All posts for the month July, 2011

Does Berlitz Offer a Course in Prairie Dog?

Yes, that’s right – before your next trip to Arizona you may need to learn another language if you really want to be able to communicate with the natives.

Prairie dog about to raise its hand in English class (photo credit: Northern Arizona University/Con Slobodchikoff)

Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has been studying Gunnison’s prairie dogs for the last three decades, and, as reported by BBC News¹, believes that these social rodents have some very special language abilities. Slobodchikoff told the BBC:

Prairie dogs have the most complex natural language that has been decoded so far. They have words for different predators, they have descriptive words for describing the individual features of different predators, so it’s a pretty complex language that has a lot of elements.

According to the BBC article:

The researchers found that the prairie dogs are confronted by so many predators that they have evolved different “words” to describe them all.

These words are barks and sounds that contain different numbers of rhythmic chirps and frequency modulations.

Individual prairie dogs have different tonal qualities, just as human voices differ, but different rodents use the same words to describe the same predators, allowing the alarm call to be understood by the rest of the colony.

For example, a single bark may be attuned to say “tall, skinny coyote in distance, moving rapidly towards colony”.

National Public Radio (NPR)² recently featured Slobodchikoff’s prairie dog research as well, providing additional color about how Slobodchikoff and his students hid near prairie dog villages, used microphones to record shrill prairie dog predator warning cries (“It sounds kind of like ‘chee chee chee chee,’ “ says Slobodchikoff), and then analyzed the sounds using computer programs to parse out the differing frequencies and overtone layers of the prairie dogs’ warnings made in response to humans, dogs, coyotes, hawks and other perceived threats.

The NPR article describes how, after Slobodchikoff noticed that there were variations in the calls used to identify individual humans, he decided to perform further tests to see how specific the prairie dogs were being in describing what they saw:

He had four (human) volunteers walk through a prairie dog village, and he dressed all the humans exactly the same — except for their shirts. Each volunteer walked through the community four times: once in a blue shirt, once in a yellow, once in green and once in gray.

He found, to his delight, that the calls broke down into groups based on the color of the volunteer’s shirt. “I was astounded,” says Slobodchikoff. But what astounded him even more, was that further analysis revealed that the calls also clustered based on other characteristics, like the height of the human. “Essentially they were saying, ‘Here comes the tall human in the blue,’ versus, ‘Here comes the short human in the yellow,’ “says Slobodchikoff.

Amazingly, it doesn’t stop there. Slobodchikoff’s next move was to see if prairie dogs could differentiate between abstract shapes. So he and his students built two wooden towers on each side of a prairie dog village. They then made cardboard cutouts of circles, squares and triangles and ran them out along a wire strung between the two towers, so the shapes sort of floated through the village about three feet from the ground. And the prairie dogs, Slobodchikoff found, were able to tell the difference between the triangle and the circle, but, alas, they made no mention of the difference between the square and the circle.

Prairie dog warning system: "One if by land, two if by sea" (photo credit: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

As the BBC puts it, if Slobodchikoff’s conclusions are correct, it would mean that “the chattering rodents communicate in a more complex way than even monkeys or dolphins.”

Pretty impressive stuff.

What do you think, does prairie dog communication amount to speaking a “language”? Is human language unique in some fundamental sense, or is there a continuum between what the prairie dogs are telling each other and what we talk about among ourselves?

We will have future posts regarding animal communication and linguistic abilities, and further explore the nature of language. Until next time, chee chee chee chee, and to all a good night!

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¹BBC News, “Burrowing US prairie dogs use complex language,” February 2, 2010.

²NPR, “New Language Discovered: Prairiedogese,” January 20, 2011.

5 Comments

by paulfnorris on July 13, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Language, Mammals, Social Behavior

Tagged Communication, Prairie dogs

Posted by paulfnorris on July 13, 2011

https://animalwise.org/2011/07/13/does-berlitz-offer-a-course-in-prairie-dog/

Tooling Around Underwater

Tool Time For Tuskfish

As reported last week in ScienceNOW¹, a professional diver exploring the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia recently snapped the first photos of a fish using tools. The diver, Scott Gardner, came across a blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii) that was hovering over a sandy area near a rock with a clam in its mouth. The tuskfish rolled on its side and, with a repeated cracking noise, slammed the clam against the rock until the shell fractured. Here’s one of the photos that Gardner took of the industrious (and hungry) tuskfish:

Tuskfish cracking open clam (photo credit: Scott Gardner)

While there have been anecdotal accounts of other fish using tools, this is the first time that this type of behavior has been caught on film.

What Is Tool Use, Anyhow?

In an interesting aside, this incident has brought to the forefront some of the ways in which it is difficult to define, and reach agreement upon, exactly what constitutes “tool use” in animals. As noted in the ScienceNOW article, there has been previous debate over whether stingrays and archerfish targeting jets of water to capture prey constitutes tool use (is a solid external object necessary for there to be a tool?), as well as whether tool use “requires the animal to hold or carry the tool itself, in this case the rock.”

The research paper regarding this tuskfish behavior, which was published in the most recent issue of Coral Reefs², the official Journal of the International Society for Reef Studies, argues that the tuskfish using the rock as an anvil to open the clam conforms to a definition of tool use first formulated by Jane Goodall back in 1970, that tool use is “the use of an external object as a functional extension of mouth or hand in the attainment of an immediate goal.” The paper adds: “The use of a rock as an anvil rather than a hammer could be considered a sign of intelligence considering the ineffectiveness of manipulating a freely suspended tool in water. The images certainly provide an interesting starting point for further comparative studies on tool use in fishes.”

The ScienceNOW article describes how Culum Brown, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a co-author of the Coral Reefs paper:

argues that it’s not logical to apply the same rules to fish as to primates or birds. For one thing, fish don’t have anything but their mouths to manipulate tools with, and for another, water poses different physical limitations than air. ‘One of the problems with the definition of tool use as it currently stands is it’s totally written for primates,’ he says. ‘You cannot swing a hammer effectively underwater.’

Those of you who pay close attention may already have noted that the definition of tool use can stir controversy. For example, beginning at the 10:34 mark in her video presentation relating to the awesome octopus, Maggie Koerth-Baker describes two very divergent definitions that might lead to different conclusions about whether the octopus engages in tool use: (a) a stricter definition that requires that an animal use a solid object to solve an “immediate problem,” rather than just to provide defense, and (b) a broader definition holding that tool use occurs whenever an animal modifies an object so as to alter some aspect of its environment.

Food For Thought

In considering tool use by animals, here are some things you might want to ponder:

Which of the above definitions makes the most sense to you?
Does it matter whether the behavior is performed by a captive animal (like the New Caledonian crow) or in the wild?
Are definitions of tool use inherently anthropocentric and subjective? That is, are we trying to come up with a definition that basically requires the behavior to look like something a human would do (if it really is a tool, then I should be able to see the Craftsman logo) before we accept it?
Is it significant whether the behavior is widespread? That is, if the behavior is only observed once or twice, is it a fluke? If the behavior is widespread, is it mere instinct?
Is nest building by birds an example of tool use?

Conclusion

There will undoubtedly be more AnimalWise posts about tool use. In the meantime, if you run across any tuskfish, you should look very closely to see if you can see their very small, teeny-tiny tool belts. They really are quite cute.

Here are some more photos (note, the following pictures may not be suitable for small children and clams):

More Scenes from "Crouching Tuskfish, Hidden Clam" (photo credit: Scott Gardner)

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¹ScienceNOW, “Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools,” July 8, 2011.

²Jones, A.M., Brown, C., Gardner, S. Tool use in the tuskfish Choerodon schoenleinii? Coral Reefs. DOI:10.1007/s00338-011-0790-y.

5 Comments

by paulfnorris on July 12, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Fish, Tool Use

Tagged Anthropocentrism, Problem Solving

Posted by paulfnorris on July 12, 2011

https://animalwise.org/2011/07/12/tooling-around-underwater/

Something to Crow About

Some of you may be aware that crows (who are corvids, like magpies and Clark’s Nutcrackers) are excellent problem solvers and that they are one of the few birds known to engage in tool use.

While there have been a variety of popular press articles describing tool use by New Caledonian crows, in this post I wanted to showcase a few videos that demonstrate visually just how impressive these crows are.

The first video features a New Caledonian crow creating a bent wire hook to fish out a food treat after realizing that a straight piece of wire won’t do the trick. Check it out; it’s pretty incredible:

…

In a second demonstration of cognitive abilities, the crow employs a sequence of three tools to obtain food reward – using a short stick to withdraw a medium-length stick, using the medium-length stick to obtain a long stick, and then using the long stick to reach the food. As the video notes, this is the first time a non-human animal with no explicit training has been observed using three different tools in the correct sequence to achieve a goal. Again, the video illustrates this feat quite nicely:

…

Finally, a recent Wired¹ article, together with accompanying video, features a New Caledonian crow finding a novel use for a tool, poking a rubber spider. This sort of flexible tool use is quite rare, and crows are the first non-mammals who have demonstrated that they can use a single tool in multiple ways. Here’s the video:

…

I love how the crow gingerly pokes at the rubber spider and then jumps back – talk about a a familiar looking reaction!

For more information and videos relating to tool usage by New Caledonian crows, you can explore the tool use website² of the Behavioural Ecology Research Group at the University of Oxford.

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¹Wired, “Clever Crows Use Tools in New Way,” January 5, 2011.

²Visited on July 11, 2011.

7 Comments

by paulfnorris on July 11, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Birds, Tool Use

Tagged Corvids, Crows, Learning, Problem Solving

Posted by paulfnorris on July 11, 2011

https://animalwise.org/2011/07/11/something-to-crow-about/

Spotted Hyenas: Clever Carnivores, Not Simply Comedians

Underestimated by many, spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) are providing insight into the roots of human intelligence.

Far from being clownish buffoons, spotted hyenas – also known as laughing hyenas – live in large, complex matriarchal communities, or clans, in which social intelligence is critical. They are fascinating animals – although they look something like dogs, they are more closely related to cats, and closer still to mongooses and civets. Female spotted hyenas are the true clan leaders: they are larger and more aggressive than males, socially dominant, and have even evolved to have male-like external features, including a pseudopenis that is extremely similar in appearance to the male’s sexual organ.

Spotted hyenas enjoying the water (photo credit: K. Holekamp)

Kay Holekamp, a professor of zoology at Michigan State University, has been studying these gregarious carnivores for many years, and is particularly focused on how they can help us gain a better understanding of why certain animals, including humans and other primates, have developed high intelligence and large brains (which, from a metabolic standpoint, are extremely expensive to maintain). More specifically, she has been looking at spotted hyena society as a means of probing the “social complexity” theory of intelligence, which posits that brainpower provides a significant edge to animals living in complex social groups, where individuals need to be able to anticipate, respond to and manipulate the social behavior of other group members.

The majority of intelligence research in this area has been performed on primates, but Holekamp notes in recent research¹ that social complexity theory predicts that “if indeed the large brains and great intelligence found in primates evolved in response to selection pressures associated with life in complex societies, then cognitive abilities and nervous systems with primate-like attributes should have evolved convergently in non-primate mammals living in large, elaborate societies in which individual fitness is strongly influenced by social dexterity.”

In this research, Holekamp acknowledges that much remains to be learned about social cognition in spotted hyenas, but concludes:

Work to date on spotted hyenas has shown that they live in social groups just as large and complex as those of cercopithecine primates [AW: a subfamily of Old World monkeys], that they experience an extended early period of intensive learning about their social worlds like primates, that the demand for social dexterity during competitive and cooperative interactions is no less intense than it is in primates, and that hyenas appear to be capable of many of the same feats of social recognition and cognition as are primates.

While the paper includes much more detail, the following are among Holekamp’s observations regarding spotted hyena social knowledge and skills:

Individual recognition. Spotted hyenas possess a rich repertoire of visual, acoustic and olfactory signals, which other hyenas can use to discriminate clan members from alien hyenas, to recognize the other members of their social units as individuals and to obtain information about signalers’ affect and current circumstances.
Kin recognition.Hyenas can distinguish vocalizations of kin from those of non-kin, with intensity of responses increasing with degree of relatedness between vocalizing and listening animals, and kin recognition potentially occurring among hyenas as distantly related as great-aunts and cousins.
Basking spotted hyena cub (photo credit: K. Holekamp)
Imitation and behavior coordination. Although hyenas have not been observed to engage in true imitation (that is, replicating a novel act performed by a species member) the way some primates do, they do appear to modify their behavior after observing goal-directed behavior of other hyenas. In addition, they engage in cooperative hunting involving complex coordination and division of labor among hunters. This cooperation, which enables them to capture prey many times their size, involves – at a minimum – communicating by simple rules of thumb (e.g., “move as necessary to keep the prey between you and another hunter”), if not the operation of higher mental processes.
Social rank and social memory. Spotted hyenas are intensely aware of social rank, and they learn quickly where they and their relatives fit into their clan’s dominance hierarchy. They are able to remember previous interactions they have had with other individuals, and appear to remember the identities and ranks of their clan mates throughout their lives. They apply their knowledge of social ranks in many ways, including to avoid conflict, figure out feeding priority, help them choose appropriate mates, determine which social relationships are desirable to establish and maintain, and when to reconcile after conflicts have occurred.
Flexible problem-solving. Similar to certain primates, it appears that spotted hyenas are able to achieve short-term goals through a variety of different tactics. As stated in the Holekamp’s research article, “For example, a hyena can avoid aggression by leaving the aggressor’s subgroup, exhibiting appeasement behavior or distracting the aggressor. A hyena can potentially use greeting ceremonies to reconcile fights, reintroduce itself to conspecifics [AW: members of their own species] from which it has been separated, or increase conspecifics’ arousal levels in preparation for a border patrol or group hunt.”
Tactical deception. One sign of social cleverness, which should be familiar to all humans, is tactical deception. It appears that hyenas may share this sophisticated behavior as well, as anecdotal accounts of hyena deception include a low-ranking hyena noticing an unprotected meal but ignoring it until higher-ranking group mates were out of range, and other low-ranking individuals similarly emit alarm vocalizations in what appear to be deceptive attempts to gain access to food.

Finally, here’s a brief video in which Holekamp shows one of the ways she and her colleagues have been assessing the puzzle-solving skills and memories of spotted hyenas:

…

So, hats off to laughing hyenas: they may sound comical, but they are seriously smart!

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¹Holekamp, K., Sakai, S., & Lundrigan, B. (2007). Social intelligence in the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362 (1480), 523-538 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2006.1993.

3 Comments

by paulfnorris on July 10, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Mammals, Social Behavior

Tagged Communication, Hyenas, Learning, Memory

Posted by paulfnorris on July 10, 2011

https://animalwise.org/2011/07/10/spotted-hyenas-clever-carnivores-not-simply-comedians-2/

The Rational Ant

In a recent post I described how pigeons are better than humans at solving the Monty Hall problem and might therefore prove to be formidable competitors on Let’s Make a Deal. In this post, I have some good news and some bad news for those of you readers who are human (I make no assumptions in this blog). The good news is that I have yet to see any research showing that pigeons can triumph over humans at Jeopardy. The bad news is that the top two winners on Let’s Make a Deal could well end up being a pigeon and an ant, leaving the human contestants to go home with nothing more than an electronic version of the game (and perhaps a goat or two).

An article in ScienceNOW¹ provides the backdrop:

Ants enjoying a nectar lunch on a sunny day (photo: Wikipedia)

Consider the following scenario: You want to buy a house with a big kitchen and a big yard, but there are only two homes on the market–one with a big kitchen and a small yard and the other with a small kitchen and a big yard. Studies show you’d be about 50% likely to choose either house–and either one would be a rational choice. But now, a new home comes on the market, this one with a large kitchen and no yard. This time, studies show, you’ll make an irrational decision: Even though nothing has changed with the first two houses, you’ll now favor the house with the big kitchen and small yard over the one with the small kitchen and big yard. Overall, scientists have found, people and other animals will often change their original preferences when presented with a third choice.

Not so with ants. These insects also shop for homes but not quite in the way that humans do. Solitary worker ants spread out, looking for two main features: a small entrance and a dark cavity. If an ant finds an outstanding hole–such as the inside of an acorn or a rock crevice–it recruits another scout to check it out. As more scouts like the site, the number of workers in the new hole grows. Once the crowd reaches a critical mass, the ants race back to the old nest and start carrying the queen and larvae to move the entire colony.

The article goes on to describe some research on ant decision-making conducted by Stephen Pratt, an Arizona State University behavioral ecologist, and Susan Edwards, of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. In this research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences², Pratt and Edwards designed a series of possible nests for 26 ant colonies:

The duo cut rectangular holes in balsa wood and covered them with glass microscope slides. The researchers then drilled holes of various sizes into the glass slides and slipped plastic light filters under the glass to vary the features ants care about most. At first, the colonies only had two options, A and B. A was dark but had a large opening, whereas B was bright with a small opening. As with humans, the ants preferred both options equally: The researchers found no difference between the number of colonies that picked A versus B.

Then the scientists added a third option, called a decoy, that was similar to either A or B in one characteristic but clearly worse than both in the other (a very bright nest with a small opening, for example). Unlike humans, the ants were not tricked by the decoy, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Although a few colonies picked the third nest, the other colonies did not start favoring A or B and still split evenly between the two.

Ants can make better decisions because they take advantage of collective wisdom and do not “overthink” their options the way humans are prone to do. As Pratt noted in an article published in PhysOrg.com³, “Typically we think having many individual options, strategies and approaches are beneficial, but irrational errors are more likely to arise when individuals make direct comparisons among options.”

This research is particularly fascinating in that it poses a direct challenge to our core belief that we will always enjoy a large advantage over other animals when there is an intellectual way to solve a problem: sure, animals may have highly-evolved senses of smell, they may be fast, they may have impressive reflexes and their instincts may be powerful, but where we humans are able to harness our large brains, we will inevitably prevail.

In fact, though, we should hold off before patting ourselves on the back. As this (and other) research shows, we suffer from biases and flaws in the way we approach thought problems that can lead to irrational decisions and that can even put us at a disadvantage vis-à-vis other animals, including the birds and the ants.

Something to think about.

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¹ScienceNOW, “Can’t Decide? Ask an Ant,” July 22, 2009.

²Edwards SC, Pratt SC. Rationality in collective decision-making by ant colonies. Proc Biol Sci. 2009 October 22; 276(1673): 3655–3661, published online 2009 July 22 (doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0981).

³PhysOrg.com, “Ants more rational than humans,” July 24, 2009.

Memory Superstar Eats Like a Bird

How has your memory been lately? You’ve been a little absent-minded, haven’t you? (Your keys are on the dining room table, right where you left them.)

If you don’t have a border collie to help you remember things, you may want to see if there are any Clark’s Nutcrackers in the neighborhood.

Clark's Nutcracker thinking about eating 30,000 pine nuts (photo: US Fish & Wildlife Service)

Clark’s Nutcrackers are medium-sized birds in the corvid family (the same family as jays, crows and ravens) that live in the Western United States and that rely on their memory to relocate stored food during the long winter months. Every year, they can harvest more than 30,000 seeds from pine cones, which they then hide in thousands of separate places within a 15 mile or so radius.

Their memories for these locations are pretty incredible. As one researcher, Brett Gibson, described it in a ScienceDaily¹ article:

Nutcrackers are almost exclusively dependent upon cache recovery for their survival so if they don’t remember where they’ve made those caches, then they are in trouble. During winter, their cache locations are covered with snow so many of the small local features in the landscape during fall are no longer available to them. What’s clear is that they are using spatial memory to recover these caches. They are remembering these caches based on landmarks and other features of the terrain.

Another biologist, Russell Balda, who has studied Nutcrackers for a number of decades, is even more effusive in National Wildlife² magazine:

How these birds find their caches looked like an incredible feat when we began studying them. We soon found out that the Clark’s nutcracker is the spatial memory superstar of the avian world, and possibly of the vertebrate world.

These two articles note that there is still some uncertainty about exactly how the Nutcracker is able to have such an astonishingly good memory. Regardless of how they do it, though, I think we all can be impressed by – and a little jealous of – these birds and their brains.

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¹ScienceDaily, “Researcher Uncovering Mysteries Of Memory By Studying Clever Bird,” October 12, 2006.

²National Wildlife, “THE BIRD THAT NEVER FORGETS – The unassuming Clark’s nutcracker has one of the most remarkable memories in the animal kingdom,” October 1, 2000.

3 Comments

by paulfnorris on July 6, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Birds

Tagged Corvids, Memory

Posted by paulfnorris on July 6, 2011

https://animalwise.org/2011/07/06/memory-superstar-eats-like-a-bird/

Fishing Buddies

We are all familiar with talented sports teams that underachieve because, despite the individual abilities of their players, they’ve been unable to “pull together” and coordinate their efforts effectively. Because teamwork requires cooperation, communication, and complex social interaction, we typically bring in outside coaches to create an environment that allows teamwork to develop, and we reserve our highest praise (and compensation) for those rare players who have the gift of making others better while being successful themselves (just ask Magic Johnson and Larry Bird).

With that in mind, you may be surprised to learn that a couple of the world’s most accomplished team players can be found not on the playing field or in the arena, but under the sea, and that they are members of different species of fish.

Grouper (from Wikipedia; photo credit: Jon Hanson)

In recent research published in PLoS Biology¹, scientists reported on a highly coordinated and communicative hunting partnership between the grouper and the giant moray eel, which they observed in the coral reefs of the Red Sea. Together, the two fish make an extremely complementary and formidable hunting team.

Groupers, large predatory reef fish, are daytime hunters, while morays usually hunt at nght and rest in crevices during the day. Groupers typically hunt in open water near reefs and have trouble catching fish that hide in the holes and crevices that they find in the coral. Moray eels, on the other hand, sneak around reef crevices and attempt corner prey in holes, but have trouble catching fish in open water.

Giant Moray Eel (from Wikipedia; photo credit: Albert Kok)

As the research report observed: “The hunting strategies of the two predators are therefore complementary, and a coordinated hunt between individuals of the two species confronts prey with a multipredator attack that is difficult to avoid; prey are not safe in open water because of the grouper hunting strategy but cannot hide in crevices because of the moray’s mode of attack.”

The researchers found that hungry groupers would actively seek out their moray eel fishing partners in their crevices and shake their heads rapidly right in the eels’ faces to let them know that it was time to go for a hunt. Here’s a video of a grouper letting an eel know that it is time to eat.

The morays would then leave their hiding holes and swim off in search of food with the groupers. Here’s a video of the hunting twosome happily swimming off together for dinner.

Moreover, the pair would cooperate as they hunted. In some cases, for instance, a grouper would remain directly above a crevice where prey was hiding, perform “headstands” and shake its head to guide the moray eel to the hidden prey’s location.

The researchers noted that, when the two fish worked together as a team, the groupers caught five times as many fish as they did separately, and the moray eels caught almost twice as many fish as the groupers. (Because the morays normally hunt at night, the researchers didn’t observe them catching any fish separately, so they were not able to draw any conclusions regarding how their partnership with the groupers changed their hunting efficiency.)

This type of inter-species coordinated hunting with differentiated roles is extremely rare and had never been seen before in fish. If you think about it, this is pretty complex and advanced behavior, as the individuals must perform specific actions and play specific roles, knowing that their counterparts are doing the same. The groupers, with their intentional signaling to call their moray partners to the hunt and to direct them to prey, demonstrate particularly sophisticated, cognitively advanced behavior.

So, forget about your local sports franchise; if you want to see some especially impressive teamwork, you should put on your wetsuit and let some reef fish show you how it’s done.

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¹Bshary R, Hohner A, Ait-el-Djoudi K, Fricke H. Interspecific Communicative and Coordinated Hunting between Groupers and Giant Moray Eels in the Red Sea. PLoS Biol 2006 4(12): e431. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040431.

A Reflection of Intelligence?

What is it that makes us most “human,” distinguishing us from other animals?

One common response is that we have a sense of self, an ability to recognize ourselves as being separate and distinct from other individuals. Thus, when I look in the mirror, I know that I am looking at myself and not a dashingly handsome stranger. You know this as well; when you gaze in the mirror, you realize that the incredibly attractive person peering back is you!

How about other animals? They don’t “get” mirrors, do they? When they look at mirrors, don’t they either stare blankly or, at best, act as if they have seen another animal? (Hey, what’s that other beast doing on my turf? I wonder if it’s friendly….) Right?

Wrong.

Increasingly, we are finding that the answer is that other animals know exactly who is staring back at them.

First, we found out that certain great apes, like chimpanzees, can recognize themselves in mirrors. Ok, we all know that primates are smart; I’ll buy that. Then, it was bottlenose dolphins. All right, Flipper was pretty darned smart, plus dolphins have those big melon-shaped heads. I suppose that makes sense. Next, Asian elephants. Really? That’s sounds a bit odd. They do have those big eyes, but still…. I guess if you say so. Most recently, birds. Hey, now, wait a minute!

That’s right, magpies are the newest – and only non-mammal – member of the mirror self-recognition club.

Magpies with colored stickers recognize themselves in the mirror (photo credit: Helmut Prior, Goethe University)

As published in PLoS Biology¹, researcher Helmut Prior and his colleagues affixed a red, yellow or black mark to feathers on the throats of five magpies (the black marks were basically a “control”: since they were the same color as the surrounding feathers they were essentially invisible to the magpies, thereby allowing the researchers to see whether any magpie behavior during the tests was the result of feeling, rather than seeing, the marks). The colored spots were positioned so that they could not be seen by the magpies unless they were looking in a mirror. When the researchers added a mirror to the cage, certain of the magpies noticed the colored spots in the mirrors and displayed “mark-directed” behavior, swiping at the marks with their beaks or scratching at them with their feet, and then checking in the mirror to determine whether they had successfully removed them. The magpies did not attempt to remove the black spots, which they couldn’t see in the mirror. Here’s a YouTube video of one of the magpies during the testing:

Also, you can read nice summaries of the research and mirror self-recognition testing in ScienceNOW² and NewScientist³ online magazines.

This research is particularly notable given the differences between the neural anatomy of birds and mammals. Science Daily⁴ describes the significance:

These findings not only indicate that non-mammalian species can engage in self-recognition behaviour, but they also show that self-recognition can occur in species without a neocortex. This area is thought to be crucial to self-recognition in mammals, and its absence in this case suggests that higher cognitive skills can develop independently along separate evolutionary lines.

Mammals and birds have developed vastly different brain structures, and future studies will be able to further examine how these structures converge to produce similar cognitive abilities.

So, the magpie, lacking a neorcortex area in its brain and with an evolutionary history that diverged from ours 300 million years ago, shares our ability to look into a mirror and see itself.

The point here is not that birds can think like humans – they undoubtedly think like birds. Rather, the lesson is that we need to be very careful in labeling ourselves as special, as having exclusive abilities and intellectual talents. The more we study other animals, the more have found – and the more we will continue to find – how much we have in common, how much we share. Increasingly, I think we will find that our claims regarding uniquely human abilities are just not true, that they are simply smoke and mirrors.

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¹Prior, H., Schwarz, A., & Güntürkün, O. (2008). Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition PLoS Biology, 6 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202.

²ScienceNOW, “The Magpie in the Mirror,” August 19, 2008.

³NewScientist, “Mirror test shows magpies aren’t so bird-brained,” August 19, 2008.

⁴ScienceDaily, “Mirror Self-Recognition In Magpie Birds,” August 19, 2008.

7 Comments

by paulfnorris on July 3, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in Birds

Tagged Corvids, Magpies, Self-Recognition

Posted by paulfnorris on July 3, 2011

https://animalwise.org/2011/07/03/a-reflection-of-intelligence/

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Header image: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

All posts for the month July, 2011

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