#animal cognition

[great-and-small]

I think one of my favorite things about cetaceans (whales and dolphins) is the way they exhibit little signs of culture varying from pod to pod. For example, in the 80s there was a wild dolphin named Billie in Adelaide who was placed in dolphin rehab after being injured, and she spent some time amongst captive dolphins while recovering. Just from watching the Marineland dolphins, Billie learned to perform a trick called “tail walking” which is a behavior that dolphins don’t really do in the wild. However, when Billie was released back into Port River after her recovery, she loved tail walking so much that she taught it to all of the other wild dolphins in the pod as well as her daughter. Billie would regularly race up to boats and tail walk alongside them to the delight of passengers

There was a period for several years where pretty much all of the dolphins in Port River were tail walking on a regular basis until the fad eventually wore off, as fads do. Billie herself though never stopped exhibiting the behavior until her death in 2009 from renal failure. What a remarkable animal she was; I love what her story tells us about dolphin behavior and cognition.

#Billie the dolphin #cetaceans #dolphins #tursiops #animal behavior #animal cognition #biology #zoology #Australia #funny #cetacean

[blorbologist]

just thought I'd throw this out there, but New York University is hosting a discussion about animal consciousness on Friday April 19th!

You can attend online and it’s free to register. None of the philosophers attending are familiar to me, but several of the people putting forth evidence for oft overlooked families are big names in animal cognition research!

Might be interesting to anyone curious about what evidence we have for a complex inner life for other organisms (pain, pleasure, play, social complexity, etc.), and how hard it is to empirically prove consciousness is present.

Image credit: Bradford Martin

#animal cognition #animal behavior #science #Idk just thought some of my personal circle would be interested but hey if this gets more reach all the better

[typhlonectes]

Fish can recognize themselves in photos, further evidence they may be self-aware

Self-awareness may be more widespread among animals than we once thought

Some fish can recognize their own faces in photos and mirrors, an ability usually attributed to humans and other animals considered particularly brainy, such as chimpanzees, scientists report. Finding the ability in fish suggests that self-awareness may be far more widespread among animals than scientists once thought.

“It is believed widely that the animals that have larger brains will be more intelligent than animals of the small brain,” such as fish, says animal sociologist Masanori Kohda of Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan. It may be time to rethink that assumption, Kohda says.

Kohda’s previous research showed that bluestreak cleaner wrasses can pass the mirror test, a controversial cognitive assessment that purportedly reveals self-awareness, or the ability to be the object of one’s own thoughts. The test involves exposing an animal to a mirror and then surreptitiously putting a mark on the animal’s face or body to see if they will notice it on their reflection and try to touch it on their body. Previously only a handful of large-brained species, including chimpanzees and other great apes, dolphins, elephants and magpies, have passed the test.

In a new study, cleaner fish that passed the mirror test were then able to distinguish their own faces from those of other cleaner fish in still photographs. This suggests that the fish identify themselves the same way humans are thought to — by forming a mental image of one’s face, Kohda and colleagues report February 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

Read more: 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fish-recognize-photo-self-aware

photographs of Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse:  Izuzuki; Matthias Kleine; w/ Doubleband Surgeonfish by Brian Gratwicke CC

#animal intelligence #fish #ichthyology #animals #science #animal welfare #nature #biology #ocean #marine biology #animal cognition

[petnews2day]

Cat 'Doesn't Understand' Why Family Surrendered Her 2 Years After Adoption

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/PHT18

Cat 'Doesn't Understand' Why Family Surrendered Her 2 Years After Adoption

A cat who was adopted from a shelter as a kitten has suffered the heartbreak of being returned two years later According to a video published on TikTok by jjack.iie, Fiona the cat “doesn’t understand” why her family surrendered her back to the Valley Animal Center in Fresno, California. As a kitten, Fiona endured a […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/PHT18 #CatsNews #Trending, #AnimalBehavior, #AnimalCognition, #AnimalRescue, #Animals, #California, #Cats, #Kittens, #Pets, #SocialMedia, #TikTok, #Viral

#trending #animal behavior #animal cognition #animal-rescue #animals #california #cats #Kittens #pets #social media #TikTok #viral #Cats News

[silvermoon424]

I legit get so pissed off and offended when people (especially scientists) claim that animals don't experience emotions. I don't know how you can spend an hour with a dog or cat and come away with the opinion "Yeah, these are just mindless automatons of muscle and bone that don't experience any deeper connection to life."

Like, scientists have literally put dogs in MRI machines and discovered that parts of their brains associated with pleasure and joy light up when they smell and hear their owners. Elephants have been observed to display mourning behavior when one of their herd dies. Chimpanzees can remember their human caretakers from many years ago and display joy and affection when they are reunited with them. Many birds are highly intelligent and birds who are kept as pets often develop close bonds with their owners.

And yet despite overwhelming evidence that many animal species are capable of experiencing emotions a lot of scientists will claim that the people who believe this are "anthropomorphizing" animals and that we can't really know because animals can't talk. I'm sorry but this is such bullshit. It's not "anti-science" to use our natural ability to empathize and recognize behavior and extend it towards other species. If anything it's anti-science to continue to hold onto a medieval understanding of animal cognition despite massive strides being made towards understanding how rich and developed non-human animals are.

Man, human supremacy pisses me off so much.

#rant #animals #animal cognition

[gobliq]

#adrian tchaikovsky #children of time #children of ruin #animal testing #animal cognition #animal intelligence

[glitter-and-be-gay]

#ooooh #Noam Chomsky #you're really in it now #recursion #language #linguistics #animal behaviour #animal linguistics #animal cognition #animals #birds #crows #I really want to know at which point are we going to give up on #human exceptionalism #science

[kenyatta]

Millions of years ago, a few spiders abandoned the kind of round webs that the word “spiderweb” calls to mind and started to focus on a new strategy. Before, they would wait for prey to become ensnared in their webs and then walk out to retrieve it. Then they began building horizontal nets to use as a fishing platform. Now their modern descendants, the cobweb spiders, dangle sticky threads below, wait until insects walk by and get snagged, and reel their unlucky victims in.

In 2008, the researcher Hilton Japyassú prompted 12 species of orb spiders collected from all over Brazil to go through this transition again. He waited until the spiders wove an ordinary web. Then he snipped its threads so that the silk drooped to where crickets wandered below. When a cricket got hooked, not all the orb spiders could fully pull it up, as a cobweb spider does. But some could, and all at least began to reel it in with their two front legs.

Their ability to recapitulate the ancient spiders’ innovation got Japyassú, a biologist at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, thinking. When the spider was confronted with a problem to solve that it might not have seen before, how did it figure out what to do? “Where is this information?” he said. “Where is it? Is it in her head, or does this information emerge during the interaction with the altered web?”

In February, Japyassú and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.

This would make the web a model example of extended cognition, an idea first proposed by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998 to apply to human thought. In accounts of extended cognition, processes like checking a grocery list or rearranging Scrabble tiles in a tray are close enough to memory-retrieval or problem-solving tasks that happen entirely inside the brain that proponents argue they are actually part of a single, larger, “extended” mind.

#spiders #extended cognition #cognitive science #animal cognition

[teachersource]

Irene Pepperberg was born on April 1, 1949. A scientist noted for her studies in animal cognition, particularly in relation to parrots. She is well known for her comparative studies into the cognitive fundamentals of language and communication, and she was one of the first to work on language learning in animals other than human species (exemplified by the Washoe project), by extension to a bird species. Pepperberg is also active in wildlife conservation, especially in relation to parrots.

#irene pepperberg #animal cognition #animal communication #animal behavior #parrots #wildlife conservation #science #science history #science birthdays #on this day #on this day in science history #women in science #women in history

[pjpblinks]

Rivers, ships, corporations are routinely granted personhood rights. Why can’t animals? Here’s the case for recognizing the personhood of Happy, an Asian elephant who’s kept in conditions comparable to solitary confinement at the Bronx Zoo.

#animal rights #vegan #go vegan #animal cognition #animal liberation #veganism #ethics

[aquilathefighter]

Bird facts request! Any interesting bird behavior studies you think are cool or like to talk about?

In particular I’d love to learn anything about bird’s social lives and relationships/communities or bird intelligence!

bird behavior is my JAM!

Recently i had the pleasure of hearing Jen Cunha speak about her research with companion parrots! She runs Parrot Kindergarten which teaches people how to create enrichment for pet parrots with tablets and she conducts research on how these activities can benefit our feathered friends.

One of the papers she and her collaborators recently published reveals that companion parrots can video call other parrots and interact with them through the screen! They noted that birds mirrored each other, saying "hello" or waving at each other. They also typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment! Birds were also able to learn new behaviors from others through the screen, like foraging or flying!!!

We know that companion parrots need a lot of enrichment throughout the day to keep them from getting bored, and they definitely need to be able to interact with flockmates throughout the day! They are very social animals and depending on the species, flocks can span from dozens to hundreds of individuals. I am really excited about the research going on here because there are so many bored parrots in people's homes who could definitely benefit from getting some socialization!

Read the paper | NPR article | Smithsonian article

Follow Parrot Kindergarten: Facebook | Instagram | TikTok

#aquila answers #birds #animal behavior #animal cognition #parrots

[great-and-small]

Extremely good paragraph from an article exploring the concept of sentience in invertebrates

#biology #animals #animal cognition #invertebrates #sentience #this article is not perfect and I don’t necessarily agree with all of their conclusions but it’s still a very important investigation

[blorbologist]

Do you have any favorite biology fun facts?

A boatload of them! I'm actually compiling my favorites for a weird little ask game for my birthday next week 👀

But here's one:

Male zebra finches learn their songs (as opposed to contact calls and such) in a very similar way to kids learning to talk! They go through a babbling phase just making random noises, before trying to model that random chatter closer and closer to a template song in their heads they listened to growing up - usually their dad's! And the females likewise learn what a good song is from their dad, with song-naive females being less picky about their preferred songs. You can train them to pull strings to hear more of songs they like better.

#biology #animal cognition #birds #stem

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Bees order numbers in increasing size from left to right, a study has shown for the first time, supporting the much-debated theory that this direction is inherent in all animals including humans.

Western research has found that even before children learn to count, they start organising growing quantities from left to right in what has been called the “mental number line”.

However the opposite direction has been found in people from cultures that use an Arabic script which reads from right to left.

A study, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), aiming to find out if the same holds true for insects, via an experiment on bees.

“It has already been shown that bees are able to count – at least up to five,” Giurfa told Agence France-Presse.

They also process information differently in the two hemispheres of their brains, he added. This trait they seem to share with humans, and is thought to be a potential reason for the existence of the “mental number line”, Giurfa said.

For the experiment, the researchers had individual honeybees fly into a wooden box.

Sugar-water was then used to entice the bees to select an image displaying a number of items affixed to the walls of the box.

The number of items stayed the same for each individual bee, but varied randomly across the group – between one, three or five – and in terms of shapes: circles, squares or triangles.

Once the bees were trained to fly towards their set number of items, the researchers removed them and put out another number of items on the other sides of the boxes wall, leaving the middle blank.

They then removed the sugar-water reward and observed which way the bees went.

As an example, 80% of the bees who were trained to select the three items would head to the left when offered just one item on either side, and went to the right when offered five items on either side.

And bees trained to go for number one went to the right for a number three, while bees targeting a five went left for their three.

#bees #animal cognition #mathematics

[petnews2day]

Sick Rescue Dog and Cat Who Became Family Put to Sleep in Each Other's Arms

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/6WIL3

Sick Rescue Dog and Cat Who Became Family Put to Sleep in Each Other's Arms

A cat and dog who suffered immeasurable hardship before finding a loving owner and friendship in the most unexpected of places have passed away in each other’s arms. Winston the rescue pup, 13, and his older cat sibling Tilly, 15, crossed the rainbow bridge together after three happy years living alongside their owner, Louisa Crook. […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/6WIL3 #DogNews #Trending, #AnimalBehavior, #AnimalCognition, #AnimalRescue, #Animals, #Cats, #Dogs, #MiddleEast, #Pets, #SocialMedia, #TikTok, #Video

#trending #animal behavior #animal cognition #animal-rescue #animals #cats #dogs #Middle East #pets #social media #TikTok #video #Dog News

[kvothbloodless]

Does anyone have that post about why bird feeders (and hummingbird feeders specifically) are often a bad idea/not safe for the birds? It was going around animal behavior tumblr a while back I think. Maybe by @is-the-bird-video-cute or @why-animals-do-the-thing ?

#animal behavior #animal cognition #animal cog