What makes a fish beautiful for humans? Is it colorful, symmetrical, and distinctive? Maybe you don't know these characteristics, but you just "know when you see it". But according to a new study, machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) neural network is able to understand what types of fish people find more aesthetically pleasing by scoring the attractiveness of the fish in the picture.
It turns out that people prefer fish with bright colors and round bodies. But what is the relationship between people's perception of beauty and the need for animal protection?
According to a machine learning study by Nicolas Mouquet and colleagues at the University of Montpellier in France, it is believed that the most beautiful reef fish are often the lowest priority for conservation support. The study was published June 7 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.
In an online survey, the researchers asked 13,000 members of the public to rate the aesthetic appeal of 481 photos of reef fish and used the data to train a convolutional neural network. They then used a trained neural network to make predictions for another 4,400 photos of the 2,417 most common reef fish species.
Combining the public's scores with the predictions of neural networks, they found that bright, colorful fingerlings with rounder bodies tended to be rated as the most beautiful. However, species rated as more attractive tend to be less distinctive in terms of their ecological characteristics and evolutionary history. In addition, species listed on the IUCN Red List as "threatened" or whose conservation status has not yet been assessed have a lower average aesthetic value than those classified as "least concerned". Unattractive species also have greater commercial interests, and aesthetic value has nothing to do with a species's importance to subsistence fisheries.
Our innate preference for shape and color may be the result of the way the human brain processes colors and patterns, but the mismatch between aesthetic values, ecological function and extinction vulnerability could mean that species most in need of public support are the least likely to be supported, the authors said. The ecological and evolutionary uniqueness of unattractive fish species makes them important for the functioning of coral reefs as a whole, and their losses can have a disproportionate impact on these highly biodiverse ecosystems.
Mouquet added: "Our study provides for the first time the aesthetic value of 2417 species of reef fish. We found that less beautiful fish are the most ecologically and evolutionarily unique species, as well as those identified as threatened. Our study highlights the potential public support for conservation and the possible important mismatch between the species that need it most. ”