#foraging behavior

African Gray parrot: “Efficacy of foraging enrichments to increase foraging time in Grey parrots”

Last week’s reviewed studymentioned that wild parrots spend 40-75% of their day foraging for and consuming food, compared to captive parrots that may spend as little as 5% of their day engaged in such behaviors. In 2013, van Zeeland et al. at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands tested eleven different foraging enrichment methods to determine which were most effective in increasing foraging…

I milked Perdie at 3.15: that’s 26 hours between milking and she was trying to kick me off. She seems to be ready now to dry off.

Afterwards, I took them down to the field. They all tucked in. They were still out when I came back at 4.15, although Perdie returned to the trees by the house, nibbling wind-fallen leaves. They stayed out browsing nettles until 5.30 in the near field, by the house. Compare this to yesterday: they only briefly came out with me at 1.30 and soon went back to the shelter, Georgette hardly browsed at all, and stayed there until 5; and pretty much the same happened at 11.30 this morning. It is possible I was giving them too much hay, so they were motivated to come out browsing earlier, but then, it is much cooler today than yesterday. The weather should be good this week, so I will try the lower hay ration again.

I increased hay quantities due to Perdie’s thinness and trying to reduce competitive aggression. Then when the herd was reduced the pasture was tired, the weather got hot and then went stormy. But, now I’ve got the opportunity to reduce the quantity. But I will still distribute it between all the racks; Georgette is so competitive she chases the other two away from any rack they are eating at. Eventually they all settle down at a rack, or if she challenges, the subordinate moves to another, but first thing she is hounding the other goats, chasing them all around.

Brain size matters when it comes to animal self-control

Chimpanzees may throw tantrums like toddlers, but their total brain size suggests they have more self-control than, say, a gerbil or fox squirrel, according to a new study of 36 species of mammals and birds ranging from orangutans to zebra finches. Scientists at Duke University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale and more than two-dozen other research institutions collaborated on this first large-scale investigation into the evolution of self-control, defined in the study as the ability to inhibit powerful but ultimately counter-productive behavior. They found that the species with the largest brain volume -- not volume relative to body size -- showed superior cognitive powers in a series of food-foraging experiments.

Moreover, animals with the most varied diets showed the most self-restraint, according to the study published April 21 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The study levels the playing field on the question of animal intelligence," said UC Berkeley psychologist Lucia Jacobs, a co-author of this study and of its precursor, a 2012 paper in the journal, Animal Cognition.

This latest study was led by evolutionary anthropologists Evan MacLean, Brian Hare and Charles Nunn of Duke University. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions that "relative" brain size is a more accurate predictor of intelligence than "absolute" brain size. One possibility, they posited, is that "as brains get larger, the total number of neurons increases and brains tend to become more modularized, perhaps facilitating the evolution of new cognitive networks."

While participating researchers all performed the same series of experiments, they did so on their own turf and on their own animal subjects. Data was provided on bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, olive baboons, stump-tailed macaques, golden snub-nosed monkeys, brown, red-bellied and aye-aye lemurs, coyotes, dogs, gray wolves, Asian elephants, domestic pigeons, orange-winged amazons, Eurasian jays, western scrub jay, zebra finches and swamp sparrows. (continue reading)

Journal Reference: E. L. MacLean, B. Hare, C. L. Nunn, E. Addessi, et al. The evolution of self-control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1323533111 (x) *** Check out the squirrel self-control task (failure) and multi-species self-control task videos! ***