PISCINE
Dudley the Wonder Fish
Think it’s impossible to train a fish? Think again! Fish enjoy the reward of working for food just
I
like any other animal, as Sharon Empson has discovered
t has been a little over a year since I trained Dudley as part of my Karen Pryor Academy Certification as a Pet Trainer. Not wanting to add more furry pets to our home, I chose a fish as my “other species.” I bought Dudley at a pet shop when he was about a little over an inch long. Cyclids are intelligent fish. I read an interesting article that stated you can see the intelligence of Cyclids in their hunting techniques. The N. Livingstonii buries itself in the sand and pretends to be dead. When a small fish comes to investigate what appears to be a dead fish, it jumps up from the sand and eats the smaller fish. One thing I especially love about Cyclids is that they are protective over their offspring. They keep the eggs and the hatched babies in their mouths and defend them with a passion. When danger comes, the babies swim quickly back into their parents’ mouths. Both the male and female protect their babies. I was excited to begin and see just how much Dudley could learn. He was a cute little Cyclid and had a spunky personality. I brought him home, set him up alone in a tank and let him settle in for about a week. He would stare at me through the corner of his aquarium as I sat a few feet away watching TV. With positive training, especially clicker training, there is so much joy in the learner. I wondered if it would be the same with a fish, and how would I measure that joy? The first exposure to clicker training for Dudley came when I began to develop value for the clicker in our training sessions together. The clicker is used to mark the instant the animal does a behavior you want and is a bridge between the behavior and the reinforcement. When you develop value for the clicker, the animal will associate the sound of the clicker with the reward that will soon follow. I quickly found out that Dudley could not hear the clicker under water. So I used a flash light instead of the clicker to mark 48
BARKS from the Guild/January 2015
Dudley the Cyclid was trained using a flashlight as a reward marker instead of a clicker
the behavior I wanted him to do. Every time I fed Dudley I would flash the flashlight and then drop a tiny piece of shrimp inside his tank. I was amazed at how quickly Dudley learned that the flash of light meant something really yummy was coming. I tried different types of fish treats but Dudley loved tiny bits of cut up shrimp the most. The first behavior I wanted to capture Dudley doing was to target a stick (a little plastic stir stick used for coffee). I placed the end of the stir stick into the water. Dudley, being a curious fish, swam closer to investigate the stick, when he did, I flashed the light and dropped a little shrimp to him. He gobbled it up. I removed the stick and placed it back in the water and he approached again, I flashed the light and dropped a tiny bit of shrimp into his tank. This is called shaping, rewarding each approximation of the goal behavior. Each time he moved closer, I would flash the light and reinforce his behavior with a tiny bit of shrimp. Once Dudley began to touch the target stick with his mouth, that was the only behavior that I would click and reinforce. Soon he was touching the stir stick with his mouth consistently. Dudley and I had communicated. When he had targeting the stir stick behavior down pat, we moved onto the hoop. My husband made Dudley a little hoop and suction-cupped it to the side of the aquarium. I decided what behavior I wanted Dudley to do. My goal behavior would be that Dudley would swim through the hoop. Each time he moved