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By Darren Incorvaia Be it an arched eyebrow, a shaken head or a raised finger, humans wordlessly communicate complex ideas through gestures every day. This ability is rare in the animal kingdom, having been observed only in primates (SN: 8/10/10). Scientists now might be able to add a feathered friend to the club. Researchers have observed Japanese tits making what they call an “after you” gesture: A bird flutters its wings, cuing its mate to enter the nest first. The finding, reported in the March 25 Current Biology, “shows that Japanese tits not only use wing fluttering as a symbolic gesture, but also in a complex social context involving a sender, receiver and a specific goal, much like how humans communicate,” says biologist Toshitaka Suzuki of the University of Tokyo. Suzuki has been listening in on the calls of Japanese tits (Parus minor) for more than 17 years. During his extensive time in the field, he noticed that Japanese tits bringing food to the nest would sometimes perch on a branch and flutter their wings. At that point, their partners would enter the nest with the flutterer close behind. “This led me to investigate whether this behavior fulfills the criteria of gestures,” Suzuki says. Suzuki and Norimasa Sugita, a researcher at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, observed eight mated pairs make 321 trips to their nests. A pattern quickly emerged: Females fluttered their wings far more often than males, with six females shaking it up while only one male did. Females almost always entered the nest first — unless they fluttered their wings. Then the males went first. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 29213 - Posted: 03.26.2024

By Anthony Ham What is the meaning of a cat’s meow that grows louder and louder? Or your pet’s sudden flip from softly purring as you stroke its back to biting your hand? It turns out these misunderstood moments with your cat may be more common than not. A new study by French researchers, published last month in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that people were significantly worse at reading the cues of an unhappy cat (nearly one third got it wrong) than those of a contented cat (closer to 10 percent). The study also suggested that a cat’s meows and other vocalizations are greatly misinterpreted and that people should consider both vocal and visual cues to try to determine what’s going on with their pets. The researchers drew these findings from the answers of 630 online participants; respondents were volunteers recruited through advertisements on social media. Each watched 24 videos of differing cat behaviors. One third depicted only vocal communication, another third just visual cues, and the remainder involved both. “Some studies have focused on how humans understand cat vocalizations,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, lead author of the study and a cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre. “Other studies studied how people understand cats’ visual cues. But studying both has never before been studied in human-cat communication.” Cats display a wide range of visual signals: tails swishing side to side, or raised high in the air; rubbing and curling around our legs; crouching; flattening ears or widening eyes. Their vocals can range from seductive to threatening: meowing, purring, growling, hissing and caterwauling. At last count, kittens were known to use nine different forms of vocalization, while adult cats uttered 16. That we could better understand what a cat wants by using visual and vocal cues may seem obvious. But we know far less than we think we do. © 2024 The New York Times Compan

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 29169 - Posted: 02.29.2024

By Jude Coleman When it comes to tail wagging among dogs, some questions still hound researchers. We know that domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) use their tails to communicate — with other dogs as well as humans — and even what various types of wags mean, researchers note in a new review of the scientific literature. But we don’t know why dogs seem to wag more than other canines or even how much of it is under their control, ethologist Silvia Leonetti and colleagues report January 17 in Biology Letters. “Among all possible animal behavior that humans experience in everyday life, domestic dog tail wagging is one of the most common,” says Leonetti, who is now at the University of Turin in Italy. “But a lot of dog behavior remains a scientific enigma.” So Leonetti and her colleagues pored through previous studies to figure out what elements of tail wagging are understood and which remain mysterious. They also hypothesized about the behavior’s origins: Perhaps tail wagging placates some human need for rhythm, the researchers suggest, or maybe the behavior is a genetic tagalong, a trait tied to others that humans bred into domesticated dogs. “People think wagging tail equals happy dog. But it’s actually a lot more complicated than that,” says Emily Bray, an expert in canine cognition at the University of Arizona in Tucson who was not involved with the work. Understanding why dogs wag their tails is important partly from an animal welfare perspective, she says, as it could help dog owners read their pups’ cues better. One main thing that researchers know about tail wagging is that it’s used predominantly for communication instead of locomotion, like a whale, or swatting away bugs, like a horse. Wagging also means different things depending on how the tail is wagged, such as its height or side-to-side movement. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29103 - Posted: 01.18.2024

A new study shows male zebra finches must sing every day to keep their vocal muscles in shape. Females prefer the songs of males that did their daily vocal workout. Sponsor Message ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Why do songbirds sing so much? Well, a new study suggests they have to to stay in shape. Here's NPR's Ari Daniel. ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: A few years ago, I was out at dawn in South Carolina low country, a mix of swamp and trees draped in Spanish moss. (SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING) DANIEL: The sound of birdsong filled the air. It's the same in lots of places. Once the light of day switches on, songbirds launch their serenade. IRIS ADAM: I mean, why birds sing is relatively well-answered. DANIEL: Iris Adam is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Southern Denmark. ADAM: For many songbirds, males sing to impress a female and attract them as mate. And also, birds sing to defend their territory. DANIEL: But Adam says these reasons don't explain why songbirds sing so darn much. ADAM: There's an insane drive to sing. DANIEL: For some, it's hours every day. That's a lot of energy. Plus, singing can be dangerous. ADAM: As soon as you sing, you reveal yourself - like, where you are, that you even exist, where your territory is. All of that immediately is out in the open for predators, for everybody. DANIEL: Why take that risk? Adam wondered whether the answer might lie in the muscles that produce birdsong and if those muscles require regular exercise. So she designed a series of experiments on zebra finches, little Australian songbirds with striped heads and a bloom of orange on their cheeks. One of Adam's first experiments involved taking males and severing the connection between their brains and their singing muscles. ADAM: Already after two days, they had lost some of their performance. And after three weeks, they were back to the same level when they were juveniles and never had sung before. DANIEL: Next, she left the finches intact but prevented them from singing for a week by keeping them in the dark almost around the clock. ADAM: The first two or three days, it's quite easy. But the longer the experiment goes, the more they are like, I need to sing. And so then you need to tell them, like, stop. You can't sing. DANIEL: After a week, the birds' singing muscles lost half their strength. But does that impact what the resulting song sounds like? Here's a male before the seven days of darkness. © 2023 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29042 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Liz Fuller-Wright, The latest exploration of music in the natural world is taking place in Mala Murthy ’s lab at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, where Murthy and her research group have used neural imaging, optogenetics, motion capture, modeling and artificial intelligence to pinpoint precisely where and how a fruit fly’s brain toggles between its standard solo and its mating serenade. Their research appears in the current issue of the journal Nature. “For me it is very rewarding that, in a team of exceptional scientists coming from different backgrounds, we joined forces and methodologies to figure out the key characteristics of a neural circuit that can explain a complex behavior — the patterning of courtship song,” said Frederic Römschied, first author on this paper and a former postdoctoral fellow in Murthy’s lab. He is now a group leader at the European Neuroscience Institute in Göttingen, Germany. “It might be a surprise to discover that the fruit flies buzzing around your banana can sing, but it’s more than music, it’s communication,” said Murthy, the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor and the director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. “It’s a conversation, with a back and forth. He sings, and she slows down, and she turns, and then he sings more. He’s constantly assessing her behavior to decide exactly how to sing. They’re exchanging information in this way. Unlike a songbird, belting out his song from his perch, he tunes everything into what she’s doing. It’s a dialogue.” It might be a surprise to discover that the fruit flies buzzing around your banana can sing, but it’s more than music, it’s communication. By studying how these tiny brains work, researchers hope to develop insights that will prove useful in the larger and more complex brains that are millions of times harder to study. In particular, Murthy’s team is trying to determine how the brain decides what behavior is appropriate in which context. © 2023 The Trustees of Princeton University

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28959 - Posted: 10.14.2023

By Jori Lewis The squat abandoned concrete structure may have been a water tower when this tract of land in the grasslands of Mozambique was a cotton factory. Now it served an entirely different purpose: Housing a bat colony. To climb through the building’s low opening, bat researcher Césaria Huó and I had to battle a swarm of biting tsetse flies and clear away a layer of leaves and vines. My eyes quickly adjusted to the low light, but my nose, even behind a mask, couldn’t adjust to the smell of hundreds of bats and layers of bat guano—a fetid reek of urea with fishy, spicy overtones. But Huó had a different reaction. “I don’t mind the smell now,” she said. After several months of monitoring bat colonies in the Gorongosa National Park area as a master’s student in the park’s conservation biology program, Huó said she almost likes it. “Now, when I smell it, I know there are bats here.” Since we arrived at the tower during the daylight hours, I had expected the nocturnal mammals to be asleep. Instead, they were shaking their wings, flying from one wall or spot on the ceiling to another, swooping sometimes a bit too close to me for my comfort. But the bats didn’t care about me; they were cruising for mates. It was mating season, and we had lucked out to see their mating performances. Huó pointed out that some females were inspecting the males, checking out their wing flapping prowess. But Huó and her adviser, the polymath entomologist Piotr Naskrecki, did not bring me to this colony to view the bats’ seductive dances and their feats of flight, since those behaviors are already known to scientists. We were here to decipher what the bats were saying while doing them. Huó and Naskrecki had set up cameras and audio recorders the night before to learn more about these bats and try to understand the nature of the calls they use, listening for signs of meaning. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc., All rights reserved.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28895 - Posted: 09.07.2023

By Tanvi Dutta Gupta The Arctic Ocean is a noisy place. Creatures of the deep have learned to live with the cacophony of creaking ice sheets and breaking icebergs, but humanmade sources of noise from ships and oil and gas infrastructure are altering that natural submarine soundscape. Now, a research team has found that even subtle underwater noise pollution can cause narwhals to make shallower dives and cut their hunts short. The research, published today in Science Advances, uncovers “some really great information on a species we know very little about,” says Ari Friedlaender, an ocean ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, not involved in the study. Knowing how the whales react to these noises could help conservationists “act proactively” to protect the animals in their Arctic home where warming waters already threaten their lifestyles. Narwhals—with their long, unicornlike horns extending from their faces—live in one of the most extreme environments in the world, explains Outi Tervo, an ecologist at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the study’s first author. Each narwhal returns in summer to the same small fjord where it was born in order to feed on fish, squid, and shrimp. As humans increasingly encroach on Arctic waters, though, scientists, conservationists, and Inuit communities have worried about how development and ship traffic will affect the whales. Many of Greenland’s Inuit communities rely on the narwhals as a culturally important food source. When Greenland’s government started to auction new permits for offshore oil exploration in 2011, Tervo and colleagues decided to examine whether the noise pollution associated with such development affected narwhals. For instance, boats exploring the sea floor tow instruments called airguns, which blast air a few meters below the vessels to sonically suss out the presence of cavities that may contain oil and gas. Those pulses can be the “loudest sound put in the ocean by humans,” says study co-author Susanna Blackwell, a biologist with Greeneridge Sciences.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28858 - Posted: 07.27.2023

By Marlowe Starling When a bird sings, you may think you’re hearing music. But are the melodies it’s making really music? Or is what we’re hearing merely a string of lilting calls that appeals to the human ear? Birdsong has inspired musicians from Bob Marley to Mozart and perhaps as far back as the first hunter-gatherers who banged out a beat. And a growing body of research is showing that the affinity human musicians feel toward birdsong has a strong scientific basis. Scientists are understanding more about avian species’ ability to learn, interpret and produce songs much like our own. Just like humans, birds learn songs from each other and practice to perfect them. And just as human speech is distinct from human music, bird calls, which serve as warnings and other forms of direct communication, differ from birdsong. While researchers are still debating the functions of birdsong, studies show that it is structurally similar to our own tunes. So, are birds making music? That depends on what you mean. “I’m not sure we can or want to define music,” said Ofer Tchernichovski, a zoologist and psychologist at the City University of New York who studies birdsong. Where you draw the line between music and mere noise is arbitrary, said Emily Doolittle, a zoomusicologist and composer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The difference between a human baby’s babbling versus a toddler’s humming might seem more distinct than that of a hatchling’s cry for food and a maturing bird’s practicing of a melody, she added. Wherever we draw the line, birdsong and human song share striking similarities. How birds build songs Existing research points to one main conclusion: Birdsong is structured like human music. Songbirds change their tempo (speed), pitch (how high or low they sing) and timbre (tone) to sing tunes that resemble our own melodies. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28817 - Posted: 06.07.2023

By Susan Milius In a castaway test setup, groups of young honeybees figuring out how to forage on their own start waggle dancing spontaneously — but badly. Waggling matters. A honeybee’s rump-shimmy runs and turning loops encode clues that help her colony mates fly to food she has found, sometimes kilometers away. However, five colonies in the new test had no older sisters or half-sisters around as role models for getting the dance moves right. Still, dances improved in some ways as the youngsters wiggled and looped day after day, reports behavioral ecologist James Nieh of the University of California, San Diego. But when waggling the clues for distance information, Apis mellifera without role models never did match the timing and coding in normal colonies where young bees practiced with older foragers before doing the main waggle themselves. The youngsters-only colonies thus show that social learning, or the lack of it, matters for communicating by dance among honeybees, Nieh and an international team of colleagues say in the March 10 Science. Bee waggle dancing, a sort of language, turns out to be both innate and learned, like songbird or human communication. The dance may appear simple in a diagram, but executing it on expanses of honeycomb cells gets challenging. Bees are “running forward at over one body length per second in the pitch black trying to keep the correct angle, surrounded by hundreds of bees that are crowding them,” Nieh says. Beekeepers and biologists know that some kinds of bees can learn from others of their kind — some bumblebees even tried soccer (SN: 2/23/17). But when it comes to waggle dancing, “I think people have assumed it’s genetic,” Nieh says. That would make this fancy footwork more like the chatty but innate communications of cuttlefish color change, for instance. The lab bee-castaway experiments instead show a nonhuman example of “social learning for sophisticated communication,” Nieh says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28695 - Posted: 03.11.2023

By Sam Jones Dolphins, pilot whales and sperm whales use echolocation clicks to hunt and subdue their prey. But the animals, known as toothed whales, also produce other sounds for social communication, like grunts and high-pitched whistles. For decades, scientists speculated that something in the nasal cavity was responsible for this range of sounds, but the mechanics were unclear. Now, researchers have uncovered how structures in the nose, called phonic lips, allow toothed whales to produce sounds at different registers, similar to the way the human voice functions, all while conserving air deep beneath the ocean’s surface. And the animals use the vocal fry register for echolocation. Yes, that vocal fryyyy. The work was published in the journal Science on Thursday. Bottlenose Sounds A sequence of vocal registers from a bottlenose dolphin: Echolocation clicks made with vocal fry; the bursts of standard vocalization; and whistles. Studying the structures responsible for whale sound production has been no small task. Over the last few decades, “there was a lot of circumstantial evidence — people filming things with X-rays or triangulating sound with different hydrophones,” said Coen P.H. Elemans, a biologist at the University of Southern Denmark. Taking a new approach, Dr. Elemans and colleagues inserted endoscopes into the nasal cavities of trained Atlantic bottlenose dolphins and harbor porpoises to get high-speed footage during sound production. They found that sound was indeed being produced in the nose. But to confirm that the phonic lips were involved — and to see if their movement was driven by muscles or by airflow — they created an experimental setup with deceased (beached or bycatch) harbor porpoises, filming the phonic lips as air was pushed through the nasal complex. They saw that the phonic lips would briefly separate and then collide back together, causing a tissue vibration that would release sound into the surrounding water. But relying on air-driven sound production would not seem to be the best idea if your food is in the murky deep. “One thousand meters down, you have 1 percent of the air you had at the surface,” said Peter Madsen, a zoophysiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has been tagging toothed whales for decades and is a co-author of the study. “To me, it’s always been super provocative to see a sperm whale or beaked whale or pilot whale dive deep, clicking happily, while having the knowledge in the back of my head that they’re supposed to use air for this.” © 2023 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28686 - Posted: 03.04.2023

By McKenzie Prillaman A newfound species of frog doesn’t ribbit. In fact, it doesn’t make any sound at all. Many frogs have unusual characteristics, from turning translucent to being clumsy jumpers (SN: 12/22/22; 6/15/22). The recently discovered amphibian lacks a voice. It joins a group of seven other voiceless frog species called spiny-throated reed frogs that reside in East Africa. Instead of croaking, the spines on male frogs’ throats might help their female counterparts recognize potential mates via touch, sort of like braille, says conservation biologist Lucinda Lawson of the University of Cincinnati. Lawson and colleagues spotted the little frog, only about 25 millimeters long, in 2019 while surveying wildlife in Tanzania’s Ukaguru Mountains. The team immediately recognized the animal, now named Hyperolius ukaguruensis, as a spiny-throated reed frog. But something seemed off. “It [was] the wrong color,” Lawson says. Most frogs from this group are green and silver, but this one was gold and brown. Some quick measurements to check if the peculiar frog simply had trivial color variations or if it could be a new species revealed that its eyes were smaller than other spiny-throated reed frogs. The researchers agreed: “Let’s do some genetics,” Lawson says. They ran DNA tests on two frogs that looked like they belonged to the suspected new species, as well as 10 individuals belonging to known spiny-throated species. Comparing the golden frogs’ genetic makeup with that of the others revealed the oddballs were genetically distinct, Lawson and colleagues report February 2 in PLOS ONE. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 28655 - Posted: 02.04.2023

By Darren Incorvaia The great apes do not have spoken language, but they share many gestures. Can humans like you understand those gestures too? Watch this short video and test your ability to read chimpanzee body language. What is this chimpanzee (the one scratching its arm) asking the other one to do? © 2023 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28640 - Posted: 01.25.2023

By Carolyn Wilke Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to be heard over a din of jackhammers and ambulance sirens. They yelled, calling louder and longer, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “Even then, there’s a dramatic increase in how often they fail to coordinate,” said Shane Gero, a whale biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa who wasn’t part of the work. The effect of increasing noise was “remarkably clear.” Scientists worked with a dolphin duo, males named Delta and Reese, at an experimental lagoon at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys. The pair were trained to swim to different spots in their enclosure and push a button within one second of each other. “They’ve always been the most motivated animals. They were really excited about doing the task,” said Pernille Sørensen, a biologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bristol in England. The dolphins talked to each other using whistles and often whistled right before pressing the button, she said. Ms. Sørensen’s team piped in sounds using underwater speakers. Tags, stuck behind the animals’ blowholes, captured what the dolphins heard and called to each other as well as their movements. Through 200 trials with five different sound environments, the team observed how the dolphins changed their behavior to compensate for loud noise. The cetaceans turned their bodies toward each other and paid greater attention to each other’s location. At times, they nearly doubled the length of their calls and amplified their whistles, in a sense shouting, to be heard above cacophonies of white noise or a recording of a pressure washer. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28628 - Posted: 01.14.2023

By Alejandro Portilla Navarro Dawn breaks in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. The city is still asleep, but the early risers are greeted by a beautiful symphony: Hummingbirds, corn-eaters, yigüirros (clay-colored thrushes), yellow-breasted grosbeaks, blue tanagers, house wrens, warblers and other birds announce that a new day has arrived. Soon the incessant noise of vehicles and their horns, construction, street vendors and more take over, shaping the soundscape of the frenetic routine of hundreds of thousands of people who travel and live in this city. Then, the birds’ songs will slip into the background. “The act of birdsong has two main functions in males: It is to attract females and also to defend their territory from other males,” says Luis Andrés Sandoval Vargas, an ornithologist at the University of Costa Rica. For females in the tropics, he adds, the primary role of their song is to defend territory. Thus, in order to communicate in cities, to keep their territory safe and find mates, birds must find ways to counteract the effects of anthropogenic noise — that is, the noise produced by humans. “The main effect of urban development on song is that many birds sing at higher frequencies,” says Sandoval Vargas. Studies over the past 15 years have found, for example, that blackbirds (Turdus merula), great tits (Parus major) and rufous-collared sparrows (Zonotrichia capensis) sing at higher pitches, with higher minimum frequencies, in urban environments than in rural ones. But the birds’ response to anthropogenic noise may be more complex than that, as Sandoval Vargas found when studying house wrens (Troglodytes aedon). House wrens are small, brown birds — about 10 centimeters tall and weighing 12 grams — that feed on insects and tend to live near humans. In Costa Rica, they are found almost everywhere, but are especially abundant in the cities. “Males sing almost year-round and sing for many hours during the day, and much of their behavior is mediated by vocalizations,” explains Sandoval Vargas. But what makes them ideal for studying adaptations to urban environments is that most of the components of their song are within the same frequency range as the noise that we humans produce. © 2022 Annual Reviews

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28553 - Posted: 11.16.2022

By David Grimm “Whooo’s a good boy?” “Whooo’s a pretty kitty?” When it comes to communicating with our pets, most of us can’t help but talk to them like babies. We pitch our voices high, extend our vowels, and ask short, repetitive questions. Dogs seem to like this. They’re far more likely to pay attention to us when we use this “caregiver speech,” research has shown. Now, scientists have found the same is true for cats, though only when their owner is talking. The work adds evidence that cats—like dogs—may bond with us in some of the same ways infants do. “It’s a fascinating study,” says Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist and expert on cat cognition at Unity College, who was not involved with the work. “It further supports the idea that our cats are always listening to us.” Charlotte de Mouzon had a practical reason for getting into this line of research. An ethologist at Paris Nanterre University, she had previously been a cat behaviorist, consulting with owners on how to solve everything from litter box problems to aggressive behavior. “Sometimes people would ask me, ‘What’s the scientific evidence behind your approaches?’” she says. “I was frustrated that there were no studies being done on cat behavior in France.” So, she began a Ph.D. and was soon studying cat-human communication. As a first step, de Mouzon confirmed what most cat owners already know: We dip into “baby talk” when we address our feline friends–a habit de Mouzon is guilty of herself. “What’s up, my little ones?” she finds herself asking in a high-pitched voice when greeting her two kitties, Mila and Shere Khan. But do cats, like dogs, actually respond more to this “cat-directed speech”? To find out, de Mouzon recruited 16 cats and their owners—students at the Alfort National Veterinary School just outside of Paris. Because cats can be challenging to work with, de Mouzon studied them on feline-friendly turf, converting a common room in the students’ dormitory into a makeshift animal behavior lab filled with toys, a litter box, and places to hide.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28525 - Posted: 10.26.2022

By Darren Incorvaia Songbirds get a lot of love for their dulcet tones, but drummers may start to steal some of that spotlight. Woodpeckers, which don’t sing but do drum on trees, have brain regions that are similar to those of songbirds, researchers report September 20 in PLOS Biology. The finding is surprising because songbirds use these regions to learn their songs at an early age, yet it’s not clear if woodpeckers learn their drum beats (SN: 9/16/21). Whether woodpeckers do or not, the result suggests a shared evolutionary origin for both singing and drumming. The ability to learn vocalizations by listening to them, just like humans do when learning to speak, is a rare trait in the animal kingdom. Vocal learners, such as songbirds, hummingbirds and parrots, have independently evolved certain clusters of nerve cells called nuclei in their forebrains that control the ability. Animals that don’t learn vocally are thought to lack these brain features. While it’s commonly assumed that other birds don’t have these nuclei, “there’s thousands of birds in the world,” says Matthew Fuxjager, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “While we say these brain regions only exist in these small groups of species, nobody’s really looked in a lot of these other taxa.” Fuxjager and his colleagues examined the noggins of several birds that don’t learn vocally to check if they really did lack these brain nuclei. Using molecular probes, the team checked the bird brains for activity of a gene called parvalbumin, a known marker of the vocal learning nuclei. Many of the birds, including penguins and flamingos, came up short, but there was one exception — male and female woodpeckers, which had three spots in their brains with high parvalbumin activity. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28486 - Posted: 09.21.2022

By Emily Anthes My cat is a bona fide chatterbox. Momo will meow when she is hungry and when she is full, when she wants to be picked up and when she wants to be put down, when I leave the room or when I enter it, or sometimes for what appears to be no real reason at all. But because she is a cat, she is also uncooperative. So the moment I downloaded MeowTalk Cat Translator, a mobile app that promised to convert Momo’s meows into plain English, she clammed right up. For two days I tried, and failed, to solicit a sound. On Day 3, out of desperation, I decided to pick her up while she was wolfing down her dinner, an interruption guaranteed to elicit a howl of protest. Right on cue, Momo wailed. The app processed the sound, then played an advertisement for Sara Lee, then rendered a translation: “I’m happy!” I was dubious. But MeowTalk provided a more plausible translation about a week later, when I returned from a four-day trip. Upon seeing me, Momo meowed and then purred. “Nice to see you,” the app translated. Then: “Let me rest.” (The ads disappeared after I upgraded to a premium account.) The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. Scientists have taught sign language to great apes, chatted with grey parrots and even tried to teach English to bottlenose dolphins. Pets — with which we share our homes but not a common language — are particularly tempting targets. My TikTok feed brims with videos of Bunny, a sheepadoodle who has learned to press sound buttons that play prerecorded phrases like “outside,” “scritches” and “love you.” MeowTalk is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences — machine-learning algorithms — to decode animal communication. The idea is not as far-fetched as it may seem. For example, machine-learning systems, which are able to extract patterns from large data sets, can distinguish between the squeaks that rodents make when they are happy and those that they emit when they are in distress. Applying the same advances to our creature companions has obvious appeal. “We’re trying to understand what cats are saying and give them a voice” Javier Sanchez, a founder of MeowTalk, said. “We want to use this to help people build better and stronger relationships with their cats,” he added. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28458 - Posted: 08.31.2022

By Carl Zimmer One of the most remarkable things about our species is how fast human culture can change. New words can spread from continent to continent, while technologies such as cellphones and drones change the way people live around the world. It turns out that humpback whales have their own long-range, high-speed cultural evolution, and they don’t need the internet or satellites to keep it running. In a study published on Tuesday, scientists found that humpback songs easily spread from one population to another across the Pacific Ocean. It can take just a couple of years for a song to move several thousand miles. Ellen Garland, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the study, said she was shocked to find whales in Australia passing their songs to others in French Polynesia, which in turn gave songs to whales in Ecuador. “Half the globe is now vocally connected for whales,” she said. “And that’s insane.” It’s even possible that the songs travel around the entire Southern Hemisphere. Preliminary studies by other scientists are revealing whales in the Atlantic Ocean picking up songs from whales the eastern Pacific. Each population of humpback whales spends the winter in the same breeding grounds. The males there sing loud underwater songs that can last up to half an hour. Males in the same breeding ground sing a nearly identical tune. And from one year to the next, the population’s song gradually evolves into a new melody. Dr. Garland and other researchers have uncovered a complex, language-like structure in these songs. The whales combine short sounds, which scientists call units, into phrases. They then combine the phrases into themes. And each song is made of several themes. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28456 - Posted: 08.31.2022

By Anna Gibbs Cradled inside the hushed world of the womb, fetuses might be preparing to come out howling. In the same way newborn humans can cry as soon as they’re born, common marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) produce contact calls to seek attention from their caregivers. Those vocalizations are not improv, researchers report in a preprint posted April 14 at bioRxiv. Ultrasound imaging of marmoset fetuses reveals that their mouths are already mimicking the distinctive pattern of movements used to emit their first calls, long before the production of sound. Early behaviors in infants are commonly described as “innate” or “hard-wired,” but a team at Princeton University wondered how exactly those behaviors develop. How does a baby know how to cry as soon as it’s born? The secret may lie in what’s happening before birth. “People tend to ignore the fetal period,” says Darshana Narayanan, a behavioral neuroscientist who did the research while at Princeton University. “They just think that it’s like the baby’s just vegetating and waiting to be born…. [But] that’s where many things begin.” Research shows, for instance, that chicks inside their eggs are already learning to identify their species’ call (SN: 9/16/21). “So much is developing so much earlier in development than we previously thought,” says developmental psychobiologist Samantha Carouso-Peck, executive director of Grassland Bird Trust in Fort Edward, N.Y., who was not involved in the research. But, she says, “we really haven’t looked much at all at the production side of this. Most of what we know is the auditory side.” Carouso-Peck studies vocal learning in songbirds and how it applies to how humans acquire language. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28325 - Posted: 05.11.2022

Dolphins are known to use physical contact like petting and rubbing to bond with their closest allies. But for more distant contacts, male dolphins bond by trading whistles instead. KELSEY SNELL, HOST: You know those friends who live far away, but you still stay in touch? You can't really hug, so you call or text them instead. Well, dolphins do something sort of similar. AILSA CHANG, HOST: That, my friends, is whistling. A new study found that the male bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia whistle to the other male dolphins they don't have strong bonds with. SNELL: University of Bristol marine biologist Emma Chereskin is the lead author of the study. She explains that male bottlenose dolphins have an alliance structure. They have their closest circle where the bonds are strong. EMMA CHERESKIN: They often use physical touch, so rubbing their fins together, swimming side by side. CHANG: Then there is another circle where the bonds are weaker and they don't use as much physical touch, but they do whistle to identify themselves and to keep alliances intact. In other words, they bond at a distance. Sound familiar? SNELL: That was a whistle exchange between three dolphins. The researchers gave them names - Kooks (ph), Spirit and Guppy. CHERESKIN: They're saying, hi, I'm Kooks. I'm right here. And then Spirit would reply, hi, I'm Spirit. I'm also right here. And then Guppy gets in on it towards the end. He's saying, hi, I'm Guppy. I'm also here. CHANG: The study tests the social bonding hypothesis of Robin Dunbar. He proposed that animal vocalizations evolved as a form of vocal grooming to replace physical grooming. Karl Berg from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley says this study advances that hypothesis. KARL BERG: These dolphin groups can be in really large groups in the dark ocean where visual communication isn't going to be possible. It makes sense that this vocal communication system is very important to them. © 2022 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 28262 - Posted: 04.02.2022