Animal minds

From BBC: The theory goes that although we sleep for fewer hours than other primates, the sleep that we have is of high quality so we do not need as much. To understand whether human sleep is unique, Samson and Nunn compared the sleep patterns of 21 primates, whose slumber patterns had already been analysed. Humans therefore have the deepest sleep of any primate As well as noting how long the animals slept for, they looked at how much time they spent in rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. This is when we dream, and when our brain consolidates our memories into long-term storage. Humans slept the least. The sleepiest primates were grey mouse lemurs and night monkeys, which slept for 15 Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The nest of black garden ants, Lasius niger, consists of an underground part made up of a network of galleries, and a mound of earth composed of a large number of bubble-shaped chambers closely interconnected with each other. Using 3D imaging techniques such as X-ray tomography[2] and a 3D scanner, the researchers characterized the 3D structures made by the ants as well as the construction dynamics. In addition, they analyzed the individual building behavior of the ants. In the part located above ground, the insects pile up their building materials forming pillars that encircle the chambers. The ants preferentially deposit their soil pellets in areas where other clusters of pellets have already been created. They add a pheromone Read More ›

Yes, animals have minds. No, they are not people. From Heather Dockray at Mashable: Earlier this week, a photo began circulating on the Internet that featured three predictably adorable kangaroos. The story, as many news organizations projected it, featured a male kangaroo, reaching out to hold his dying kangaroo wife, who just wanted to embrace her baby. As a story, it had the key, painterly, elements of viral triptych: a cute animal + a sad death + a tiny, human-like gesture. For 24 hours, it dominated the Internet, grabbed our headlines, and stole our desperate little hearts. It was also completely and totally wrong, as Mashable reported. After the picture went viral, scientists began to speak up. No, this wasn’t Read More ›

Darn right. The simpler emotions, anyway. And what would we make of a study that claimed they didn’t? Well, anyway, … from ScienceDaily: Dogs can recognize emotions in humans by combining information from different senses — an ability that has never previously been observed outside of humans, a new study published today reveals. … The researchers advance a claim that the dogs are forming abstract representations of mental states in order to do that. It’s not clear why they would need to. “Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. To do so requires a system of internal categorisation of emotional Read More ›

What our dogs and cats feel like when we don’t understand them. From Evolution News & Views: … Continuities can be merely apparent, not actual. Consider, for example, the laptop computer vs. the typewriter. Both feature the QWERTYUIOP keyboard. That might suggest a physical continuity between the two machines. The story would run thus: Computer developers added more and more parts to the typewriter, and subtracted some, until they had transformed the typewrter into a laptop. But of course, they didn’t. They adapted a widely recognized keyboard layout to an entirely new type of machine. Continuities are created by history, not laws. If we don’t know the history, we don’t know whether a similarity reflects continuity or not. Bolhuis and Read More ›

Recently, I (O’Leary) raised the question whether epigenetically triggered dominance behaviour in fish was rightly considered a struggle for “social status”: The concept of social status presupposes not only a society but a relationship to that society consciously recognized by most actors within it. It is not only the behaviour, but also the consciousness—evident in human affairs, as people strive for social status, even from something as apparently abstract as area codes and zip codes. Purely virtual territory. Some may argue that the term social status “shouldn’t” mean what human beings generally understand it to mean. But the term was invented by and for human beings, to describe a situation we experience. Part of that experience is knowing one’s status Read More ›

Not smell? At Scientific American blogs, animal behaviour researcher Julie Hecht asks, Does a dog know, merely by sight, that an approaching being is a fellow dog? Before you answer, remember this: Canis familiaris is the least uniform species on the planet. Members of this species come in a wide range of body shapes and sizes from itty bitty teeny weeny to absolutely ginormos. Adult members of this species appear as tight little packages, huge weightlifters, lean ballerinas, elongated hotdogs and everything in between. Of course the obvious response is, “How do humans manage it?” The old canard about the gullible couple buying a chihuahua that turns out to be a yappy rat* is funny precisely because it is not likely Read More ›

Epigenetics at work, sure, but … From ScienceDaily: Flexible gene expression may regulate social status in male fish For a small African fish species, a colorful dominant male does better in life, winning access to food and females. New research by Stanford biologists suggests that this lucky outcome is regulated at a genetic level, by turning genes on and off. … Fernald studies Astatotilapia burtoni, one of the hundreds of cichlid fish species inhabiting Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa, because of the unique ways they have evolved over time. For male A. burtoni, dominance is everything. They battle frequently for territory, with the victor winning access to the two most important resources — food and females. Sporting bright rainbow-colored scales, Read More ›

From Nature: “We think bumblebees are using this ability to perceive electrical fields to determine if flowers were recently visited by other bumblebees and are therefore worth visiting,” says Robert. “We had no idea that this sense even existed,” says Thomas Seeley, a behavioural biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Assuming we can replicate the findings, this is going to open up a whole new window on insect sensory systems for us to study.” More. See also: Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain? The way insect intelligence develops may be different as well. Bees, like many insects, exhibit “an incredibly wide variety of intelligent behaviors.” But, according to some researchers, insect intelligence tends to increase Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Are There Patterns in Invertebrate Brains and Intelligence? Reptiles and fish sometimes show signs of intelligence despite having quite different brains from mammals. But, being exothermic, they don’t do much of anything very often. For example, turtles may rescue each other, but can also spend months in a state of icy torpor with little adverse effect. At one time, it was assumed that the intelligence to rescue would not co-exist with lengthy inertia (the reptilian or triune brain hypothesis). Actually, the two qualities can co-exist, though they wouldn’t be simultaneous. Invertebrate just means “not a vertebrate,” so there is no single type of invertebrate brain: Invertebrates have immensely diverse nervous structures and body plans, revealing Read More ›

They are getting a hearing at Evolution News & Views: There is no Darwinian tree of intelligence, rather we need to study when and how it might be displayed in a given life form: Reptiles lack certain brain structures found in mammals, but like birds they sometimes use the ones they have for purposes that apparently display intelligence: Crocodilians (alligators and crocodiles) are reported to use sticks as decoys, play, and work in teams. Tortoises may well be smarter than once believed, though here we rely mainly on anecdotes, not formal studies, for now. Even fish have shown signs of what seems like intelligence. We are told that pairs of rabbitfishes “cooperate and support each other while feeding”: While such Read More ›

From New Scientist: Parrots use pebble tools to grind up own mineral supplements … They were filmed using pebbles for grinding, thought to be a uniquely human activity – one that allowed our civilisations to extract more nutrition from cereal-based foods. … But the purpose of the behaviour is not yet settled. Although females need the calcium, it was usually males who were caught grinding. Perhaps, they regurgitate the mineral and pass it on to their mate: they are known to do so with food. But why use a tool and not just the beak, anyway? The team suspects that using their beak alone for grinding may be uncomfortable. … “It adds to the rich assortment of tool-related skills in Read More ›

This got funded: From Sciencedaily: Chitchat, small talk could serve an evolutionary need to bond with others Well yes, but what is the word “evolutionary” doing in this sentence? A real science comes bolstered with specifics, not speculations. Many of us expect that our early ancestors gossiped plenty. But it is precisely what has not evolved that causes us to think so. Anyway, Princeton University researchers report in the journal Animal Behaviour that social primates use vocalizations far more selectively than scientists previously thought. They found that ringtailed lemurs (Lemur catta) living in groups primarily call and respond to the individuals with which they have close relationships. While grooming is a common social-bonding experience for lemurs and other primates, the Read More ›

From Discovery News: All dogs alive today can trace at least some of their ancestry back to dogs that were domesticated 33,000 years ago in southern East Asia, suggests one of the most extensive ever investigations of canine DNA. In addition to pinpointing the place and time for the earliest dog domestication, the new study, published in the journal Cell Research, found that the first domesticated dogs descended from grey wolves that likely came from China. The research, conducted by an international team, further determined that dogs began to migrate out of East Asia and towards the Middle East and Africa 15,000 years ago. They then reached Europe in large numbers approximately 10,000 years ago. It appears that the dogs Read More ›

From Atlantic: So far, most of the interspecies relationships researchers have observed have happened in captivity—possibly because the probability of seeing one among zoo or household is just higher than happening upon it in the wild, but also because animals living in the world of humans are just more likely to interact with other species from a young age. There’s a reason so much of the Internet’s interspecies-friendship porn focuses on baby animals: The strongest bonds form early. Studies have shown that geese and ducks raised together will view each other as members of the same family; kittens raised with baby rats would never harm them. If a relationship takes root early enough in an animal’s social development, it can Read More ›