This incredible cyborg robo-fish is one of the world’s first artificial animals

It's not the sort of thing you'd like to cover in batter and serve with a plate of chips.

And you wouldn't want this particular creature swimming around a fish bowl in your front room.

But despite the obvious lack of taste and cuteness exhibited by a pioneering cyborg fish, it's being hailed as one of the world's first ever artificial animals.

Scientists built a skeleton from gold and then used rubber and rats' heart cells to build the "flesh" of the beast, which was made to look like a stingray.

The heart cells were programmed to contract when exposed to light, allowing researchers to make their creation swim through the water.

This incredible robo-fish survived for a total of six days and was so sophisticated that researchers were able to steer it through an assault course.

"It turns out the musculature in the stingray has to do the same thing as the heart does: it has to move fluids," said Professor Kevin Kit Parker of Harvard University, the Dr Frankenstein who created the beastie.

"When we have a light in the front [of the ray], we activate an electrical signal in the tissue and it propagates like a wave through the musculature,"
"You get this undulatory motion of the fins, and it looks as if it is chasing the light."

Professor Kit used a similar trick in 2012 to create a fake jellyfish, which could also swim about.

At the time, he described his experiment as an attempt to  “build a beast".