Great Minds (Don’t Always) Think Alike: Recognising Animal Intelligence
Image Credit: jans canon, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
Tag Archives: anthropomorphic
The Ecology of The Lion King (With Lion Specialist Maria Gatta)
Image Credit: Wade Tregaskis, CC BY-NC 2.0, Image Cropped.
If there’s one film that I could perhaps credit for sparking my fascination with the natural world, the it’s The Land Before Time. BUT if we’re going with films that do not feature the most gangly Pachycephalosaurids you ever did see, then it has to be The Lion King. The sweeping landscapes, the (at times literal) fountains of species, the Shakespearian drama, the poor understanding of trophic cascades – it’s got it all.
Read moreThe Kids Are Not OK: Causes of Infanticide in Female Mammals
The Bonnet Macacque, one of the 89 species in which females have been shown to commit infanticide (Image Credit: Vino Rex, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)
The evolution of infanticide by females in mammals (2019) Lukas & Huchard, Philsophical Transactions of the Royal Society – Biological Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0075
The Crux
The practice of male mammals killing their rival’s cubs has been well-documented by wildlife biologists. The image of a male lion striding away from a pride with a dead cub in his mouth is quite haunting (spare a though for Scar’s kids when Simba takes over again). But infanticide by female mammals has received less attention.
Whilst males generally only kill young to ensure they have more access to mates, the motivations behind infanticide in females are more complex. It ultimately comes down to resource competition, but the resources themselves are myriad – milk, availability of space, care from more than one ‘parental’ figure (allocare), and social status. These four resources make up the competing hypotheses as to why females commit infanticide. This week’s researchers wanted to know what factors of a species biology increased the likelihood of a mother to kill an infant of the same species.
Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson: Rise of the Planet of the Insects
Anne-Sverdrup-Thygeson has made it her life’s mission to fascinate the world – with insects (Image Credit: Håkon Sparre, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)
The Internet has been set abuzz (pun intended) lately by rumours of the Insect Apocalypse. And whilst the concept itself is depressing, it’s worth smiling at the fact that the public has finally started to take an interest in the ecological plight of a group of animals until recently ignored whenever possible. After all, insects include, wasps, cockroaches, bees and myriad other ‘nasties’.
Professor Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson is one academic/author who has made it her life’s mission to turn people around on insects, which includes her recent Brage Prize nominated book “Terra Insecta”. Sam Perrin and I sat down at the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference to ask Anne about why people have an aversion to creepy crawlies, how scientific communication helps in her mission, and whether or not the planet could survive the eradication of the mosquito.
Seeing Ourselves in Animals: The Pitfalls of Anthropomorphism
The thought of an orca playing with its food – a cute seal – can be a grim one. But is it useful to project our ideas of morality and emotion onto other species? (Image Credit: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)
Ecology for the Masses 