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jnecr t1_isablvp wrote

Replying to [deleted] (#101,803)

They are rubbing their wings together to communicate. I believe it is essentially communicating their location either for mating purposes or for territory purposes, which is all down to mating anyways. It really all boils down to mating in the end.

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Upst8r t1_isact6e wrote

Replying to jnecr (#101,928)

>I believe it is essentially communicating their location either for mating purposes or for territory purposes ...

This makes sense, thank you.

Especially the mating part as a lonely redditor ...

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KillerJupe t1_isadgwr wrote

Entomologist here…. Yes*

*each species has their own song and will only respond to their song. Some insects songs are too high pitched for you to hear/your speakers to reproduce, but most are easily reproduced.

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echoAwooo t1_isaii2i wrote

Replying to dbrodbeck (#101,777)

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

Replying to echoAwooo (#102,246)

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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ZZZfrequently t1_isar3fx wrote

Replying to dbrodbeck (#101,777)

Very cool. My senior project in college incorporated playback. I was looking at the effect housing development had on the Barred Owl population in my area. I probably looked like a lunatic driving down dirt roads stopping every mile to set up a bunch of audio equipment blasting owl calls.

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csreid t1_isat8n1 wrote

Replying to echoAwooo (#102,246)

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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LunacyNow t1_isb2wa7 wrote

On a similar note - I once saw a mockingbird trolling a cardinal with its own song. Even though the cardinal could see the mockingbird was making that sound he still felt complled to respond every time the mockingbird sung it.

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GrinningDentrassi t1_isb76ej wrote

Replying to KillerJupe (#102,016)

Not to derail OP but question for the entomologist: I once lived in a house with crickets, we couldn't get rid of the damned things. One week we agreed to babysit a friend's pet tarantula, and during that time fed it two or three of our huge cricket infestation. The crickets left us in blissful silence afterwards. It was glorious. So, do crickets avoid predator rich location's?

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Kirk_Kerman t1_isb91u7 wrote

Replying to csreid (#102,709)

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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dbrodbeck t1_isbfoyp wrote

Replying to csreid (#102,709)

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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slyder777 t1_isbmt29 wrote

Replying to LunacyNow (#103,205)

Not sure what kind of bird it was, but it was in our neighborhood for awhile, it was copying a car alarm quite accurately, which I found quite funny and remarkable.

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oneglory t1_isbp007 wrote

This reminds me of the time I played a YouTube video for a fox.

I live next to the woods and one night I was cleaning out the garage and a fox was screaming (if you've never heard a fox screaming it's not at all what you think). I thought it'd be funny to play a YT video of a fox screaming to, you know, mess around in this fox's territory as he was clearly currently claiming it.

Each restart of the video was retorted until the royally agitated animal was at the tree line and no amount of hand waving, "dude go away, it was just a prank" was making this pissed off fox retreat from my fake fox noise making. I went inside.

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KillerJupe t1_isbxv0n wrote

Replying to GrinningDentrassi (#103,388)

Ehhhh... they aren't really smart. They usually survive by reproducing faster then the predators and hoping for the best.

You'll see rock piles, where crickets like to live, and lots of spiders hunting there.

I suspect the spider showing up was timed around a natural die-off.
If they sense something sneaking up to them, they will stop sinking as many predators use the sound to find the insect.
In almost all cases it's the male that sits in one place and sings, the female comes to them, so they can't stop at every noise.

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KillerJupe t1_isbzlut wrote

Replying to NotATroll_ipromise (#102,206)

Some males will come to other males singing in the hope of poaching their females. Females come to males singing as well as predators, so these satellite males get fewer ladies, but they get eaten less.

Buddy might have come in to hang near Alexa then she stopped so he had to start.

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koreth t1_isc0y56 wrote

Replying to dbrodbeck (#103,851)

> 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

Replying to koreth (#104,955)

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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Not_as_witty_as_u t1_isceivz wrote

Replying to csreid (#102,709)

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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