We read in the news everyday that our government doesn't have enough money; actually they have none, to fund Social Security or Medicare or education, or any one of a hundred important programs in our country. Thank the good Lord they have the money to spend on getting fish to answer to a dinner bell.
I wish I was joking but a Marine biology lab has received a $270,000 grant to see if they can teach fish to turn themselves in when it's time to be turned into fillets and fish sticks.
The researchers don't seem to even bat an eye of incredulity at their idea of teaching fish to answer a special tone that will cause them to swim into fishing nets.
The researchers are starting out by training the fish. The fish will hear the tone, then be fed and it will be repeated until the fish relate the sound to chow time not realizing that eventually they will end up being the chow. The idea has been compared to Pavlov's dogs that were taught to answer a bell that was associated with dinner being fed to them. In this case the bell will be a signal to the fish that they are about to be the dinner. If this works there can be no question that fish are not up there on the IQ scale with other higher thinking mammals but are closer in thought process to bugs, birds and politicians.
The idea is that fish can be let out into the oceans to swim around and get bigger and then when the fishermen need their nets filled they set off a tone that will cause the fish to return home to end up being smeared with tartar sauce and lemon juice. I didn't know fish could hear that well but maybe they do, otherwise why would we spend a quarter million dollars teaching them a dinner bell sound.
Maybe what the researchers mean by setting off a tone is they will set a vibration off in the water and the fish will sense that and reluctantly agree that their time is up and turn themselves in but then again maybe not. The researchers have stated the fish they have been trying to train have a long term memory problem that they are working on correcting.
It seems that after a few days the fish don't remember that the signal means food and they just swim about being fish.
There are some groups that think this spending of taxpayer's dollars is important. "NOW", the National Organization of Worms says it's about time the cruel and medieval practice of impaling their clients on a sharp hook and then drowning them should have been stopped centuries ago. It is expected that attorneys representing, crawdads, crayfish, minnows and slugs will also start spreading cash along capital hill to keep this program going forward.
The researchers plan to have a huge experiment this summer with about 6500 black sea bass that will be freed into the ocean and then "whistled" to return three days later. It is anyone's guess if any will come back. My guess is most won't. No doubt most will have been caught by ten-year-olds using spinners that didn't cost taxpayers a dime. |
