How does the caches.default interact with fetch by default?

In the screenshot (https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/how-the-cache-works/#cache-api) it says that the caches.default is the same one that fetch requests use. Does that mean that if I use fetch function for making network requests, they are cached by default? I am asking cause there is one external API I'm hitting and it's probable that the backend makes the exact same request multiple times within a few minutes. Do I need to use the caches manually or is automatically enabled in the fetch request? I'd assume it's not cause by default you shouldn't get stale data, right?