Footage by UC Santa Cruz professor and biologist Giacomo Bernardi, taken in Palau off Australia's great Barrier reef shows a male Wrasse, or Orange Dotted Tusk Fish use its pectoral fin to uncover a clam under
the sand.
It then picks up a clam with its teeth and takes it to a rock wall. There, it hurls the clam against the rock to get its meal.
Bernardi, who specializes in evolutionary biology says this is a remarkable example of how evolution gave these fish the ability to think and to figure out how to get to hidden sources of food.
"It's expected, when you look at apes and monkeys and dogs and dolphins, but then when you are going down the evolutionary scale, you are really not expecting that," Bernardi said. "When you start looking at fishes, which is what I do, then you observe very, very sophisticated behaviors that you're not expecting from these kind of animals."
Bernardi has been tracking down Wrasse fish since 1996, after seeing the fish use tools during an underwater expedition in Florida.
TXT 24
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