Not saying you're wrong, but calling it "ancestral memory" makes it sound like some sort of mystical thing when in reality their brain is just programmed to fear the general look and shape of sharks because those that didn't got killed by said sharks.
Literally the same reasons and ways humans have fear of things without usually having had a traumatizing encounter with said thing, yet we don't typically say humans have "ancestral memory". Sorry for the mini rant, just felt like I wanted to say it, so I did lol
That's learned behavior passed genetically I'd say. Like some mouse on the other side of the world isn't suddenly going to be scared of getting shocked because that one mouse did. Only ones that would get scared are those related to that first mouse. And especially the mice don't actually have a memory of anything, which is why it's not "genetic memory".
And that's basically how evolution works lol: a change happens in a parent that gets passed to their offspring. It's not memory, it's just instinct. The mice don't know why they get scared, they just do becauze that's how their brain reacts to that noise. If it is an actual threat in the wild, then those genes that are responsible for that fear keep getting passed down because the mice who aren't afraid get killed usually. If there is no threat, that instinct will slowly fade through the generations.
No memory, just instinct. Memory is something unique to every individual experience of life. Certain things can subtly change our genes as we grow which can get passed into children, but children don't actually have any memory from their parents, obviously or else humans would experience this as well lol.
Memory as a word is quite a bit more expansive than that. We have cultural memories that are passed on through generations, the Australian aboriginal Dreaming is a great example of a very ancient cultural memory. And then the word memory is used in the context of electronics too, which has absolutely nothing to do your explanation. It's just information that is stored and transmitted, regardless of the physical progress of how it happens in each instance, this is still a description of what is happening. That's why we can talk of concepts such as genetic memory to simplify the understanding of a more complex underlying process. It's a symbolic abstraction, in other words. Because the meanings of words are arbitrary and the word memory has a much wider meaning than what you claim.
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u/AUREL-FOR 6d ago
If it is an aquatic tortoise should have ancestral memory of it enemies