The look on the cat’s face says, “I’ve made a huge mistake”
(Source: addelburgh, via thefrogman)
Ravens Remember and Greet You Accordingly
When you go outside, do the birds sound happy or angry when they see you? New research has found that at least one group of birds, ravens, remembers prior interactions with people and varies calls based on those earlier experiences.
So it’s not too far fetched to think that if you bothered a bird some time ago, the bird might unleash the avian version of swearing the next time you approach.
The research, published in Current Biology, adds to the growing body of evidence that birds remember the appearance and voices of individuals, along with their prior encounters with them. Last year we told you how crows don’t forget faces, for example.
Ravens can also mimic human speech.
A bear with no hair. A bare bear - Fuzzy wuzzy? is that you?
In 2009 at Leipzig Zoo in Germany, the female Speckled Bears inexplicably lost all their fur.
Honeybees Might Have Emotions…
If these honeybee blues are interpreted as they would be in dogs or horses or humans, then insects might have feelings.
Honeybee response “has more in common with that of vertebrates than previously thought,” wrote Newcastle University researchers Melissa Bateson and Jeri Wright in their bee study, published June 2 in Current Biology. The findings “suggest that honeybees could be regarded as exhibiting emotions.”
Bateson and Wright tested their bees with a type of experiment designed to show whether animals are, like humans, capable of experiencing cognitive states in which ambiguous information is interpreted in negative fashion.
Of course, unlike unhappy people, animals can’t say that the glass is half-empty. Researchers must first train them to associate one stimulus — a sound, a shape, or for honeybees, a smell — with a positive reward, and a second with a punishment.
Then, by prompting the animals with a third, in-between stimulus, it’s possible to assess their outlook. Like a depressed person seeing hostility in a neutral gaze, pessimistic animals tend to treat that uncertain stimulus like a punishment.
Such tests might seem simplistic compared to the richness of human emotion, but they’re the most objective available tool for comparing cognition across species. And pessimism is no mean feat: It’s a form of cognitive bias, considered in humans to be an aspect of emotion. You can’t be pessimistic if you don’t have an inner life.
