That's one smart fish! An orange-dotted turkfish was captured for the first time on video digging a clam out of the sand, then repeatedly throwing it against a rock to crush it.
"The animal excavates sand to get the shell out, then swims for a long time to find an appropriate area where it can crack the shell," videographer Giacomo Bernardi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal." [...]
The clam-cracking tuskfish isn't the first fish to be observed using tools. The tuskfish is a kind of reef fish known as wrasse, and these species have been seen using rocks as anvils to crush shellfish. But this is the first time the behavior has been caught on video.
LiveScience has
the story and
video clip.
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