Apparently, the answer to the long-asked question is yes, fish can in fact drive. Scientists in Israel created a fish operated vehicle (FOV) to test how well Goldfish could navigate.
The FOV was moved by utilizing a video signal to determine where in the tank the fish was. When the fish move close to one side of the tank, the FOV moves in that direction so long as the fish was facing outward. If said fish was facing inward, then there would be no movement of the FOV.
The task given to these FOVs was to navigate through a terrestrial environment, something that it did actually do quite well. The fish even managed to avoid dead-ends in the arena used and corrected their path when they got off of it.
With any research, we have to ask what the application of it was, and in this case, scientists were attempting to study domain transfer methodology, which was defined as something "where one species in embedded in another species' environment and must cope with an otherwise familiar (in our case, navigation) task." (Givon et al., 2021).
What I find to be the most interesting, however, was a quote from a CNN article about the research. "'Surprisingly, it doesn't take the fish a long time to learn how to drive the vehicle. They're confused at first. They don't know what's going on but they're very quick to realize that there is a correlation between their movement and the movement of the machine that they're in,' said researcher Shachar Givon" (Reuters, 2022).
While scientists have trained animals before in navigation, there's something about the fact that it was fish in an environment they don't usually navigate makes it special. Of course, if you're not interested in Domain Transfer Methodology, this is still an inspiring and hopeful bit of research, it tells us that no matter how out there your research might be (and even if it takes inspiration from Dr Seuss), there will still be someone who will fund it.
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