Study - Goldfish can feel pain

The Daily Telegraph. 30 January 2006.
Painful memories for goldfish.
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Popular mythology holds that goldfish have three-second
memories. Now it seems that they can remember pain for at
least a day, according to research that will reopen the
debate about whether angling is a cruel sport.

The urban legend of the amnesiac fish has been dealt a new
blow by a study which shows that goldfish can learn to avoid
parts of their tanks where they receive electric shocks for
at least 24 hours, probably longer. Earlier work at the
University of Plymouth showed that they can be trained to
remember for up to three months.

The new study was conducted by Rebecca Dunlop, Sarah Millsopp
and Peter Laming at the Queen's University of Belfast and is
published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
"Angling is not considered to be a cruel sport as it has been
assumed that fish cannot perceive pain. Rather it is a reflex
action," said Miss Dunlop yesterday.

"This paper shows that pain avoidance in fish does not seem
to be a reflex response, rather one that is learned,
remembered and is changed according to different
circumstances. Therefore, if fish can perceive pain, then
angling cannot be continued to be considered a non-cruel
sport." The Belfast team showed that goldfish can remember
accurately where in their tanks they receive electric shocks.
The stronger the shocks, the less likely the fish were to
return to the sector of the tank where they had received
them. The team reported similar results with trout.