish, from the way they are able to solve psychological tests faster than primates,  mind you,  to how they are able to make/use tools to achieve their goals much like humans trying to figure out the best way to accomplish a task.    The author has researched pretty much every current scientific testing going on and has visited sites and seen for himself the magnitude of what fish are capable of and sadly on the other side of that,  he has also visited locations that are farming fish for food as the public demand for fish on the menu rises and the oceans are so over harvested that he sees fish becoming an endangered species.     He likens fish farming tanks to the industrial farm buildings where chickens are kept in conditions where there are so many they can’t move around and they are fed steroids, etc. to pump them up to become supersized to get more meat out of each one.    Fish are undergoing like treatment.   Raised purely for food, the fishes needs are not taken into consideration, they are fed to become large and meaty and have no room to swim.   He talks about the technological equipment fishermen use now to find schools of fish and then go after them taking them all.   He likens it to bobbing for apples with both hands – the fish have no chance.    All of the oceans are being over-fished to the point of extinction.  Hence, the popularity of fish farms.  He describes how fish can show emotional attachments to the people they live with as pets.     One lady puts her hand in the tank and her fish will swim into the palm of her hand and stay there while she lovingly pets him.    Other people talk about how their fish will swim up to the glass when they are near the tank and not just when it is time for food, but, always.    Experiments have been done to show that fish do bond to their people.   Another person can come up to the tank and the fish won’t react but the person they bond with receives their utmost attention.   The book goes into how fish get a bad rap.   Because they aren’t cute and cuddly like puppies, they are thought to be cold with dead eyes and no expression as mammals do.   Birds and reptiles get more respect than fish who are thought to be floating emotionless creatures that do not even feel the hooks they get caught on.    This is not true as several studies point out.   He describes things done to fish in the name of science that are very cruel just to test whether fish do feel pain like putting burning stingers from sucker fish in their mouths.   Yes, they do feel pain as they have sensory parts on their bodies similar to humans that react to pain just like humans do, but, because their features stay the same people think they don’t feel anything but fish do cry out in pain when under water they just aren’t able to articulate audibly above water.   Balcombe also busts many other fallacies about fish, salmon do not all die after swimming upstream to spawn.   Some have been tracked by researchers to have returned to the ocean and living out their lives to ripe old ages for fish, though they never feel the urge to go through the spawning process again (Geez!  Who could blame them?)   Lots of amazing things to learn from this book about our fellow travelers on this planet.    It is an eye opener to a much maligned species.    Well done Jonathan Blacombe, terrific job on the research and the chronicling.