(If this embedded video won't play, go to The Pioneer Press web site.)

Then:

Now:

Fancy goldfish are bred in a seemingly infinite variety of lovely shapes and colors. But it's a little risky to choose a fish because of body markings or colors. These can change over the life of the fish due to diet, disease, or just aging.

I mainly chose Miss Mango for The Ugly Guppy because of her alertness, strong swimming, and buoyancy control. But her clown-suit colors, orange cap and little pouty orange lips seemed perfect for the show. My graphics and puppet designs of Mango all emphasize her coloration.

I may have to rethink those designs, though, because Mango's color is changing! Her orange areas are slowly lightening, and her white areas are darkening, to pale peach. She may end up being a peachy goldfish! I don't know if this is happening due to diet, growing up, or the effects of antibiotic treatment for the intestinal infection that she and Ricky have both been fighting for months. I am trying various color-enhancing diets, hoping to keep her original color intact. If she does change colors completely, she will be no less valuable to me and the show. I'll just have to work the color change into The Ugly Guppy's plot!

Time will tell...

We have a new, high-definition video camcorder, which will allow bigger and better video footage for The Ugly Guppy performance and for The Bubble Blog. Feast your eyes:

I upped the hoop behavior's difficulty to a chain: Follow my finger -> stop and check in at front of tank -> receive iPod cue as reinforcement for check-in -> perform 3 passes through the hoop in response to this one flash of the cue.

And she did it! Almost every time! Awesome!

I have also come to a better understanding of Mango's view of The Rules of Engagement. She does a few reps, then she wants a "coffee break" to putter around the gravel, just in case something yummy fell down there. I'm not fighting her on this. Substrate foraging is deeply innate in goldfish. If I tried to get rid of this behavior during training, everything else might break down. This is an example of what Bob and Marion Bailey called "The Misbehavior of Organisms": some behaviors are so instinctive that they can't be trained out of the animal. So I let Mango have her 5-10 second coffee breaks, then I ask her to check in and re-engage in training. What I might eventually try is actually timing the coffee break, then gradually shortening its duration.

But for now, I'm just happy with my little fishie's golden performance!

Mango is now reliably doing a triple pass through the hoop, cued by a blue circle projected on an iPod. During past training sessions I have presented the cue at the beginning of each hoop pass, to help Mango associate the blue circle with hoop swimming. Now she has improved to one cue flash per triple pass through the hoop. This video demonstrates her progress.

You Minnesotans will get the reference, but others might not. When we see something adorable here in the Frozen North, we say "Oh, fer cute!"

I've been working to add cues to Mango's hoop behavior and Ricky's piano playing/spins. Initially I thought a flash from a colored penlight would work well as a cue, with different colors to cue different behaviors. That's not a bad system, but I thought it could be improved. Since I use a flash from a white penlight as the "click" to mark rewardable behavior, sometimes I feel the fish become confused by a second flash, even though it has color. While the confusion could probably be overcome with many, many training sessions and repetitions, I decided to search for a better cueing system. What I wanted was the potential to create dozens of distinct cues for different behaviors. And I wanted the cue to be very different from the click.

I have read astracts from several studies where goldfish are taught shape and color discrimination; the test fish could tell a red square from a blue circle, for example. A system of colored shapes for cues would be infinitely versatile. But how to get my fish to notice such shapes? And how to be sure the fish can see the cues?

iPod to the rescue! I am now using my iPod to flash a JPEG of a colored shape for the cue. At first I tried doing this on my Powerbook, thinking that a large picture would be more salient. But that was too unwieldy; I couldn't cover/uncover the screen fast enough to time cueing correctly. The iPod works beautifully. It's small and handheld, thus easy to flash quickly. The shape picture is backlit, which makes it more noticeable to the fish. (I do have to be careful not to get the iPod wet.)

I tried the iPod cueing system with Ricky, and it really didn't work. He's fixated on receiving his cue on the piano keyboard or (for Spin) on the back wall of his tank. His responsiveness to training is variable now, too, because he's still suffering from bacterial enteritis. He generally does pretty well with a blue or red penlight flash, though. So for now I'll stick with what he knows.

But Mango Smoothie is really catching on to the iPod system. My criteria for rewarding the hoop behavior is currently 3+ passes through the hoop per rep. To start, I let her make one pass through. Then just as she begins each of the remaining hoop passes, I flash an iPod pic of a blue circle. (I only flash the iPod when Mango is facing front, otherwise she can't see it.) She does look at the iPod. We're not quite at the stage of flashing the iPod BEFORE the hoop pass, but I do believe Mango is already associating that iPod blue circle with hoopage. I expect in another week or so we'll have a bona fide iPod cue.

I suppose next she'll demand a little cell phone. ;-)

Video of iPod training coming up...

My ultimate goal is to have Mango swim through, about-face and swim back through again, then repeat that sequence 2-3 times before expecting a reward. In this video sequence I first reinforce a couple of single hoop passes, then raise the criterion to two passes. Mango offers the about-face, and I snatch the opportunity! We still have a ways to go to cement the about-face pass and move on to several passes per reward, but we're on the way!