(NPR) — Picture this: A goldfish swimming in a square tank on wheels as it rolls deliberately from one side of a room to the other.
It’s not a scene from a children’s book or a futuristic movie. It’s an animal behavior experiment at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where researchers have successfully trained several goldfish to operate a robotic vehicle in an effort to explore whether their species is capable of navigating on land.
And it turns out they just might be, according to findings published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.