Humans, for the most part, are either right-handed or left handed. But how do you find out if an eight-armed creature has a preferred limb? You give it a Rubik’s Cube.
Today, marine biologists from Sea Life Centres, a group of aquatic attractions scattered across Europe, will begin a month-long observation of the octopus’ grabbing habits. By throwing toys—including Rubik’s Cubes—and food into the tank, the researchers hope to see whether octopuses favor one arm or one side of their body when reaching for things, or whether they are in fact “octidextrous” and have no preference.
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Leaf-cutter ants are one of the world’s most organized species, sending out swarms of individuals to cut off leaf scraps and carry them back to the nest. Now, it seems, they’re even smarter than we thought: They can adjust on the fly.
To test the insects’ intelligence, a team of scientists led by Audrey Dussutour at the University of Sydney threw a road block in their way. The researchers built a lab setup in which the ants could only travel between a source of leaves and their nest via a short passageway with a roof only one centimeter off the ground. But instead of getting confused or frustrated that their cargo wouldn’t fit under the bridge, the ants adapted their tactics.
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Perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube video, shown below, of Snowball the cockatoo bobbing its head and kicking its legs in time with Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Nature reports that some scientists have seen it, too, and they say it could be more than a neat trick. If Snowball really feels the beat, the researchers say, that could help show them whether there’s a biological basis for rhythm perception.
At first, Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues had doubts. Snowball’s owners say they actually would dance off-camera while filming the bird to encourage it to bust a move. If Snowball were just a copycat, Patel says, that wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as if he could dance on his own. So to figure out whether the bird could actually feel the rhythm, they traveled to Snowball’s home in Indiana and videoed the bird dancing to music with different tempos. You can see the rhythm get progressively faster here, here, and here.
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And here we thought uncultured swine didn’t care for classical music.
Piglets, like many young mammals, like to fight amongst themselves, and pressing them together in the confined space of a hog house only exacerbates this tendency. However, a team of Dutch scientists led by Francien de Jonge at Wageningen University announced this week that they’d discovered a way to calm the little pigs—playing the music of Edward Elgar and Johann Sebastian Bach.
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We thumb through real estate listings and drive around neighborhoods to find the best place to live, but some birds have it easier—they just listen to songs.
Male black-throated blue warblers sing to their newborn chicks in the autumn, probably trying to teach the young ones to sing themselves. But biologist Matthew Betts from Oregon State University, along with two Canadian colleagues, studied the warblers in New Hampshire and found that the song of males who successfully reproduced is also a cue—when other males hear it, they assume that location must be a good place to nest, and so they’ll try to return there the next year. Not only that, the scientists say, but eavesdropping on the songs other warblers can override the birds’ other senses.
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For more than 40 years, scientists have known that honeybees communicate with one another through the language of dance. One bee flies around in loops and wags its rear end in patterns that can tell other members of the hive where to find food. Honeybees in different parts of the world perform the dance a little differently, according to a team of Australian, German, and Chinese researchers. And now the scientists say they’ve discovered that bees can even learn the dance language of their cousins from another continent.
The researchers carefully examined an Asian species and a European species of honeybee separately to determine that they used different “dialects” of the dance—in other words, they sent the same messages with slightly different dance moves. Then the scientists placed the two groups together for as long as 50 days, and after only a few tries, the European and Asian bees learned to communicate. The first time Asian worker bees watched a European bee dance, they didn’t fly far enough toward the food because the two species communicate distance differently. But the second time, researchers say, most Asian workers had learned the European bee language and found the food source right away.
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When settling down for a bite to eat, wild starlings like a little privacy—and they’re smart enough to know when they’ve got it. A recent study shows that wild starlings won’t touch their food if a human is looking at it, but don’t mind so much when a human is close but averting his ravenous, predatorial gaze.
Most animals respond to obvious signs of endangerment—a screaming child running around with his arms flailing, say—but this is the first time scientists have shown a bird to be sensitive to eye direction. (Most wild animal lovers, however, know that you can sneak up to the critters by sidestepping towards them and looking out of your periphery).
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