How we made it: Archer fish and the art of ballistics

The Asian archer fish has one of the most extraordinary of all methods of capturing prey. It fires a jet of water at insects living in vegetation above the water surface. If it’s to hit the prey and knock it off its perch, so that it falls into the water below, a fish must perform a complex feat of ballistics. It must calculate where the prey actually is, because its image refracts through the water surface; it must calculate how far away the prey is and how big it is. Then it fires a water jet with exactly the right amount of power to hit and dislodge it.

German scientist Stephan Schuster maintains study populations of the fish at his university in Germany. He has observed, in these populations, that a young fish appears to be able to learn how to perform this complex feat simply by watching an adult doing it, rather than undergoing its own period of trial and error to ‘calibrate its systems’.

In order to illustrate this story we needed Stephan’s expertise and his detailed understanding of his own fish populations. So a Life Story crew spent two weeks filming in his laboratory, allowing cameraman Rod Clarke to capture this fish’s natural behavior in unprecedented detail.