What is a synthesis assignment?/Animals

If you have taken Psychology, you might have learned about Bloom's Taxonomy.

Teachers use the taxonomy to describe types of assignments.

 

  

 

This assignment is a synthesis assignment. According to thoughtco.com, synthesis "requires students to infer relationships among sources. The high-level thinking of synthesis is evident when students put the parts or information they have reviewed as a whole in order to create new meaning or a new structure" (2018, para. 1).

 

SITUATION:

• This assignment is a simulation to mimic doing research for a paper. 
• Imagine that you have to write a research paper about animals; below are some articles to consider. Some are scholarly and some are not.
• Just as when you find articles for actual research papers, you will not have to read every single article thoroughly to be able to do this assignment.
• Come up with a thesis statement for the paper. The thesis should be a statement that you think you can prove by using the information that you found in the articles. 
• All you need to write is your thesis statement. You will be graded on whether it is something that can be supported by the articles in this assignment. Remember that a thesis statement is ONE complete, grammatical sentence. It is not a question. 

 

ARTICLES:

This is a simulation of the variety of things that might pop up if you were googling around for animal articles. For your convenience, I have put them into this one document. Since everyone has the same exact articles, I am not asking for any APA citations or a reference list or anything like that: just write the thesis statement that you come up with.

 

COWS COMMUNICATE WITH UNIQUE MOOS

BY BRIGIT KATZ, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, JANUARY 14, 2020

Should you encounter a herd of cows munching on a field of grass, you might very well hear them emit some emphatic “moos.” It’s hard for humans to decipher these cow calls, but a new study shows that our bovine buddies communicate using unique voices, which remain consistent across a range of emotional circumstances.

Previous research has shown that mothers and calves show individuality in their vocalizations, helping moms recognize babies’ calls, and vice versa. But Alexandra Green, a PhD student at the University of Sydney’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences, wondered whether cows also display unique voices in other aspects of their lives. So she headed to a free-range farm on the university’s campus, equipped with headphones and a shotgun mic.

Green spent five months hanging out with a herd of Holstein-Friesian heifers, capturing their moos and lows. “My friends and family think it’s a bit funny,” she tells Liam Mannix of the Sydney Morning Herald, “but they are really intrigued by the results. Not many people think about this, I guess.”

In total, Green and her colleagues recorded 333 high-frequency vocalizations from 13 heifers, none of which had been pregnant. The calls were collected during a number of different situations, like when the cows were in heat and when they were anticipating a tasty meal, which the researchers identified as “positive” contexts. Calls were also collected when the animals were denied food, when they were physically isolated from their fellow herd members, and when they were both physically and visually isolated from the rest of the herd, which the researchers identified as “negative” contexts.

Using acoustic analyses programs, the researchers determined that the cows maintained individual vocal cues, whether they were communicating arousal, excitement or distress. It is “highly likely,” the study authors write, that cows are able to recognize other members of their herd through these calls. Listening back to her recordings, even Green could pick up on differences in the vocalizations.

“I could definitely tell them apart,” she tells Mannix.

The researchers’ findings align with previous observations indicating that cows are profoundly social creatures, which live in herds with observable hierarchies, experience long-term effects when they are separated from their mothers at an early age, and even learn better when they have their buddies around. It makes sense, in other words, that the animals would use vocal cues to aid in recognition of other herd members.

“In one sense, it isn't surprising they assert their individual identity throughout their life and not just during mother-calf imprinting,” Green acknowledges. “But this is the first time we have been able to analyse voice to have conclusive evidence of this trait.”

The study also adds to our understanding of the richness of cows’ social and emotional lives, an important finding at a time when cow welfare is severely compromised by mass farming practices. Farmers could use cow vocalizations to detect the wellbeing of distinct cattle, the study authors say—but treating cows as individual creatures with unique needs is often not a priority of industry farms.

“In the dairy industry, we’re seeing increasing herd sizes,” Green tells Isaac Schultz of Atlas Obscura. “We need to think of novel ways to look at their welfare.”

 

 

A NEW MODEL OF EMPATHY: THE RAT

BY DAVID BROWN, WASHINGTON POST DECEMBER 8, 2011

 

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes. The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.

 

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

 

“There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual,” said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment along with graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and fellow researcher Jean Decety. “There is a common misconception that sharing and helping is a cultural occurrence. But this is not a cultural event. It is part of our biological inheritance,” she added.

 

The idea that animals have emotional lives and are capable of detecting emotions in others has been gaining ground for decades. Empathic behavior has been observed in apes and monkeys, and described by many pet owners (especially dog owners). Recently, scientists demonstrated “emotional contagion” in mice, a situation in which one animal’s stress worsens another’s.

 

But empathy that leads to helping activity — what psychologists term “pro-social behavior” — hasn’t been formally shown in non-primates until now.

 

If this experiment reported Thursday holds up under scrutiny, it will give neuroscientists a method to study empathy and altruism in a rigorous way.

 

Do age and gender affect empathic behavior? Will a rat free a rat it doesn’t know? Is more help offered to individuals an animal is related to, either directly or as a member of the same genetic tribe? What are the genes, and their variants, that determine whether one animal helps another and how much? Answering those questions becomes possible now that there is an animal “model” for this behavior.

 

“The study is truly groundbreaking,” said Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University who has written extensively about empathy. What is particularly interesting, he said, is there appears to be no clear cost benefit trade-off going on.

 

“We are entering a distinctly psychological realm of emotions and reactions to the emotions of others, which is where most human altruism finds its motivation.”

 

Jeffrey S. Mogil, the McGill University neuroscientist who showed emotional contagion in mice in 2006, said that “what is amazing about this is that it shows empathy in such a robust way. This is not something that rats would otherwise be doing.”

 

A major question that needs to be answered next is whether the free rat liberates the captive one to relieve its own stress or the stress of the other animal. “It’s more likely to be the former,” Mogil said. “But even if it is the former, I’m not sure that’s so different from humans.”

In the new experiment, the pairs of rats were put in the experimental condition for an hour a day for 12 days. (They had previously spent two weeks together in a cage and knew each other.) The rat opened the door to the trapped rat’s cage by chance the first time, usually freezing in fright when it fell over noisily. In an average of seven days, however, it had learned to open the door intentionally and was no longer spooked when the door fell over.

In 13 percent of the sessions, the trapped animal gave an alarm call, but vocalized distress was clearly not necessary to put the free rat to work. When the cage was empty or occupied by a rat doll, the free rat sometimes opened it, but over the course of days lost interest in doing so.

 

After liberation, the rats nuzzled and explored the experimental arena. But when the setup was changed so that the captive exited into a different area, the free rat still opened the door for the captive one.

 

When a cage with five chocolate chips was added to the arena, the free rat opened it, too. That animal consumed all the treats if the other cage was empty. But if it contained a captive rat, the free rat shared the chocolate about half the time, letting its compatriot have 11 / 2 pieces on average.

 

“To actually share food — this is a big deal to a rat,” Mason said. “I didn’t think they would do that.”

 

Mason sees two processes at work. The first is one animal’s ability to identify and share another animal’s stress. But equally important is the ability to control the “acquired” stress and keep from becoming overwhelmed. But that was something not every rat could do. All six female rats in the experiment learned to open the captive’s cage, but seven of 26 males never did.

 

“I don’t think it’s because they didn’t have empathy. I don’t think they had the ability to down-regulate their own stress and act on the empathy,” she said.

 

Mason thinks that empathy and altruism evolved with females caring for helpless offspring. Natural selection favored those maternal traits, which then became generalized to both sexes. They helped forge social bonds that aided the survival of individuals and groups. She suspects the behavior is “sub-cortical” — closer to a reflex than a thought, and driven by ancient parts of the brain. De Waal, who in 2009 wrote a book called The Age of Empathy whose cover featured a chimpanzee shaking hands with a man, agrees up to a point.

 

“It is an intelligent response, but the motivation is, as in humans, an empathic process that is fairly automatic,” he said.

 

Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University who wrote an accompanying commentary in the journal, said that many people still doubt that animals have emotional lives that can be studied: “Some skeptics are bound to say that this interpretation is a bit far-fetched,” he said in an interview. “What this provides is reasonably good evidence for empathy, and a model system to study the underlying processes further.”

 

LONDON FOXES SHOW EARLY SIGNS OF SELF-DOMESTICATION

BY THERESA MACHEMER, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, JUNE 8, 2020

The National Museums Scotland has a collection of about 1,500 fox skulls, diligently labeled with their original locations in London and the surrounding countryside. And when researchers compared rural fox skulls to those from in the city itself, they found some key differences.

The results, published on June 3 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that while rural foxes remain adapted for speed and hunting small, scampering prey, urban foxes have different priorities. Their skulls reflect the different needs of a carnivore that scavenges in a city chock-full of human refuse, ripe for the taking by a cunning canine. Shorter, stronger snouts are better adapted for breaking open packaging and crunching leftover bones, and smaller brains are fine when their meals don’t run away, Virginia Morell reports for Science magazine.

Together, the characteristics resemble what Charles Darwin labeled “domestication syndrome,” a set of traits that accompany a wild animal’s transition to tameness and eventually domestication.

“What’s really fascinating here is that the foxes are doing this to themselves,” Kevin Parsons, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Glasgow, tells the BBC in a video. “This is the result of foxes that have decided to live near people, showing these traits that make them look more like domesticated animals.”

But, the researchers stress, the urban foxes are definitely not house pets. Instead, the differences illuminate the path that dogs and cats may have taken early in their paths toward human companionship.

The fox skulls were collected between 1971 and 1973, when the animals were being culled and London boroughs were responsible for handling their fox populations. According to London’s Natural History Museum, attempts to cull the urban foxes were unsuccessful because the populations are self-regulating, and when one animal was killed then another would take its territory within days. The city abandoned fox culls in the 1980s, although fox control measures were raised for discussion again in recent years.

The skulls served as a snapshot of a large fox population in the early 1970s. Parsons photographed 111 skulls—57 female and 54 male—from rural and urban areas and identified key features in the skulls’ shapes. He and his team found that a fox’s habitat has a noticeable effect on the shape of the skull. A rural fox’s long, tapered snout is ideal for agility, but an urban fox doesn’t need speed since its energy is better spent digging through a trash pile than hunting prey.

“They also have a smaller brain case, so they may have smaller brains in the urban environment,” Parsons tells the BBC. “So an evasive prey that’s scooting back and forth and trying to avoid capture is going to be much more mentally challenging for a fox than the stationary prey, the stationary food that an urban fox will come across.”

The changes in the urban fox skulls also line up with a long-running study into fox domestication in Russia. The study began in the 1960s, and after generations of breeding only the least aggressive, most human-friendly foxes, the animals have traits like curled tails, floppy ears, short snouts and barking. (A recent paper raised questions about whether the traits are actually associated with domestication, or if they’re a result of the original gene pool of 130 foxes in the study.)

But in regards to the new study, “I’m not so much surprised as delighted,” by the results, evolutionary biologist Lee Dugatkin of the University of Louisville, who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Science magazine. “This is a ‘natural experiment’ that is very much in line with what the Russian experiment has found.”

The foxes are nowhere near as domesticated as familiar animals like dogs or cats, but the study shows in a heavily human environment like a city is enough to nudge animals down a domesticated evolutionary path.

“[Foxes] never move any farther down the path to domestication,” than what is observed in the study, Melinda Zeder, emeritus archaeologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, tells Science. “We don’t know why.”

 

GOATS CAN UNDERSTAND HUMAN EXPRESSIONS AND ARE DRAWN TO SMILING FACES

CAITLYN.CLANCEY, DIPLY.COM, 18 SEP 2019

 

A new study out of Queen Mary, University of London, has found that goats are able to read human expressions, and unsurprisingly, they prefer the positive ones.

The purpose of the study, which was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, was to determine whether animals domesticated for production, such as goats, are as sensitive to human emotional expressions as those domesticated for companionship, like dogs.

A previous study from 2017 sought to prove that our favorite pups identify facial expressions.

Conducted by the University of Helsinki, this particular research project found that dogs are actually attracted to smiling faces, particularly those belong to their owners.

Apparently, dogs who took part in the study were more interested in smiling faces than angry ones.

In fact, focusing on images of smiling faces enhanced the dogs' emotional state more than angry ones.

So not only were they more drawn to positive expressions, but those expressions actually made the dogs happier, too.

As part of the goat study, researchers presented a group of goats with two photos ⁠— one with a happy face and the other with an angry one.

The goats were left to wander as their little hearts desired, and all of them chose to approach the happier face to give it a closer look.

In fact, not a single goat wanted anything to do with the negative picture.

Whenever the happy picture was placed on the right side of the pen, all the goats were drawn to it.

However, their interest waned whenever it was placed on the left side, though researchers suspect this can be attributed to the fact that goats use only one side of their brain to process information.

So what can we take away from this study?

 

Well, according to researchers, the results firmly conclude that goats can not only distinguish between different human facial expressions, but they also generally prefer happy ones:

"These findings suggest that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited to those with a long history of domestication as companions, and therefore may be far more widespread than previously believed."

To put it simply, dogs and goats aren't so different after all.

 

LANGUR MONKEYS TENDERLY COMFORT ONE ANOTHER OVER THE ‘DEATH’ OF A ROBOTIC SPY MONKEY

BY LORI DORN ON JANUARY 11, 2017, LAUGHINGSQUID.COM

In the first episode of the BBC Series “Spy in the Wild”, narrated by David Tennant, a small robotic spy monkey was placed amongst a tribe of langur monkeys who quickly accepted the new “baby” as one of their own. One of the monkeys accidentally dropped the robot and believed the baby to be dead.

Incredibly, the entire tribe gathered together around the “body”, tenderly comforting one another much in the way humans do in similar circumstances. Mothers pulled their children closer to them, adults hugged one another and all paid respects to the baby that they never had a chance to know.

 

MANTIS SHRIMP CAN PUNCH EACH OTHER TO DEATH BUT PREFER TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS PEACEFULLY

BY KRISTIN HUGO, NEWSWEEK, 1/17/18

When an argument comes to blows, it's especially devastating for a mantis shrimp. Their punches are powerful enough to break glass, so if they fight among themselves, a disagreement could be fatal.

But a new study shows that mantis shrimp communicate without trying to kill each other.

Scientists at Duke University decided to create some conflict between mantis shrimp in order to see if and when they would resort to drastic violence to solve it. They took pairs of mantis shrimp of a certain species, Neogonodactylus bredini, and gave one of each pair a burrow. Then they sent the other to the area to see if they would fight over the burrow.

The mantis shrimp didn't immediately deploy their powerful weapons to knock each other into the next world. Instead, they went through several phases of communicating to demonstrate how fit they are—and why they're formidable opponents.

First, they flicked their antennae. Then, they raised up the front of their body to show off. If neither animal left the ring, they sparred by nonlethally tapping each other on the hard shells on their back.

"These 'phases' are indicative of how they are assessing each other," Patrick Green, an author of the study, wrote to Newsweek in an email. Green is a biomechanics researcher at Duke University.

After they had assessed who was the fitter contestant, one mantis shrimp would move away from the burrow, and to the victor goes the spoils. The research was published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

 Why didn't the mantis shrimp punch their opponent to the death? Non-lethal displays are common in the animal kingdom. This behavior communicates that an individual has plenty of resources and could harm their opponent, so the opponent might as well just back off. It's a good idea, evolutionarily speaking, for the smaller, weaker individual to take a hint and live to try again later.

Furthermore, killing and maiming members of your own species isn't a good survival tactic for a population. That's why fights for mates involve locking horns, but not goring each other. Even if you win a fight and kill your opponent, a full-fledged bout of violence is likely to leave both participants damaged.

However, if you are the prey of a mantis shrimp, you aren't likely to receive this type of communication. They'll go straight for the kill. Mantis shrimp can move their appendages as fast as a speeding bullet, and their strength is enough to break glass and boil water. Luckily for smaller members of these rainbow, aquatic creatures, conflicts within the species rarely come to blows.

 

OCTOPUSES ARE BUILDING UNDERWATER ‘CITIES’

BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING, DISCOVER MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

 

Underneath the waves lies a lost city, home to untold riches and guarded jealously by the strange creatures who make their homes within its confines.

Well, the riches are all shellfish, but “Octlantis,” a newly discovered settlement inhabited by around a dozen common Sydney octopuses, does have some strange residents.

Tale of Two Cities

Octopuses were once considered solitary creatures, thought to roam the depths alone, meeting only to mate. But recent discoveries have begun to overturn that assumption, however. Just take the 2009 discovery of a settlement similar to Octlantis, dubbed “Octopolis,” inhabited by the same type of octopus. While this species, dubbed the “Gloomy Octopus,” is still commonly found by its lonesome, in certain situations, it appears that they decide to band together into communities centered around small dens made of shells.

In Jervis Bay, off Eastern Australia, Octopolis was built around a man-made object of uncertain provenance, about which the octopuses gradually constructed small dens from the shell middens left over from foraging and feasting. Nearby Octlantis provides a crucial confirmation of the behavior, but that “city” didn’t start around an artificial nucleus. The findings were published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology.

Researchers from the U.S. and Australia made several dives to the site in 2016 and 2017, and placed cameras to record the octopuses’ interactions. Life in the city is no peaceful idyll, they found. Octopuses taking shelter in their dens were often attacked and forced out by other members of their species, and various forms of aggression were common. Victory often went to the larger of the two, and the loser was forced to slink away, homeless for the time being.

Nevertheless, living in a community could offer some important benefits for tentacled city-slickers. As study co-author Peter Godfrey-Smith writes in his book on octopus intelligence Other Minds: Residents of Octopolis are often harried by sharks, fish and other predators when they ventured out into the open waters. Their dens, however, seemed to provide them safe haven.

Poseidon’s Own Country

Both communities were also built near dense populations of scallops, and the bounty of food both enables the octopuses’ sedentary lifestyle and could convince them to play nice with each other. Indeed, the rich prey availability has enabled a sort of cyclical expansion of the cities. As more shellfish get eaten and discarded, the midden grows, allowing more octopuses to build dens and begin discarding shellfish in turn.

Godfrey-Smith refers to the octopuses in the two cities as “ecosystem engineers,” given that they have essentially landscaped their surroundings to create a more hospitable environment. The urban development has itself attracted a much more diverse assemblage of sea life, he writes, expanding the effects of the octopuses labors beyond just their species.

Of course, it is a bit of stretch to call Octatlantis a community in the traditional sense. Octopuses are not obligated to live together, and given the unique advantages of this particular area, it seems they’ve simply chosen to put up with each other’s presence rather than embrace togetherness wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, the advent of communities and social life is theorized to have spurred our own development, and these gatherings give researchers the chance to observe the beginnings of what could be a long-term experiment in octopus cultural evolution.

Already, several generations of octopus have inhabited the sites, indicating that they are more than just a passing fad. Octopolis and Octlantis, two cities on the rise, seem here to stay.

 

PARROTS WILL SHARE CURRENCY TO HELP THEIR PALS PURCHASE FOOD

BY KATHERINE J. WU, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, JANUARY 9, 2020

Parrots go bonkers for walnuts.

After snatching the seeds, these brightly plumed birds crack into them with glee. When offered the nuts as a prize, parrots will do tricks, solve puzzles and learn complex tasks. They’ll even trade currency for them in the form of small metal rings passed into the hands of human researchers.

“They all really like the walnuts,” says Désirée Brucks, an animal behaviorist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. “They don’t get them in their normal diet, so it’s quite a good reward.”

But despite the nuts’ value—or perhaps because of it—parrots are also willing to share their treats and the tokens to buy them with other birds. Given the option, the birds will transfer the precious metal rings to a friend in a neighboring cage so they, too, can enjoy some nutty nosh—even without the promise of reciprocation, Brucks’ latest research shows.

African grey parrots Nikki and Jack, who are also siblings, exchange tokens, which can "buy" walnuts from a human researcher (Anastasia Krasheninnikova)

The birds’ generosity has animal scientists intrigued. It’s one thing to pass a partner a piece of grub; it’s another to give them the currency to purchase it. Such acts of charity have long been thought to be restricted to primates like humans, orangutans and bonobos. Few, if any, other mammals were thought capable of it, let alone a creature with a bird brain.

But big-brained African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) may be the first avian known to engage in this helpful behavior, Brucks’ team reports today in the journal Current Biology. Parrots, it seems, don’t just have the ability to comprehend metal rings as currency for food, but they also “understand the consequences their actions can have on another individual,” says Christina Riehl, an expert in bird behavior at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research. “That’s pretty sophisticated reasoning.”

In research labs and wild habitats alike, plenty of animals have been observed gifting their friends with grub. Bonobos pass morsels of meat to strangers, vampire bats barf blood into hungry relatives’ mouths, and canines will tap their snouts to touch screens to share sausages with packmates.

But Brucks and Auguste von Bayern, an animal behaviorist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, wanted to test the limits of this generosity in parrots, long considered to be among the brainiest of birds. So they set up an experiment that involved the transfer of treats—with a bit of extra mental gymnastics mixed in.

After training eight African grey parrots and six blue-headed macaws to barter metal rings for walnuts, the researchers paired the birds up with same-species partners. They then put the parrots in clear chambers joined by a transfer hole, and gave one bird—the donor—ten rings, while the other was left with none.

Even without the promise of a reward for themselves, seven out of eight of the African grey parrot donors passed some of their available tokens through the transfer hole to their broke partners, usually shuttling them beak to beak. On average, about half the metal rings made it through, allowing the recipients to trade the trinkets for walnuts through another window.

“It was amazing to see,” Brucks says. “I thought that when they saw they weren’t gaining anything, they’d stop. But they just kept doing it … some transferred [all] ten of their tokens.”

The blue-headed macaws, however, weren’t as philanthropic, keeping almost 90 percent of their metal rings to themselves. And when they did transfer tokens, the acts were mostly passive: They simply dropped the currency onto the floor of their partner’s enclosures.

The macaw behavior wasn’t necessarily selfish, however. During these trials, none of the walnut exchange holes on the donor side were open, so the birds weren’t explicitly hoarding snacks for themselves. But unlike the African greys, the macaws didn’t appear to have any spontaneous inclination to lend a helping wing, Brucks says.

The parrots eventually swapped roles, giving recipients the chance to pay their donors back. But none of the birds started the task with this knowledge. And when the researchers repeated the experiment, this time blocking the recipients from exchanging their tokens so neither bird could buy walnuts, the African grey donors took note—and transferred far fewer rings.

“Anytime birds undergo a lot of training … behaviors like transferring tokens can become automatic,” says Jennifer Vonk, a cognitive psychologist at Oakland University who wasn’t involved in the study. “But these parrots could differentiate. They only transferred tokens when it was actually useful for [their partners].” That discrepancy, she says, hints that the parrots aren’t just capable of sharing—they understand why they’re doing it.

African grey parrots (pictured above) will pass tokens to other members of their own species to trade for treats, but blue-headed macaws don't do the same (Anastasia Krasheninnikova)

But even the most charitable African greys didn’t transfer tokens willy-nilly. The stronger the social bond they shared with their partners—some of whom were directly related to the donors—the more rings passed from chamber to chamber. Because of these preferences, the team’s results can’t be generalized to all kinds of parrot partnerships, or to wild populations, says Irene Pepperberg, an animal cognition expert who studies African grey parrots at Harvard University but wasn’t involved in the study. How this behavior might benefit birds in more natural environments is also up for debate. The forests of Africa, where these birds are found, aren’t exactly teeming with walnut markets that deal in metal rings.

The experiments also didn’t test what parrots would do in a more costly situation, Riehl points out. If, for instance, the donor birds’ own walnut exchange holes had been open, they might have been more hesitant to give up their tokens.

Still, understanding how members of other species respond to friends in need is an important pursuit, Pepperberg says. Her own research with these birds has shown time and time again that African greys aren’t shy about sharing and have clever ways of doing it. In the wild, these parrots live in large, haphazard groups, where building up a reputation for generosity could give individual birds a leg up, Vonk says.

Whether other birds, including the nearly 400 other parrot species around the globe, exhibit these behaviors remains to be seen. Somewhat surprisingly, one team of researchers found that, in a similar experiment, ravens, another exceptionally bright bird, don’t exhibit the same tendency to share, Brucks says. Neither, it seems, do chimpanzees or gorillas.

African grey parrots have shown that cleverness and complex behavior are present in many branches of the tree of life. “Birds are still often thought of as much less ‘advanced’ than mammals, especially primates,” Riehl says. “But they have a lot of regard for each other … and they can form these bonds with humans, too. It’s why they make such great pets.”

 

An article from the APA!

RACCOON INTELLIGENCE AT THE BORDERLANDS OF SCIENCE: IS IT TIME TO BRING RACCOONS BACK TO THE PSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY?

HTTPS://WWW.APA.ORG/MONITOR/2010/11/RACCOON, BY MICHAEL PETTIT, NOVEMBER 2010, VOL 41, NO. 10, PRINT VERSION: PAGE 26

 

How does intelligence of raccoons compare with other species? That was a topic of heated debate between 1905 and 1915 within the then-nascent field of comparative psychology.

In 1907, psychologist Lawrence W. Cole, who had established a colony of raccoons at the University of Oklahoma, and Herbert Burnham Davis, a doctoral student at Clark University, each published the results of nearly identical experiments on the processes of learning, association and memory in raccoons. They relied on E.L. Thorndike’s puzzle-box methodology, which involved placing animals in wooden crates from which the animal had to escape by opening the latch or sequence of latches. They observed the number of trials required for successful completion and the extent to which the animal retained the ability to solve the same problem more quickly when confronted again with it. Using this method, they sought what Davis called “a tolerable basis” for ranking the intelligence of raccoons on the phylogenetic scale of evolutionary development. They independently concluded that raccoons bested the abilities of cats and dogs, most closely approximating the mental attributes of monkeys.

Raccoons had attracted interest because they flourished, rather than receded, in the face of human expansion. Over the centuries, people had hunted raccoons for food and fur, decried them as agricultural pests and urban bandits, and kept them as household pets. This latter role brought the species to psychologists’ attention. Cole reported that he got the idea to work with raccoons from observing the behavior of a pet raccoon kept at a local market. At the time, most animal experiments being conducted occurred on the borderlands of academic research, nature study and domestic life. Scientists such as Charles Darwin, William James and James Mark Baldwin all developed psychological theories based upon observations of their own children and pets. Cole’s raccoons, for example, lived simultaneously as research objects and amusing pets, a relationship that shaped how these experiments were presented to and perceived by the public. Despite Davis’s protests, a widely printed newspaper story depicted his puzzle-box experiments as an example of teaching “tricks” to one’s pets.

Both popular and scientific naturalists had argued that cunning, mischief and curiosity characterized the species. Davis and Cole largely agreed with this assessment. The raccoon’s instinctual curiosity lay at the heart of Cole’s most startling claim: that the animal possessed ideas derived from complex forms of mental association, a quality that many scientists argued non-human animals did not possess. Psychologists considered curiosity a notable trait because it was a form of attention stripped of any utilitarian motive such as hunger or fear. It represented learning in its purest form. Cole claimed that his raccoons could, in certain instances, learn how to solve a puzzle box simply by being “put through” the solution by the experimenter. They did not simply rely upon the muscular associations built through trial-and-error learning, as was the case with Thorndike’s cats. Reporting on these experiments for McClure’s Magazine in 1909, E.T. Brewster suggested that raccoons counted among those animals that at least “get into the borderland that separates reasoning from other mental processes.” Review articles by leading “genetic psychologists,” such as Herbert Spencer Jennings and Robert Yerkes, suggested that that these raccoon experiments furnished some of the best evidence that “free ideas” rather than simply ingrained experiences may motivate the behavior of non-human animals.

Cole’s claims about raccoon intelligence drew ire from early advocates of behaviorism, such as Walter S. Hunter. Raccoons featured prominently in his celebrated delayed-reaction experiments, first published as his 1913 dissertation. One of the most truly comparative studies of the era, his research subjected 22 rats, two dogs, four raccoons and five human children to the same experiment. Hunter first trained the subject to associate a light source with the positive experience of being fed. Next, he detained the subject behind a gate, but permitted it to observe three light bulbs, one of which was briefly illuminated and then turned off. The task was to remember the position of the lighted bulb and to approach it and collect the food reward. Hunter defined success in terms of the subject’s repeated correct approach to the stimulus. He manipulated the duration of the delay before release to assess how long a subject could remember the location of the previously lighted bulb. He concluded that the same forms of learning governed rats, dogs and raccoons and found little evidence of mental images. He did report one telling difference: The rats and dogs needed to constantly maintain their bodily orientation toward the lightbulb during the period in which it was off in order to correctly identify it, but the raccoons moved about during the delay. Like the human children, raccoons could identify the correct stimulus even after being distracted.

These results were still not enough to convince Hunter that raccoons possessed human-like reasoning. Hunter accused Cole of anthropomorphism and gullibility when it came to interpreting animal behavior. Cole fired back that Hunter and his students lacked the skills necessary for handling a semi-wild species, preferring instead “toothless” domesticated animals.

Criticisms by Hunter and others gradually pushed raccoons out of the purview of psychologists’ research. Since the 1910s, raccoons have had a few but scattered advocates among psychologists. After 1915, few studies about raccoons appeared in psychology journals. Like many of their generation, Davis and Cole moved from comparative psychology to the field of education. Hunter conducted a few experiments on raccoons over his long career but continued to downplay species-specific traits. With the renewed interest in comparative cognition, perhaps it is time to reconsider the raccoon’s exclusion from the discipline of psychology.

________________________________________

Michael Pettit, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at York University, Toronto. Katharine S. Milar, PhD, of Earlham College, is the historical editor of “Time Capsule.”

Suggested reading

• Cole, L.W. (1907). Concerning the intelligence of raccoons. The Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 17, 211–261.
• Davis, H.B. (1907). The raccoon: A study in animal intelligence. The American Journal of Psychology, 18, 447–489.
• Hunter, W.S. (1913). The delayed reaction in animals and children. Behavior Monographs, 2, 1–86.
• Pettit, M. (2010). The problem of raccoon intelligence in behaviourist America. British Journal for the History of Science, 43 (3), 391–421.

 

SQUIRRELS EAVESDROP ON BIRDS TO CHECK IF DANGER HAS PASSED

BY MEILAN SOLLY, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

When squirrels hear the shrieks of a red-tailed hawk, they shift into danger mode, alternately freezing in place, searching the skies or fleeing. But new research suggests the rodents aren’t attuned solely to avian alarms. As a trio of scientists from Ohio’s Oberlin College reports in the journal PLoS One, eastern grays rely on the cadences of everyday bird calls to sense whether threats have passed.

As Katherine J. Wu of NOVA Next reports, the researchers found that squirrels wary of predators resume their normal activities more quickly after hearing nearby birds’ casual chatter. Distinct from “all clear” alerts, these exchanges essentially act as background noise, signaling a return to normalcy for animals in the vicinity.

“There’s a lot of information in alarm calls,” explains Oberlin behavioral ecologist Keith Tarvin. “It dawned on us that cues of safety might be equally informative.”

To gauge eastern grays’ sensitivity to bird conversations, Tarvin and then-undergraduates Marie Lilly and Emma Lucore designed an experiment centered on Oberlin’s squirrel population. Per the New York Times’ James Gorman, Lilly spent several winter days biking around the city in search of squirrels. Upon spotting suitable subjects, she set up a special sound system, played a series of recordings and waited to see the rodents’ reaction.

“I did have quite a few people ask what in the world I was doing as I biked around Oberlin looking for squirrels,” Lilly says to Psychology Today’s Mary Bates. “I had two giant, repurposed cat litter buckets on my bicycle handlebars filled with sound equipment and binoculars and after setting up, I would crouch a few meters away so that my presence was not associated with the recording being played.”

 The researchers spent several winter days tracking down squirrels across the city of Oberlin, Ohio (Dan Foy via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Some of the 54 squirrels observed for the study heard red-tailed hawk cries succeeded by multi-species songbird calls. Others were treated to a playlist featuring hawk sounds and largely silent ambient noise.

As Gorman writes, Lilly used a customized app to track each squirrel’s actions in the three minutes following the simulated soundtrack. She classified freezing, fleeing and standing as vigilant states and foraging, preening and resting as more relaxed states.

In an interview with NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce, Tarvin explains that subsequent data analysis confirmed the team’s suspicions: “When squirrels are hearing chatter coming from other birds, that chatter conveys a message or a cue that apparently these birds feel pretty safe. And the squirrels apparently interpret that to mean that the environment is relatively safe.”

NOVA Next's Wu notes that the timing of such events is probably more varied in nature, where squirrels aren’t always in hearing range of birds enjoying a friendly catch-up. Still, Tarvin says, this chatter amounts to “free, public information” available to any animal in earshot; by offering up a chorus of calls, birds send out an unintentional signal to those cognitively equipped to interpret their message.

“This [study] highlights how interconnected ecosystems are,” Amanda Robin, a squirrel expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new research, tells Wu. “If you removed one species [like a bird], you might be changing the entire life of another species and not know.”

Moving forward, Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian, the researchers hope to examine whether squirrels keep an ear out for particular species and if the rodents rely mainly on bird chatter or general foraging and jostling sounds. The team also warns that rising levels of human-made noise could interfere with squirrels’ listening abilities.

Jakob Bro-Jorgensen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Liverpool who was not involved in the study, says the research highlights how animals can garner information from seemingly irrelevant cues.

Speaking with Davis, he concludes, “It makes you wonder how the more and more pervasive impact of human activities on natural soundscapes may compromise survival of wildlife in ways we haven’t thought of.”

 

 

SIX STUPENDOUS REASONS TO APPRECIATE THE HECK OUT OF SQUIRRELS

BY KATHERINE J. WUMONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2019, NOVA

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/six-snippets-squirrel-science/?utm_campaign=nova&utm_content=1599508822&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3UKdvMyJbQXMkhdXfbjN2naJfKOyQDEzEoNTtk9waXY5fhFcIUiqIdVfU

There are a lot of weird squirrel stories floating around out there.

These nut-crazed little critters have been spotted canoodling car engines and casually snacking on discarded egg rolls. There’s little squirrels won’t sink their teeth into—and their taste for electrical wiring has infamously triggered citywide power outages. Squirrels have even sparked an international rivalry through the color of their fur alone: For years, five North American towns have been vying to be hailed as the “White Squirrel Capital of the World” (the title is supposedly held by Olney, Illinois).

But that shortlist of shenanigans is just the tip of the bushy-tailed iceberg. Here are six stupendous snippets of squirrel science to help you celebrate squirrels today and every day.

 

1. Tree squirrels might give investment bankers a run for their money.

The moment a squirrel first encounters a tasty morsel of food, it has to make an important decision: Is it better to eat this now, or will it be more valuable in the future?

A lot goes into answering that question, says Amanda Robin, who studies squirrel behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. Depending on the season, food might be scarce, making the prospect of a little nosh extra appealing. The nut itself could be highly perishable, and not worth a laborious dig. Or there could be lurkers nearby, waiting to poach a hastily buried treat.

Many squirrel species make a ritual out of hoarding snacks—not unlike us humans. These rodents may not be ticking items off a grocery list or stashing leftovers in a refrigerator, but their food-storing strategies are no less sophisticated.

Recent work from a research group led by Lucia Jacobs, a behavioral biologist and squirrel expert at the University of California, has shown that fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), arboreal squirrels native to the eastern half of North America, will cache anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 nuts each year. And the stockpiling isn’t done willy-nilly: The squirrels meticulously categorize their treats by source, variety, quality, and even preference as they bury them in various locales.

“Even if you give squirrels a random series of nuts, they will put the almonds here, but the hazelnuts there,” Jacobs says. This technique, called “chunking,” essentially bins important bits of information into manageable blocks, and is thought to help squirrels keep track of their yearly inventory. It’s the same mnemonic device that makes a phone number easier to remember when it’s written out as 867-5309 rather than 8675309.

 

And that’s only part of the squirrel sorting scheme: When they chance upon larger, more valuable nuts, squirrels will also venture farther from foraging sites before settling down to dig. The idea is that more far-flung locales might be tougher for competitor squirrels to find and pillage.

Jacobs likens the process to investment banking, with each new find triggering a fresh round of caching calculus. The more precious a food item, the more important it is to stow it away with care. In other words: have nut, will travel. “These are economic decisions,” Jacobs says. “They just want to minimize that risk-return ratio.”

2. With so many nuts to keep track of, squirrels need astoundingly good memories—and oh, do they deliver.

Once a squirrel learns a trick, it won’t hesitate to use it again and again. It’s a lesson learned the hard way by certain homeowners, who pray in vain that the next screen door or bird feeder won’t be torn to shreds.

In 2017, Pizza Ka Yee Chow, a squirrel researcher at Hokkaido University in Japan, put this mental longevity to the test with a group (or scurry) of eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), which are native to the eastern half of the United States and southeastern pockets of Canada. Chow presented her squirrels with a tricky task: pressing levers to access big, juicy hazelnuts. The critters quickly finagled their way through, and Chow took the puzzle away. But even after nearly two years had passed, the same squirrels, which hadn’t seen the contraption in the interim, still knew how to nab the nuts.

They even proved handy when offered a modified puzzle that also relied on levers, but looked completely different. After a brief moment of hesitation, the squirrels realized that even with this new challenge, the same logic applied.

Considering that 10 years old is a ripe old age for your garden-variety tree squirrel, a 22-month memory ain’t too shabby. “Their memory is just excellent,” Chow says. “It’s really amazing.”

 

 

 

3. Squirrels are marvelously mischievous.

Stop a dog on the street, and chances are it has a bone to pick with a squirrel. These critters are known to tease and deceive—and their penchant for mischief truly knows no bounds.

Many of Chow’s experiments have been at least partially foiled by roving bands of squirrel saboteurs. “They’ve bitten off the screws and nails on our puzzle boxes,” she says. “And they’ve destroyed some of our cameras: They’ll bite off all the buttons… and then I have to use a pencil to get at the start and stop record buttons.” And, Chow adds, as the squirrels fiddle with the equipment, they end up taking a lot of selfies. That last one sounds funny—but those glamour shots can get in the way of recording real data.

 

 

Even amongst their own kind, squirrels are master manipulators. When eastern gray squirrels forage in the presence of others, they’ll sometimes engage in what’s called deceptive caching: If it senses a hungry interloper, a squirrel will fake the act of burying a seed, all the while keeping the true prize tucked away in its mouth. A squirrel can get pretty elaborate with the ruse, making a big show of packing the hole with soil and leaf material, before bounding off to deposit the actual seed elsewhere. The second squirrel, of course, raids the decoy only to be disappointed.

“Up until the point where we found it in squirrels, this kind of tactical deception was thought to only occur in primates,” says Michael Steele, an evolutionary biologist and squirrel expert at Wilkes University. “To discover it in [what people consider] a lowly rodent was pretty exciting.”

According to Chow, squirrels are so clever that, in theory, we could probably get these tiny titans of trickery to use their powers for good (à la these trained crows that are solving France’s litter problem one theme park at a time). But that doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily be seeing recycling rodents in our near future. “They’re so impatient,” Chow says with a laugh. “They’re just like, ‘Give me the nuts!!’”

4. Squirrel speak is all kinds of complicated.

Squirrel chatter might sound like a blur of nonsense, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Within that fast-paced gobbledygook is actually an intricate repertoire of vocalizations that—depending on the species—might involve anything from come-hither calls to signaling the presence of a predator.

Even arboreal squirrels, which tend to be fairly solitary creatures, will still raise the alarm when threatened by a passing hawk or a particularly ornery dog. And many of these sounds have impossibly delightful, onomatopoeic names: The “kuk” is short, low, and repetitive—the standard scolding you’d get from a disgruntled squirrel that’s recently been driven up a tree. The “quaa” is higher and more protracted, while the third sound, the moan, is even shriller and more ululating.

And it seems squirrel body language is just as important. These rodents’ fluffiest appendages often offer the most tell-tail signs of danger. Two common tail movements are the twitch—which looks something like a shudder—and the flag, which engages the tail in a rhythmic whipping motion, almost like a revolving dough hook.

 

 

Combined with a stern flick of the tail, a reproachful chitter from a squirrel might portend the approach of one type of predator over another. Scientists are still hard at work deciphering the squirrelly code—but while some progress has been made, much of the jargon has proved a tough nut to crack.

 

 

5. Squirrel sashays and shimmies could someday inspire new-and-improved search and rescue technology.

Though not all squirrels are entirely aerodynamic, for those that live amongst the trees, their day-to-day movements can put the best Cirque du Soleil shows to shame.

“They’re so agile, leaping from tree to tree,” Chow says. “They’re like little monkeys.” Chow recalls seeing a tree squirrel on one of her first trips to England and being struck by its agility and flexibility. “The squirrel was very goal-oriented,” she says. “It made me want to understand how they maneuver in this world.”

 

 

They may pale in comparison to their flying squirrel relatives, but even tree squirrels are equipped with extraordinary anatomical adaptations that enable them to clear ten-foot gaps between branches and stabilize on uneven surfaces. Gray squirrels’ hind legs, for instance, are exceptionally powerful, packed with muscles that can propel their light bodies forward over large distances. They’re also equipped with hyper-mobile ankles, allowing them to rotate their paws and grip onto surfaces in nearly any orientation. “Their ability to navigate through trees and balance so well is kind of a superpower,” Robin, the UCLA researcher, says. “At least, it’s one that I don’t have.”

These aerodynamic feats are reason enough to give squirrels their due. But a team of researchers led by Robert Full at the University of California, Berkeley is putting their appreciation to work in pursuit of even loftier goals. By studying how squirrels move through space, Full and his colleagues are figuring out how to build bio-inspired robots that might power the search and rescue operations of the future.

6. Sometimes, it seems like squirrels are everywhere. You’re not wrong (unless you’re in Antarctica).

To date, there have been nearly 300 species of squirrels discovered worldwide. And these globe-trotting goobers come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from the aptly named African pygmy squirrel (Myosciurus pumilio), which runs just five inches from nose to tail, to the glorious, technicolor Malabar giant squirrel (Ratufa indica), whose three-foot-long body can be seen soaring through the lush green canopies of Indian forests.

 

 

These raucous rodents are native to every continent, with the notable exceptions of Antarctica and Australia (though due to the deliberate introduction of two species in the late 19th and early 20th century, the outback is technically no longer squirrel-free). But travel far back enough along the squirrel family tree, and you’ll find that squirrels appear to have originated in just one place: North America.

“They evolved here—they’re ours,” Jacobs, the UC Berkeley behavioral biologist, says. “Then they spread all over the world.”

For better or worse, squirrels are here to stay. You don’t get to be one of the most successful invasive species on the planet without some serious know-how… or without stepping on a few toes along the way. At the end of the day, though, whether squirrels have wriggled their way into your bird feeder or your heart, they’re worthy of respect—grudging though it might sometimes be.

 

 

VIRAL POSTS CLAIM WOMBATS SHARE THEIR BURROWS DURING AUSTRALIAN FIRES

BY JAMES FELTON IFLSCIENCE.COM, 13 JAN 2020

Several posts claiming that wombats have been acting like rescue workers during the Australian wildfires have gone viral over the last week, with some of them claiming that the animals are "shepherding" smaller animals into their burrows.

The posts generally say that wombats have been "sharing" their burrows with other mammals, and sometimes state that they're doing more to help with the crisis than the Australian government.

 

 

Apparently wombats in fire effected areas are not only allowing other animals to take shelter in their deep, fire-resistant burrows but are actively herding fleeing animals into them.

Greenpeace New Zealand wrote that there are "reports from Australia that countless small animals have escaped death because wombats, unusually, opted to share their massive complex burrows. Even reports that they have been observed exhibiting 'shepherding behavior'."

Which all sounds a little bit too Disney, doesn't it? So is there any truth to these claims?

Well, first off, the claims that wombats have been observed herding smaller animals to safety is not substantiated. Greenpeace themselves later posted an update crossing out reports of shepherding behavior with the apology "we shared this from a social media post from Australia, but it turns out it’s not true".

Jackie French, author and director of The Wombat Foundation, told IFLScience she was skeptical of claims of shepherding.

"Wombats are extremely short-sighted. They focus mostly on food and dirt. It would be hard for them to see well enough to shepherd, nor have I seen one do so."

However, she isn't dismissing the possibility entirely.

"Wombat behavior is usually extremely limited – eat, sleep, scratch – but they are capable of extraordinary ingenuity in the rare times it's needed. I'd have dismissed the shepherding claim altogether if I hadn't known a wombat who decided to make friends with me four decades ago, and showed me around the bush. But he didn't shepherd – he just waited, looking around to see if I followed. Baby wombats follow their mothers by trying to touch them at all times – the mothers don't shepherd their young as a dog might do.

"It's unlikely any shepherding would be necessary. [Other animals] would know the wombat warrens existed and are intelligent enough to seek shelter."

But could they be sharing burrows?

Wombats create complex burrows, often with multiple chambers and entrances. And they're huge, with some of them stretching over 100 meters (330 feet). French told the Canberra Times that the burrows are deep and well-ventilated enough to protect them from the fires, and that these usually solitary creatures had been sharing the burrows with each other for some six weeks now.

But sharing with other species? Using camera traps, University of Melbourne zoology students have captured other species utilizing wombat burrows.

Before you start coming up with a sitcom based on mismatched living arrangements between a koala and a wombat, we should point out that the burrows are so large and complex it's unlikely that the animals met, and the smaller animals wouldn't have stuck around long if they had.

“Wombats can be a bit cantankerous," Dr Kath Handasyde, an expert in native mammal ecology and physiology, told the University of Melbourne. If the koala had encountered the wombat, it would probably have been chased out and wouldn’t have been anywhere near as relaxed as we can see in the photos."

However, during dire circumstances, Jackie French said that that might be different.

"I've seen wombats share their burrows in times of crisis with other wombats, snakes, quolls, possums, bandicoots, echidnas, bettongs and possibly other smaller creatures," she told IFLScience.

"Wallabies will shelter in wombat burrows too, but only those with larger entrances, and they don't seem to go far down them, but as I've never shared a wombat burrow in a fire I can't tell what else may have been down there, only seen what has emerged or vanished into a warren.

"The animals here as I write this are sharing food bowls at the food and water station, and wombats will allow others to share their burrows in danger, but usually (not always) only in danger, but this seems to be more interspecies tolerance in extremis, not shepherding."

So, in short, it's possible that animals are sheltering in wombat burrows and that wombats would tolerate them, but it's likely that if that is happening they weren't shepherded there, and that the animals fled there themselves.

 

 

matadornetwork.com, Wombats are the heroes of the Australian fires, sheltering animals in their burrows, by Eben Diskin, Jan 15, 2020

AMID ALL THE devastation caused by Australia’s bushfires, an unlikely hero has emerged: the wombat. Quite generously, wombats have reportedly been allowing other animals to take refuge in their homes, as they hide from the blazes that threaten their own habitats. Complex underground tunnels, created by wombats, have served as safehouses for other species like wallabies and echidnas, allowing them to survive an otherwise fatal situation.

Peter Hylands, a documentary filmmaker, visited the burnt landscape of the Cobargo Wildlife Sanctuary, and told Yahoo, “You’ve got animals that are completely unscathed and those must be the animals that have been under the ground, it’s the only explanation when the fire zones are so extensive.”

This sentiment is echoed by Wombat Rescue manager Yolandi Vermaak, who said, “At most, there would be animals fleeing into burrows. I’ve seen echidnas going into burrows — lizards, and skinks, rabbits — those sort of things. I have even seen a small wallaby.”

Vermaak also said that she hasn’t seen a single burnt wombat during her rescue missions, and instead has discovered a series of survivors — wombats and several other species — hiding in the tunnels.

When the fires are eventually extinguished, hopefully wombats get the praise they deserve — both from the people of Australia and their fellow members of the animal kingdom. 

 

 

 

Bird Brains Are Far More Humanlike Than Once Thought

By Bret Stetka Scientific American, January 2020

 

With enough training, pigeons can distinguish between the works of Picasso and Monet. Ravens can identify themselves in a mirror. And on a university campus in Japan, crows are known to intentionally leave walnuts in a crosswalk and let passing traffic do their nut cracking. Many bird species are incredibly smart. Yet among intelligent animals, the “bird brain” often doesn’t get much respect.

Two papers published today in Science find birds actually have a brain that is much more similar to our complex primate organ than previously thought. For years it was assumed that the avian brain was limited in function because it lacked a neocortex. In mammals, the neocortex is the hulking, evolutionarily modern outer layer of the brain that allows for complex cognition and creativity and that makes up most of what, in vertebrates as a whole, is called the pallium. The new findings show that birds’ do, in fact, have a brain structure that is comparable to the neocortex despite taking a different shape. It turns out that at a cellular level, the brain region is laid out much like the mammal cortex, explaining why many birds exhibit advanced behaviors and abilities that have long befuddled scientists. The new work even suggests that certain birds demonstrate some degree of consciousness.

The mammalian cortex is organized into six layers containing vertical columns of neurons that communicate with one another both horizontally and vertically. The avian brain, on the other hand, was thought to be arranged into discrete collections of neurons called nuclei, including a region called the dorsal ventricular ridge, or DVR, and a single nucleus named the wulst.

 

In one of the new papers, senior author Onur Güntürkün, a neuroscientist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, and his colleagues analyzed regions of the DVR and wulst involved in sound and vision processing. To do so, they used a technology called three-dimensional polarized light imaging, or 3D-PLI—a light-based microscopy technique that can be employed to visualize nerve fibers in brain samples. The researchers found that in both pigeons and barn owls, these brain regions are constructed much like our neocortex, with both layerlike and columnar organization—and with both horizontal and vertical circuitry. They confirmed the 3D-PLI findings using biocytin tracing, a technique for staining nerve cells.

 

“We can now claim that this layered, corticallike organization is indeed a feature of the whole sensory forebrain in most, if not all, birds,” says Martin Stacho, co-lead author of the study and Güntürkün’s colleague at Ruhr University Bochum.

“It’s not that the DVR is the neocortex,” says Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who wrote a commentary accompanying the two new papers and was not involved in either of them, “but rather that the whole of the pallium in mammals and in birds has similar developmental origins and connectivity, and therefore [the pallia of both classes] should be considered equivalent structures. Stacho shows that settling for what the naked eye sees can be misleading.”

 

The idea that the DVR was somehow related to the neocortex was proposed in the 1960s by neuroscientist Harvey Karten. Yet it didn’t stick. Others subsequently claimed the DVR actually corresponded with other mammalian brain regions, including the amygdala, which, among other tasks, carries out the processing of emotion. “The theory about a DVR [correlation] has been possibly one of the biggest disputes in the field of comparative neurobiology,” Stacho says. But his new work lends credibility to Karten’s original hypothesis.

 

Stacho and his colleagues think the findings also represent a glimpse into ancient animal brain evolution. The last common ancestor of birds and mammals was a reptile that roamed the earth around 320 million years ago. And its brain, the team believes, was probably a precursor to that of the two lineages that diverged through evolution. “Nobody knows how exactly the brain of the last common ancestor looked like,” Stacho says. “Most likely, it wasn’t like the neocortex or the DVR. It was probably something in between that, in mammals, developed to a six-layered neocortex and, in birds, to the wulst and DVR.”

 

The other new paper, by a group at the University of Tübingen in Germany, lends still more insight into the avian brain, suggesting that birds have some ability for sensory consciousness—subjective experiences in which they recall sensory experiences. Consciousness has long been thought to be localized in the cerebral cortex of smart primates—namely, chimps, bonobos and us humans. Yet crows appear to have at least a rudimentary form of sensory consciousness.

In the Tübingen group’s experiment, two carrion crows were trained to recall a previous experience to guide their behavior. When their training was completed, they went through a testing phase in which a gray square might appear followed by either a red or blue square 2.5 seconds later. In this exercise, the crows were trained to move their head if they saw a gray square and then a red one. And they learned to keep their head still if they saw a gray square and then a blue one. When the birds saw no stimulus followed by the appearance of a colored square, the sequence was reversed: blue signaled them to move their head, and red told them not to. So to correctly respond to the colored squares, the crows had to recall whether or not they had seen a gray one first—equating to a past subjective experience.

 

It was crucial to the experiment to present the gray square in six different intensities, including at the threshold of the birds’ perception. This way, lead author and neurobiologist Andreas Nieder and his colleagues could confirm that the crows were not simply carrying out conditioned responses to stimuli but instead drawing on a subjective experience.

Further, by implanting electrodes in an avian brain region called the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), the researchers were able to monitor activity of individual neurons in response to the stimuli. When the crows viewed a dim gray square at their perceptual threshold, NCL neurons became active in the period between that stimulus and the presentation of a colored square—but only if the crows reported seeing the gray one. If they could not detect that square, the neurons remained silent. This result suggests a unique subjective experience was being manifested through neuronal activity.

 

Nieder does not claim crows have the self-conscious existence and self-awareness of apes but simply that the birds can partake in a unique, multipart sensory experience in response to a stimulus. “I am generally not a big fan of ascribing complex humanlike cognitive states to animals and prefer to maintain a conservative attitude,” he says. “Humans easily start to project their own mental states to other living (or even nonliving) beings. But in terms of sensory consciousness in other species, it is probably fair to assume that advanced vertebrates, such as mammals and birds, possess it.”

Nieder’s team’s findings suggest that the neural underpinnings of sensory consciousness either were in place before mammals evolved or developed independently in both lineages—with the avian line showing that being conscious does not necessarily depend on a bulky cerebral cortex.

 

Work by Herculano-Houzel demonstrates that the brains of corvids—members of a family of so-called “smart birds” such as crows, ravens and magpies—are very densely populated with interconnected neurons. Her studies jibe with the new Science papers. “With Güntürkün’s findings that pallium connectivity is indeed very similar between birds and mammals..., it all comes together very nicely,” she says, pointing out that the corvid pallium holds about as many neurons as you’d find in primates with a much larger brain.

 

This latest research also undercuts primate exceptionalism. “I hope that more people will be tempted to drop the notion that there is something very unique and exclusive about the human brain,” Herculano-Houzel says.

 

 

Kangaroos Communicate With Humans Like Dogs in Experiments

By Alex Fox, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, DECEMBER 18, 2020

 

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Kangaroos might be capable of intentionally communicating with humans, suggesting the bounding marsupials might be more intelligent than previously thought, reports Matilda Boseley for the Guardian.

The findings, published this week in the journal the Biology Letters, also challenge the notion that communication with humans is restricted to domesticated animals such as dogs, cats, horses or goats and that the capability is a product of the domestication process itself. And, to be clear, despite their ubiquity across Australia, kangaroos have never been domesticated.

The study was based on experiments involving 11 captive, but not domesticated, kangaroos, reports Paulina Duran of Reuters. When ten of the 11 the kangaroos were presented with an “unsolvable problem,” a box filled with food that they couldn’t open, the animals began to gaze intently at the researchers when their efforts to get the box open failed. Nine kangaroos even looked back and forth between the researcher and the box, as if to say, “Can you give me a hand with this?”

“We interpreted this as a deliberate form of communication, a request for help,” Alan McElligott, an animal behavior researcher at City University of Hong Kong and first author of the study, tells Reuters. “Wild species are not really expected to behave as those subjects were, and that’s why it is surprising.”

McElligott’s research builds on studies conducted with horses, dogs and goats that elicited similar results.

“They’d look straight up at my face, like a dog or a goat would do, and back at the box, and some even came up and scratched my knee like a dog pawing [for attention],” McElligott tells Christa Leste-Lasserre of New Scientist.

What further surprised McElligott is that he and his co-authors saw the same behavior across several kangaroo species, even ones such as eastern grey and red kangaroos with reputations for being skittish. “I was really shocked,” McElligott tells New Scientist in reference to these two species. “I didn’t even think we would get through the training protocol with them.”

Previously, many researchers thought that the ability to communicate with humans was a trait bred into certain animals during domestication, Alexandra Green, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Sydney and co-author of the research, tells the Guardian. Green says her team’s research instead suggests such behavior can be learned under the right conditions.

Though the experiments were limited to just 11 kangaroos, McElligott and Green say the research is a strong signal that the abilities of non-domesticated animals to learn to communicate with humans may have been underestimated.

Green also says she hopes the findings will engender some kind feelings towards the study’s subjects.

“Kangaroos are iconic Australian endemic fauna, adored by many worldwide but also considered as a pest,” says Green in a statement. “We hope that this research draws attention to the cognitive abilities of kangaroos and helps foster more positive attitudes towards them.”

 

Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—A Lot

By Jason Daley
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
DECEMBER 23, 2016

Plenty of animals communicate with one another, at least in a general way—wolves howl to each other, birds sing and dance to attract mates and big cats mark their territory with urine. But researchers at Tel Aviv University recently discovered that when at least one species communicates, it gets very specific. Egyptian fruit bats, it turns out, aren’t just making high pitched squeals when they gather together in their roosts. They’re communicating specific problems, reports Bob Yirka at Phys.org.

According to Ramin Skibba at Nature, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds. The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

“We have shown that a big bulk of bat vocalizations that previously were thought to all mean the same thing, something like ‘get out of here!’ actually contain a lot of information,” Yovel tells Nicola Davis at The Guardian. By looking even more carefully at stresses and patterns, Yovel says, researchers may be able to tease out even more subtleties in the bat calls.

This isn't the end of the research, Yirka reports. Yovel and his team want to investigate whether bats are born knowing this “language” or if they learn it over time while living in their colonies. They also want to know if the bats use similar communication outside the roost. To understand that, they will attach microphones to some bats and release them into the wild.

Kate Jones, professor of ecology and biodiversity at University College, London, tells Davis that the research is very interesting. “It is like a Rosetta stone to getting into [the bats’] social behaviors. I really like the fact that they have managed to decode some of this vocalization and there is much more information in these signals than we thought,” she says. She says that it might even be possible to use similar techniques to begin understanding nuanced communications in other species as well.