Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró)

4/4 It reminded me of the paper we published on the concept of death, in which we argued that thanatosis (playing dead) can only have reached its current levels of sophistication because predators have expectations about what death should look like.

(paper, 2021) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

3/4 The evidence in predators is somewhat less (there are fewer studies), but like their prey, they are subject to selective pressures that lead them to better remember locations, recognize subtle patterns, distinguish mimetic prey, etc.

2/4 There is strong evidence that better cognitive performance is associated with individuals with greater survival in nature (from mice and pheasants to lemurs). Another interesting aspect is how species that develop physical defenses tend to reduce their brain size.

1/4 The role of predators and prey in the evolution of intelligence.

The hypotheses of social intelligence and ecological intelligence are insufficient; they argue here that what is missing from the equation is the arms race between predators and prey.

(paper) www.nature.com/articles/s44...

3/3 The mosaic landscapes created by agriculture (fields, pastures, forests, hedges) are the most diverse. When humans disappear, the forest recovers, but it is homogeneous. Many of the plants we know are adapted to us.

They use the Spanish dehesas as an example of maximum diversity.

2/3 Plant diversity increased with the growth of human populations (from the year 0 to approximately 1300). When the Black Death struck (1347-1353), plant diversity plummeted, and it took nearly 300 years to recover.

1/3 We are part of the ecosystem (or we have been)

They have studied 4,616 samples of fossil pollen from the year 0 to 1850, and have discovered that the Black Death (which wiped out half of Europe's population) led to a REDUCTION in biodiversity.

(paper) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Esperemos que sí. Es muy interesante e inspirador lo que hace. Aunque sea un palo, sospecho que acabará continuando : )

Qué pena. Lo he estado siguiendo en Instagram todo este tiempo : /

Gracias por el aviso, por cierto. Últimamente entro menos, no me habría enterado de no ser por ti 🙏

I’m looking forward to learning from that chapter!

2/2 It's important to note that these photos might give people the impression that monkeys are cute pets. Please don't make that mistake. Macaques need complex social lives, which can only be found in a healthy macaque society.
We should respect monkeys instead of owning them

1/2 You've probably heard of Punch, the little Japanese macaque who went viral after being abandoned by his mother.

I was interviewed by Indian Express to explain why this can happen and what the future holds for him.
indianexpress.com/article/expl...

4/4 The authors believe that this species is unique. While other sea lions reproduce annually, Australian sea lions only reproduce every 18 months. This gives their offspring extra time to learn from their mothers.

They are somewhat more "K specialists"

3/4 The mother sacrifices her hunting ability so that her young can learn. Alone, she would go out to sea for 3 days; accompanied, the sessions lasted 8h. She attempted to hunt alone 172 times; accompanied only 3 times, on one of which she caught a giant cuttlefish before the eyes of her young.

2/4 The differences between hunting alone and hunting with her calf were enormous. She took her calf to macroalgae meadows, while she hunted in deep reefs. These meadows do not require calves to dive very deep and allow them to learn complex hunting techniques.

1/4 Australian sea lions do something very similar to teaching their pups

They studied the behaviour of a mother in detail using video, GPS and accelerometers, and compared her trips alone with those when she was hunting with her young.

(paper) connectsci.au/zo/article/7...

Yes, I have read it!
It's another reminder never to say "exclusive to humans" when something is not found in other apes. Chickens could be out there waiting to be tested : )

haha yes, I have it in my collection :D
What a weird world

9/9 If a chicken benefits from immediately associating the sound 'Bouba' with rounded objects and 'Kiki' with pointed shapes (even the letters comply with this!), then this is because the world behaves this way, and this information eventually filters into the genes.

This is worth contemplating.

8/9 In my opinion, the implications of all this are much more profound. These results reveal something very deep about how genetics encodes not only information about our ancestors' bodies and minds, but also about the world in which they lived.

7/9 It was once believed that language had to be arbitrary (with no relationship between words and their meanings). We now know that this is not the case, as it appears to have an crossmodal origin (crossing between the senses), so that the word “snake” has properties of the animal.

6/9 This isn't the first time I've talked about Bouba and Kiki. There has been much debate about why this occurs in humans across all cultures. V.S. Ramachandran has played an important role in popularizing it and linking it to the origin of language (and synaesthesia).

5/9 Since the results were good, the researchers decided to try with day-old chicks and expose them to the figures and words “Bouba” and “Kiki” without prior training or rewards!

As before, the chicks approached the correct figure

4/9 Surprisingly, despite the fact that there was no reward to be found during the test, the association remained constant, showing no effects of learning or extinction of what had been learned.

3/9 They were then confronted with both figures while a speaker played the words “Bouba” or “Kiki” (there was no food hidden in the test).

Surprisingly, just like adult humans, the chickens approached Bouba or Kiki to look for food depending on the sound.

2/9 First, they trained chickens only 3 days old (n = 42) to find food behind a figure that was a mixture between Bouba and Kiki.

The drawings of the chickens deserve a special mention. I noted this when the preprint was published : )
(preprint, 2024) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/9 The Bouba and Kiki effect is confirmed in newborn chicks

Chicks just one day old already associate the rounded shape with the sound “Bouba” and the pointed shape with “Kiki,” and the implications are profound.

(paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

2/2 Although the evidence is strong, the study faces the challenge of not being able to distinguish whether whales spend a lot of time together because they know how to do this already, or if they learned the technique by spending a lot of time together. I would say that one leads to the other.

1/2 Humpback whales learn the bubble net technique through social learning

This study found very strong evidence of this, observing over 500 whales and 4,000 interactions over 20 years. They learn from the whales with whom they spend the most time

(paper) royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró) (@biotay.bsky.social) 1/2 To experience an 'aha' moment, it is best to reach the second phase of NREM sleep. In this experiment, 90 participants took a test, then slept for 20 minutes. Of those who reached light N2 sleep,…

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