Featured Image Credit: Youtube
By Eva Gruber
How often have you visited an aquarium, gazing at a huge tank containing sharks and wondered, “Why don’t the sharks eat all the other fish?” It’s a crucial question that aquarists have to deal with when forming multi-species tanks, especially when containing such top predators as sharks. One of the greatest challenges is arranging happy and safe marine assemblages.
One way to do this when including sharks, is to train the sharks not to eat their tank-mates.
Sharks are actually quite intelligent, and are very responsive to learning with positive reinforcement (i.e. reward-based) training methods.
Staff at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Portsmouth, England are teaching their sharks using a method called target-training.
This training technique is very common at aquariums and aquatic parks around the world when working with marine mammals, as they are highly responsive to such training. For example, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, their sea otter ambassadors each have a unique symbol to which they are individually trained towards. It is used during health checkups and behavioral enhancement – each otter sees their symbol and goes towards it.
The symbols can be placed in various locations to direct the otter to move there. The otter does so willingly because it associates the symbol – and moving towards it – with a reward. In psychology, this is called operant conditioning. Target-feeding sharks keeps them satiated and uninterested in eating their fellow tank-mates.
Other animals also contain the ability to respond to operant training – in fact, many more species than we are probably aware of have the capability to remember and recognize unique shapes.
Target-training sharks is also used at other aquariums, mostly to make it easier for aquarists to perform health check-ups on the animals – i.e. to get them to move into a stretcher for a physical inspection – or to allow guests to get a better view.
Training sharks may come as a surprise to some people, but recent research studies have been revealing the secret intellectual life of many shark species. Defining intelligence in the animals presents many problems, as we can’t apply IQ tests and must simply rely on observed behavior – much of which occurs out of our sight below the ocean surface.
Many species indeed have complex social structures. Most shark species must have fine-tuned orientation in order to remember where to migrate in the wide, featureless expanse of the ocean. However, training sharks in aquarium settings has proven to reveal much of what was once hidden from our view – that sharks are trainable, curious, inquisitive, and intelligent beings worthy of our respect and therefore we must protect them.