The most comprehensive cichlid blog on the Web!
To numerous fish hobbyists, the Web is a great tool. We have probably all performed online searches looking for information about different species, hardware, fish food, and everything else. As I recall, I first learned about today’s interviewee as my fish keeping journey was just getting started. In fact, I believe I learned about Rick Borstein while searching for fish profiles. Fast forward to the present and I reached out to him about doing an interview.
If you follow the blog, you’ve probably read posts about cichlid enrichment, something I am big proponent of. Fish enrichment considerations are a natural extension of a larger focus, fish welfare. As a hobbyist who is sensitive to my fishes’ wellbeing, fish welfare studies involving aquarium fish are of great interest to me. Earlier this year, I was searching for some articles on fish welfare and I came across the work of today’s interviewee.
I have mentioned before that I am not a big aquarium plant person. Yes, I do have a couple of tanks with live plants, but historically I have not had great success with such tanks. My lack of success has created enormous trepidation with them.
As such and though there are numerous planted aquarium experts in the hobby, I only knew one of them, prior to today’s interview. Now I get to say I know two!
While I am constantly on the lookout for new interviewees, there is one individual who’s always willing to be interviewed and for multiple reasons – Pam Chin. Perhaps the main reason is that she LOVES to discuss cichlids. She’s no stranger to the cichlid community. I could write multiple paragraphs to introduce Pam, but instead I would encourage you to read the previous three interviews I have done with her. That’s right, this is interview number four!
This is an interesting question. The short answer is yes, no, and maybe. Since anthropomorphizing is generally frowned upon by the scientific community, the subjectivity of the word “play” becomes more acute. If we assume that behavior we observe in other species occurs under the same motivation as our own, then applying our own term for it is less problematic. However, now the word “motivation” becomes an issue. So just think of the terms “stimulus and reward,” and let’s move on.
Do you own Tropheus duboisi? If so, you might be interested to know that a team of researchers has recently concluded that the species does play. If you can get your hands on a copy of the article “Highly Repetitive Object Play in a Cichlid Fish (Tropheus duboisi),” give it a read. It’s pretty fascinating.
In fact, the lead author, Gordon Burghardt, has outlined in the article his five criteria for defining play:
1. The behavior is incompletely functional in the behavioral context in which it is expressed
2. The behavior is voluntary, spontaneous, or rewarding
3. The behavior differs from ethotypic functional versions in form, targeting, or ontogenetic timing
4. The behavior is repeated with some regularity, but is not rigidly (pathologically) stereotyped
5. The behavior is initiated in the absence of severe chronic stress such as disease, crowding, hunger, and predation
Interestingly enough, according to the authors, at the time of the article T. duboisi was the only cichlid species to have been studied and display behavior that met the “play” criteria above.
Citations:
Burghardt, G. M. 2011: Defining and recognizing play. In: Oxford Handbook of the Development of Play (Pellegrini, A. D., ed.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 9-18
Burghardt, G. M., Dinets, V. and Murphy, J. B. (2015), Highly Repetitive Object Play in a Cichlid Fish. Ethology, 121: 38–44. doi:10.1111/eth.12312.