Fish Sense (Picador Shorts)

About this book

An extract from the much-loved modern classic on the subject of fish consciousness, What a Fish Knows.

Do fishes 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 dives in among our marine cousins to explore the essential questions of how fish perceive and process the world.

With his ethologist's gift for showing us the hidden depths of questions we've routinely preferred to think of as simple, and his raconteur's flair for the surprising and the curious, Balcombe takes us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Balcombe 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. Using humour and a repertoire of some of the most surprising fish facts you've ever heard, Balcombe shakes up what you think you know about what's going on inside the mind of these denizens of the deep.

Fish Sense is part of the Picador Shorts series Oceans, Rivers, and Streams in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behaviour. His books include Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, What a Fish Knows – a New York Times bestseller available in fifteen languages – and Super Fly. He has published more than sixty scholarly papers and book chapters, as well as essays, opinions, and letters in popular magazines and newspapers. He lives in Belleville, Ontario, where in his spare time he enjoys biking, baking, birding, Bach, and trying to understand the neighbourhood squirrels.