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finding dory

via Pixabay

A beautiful goldfish, with a great memory.

It’s long been a common belief that fish have the memory capacity of only a few seconds. People often make fun of people with bad short-term memory by saying they have the “memory of a goldfish.”

This belief about fish spread even further after being highlighted in Disney’s “Finding Nemo” films where Dory, played by Ellen DeGeneres, has a memory that lasts only about 10 seconds. However, a new study from Oxford University may have just proved that we got Dory all wrong.

To find out if goldfish have memories, the team at the University of Oxford trained nine goldfish to swim 2.3 feet and back to get a reward. Yes, goldfish are even smart enough to be trained. All these years they’ve been swimming in circles in small bowls when we could have been teaching them to do some fun behaviors.

The researchers marked off the tank in vertical stripes every ¾ inch.

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