Can a goldfish drive a robotic car on land? It sounds almost like a joke or Dr. Suess – but it’s genuine science carried out by sober researchers at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev in Beersheba. There’s even a video to prove it.

The researchers wanted to find out whether an animal’s inborn navigational abilities are universal or if they are they restricted to their home environments. Taking the notion to the extreme, the researchers designed a set of wheels under a goldfish tank with a camera system to record and translate the fish’s movements into forward and back and side to side directions to the wheels. By doing so, they discovered that a goldfish’s navigational ability overcomes its watery environment.

Their findings have just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioural Brain Research under the intriguing title “From fish out of water to new insights on navigation mechanisms in animals.” 

The researchers, led by doctoral student Shachar Givon in the life sciences department in BGU’s Faculty of Natural Science, included 

Matan Samina, a master’s of science degree student in the biomedical engineering department in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Prof. Ohad Ben Shahar of the computer sciences department and head of the School of Brain Sciences and Cognition, and Prof. Ronen Segev of the life sciences & biomedical engineering departments.

The team tested whether the fish was really navigating by placing a clearly visible target on the wall opposite the tank. After a few days of training, the fish navigated to the target – and they were able to do so even if they were interrupted in the middle by hitting a wall. They were also not fooled by false targets placed by the researchers.

“The study hints that navigational ability is universal rather than specific to the environment,” the team concluded. “Second, it shows that goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in. As anyone who has tried to learn how to ride a bike or to drive a car knows, it is challenging at first,” said Givon, 

“Navigation is a critical ability for animal survival and is important for food foraging, finding shelter, seeking mates and a variety of other behaviors,” the team wrote. “Given their fundamental role and universal function in the animal kingdom, it makes sense to explore whether space representation and navigation mechanisms are dependent on

the species, ecological system, brain structures or whether they share general and universal properties… Here we push this

idea to the limit by studying the navigation ability of a fish in a terrestrial environment. For this purpose, we trained goldfish to use a Fish-Operated Vehicle (FOV), a wheeled terrestrial platform that reacts to the fish’s movement characteristics, location and orientation in its water tank.”