Tag: sophonts

Animal Numerosity

Practically every animal that scientists have studied — insects and cephalopods, amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals — can distinguish between different numbers of objects in a set or sounds in a sequence. They don’t just have a sense of “greater than” or “less than,” but an approximate sense of quantity: that 2 is distinct from 3, that 15 is distinct from 20. This mental representation of set size, called numerosity, seems to be “a general ability,” and an ancient one. Many species have displayed a capacity for abstraction that extends to performing simple arithmetic, while a select few have even demonstrated a grasp of the quantitative concept of 0 — an idea so paradoxical that very young children sometimes struggle with it. Both monkeys and honeybees know how to treat 0 as a numerosity, placing it on a mental number line much as they would numerosity 1 or 2. And crows can do it, too.

Monkey ransom

Shrewd macaques prefer to target items that humans are most likely to exchange for food, such as electronics, rather than objects that tourists care less about, such as hairpins or empty camera bags. Bargaining between a monkey robber, tourist and a temple staff member quite often lasted several minutes. The longest wait before an item was returned was 25 minutes, including 17 minutes of negotiation. For lower-valued items, the monkeys were more likely to conclude successful bartering sessions by accepting a lesser reward.

Chickadee memory

Mountain chickadees remember the location of 80K seeds

Despite weighing less than 15g, mountain chickadees are able to survive harsh winters complete with subzero temperatures, howling winds and heavy snowfall. How do they do it? By spending the fall hiding as many as 80K individual seeds, which they then retrieve — by memory — during the winter. Their astounding ability to keep track of that many locations puts their memory among the most impressive in the animal kingdom.

Monkey Grief

You can see how the relationship grows between the real Langur monkeys and the robot monkey in the video below. First, they’re curious about the motionless spy. Then, they include it in their herd. Then, they even want to start babysitting the fake baby robot and take care of it. And finally, when it falls off the tree branch, the monkeys all grieve for it like they would if their own babies died.

Sentient animals

In the recently released book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Carl Safina reports on the intricate social interactions, family bonds and distinct personalities observed in mammals such as elephants, orcas, primates, dogs and wolves. Safina delves into the latest scientific research that reveals layers of complex thought and behavior throughout the animal kingdom

Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, makes a case not only for plant sentience, but also plant rights. Interesting, though science fiction authors have been doing thought experiments about this for a long time, e.g. in Ursula LeGuin’s novel “The Word for World is Forest” and in my own “The Uplift War.” Jack Chalker’s “Midnight at the Well of Souls” portrayed sentient plants, as did Lord of the Rings.

A couple more pointers to possible plant sentience:

Roots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza: itself a growing-together of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web. This symbiosis is thought to be 450 ma old. The fungi help plants grow by assisting in the delivery of water, phosphorus, and nitrogen. In exchange plants send the fungus food. The network enables plants to communicate with each other. Fungus will even help plants defend themselves.

This one beech tree was cut 500 years ago by a charcoal maker, but the stump is still alive — we found green chlorophyll under the thick bark. The tree has no leaves to create sugars, so the only explanation is that it has been supported by neighboring trees for 500 years.

Gorilla speech

“She doesn’t produce a pretty, periodic sound when she performs these behaviors, like we do when we speak”. This suggests that some of the evolutionary groundwork for the human ability to speak was in place at least by the time of our last common ancestor with gorillas, estimated to be around 10M years ago.

Interspecies fishing

wow. reminds me of the uplifting of dolphins

They have been reported to exist in Australia, India, Mauritania, Burma, and the Mediterranean, but the best known are in Brazil. In parts of southern Brazil, human fisherman have been cooperating with dolphins for many generations. If fishermen clap just the right way, dolphins will herd fish into the desired areas of fishermen, in muddy lagoon areas. The dolphins perform a distinctive kind of dive to signal to the humans it is time to cast the net for the fish. Only some individual dolphins are able (willing?) to do this well, perhaps the others belong to the 47%. The dolphins which cooperate with the fisherman are also more social, more socially connected, and more cooperative with other dolphins