Do Not Mess With Fish 244,

and you thought fish were fun!

slightly of topic, but I will get back to it, cat herding, sounds easy but as the video above shows it is not without it's perils, which brings me on to cod herding, yes the good ole cod, in our UK's national dish, fish and chips, can be herded and then caught in a more efficient way than before, or so it is claimed, it took a week for Björn Björnsson to train 20 wild cod, in a compelling demonstration of classical conditioning, the aquaculture researcher at Iceland’s Marine and Freshwater Research Institute taught the fish to associate a low-frequency sound with a free meal, 

it only took another day for Björnsson—with the help of one of his trained fish—to teach another 19 wild cod, people might not think of cod as herd animals, but Björnsson says cod are adept at reading social cues to learn where to grab a bite, the end result of this training? dozens of Atlantic cod congregating around a floating platform moored in an Icelandic fjord, ready to be plucked from the water in a fisherman's net, a 2012 paper, also by Björnsson, showed that ranching has the potential to yield higher profit margins than fishing or fish farming, fish ranching is not an entirely new idea: it’s been tried in Norway with wild saithe (a fish in the cod family), in Japan with red sea bream, and elsewhere, the addition of sound-based training, however, has the potential to make it even more effective, I can just imagine the skippers in the UK's fishing fleet, if we still have one, shouting out as they leave the harbor, 'put the deep fat fryer on, we are going to herd them up and move them out!' photograph by Alex Mustard/Minden Pictures.