The world’s largest animals have been hiding something. The bodies of the giant rorqual whales—including the blue, fin and humpback—have been regularly displayed in museums, filmed by documentary makers, and harpooned by hunters. Despite this attention, no one noticed the volleyball-sized sense organ at the tips of their lower jaws. Nicholas Pyenson from the Smithsonian Institution is the first, and he thinks that the whales use this structure to coordinate the planet’s biggest mouthfuls.

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In the coastal waters of Laguna, Brazil, a shoal of mullet is in serious trouble. Two of the most intelligent species on the planet – humans and bottlenose dolphins – are conspiring to kill them. The dolphins drive the mullet towards the fishermen, who stand waist-deep in water holding nets. The humans cannot see the fish through the turbid water. They must wait for their accomplices.

As the fish approach, the dolphins signal to the humans by rolling at the surface, or slapping the water with their heads or tails. The nets are cast, and the mullet are snared. Some manage to escape, but in breaking formation, they are easy prey for the dolphins.

http://youtu.be/sVinWYmu5lQ

According to town records, this alliance began in 1847, and involves at least three generations of both humans and dolphins. Today, there are around 55 dolphins in the neighbourhood, and around 45 per cent of them interact with the fishermen.

Now, Fabio Daura-Jorge from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil studied Laguna’s dolphins to learn how their unusual collaboration has shaped their social networks. He spent two years taking photographs of the local dolphins, and noting where they travelled and who they were associated with. As is typical for bottlenose dolphins, the Laguna individuals formed a ‘fission-fusion’ society – they all belonged to the same large group, but they had specific ‘friends’ whom they would spend more time with.

The dolphins roughly split into two separate groups, based on their tendency to hunt with humans. Those that co-operated with the fishermen were more likely to spend time with each other than the uncooperative individuals. Likewise, the uncooperative dolphins showed a tendency to stick to their own clique.

One individual even seemed to act as a “social broker”, and spent time with individuals from both groups.

Of the two groups, the human-helpers seemed to form stronger social ties. It is not clear if helping humans means they spend more time together, or vice versa. But certainly, their close associations increase the odds that one dolphin will learn the hunting technique from its peers.

This fits with what we know about bottlenose dolphins. They are extremely intelligent animals and different populations have developed their own quirky foraging traditions by learning from one another. Some use sponges to guard their snouts when they root about the ocean floor for food. Others can prepare a cuttlefish meal by sequentially killing and stripping them.

Daura-Jorge now wants to understand why only some of the dolphins help the fishermen, given that doing so clearly provides them with benefits, and all of them have the opportunity to help. By analysing the dolphins’ genes, he hopes to piece together their family trees, and work out if mothers pass on the behaviour to their calves.

Reference: Daura-Jorge, Cantor, Ingram, Lusseau & Simoes-Lopes. 2012. The structure of a bottlenose dolphin society is coupled to a unique foraging cooperation with artisanal fishermen. Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0174

Bonus: There are several cases around the world where dolphins feed on the discarded remains of fish thrown away by humans. But the Laguna animals do far more than that – the fisherman wouldn’t catch any fish at all without their help. A similar alliance takes place half a world away in Burma, where Irrawaddy dolphins also fish cooperatively with humans.

More on dolphin behaviour:

• Will we ever… talk to dolphins?
• When meeting up at sea, bottlenose dolphins exchange name-like whistles
• Dolphin detects electric fields with ex-whisker pits
• Dolphins stay alert after five straight days of round-the-clock vigilance
• How dolphins prepare the perfect cuttlefish meal
• Sponging dolphins keep it in the family
• Boto dolphins woo females with chat-up vines

Doesn’t look a day older than 602,000

It looked like we had the polar bear’s origin story nailed down. Genetic studies suggested that between 111 and 166 thousand years ago, a group of brown bears, possibly from Ireland, split off from their kin. In a blink of geological time, they adapted to the cold of the Arctic, and became the polar bears we know and worry about. Fossils supported this story: the oldest polar bear bone is between 110 and 130 thousand years old.

But according to Frank Hailer at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, this story is wrong in two important ways. First, the polar bear aren’t just a branch of the brown bear family tree. They’re a separate lineage in their own right. Second, they around four times older than anyone had thought, arising around 600 thousand years ago.

If this new vision is right, the bear’s journey to polar dominance wasn’t a speedy sprint, but a more leisurely stroll. As a species, polar bears have seen many ice ages. Rather than being a symbol of extraordinarily fast evolution, they’ve actually had plenty of time to adapt to life in the freezer.

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled news programming to bring you this wonderful piece of trivia about kangaroo genitals.

Regular readers will know of my love for Inside Nature’s Giants, the British documentary where anatomists cut up large animals to examine how their bodies work and evolved. It’s a truly incredible show, combining unbridled joy at the natural world, drama, and solid educational value.

So far, it has brought us the horrifying throat of a leatherback turtle, the mysterious bloodsweat of a hippo, and the exploding insides of a beached whale. But this week’s episode may have topped all of that with the triple vaginas of the female kangaroo. The diagram above (an annotated screengrab from the show) explains the complicated plumbing.

This set-up is shared by all marsupials – the group of mammals that raise their young in pouches. Koalas, wombats and Tasmanian devils all share the three-vagina structure. The side ones carry sperm to the two uteruses (and males marsupials often have two-pronged penises), while the middle vagina sends the joey down to the outside world.

Note that the ureters, which carry urine from the kidneys to the bladder, pass through the gaps between the three tubes. In placental mammals, like us, the ureters develop in a different way, and don’t go through the reproductive system. As we develop, the precursors to the reproductive tubes eventually fuse into a single vagina. In marsupials, this can’t happen.

The programme also suggested that this might explain why marsupial embryos are born at such a premature stage of development. A kangaroo’s joey is about the size of a jellybean when it leaves the vagina, and it must endure an arduous crawl into the pouch. It’s possible that with such a narrow tube to go down, it couldn’t get any bigger before its birth.

With its complicated reproductive set-up, a female kangaroo can be perpetually pregnant. While one joey is developing inside the pouch, another embryo is held in reserve in a uterus, waiting for its sibling to grow up and leave. Indeed, a mother kangaroo can nourish three separate youngsters at a time – an older joey that has left the pouch, a young one developing inside it, and an embryo still waiting to be born.

We normally think of nests as the creations of birds, but our ape cousins build nests too. Orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos all build tree beds, by weaving branches, twigs and leaves together into a bowl-shaped cradle. These nests may provide safety from predators, or help the apes to sleep warm.* But it seems that their main function is to provide a good night’s rest. Sleeping against a tree bough is hard on a large ape, and nests offer a more comfortable option.

Of all the apes, orangutans reputedly create the sturdiest and most elaborate nests. By studying the physical properties of these treetop bunks, Adam van Casteren from the University of Manchester has found that the apes are skilled engineers. As befits animals of their intelligence, they don’t just mash branches together. Instead, they seem to have an impressive amount of technical knowledge about their construction materials.

Orangutans build their nests between 11 and 20 metres up. Once they choose a good spot on a sturdy branch, they bend or break other branches in towards them, and weave them in place to create a basic foundation. On top of that, they add smaller branches to create a ‘mattress’. That’s the basic model, and some orangutans add deluxe features. They can create blankets, by covering themselves with large leafy branches, or pillows, by clumping such branches together. They can loosely braid branches above their heads to make a roof, or even create a secondary ‘bunk-nest’ over the main one.

Like all apes, orangutans construct new ones every day. This means that intrepid scientists have plenty of old discarded nests to study. Van Casteren, along with Julia Myatt from the Royal Veterinary College, found 14 such nests in the Sumatran rainforest. They hoisted themselves into the canopy, attached ropes to different parts of the nests, and lowered these to the ground where team members were waiting with force gauges. “Climbing up into the high canopy is breathtaking,” says van Casteren. “You enter an area of the forest that isn’t used to having humans hang around in it.”

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Van Casteren found that orangutans use thicker branches in the structural foundation of the nest, and thinner branches in the mattress. The structural ones are four times stronger and four times more rigid, and they make the nest sturdy. The mattress branches are thinner and more flexible for comfort.

The orangutans also break the two types of branches in different ways. If you bend a dense branch, it will only break halfway – this is known as a “greenstick fracture (see below). That’s what van Casteren found in the structural part of the nest. Once broken like this, it’s surprisingly hard to fully snap a branch in two, even for a powerful animal like an orangutan. The trick is to twist the branch. The fracture extends outwards until the two halves come apart, producing two pieces with long tapered ‘tails’.  Van Casteren filmed the apes using this technique, and the found plenty of the distinctive tailed branches in their mattresses.

There are plenty of questions about the nests left to answer. For example, orangutans don’t choose their trees randomly, and actually avoid the most common species. What’s special about the ones they pick, and does that factor into the properties of the nests? The apes also learn their craft from adults, so do immature orangutans build nests with less distinctive foundations and mattresses? Van Casteren also wants to look at the nests of other great apes, and of other architects such as beaver or birds, to see if he gets similar results.

But for now, his data already show that orangutans make sophisticated technical choices when they build their nests. He thinks that they account for the different properties of the materials in their environment, and use those properties to make bunks that are both safe and comfortable. While many studies of animal intelligence focus on the use of tools, he argues that nest-building is no less mentally demanding.

Roland Ennos, who was involved in the study, says, “I hope helps to show how the evolution of intelligence can be driven by the need to deal with the mechanical environment, rather than the prevailing orthodoxy that it’s only the social environment that’s important.”

* In writing this story, I stumbled across a wonderful study by Fiona Stewart from the University of Cambridge, who tested the value of chimpanzee nests, by sleeping in them. She spent several nights in Senegal either sleeping in newly made chimp beds or on the bare ground. She was warmer in the nests, and received fewer insect bites. She didn’t get any more sleep, but what she got was less disturbed. “Terrestrial animals, including hyenas, were more concerning during ground sleep, although snakes were always a concern,” she writes, in a wonderfully deadpan way. Van Casteren, however, never tried to sleep in the orangutan nests that he studied. They are higher than a chimp’s and he was “too worried about falling out mid-dream”.

Reference: Van Casteren, Sellers, Thorpe, Coward, Crompton, Myatt & Ennos. 2012. Nest-building orangutans demonstrate engineering know-how to produce safe, comfortable beds. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1200902109

Images courtesy of Adam van Casteren

More on orangutans

• Expedition records show severe orangutan decline
• Orangutans are masters of conserving energy
• Photo safari – Orangutans Part 1
• Orang-utans use leaves to lie about their size

It’s Easter. For some of people, this means they can take up all the vices they gave up for Lent, and binge on chocolate till they feel sick. For the hyenas of northern Ethiopia, it means it’s time to stop hunting donkeys.

Spotted hyenas are unfussy eaters and incredible opportunists. They can feast on rotting meat, anthrax-infected corpses, garbage and dung. They digest their food so completely that their droppings tend to consist of hair, hooves, and white powder made from broken-down bones. Unsurprisingly, they do rather well near urban environments, where humans provide them with a bonanza of scraps, leftovers, and livestock. The hyenas of northern Ethiopia get almost all of their food by scavenging on such sources.

Local humans tolerate the hyenas, which are affectionately known as “municipal workers”. The animals clean the waste from butchers, households, and even the local veterinary college. They’re seen and heard almost every night, and they almost never attack humans. Instead, they have come to depend on the Ethiopians for their food.

But that changes in the run-up to Easter. For 55 days, the local Orthodox Christians go through a period of fasting. Meat goes off the menu, and few animals are slaughtered. This lack of demand creates supply problems for the hyenas. Gidey Yirga from Mekelle University in Ethiopia has found that they sate their hunger by hunting instead.

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Here’s the fourth piece from my new BBC column

“What’s that Flipper? The treasure is over there?” So went a typical plotline for the popular TV series featuring the cute, bottlenosed dolphin who could communicate with his human guardians, and who – in the time-honoured fashion – used his animal powers to apprehend criminals.

The idea that animals like Flipper can communicate with humans is not just the preserve of the small and big screen. History is littered with celebrity animals who have communicated with human scientists, with varying degrees of success. Many apes, including Washoe and Nim the chimps, and Kanzi the bonobo, have learned to communicate by using sign language or symbols on a keyboard. Alex, an African grey parrot learned over 100 English words, which he could use and combine appropriately; his poignant last words to Irene Pepperberg, his scientist handler, were “You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.”

Dolphins hold a particular fascination; we are captivated by their intelligence and beauty, and swimming with dolphins features regularly on lists of things to do before you die. Denise Herzing has a lifetime of such experiences. For the last 27 years, she has been swimming with a group of Atlantic spotted dolphins in Florida as part of the Wild Dolphin Project. She can identify every individual and they, in turn, seem to trust and recognise her. It is a solid foundation for the boldest attempt yet to talk with dolphins.

One-way chat

“Talk” is tricky to define. A SeaWorld trainer who prompts a dolphin to jump for fish is arguably communicating with it. But such simple one-way interactions are a far cry from the conversational world of Dr Doolittle. Here, the dolphin responds, but says nothing intelligible back. Herzing’s vision is much more ambitious – she wants to establish two-way communication with her dolphins, with both species exchanging and understanding information.

The idea of talking to dolphins has a long and chequered history. It was widely publicised in the 1960s by John Lilly, who argued that dolphins have such large brains that they must be extremely intelligent and have a natural language. All we had to do was to “crack the code”. Much of Lilly’s work was highly questionable. He once flooded a house to keep a captive dolphin, instigated failed attempts to teach them spoken English, and even gave the animals LSD (while taking the drug himself). But there is no denying his influence in popularising the idea of two-way dolphin communication. “He said that in a few years, we will have established complex dialogue with them,” says Justin Gregg from the Dolphin Communication Project. “And he was saying that every few years.”

Lilly was right about dolphin intelligence, but not dolphin language. A true language involves small elements that combine into larger chains, to convey complex, and sometimes abstract, information. And there is no good evidence that dolphins have that, despite their rich repertoire of whistles and clicks.

Little less conversation

Wild dolphin communication is hard to study. They are fast-moving and hard to follow. They travel in groups, making it hard to assign any call to a specific individual. And they communicate at frequencies beyond what humans can hear. Despite these challenges, there is some evidence that dolphins use sounds to represent concepts. Each individual has its own “signature whistle” which might act like a name. Developed in the first year of life, dolphins use these whistles as badges of identity, and may modulate them to reflect motivation and mood. This year, a study showed that when wild dolphins meet, one member of each group exchanges signature whistles.

But beyond this, dolphin chat is still largely mysterious. “To communicate with dolphins, we need to understand how they communicate with each other in the natural world,” says psychologist Stan Kuczaj at the University of Southern Mississippi. “We still don’t know basic things like what the units of dolphin communication are. Is a whistle the equivalent of a “word” or a “short sentence”? We don’t know.”

We may not be able to understand them yet, but we know that dolphins can learn to understand us. In the 1970s, Louis Herman taught an invented sign language, complete with basic syntax, to a bottlenose dolphin called Akeakamai. For example, if he made the gestures for “person surfboard fetch”, Akeakamai would bring the board to him, while “surfboard person fetch” would prompt her to carry the person to the board. His experiments showed that dolphins could understand hundreds of words, and how those words could be combined using grammatical rules.

What’s my motivation?

Herman’s work was groundbreaking, but this was still one-way communication. It focused on comprehension, not conversation. In the 1980s, Diana Reiss had more luck by showing that dolphins could use underwater keyboards to make basic requests. When they prodded keys with their snouts, a whistle would play and Reiss gave a reward like a ball. Eventually, the dolphins used the artificial whistles to ask for the associated rewards.

But as conversations go, these were shallow ones. “The dolphins were only really interested in communicating about needs that they had, like a tool they needed or a fish they wanted,” says Kuczaj, who was involved in a similar project at DisneyWorld’s EPCOT Center. “We hoped they would also comment on other things going on in the aquarium but they didn’t.”

It is difficult persuading dolphins to learn some arbitrary signals, like a whistle signifying a ball, and then use them in a social context, admits Gregg. “They don’t seem to run with it the same way that chimps or bonobos have. The big stumbling block is motivation. Dolphins don’t seem to care.”

Herzing disagrees. She notes that captive animals, which often lack stimulation, will respond to systems like the underwater keyboards. She thinks that these experiments disappointed because they were cumbersome. “The dolphins swim very fast and went to where they were requested, but humans are very slow in the water. There wasn’t enough real-time interaction.”

Chat line

Herzing is trying to solve that problem with Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) – a lighter, portable version of the underwater keyboards. It consists of a small phone-sized computer, strapped to a diver’s chest and connected to two underwater recorders, or hydrophones. The computer will detect and differentiate dolphin sounds, including the ultrasonic ones we cannot hear, and use flashing lights to tell the diver which animal made the call.

The CHAT device can also play artificial calls, allowing Herzing to coin dolphin-esque “words” for things that are relevant to them, like “seaweed” or “wave-surfing”. She hopes the dolphins will mimic the artificial whistles, and use them voluntarily. By working with wild animals, and focusing on objects in their natural environment, rather than balls or hoops, Herzing hopes to pique their interest.

Herzing emphasises that her device is not a translator. It will not act as a dolphin-human Rosetta stone. Instead, she wants both species create a joint form of communication that they are both invested in. She hopes that CHAT will tap into the “natural propensity” that dolphins have “for creating common information when they have to interact”. For example, in Costa Rica, distantly related bottlenose and Guyana dolphins will adopt a shared collection of sounds when they come together, using sounds that they don’t use when apart.

As with past projects, all of this depends on whether the dolphins play along. Kuczaj says, “It’s a remarkable challenge because she is working with wild dolphins so they’ve got the option to participate or not.” Here, Herzing has an edge, since the animals know her, and vice versa. “We’ve been observing them underwater every summer since 1985,” she says. “I know the individuals personally – their personalities and relationships. We’ve got a pretty good handle on what they’d be interested in.” Perhaps this combination of cutting-edge technology and old-school fieldwork will finally produce the conversations that have eluded scientists for so long.

The giant squid sees the world with eyes the size of soccer balls. They’re at least 25 centimetres (10 inches) across, making them the largest eyes on the planet.

For comparison, the largest fish eye is the 9-centimetre orb of the swordfish. It would fit inside the giant squid’s pupil! Even the blue whale – the largest animal that has ever existed – has measly 11-centimetre-wide eyes.

So why the huge leap in size? Why does the giant squid have a champion eye that’s at least twice the size of the runner-up?

Dan-Eric Nilsson and Eric Warrant from Lund University, Sweden, think that the squid must have evolved its eye to cope with some unique challenge that other animals don’t face. They suggest that the world’s biggest eyes evolved to spot one of the world’s biggest predators – the sperm whale.

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Imagine a world without sweetness, where you couldn’t taste the sugary rapture of cakes, ice cream or candy. This is what it’s like to be a cat. Our feline friends carry broken versions of the genes that build sugar detectors on the tongue. As such, they’re completely oblivious to the taste of sweet things.

So are Asian otters. And spotted hyenas. Sea lions and dolphins too. In fact, Peihua Jiang from the University of Zurich has found that a wide variety of meat-eating animals can’t taste sugars. The genomes of these carnivores are wastelands of broken taste genes.

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We are like dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. This metaphor, famously used by Isaac Newton, describes how humans build on what has come before. Everything in our culture is the result of knowledge and skills that have slowly accumulated over time. Without this “cumulative culture”, we wouldn’t have our deep scientific knowledge, rich artistic traditions, or sophisticated technology. Simply put, you can’t make a car from scratch – first, you need to invent the wheel.

Are we alone in this respect? Certainly, many other animals can learn knowledge and skills from each other, and many of them have cultural traditions. But Newton’s metaphor involves not just the spread of knowledge, but its gradual improvement. We build on the past, rather than just passing it along. As generations tick by, our culture becomes more complex. Do other species show the same ‘cultural ratchet’?

Lewis Dean from the University of St Andrews tried to answer that question by presenting human children, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys with the same task: a puzzle box with three, increasingly difficult stages, each one building on the last.

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