National Geographic video here.

Can self-loathing be far behind?

Earlier studies have shown that apes and other mammals can be aware that they do not know the answer to a test. However, Call claims that the doubt apparently revealed by his trials represents a subtle thought process not previously seen beyond humans.

New Scientist phrases it as ‘Apes found suffering self-doubt’. There’s a real existential horror to this discovery.

Previously their sounds had been considered a simple gesture of submission, but the new study has allowed researchers to identify exactly which individual hyena makes each giggle, and the circumstances in which they do so.

This is the first report of flounder mimicry by an Atlantic octopus, and only the fourth convincing case of mimicry for cephalopods.

Crafty buggers.

BBC News:

When ants of the species Temnothorax unifasciatus get sick, they abandon their nest, walking far away from their relatives to die alone.

They perform this act of heroism to prevent the illness that is killing them from spreading to the colony.

The discovery, published in Current Biology, is the first time that such behaviour has been shown in ants or any other social insect.

…
By choosing to face death alone, the ants were making a truly altruistic act.

Compared to bumblebees:

… the exact opposite has been found in the bumblebee, another social insect.

Bees infected by fly larvae move out of the hive into colder air.

But in doing so, the cold temperatures slow the lifecycle of the parasite.

So the infected bees are actually trying to extend their own lives, rather than save their nest mates.

That last bit seems like a false choice, because they could be trying to both extend their own lives AND save their nest mates. Still, the trend worth noting is that scientists speak openly these days of insects “making choices” which implies minds and self-awareness. The idea of animals as creatures of “pure instinct” is rapidly fading.

Which brings me to one of my favorite scientific papers (pdf file) on bacterial cognition.

Up with anthropomorphism!

Too good a fate for these lads.

Three crew members of a Japanese whaling vessel suffered face and eye injuries from acid fired by anti-whaling protesters during their latest clash in the Antarctic Ocean, their Japanese employers said Friday.

The Sea Shepherd protesters said they shot butyric acid, produced from stinking rancid butter, which they often aim at the whalers to try to disrupt the annual Japanese hunt. The activists maintain that butyric acid is nontoxic.

The injuries Thursday were the first to Japanese whalers this year during confrontations with Sea Shepherd, although there have been two ship collisions that each side blamed on the other.

Japanese Fisheries Minister Hirotaka Akamatsu lashed out at the activists on Friday, telling reporters: “I am full of rage. I could not believe they did such a thing.”

Glenn Inwood, spokesman for Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research, which sponsors the hunt, said the injuries were not serious, but he cautioned that butyric acid can cause temporary blindness.

And harpoons can cause permanent deathness.

Bonobo group eats dead infant, causes media kerfuffle:

Though uncommon, the behaviour may not be aberrant, says the scientist who witnessed it.

But it does further challenge a widely perceived notion that bonobos are an especially “peaceful” ape species.

Poppycock. We’re with this guy:

However, says Dr Fowler: “I am not sure there are wider implications from a scientific point of view.”

“I don’t see that occasionally consuming dead infants, however distasteful it might seem to us, is a sign of pathology or aberration per se.”

“I don’t think it necessarily says anything about ‘empathy’ or ‘morality’,” he adds.

“It had been suggested in the past that bonobos might feel more sympathy for victims, which is why they didn’t hunt monkeys, for example.

Metaphor

“But we now know they do hunt monkeys. So I think eating an already dead baby says little about bonobos in that respect.

“Bonobos are often used in a symbolic way, held up as the sexy, peaceful ‘Hippy Chimps’.

“The fact that they eat monkeys and consume their own dead offspring may not accord with this view, but I personally don’t see this as a problem.”

“The idea of the ‘Hippy Chimp’ is more a metaphor than a scientific argument,” he continues.

“I think the major implication is that we don’t need to see it as an aberration among other apes.

…i.e., no one should be getting the vapors about this.

Trying to iron out all the ways animals sense the earth’s magnetic field, researchers have managed to overturn a “widely held view” about the functioning of certain photoreceptor molecules:

…states Dr. Reppert, “the finding provides the first genetic evidence that a vertebrate-like (photoreceptor molecule) can function as a magnetoreceptor.”

An interesting feature of the team’s work disproved a widely held view about how these proteins can chemically sense a magnetic field.

In your face!!

“These findings suggest that there is an unknown photochemical mechanism that the (photoreceptor molecules) use instead,” says Dr. Gegear, lead author on the paper, “one that we are hotly pursuing.”

Mission: tag and bag all unknown photochemical mechanisms.

Tests on stingrays reveal they are smart as shit, with tool use (manipulating water flow as tool) and other cognitive abilities.

It reveals that the fish, once thought a “simple reflex animal”, has cognitive abilities to rival birds, reptiles and mammals, scientists say.

… In the past, scientists have assumed that such cartilaginous fish have limited cognitive abilities, in part because they have been difficult to study, says Dr Michael Kuba from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel who undertook the latest study.

You got that? Because (in part) they were difficult to study, scientists assumed they had limited cognitive abilities. Absent any data whatsoever, the default scientific belief is that a given animal has limited cognitive abilities.

That illustrates nicely how anthropomorphism is underrated. Because the default belief of anthropomorphism is that well, any given animal is probably a lot like us. And time and time again, as in this case, it’s the anthropomorphic position that is correct, or at least, not surprised.

Cool photo here of a cast of an ant nest, made with a thin slurry of dental plaster.

More here.

Whaler scum ram Sea Shepherd boat

2 from the BBC:

Disinfectants “train” superbugs

“Lifeless” prions “evolve”

Bacterial cognition(pdf)? You decide.

More tool use found among chimps:

This is the first account of chimpanzees using a pounding tool technology to break down large food items into bite-sized chunks rather than just extract it from other unobtainable sources such as baobab nuts, Ms Koops told the BBC.

Wasn’t that long ago the very idea of face-eaters using tools was laughable. But not only are new tools constantly discovered in use, but new kinds of tools as well. Chimps are clearly in the stone age and have been for many thousands of years. Those early scientific assessments were, how you say, talking out their ass.

…in fruit flies that is: (oops link broke)

after mating, females still slept deeply at night, but ditched the usual siesta in favour of extra foraging and searching for places to lay her eggs,” he says. “This behaviour lasts for around eight days – and our research findings suggest that this change is not by choice.

And so the fruit fly is confirmed to be a prisoner of its own biology, like everybody. Article also contains this gem:

Fruit flies are a good model for looking at sleep behaviour in humans as they exhibit many of the hallmarks of mammalian sleep. For example they sleep deeply at night from which they’re difficult to rouse and they have a preferred sleeping posture. If kept awake through the night, they exhibit tiredness the next day; if fed caffeine, they stay awake, and they become drowsy if given antihistamines.

I find it difficult to avoid anthropomorphising here.

Anyway, aggregating weird science stories like this is the kind of thing that’s made us the #1 animal sex facts site on the web.

Specifically the leatherback turtle:

Such preference is known by scientists as a “lateralised functional behaviour”, and it usually indicates that an animal’s brain function is also lateralised, with one side of the brain dominating control of certain tasks….

….While researchers have recently found differences in brain structure between left- and right-handed primates, with the left and right brain hemispheres having slight structural differences, there is no evidence as yet that the left and right sides of a turtle’s brain are different.

…Except for their lateralised functional behavior.

Adds to a short list of documented genital licking in raunchy animal kingdom sex:

Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation.

The paper details various hypotheses to explain the behaviour including added lubrication and that old sawhorse, pair bonding. Swiped this from Bayblab which is quickly becoming a favorite science site around here.

Our special today: giant squid.

Eating on the run, a female sperm whale carries the remains of a giant squid off the Bonin Islands, about 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of Tokyo, on October 15, 2009.

The whale almost certainly carried the giant morsel up from the dark depths of the nearby Osagawara Trench, a favorite hunting ground of sperm whales. The whales routinely dive for an hour or more to depths of up to 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) in pursuit of giant squid, which are thought to rarely venture higher than 1,000 feet (300 meters) below sea level.

First photos of Sperm whale with piece of giant squid in its mouth, believed to be teaching its youngster how to do it.

Interesting, but no surprises here.

“One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it, just as an elephant would nose the carcase of another elephant, and stepped back. Another magpie did the same thing, ” he said.

“Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then all four stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off.”

…
Those who see emotions in animals have been accused of anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to animals.

Oh yeah, I forgot. Animals other than ourselves are mindless drones here for our plundering. Check.

Seriously, the mindlessness of some some scientists should be the topic up for debate.

Scientists have introduced currency to chimps, but since deregulating it, the entire face-eater economy has collapsed:

The chimp commerce broke down amid soured transactions soon after human experimenters stopped refereeing them

Maybe we should try it with hyenas.

Newer experiments with the bees’ “waggle dance” show that it has limited value in natural conditions, namely because

 …bees often seem unable to follow the instructions.

Canine expert/professor emeritus: dogs can learn 165 words,

…have a basic understanding of arithmetic, and they can count to four or five.

….He found the top dogs, in order of their doggy IQ are:

1. Border collies
2. Poodles
3. German shepherds
4. Golden retrievers
5. Dobermans
6. Shetland sheepdogs
7. Labrador retrievers

Bird Art: Attenborough on Bowerbirds

Previous research had shown that birds seem to have an internal compass that allows them to “see” Earth’s magnetic field. This magnetic vision guides them on long journeys.

Scientists have also studied a protein molecule, called cryptochrome, that drives the chemical processes behind the birds’ magnetic abilities.

But what the molecule was reacting with to create birds’ special sight has been a mystery—until now.

Due to a laboratory mishap, scientists have discovered that toxic superoxides may be the previously missed ingredient.

Fuckin’ birds get all the cool stuff.

A single door-slam to punctuate her natural call, but technically tool-use. Kinda flirts with musicality too, in keeping with our “Up With Anthropomorphicization” campaign.

RELATED: Proto-language of the housecat 

The muriqui’s peaceful reputation stems mainly from northern populations that feed on abundant leaves, and where males patiently queue to mate with females. But in the southern population…, fruit is more widely available than in the north… Because fruit is widely dispersed, females detach from the main group to locate it, making them less available for sex with the males than in the north where everyone stays together to eat leaves. Lacking ready mates, males may become frustrated, creating mutual tension and aggression.

Tense monkeys are violent monkeys.

I for one welcome our new ant overlords.

Chimps, those charming little face-eaters, have a hell of a memory for fruit trees:

Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found.  

….One idea, known as the ‘ecological hypothesis’ proposes that the need to remember and find food resources, such as fruit trees, could have driven the evolution of primate brains. In particular, it says that a preference for fruit eating, or frugivory, would select for intelligence compared to leaf-eating, or foliovory.

“That’s because the distribution of fruits is more scattered, less predictable and fruits can be more difficult to manipulate than leaves, the nut cracking by Ta chimpanzees being an extreme example,” says Normand.

Compared to monkeys, chimpanzees live in larger territories and are highly frugivorous, suggesting that developing an outstanding ability to navigate to fruit trees could have a key driver in the evolution of ape intelligence.

Stone-age chimp tech has produced a multi-purpose tool:

…They found that the chimps built and used five different types of tools to help them find beehives and extract honey: thin, straight sticks to probe the ground for buried nests; thick, blunt-ended pounders to break open beehive entrances; thinner lever-like enlargers to break down walls within the hive; collectors with frayed ends to dip honey from the opened hive and bark spoons to scoop it out. Various tools were often found near the same hive, suggesting that the chimps employ them in sequence (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.04.001).

A few tools even appeared to have two uses, with enlargers at one end and collectors at the other. This is the first example of a non-human species constructing multipurpose tools.

Chimps use bark spoons? Little face-eaters.

Exceeding the abilities of chimps yet again, some rooks (like crows, part of the corvid family, but unlike crows in that rooks are not known to use tools in the wild) have spontaneously used (and made) tools in the lab, perplexing everyone. With video.

Beefy article with some cool videos of crows making tools etc, including some still photos of birds looking thoughtfully at things.