It is a common belief that goldfishes are only capable of having short term memory and cannot remember things that happened just more than three seconds earlier.

However, this idea has been proven wrong by an Australian 15-year old student. The said student is Rory Stokes of the Australian Science and Mathematics School in Adelaide.

His experiment involved teaching goldfish to swim to a beacon by making a connection to the beacon itself and food. He sprinkled food at the beacon every feeding time for a period of three weeks.

He then removed the beacon for a period of six days. After that, Stokes placed back the beacon and amazingly, the goldfish swam to it just after 4.4 seconds.

"I wanted to challenge this theory as I believe it is a myth intended to make us feel less guilty about keeping fish in small tank. My results strongly showed that goldfish can retain knowledge for at least six days," commented Stokes.

Aside from the above mentioned experiment, Rory Stokes also conducted several maze experiments to check if goldfish are capable of solving such in search for food. The brilliant student added:

My experiments showed that goldfish have the mental capabilities to learn and remember fairly complex concepts and they can retain that knowledge for at least a number of days.