My grandpa accidentally dropped a bottle pf aspirin into my tank one time. Everything died...EXCEPT one Super Shrimp! He's an Amano shrimp, and he's now outlived my grandpa by about a decade. He's maybe immortal now.
Well, antidepressants also work on lobsters so I think our minds and physical bodies are much closer linked than we'd like to think as sentient creatures.
Wow! In aquarium keeping, one of the ways we treat fish for illnesses is to bump the temperature up, to specific different temperatures depending on the illness and the fish involved. I didn't realize that in the wild, they would self-regulate temperature for illnesses, and it makes so much sense. In captivity we need to decide for them, since they can't seek out the ideal temperature (unlike with reptiles and other terrestrial animals it's much harder to provide a temperature gradient for them to self-regulate in a home aquarium). The aspirin thing is just a lovely, bizarre fact that I don't understand, and it reminds me of the XKCD comic "Easy or Hard" (
As a zoologist, this feels right. I imagine that the mechanism that causes our bodies to increase temperature and the mechanism that causes a change in the fish's behaviour evolved from the same ancestral mechanism. After all it's the immune system's way of reaching the same end result. I may be wrong, because I don't work with vertebrate immunity, but this seems likely to me. It would be fun to also see if insects have a similar behavioral change when sick and if the aspirin works too. I imagine that we'd likely get similar results.
This is super interesting for sure, but I think it's worth pointing out that the reason this feels so mind-breaky is because we categorize "making a decision" as somehow a special process outside of basic metabolism and endocrinology. I'm a neuroscientist, I am deeply interested and invested in understanding the mechanisms of thought and other neural processes, but in the grand scheme of things the brain is just a big watery meat sack doing (interesting and complex) metabolism and (neuro)endocrinology. So when we assume that our fever reduces by an unconscious metabolic mechanism, and a fish's "fever" reduces because it makes a decision to do so.... there's not a lot of substantive distinction there. Absolutely no disrespect to Hank's video, of course. I am a big fan of his science communication work, but I just though I'd point out that this distinction is mostly rooted in a perceptual bias that we place on conscious processes as being somehow special from unconscious ones. Now, is the fish making a conscious decision??? That's a bigger ball of wax.
I have a guess for this that I actually feel pretty good about. One thing that stuck out to me as you were describing how fish seek heat when they are sick is that humans actually do that too. When you have a fever, frequently you also experience chills, which make you feel very cold and should pile some blankets on, even though you are actually burning up. Taking fever inhibiting drugs tends to subdue the chills as well.
