The first video of tool use by a fish has been published in the journal Coral Reefs by Giacomo Bernardi, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An orange-dotted tuskfish digs a clam out of the sand, carries it over to a rock, and repeatedly throws the clam against the rock to crush it. Bernardi shot the video in Palau in 2009. Bernardi said. “It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it’s a pretty big deal.” The actions recorded in the video are remarkably similar to previous reports of tool use by fish. Every case has involved a species of wrasse using a rock to crush shellfish. A report published in June in Coral Reefs included photos of this behavior in a blackspot tuskfish on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Bernardi said he first heard of the phenomenon in 1994, when a colleague observed a yellowhead wrasse in Florida doing the same thing. Similar behavior was also reported in a sixbar wrasse in an aquarium. Does this mean that fish are getting smarter, to me it does. For an animal to have that type of skills they have to be smart.
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