What a Fish Knows
Arguably the least understood, and certainly the most exploited vertebrates on Earth, fishes have been mainly viewed by us in two contexts: as a source of food, and a source of recreation. It is as if they didn’t have lives of their own. Modern science shows otherwise. This eye-opening presentation explores the colourful lives of the most diverse group of vertebrates. We explore fish perceptions, cognition, emotion, social behaviour, and cooperation, all within the context of our evolving relationship to fishes and their vital aquatic habitats.
Do fish think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognise the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water?
Jonathan Balcombe, animal behaviour expert and author of the bestselling What a Fish Knows, will address these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes.
Although there are more than thirty thousand species of fish – more than all mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians combined – we rarely consider how individual fishes think, feel, and behave. Balcombe’s research upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian – in other words, much like us.
Speaker Bio
Jonathan Balcombe was born in England and raised in Canada where he now lives. He has loved animals since age three when he decided he wanted to be a hippopotamus. Instead, he became a biologist with a PhD in the study of animal behaviour. During a career focused on animal protection, he developed and taught courses in animal behaviour and animal sentience for the Viridis Graduate Institute, and Humane Society University, and served as Associate Editor to the open-access journal Animal Sentience. His main focus these days is researching and writing books, which include Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, and What a Fish Knows, a New York Times best-seller available in seventeen languages. His latest book for grown-ups, Super Fly, won the National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature. His first children’s book, Jake and Ava: A Boy and a Fish, was published in 2021. He is currently writing a book that explores cooperation and joy in the wild. In his spare time Jonathan enjoys biking, hiking, birding, baking, snorkelling, and trying to understand the neighbourhood squirrels.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
