This is quite striking. Certainly seems to go beyond the procedural mimicry that some apes (especially orangutans, interestingly) are so good at. I got to meet Kanzi once in relation to a rhythm study I was working on. A charming fellow!

A new paper in Science suggests that primates (a bonobo male) can engage in "secondary representation" or "pretense", similar to children drinking pretend tea at a tea party.

whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/02/06/c...

Gray Seal Cannibalism at the Largest Colony in the World, Sable Island Click on the article title to read more.

Another new paper led by SMRU's @izzylangley.bsky.social: First observations of grey seal cannibalism at Sable Island, inc. a comparison of carcass pathology to cases in Scotland. Collab between SMRU, DFO and @dalhousie.bsky.social with support from @oceanfrontier.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1111/mms....

Yeah, this is how I feel when I read Jane Austen's Juvenilia. But I'm sure I was doing something else really important....

Long-term pair bonding and genetic evidence for monogamy among urban coyotes (Canis latrans) Abstract. Coyotes (Canis latrans) occur across North America in many types of ecosystems, including urban areas, yet certain aspects of coyote behavior rem

No disrespect to wolves, which are certainly socially monogamous and probably more sexually monogamous than humans, but it's coyotes who are the TRULY monogamous wild canid... academic.oup.com/jmammal/arti...

New article with some legendary marine mammal research vets - we make the case for opportunistic, developmental studies of naturally occurring maternal exposure to algal neurotoxins in sea lions.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Perception, habit, memory, decision making, learning -- all of these will affect how an animal might respond to an environmental challenge. We may not be able to know what it's like to be a dolphin, but we have plenty of evidence for how they perceive, process, and act on environmental information.

Our core argument, and this is something Gordon and Heidi and I discuss frequently, was that cognition (information processing, running from sensation to action and everything in-between) allows real-time adaptation to challenges, and is typically underconsidered in conservation.

We had teams of scientists with different backgrounds - ecology, biology, conservation, psychology, behavior, neuroscience - brainstorm solutions to pressing marine mammal conservation concerns. The twist was that solutions had to take the animal's cognition into account.

Exploring Marine Mammal Cognition as a Conservation Tool Cognition is an animal's real-time adaptation system for responding to change. Rapid environmental change, often anthropogenic, is expanding the range and severity of challenges confronting wild anim...

This one was a long time in the making! Written with my great colleagues Heidi Harley and Gordon Bauer, and a host of people game enough to engage with us on cognition and marine mammal conservation at a special 2022 Marine Mammal Society workshop.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We live in a world, a real world, governed by cooperation, mutualism, coordination for maximally beneficial distributed outcomes. These are the iron laws of the world, handed down from time immemorial!

Really interesting species -- in the Med they've largely moved to pupping in caves instead of on beaches, which is actually a problem for continued survival. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Multiple Determinants of Whole and Regional Brain Volume among Terrestrial Carnivorans Mammalian brain volumes vary considerably, even after controlling for body size. Although several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this variation, most research in mammals on the evolution of ...

Cool stuff -- of course important to always remember that sociality is far from universally accepted as the sole determinant of brain size (or, more relevant to cognition, neuron count/organization) in mammals e.g., journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Foraging ecology a major factor too.

Congress Urges Trump Administration to Abandon Effort to Gut Endangered Species Act | Wolf Conservation Center Today, prominent Congressional Democrats led members of their party in demanding the Trump administration withdraw their proposed rules that would effectively dismantle the Endangered Species Act.

On Friday, Congressional Democrats led members of their party in demanding the Trump administration withdraw their proposed rules that would dismantle the ESA.

Over one million comments were submitted before the close of the public comment period on December 22. Read more: https://bit.ly/49uubtd

The holotype skull of Otaria josefinae in dorsal view

Referred rostrum of Otaria josefinae in multiple views

Figure showing the geochronologic ranges of several otariids from the Pacific margin of South America, fossil pinnipeds and crocodilians from the Pisco Formation, and several climatic and oceanographic events

New paper: New species of sea lion, Otaria josefinae, from the early Pleistocene Pongo Fm. of Peru (1.9-1.4 myo) - extinct ancestor(?) or sister species of the South American sea lion. 🐬🦖🧪Read the paper here: academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

Cow Tools!

We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years.
We breed them and exploit them

It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS

Here I describe our study

(paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social
with @auersperga.bsky.social

Love this! Immediately thought of the Larson cartoon when I saw this paper…

Learnt formant modulation via upper vocal tract movements in a marine mammal - Discover Animals Discover Animals - Formants are resonance frequencies shaped by the upper vocal tract. Across vertebrates, they have a key role in acoustic communication. Humans show fine-grained control of...

Here's a fun one - colleagues did formant analysis on a harbor seal before and after he learned to modify one of his vocalizations. A growing body of work suggests Phocinae seals really do have fairly high vocal production plasticity. Wonder why...
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Working memory as an emergent property of the mind and brain Cognitive neuroscience research on working memory has been largely motivated by a standard model that arose from the melding of psychological theory w…

This is a good one! I think domain general recruitment of domain-specific regions is a robust model here. The best and most convincing thing I've read on this is still the great Brad Postle's 2006 review - Working Memory as Emergent Property...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus - Nature Calcium imaging of mouse hippocampal neurons while mice learn a reward-based task over several weeks provides insight into the evolution of the hippocampal reward representation during extended periods of experience.

Nature research paper: Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus

go.nature.com/49mB13V

AI tools boost individual scientists but could limit research as a whole Analyses of hundreds of thousands of papers in the natural sciences reveal a paradox: scientists who use AI tools produce more research but on a more confined set of topics.

Analyses of hundreds of thousands of papers in the natural sciences reveal a paradox: scientists who use AI tools produce more research but on a more confined set of topics

go.nature.com/458k7Ub

In other words I expect there IS domain-specific species variance, but dependent on the representational capacity of the domain-specific system in question. And due to our reliance on detailed vision for social, tool use, and foraging applications, never sat right w/ me that chimps would beat us...

It's a cool idea for sure, but I feel pretty strongly that working memory is a loose assembly of emergent recruitment capabilities that involve prefrontal resonance with whatever domain-specific region is required for the representation. Humans (as you note with practice) are GREAT at this :-)

Why these orcas are wearing salmon as hats (again) First observed in the 1980s, the fad of orcas swimming around with dead salmon on their foreheads off Washington State seemed to have faded—until now.

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

Salmon hats may be the closest thing to a non-human animal meme yet documented. Socially spread, no clear link to vital learned behaviors as with most animal play. The stuff about the paralimbic lobe though - we don’t know it’s function yet.

1/2 Ai, the chimpanzee who revolutionized science from Kyoto, has died at the age of 49.
She was the first chimpanzee to learn Arabic numerals.
Here you can see her in action in Tetsuro Matsuzawa's laboratory.

Amazing animals! my grad advisor and I debunked the superior working memory story though - practice effects. We had undergrads do the task for a semester and they were as good or better than ayumu. link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

Mark McCaughrean: the astronomer’s guide to the cosmos Our podcast on science and technology. This week, the space scientist and author takes us on a tour of the universe’s most intriguing places

“There is nothing we can do to this planet…that will make it less habitable than Mars already is.” Mark McCaughrean shares the lessons he’s learnt from a career in space science, on “Babbage”

e.g., administering amnestic drugs to new arrivals and THEN relocating them. That might sound pretty out there, but if the alternative is slaughtering a cognitively complex, long-lived, protected marine mammal...

But most sea lions DON'T go up river in the first place, so aggressive deterrents around river mouths (where sea lions have yet to learn of the high value resource at the dams) might be a more efficient approach. There are some wackier ideas too

But I argue in an upcoming omnibus paper on cognition and conservation in marine mammals that more might be done (figuratively) upstream (literally downstream) from the problem. Once sea lions find the fish buffet you have limited options aside from lethal removal.