you're a strange animal

brosnakes:

infoneer-pulse:

Pigeons Can Learn Higher Math as Well as Monkeys

By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame.

Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest.

They learned to rank groups of one, two and three items in various sizes and shapes. When tested, they were able to do the task even when unfamiliar numbers of things were introduced. In other words, having learned that two was more than one and three more than two, they could also figure out that five was more than two, or eight more than six.

Damian Scarf, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, tried the same experiment with pigeons, and he and two colleagues report in the current issue of the journal Science that the pigeons did just as well as the monkeys.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

Pigeon!

(via tank-commander)

tank-commander:

magalomania:

flowerfistandbestialwail:

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

“A New Model of Empathy: The Rat” by David Brown, Washington Post

Oh how I would have loved to have been part of this research. Animal altruism is my favorite aspect of biological/behavioral psychology.

People really underestimate the intelligence of rodents. I swear I had my gerbil trained to come when called.

yourcerebellum:

I bet you guys didn’t know that this is where a jellyfish comes from. The fertilized egg of a jellyfish becomes a larva, then settles itself to the seafloor becoming a polyp, which is that organism above. The polyp matures and miniature jellyfish bud off of the polyp and goes into a new motile stage. Biology is amazing sometimes. 

thedailywhat:

Adorable Animal Being Adorable of the Day: Three months ago, Perth Zoo welcomed its sixth Short-beaked Echidna since 2007.

The prickly puggle, who weighed less than one gram upon hatching, made its first public appearance yesterday after spending its first few months on Earth gaining weight inside its mother’s pouch.

“Once Kai leaves the nursery burrow, we will take a couple of small hairs for DNA sexing,” said the zoo’s Australian Fauna Supervisor, Arthur Ferguson. “The previous five echidnas born at Perth Zoo were all females, so we are hoping that Kai is a male.”

[zooborns.]

executions:

Rescue dog nurses baby foxes
Mama, an American foxhound mix, and her foster babies, a litter of North African fennec foxes at LEO Zoological Conservation Center in Greenwich, Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2011. Mama, an American foxhound mix from a shelter in North Coarolna, nursed the newborns.
Photo: Helen Neafsey

(via fuckyeahfoxfriends)

theanimalblog:

A Zebra Of A Different Color (by Bill Adams)

(via geekycrap)

Cyclops Shark of the Day: A one-eyed albino “cyclops” shark discovered earlier this year in Mexico is real, scientists say. The shark suffered from a birth defect called cyclopia, leaving it with one eye in the middle of its face. It didn’t survive for long after fishermen removed it from the womb of its mother, a dusky shark. Biologist Felipe Galván-Magaña, of the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences in La Paz, Mexico, said less than 50 examples of this type of abnormality have ever been recorded. (via Cyclops Shark of the Day - TDW Geeks)

tank-commander:

The real hypnotoad