4.4. animals

Amphibians (424)
Animal (4606)
Arthropods (601)
Birds (3933)
Carnivore (4)
Chordates (34)
Domestic animal (242)
Insecta (7280)
Invertebrate (938)
Mammals (12448)
Marine animals (10)
Other (1069)
Pest (951)
Predator (490)
Protoctists (113)
Reptiles (982)
Vermins (7)
Vertebrates (66)

Why do animals adopt? Is adopting a child a benevolent or a foolish act? If you were taking a cold evolutionary perspective,

But this makes it especially perplexing in animals, who do not have the cultural influences we do.

One of the more striking places to see adoption in the animal kingdom is Ano Nuevo Island, rising from the sea less than one kilometre off the rocky California coast.

Once a year, it is host to the breeding of hundreds of northern elephant seals. From 1976 onwards, marine scientist Marianne Riedman, together with her colleague Burney Le Boeuf, studied adoption among the seals oe and why it was happening.

It's a crowded beach, with bad weather, high tides and rough surf, which perhaps explains why one-quarter to two-thirds of pups each year were separated from their mothers at least once oe some permanently.

it's easy for elephant seal pups to get separated from their parents (Frans Lanting/Mint images/SPL) The researchers counted a total of 572 orphaned pups over the course of the four consecutive breeding seasons.

Intriguingly, some adult seals were more likely than others to become foster parents. For one thing, all the foster parents were female.

Some adult elephant seals are more likely to adopt a pup than others (Frans Lanting/Mint images/SPL) Elephant seal pups aren't the only ones to win adoptive parents either.

It's actually fairly common among birds. Many chicks intentionally abandon the nests in which they hatched to seek out temporary or full adoption by foster parents.

Take white storks. In one breeding season, biologists from Spain's Universidad de Cordoba found nest switching in 40%of broods across three distinct white-stork breeding colonies.

That infant birds seek out new digs actually makes sense, since they could benefit from a longer period of parental care.

If they moved into nests containing fewer or younger chicks than their previous homes, then they could also receive more food by more easily outcompeting smaller adoptive siblings.

But why would the adoptive parents allow the intruder into their nest especially to the detriment of their own young?

It could simply be that evolution has endowed not the parents with the ability to discriminate their own chicks from strangers.

This lack of discriminatory ability is seen particularly starkly in Lake erie's ring-billed gulls. Nest invasions are common,

but unlike for white storks, there is a significant cost incurred by the foster parents: half as many of their own chicks grow to fledging age than the gulls that did not adopt.

White storks allow baby intruders to share their nest and food-but why?(Thinkstock) Given such high risks for adoption, why hasn't evolution endowed these birds with a better ability to identify oe and reject oe intruders?

Biologist Kevin Brown of York University thinks that the costs of better chick discrimination could be even higher.

If the cost of rejecting one's own offspring is greater than accepting an alien chick,

he writes in the journal Animal Behaviour, selection will favour universal acceptance of young in the nest.

In other words, it may be better to needlessly waste resources on alien infiltrators than to accidentally reject one of your own hatchlings.

Adoption is also fairly common among nonhuman primates. It's been seen in red howler monkeys in Venezuela,

howler monkeys adopt infant howlers. In captivity, there are occasionally cross-species adoptions, such as between rhesus and Japanese macaques or among different types of marmoset.

But these species are related closely, and have similar behaviour. Given that, perhaps the most striking instance of adoption in the wild was between completely different types of monkeys.

In 2004, researchers noticed an infant marmoset travelling with a group of capuchin monkeys at the Green Wing Valley wildlife reserve in Brazil.

For at least 14 months the marmoset was raised by its adoptive capuchin group, alternating between two primary female foster mothers.

In one strange case, a marmoset (pictured) was adopted by much bigger capuchin monkeys (Thinkstock) One reason the adoption was

so surprising is because marmosets and capuchins are so different. For one thing, a fully grown capuchin weighs perhaps 3-4kg (7-8lbs),

but a fully grown marmoset maxes out at less than 500g (1lb). The two species also have different feeding patterns

and different parenting styles. Despite those differences, the juvenile marmoset became wholly integrated into its adoptive social group.

It travelled and fed with the group, responded to alarm vocalisations given by members of the group,

and played, the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Primatology. During social play with their unlikely friend, the juvenile capuchins actually adjusted the force of their movements to account for the puny marmoset's size and strength.

And the adult capuchins, including the dominant male, were extremely tolerant of the impostor. The marmoset would patiently watch the adults crack nuts between two rocks and sneak an occasional snack

Capuchins travel by leaping from tree to tree. Given its size, the marmoset often struggled to keep up.

The capuchins all but ignored the marmoset's distress cries, despite being within hearing distance. Like many human adoptions,

the match wasn't always perfect. How did it happen? It's likely that the adult capuchins were predisposed simply to care for young primates.

They're also extremely tolerant of infants in the first place. In addition, given how small the marmoset is compared to the capuchins,

they didn't need to give up too much of their own food so that it might survive. A female capuchin would barely notice a tiny marmoset clinging to her fur,

making it reasonable to assume that the infant didn't slow her down at all. It seems as if the drive to care for helpless infants is fairly universal among species that care for their own young oe and even between different animals.

What else could explain our own species'obsession with puppies kittens and other baby animals?

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How salmon help keep a huge rainforest thrivingthe Great bear Rainforest is vital to the health of the planet.

This enormous habitat covers 32,000 Â sq km (12,000 Â sq Â mi) on the Pacific coast of Canada,

The forest is the scene of one of nature's most impressive migrations; the perilous journey of the Pacific salmon from the sea through the forest rivers to spawn in its creeks.

The salmon run draws carnivores such as bears and wolves to the river bank, where they gorge on the migrating fish.

In this film, ecological economist Pavan Sukhdev, The Nature Conservancy's lead scientist Dr M Sanjayan and camerawoman Sophie Darlington talk about the salmon's unsung role in fertilising the forest.

The bears who feast on the spawning salmon don't eat on the river oe they drag the carcasses far into the forest.

The remains of the salmon contain vast quantities of nitrogen that plants need to grow.

Eighty percent of the nitrogen in the forest's trees comes from the salmon. In other words, these ocean dwellers are crucial for the forest's long-term survival.

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Sea otters: Saving kelp forests and our climatethe kelp forests fringing the North Pacific coast are one of the richest marine ecosystems On earth.

The fish that find refuge form the basis of an immense ocean food web and a huge fishing industry.

Kelp beds buffer coastlines from storms and sequester carbon as effectively as tropical rainforests. One of the kelp forest's most endearing denizens, the sea otter, is an important key to its survival.

In some places this valuable kelp carbon store is mown disappearing down by a hungry army of sea urchins.

In this film marine ecologist Professor James A Estes, cameraman Doug Allan, ecological economist Pavan Sukhdev,

and lead scientist with the Nature Conservancy, Dr M Sanjayan, reveal how sea otters eat sea urchins

which would otherwise devour the kelp and disrupt the rich web of life that relies on it.

So the otters are helping the forests to store as much carbon as they can. We tend to think that we can deal with the challenge of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by planting more vegetation,

but it turns out that animals like sea otters are providing another solution by helping to keep forests growing.

I will be exploring the mind-reading abilities of humans and animals in all forms. We start with one of the most basic aspects of theory of mind:

if chimpanzees have theory of mind. At the time, researchers thought that deception might be a good way to get at the question,

if chimpanzees could be taught to deceive fellow chimpanzees. If a snack was hidden in one box,

The researchers only managed to teach two of four chimpanzees to do this, and it took them a whopping five months to get it right.

Chimpanzees have trouble comprehending the pointing gesture in the first place. Pointing with their hands and fingers is not part of their own behavioral repertoire.

Â Then, in 1987, science writer Virginia Morell witnessed a now-classic example of apparent chimpanzee deception while visiting Jane Goodall at Gombe National park in Tanzania.

The two were hiding in a feeding station, a spot where Goodall and her team sometimes handed bananas out to passing chimps.

standard behavior for a chimpanzee. After promptly devouring the whole bunch oe chimpanzees tend not to share food,

even with their infants oe Beethoven settled down for an afternoon nap, leaving a hungry Dilly to groom him.

as chimpanzees normally do watched, but simply as Goodall placed the banana outside on the ground.

or motivation within an animal. Goodall would describe the behavior as if it was deceptive. Â And it certainly was a stretch to say that this meant chimpanzees had theory of mind.

Scientists needed empirical evidence derived from controlled experiments before they could make any firm conclusions.

Â One way that researchers tried oe experimentally oe to get at the question of chimpanzee theory of mind in the subsequent years was"gaze-following Â. Could a chimpanzee tell what you're looking at by following your gaze?

In 1996, psychologists Daniel Povinelli and Timothy Eddy gave some juvenile chimps a test: the apes were given a choice to ask for food

either from a human who could see them clearly, or from to a human whose eyes were hidden,

It seemed that the young chimps didn't care whether a human was actually able to see them

Â If chimps couldn't even understand what others could and couldn't see, then it seems unlikely that they could deceive, let alone attribute more sophisticated goals and intentions to others.

and Eddy had thrust their chimpanzees into a strange situation. The experiments had arbitrary conditions that were perhaps not obvious to the chimps,

such as the rule that they were allowed only to make one choice per trial. From the chimp's perspective, it could actually be quite reasonable to beg from everyone until someone hands over a tasty treat.

The flaws of such experiments led evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare to develop a more naturalistic,

species-appropriate test for chimpanzees. That meant he had to think like a chimpanzee. What he devised was a clever situation in

which a subordinate chimp could compete for food with a more dominant chimp. Â In his experiments, Hare set up enclosures containing two chimps, one at either end.

He placed food in the centre. Thanks to well placed barriers, sometimes both chimps could see the food;

sometimes only one. Â In one instance, Hare allowed a dominant and a subordinate chimp to watch as he put food in the middle.

However, the food was obscured from the dominant one once it was placed down. Â As is typical for chimpanzees in this sort of scenario,

the subordinate all but ignored the food, leaving it for the dominant. Subordinate chimps know better than to take food from dominant group members,

just as Dilly knew not to let Beethoven catch her eating that banana. Even though the dominant couldn't see the food,

it knew where it was. Then Hare added a twist: when the dominant chimp was replaced with a second dominant who hadn't seen the food oe all she could see was opaque barriers oe the subordinate had no problem gobbling it down.

The conclusion? Chimpanzees don't just know what others see; they also know what others know.

Animal trickery Â The so-called Hare task has since been adapted and modified for a wide range of animals.

A clever experiment in which rhesus monkeys could steal food either from a silent box or from a box outfitted with bells showed that they anticipated

what others would and would not hear. Another set of studies demonstrated that ravens, too, know what others do

and do not see. The food-caching corvids were more likely to hide their caches in a spot hidden from the view of others.

the ravens usually picked up and tried to hide their cache elsewhere. Together, these experiments demonstrate both the ravens'gaze-following abilities and their tactical deception skills.

How about our pets? Well, researchers know dogs can be sneaky. In one experiment, dogs were instructed not to take food from boxes, a few

of which were rigged with noisy bells. Yet when a researcher wasn't looking, the dogs would steal a meal,

and would deliberately avoid the boxes with bells to avoid detection. The evidence gathered so far suggests that many clever animals are capable of deception,

and some can make basic predictions about the knowledge states of others. They can predict what others can see,

and sometimes what others can hear, and they can use that information for their own benefit.

They know who is knowledgeable and who is naive. Perhaps we should give their mind-reading talents more credit.

In Cairns, Australia, the local master plan embraces tropical urbanism that conveys a sense of place through landscaping features,

when he connected two metals to the legs of a frog, causing its muscles to twitch.

dog owners who fail to clean up after their dogs can face hefty fines. Ours is not the only species that goes out of its way to avoid exposure to disgusting things like excrement,

Horses leave the parts of their fields where they eliminate ungrazed as well. Wild reindeer also selectively forage in uncontaminated areas,

as do many primates. But not all species explicitly avoid contact with yuck-inducing substances.

In fact, some actually seem to seek out faeces. Patrick Walsh and Amy Pederson from the University of Edinburgh, UK, together with Erin Mccreless from the University of California, Santa cruz, noticed that the related wild white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus)

Turd fansthe researchers conducted three different experiments to see whether the mice truly prefer being near the smelly stuff Their first finding was that, like sheep,

they could not distinguish between the droppings of parasitised and healthy mice. But the second finding was a complete surprise:

the mice were more likely to choose to spend their time in an enclosure containing faeces than in a clean one.

When given a choice, they preferred cotton previously used by other mice to unused cotton for nest-building.

Perhaps most surprising the mice even preferred parasitised cotton balls to clean ones. These preferences also applied to their foraging behaviour.

The mice were no less likely to eat seeds that were found near faecal material oe

whether infected or not oe than to eat seeds that were clean. In a way, the mice were the opposite of the sheep.

Neither animal could distinguish parasitised from healthy droppings yet sheep responded by playing it safe,

while the mice took a gamble. The crucial question is why? At first glance, their actions might seem like a bad idea, given the high costs of becoming infected.

What is really interesting is domesticated that rodents, such as mice and rats bred for laboratory use

or for the pet trade, do avoid faeces. As wild reindeer and primates also avoid faeces,

domestication isn't the key, so what is it? Walsh and colleagues believe that for their wild mice,

the presence of faeces from other mice at a potential nesting location or near food suggests safety from predators.

When the wrong move could land you between the teeth of a bigger animal, perhaps the risk of infection from faecal matter is the lesser of two concerns.

Laboratory animals, pets, and livestock are generally at a much lower risk from predators than their wild counterparts,

so they can be more selective in their foraging and nesting behaviours. Every animal, the researchers argue,

must calculate the trade-off between dodging parasites and surviving another day. When you look at it this way

our faecal avoidance is something of a luxury. Perhaps our species'lack of natural predators means we are lucky to be able to afford to be disgusted by faeces and other disgusting things.

Knowing this may give you a better understanding of your reaction next time you encounter a dirty nappy

or some dog waste on the sole of your shoe. It probably won't make them smell of roses though.

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The bats that mix nature's grossest perfumewomen would do well to look, act and smell like flowers oe at least

Smell is important to various other animals too. What is less well known is that the intentional creation of aromas is not a uniquely human trait.

There is at least one other animal that practices the ancient art of perfume mixing and perhaps the most disgusting is the male greater sac-winged bat, Saccopteryx bilineata.

Colonies of up to 60 of these bats are found from northern Argentina to southern Mexico.

which is given large the animal's size. Despite the presence of what researchers call odiferous content oe smelly stuff, basically oe within the wing sac,

or perfume containers, says Christian Voigt, of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.

This continues until both sacs have a sufficient amount of bat perfume. The process lasts 30 to 60 minutes.

Voigt and other bat scientists think that the perfume must therefore play other social roles,

more generally oe plays a fundamental role in the social communication of this species. It also means that bat noses,

whether there might be potential in"eau de bat Â, Voigt describes its smell as sweetish, with a touch of bitter almond.

These geodesic aquariums, inspired by Fuller's prototypes for sturdy lightweight structures, will be let loose in swirling ocean gyres,

which helps cater to specific species of birds. The task of conserving water can also be addressed on a smaller scale, beginning with improvements to architecture and homes.

frogs boiled in oil and fermented goat dung. Greeks from the 4TH CENTURY BC preferred rendered pig fat

and Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake (along with its sort of sequels The Year of the Flood and the about to be published Maddaddam)

which, although made from tiny alien worms, is supposedly as good as 23rd century eating gets. It may seem bonkers to pin our hopes of feeding all the world's billions on some entirely new species,

and waters warm there will be a global shift"from a fish to a jellyfish ocean Â. Its author Ferdinando Boero, Professor of Zoology at Salento University,

eat them Â. So look out for jellyfish cookbooks. And keep the salt, pepper and ketchup handy.

Why wet dogs are a Mars rover's best frienda Golden Labrador shaking itself dry may sound like a mundane topic for a film.

and mammals can face hypothermia pretty quickly, so it's vital to get dry as quickly as possible.

when he published his work showing how furry mammals, from mice to brown bears, shake their bodies

when wet oe the frequency being directly related to their size. A bear, for instance, needs to shake from side-to-side four times per second.

The loose skin on its large frame whips around its body with enough force to shed the water quite easily.

A mouse on the other hand has such a small frame, it needs to shake proportionally faster to generate the same forces to break the surface tension of water on its fur oe up to 33 times per second,

All of which suggests that animals tune the frequency of their shakes to maximise the efficiency of getting dry.

as well as adding a few of their own into the mix oe a colleague's pet rat called Coco, a pygmy hedgehog,

and Mogwai the golden lab. Dickerson had filmed his soggy animals at around 500-1, 000 frames per second (fps).

The first guinea pig was, well, the hedgehog. It didn't work. It looked spectacular surrounded by falling water droplets but ultimately, even in slow motion,

which states that animals from places such as North africa or Australia that get wet, but maybe not that cold, simply don't need to shake so efficiently.

Then it was the turn of the rat and the dog oe both are found across much of the world and in wet and cold environments.

In theory, they should have evolved to dry off as quickly as possible. And it proved to be the case.

and camera equipment oe perhaps hardly surprising following Dickerson's findings that dogs can get rid of 70%of the water on their fur in just four seconds.

But shaking dogs may also have a practical application. Dickerson has used his insights to create a"wet dog simulator Â;

a rotating device that looks at the speed wet brushes need to spin to rid themselves of water.

So, perhaps in the not too distant future, Mars rovers will shake their circuits in a similar way to a dog emerging from a pond.

How do birds actually navigate? The price of hypocrisy Evgeny Morozov Frankfurter Allgemeine 24 july 2013 Lessons from the Snowden affair."

Â How do birds navigate? Tom Standage The Economist 17 july 2013 I hereby propose a new law of science journalism,

The global positioning system with which birds are born appears to rely on particles of iron in the ear, nerves in the beak, a chemical reaction in the eyes,

birds see magnetic fields as patterns of spots. For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser.

bringing us closer to monkeys and apes, for example, which are traded internationally for bushmeat and pets.

We are also living in close proximity to domestic creatures like pigs, chickens and ducks.

It means that diseases that infect animals have unprecedented an chance to jump across species to us.

Humans are so genetically alike that pathogens easily spread between individuals and across populations. And because we are living in greater numbers and densities than ever before,

Yale mechanical engineer Michelle Addington has documented vividly control systems for dynamic plumes of heating and cooling air that enclose building surfaces,

extending tendrils and plumes and interacting with the layers of the air that surrounds us.

Within this kind of city fabric, the thermal plumes emitted by each human occupant offer a new form of energy to be captured

attracting birds and wildlife to sky-gardens, tens of floors up. In Singapore, for example, the Marina Bay Sands hotel features a skypark on the 56th floor, with trees,

growing food in the urban environment on regular multistorey plots is likely to increase as hobby farmers,

and once-polluted industrial wastelands now chirp with birdsong, rivers swim with fish and populations of animals that have become rare in the countryside are thriving in urban niches.

There is already a new field of urban ecology for scientists who study the city and biophysical interactions within it, in a similar way to traditional ecosystem research.

In fact, a surprising amount of wildlife now depends on the human-made environment, from the clouds of huge Sydney fruit bats to London's wily foxes,

to skyscraper-nesting peregrine falcons, animals have made cities their home in some cases, their natural habitats have disappeared.

In other places, the mix of human-introduced plant and animal species, and those opportunists that migrate to the urban environment,

Seagulls, for example, now often live in cities hundreds of kilometres from the coast. As their traditional food oe fish oe becomes scarcer,

But what is certain is that the survivors of these menagerie experiments in the human garden will produce a genetic legacy.

Already, urban moths have evolved changes in shade suiting their dull concrete habitat (compared with the tree trunks they used to live among),

songbirds have got louder to compete with traffic noise. And, as many city dwellers know, there are now new varieties of urban rat, housemouse and cockroach.

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