(Sorry if you already know all this, I'm just excited about this and wanna share with people reading through comments)

Its still unclear how much that reflects on fish broadly, and the researcher has actually expressed a belief that many animals could be much smarter than we have assumed because our experimental design was inadequate

In their research they chose the color red for the mark on the fish (the mirror test and some other tests used for assessing animal intelligence requires a mark be put on the animal)- the researcher chose red because the parasites they have exposure to are red (clearner wrasse are fish that work in complex social groups to clean parasites off larger fish. I'm not sure if they might be impacted by red parasites themseleves or if its the color they look for when cleaning other fish, or both).

When later tested with green they acted as if the mark wasn't there, so the researcher feels theres a chance that tests failed to adequately take into account the way animals experience the world and may not have designed tests in line with what information would be ecologically significant to them. Had he not thought carefully about it and picked another color the test would have shown exactly what people expected of fish- that theyre not that smart

This was a super cool video covering the progression of research https://youtu.be/s_aNH4hXz8I. For a long time his results were dismissed so he just kept writing papers and collecting more evidence

Who are they to judge me, they can't even do it

Well how about they show me how it's done before criticising

wow nemo's graphics really didn't age well

Mhm.

“These are defective, are they still under warranty?”