Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Geeky Guppies

As we often remind economics students, life is all about tradeoffs, and it would seem that the fish world is no exception.

Scientists have bred a strain of big-brained guppies that did turn out to be brighter, outscoring the others in a test of numerical learning. But bigger brains exhaust a lot of the body's resources, and don't necessarily lead to a breeding advantage, as these larged-brained guppies also had fewer offspring.