Possessing a relatively primitive brain, stickleback fish demonstrate amazing abilities due to their ability to unite in something like a "collective mind" - writes the RIA Novosti news agency, citing the publication Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“Fish, like birds, can solve truly complex problems with the mind of the hive. This feature, as it turned out, does not require highly developed intelligence - it is due to mathematics, which nature came to as a result of millions of years of evolutionary development,”- says one of the study authors, a researcher at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Mike Webster.
Stickleback fishes, as shown by complex experiments, are able to adapt to dynamically changing environmental conditions with the help of their "collective mind". For example, it is enough for a few individuals to learn something, as this new and important knowledge for the whole flock is "picked up" by other individuals.
Birds have something similar (synchronous flights, in particular, are analogous to synchronized swimming), as well as some mammals.
Scientists say that "collective intelligence" is a feature that is characteristic of humans as well. It is thanks to him that people are supposed to have survived in the harsh primitive world.
Kolesnikov Andrey
