By Rebecca Dzombak Birds can be picky building their nests. They experiment with materials, waffle over which twig to use, take them apart and start again. It’s a complex, fiddly process that can seem to reflect careful thought. “It’s so fascinating,” Maria Tello-Ramos, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said. “But it hasn’t been studied much at all.” New research led by Dr. Tello-Ramos, published on Thursday in the journal Science, provides the first evidence that groups of birds that build their homes together learn to follow consistent architectural styles, distinct from groups just a few dozen feet away. The finding upends longstanding assumptions that nest building is an innate behavior based on the birds’ environment and adds to a growing list of behaviors that make up bird culture. As important for survival as nest building is, scientists know relatively little about it. Most of what is known about bird nests has come from studying their role in reproductive success, focusing on their usefulness in protecting birds and eggs from cold, wind and predators. “The focus has been on the structure, not the behavior that built it,” Dr. Tello-Ramos said. She said she found that surprising because nest building is one of the rare behaviors that has a tangible product, something that can be measured and provide insight into why birds behave the way they do. Part of the reason nest-building behaviors haven’t been researched much, Dr. Tello-Ramos said, boils down to one cliché: bird brain. Nest building is such a complex behavior that, for decades, scientists thought “the little brains of birds couldn’t possibly deal with such a large amount of information, so it must be innate,” she said. Recent work has shown birds repeating others’ nest building, but those studies were often limited to individuals or small groups in labs. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29457 - Posted: 08.31.2024

By Shaena Montanari Mammalian brains famously come with a built-in GPS system: “place cells” in the hippocampus that selectively activate when an animal enters a specific location and power spatial cognition. A comparable navigation system had not been described in fish—until now. As it turns out, zebrafish larvae, too, possess place cells that integrate multiple sources of information and generate new cognitive maps when the animal’s environment changes, according to a study out today in Nature. The search for these cells in fish became “kind of like a myth, almost,” says the study’s co-lead investigator Jennifer Li, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. She and her team were hesitant to look for place cells in fish at first, Li says, “because we figured if nobody’s seeing them after all this time,” they might not exist. But Li and her colleagues had already custom-built a microscope that tracks calcium signaling in the brains of zebrafish larvae as they swim freely. The device helped them pinpoint the place cells in the larvae’s telencephalon region. “I think this work is definitely extremely interesting, because it demonstrates that, at least in some fish, you can find place cells,” says Ronen Segev, professor of life sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who was not involved in the study. The finding also suggests that spatial cognition has origins deep in the vertebrate evolutionary tree, Li says. There is an idea that the “hippocampus and cortex are these structures that evolved at some point to enable flexible behavior,” but evolutionarily, “it was never clear when that happened.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29456 - Posted: 08.31.2024

Joe Hernandez If a human or another animal close to them dies, does a cat grieve the loss? That was the question a team of researchers from Oakland University in Michigan set out to answer when they surveyed hundreds of cat owners about their cat’s behavior after another cat or dog in the household passed away. The data showed that cats exhibited behaviors associated with grief — such as eating and playing less — more often after the death of a fellow pet, suggesting they may in fact have been in mourning. “It made me a little more optimistic that they are forming attachments with each other,” said Jennifer Vonk, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who co-authored the study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. “It’s not that I want the cats to be sad,” Vonk went on, “[but] there is a part of us, I think, as humans that wants to think that if something happens to us our pets would miss us.” Though animals from elephants to horses to dogs have been shown to express signs of grief, less is known about the emotional life of the domesticated house cat. Vonk said she knew of only one other study on grief in domestic cats. For their research, Vonk and her coauthor, Brittany Greene, surveyed 412 cat caregivers about how their feline companion acted after another pet in the house died. They found that, after the death of a fellow pet, cats on average sought more attention from their owners, spent more time alone, appeared to look for the deceased animal, ate less and slept more. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 29426 - Posted: 08.11.2024

By Katie Moisse Monkeys can memorize a sequence of images and then toggle between them in their minds, a new study has found. Each mental move is associated with a tiny burst of brain activity that could be the neural representation of a thought, the study authors say. The study is the first to find evidence that an animal creates cognitive maps based on experience and later uses them exclusively, without any sensory input, to navigate a new task. It also marks one of the first times researchers have registered brain activity tied to an ongoing, complex thought process. “It’s a very fluid process—the process of thinking. And we have no way in animals to know what they’re thinking and therefore map what we record in the brain to what’s happening in the mind,” says study investigator Mehrdad Jazayeri, professor and director of education, brain and cognitive sciences at MIT’s McGovern Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. In the new study, however, Jazayeri and his team designed a task that requires the animal to imagine a specific scenario at a specific time. “Imagination: There’s no magic to it; it’s a pattern of activity in the brain,” he says. Previous studies suggest rodents use cognitive maps to recreate the past and predict future possibilities. The new study, published last month in Nature, suggests monkeys also engage in such mental simulation and do so in the present—imagining states of the world that they just can’t see. “It’s a little bit like an animal navigating in the dark, where they’re using an internal map of where they are and where they’re going to update their sense of how close they are to their goal,” says Loren Frank, professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who was not involved in the work. “Our brains do this all the time. But this study gives us a sense of how they do it and shows there’s an identifiable underlying process. It’s a really nice step forward.” Research image of the activity of a single neuron in a monkey brain. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29412 - Posted: 07.31.2024

By Carl Zimmer After analyzing decades-old videos of captive chimpanzees, scientists have concluded that the animals could utter a human word: “mama.” It’s not exactly the expansive dialogue in this year’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” But the finding, published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, may offer some important clues as to how speech evolved. The researchers argue that our common ancestors with chimpanzees had brains already equipped with some of the building blocks needed for talking. Adriano Lameira, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Warwick in Britain and one of the authors of the study, said that the ability to speak is perhaps the most important feature that sets us apart from other animals. Talking to each other allowed early humans to cooperate and amass knowledge over generations. “It is the only trait that explains why we’ve been able to change the face of the earth,” Dr. Lameira said. “We would be an unremarkable ape without it.” Scientists have long wondered why we can speak and other apes cannot. Beginning in the early 1900s, that curiosity led to a series of odd — and cruel — experiments. A few researchers tried raising apes in their own homes to see if living with humans could lead the young animals to speak. In 1947, for example, the psychologist Keith Hayes and his wife, Catherine, adopted an infant chimpanzee. They named her Viki, and, when she was five months old, they started teaching her words. After two years of training, the couple later claimed, Viki could say “papa,” “mama,” “up” and “cup.” By the 1980s, many scientists had dismissed the experiences of Viki and other adopted apes. For one, separating babies from their mothers was likely traumatic. “It’s not the sort of thing you could fund anymore, and with good reason,” said Axel Ekstrom, a speech scientist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29408 - Posted: 07.27.2024

By Vivian La Great Basin was burning the midnight oil on a chilly fall evening in 2016 when he made his move. Slinking out of the shadows in Laramie, Wyoming, the raccoon approached what looked like a metal filing cabinet lying on its side. He could smell a mix of dog kibble and sardines within, but 12 latched narrow doors blocked his entry. Making matters worse, a fellow raccoon had beaten him there. So Great Basin jumped on top of the cabinet and began to fiddle with the latches upside down. He quickly opened one of the doors, securing the treats and filling his belly. Humans have long regarded raccoons—renowned for their ability to jimmy their way into locked garbage cans and enter seemingly impassable attics—with a mixture of awe and scorn. But outside of the lab, researchers have little scientific sense of how clever these “trash pandas” really are. A study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences may change that. The work was led by Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley who has studied raccoons for 10 years. She says she’s drawn by their quirky personalities and quick ability to adapt to environments such as urban areas. “I think it’s fascinating to think about how raccoons perceive the world.” Despite their reputation for cleverness, Stanton says raccoons generally are understudied because they can be “a menace in the lab,” gnawing on cages and biting scientists. Research on wild raccoons is even more scarce. © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29406 - Posted: 07.27.2024

By Cathleen O’Grady Human conversations are rapid-fire affairs, with mere milliseconds passing between one person’s utterance and their partner’s response. This speedy turn taking is universal across cultures—but now it turns out that chimpanzees do it, too. By analyzing thousands of gestures from chimpanzees in five different communities in East Africa, researchers found that the animals take turns while communicating, and do so as quickly as we do. The speedy gestural conversations are also seen across chimp communities, just like in humans, the authors report today in Current Biology. The finding is “very exciting” says Maël Leroux, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Rennes who was not involved with the work. “Language is the hallmark of our species … and a central feature of language is our ability to take turns.” Finding a similar behavior in our closest living relative, he says, suggests we may have inherited this ability from our shared common ancestor. When chimps gesture—such as reaching out an arm in a begging gesture—they are most often making a request, says Gal Badihi, an animal communication researcher at the University of St Andrews. This can include things such as “groom me,” “give me,” or “travel with me.” Most of the time, the chimp’s partner does the requested behavior. But sometimes, the second chimp will respond with its own gestures instead—for instance, one chimp requesting grooming, and the other indicating where they would like to be groomed, essentially saying “groom me first.” To figure out whether these interactions resemble human turn taking, Badihi and colleagues combed through hundreds of hours of footage from a massive database of chimpanzee gestural interactions recorded by multiple researchers across decades of fieldwork in East Africa. The scientists studied the footage, describing the precise movements each chimp made when gesturing, the response of other chimps, the duration of the gestures, and other details. © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29403 - Posted: 07.23.2024

By Brandon Keim 1 How We Think About Animals Has a Long, Complicated History Back when I first started writing about scientific research on animal minds, I had internalized a straightforward historical narrative: The western intellectual tradition held animals to be unintelligent, but thanks to recent advances in the science, we were learning otherwise. The actual history is so much more complicated. The denial of animal intelligence does have deep roots, of course. You can trace a direct line from Aristotle, who considered animals capable of feeling only pain and hunger, to medieval Christian theologians fixated on their supposed lack of rationality, to Enlightenment intellectuals who likened the cries of beaten dogs to the squeaking of springs. But along the way, a great many thinkers, from early Greek philosopher Plutarch on through to Voltaire, pushed back. They saw animals as intelligent and therefore deserving of ethical regard, too. Those have always been the stakes of this debate: If animals are mindless then we owe them nothing. Through that lens it’s no surprise that societies founded on exploitation—of other human beings, of animals, of the whole natural world—would yield knowledge systems that formally regarded animals as dumb. The Plutarchs and Voltaires of the world were cast to the side. The scientific pendulum did swing briefly in the other direction, thanks in no small part to the popularity of Charles Darwin. He saw humans as related to other animals not only in body but in mind, and recognized rich forms of consciousness even in earthworms. But the backlash to that way of thinking was fierce, culminating in a principle articulated in the 1890s and later enshrined as Morgan’s Canon: An animal’s behavior should not be interpreted as evidence of a higher psychological faculty until all other explanations could be ruled out. Stupidity by default. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Evolution; Attention
Link ID: 29399 - Posted: 07.23.2024

By Freda Kreier Dogs’ ability to feel your pain could be innate. It is the result of centuries of co-evolution with humans, suggests a community-science study that compared the responses of dogs and pet pigs to the sound of humans crying and humming. The results were published on 2 July in Animal Behaviour1. Humans pay attention to how the animals in their lives are feeling, and it seems that this attentiveness is reciprocal. Researchers have found that horses will stop and listen longer to human growls than to laughter2. Pigs respond more strongly to sounds made by people than wild boars do3. But studies testing whether the animals are just reacting to weird human sounds, or are capable of true emotional contagion — the ability to interpret and reflect people’s emotional states — are thin on the ground. Most animals can accurately echo the feelings of only other members of their species. But studies have shown that dogs (Canis familiaris) can mirror the emotions of the people around them4,5. One question is whether this emotional contagion is rooted in ‘universal vocal signals of emotion ’ that can be understood by all domesticated animals, or is specific to companion animals such as dogs. To test this, researchers compared the stress response of dogs and pet pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) to human sounds. Pet sounds Like dogs, pet pigs are social animals that are from a young age raised around people. But unlike dogs, pigs have been kept as livestock for most of their history with humans. So, if emotional contagion can be learnt through just proximity to people, pet pigs should respond in similar ways to dogs. The team recruited dog or pig owners around the world to film themselves in a room with their pets while playing recorded sounds of crying or humming. Researchers then tallied the number of stress behaviours — such as whining and yawning for dogs, and rapid ear flicks for pigs — exhibited during the experiment. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 29394 - Posted: 07.18.2024

By Dennis Normile For several decades, evidence has accumulated that animals turn to medicinal plants to relieve their ailments. Chimpanzees (and some other species) swallow leaves to mechanically clear the gut of parasites. Chimps also rely on the ingested pith of an African relative of the daisy, Vernonia amygdalina, to rid themselves of intestinal worms. Dolphins rub against antibacterial corals and sponges to treat skin infections. And recently, a male Sumatran orangutan was observed chewing the leaves of Fibraurea tinctoria, a South Asian plant with antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, and dabbing the juice onto a wound. These instances of animals playing doctor with therapeutic plants have typically been identified one by one. Today, in PLOS ONE, a multinational team proposes adding 17 samples from 13 plant species to the chimpanzee pharmacopia. “The paper provides important new findings about self-medication behavior in wild chimpanzees,” a topic that’s still relatively unknown, says Isabelle Laumer, a cognitive biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and lead author on the orangutan self-medication paper who was not involved in the new chimp research. Observers with the team behind today's paper spent 4 months with each of two chimp communities habituated to human observers in Uganda’s Budongo Forest. The researchers supplemented their own observations with historical data. From the 170 chimps in the two communities, the observers zeroed in on 51 individuals suffering bacterial infections and inflammation as indicated by abnormal urine composition, diarrhea, traces of parasites, or apparent wounds. For 10 hours a day they followed the sick chimps through the forest, noting which plants they ate and when, and watching in particular to see whether the animals went out of their way to find and consume plants not part of their usual diet. In one example, researchers observed an individual suffering from diarrhea very briefly venture outside the group’s safe home territory to eat a small amount of dead wood from Alstonia boonei, a tree in the dogbane family. Chimps rarely eat dead wood, which is not nutritious for them, the team says.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 29364 - Posted: 06.24.2024

By Virginia Morell Leaping over waves or body surfing side by side, dolphins are a fun-loving bunch. But their frolicking—and that of species from hyenas to humans—has long baffled evolutionary biologists. Why expend so much energy on play? A new study offers an intriguing explanation: Juvenile male dolphins use play to acquire the skills required for fathering calves, researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most significantly, the scientists found the most playful males go on to have more calves as adults. The study is likely to spur further research into play behavior in additional species, other scientists say. “It’s exciting research, and it solves an evolutionary puzzle,” says Jennifer Smith, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. “This is the first study to link play behavior in the wild to reproductive success.” Since 1982, scientists have observed some 200 male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in the exceptionally clear waters of Shark Bay in Australia. About 20 years ago, the researchers noticed that young males, 4 to 12 years old, often played together as if they were herding a fertile female, flanking her on either side, while swimming in sync with each other and making popping vocalizations. This kind of “synchronicity is crucial for male reproduction,” says Kathryn Holmes, a behavioral biologist with the Shark Bay Dolphin Research project and lead author of the new study. The young dolphins’ behaviors were strikingly similar to those of the adults. “We wondered if this was ‘play practice’ for the adult behaviors,” Holmes says. So she and her colleagues closely tracked 28 juvenile males for 4 to 5 months over several years, recording their interactions and play behaviors. When socializing, the males “played almost continuously,” Holmes says. “They seemed to never tire of their games.” © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 29353 - Posted: 06.11.2024

Elephants call out to each other using individual names that they invent for their fellow pachyderms, according to a new study. While dolphins and parrots have been observed addressing each other by mimicking the sound of others from their species, elephants are the first non-human animals known to use names that do not involve imitation, the researchers suggested. For the new study published on Monday, a team of international researchers used an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse the calls of two wild herds of African savanna elephants in Kenya. The research “not only shows that elephants use specific vocalisations for each individual, but that they recognise and react to a call addressed to them while ignoring those addressed to others”, the lead study author, Michael Pardo, said. The video player is currently playing an ad. “This indicates that elephants can determine whether a call was intended for them just by hearing the call, even when out of its original context,” the behavioural ecologist at Colorado State University said in a statement. The researchers sifted through elephant “rumbles” recorded at Kenya’s Samburu national reserve and Amboseli national park between 1986 and 2022. Using a machine-learning algorithm, they identified 469 distinct calls, which included 101 elephants issuing a call and 117 receiving one. Elephants make a wide range of sounds, from loud trumpeting to rumbles so low they cannot be heard by the human ear. Names were not always used in the elephant calls. But when names were called out, it was often over a long distance, and when adults were addressing young elephants. Adults were also more likely to use names than calves, suggesting it could take years to learn this particular talent. The most common call was “a harmonically rich, low-frequency sound”, according to the study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 29352 - Posted: 06.11.2024

By Betsy Mason To help pay for his undergraduate education, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin had an unusual summer job: cruise ship magician. “I was that guy who comes out at dinnertime and does random magic for you,” he says. But his latest magic gig is even more unusual: performing for Eurasian jays at Cambridge University’s Comparative Cognition Lab. Birds can be harder to fool than tourists. And to do magic for the jays, he had to learn to do sleight-of-hand tricks with a live, wriggling waxworm instead of the customary coin or ball. But performing in an aviary does have at least one advantage over performing on a cruise ship: The birds aren’t expecting to be entertained. “You don’t have to worry about impressing anybody, or tell a joke,” Garcia-Pelegrin says. “So you just do the magic.” In just the last few years, researchers have become interested in what they can learn about animal minds by studying what does and doesn’t fool them. “Magic effects can reveal blind spots in seeing and roadblocks in thinking,” says Nicky Clayton, who heads the Cambridge lab and, with Garcia-Pelegrin and others, cowrote an overview of the science of magic in the Annual Review of Psychology. What we visually perceive about the world is a product of how our brains interpret what our eyes see. Humans and other animals have evolved to handle the immense amount of visual information we’re exposed to by prioritizing some types of information, filtering out things that are usually less relevant and filling in gaps with assumptions. Many magic effects exploit these cognitive shortcuts in humans, and comparing how well these same tricks work on other species may reveal something about how their minds operate. Clayton and her colleagues have used magic tricks with both jays and monkeys to reveal differences in how these animals experience the world. Now they are hoping to expand to more species and inspire other researchers to try magic to explore big questions about complex mental abilities and how they evolved.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 29345 - Posted: 06.06.2024

By Mariana Lenharo Crows know their numbers. An experiment has revealed that these birds can count their own calls, showcasing a numerical skill previously only seen in people. Investigating how animals understand numbers can help scientists to explore the biological origins of humanity’s numerical abilities, says Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Rovereto, Italy. Being able to produce a deliberate number of vocalizations on cue, as the birds in the experiment did, “is actually a very impressive achievement”, he notes. Andreas Nieder, an animal physiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a co-author of the study published 23 May in Science1, says it was amazing to see how cognitively flexible these corvids are. “They have a reputation of being very smart and intelligent, and they proved this once again.” The researchers worked with three carrion crows (Corvus corone) that had already been trained to caw on command. Over the next several months, the birds were taught to associate visual cues — a screen showing the digits 1, 2, 3 or 4 — with the number of calls they were supposed to produce. They were later also introduced to four auditory cues that were each associated with a distinct number. During the experiment, the birds stood in front of the screen and were presented with a visual or auditory cue. They were expected to produce the number of vocalizations associated with the cue and to peck at an ‘enter key’ on the touchscreen monitor when they were done. If they got it right, an automated feeder delivered bird-seed pellets and mealworms as a reward. They were correct most of the time. “Their performance was way beyond chance and highly significant,” says Nieder. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 29326 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Kermit Pattison Since the Stone Age, hunters have brought down big game with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. Now, a new study reveals traditional societies around the globe also relied on another deadly but often-overlooked weapon: our legs. According to a report published today in Nature Human Behaviour, running down big game such as antelope, moose, and even kangaroos was far more widespread than previously recognized. Researchers documented nearly 400 cases of endurance pursuits—a technique in which prey are chased to exhaustion—by Indigenous peoples around the globe between the 16th and 21st centuries. And in some cases, they suggest, it can be more efficient than stealthy stalking. The findings bolster the idea that humans evolved to be hunting harriers, says Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. “Nobody else has come up with any other explanation for why humans evolved to run long distances,” says Lieberman, who adds that he’s impressed with the paper’s “depth of scholarship.” For decades, some anthropologists have argued that endurance running was among the first hunting techniques employed by early hominins in Africa. Advocates suggest subsequent millennia spent chasing down prey shaped many unique human features, including our springy arched feet, slow-twitch muscle fibers optimized for efficiency, heat-shedding bare skin, and prodigious ability to sweat. The “born to run” idea has become something of an origin story among many endurance athletes. But a pack of skeptics has dogged the theory. Critics cited the higher energetic costs of running over walking and noted that accounts of persistence hunting among modern foragers are rare. Yet hints of such pursuits kept popping up as Eugène Morin, an archaeologist at Trent University and co-author of the new paper, scoured the literature for a book he was writing on hunting among traditional societies. As he pored over early accounts by missionaries, travelers, and explorers, he repeatedly found descriptions of long-distance running and tracking. © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 29309 - Posted: 05.16.2024

By Jake Buehler Sounding like a toxic moth might keep some beetles safe from hungry bats. When certain tiger beetles hear an echolocating bat draw near, they respond with extremely high-pitched clicks. This acoustic countermeasure is a dead ringer for the noises toxic moths make to signal their nasty taste to bats, researchers report May 15 in Biology Letters. Such sound-based mimicry may be widespread among groups of night-flying insects, the scientists say. At night, bats and bugs are locked in sonic warfare. At least seven major insect groups have ears sensitive to bat echolocation pitches, and many often flee in response. Some moths have sound-absorbent wings and fuzz that impart stealth against bat sonar (SN: 11/14/18). Others use their genitals to make ultrasonic trills — above the range of human hearing — that may startle bats or jam their sonar (SN: 7/3/13). Previous research suggested some tiger beetles — a family of fast-running, often strikingly colored predatory beetles with strong jaws — also make high-pitched clicks as a response to human-made imitations of bat ultrasound. So Harlan Gough, a conservation entomologist now at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Burbank, Wash., and his colleagues set out to answer why. The researchers collected 19 tiger beetle species from southern Arizona and brought them into the lab. They tethered the insects to a metal rod and prompted them to fly. The team then filmed and recorded audio to see how the beetles responded to playback of a bat clicking sequence that immediately precedes an attack. Right away, seven of these species — all nocturnal fliers — pulled their hard, case-like forewings into the path of their beating hindwings. The resulting collisions made high-pitched clicking noises. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 29308 - Posted: 05.16.2024

By Emily Anthes Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists tried using sign language to converse with apes and trained parrots to deploy growing English vocabularies. The work quickly attracted media attention — and controversy. The research lacked rigor, critics argued, and what seemed like animal communication could simply have been wishful thinking, with researchers unconsciously cuing their animals to respond in certain ways. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the research fell out of favor. “The whole field completely disintegrated,” said Irene Pepperberg, a comparative cognition researcher at Boston University, who became known for her work with an African gray parrot named Alex. Today, advances in technology and a growing appreciation for the sophistication of animal minds have renewed interest in finding ways to bridge the species divide. Pet owners are teaching their dogs to press “talking buttons” and zoos are training their apes to use touch screens. In a cautious new paper, a team of scientists outlines a framework for evaluating whether such tools might give animals new ways to express themselves. The research is designed “to rise above some of the things that have been controversial in the past,” said Jennifer Cunha, a visiting research associate at Indiana University. The paper, which is being presented at a science conference on Tuesday, focuses on Ms. Cunha’s parrot, an 11-year-old Goffin’s cockatoo named Ellie. Since 2019, Ms. Cunha has been teaching Ellie to use an interactive “speech board,” a tablet-based app that contains more than 200 illustrated icons, corresponding to words and phrases including “sunflower seeds,” “happy” and “I feel hot.” When Ellie presses on an icon with her tongue, a computerized voice speaks the word or phrase aloud. In the new study, Ms. Cunha and her colleagues did not set out to determine whether Ellie’s use of the speech board amounted to communication. Instead, they used quantitative, computational methods to analyze Ellie’s icon presses to learn more about whether the speech board had what they called “expressive and enrichment potential.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Epilepsy
Link ID: 29306 - Posted: 05.14.2024

By Lee Alan Dugatkin 1 The complexity of animal social behavior is astonishing I have studied animal behavior for more than 35 years, so I’m rarely surprised at just how nuanced, subtle, and complex the social behavior of nonhuman animals can be. But, every once in a while, that “my goodness, how astonishing!” feeling—which I felt so often in graduate school—returns. That’s how I felt when I read Kevin Oh and Alexander Badyaev’s work on sexual selection and social networks in house finches (Haemorhous mexicanus). The house finches in question, I learned while researching my book, live on the campus of the University of Arizona, where, in 2003, Oh was doing his graduate work and Badyaev was a young assistant professor. Using data on thousands of finches they banded over six years, these two researchers were able to map the social network the birds relied on during breeding season. This network was composed of 25 “neighborhoods” with an average of 30 finches per group. Females rarely left their neighborhoods to interact with birds in other neighborhoods. But how much males moved around from one neighborhood to the next depended on their coloring. Those with plenty of red coloration—which females tend to prefer as mating partners—generally remained put, just like females. But drabber colored males were more likely to socialize across many neighborhoods. The question was why? The answer was what rekindled my own sense of awe in the power of natural selection to shape animal social behavior. When Oh and Bedyaev mapped reproductive success in their house finches, they found that the most colorful males did well no matter what neighborhood they were in. Drab males, however, had greater reproductive success if they tried their luck all around town—essentially, this allowed them to find just the spot where their relative coloration was greatest and therefore most likely to score them a mate. In other words, they learned to play the field, restructuring social networks in a way that served their purposes best. 2 Technology is radically changing how scientists study the behavior of animals © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29305 - Posted: 05.14.2024

By Gillian Dohrn “Puppy-dog eyes didn’t just evolve for us, in domestic dogs,” says comparative anatomist Heather Smith. Her team’s work has thrown a 2019 finding1 that the muscles in dogs’ eyebrows evolved to communicate with humans in the doghouse by showing that African wild dogs also have the muscles to make the infamous pleading expression. The study was published on 10 April in The Anatomical Record2. Now, one of the researchers who described the evolution of puppy-dog eyebrow muscles is considering what the African dog discovery means for canine evolution. “It opens a door to thinking about where dogs come from, and what they are,” says Anne Burrows, a biological anthropologist at the Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and author of the earlier paper. The 2019 study garnered headlines around the world when it found that the two muscles responsible for creating the sad–sweet puppy-dog stare are pronounced in several domestic breeds (Canis familiaris), but almost absent in wolves (Canis lupus). If the social dynamic between humans and dogs drove eyebrow evolution, Smith wondered whether the highly social African wild dog might also have expressive brows. African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are native to sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1997 and 2012, their numbers dropped by half in some areas. With only 8,000 or so remaining in the wild, studying them is difficult but crucial for conservation efforts. Smith, who is based at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and her colleagues dissected a recently deceased African wild dog from Phoenix Zoo. They found that both the levator anguli oculi medalis (LAOM) and the retractor anguli oculi lateralis (RAOL) muscles, credited with creating the puppy-dog expression, were similar in size to those of domestic dog breeds.

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29295 - Posted: 05.07.2024

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan An orangutan in Sumatra surprised scientists when he was seen treating an open wound on his cheek with a poultice made from a medicinal plant. It’s the first scientific record of a wild animal healing a wound using a plant with known medicinal properties. The findings were published this week in Scientific Reports1. “It shows that orangutans and humans share knowledge. Since they live in the same habitat, I would say that’s quite obvious, but still intriguing to realize,” says Caroline Schuppli, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, and a co-author of the study. In 2009, Schuppli’s team was observing Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) in the Gunung Leuser National Park in South Aceh, Indonesia, when a young male moved into the forest. He did not have a mature male’s big cheek pads, called flanges, and was probably around 20 years old, Schuppli says. He was named Rakus, or ‘greedy’ in Indonesian, after he ate all the flowers off a gardenia bush in one sitting. In 2021, Rakus underwent a growth spurt and became a mature flanged male. The researchers observed Rakus fighting with other flanged males to establish dominance and, in June 2022, a field assistant noted an open wound on his face, possibly made by the canines of another male, Schuppli says. Days later, Rakus was observed eating the stems and leaves of the creeper akar kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), which local people use to treat diabetes, dysentery and malaria, among other conditions. Orangutans in the area rarely eat this plant. In addition to eating the leaves, Rakus chewed them without swallowing and used his fingers to smear the juice on his facial wound over seven minutes. Some flies settled on the wound, whereupon Rakus spread a poultice of leaf-mash on the wound. He ate the plant again the next day. Eight days after his injury, his wound was fully closed. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29290 - Posted: 05.03.2024