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Comment by amscanne | Hacker News Reader

Fish are amazing, but do you really think they are SMART? In my experience, fish are incredibly stupid and wholly reliant on instinct. I suppose instincts can seem like intelligence sometimes, but if put into the wrong situation, fish will make the same mistake over and over and over again.

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By that standard the monarch butterfly is stupid too. That said they are smart enough to follow only a portion of their full migratory route which takes 4 generations to complete.

Squirrels remember where they bury their nuts. Octopuses can solve puzzles.

So what about fish? Salmon remember where they were spawned before they head out to the ocean, and come back to the exact same pool to spawn before dying.

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/02/13/mystery-solve...

So sure, they're not "SMART" but there is a lot of "intelligence" they have acquired over many generations of evolutionary cycles.

I'll settle this;

Salmon, butterflies and squirrels are all dumb as hell.

What they are is incredibly well adapted to reproduce and survive on this crazy planet!

Squirrel do not remember much though. They fill the ground with nuts. Then they dig the ground seemingly at random. Most of theis caches are forgotten. Which often leads to nuts trees sprouting all over the place during spring.

https://www.livescience.com/64104-how-do-squirrels-find-buri...

This article seems to suggest otherwise.

People say this about many beings, and even about other humans. What they all have in common is a lack of exposure to those they denigrate and reduce in their mind to dumb automatons. I don't think you are smart to say that about anyone you haven't spent much time around or bonded with in any significant way.

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