#animal intelligence

Have you ever sat in a quiet woodland and felt like something was going on simply beyond your sight? Like the bushes, animals, and even the soil were all busy with a communication you have now not been invited to? That feeling is not wrong. The natural world runs on a completely separate schedule the moment human eyes turn away. Animals grieve. Trees warn each other. Dolphins laugh. Crows plot…

People have this idea that comes from snakes in stories of them being sneaky and clever and evil, so this leads to them thinking of the real animal as dangerously smart

Cannot emphasize enough how not true that is

It is difficult for us to understand animal intelligence as humans because they think differently than we do

However a snake is not capable of coming up with a multi step plan to kill you and your entire family even if it wanted to do that, which it doesn't

The highest level of snake cognition is investing a new area with new smells

Their hunting "strategy" is instinctually strike at anything that vaguely smells like a rat and has a heat signature

They are dumber than your zero brain celled cat

My snake regularly falls off surfaces because he doesn't understand that if he crawls too far off of it he will fall

He investigates my nose because there's warm air coming out and there might be a rat over there

They are big dumbasses

They are not intelligent

They are not clever

They have no brain cells at any time

I need you to spread this knowledge to everyone you speak to

I used to think I had a decent handle on how animals worked. Cute, dangerous, or somewhere in between—that was pretty much my whole framework. Then I started analyzing the stuff researchers have quietly been documenting for decades, and it absolutely wrecked that framework. Turns out the herbal world runs on conversation structures, survival hints, and even emotions that most of us never study in…

Of course! It's a great question.

It's because feral pigeons have a type of intelligence that can't be ethically sourced any other way.

There is a huge difference between maintaining intelligence over generations and building it up in the first place.

The same way Racing Homers are more structurally sound and fitter, with a much more robust and adaptable immune system than any other pigeon, because they are bred to race hundreds of miles and thousands of them from all over the country are exposed to each other all at once and then to the wild when they are transported to a race and then released.

No other breed has that kind of strength or stamina, and no other breed has to endure exposure events of such magnitude.

Ferals have the single most rapid uptake of new information and highest learning flexibility of any pigeon breed because they survive entirely on their wits.

Racers are the second most intelligent breed, capabpe of independent decision making, with a very long memory.

But they are extremely rigid thinkers. Once something becomes a habit for a racer, they can't unlearn that habit with new information they way ferals can.

No other breed comes close to a Racer's intelligence.

I have Rollers and Tumblers in the program because generations of working with their breeder (looking to him to be called in away from a hawk or storm) have made a very biddable bird, but they are not intelligent enough to think as independently as a racing homer, because there is no pressure to.

There is no humane way to recreate the pressures that built feral intelligence.

Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities.

The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving.

In the latest research, bees were shown to be able to roll a polystyrene ball to a specific location and climb on to it in order to access an artificial flower on a low ceiling. The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that insects operate purely on instinct and mindless trial-and-error learning.

“Most people think insects are reflex-based machines,” said Dr Olli Loukola, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Oulu, Finland, and senior author. “That they can’t have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don’t even realise that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that.”

The bees, which were only a couple of weeks old, were first trained to associate a blue artificial flower with a reward of sugar water. During the test, the flower was moved to the ceiling of a transparent petri dish-style chamber whose ceiling was too high for them to reach, but with insufficient space for them to hover. A ball was also introduced into the chamber. To reach the flower, the bee had to roll the ball under it and climb on top – a behavioural sequence they had never previously encountered or been trained to perform.

In the most basic version of the test, 75% of the bees were successful in reaching the flower. “This is essentially an insect version of the classic ‘box-and-banana’ problem,” said Loukola. “The animal must realise that an object can be repositioned and then used as a tool to reach an otherwise inaccessible goal. What stands out about the result is that this kind of spontaneous problem solving is now demonstrated in an insect.”

A question remained, however, about whether the bees were really solving the problem. An alternative possibility was that the bees simply enjoyed the sensation of rolling a ball along and – separately – were attracted towards the blue dot, meaning that they fortuitously ended up positioning the ball in the right spot.

To test this, the scientists put the bees through increasingly complex versions of the challenge. In the final setup, the bees were allowed to explore a left and right chamber, one of which featured the artificial flower, before the ball was introduced. The scientists then illuminated the chamber with red light, preventing the bees from seeing the blue flower, and introduced the ball. To complete the task, the bees needed to recall the location of the flower and position the ball beneath it – and 23 out of 30 bees were successful.

“We are not claiming that bees think like humans,” said Loukola. “But our findings show that miniature brains can generate flexible solutions to novel problems in ways we are only beginning to understand.”

Prof Lars Chittka, a behavioural ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, and author of The Mind of a Bee, who was not involved in the latest research, said: “We’ve seen bees do all kinds of remarkable things in our lab: counting, impressive object manipulation – but they surprise me every time. This is the clearest demonstration yet of some kind of comprehension of what’s at stake.”

“There’s a general perception that intelligent behaviour requires big brains because we are big-brained and relatively intelligent among animals,” Chittka added. “Bees are a model of how much intelligence you can squeeze into a small nervous system … It’s a good reminder of there being a motivation to pay some respect to these other beings.”