In the above clip, a young orangutan repeatedly tries to run away from its parent (unsuccessfully).
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All posts for the month April, 2010
When his owner’s home caught fire, Buddy the German Shepherd led a state trooper’s car over back roads and across intersections to the burning property (the above clip shows actual footage from the vehicle). According to the officer, once the car reached its destination, the dog waited at the driver’s side door and nudged the trooper towards the house.
Via [Unleashed] and [BBC News]
An orangutan at a zoo in Adelaide, Australia, shorted out wires in her enclosure using sticks and made a ladder with branches as part of an elaborate (and successful) escape strategy.
While many arguments can be made as to the reason driving this elephant seal’s behavior (e.g. play, social interaction, physical contact, curiosity, food), the apparent enjoyment of the situation at hand among both parties in this clip is hard to ignore.
[via Boing Boing]
Male monkeys holding babies have been shown to enjoy more positive social receptions from other adults while doing so and gain better social status.
via [Discover], image by Andrea Ploss
In order to retrieve its reward, this crow must climb down a rope, retrieve a short stick that can be used to remove a much longer stick from behind a cage, and then use the longer stick to drag a piece of meat from behind a glass to within reaching distance.
[Proceedings of the Royal Society B] via [BBC News] and [Discover]
In this poignant clip, a squirrel protects the body of one of its peers from a growing group of approaching crows.
Not to be outdone by her camera stealing or camouflage using counterparts, this octopus at a zoo in New Zealand showcases her ability to open twist top bottles.
Salsa the therapy dog can detect when her charge, an 11 year old named Destiny who has a severe form of epilepsy, is going to have a seizure and warns her family of the upcoming event up to 15 minutes in advance. Salsa’s skills, while concentrated toward her owner, have even accurately predicted the seizures of others - she recently left Destiny’s side during school one day to lay down at the feet of the class’s teacher before the woman experienced the first seizure of her life.
[PBS] via [Pet News and Views], [image]
Rats placed in situations replicating the prisoner’s dilemma, a common challenge of game theory, have been found to change their behavior based on prior experience. In a recent study, two rats were placed in situations where if both independently chose to cooperate they would receive a modest reward but where if one defected while the other cooperated, the traitor received a large reward while the betrayed cooperator had his tail pinched. If both rats chose to selfishly defect they both had their tails pinched. In this situation, if one rat was forced to play a tit-for-tat strategy, the other rat quickly stopped his own traitorous behavior after a few trials and began cooperating to stop the other rat from defecting.
[PLoS ONE] via [Boing Boing] & [TheScientist], [image]
