'In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish,' Paul said. Scientist guts Paul on fish study

A scientist nibbled away at Sen. Rand Paul on Friday after the Kentucky Republican blasted his research on schools of fish as wasteful federal spending.

“He got the funding wrong and the species wrong, and he misrepresents the work we’ve done,” Princeton science professor Iain Couzin told POLITICO. “He’s done some serious cherry-picking here. That’s one study, we’ve had a series of studies that have taken many years.”


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On Fox News on Thursday night, Paul said the military has spent $5.2 million studying goldfish and advocated yanking funding for such programs to cut the budget.

“In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish — studying goldfish to see how democratic they were and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish,” Paul said on Fox. “I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies.”

But Couzin charged Paul “misrepresented” the research that scientists have been doing for about four years. First of all, Couzin said, they studied golden shiner fish — not goldfish.

He also said the research, among other things, can help lead to advances in technology for robots that work on deep sea oil spills and radioactive leaks. He said the research has “direct applications to human security and collective control of robots.”

“Our work aims to understand the principles of collective control in animal groups and what this can inform us about collective robotics. It has nothing at all to do with human politics,” Couzin said.

Couzin was not able to provide an immediate financial estimates but said it was a mixture of funding a variety of sources, including federal grants. They’ve published multiple research beyond the 2011 study that Paul seemed to be referring to.

“If you think about it, schools of fish have been on the planet for much longer than we have and they’ve evolved to find solutions to problems. They can sense the environments in ways that we simply didn’t know how to do that,” Couzin said. “From ant colonies to schooling fish, it’s not that complicated but the feats they can achieve are extraordinary. The collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot.”

He added: “Perhaps Sen. Paul should read our papers before he comments on them and perhaps he should consider more broadly how science can help society.”