Motor adaptation is crucial for animals navigating diverse environments, and we don’t understand how this process works in fish especially when compared to mammals. This prevents a comprehensive view of adaptive motor control across vertebrates. Here we show that goldfish operating a Fish Operated Vehicle (FOV) adapt swimming behavior to achieve targets when vehicle movement is perturbed by a rotational transformation. Goldfish gradually adjusted their swimming patterns to compensate for the perturbation and had aftereffects when the perturbation was removed. Fish showed improved performance when the perturbation was re-introduced, although their initial learning rate in the second exposure was slower compared to the first exposure. These findings reveal that while goldfish can adapt to novel dynamics, their adaptation mechanisms may differ from those of mammals. This study broadens our understanding of motor adaptation across species, contributing to a more comprehensive view of motor learning in vertebrates.