Perhaps the biggest question is whether the processes underlying collaborative partner choice in humans, chimpanzees and trout are the result of common ancestry or an evolutionary convergence.
— Alex Vail
Coral trout are fast when chasing prey above the reefs of their habitat, but can’t pursue their quarry if it buries itself into a hard-to-reach reef crevice.
When this happens, the trout will team up with a snake-like moray eel to flush out the unfortunate fish in a remarkable piece of interspecies collaboration: either the eel takes the prey in the reef, or scares it back into the open so the trout can pounce.
Coral trout - along with close relative the roving coral grouper - will use gestures and signals to flag the location of prey to an eel, including head shakes and headstands that actually point the eel in the right direction. Field observations also suggested that they have a startling ability to assess when a situation needs a collaborator and to pick the right partner in the vicinity to get the best hunting results.
Now, for the first time, researchers at the University of Cambridge have cross-examined the collaborative capacities of these trout with the highly-intelligent chimpanzee using comparably similar experiments, and found that the fish perform as well - if not better - than humankind’s closest evolutionary relative when it comes to successful collaboration.
The trout even match chimpanzees in the ability to learn at speed which possible collaborator is the best candidate for the job. The study is published this week in the journal Current Biology.
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Image: Coral trout with modal of moray eel during experiment
Credit: Alex Vail
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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