2UE Fish

You may think of the desert south of Alice Springs as a pretty quiet place.
Bit of red soil, a bit of grass and a few kangaroos hopping around.
But new research has shown it was once one of the most dynamic places on the face of the Earth, complete with erupting volcanoes, lava and newly-formed moutain ranges.
An Adelaide University academic says just south of Alice Springs is the spot where two early continents came together to form Australia and she's found evidence of the collision.
Up until the late 1980s most scientists believed that Australia as a continent had always been more or less in the shape it is today.
But about 20 years ago theories began being put forward that the country had been formed from a series of smaller early continents. It is thought that two continents that became northern Australia and Central Australia slammed into each other about 1.6 billion years
Kate Selway went bush and used a technique called ''magneto tellurics'' to find the spot of the collision. There is a certain amount of natural current running through the rocks deep beneath the Earth. Rocks that come from different early continents carry the current in different ways. By identifying the differences Kate was able to tell where one early continent ends and another begins, deep beneath the desert.
Her theory is that northern Australia, central Australia, southern Australia and northern Australia all came together at about the same time geologically. Eastern Australia came later. The volcanoes and mountain ranges that resulted from most of the these collisions have long since eroded away.
All this was before the formation of the super continent gondwanaland, many people will be familiar with. That came much later.
The band Gondwanaland of course came much later still!



That's right Mike.
It's a long-held belief that fish are dumb and have no memories.
The old saying goes that you don't have to worry about goldfish getting bored because they only have a three-second memory.
It turns out nothing could be further from the truth.
Culum Brown a researcher with Macquarie University has been studying fish for the past 10 years and says they not only have excellent, long-term memories, they're pretty good at reading symbols!
Culum put fish through a series of trials to see how smart they were.
In one test his team created a mock trawl net where fish in the lab were scooped up as they were swimming.
Culum put a small hole in the net and the fish could escape the net by swimming through it.
After being scooped up three or four or five times the fish learned the location of the hole and from then on always escaped.
That's pretty smart, but the amazing part is when the test was repeated a year later all the fish remembered where the hole was and could get out of the net straight away.
So much for the three second memory theory.
In another test the fish were put in a maze, with different lanes marked by symbols such as a red square, a blue circle, a yellow triangle.
Following one particular symbol meant the fish were rewarded with food.
Culum and his team found the fish used - guppies - soon learned what the symbols meant and would go straight for the food.
That means they were doing something pretty similar to what we do when we look a road sign or check which door to go through at the public loo.
Interestingly other recent research has shown fish are better at some tasks - like escaping traps - than dolphins.