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echoAwooo t1_isaii2i wrote

Reply to comment by dbrodbeck in Do crickets respond to TV’s and video audio, with their own sounds? by Bony_Geese

Playback experiments are how we've determined that prairie dogs have a pretty sophisticated language system that can specifically reference individuals within a group ('a name') and provide relevant information about abstract concepts such as color, direction, distance or friendly/dangerous.

We obvs can't speak prairie dog, but we can predict responses to some sounds for some groups of prairie dogs. Oh, yeah, they also apparently have dialects and proper different languages as different groups can't talk to each other.

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tenbatsu t1_isaqgfz wrote

Same goes for naked mole rats! What’s more, when a colony’s queen is deposed and a new queen takes over, within the span of a few weeks the colony’s dialect will shift to match that of their new leader’s.

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FartIntoMyButt t1_isav0m4 wrote

Like that (unfortunately) apocryphal story about how the Spanish lisp came about!

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Bony_Geese OP t1_isb17p0 wrote

Oh, that’s cool, that’s another thing to add to the list of cool things about naked mole rats

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Not_as_witty_as_u t1_isce0v4 wrote

the coolest thing is they're naked and they're totally comfortable with it. It's like the 60's underground, man.

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csreid t1_isat8n1 wrote

Sometimes I wonder what, when I'm old, is going to be the thing that my generation was obviously backwards and awful and ignorant about, but more and more I think it's gonna be that lots of animals are smarter/more aware than we realized and we're going to be severely but fairly judged for the way we treated them.

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defunctmaterials t1_isb4v8t wrote

Absolutely. "It's okay to treat them badly because they aren't like us" has been the justification behind historical violence that we now consider atrocities

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dbrodbeck t1_isbfoyp wrote

They know more than many give them credit for. My work has over the years focused on food storing birds. There are birds who store tens of thousands of seeds in a 40 km radius and recover the vast majority of them, months later. They use memory to do this.

The biggest trap you can get in is trying to rank order species on some made up 'evolutionary ladder' ranking of intelligence. You can study animal intelligence, but it's complicated.

Here's a good theoretical paper to get anyone started who is interested. It's old, but it's a bedrock type of thing, the ideas in here were, at the time, revolutionary, and now are generally accepted.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/bioscibehavior/14/

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koreth t1_isc0y56 wrote

> You can study animal intelligence, but it’s complicated.

I’ve read that a recurring problem with research into reptile intelligence has been that the experiments are often based on experiments on mammal intelligence and don’t take into account biological differences that cause reptiles to respond differently. The example I’ve seen mentioned is that ambient temperature affects reptile behavior more (and differently) than it affects mammal behavior, meaning an intelligence test given in a cool air-conditioned room might underestimate a lizard’s intelligence level.

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dbrodbeck t1_isc2uqj wrote

That paper I linked sort of talks about such things.

You have to look at the animal's life history, its evolutionary history, its brain etc. It's a very interdisciplinary thing. I'm a psychologist, but I'm also quite comfortable with zoologists and neuroscientists (to the point where I teach that stuff as well).

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Kirk_Kerman t1_isb91u7 wrote

Pigs are about as smart as a three year old (comparable to a smart dog) and cows have best friends. Crows and ravens have been seen engaging in play and are able to describe specific individuals to each other.

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Not_as_witty_as_u t1_isceivz wrote

yeah I think we're seeing more and more evidence of this. What I worry is that we'll understand more that animals see us as protectors and then we kill them for food. I once saw a duckling get taken by a hawk and the mum duck came running up to me, squawking in panic, like it was yelling help. Fortunately the hawk dropped it and we grabbed it and took it back to her but I often think about it as it was so intentional, it didn't run towards the hawk nor was panicking and running around aimlessly, it chose to come up to me.

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dmcginvt t1_isbt17a wrote

I love that they put a tape recorder playing the sound of running water near a beaver pond and the beavers built a damn around it

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