Animal Natures

Language & Communication

Hush Little Humpback. . .

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We might not be able to hear them without the use of sophisticated technology, but humpback whales are loud. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to this recording:

They call to one another to gather in groups and males sing their hearts out to attract females. So after decades of listening to and studying their songs and other vocalizations, scientists were surprised to learn that these whales sometimes “whisper.”

Humpbacks migrate long distances between foraging and breeding grounds and sometimes the moms don’t get much time in the “nursery.” While in their breeding grounds, pregnant females need to be efficient about giving birth and adequately nursing their calves so that they are strong enough to tolerate the long return migration to their foraging grounds. Scientists didn’t know much about the nursing behavior of cetaceans, so Simone K. A. Videsen and colleagues decided to investigate.

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Language & Communication

Cursing in the Wild, Singing Pavarotti and Heavy Metal in Captivity

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What happens when captive talking birds, such as parrots and cockatoos, escape and return to the wild? They start teaching their new wild bird buddies some of the words they learned while hanging out with humans, including the naughty ones. Swearing parrots are nothing new. Parrots are mimics and when kept in captivity they often learn to repeat the words they hear, even the kind their human family didn’t intend for them to learn.

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Imagination & Play, Self-awareness

Magpie Hide-and-Seek: A Theory of Mind?

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Magpies are an intelligent, social, self-aware species capable of reasoning, strategy, foresight, altruism, and other behaviors not previously associated with birds. They also play a mean game of hide-and-seek.

Lots of animals stalk and ambush one another during play, but magpies actually play hide-and-seek the same way we do. They take turns concealing themselves, peek out from their hiding places, and call out to their companion when they are ready to be found.

Being able to play hide-and-seek suggests (along with other magpie behaviors) that magpies have a “theory of mind,” which is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. It allows a human or nonhuman animal to recognize its mind as separate from other minds and to understand that others have their own mental states, such as intentions, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and perspectives. Theory of mind is also called “perspective taking” because it involves imagining the perspective of another. In order to play hide-and-seek, one needs to understand the intentions (she is trying to find me) of another.

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Emotion, Laughter & Humor

Let’s Go Tickle Some Rats: In Memory of Jaak Panksepp

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rat isolated on white background

Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist who studied the brain, behavior, and emotions, died this week, on April 18. Panksepp helped establish the idea that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. He also made incredibly important contributions to our understanding of emotions—our own, those of other animals, and evolutionary continuity between the two.

In the popular press, Panksepp was most famous for his rat tickling experiments that pretty much proved rats laugh when happy and having fun, just like humans do.

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Aesthetics & Creativity

The Fish Artist Formally Known as Torquigener albomaculosus

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This sand mandala looks like something created by the artist Andy Goldsworthy, but the artist who created it is a white-spotted pufferfish. Photograph by Photograph by Y. Okata.

Art is hard enough to define when it is created by humans, but what about when wild animals make objects that look like art?

Consider Torquigener albomaculosus, more commonly known as the white-spotted pufferfish. Found in the coastal waters of subtropical Japan, this amazing fish has the distinction of being the most accomplished underwater animal artist discovered to date. Continue reading →

Death & Grieving, Emotion, Empathy & Consolation

Langur Monkeys Respond to “A Change in Environment” (aka Death)

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Scientists have found plenty of evidence suggesting that many animals have at least a basic understanding of death.  But there are a few species who seem to have a deeper understanding. These species respond to death in ways that aren’t all that different from the ways humans respond. When a companion, mate, or offspring is lost, they often gather, touch the body, and console one another in ritualized ways. Some will stop eating, stare into space, and withdraw from their group, or wail, howl, and act out.

Despite the many observations of mourning in the animal kingdom, some skeptics still assert that what appears to be grief may just be stress caused by a change in environment. But when a human loses a loved one, how do we describe them? We would say the bereaved was sad because she had lost someone she cared about. We would never describe that person as experiencing stress caused by a change in environment.

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Friendship & Affection, Language & Communication

Interspecies Friendship at Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary

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Interspecies friendship raises intriguing questions about animal communication, such as how do different species learn to read one another’s signals and become friends? After all, many examples of friendships that cross the species divide involve animals with very different behaviors that arose from adaptations to diverse habitats.

Though interspecies friendship occasionally happens in the wild, it seems to be far more common when species are raised together in captivity. When housed together—whether in farms, sanctuaries, zoos, aquaria, or our homes—animals belonging to different species sometimes develop a common language that they use to establish the rules of their interactions, such as how to play together, when to give give each other space, and when it’s okay to snuggle. And then friendships develop.

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Books & Films

The Whale

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I use a quote from the film The Whale in my introduction to my book, and on my “About” page on this blog. The quote—and the film—call our attention to the often unrecognized animal sentience and intelligence that surrounds us.

The film tells the true story of “a young, wild killer whale—an orca—nicknamed Luna, who lost contact with his family on the coast of British Columbia and turned up alone in a narrow stretch of sea between mountains, a place called Nootka Sound. . . Orcas are social. They live with their families all their lives. An orca who gets separated usually just fades away and dies. Luna was alone, but he didn’t fade away. There weren’t any familiar orcas in Nootka Sound, but there were people, in boats and on the shore. So he started trying to make contact.”

The Whale is a beautiful, provocative film that celebrates the life of an intelligent, emotional, and charismatic orca that craves friendship and community as much as any human. It reminds us that we don’t need to search for other intelligent beings in space. We can find them right here, on Earth. Visit the film’s website for more information.

Aesthetics & Creativity

David Rothenberg Jams with Humpback Whales

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Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg has written extensively about the relationship between humanity and nature. He is the author of Why Birds Sing, on making music with birds, which was turned into a feature-length BBC TV documentary. His following book, Thousand Mile Song, is on making music with whales. It was turned into a film for French television.

Here is an excerpt from the documentary, in which David plays clarinet live with humpback whales in Pacific waters. Interspecies music at its best!

Problem-solving, Self-awareness

Self-Aware Until Proven Otherwise

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Four years ago, ethologist and animal advocate Marc Bekoff wrote an op-ed for LiveScience titled “After 2,500 Studies, It’s Time to Declare Animal Sentience Proven.” In this essay, Bekoff points out that the ample empirical evidence supporting animal sentience (over 2,500 studies at the time he was writing and many more than that now) still wasn’t stopping skeptics from continuing to question—and even deny—what research had already proven.

What puzzles me is why science didn’t start off with a different principal for how we view self-awareness in animals, one closer to that used by the American criminal justice system, which holds innocence as the presumption unless guilt is proven. Instead of needing proof of self-awareness in animals, we could instead assume that an animal is self-aware unless proven otherwise. After all, this assumption better reflects our observations of and experiences with animals, who certainly behave as if they are self aware.

But the skepticism lingers. . . And this is why we owe a debt of gratitude to all the scientists who continue to design ingenious ways of demonstrating that animals are self-aware, experience emotions, and have incredibly cognitive abilities.

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