99 YEARS OLD AND STILL FISHING FOR FACTS...

THE journal Animal Behaviour is one of my favourites for finding out fascinating things about subjects I didn’t realise I was interested in. The latest edition, for example, presumptuously dated January 2017, includes a paper on the differences in mental ability between male and female guppy fish.

The authors of the paper, who came from the psychology department of an Italian university, report that while male and female guppies were equally good at navigating around an obstacle, males were more persistent in trying to swim though the object if it was transparent and were also better at learning more complex mazes.

Wishing to hear a female perspective on these findings, I popped over to a nearby aquarium and called over an intelligent-looking guppy girl. She hadn’t yet read the paper (“We’re waiting for the waterproof edition,” she said. “The usual one goes all soggy when dropped into our tank.”) but was appalled when I told her of its findings.

“Typical!” she said. “They always try to prove that males are intellectually superior but the tasks they give us in their experiments could hardly have been better picked to favour the men.”

I asked her to give examples and she said: “Well, it’s all in the paper: we females do just as well as males at navigating around obstacles which is something all guppies find useful when they’re swimming around.

“Then they praise the males for learning complex mazes. That’s ridiculous! Maybe the men have time to learn mazes but we have far better things to do, what with looking after the babies and keeping the home clean. And as for the men being more persistent at trying to swim through a transparent obstacle, well, that just shows how stupid they really are.

“When a girl sees a complex maze she swims around it rather than waste time trying to beat a way through and when we bump into transparent obstacles, we do the same instead of stubbornly butting our heads against them like the obstinate males.”

Just as she finished saying all that, a male guppy happened to swim past. ”Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, “but I read that paper too and I think you’re ignoring the findings of another piece of research a few months ago showing that mate choice behaviour in male fish is finely attuned to maximise our chance of mating success.”

“Oh, that’s all you male guppies ever think about,” the female guppy said dismissively. “I saw that paper and all it says is that you men run away when you’re trying to pick up a girl and a more brightly coloured male appears.”

“What it showed,” the male said snootily, “is that when we realise we’re liable to be competing against a phenotypically superior rival, we yield to the greater force and sensibly swim off to find another woman.”

“You say ‘phenotypically superior’, I say ‘more brightly coloured’,” she said. “It means the same. And you even give up if the colour is artificial.”

“I’m going now,” said the male. “There’s a fish in a gaudy pullover approaching.” And off he went, cutting short the debate immediately.