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The bright, white tail feathers of the otherwise inconspicuous Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) are the most refle...
08/03/2023

The bright, white tail feathers of the otherwise inconspicuous Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) are the most reflective on record.

An international team of researchers found that the woodcock's white patches reflected up to 55 percent of light, making their feathers around 30 percent more reflective than any other bird previously measured.

Woodcocks are mottled brown birds with white patches on their tail feathers' undersides.

Around spring in Europe and Asia, males use these bright patches in breeding display flights to catch the eye of females on the ground, and females fan out their tail feathers to attract males flying overhead.

If kneading is a kitten behavior, why is my adult cat still doing it?While kneading evolved to stimulate milk supply and...
04/03/2023

If kneading is a kitten behavior, why is my adult cat still doing it?
While kneading evolved to stimulate milk supply and express chemical and tactile messages between kitten and mother, it's also a common behavior in adult cats, because of something called neoteny.

Neoteny is when an animal retains their juvenile physical or behavioral traits into adulthood. It's likely these traits are advantageous for cats when needing to socialize with humans and other cats or animals in the household.

Kneading, in particular, may be retained into adulthood because it can help communicate messages.

Kneading on your lap is a cat's way of saying, "we're affiliated" or "you're in my social group". Or, to be very human about it, "you're my person".

Gatti tested this with a sniff test equivalent of the mirror test for dogs. The dogs were tested to see how they reacted...
02/03/2023

Gatti tested this with a sniff test equivalent of the mirror test for dogs. The dogs were tested to see how they reacted to displaced snow that had been marked with their own or other dogs' urine. Sure enough, the canines spent way more time smelling the urine samples of the other dogs.

"This test provides significant evidence of self-awareness in dogs and can play a crucial role in showing that this capacity is not a specific feature of only great apes, humans, and a few other animals, but it depends on the way in which researchers try to verify it," said Gatti.

Other tests have since backed up the idea that dogs do have a clear sense of self, even if it may not be visually based.

Since its inception some half a century ago, there has been increasing evidence the mirror test is not as clear-cut as p...
02/03/2023

Since its inception some half a century ago, there has been increasing evidence the mirror test is not as clear-cut as proposed. Many animals known to be highly social fail the test, including monkeys, unless they're trained how to use a mirror first.

Animals that we're pretty confident are self-aware have failed it too, including gorillas.

Take dogs for example. They're capable of empathy, a trait that also implies a sense of self and others, yet they typically fail the mirror test.

"I believed that because dogs are much less sensitive to visual stimuli with respect to what, for example, humans and many apes are, it is likely that the failure of this and of other species in the mirror test is mainly due to the sensory modality chosen by the investigator to test the self-awareness and not, necessarily, to the absence of this latter," explained Tomsk State University evolutionary biologist Roberto Cazzolla Gatti in 2015.

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