Goldfish Learn To Drive

Faint outburst foretells a star’s doom
A star’s death usually comes without warning. But an early 
sign of one star’s imminent demise hints at what happens 
before some stellar explosions.
In a last hurrah before exploding, a star brightened, sug-
gesting that it blasted some of its outer layers into space. It’s 
the first time scientists have spotted a pre-explosion outburst 
from a run-of-the-mill type of exploding star, or supernova, 
researchers report in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal.
Scientists have previously seen harbingers of unusual 
types of supernovas. But “what’s nice about this one is it’s a 
much more normal, vanilla … supernova,” says astronomer 
Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech, who was not involved in the work.
In September 2020, astrophysicist Raffaella Margutti of 
the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues spotted 
the explosion of a star roughly 10 times as massive as the sun, 
located about 120 million light-years from Earth. Thankfully, 
other telescopes had been observing the star well before 
it detonated. About 130 days before the explosion, the star 
room, the fish still drove to the pink board.
“That was pretty conclusive that the fish 
actually navigate,” says study coauthor 
and computer scientist Ohad Ben-Shahar. 
Recently, the team let a goldfish take 
a joyride through an entire building, 
Ben-Shahar says, “and it actually started 
to explore. It went down one of the corri-
dors and started to sneak away.”
Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly 
L ambert is “not completely surprised but 
still intrigued” by the driving abilities of 
Mr. Darcy and his fish friends. In her own 
research at the University of Richmond in 
Virginia, Lambert has taught rats to drive 
toy cars. But teaching goldfish to navigate 
such alien terrain takes animal driving 
experiments to the next level, Lambert 
says. “I love the fish out of water idea.”
When it comes to testing the bounds 
of animal navigation, “it’s important to 
diversify and expand our tasks and our 
species,” Lambert says. “I think we need 
an international race between the rats and 
the goldfish.” — Maria Temming 
THE –EST