Drunk Fish Convince Sober Ones to Follow Them Around

It’s a good thing fish can’t operate a vehicle. Not only do drunk zebrafish swim extra fast, but they somehow get all the sober fish to follow them. Essentially, a drunk fish becomes the designated driver for the whole group.

Although a fish is only marginally like a human, fish can be convenient subjects for scientists who want to study the effects of alcohol. That’s because to get a fish tipsy, you don’t have to force it to drink anything. You only have to put a small concentration of alcohol into its tank.* Maurizio Porfiri, an associate professor at the New York University Polytechnic Institute of Engineering, used this technique to show last year that drunk zebrafish don’t fear robotic predators.

For his latest study of intoxicated fish, Porfiri and his coauthors had their subjects swim in three different alcohol concentrations: 0.25%, 0.5%, and 1%. The highest concentration translates to about a 0.1% blood alcohol content in the fish, Porfiri says—above the legal limit of .08% for people in the United States.

Earlier studies had found that a moderate dose of alcohol makes fish more active, while a higher dose slows them down. But for this study, Porfiri wanted to see how an alcohol-exposed fish would behave when it was surrounded by sober ones.

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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfish/2014/05/19/drunk-fish-convince-sober-ones-to-follow-them-around/#.U3qwEMbWRuY