AnimalMind

suprising information on animal minds:

• "A California sea lion called Rio who remembered a complicated trick for ten years without ever practicing it has astounded her trainers and may shake up the world of animal science, researchers say. ". The sea lion’s name is Rio, and the scientists are Ron Schusterman and
  Colleen Reichmuth Kastak, marine biologists from the University of California Santa Cruz.

Koko the gorilla is a gorilla who understands human speech and can speak using sign language.

She has exhibited such cognitive behaviors as deception (when she broke something once she claimed that one of her handlers did it), invention of new words, and teaching sign language to another gorilla. Once after breaking a mirror, she was given another one. That night, she slipped it under the door. When they asked why the next morning, she said she didn’t want to break it accidentally. She talks to herself in sign language when no one else is around.

Another gorilla, Michael, who learned sign language from Koko, painted representative art:

• Michael’s dog, Apple:
  
  (note that Michael had many other colors to choose from and used other colors in his other paintings)
• Tree Lettuce:

Michael was an orphan gorilla found in the wild. When Michael was asked about his parents (years later), he said that they had been shot by humans.

The OrchOR theory suggests that Aplysia is probably conscious and that even C elegans might be.

Whale Culture

from http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?language=english&type=article&article_id=218392150 :

In addition to language, Whitehead says that different behaviors among whales indicate that whales might have what we’d call a culture. He notes that different pods of whales can have distinctly different sets of behaviors and languages even though they share territory. “We find this situation where we have multi-cultural societies,” he says. “In one place, there are animals who make their living in very different ways.”

It isn’t just killer whales. Whitehead says sperm whales off the Galapagos islands have two distinct ways of speaking. These whales speak in a series of clicks, but some of them often add a pause and a final “click.” Whitehead likens it to the way many Canadians often add “eh” to the end of a sentence. Where this is important, says Whitehead, is that depending upon the weather, one group may survive better than the other. He notes that the whales with the last click accent seem to thrive in El Nino years, when the water is much warmer, while the group without the accent prefers the colder waters of normal years.

class:

http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/bcs/programs/courses/info/183/

Notes from 2003 Stanford Symbolic Systems Undergraduate Honors Presentation by Kiely Martinez:

• birds seem to play
• you might say that reptiles play, but their “play” behavior is highly stereotyped and is perhaps questionable as “play”
• mollusks (octopi in particular) seem to play; implies that play may have evolved separately in protostomes (like mollusks) and Deuterostomes (like chordates)

• Birds can be taught that certain pictures correspond to certain objects (symbolic learning?)
  

CategoryPhilosophy