https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240606152109.htm

"Swimming through turbulent water is easier for schooling fish compared to solitary swimmers, according to a study published June 6...

***

"In this study, Zhang and colleagues propose the "turbulent sheltering hypothesis," which suggests that traveling in schools allows fish to shield each other from disruptive water currents, thus making it easier to swim through rough waters.

***

"High-speed cameras allowed researchers to observe the movements of the fish as they swam, and a respirometer allowed for measurements of fish respiration rates and energy expenditure.

"These trials revealed that schooling fish expended up to 79% less energy while swimming in turbulent water compared to solitary fish.

"Schooling fish also clustered more closely together in turbulent water compared to steady water, while solitary fish had to beat their tails much more vigorously to maintain the same speed in more turbulent currents.

"These results lend support to the "turbulence sheltering hypothesis," indicating that locomotion efficiency might be a driving factor behind the evolution of schooling behavior.

"This information is valuable for understanding fish ecology, fundamentals of hydrodynamics and it might also be applied to the design and maintenance of habitats meant to harbor protected fish species or to hinder invasive ones."

Comment: grouping together in herds is common for protection and may play a role in schooling of fish.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fluttering-wings-bird-body-language

"Researchers have observed Japanese tits making what they call an “after you” gesture: A bird flutters its wings, cuing its mate to enter the nest first. The finding, reported in the March 25 Current Biology, “shows that Japanese tits not only use wing fluttering as a symbolic gesture, but also in a complex social context involving a sender, receiver and a specific goal, much like how humans communicate,” says biologist Toshitaka Suzuki of the University of Tokyo.

***

"Suzuki and Norimasa Sugita, a researcher at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, observed eight mated pairs make 321 trips to their nests. A pattern quickly emerged: Females fluttered their wings far more often than males, with six females shaking it up while only one male did. Females almost always entered the nest first — unless they fluttered their wings. Then the males went first.

"The birds also “never flutter their wings when they visit the nest alone,” Suzuki says. Fluttering happens only when birds are in the company of their mates, and they seem to direct their fluttering at their mate rather than at the nest entrance. This observation suggests that the Japanese tits aren’t pointing — a simple gesture that’s been seen in birds, like magpies and ravens, before, and is meant only to direct attention — but rather are communicating a complex message.

“'I might think of this as an imperative gesture – a movement that communicates to another individual that they need to do something,” says primatologist Kirsty Graham of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

“'It’s really exciting to uncover meaningful gestures in another species,” she adds. “I expect that we’ll probably find gesturing to be more widespread than previously thought.”

"'Gesturing by the nest instead of calling may help the birds avoid attracting predators, Suzuki says. He next wants to find out how wing fluttering fits into the tits’ larger communication repertoire.'"

Comment: these guys are not "bird brains". Once again this appears to be a learned practice which became an instinct.

https://www.livescience.com/animals/whales/sperm-whales-drop-bubble-of-poo-off-western-...

"Sperm whales blasted a "big dark bubble" of poop to prevent an impending orca attack off the southern coast of Western Australia.

"Scientists witnessed the clever defense strategy unfold Tuesday (March 19) during a tourist excursion in Bremer Canyon, a whale-watching hotspot off the coast between Albany and Hopetoun. They described seeing a "cloud of diarrhea" permeate the water, and this rarely seen defense mechanism seemed to help the sperm whale pod escape what could have been a fatal attack by at least 30 killer whales, ABC News Australia reported.

"'It's called defense defecation," Jennah Tucker, a marine biologist with Oceans Blueprint, a marine and environmental sciences research organization, who was on the charter boat, told ABC. When the animals defecate, she said, they pass their huge tails through their poop to drive away or confuse attackers.

"As the event unfolded, onlookers noticed a large, "dark bubble" pop up to the water's surface. At first, they thought it was blood from one of the sperm whales, potentially a small calf. But when the team later reviewed footage of the plume, they realized it was actually whale poop.

"'Because [a] sperm whale's diet consists mostly of squid, they actually have this really reddish colored poo," she said.

"In this demonstration of defense defecation, the pod formed a circle with their heads together, and the whales fanned their tails in unison — forcing their excrement toward the unsuspecting orcas.

"'This is called a rosette, another defensive mechanism they use when they're under attack," Tucker said.

***

"There have been only a few documented instances of orca attacks on sperm whales, largely due to the sheer size differential between the two species.

"'Sperm whales are considered an apex predator, and historically, it was thought that they were pretty much immune to killer whale attacks," Tucker said. "It's actually pretty adventurous for orcas to try to take on sperm whales. They're punching above their weight.'"

Comment: this type of coordinated behavior looks certainly like a learned reaction which became an instinct.

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-uncovers-rare-resin-fossil-spider.html

"'Ants are particularly good creatures for spiders to pretend to be—many animals find ants distasteful or dangerous to eat," said Poinar, who has a courtesy appointment in the Oregon State University College of Science. "Ants are aggressive in their own defense—they have a strong bite as well as a stinging venom, and they can call in dozens of nestmates as allies. Spiders, meanwhile, have no chemical defenses and are loners, which makes them vulnerable to being hunted by larger spiders, wasps and birds—predators that would rather avoid ants. So if a spider can be like an ant, it's more likely to be unbothered."

"Spiders that disguise themselves as ants live in many locations around the globe but until now most have been able to avoid detection from fossil researchers as well as predators. The specimen that Poinar describes, which he named Myrmarachne colombiana, was entombed in a type of fossilized resin known as copal.

"Copal is a less mature form of fossilized resin than amber, which is routinely dated to be 25 million or more years old. Still, copal can be up to 3 million years old.

"The age of the resin in this case, however, could not be determined, said Poinar, an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn about the biology and ecology of the distant past.

The resin block he was working with, which came from Medellin, Colombia, was too small to age-test without risk of damaging the spider inside. Poinar notes there is no record of any currently living ant-mimicking spider making its home in Colombia.

"'It is a challenge for spiders to accomplish this magical transformation to ants," he said. "Ants have six legs and two long antennae, while spiders have eight legs and no antennae."

"To get around those anatomical differences, Poinar said, spiders typically position their two front legs in a way that approximates the look of antennae. But number of legs and absence/presence of antennae are not the only characteristics differentiating an ant's appearance from a spider's.

""The abdomen and cephalothorax of spiders are closely attached, while in ants the equivalent of these body parts are separated by a narrow segment called the petiole," Poinar said. "And there are many other lesser structures that need to be modified in spiders for them to closely resemble ants. How is this accomplished? Most scientists say it begins with spider mutation, adaptation and then natural selection.

"'However, I think there is some spider reasoning and intelligence involved too since the spiders often model their body changes after specific ants in the same environment," he said. "In the early days, we were told that all habits of insects were the result of instincts, but that is no longer the case."

"Several groups of spiders have developed the ability to look and behave like various types of ants, he added. There are also spiders that try to blend in as other insects, such as flies, beetles and wasps.

"Most of the copycat spiders belong to a few families of hunting spiders, including Salticidae or jumping spiders. The specimen in the Colombian copal appears to be a jumping spider."

Comment: dhw will be pleased with Poinar's theory. I think it is a developed instinct over time with trial and error involved.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2420960-bumblebees-show-each-other-how-to-solve-co...

"Bumblebees can show each other how to solve a puzzle so hard they could not crack it alone. The finding suggests these insects might use advanced social learning that has previously only been demonstrated in humans.

"Prior research by Alice Bridges at Queen Mary University of London suggested bumblebees could show each other how to open a lever-based puzzle to access a sugary treat. And they preferred the solution learned from peers to one they figured out independently, as if the technique were a cultural trend.

"Now, Bridges has challenged the bees to a harder puzzle box that required them to manoeuvre a a blue lever and then a red one in sequence. On their own, no bees from three different colonies could figure it out – even after 12 to 14 days of trying.

"Then, the researchers taught nine of the bumblebees the key – although training them was so hard the critters initially refused to participate, says Bridges, until the humans provided extra sugary rewards along the way. When reintroduced in the colony, the upskilled bees passed their new knowledge onto five other bees that had never seen the puzzle box before.

“'Suddenly, [naive bees] were able to learn the whole thing from the trained demonstrator,” says Bridges. “When we could barely train [the demonstrators] to do it.”

"Before this, there was little proof that non-human animals could have cumulative culture, defined as the ability to learn skills from others that they wouldn’t be able to pick up over a lifetime of independent trial and error. This feat is what allowed humans to create complex knowledge systems such as modern medicine.

***

"But we shouldn’t laud bees for cumulative culture just yet, says Elisa Bandini at The University of Zürich. She’s not convinced this experiment shows a behavior so complex that individual bees could not develop it on their own: if the untaught bees had also received an extra reward like the trained bees did, they might have solved the puzzle solo."

Comment: Still an amazing skill.

https://www.sciencealert.com/these-birds-score-as-high-as-primates-in-a-puzzling-cognit...

"Oriental pied hornbills (Anthracoceros albirostris) are one of the few with an advanced understanding, a new study confirms. It's a clever skill that comes in handy when nesting females seal themselves out of sight in tree hollows, relying on their mate to bring them food.

"To lay and tend to their eggs in safety, female Oriental pied hornbills brick themselves into their refuge with dollops of mud, poop, saliva, fruit, and bark. They leave only a narrow slit for the males' food deliveries.

"For any offspring inside to survive, male hornbills must understand that their mate still exists even when they can't see them.

"'From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to represent other animals and objects when they are out of sight provides great adaptive advantages in activities such as foraging and avoiding predation," National University of Singapore psychologists Ruitong Yao and Elias Garcia-Pelegrin explain in a new paper.

"Yet, aside from notoriously clever corvids and cheekily smart parrots, no other birds were previously known to have object permanence to the same extent as primates. While other bird species have been tested, they only made it to stage four of the six developmental stages seen in human children.

***

"At stage five, the birds watched a reward get placed under one cup, then moved to another cup. By indicating the cup that the treat ended up in, the birds demonstrated an understanding of visible displacement.

"All six birds tested by researchers were able to achieve this level of object permanence, receiving the treat as a well-deserved reward.

"But only three of the hornbills made it to stage six: invisible displacement. For this stage, the birds did not get to see the treat move from one cup to another. Instead, the treat was hidden under a small, red box and then moved underneath a larger cup. When the red box was taken out from underneath the cup and shown to be empty, some birds figured out that the treat must have been left behind under the last cup, even though they didn't directly see it happening.

"'Understanding invisible displacement is more intricate, involving the integration of various cognitive skills, including memory, spatial reasoning and logical inference," write Yao and Garcia-Pelegrin.

***

"'To the best of our knowledge, Oriental pied hornbills are the first bird species outside of the corvid and parrot families to display object permanence levels comparable to apes," Yao and Garcia-Pelegrin confirm.

"The team's findings suggest that hornbills may be an overlooked group of highly intelligent bird species. Further research is now required to see if this species of bird has other cognitive abilities that also rival those of parrots and corvids."

Comment: a small brain, packed with neurons, can handle amazing feats of cognition. The incidental event described in this story is their advanced form of protected nesting. That is quite a complex adaptation or instinct requiring a very inventive mind. No wonder their cognitive abilities tests so advanced.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parrots-move-branches-beakiation-animals-physics

"Parrots can move along thin branches using ‘beakiation’ The sidestep involves shuffling across the underside of a branch using both feet and the beak.

"To move along narrow branches, a parrot can hang from a branch with its beak, swing its body sideways and grab hold farther along with its feet. The newly described gait, dubbed beakiation, expands the birds’ locomotive repertoire and underscores how versatile their beaks are, researchers report January 31 in Royal Society Open Science.

"Parrots “are specialized for climbing and moving around in the trees,” says biomechanist Michael Granatosky of the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury. But, he wondered, “what would happen if you flip a bird upside down or make them go onto the tiniest [branch] possible?”

"So Granatosky and colleagues put four rosy-faced lovebirds (Agapornis roseicollis) to the test. Birds placed on a suspended bar just 2.5 millimeters in diameter realized that the best way to shuffle along it was to use their beaks and feet in a cyclical side-swinging motion. The birds traveled 10 centimeters per second on average during each stride (beak touchdown to beak touchdown).

“'This wasn’t something that the parrots were trained to do,” says NYIT biomechanist Edwin Dickinson. “This was an innovative solution to a novel problem.” Parrots are known to be brainiacs, after all (SN: 1/26/24).

"The bar was segmented into three pieces, with the central bar hung from an instrument that measures force. Using those readings and other measurements across 129 strides, the researchers calculated beakiation’s energy efficiency. The birds lost most of the energy they put into a swing: The exchange of potential and kinetic energy during the slow but pendulumlike movement recovered, on average, about 24 percent of the energy expended.

"For comparison, gibbons (Hylobatidae) recover nearly 80 percent of the energy put into a stride when they swing between branches using their arms. This movement, called brachiation, is fast and smooth. Beakiation, on the other hand, consists of careful movements that start and stop.

“'I see this as one of many different beak-assisted gaits that parrots use,” says biomechanist David Lee of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study. The birds typically live in dense forests where flying can be difficult, so sometimes vines and fine branches provide the only paths, he says. “They’re navigating complex 3-D environments all the time.'”

Comment: As clever as ever. I view this as thoughtful, not instinct.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parrot-intelligence-smart-brain-behavior

"Tool use is just one of parrots’ many talents. The birds are famous for emulating, and perhaps sometimes even understanding, human speech. Some species can also solve complex puzzles, like how to invade a secured trash bin, or practice self-control. Such abilities, on par with some primates, have earned parrots a place alongside members of the crow family as the “feathered apes.”

***

"Parrots’ most well-known talent is their affinity for spoken words. Proficiency varies among species, but African grays (Psittacus erithacus) are particularly good at picking up words and speaking clearly, Pepperberg says.

"These parrots can repeat up to 600 different words, researchers reported in 2022 in Scientific Reports. While some parrots simply mimic words, it is possible to train birds such as Alex, who had a vocabulary of more than 100 words, to communicate with people.

***

"Overall, 11 of the nearly 400 parrot species, or about 3 percent, have been documented in scientific studies using tools. Crowdsourcing from YouTube videos, Bastos and colleagues uncovered 17 more tool-using species, bringing the total to 28. After plotting the known tool users onto an evolutionary tree, the team estimates that 11 to 17 percent of parrot species may use tools.

***

"By the early 2000s, scientists had discovered that, in fact, parts of the avian brain are akin to the mammalian neocortex, the largest part of the cerebral cortex. Subsequent work has found that, compared with mammals, avian brains have “a higher total number of neurons for the same amount of skull space,” says neurobiologist and geneticist Erich Jarvis of Rockefeller University in New York City.

"Parrot brains are especially densely packed. Some species even have more neurons than some large-brained primates. This density may facilitate the formation of brain circuits not found in other animals, Jarvis says.

***

"Human brains transfer information from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum — a “little brain” at the back of the skull that in part coordinates movement — through clusters of neurons known as the pontine nuclei. This connection is crucial for cognitive functions like learning how to talk or making tools.

"In birds, the similar pathway connects the avian equivalent of the neocortex to the cerebellum, Gutiérrez-Ibáñez and colleagues reported in 2018 in Scientific Reports. In addition to the pontine nuclei, birds shunt information through a second conduit, the SpM. It’s unclear what info gets transmitted via the SpM, Gutiérrez-Ibáñez says. But among birds, the parrot SpM is particularly large in size — a tantalizing hint that it may contribute to parrot intelligence.

***

"Parrots have acquired duplicate copies of various genes, some of which are known to be important for brain development and speech in people, says Mello, of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. More copies could mean more ability. But parrot smarts may come down to how genes in the brain are regulated in addition to gaining more or new genes. Unlike other studied birds, parrots have genetic mutations in regions of DNA that provide instructions to switch genes on or off, perhaps to activate certain genes crucial for brain function and cognition.

"This is reminiscent of humans, Mello says. We have mutations in these same gene regulators while other apes don’t. In us, the changes allow the regulators to kick-start genes related to growing big forebrains, a region important for complex cognition. If the same is true in parrots, it could point to a shared evolutionary process for humanlike intelligence.

***

"A large brain relative to body size is one indication, albeit imperfect, that an animal might be intelligent. Parrots, as well as members of the crow family, ended up with some of the largest brains of any birds.

***

"It’s also possible that scientists are just missing the cognitive feats of wild parrots. It’s difficult to get wild parrot studies off the ground because the birds can fly away, and researchers can’t easily follow. (New Zealand’s kākāpō, the only flightless parrot, is the exception.) “Researching these highly mobile animals is a challenge in the wild.'”

Comment: I had to condense a huge article. This is far more than 'basal cognition' since it involves real brains.

https://www.sciencealert.com/world-first-footage-shows-dolphins-pulling-off-a-clever-ba...

"Underwater cameras have captured a unique dolphin behavior off the coast of Western Australia in what scientists suspect is a world-first.

"For decades now, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and local crabbers in the Bunbury area, roughly 160 kilometers south of Perth, have been locked in a battle over bait.

"When a crab pot is dropped in Koombana Bay, the local dolphins swoop in to snag the dead fish, usually before any pincered arthropods can come crawling along.

"When wildlife conservationist Rodney Peterson heard of the problem, he feared for the dolphins' safety, given the risks of net entanglement.

"Peterson approached the Dolphin Discovery Center in Bunbury – a non-profit organization that funds education, research, and ecotourism projects – about the possibility of filming the thieves in action.

"Over two years, a team of filmmakers, conservationists, and researchers put their heads together to reveal "the secrets of the crab bait thieves" in Koombana Bay.

"Under the turquoise waves and on the sandy seafloor, local dolphins were caught on camera using their long snouts, jaws, and teeth to pull bait out of crab pots.

"Even when bait was attached underneath the pots or tucked away in boxes, it didn't take long for the dolphins to start flipping the traps over or opening the latched boxes.

"'We were stunned by what we saw," reads the Dolphin Discovery Center's caption posted along with the video on their social media, "and so were researchers Dr Simon Allen and Dr Delphine Chabanne."

***

"Alex Grossman, a volunteer filmmaker on the project, told Live Science that because only some dolphins partake in the behavior, stealing crab bait may be more for 'fun' or 'convenience' than for reasons of hunger.

"Two dolphins, in particular, seem to be leading the clever gang of bait thieves: a mother and her calf.

"'Calypso and Reggae, yeah, if it wasn't for those two, crabbing would be pretty simple, really," laughs Peterson in an explainer video shared by the Dolphin Discovery Center.

"Peterson and others are concerned that these dolphins are too clever for their own good. If the behavior continues to develop and spread, it may have more downsides than upsides for the local population.

"The crab bait that the dolphins are stealing is not all that nutritious and the risk of getting entangled or hurt by gear is high, especially as crabbers wrap their bait in more intricate ways.

"Luckily, researchers working in Western Australia have figured out a method that seems to be 'dolphin-safe', at least for the moment.

"'The bait is placed inside a strong mesh connected to the pot by metal hook," explains the Dolphin Discovery Center.

"'The animals scan the pot with echolocation and eyesight, learn it cannot be opened, and swim off. Leaving healthier dolphins, happy crabbers, and proof that coexistence can work."

"Hopefully that will stop Calypso and Reggae for good."

Comment: pretty brainy! See the photos.

https://vinbaza.com/news/freakishly-smart-falcons-run-these-islands/44521/

"...travel to the Falkland Islands near the Argentine coast, and you’ll find not parrots or crows but freakishly smart falcons called striated caracaras.

***

"By adapting a series of tests originally designed to assess cockatoo cognition, Ms. Harrington found that the caracaras can problem-solve as well as parrots. The results were published Monday in the journal Current Biology.

"Ms. Harrington leads the Johnny Rook Project, an effort to study the Falkland falcons that got its name from the birds’ local nickname. To compare the caracaras with other brainy birds, she adapted eight tasks from a prior experiment that studied innovative problem-solving in Goffin’s cockatoos.

"Of the 15 Johnny rooks that Ms. Harrington tested, all solved at least one puzzle, and 10 of them figured out all eight — without any prior training.

“'These caracaras actually solved tasks that some of the tool-using parrots couldn’t solve,” Ms. Harrington said.

"Some animals are understandably skittish around scientists and their strange equipment, which can make testing their intelligence difficult. With the caracaras, Ms. Harrington had the opposite problem. “I had to literally run defense,” she said, keeping curious birds away while another was being tested with a plexiglass puzzle box that challenged the caracaras to pull, push, swipe, poke or do whatever else they needed to do to access tasty bits of meat.

"Given how well they performed in this experiment, and their general boldness, striated caracaras represent a promising new model species for studying bird cognition. “They’re absolutely worth studying,” said Rachael Miller, a comparative psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England who was not involved with the research.

"Ms. Harrington suspects that caracaras evolved their cunning to cope with the tough life of the Falkland Islands, especially in winter, when curiosity and ingenuity could help a hungry caracara find a meal in lean times.Credit…Katie Harrington

"Not many scientists have investigated the brainpower of falcons, which are closely related to parrots and crows, the most famous feathered geniuses. Ms. Harrington attributes this to their bird of prey label, which implies a simple lifestyle of “perch, hunt, sleep, repeat.” But those who spend time with caracaras quickly learn that they don’t have just meat on their minds.

“'Falconers share these stories of how striated caracaras aren’t like the other birds that they’re trying to train,” she said. “You have to give striated caracaras dog toys to play with.”

***

"Ms. Harrington suspects that the caracaras evolved their cunning to cope with the tough conditions of life on the Falkland Islands. In the summer months, caracaras can feed on seabird colonies. But when those birds migrate in the winter, the falcons are “kind of like, out of luck,” Ms. Harrington said. Curiosity and ingenuity could help a hungry caracara find a meal in lean times.

"Their daring ways have gotten the falcons in trouble with the sheep farmers of the Falklands. “They have historically faced persecution,” Ms. Harrington said. “There actually used to be a bounty on their beaks.”

"These days, public perception has motivated legal protections for the birds. This is important because, while their brilliance may make them seem poised for world domination, striated caracaras have a limited range — they’re found only on the outer islands of the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern end of South America."

Comment: another set of brilliant birds. And I thought I should see the penguins there.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bees-can-learn-play-soccer-score-one-inse...

“Now, Perry and his colleagues have released the results of a creative new experiment in which they essentially taught bumblebees how to play "bee soccer." The insects’ ability to grasp this novel task is a big score for insect intelligence, demonstrating that they’re even more complex thinkers than we thought. Moreover, they did it all not just in spite of their tiny brains—but because of them.
“For the study, published in the February 23 issue of Science, researchers gave a group of bees a novel goal (literally): to move a ball about half their size into a designated target area. The idea was to present them with a task that they would never have encountered in nature. Not only did the bees succeed at this challenge—earning them a sugary treat—but they astonished researchers by figuring out how to meet their new goal in several different ways.
“Some bees succeeded at getting their ball into the goal with no demonstration at all, or by first watching the ball move on its own. But the ones that watched other bees successfully complete the game learned to play more quickly and easily. Most impressively, the insects didn't simply copy each other—they watched their companions do it, then figured out on their own how to accomplish the task even more efficiently using their own techniques.
“The results show that bees can master complex, social behaviors without any prior experience—which could be a boon in a world where they face vast ecological changes and pressures.

“’Even more complex tasks like communication or navigation are genetically preprogrammed and not really flexible,” he says. “What we really wanted to do is to test something unnatural, as far removed as we could outside what they would normally do.”
“Scientists gained some insight on just how the bees learned by changing up the conditions of the game. For some bees, researchers provided no demonstration at all of the game’s objective, but merely a reward if the insect somehow succeeded. Two individuals still figured out the task, but most struggled. Other bees were shown a “ghost demonstration,” in which the ball moved to the goal controlled by a magnet. Around 80 percent of the bees learned to complete the task this way.
“The most effective method was having bees learn by watching a previously trained bee perform the task. Every single bee that was taught this way learned the game correctly, and learned more quickly than the others. But the bees not only copied their companions—they also improved on what they'd seen and added their own flair to complete the task more efficiently.

“There was one cognitive leap that especially impressed Perry and colleagues. In the bee demonstrations, demonstrator bees were trained with a setup in which only the farthest away of three balls was mobile, meaning they always moved that most distant ball. Untrained bees then watched a demonstrator perform the task in this same way, three times. Yet when they were given a chance to perform it on their own, they moved the closest ball—even though they'd never seen it moved before.
“The new study helps demonstrate that how an animal thinks depends on its lifestyle, says Felicity Muth, a bumblebee researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. Although the ball-rolling behavior isn't part of a bee's life, the cognitive powers that make it possible are a product of that environment, she says.”

Comment: Bee brains can correlate even if most of their activities are instinctual. That one bee teaching others is an obvious advantage since this is how bees are taught.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2292064-female-cleaner-fish-can-judge-when-to-chea...

"Female cleaner fish are sensitive to what their partners can and cannot see while working on client fish. This means they may have theory of mind, a concept built on awareness of other’s perspectives, often associated with humans and other primates.

"Cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) typically work in male-female pairs to “clean” client fish by eating their dead skin cells and skin parasites. The wrasse actually prefer to eat the mucus produced by these client fish, but the clients can react to this by terminating the relationship – leaving the cleaners without food.

"This means a lot is at stake when a male-female cleaner wrasse pair work as a team. If one fish cheats by attempting to eat mucus while their partner is cooperating with the client, this may leave both fish without food. If a male cleaner fish knows his female partner has cheated, he will sometimes punish her by chasing and even attempting to bite her, says Katherine McAuliffe at Boston College in Massachusetts.

"But this made McAuliffe and her colleagues wonder whether females had developed ways to cheat without the knowledge of the males. “Because punishment is on the line and females would benefit from getting away with cheating, we had reason to suspect that they might show this sensitivity to what their male partner can and cannot see,” she says.

"In an experimental set-up, females had the choice of feeding in a tank with transparent or opaque barriers while their male partner was in a separate part of the tank with either a transparent or opaque partition. The researchers demonstrated that female cleaner fish are indeed more likely to cheat when their male partners are out of view. The team also found that females paired with more punitive males cheated more strategically by moving behind the opaque barriers.

"This sensitivity suggests that cleaner wrasse have evolved cognitive abilities that allow them to find solutions to their problems on a par with other animals, such as corvids and primates.

“'It’s controversial because in many people’s scheme of the natural world primates can do things that are impossible for other animals, in particular fishes,” says Alex Jordan at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “The greatest message of this paper is that there is no ladder which humans sit at the top of and then there’s primates and then there’s something else.'”

Comment: I know dhw will enjoy this. I ignore the final obligatory comment that humans aren't worth any more than anyone else. The last rung on the animal ladder is huge.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/animals-can-count-and-use-zero-how-far-does-their-number...

"...rigorous experiments during the past two decades have shown that even animals with very small brains can perform incredible feats of numerical cognition. One mechanism common to all of them seems to be a system for approximating numerosity that’s correct most of the time but is sometimes imprecise in specific ways. Animals are most effective, for instance, at distinguishing numerosities far apart in magnitude — so comparing a group of six dots to three dots is easier than comparing six to five. When the difference between two numerosities is the same, it’s easier to deal with smaller quantities than larger ones: Discriminating 34 items from 38 is much more difficult than discriminating four from eight.

***

"In the prefrontal cortex of monkeys, researchers found neurons that were selectively tuned to different numerosities. Neurons that responded to three dots on a screen also responded weakly to two and four, but not at all to more distant values, such as one or five.

***

"That observation seems to imply that a “sense” of number is innate and deeply rooted in the brains of animals, including humans. “Underlying the sense of number, there is a very ancient, fundamental psychophysical law,” Vallortigara said.

"Once “you realize that almost every animal, or maybe even every animal, has some ability to do a numerical task, then you start wanting to know … what’s the threshold? What’s the limit?” said Scarlett Howard, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University in Australia who studies numerical cognition in honeybees. If animals had this natural, hard-wired ability for telling quantities apart, scientists wanted to determine what other abilities might emerge with it.

"First up was arithmetic. Several species have demonstrated that they can essentially add and subtract.

***

"Honeybees, meanwhile, can be taught simple arithmetic.

***

"Insects, birds and primates have also been trained to link symbols to numbers of elements. “We took the bees and taught them as if they were in primary school: this symbol represents this number,” Dyer said. “And they got the association.” Chimpanzees that have been trained to link numerosities to number symbols could also learn to touch the digits in ascending order.

***

"Over and over again, she and others are finding evidence not just for a relatively simple, ubiquitous sense of numerosity in animals, but also for a growing inventory of much more abstract and complex forms of numerical cognition. That’s why for some neurobiologists, the current great frontier is in learning whether some animals’ grasp of numerical abstractions extends to the slippery concept of “nothing.”

***

"...the researchers uncovered a familiar numerical understanding of zero: The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. “From a physiological point of view, this fits in beautifully,” Nieder said. “We see exactly the same responses, the same type of code, represented in the crow brain as in the monkey brain.”

***

"Why should animals have to recognize specific quantities at all? Why has evolution repeatedly made sure that animals can understand not just that four is less than five but that “four squares” is in some way conceptually the same as “four circles”?

"According to Vallortigara, one reason might be because arithmetic ends up being so important. “Animals continuously have to do arithmetic. Even simple animals,” he said. “If you have an abstract representation of numerosity, this is very easy to do.” Abstracting numerical information allows the brain to perform additional computations much more efficiently.

"That’s perhaps where zero fits in as well. If two predators enter an environment and only one leaves, the area remains dangerous.

***

"Nieder hopes that his work on zero can help demonstrate how an abstract sense of number might emerge from a more approximate and practical one. He is currently conducting studies in humans to explore the relationship between non-symbolic numerical representations and symbolic ones more precisely.

"Vallortigara, Butterworth and some of their colleagues are now collaborating with Caroline Brennan, a molecular geneticist at Queen Mary University of London, to pin down the genetic mechanisms underlying numerical ability."

Comment: An enormous article filled with summaries of research. Simple counting is necessary, but these animlas are nowhere near human math.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00287-y

"A complex web is unravelling in the field of spider research. On 5 February, McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, confirmed that it was investigating allegations that behavioural ecologist Jonathan Pruitt fabricated data in at least 17 papers on which he was a co-author.

"Since concerns about his work became public in late January, scientists have rushed to uncover the extent of questionable data in Pruitt’s studies. Publishers are now trying to keep up with requests for retractions and investigations. According to a publicly available spreadsheet maintained by Daniel Bolnick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, seven papers have been retracted or are in the process of being retracted; five further retractions have been requested by Pruitt’s co-authors; and researchers have flagged at least five more studies as containing possible data anomalies.

***

"Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman say that although the wave of retractions deals a blow to behavioural ecology, they are heartened by how quickly the community has acted to set the scientific record straight. They acknowledge that researchers have lessons to learn about making data publicly available — by one estimate, more than 60% of Pruitt’s data-containing papers are in journals with no data-sharing requirements — and about carefully checking data that they receive from colleagues. But they are both optimistic that these lessons will ultimately strengthen the field.

“'Despite all I’ve gone through, I’m going to continue to trust collaborators,” Pinter-Wollman says. “It’s hard to grow in a vacuum.'”

Comment: Research scientists make their living by getting grants. Self-aggrandizement is a human tendency and fraudulent study results are not uncommon. Always check to see if the required confirmatory studies are available, before accepting conclusions.

http://wise.nautil.us/feature/514/if-bugs-are-sentient-should-we-eat-them?utm_source=Na...

"'In fact, humans eat over 1,600 species of insects. “The Western abhorrence of eating insects is unusual on a global scale,”...

***

"In the training phase, these wasps did learn to discriminate faces. Presumably, this ability had not been directly selected for in this species over evolutionary time. The mental capacity is there but doesn’t emerge under natural conditions. Reviewing studies of wasps and bees in general, Tibbetts and Dyer conclude that “there is ever so much more going on their teensy brains than we could have imagined possible.”

***

"...fruit fly subjects were first trained to avoid a certain strong smell, then offered a choice between two samples of that smell whose intensities varied by degrees. The insects took longer to make their choice when the difference in smell was subtle (or minimal) than when it was pronounced (or maximal). Neuroscientist Shamik DasGupta and his team concluded that the experimental outcome “bears the behavioral signature of evidence accumulation.” In other words, these insects wait until they have gathered enough information to make a reasonable choice when presented with options that complicate decision-making. This weighing of variables according to context is linked in the fruit flies to one specific gene (FoxP) and about 0.1 percent of the flies’ total neuron count—right around 200 neurons.

"Far more famous an example of insect learning is the honeybees’ waggle dance. In this case, the acquiring of new information happens socially. Performing in the dark hive, the dancers, experienced forager bees, clue in younger, naïve bees about how far to fly, and in what direction, to find suitable flowers. Thanks to scientific experiments, we know that the dances do not operate like the GPS devices that send us, via detailed driving instructions, to a pinpoint location. Instead, they convey information that directs the observer bees to the right general region. There, the flowers themselves provide sight and smell cues; the bees zero in on these beacons and begin to forage.

***

"The ecologist Jonathan Pruitt found that studiosus individuals can be categorized as more aggressive or more docile. He became a sort of arachnid matchmaker, creating in the lab 90 spider couples; some paired an aggressive male and an aggressive female, some a docile male and a docile female, and others one of each. The next generation’s temperaments were consistently (but not completely) predictable: An aggressive pair’s offspring were nearly all aggressive, and so on.

***

"Generalizing about an enormous taxonomic group of animals is risky. Nonetheless, writing in 2014, Oliver Sacks felt confident enough to offer a summary that resonates with the material reviewed in this chapter: “We often think of insects as tiny automata—robots with everything built-in and programmed. But it is increasingly evident that insects can remember, learn, think, and communicate in quite rich and unexpected ways. Much of this, doubtless, is built-in—but much, too, seems to depend on individual experience.” It’s precisely that unexpected angle that we need to keep our eye on. While it’s far less easy to offer a definitive statement about sentience in insects than about intelligence or personality, insects are surprising us." (my bold)

Comment: Insects can show just as much purposefulness as my dog does. Note the bold. Much of this is instinct, but as the article shows insects can be trained. However, note the following entry today, on spider research retractions.

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-pigeons-discriminate-space.html

"New research at the University of Iowa shows that pigeons can discriminate the abstract concepts of space and time—and seem to use a different region of the brain than humans and primates to do so. In experiments, pigeons were shown on a computer screen a static horizontal line and had to judge its length or the amount of time it was visible to them. Pigeons judged longer lines to also have longer duration and judged lines longer in duration to also be longer in length.

"What that means, says Edward Wasserman, Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the UI, is pigeons use a common area of the brain to judge space and time, suggesting that these abstract concepts are not processed separately. Similar results have been found with humans and other primates.

***

"'Indeed, the cognitive prowess of birds is now deemed to be ever closer to that of both human and nonhuman primates," says Wasserman, who has studied intelligence in pigeons, crows, baboons, and other animals for more than four decades. "Those avian nervous systems are capable of far greater achievements than the pejorative term 'bird brain' would suggest."

"Humans are able to perceive space and time, even without the aid of inventions such as a watch or a ruler. The region of the brain that helps humans make those abstract concepts more tangible is the parietal cortex, part of the cerebral cortex and the outermost layer of the brain. The cerebral cortex is known to be a locus of higher thought processes, including speech and decision-making, and the four lobes that comprise it, including the parietal cortex, process different types of sensory information.

"But the pigeon brain doesn't have a parietal cortex, or at least one developed enough to be distinct. So, the birds must employ another area of the brain to discriminate between space and time—or perhaps there's a common evolutionary mechanism in the central nervous system shared by early primates and birds.

***

"The researchers found that the length of the line affected the pigeons' discrimination of line duration, and the duration of the line affected the pigeons' discrimination of line length. This interplay of space and time paralleled research done with humans and monkeys and revealed the common neural coding of these two physical dimensions. Researchers previously believed that the parietal cortex was the locus of this interplay. However, because pigeons lack an apparent parietal cortex, Wasserman's findings suggest this isn't always the case."

Comment: Even simple brains are very complex and what they can produce at the animal level is truly amazing, but it also tells us how the human brain is able to pack in so many more activities at the same time

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171002105204.htm

"Researchers have discovered that New Caledonian crows and kea parrots can learn about the usefulness of objects by playing with them -- similar to human baby behaviour.

"The study, led by researchers at the Universities of York and St Andrews, demonstrated that two types of bird were able to solve tasks more successfully if they had explored the object involved in the task beforehand.

"It has long been thought that playful exploration allows animals to gather information about their physical world, in much the same way that human infants learn about their world through play.

"In one of the first direct tests of this hypothesis, scientists studied two bird species, the New Caledonian crow and the kea parrot, to understand how they interact with objects before, during and after a task involving that object.

***

"'We found that both species were better at selecting the correct tools to solve a task if they had the opportunity to explore them beforehand, suggesting that they were learning something about the properties of them as they interacted with them."

"The team presented the birds with blocks and ropes of different colours, weights and patterns to explore and play with, before presenting a task where they had to collapse a platform with a ball and retrieve a reward from a pipe with a stick. The ball and stick where later replaced with the blocks and ropes to see whether they could choose the right tool from their earlier play session to complete the task.

***

"Megan Lambert, PhD student at the University of York, said: "This type of 'latent learning', which occurs without any reinforcement, is thought to be particularly important for animals to be able to use objects as tools in a variety of contexts for creative problem-solving.

"'Although the birds appeared to learn from their exploration, we found no evidence that the birds changed the way they interacted with the objects after learning they could be used as tools.

"'This means that the birds did not appear to explicitly seek information about the objects, but rather learned about their properties incidentally through exploring them.'"

Comment: These birds did some type of simple analytic thought process to see the usefulness of the objects of play that might then be used as tools. This is their brain at work, which means adaptations require brain work. I do not believe this type of adaptation can happen without a brain.

dhw: The experiment has proved that their behaviour is not confined to instinct. They can solve problems, and there is no reason to suppose that their intelligent ability to cope with and/or exploit new conditions was not the creative force that first invented the now established social, architectural and behavioural patterns that have enabled them to survive.So although of course we all wish we knew the answers to all the difficult questions, since you are generally opposed to fence-sitting, do please tell us which of these options you think most likely (you don't have to believe it). Bee behaviour: preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, personally dabbled by your God, or the consequence of autonomous intelligence?

Bees are an integral part of the balance of nature. They are raised as pollinators to help in agriculture, and because of bee hive decline are in short supply right now. God may well have paid special attention to them. The complexity of their 'dances' signaling information suggests that. God obviously played a role.

dhw: Yet more evidence that insects are intelligent. Not as intelligent as humans, of course, and applying their intelligence only to what is useful for survival. For innovation, we would have to go back to the origins of bee society and bee behaviour – long, long, long before humans came on the scene. Either they worked it all out for themselves, or your God provided the first cells with a special bee-behaviour programme, or your God dabbled with an existing species (wasp?) to show them what to do. I wonder which you think is most likely.

DAVID: Animals with brains can have intelligence as bees show. The hexagonal forms in their hives are shown to be due to physical properties of the materials they create. They don't know geometry. To answer your question I wish I knew how instinctual behavior is developed or how much God does to create it.

The experiment has proved that their behaviour is not confined to instinct. They can solve problems, and there is no reason to suppose that their intelligent ability to cope with and/or exploit new conditions was not the creative force that first invented the now established social, architectural and behavioural patterns that have enabled them to survive.So although of course we all wish we knew the answers to all the difficult questions, since you are generally opposed to fence-sitting, do please tell us which of these options you think most likely (you don't have to believe it). Bee behaviour: preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, personally dabbled by your God, or the consequence of autonomous intelligence?

DAVID’s comment: A tiny brain can still learn with training. But the untrained bees could not innovate, showing that training is required.

dhw: Yet more evidence that insects are intelligent. Not as intelligent as humans, of course, and applying their intelligence only to what is useful for survival. For innovation, we would have to go back to the origins of bee society and bee behaviour – long, long, long before humans came on the scene. Either they worked it all out for themselves, or your God provided the first cells with a special bee-behaviour programme, or your God dabbled with an existing species (wasp?) to show them what to do. I wonder which you think is most likely.

Animals with brains can have intelligence as bees show. The hexagonal forms in their hives are shown to be due to physical properties of the materials they create. They don't know geometry. To answer your question I wish I knew how instinctual behavior is developed or how much God does to create it.