The Emotional Lives of Fish: What Science Knows, and What We Ignore
They’ve always flickered behind glass at my local Petco, slipped through the ocean’s veins when I peer into the ocean, and, sadly, lie breathless on ice in the supermarket, waiting to be taken home and cooked.
To many, fish are the simplest of creatures, they don’t cry or scream, and they don’t have any expression we recognize.
But just because something doesn’t beg, doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel.
Science is catching up to what my intuition already knew: fish remember, fish learn, fish hurt, and they even feel.
Fish Have Brains, And Not Small Ones
Fish brains are smaller than mammal brains by volume, but not always by complexity.
Some fish navigate across vast distances, build intricate nests, recognize other fish by face, use tools even, and learn from one another. Don’t even get me started on Finding Nemo, that movie brought me to tears more than once.
Species like wrasses, groupers, cichlids, and even manta rays show signs of cognition once thought totally exclusive to birds or primates.
The cleaner wrasse can pass the mirror test, which is a measure of self-awareness some dogs don’t even pass. The archerfish calculates trajectory to shoot prey out of the air, and manta rays even show play behaviors and social bonding.
Contrary to myth, goldfish do not have 3-second memories. They can remember learned mazes, feeding times, social relationships, and predators, for weeks or even months. Some fish can even recognize the humans who feed them, probably their favorite humans if I had to guess.
The zebra fish has become a model for studying long-term memory formation, helping researchers understand memory loss in humans. They don’t just live moment to moment, they actually hold on.
Do Fish Feel Pain?
This is the question science danced around for decades, because to say yes…to say they suffer…is to ask what it means to eat suffering.
But here’s what we now know, fish have nociceptors, pain receptors like ours. They respond to injury with stress hormones, they actively learn to avoid pain and exhibit anxiety-like behaviors after trauma. They change feeding patterns when injured as well.
Pain isn’t just reflex to them, it’s processed and it changes them.
We don’t know if fish are conscious like we are, and most likely never will. To measure consciousness is a tricky thing in any animal or even people. Fish do have the hallmarks though, they learn, have an awareness of their surroundings, behavioral flexibility, social learning, and even anticipation. Some scientists argue for a “minimal self” in fish, a sense of agency and environmental responsiveness.
Others argue for sentience…the capacity to feel seems like enough for most people (myself included).
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Now comes the part we want to turn away from because it makes us all feel uncomfortable.
If fish feel pain, remember fear, if they know loss, even dimly…what does that mean for the way we fish?
We net them in the millions then let them asphyxiate in silence? What does it mean to eat a creature that remembers? I suppose we do it every time we eat a pig or a cow, but I’ve never stopped to think about fish the same way, and maybe that’s my fault.
Wild-caught fish often die by suffocation or being crushed in nets, sometimes ice baths while still conscious, or even bleeding out. I’m not a vegetarian, but my stomach is churning right now writing this.
Farmed fish are slaughtered en masse, sometimes without stunning, some are bled alive, while some die in systems too automated for mercy. There are no federal humane slaughter regulations for fish in the U.S….out of sight, out of mind.
They Arn’t Simple
We believed they were less because it made it easier.
They’re easier to eat, discard, farm and forget if I don’t have to think about the pain and the horrors we’ve inflicted on the oceans in the world and the billions of individual fish out there.
Fish are not simple though, they’re old and the architects of coral and memory. At some point, don’t forget, our ancestors were gilled. You started your life in your mother’s stomach submerged in fluid just like they did, you just left the water behind even though they didn’t.
They don’t need to cry out for it to be real and they don’t need to explain pain to us for it to exist. So the next time you see one flicker in a stream, or on a plate, or behind glass, remember, they’re alive. I don’t mean just in body either, but in thought, in fear, in a silence that doesn’t need words to matter.
