Animal minds

New Scientist advises, “Bonobos use a range of tools like stone-age humans.” Indeed, they “demonstrate caveman skills.” The study shows that bonobos are capable of a wide range of tool use that puts them at least on a par with chimps, says Roffman. Their foraging techniques resemble those used by the earliest Stone-Age humans of the Oldowan culture. “When you give them the raw materials, they use them in correct and context-specific strategies,” Roffman says. However, captive bonobos, unlike their wild cousins, have plenty of time to experiment, says Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France. The captive animals’ actions may bear little resemblance to what happens in the wild. Still, says d’Errico, it shows the potential is Read More ›

Says new BBC feature: We once viewed ourselves as the only creatures with emotions, morality, and culture. But the more we investigate the animal kingdom, the more we discover that is simply not true. Many scientists are now convinced that all these traits, once considered the hallmarks of humanity, are also found in animals. If they are right, our species is not as unique as we like to think. In a rare, special tribute to common-sense, Brit Tax TV offers a look at the counter-argument as well. Not an especially insightful one. Which is probably what they wanted. But there is really no argument. It apparently never occurs to the people who write this sort of thing that, were it Read More ›

Yes, says Rupert Sheldrake, worth a listen: If we think information is not just an illusion: Rupert Sheldrake: The Extended Mind Some of us find it difficult to account for the intelligence of an insect colony that clearly does not reside in the brain of the individual insect. Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Further to how cats get the rodents they will eat to lose their fear of them, we are now beginning to understand how parrots become excellent voice imitators. From Duke University, An international team of scientists led by Duke University researchers has uncovered key structural differences in the brains of parrots that may explain the birds’ unparalleled ability to imitate sounds and human speech. Parrots are one of the few animals considered ‘vocal learners,’ meaning they can imitate sounds. Researchers have been trying to figure out why some bird species are better imitators than others. Besides differences in the sizes of particular brain regions, however, no other potential explanations have surfaced. By examining gene expression patterns, the new study found Read More ›

This coffee time is dedicated to: animal mind  Urine: Surely not an incentive one would expect, if one must clean litter boxes. But this just in from From BBC News: Cats ‘control mice’ with chemicals in their urine Researchers found that when very young mice were exposed to a chemical in cat urine, they were less likely to avoid the scent of cats later in life. … This new study revealed that baby mice exposed to the compound during a “critical period” in their development would, as adults, react quite differently to their arch enemy’s smell. The team exposed one-month-old mice to the chemical over two weeks. When they were tested later for their reaction, they were much less likely Read More ›

Here are links to O’Leary for News’ posts on what research tells us about animal minds. This page is a work in progress; feel free to check back or leave comments. 1. First, there is no fixed “tree” or “scale” of animal intelligence. See, for example,  Matching Darwin’s “Tree of Life,” the “Tree of Intelligence” comes crashing down” (2014 12 08) It is true that chimps can learn to spring simple snare traps that are set for them without getting hurt. But does that really put them on a continuum with humans? They do not do nearly as well as human toddlers on an abstract reasoning test. Not only is there a vast gulf between human and chimpanzee intelligence but chimpanzees Read More ›

Alfred Russel Wallace’s take, explicitly. From ScienceDaily: Not every encounter between predator and prey results in death. A new study co-authored by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor suggests that prey emit warning cues that can ultimately lead to both their survival and that of their predators. The hypothesis addresses a 150-year-old mystery of evolution on how warning signals of animals and plants arise and explains animals’ instinctive avoidances of dangerous prey. … In 1867, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-proponent with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, proposed that animals evolve colorful, distinctively recognizable appearances to advertise their distastefulness or toxicity to predators. Despite a number of attempts, however, no satisfactory evolutionary mechanism for the origin of Read More ›

Here. The first feeding study of tropical Australia’s Irukandji box jellyfish has found that they actively fish. They attract larval fish by twitching their extended tentacles, highlighting their nematocyst clusters (stinging structures) and using them as lures. It’s an impressive feat by any standards, but particularly so for an animal that doesn’t have a defined brain. “They’re not opportunistically grazing — they’re deliberately fishing. They’re targeting and catching fish that are at times as big as they are, and are far more complex animals. This is a really neat animal that is displaying a surprisingly complex prey capture strategy.” The researchers were able to catch Carukia barnesi in the act by filming them through a full day and night cycle, Read More ›

From New Scientist, reviewing two books: Plants, say the authors, are highly responsive, attuned to gravity, grains of sand, sunlight, starlight, the footfalls of tiny insects and to slow rhythms outside our range. They are subtle, aware, strategic beings whose lives involve an environmental sensitivity very distant from the simple flower and seed factories of popular imagination. More. Here’s a possibility: Our notion of intelligence was actually standardized on human intelligence. Which is of an entirely different type. Intelligence is everywhere in nature, and manifests itself in different ways. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Earlier we noted that the “We share 99% of our DNA with chimps” claim rises again” (Like Dracula it can’t really die, as it is culturally needed. So it just keeps rising from the grave. Evidence is irrelevant.*) In a paywalled article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Henry Gee reviews Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap: Suddendorf’s task is to get into the minds of apes to get a more precise idea of what it is that separates us from the other apes. He concludes that the difference springs from six interdependent facilities, some of which are present in some degree in other creatures but which, in humans, reinforce one another, bootstrapping us from the mud and into the firmament. These Read More ›

From New Scientist: Until recently, the consensus has leaned towards a very Darwinian story. In this scenario, sometime around 600 million years ago, the common ancestor to all animals gave rise to some organisms with simple neural networks. Central nervous systems arose later, allowing for greater coordination and more complex behaviours. These perhaps started out as tight balls of neurons, but eventually gave rise to the magnificently complex primate brain. The story was somewhat turned on its head by the recent whole genome sequence of comb jellies. These small marine animals look like jellyfish but in fact seem to be only distantly related. They use a neural network just beneath their skin and a brain-like knot of neurons at one Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “Octopuses use unique locomotion strategies that are different from those found in other animals,” says Binyamin Hochner of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “This is most likely due to their soft molluscan body that led to the evolution of ‘strange’ morphology, enabling efficient locomotion control without a rigid skeleton.” Odd, isn’t it, how entirely different, very complex systems can just happen to evolve randomly in a universe dominated by mere agglomerations of lifeless material. After poring over videos of octopuses in action, frame by frame, the researchers made several surprising discoveries, as reported in the new study. Despite its bilaterally symmetrical body, the octopus can crawl in any direction relative to its body orientation. The orientation of its Read More ›

Like Dracula it can’t really die, as it is culturally needed.* So it just keeps rising from the grave. Evidence is irrelevant. In the context of giving apes human rights instead of protection, we read: We share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and it has been argued this makes ape experimenters 99% as bad as the Nazis. It has also been argued that the medical benefits obtained from experiments on chimpanzees have been minimal. The chances are that the advancement of medical research would suffer little if the apes were given new rights that protected them from these experimental procedures. Most funding for chimp lab research in the United States was to end immediately in 2011, and the Read More ›

At Braindecoder: “Spiders are very smart, that’s why we’re studying them,” says Ronald Hoy, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. “They use visual cues to steer by, and the kind of mazes that they can solve is considered to be pretty impressive for an invertebrate.” There is a limit to how small neurons can get, so Perhaps as a solution to space limits, some small spiders have brains that spill out all the way into their legs. Scientists have discovered that the central nervous systems of the smallest spiders fill up almost 80 percent of their total body cavity, including about a quarter of the space inside their legs. More. It was easier to believe in Darwinism Read More ›

Here. Sheldon, an eight year-old sulfate tortoise, and Dolly, a three year-old American Pit Bull Terrier, were both rescued from HSNT and are now best friends! Their owner says they love to play chase like in this video and that Dolly even tries to get Sheldon to play with her favorite ball, though so far he’s had no interest. Look how speedy Sheldon is! These two are great examples of just how amazing rescued animals are and how friendship doesn’t see species! From the News desk’s perspective, the tortoise does seem to be playing (hostility seems absent), but we doubt he’ll “get” the idea of whacking a ball around soon. At one time, it was generally assumed that reptiles were Read More ›