Mourning Mom? Macaque Carries Daughter's Mummified Corpse for 4 Weeks

By Dan Robitzski, Live Science Staff Writer | September 27, 2017 06:42am ET

Loss and grief can make people do strange things, but that's nothing compared to our cousins in the animal kingdom. Recently, in a wildlife park in Italy, one macaque mother named Evalyne whose newborn died after just five days spent four weeks carrying around the infant's mummified remains.

In addition to occasionally grooming the decaying body, Evalyne was also seen taking bites of her deceased daughter, cannibalizing the remains in what may have been a final maternal instinct, the researchers studying her said in a case study published online Sept. 20 in the journal Primates.

"Everybody asks us why the mother came to cannibalize her offspring. To be honest, we simply do not know," said study co-author Bernard Thierry, a research director at France's National Center for Scientific Research, who studies ecology and physiology.

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Humans identify emotions in the voices of all air-breathing vertebrates - via Herp Digest

Joint press release by Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 7/26/17

Amphibians, reptiles, mammals -- all of them communicate via acoustic signals. And humans are able to assess the emotional value of these signals. This has been shown in a new study conducted by researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, in collaboration with colleagues from Alberta, Canada, and Vienna, Austria, in the journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society B". They interpreted these findings as evidence that there might be a universal code for the vocal expression and perception of emotions in the animal kingdom. Previous studies had demonstrated that humans are capable of identifying emotions in the voices of different mammals. The new study results have been expanded to include amphibians and reptiles.

The team headed by Dr Piera Filippi, currently at the University of Aix-Marseille and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, included, amongst others, three academics from Bochum: philosophy scholar Prof Dr Albert Newen, biopsychologist Prof Dr Dr h. c. Onur Güntürkün and assistant professor Dr Sebastian Ocklenburg.

Animal voices for different classes of vertebrates

Participants in the study included 75 individuals whose native language was English, German or Mandarin. They listened to audio recordings of nine different species of land-living vertebrates in the classes mammals, amphibians and reptiles, with the latter including birds and other reptiles.

Participants were able to distinguish between high and low levels of arousal in the acoustic signals of all animal classes. To do so, they mainly relied on frequency-related parameters in the signal.

"The findings suggest that fundamental mechanisms for the acoustic expression of emotions exist across all classes of vertebrates," conclude the authors. The evolutionary roots of this signal system might be shared by all vocalizing vertebrates. This finding goes in the direction of what Charles Darwin suggested more than a century ago, namely that acoustic expressions of emotion can be traced back to our earliest land-dwelling ancestors.

Audio files online

Recordings of low and high arousal calls of different animals can be found online at: http://news.rub.de/english/press-releases/2017-07-26-evolution-humans-identify-emotions-voices-all-air-breathing-vertebrates

Funding

The collaboration between Piera Filippi and the researchers from Bochum was realised thanks to a fellowship that was awarded by the Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution in Bochum.

Sugar gives bees a happy buzz, study finds

September 29, 2016

An unexpected sugary snack can give bees a little buzz and appears to lift their mood, even making them optimistic, according to research Thursday that suggests pollinators have feelings, too. 

Since emotions are subjective and difficult to measure—particularly in animals—researchers looked at how bees' behavior changed after they were given a sip of sucrose solution.

They found that bees learned to fly faster to a container with a sugary drink inside than to one with just water.

"Bees given a 60 percent sucrose reward to induce a positive affective state flew faster to the cylinder than non-rewarded bees," said the study in the journal Science, led by Clint Perry at the University of London. 

"Much like happy people are more likely to make optimistic judgments about ambiguous situations."

The sugar-buzzed bees also appeared to recover faster from a scare—when they were briefly caught and released, as if attacked by a predator spider—than bees that had not indulged in the sweet treat.

"Sweet food can increase positive emotions and improve negative mood in human adults, and reduce crying and grimacing of newborns in response to aversive stimuli," said the study.

"If drinking an unexpected sucrose solution caused a positive emotion–like state in bees, we predicted that, after consumption, bees' aversive reaction to the 'predator' would be attenuated," it added.

"Indeed, bees that consumed sucrose solution before the 'attack' took less time to reinitiate foraging."

Researchers said their study lends support to "the notion that invertebrates have states that fit the criteria defining emotion."

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Do fish have emotions and a consciousness?

DECEMBER 1, 2015

by Brett Smith

We have mostly thought of fish as unfeeling animals driven purely by instinct, but a new study from a team of European researchers has found evidence that fish can feel emotions.

Published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the new study reported a significant rise in body temperature among zebrafish when they were exposed to stressful situation, a phenomenon referred to in other animals as “emotional fever”.

In the past, emotional fever has been observed in birds, mammals, and some reptiles, but never before in fish. The phenomenon has somewhat controversially been linked to consciousness in these animals.

In the new study, researcher from Spain and the United Kingdom split six dozen fish into two groups of 36, and they were then put into a large tank with various interlocking compartments with temperatures spanning from about 64 degrees F to 95 degrees F.

The fish in a control group were left undisturbed in the location where the temperature was at the level they prefer: 82 degrees F. The other group was exposed to a stressful situation—they were enclosed in a net within the tank at 80 degrees F for 15 minutes. After this period of time the test group was let go.

While the control fish remained in the compartments at around 82 degrees, the fish exposed to stress tended to maneuver towards the chambers with a greater temperature, escalating their body temperature by 2 to 4 degrees. The scientists said this demonstrated that these fish were showing emotional fever.

Can fish be conscious despite having a simple brain? 

Researchers disagree on the level to which fish can have consciousness. Some scientists debate they cannot have consciousness as their brain is simple and absent a cerebral cortex with little ability to learn and remember, a small range of behaviors, and no capacity to experience misery.

Read more at

Animal welfare could be improved by new understanding of their emotions

Date:

December 3, 2014

Source:

University of Queen Mary London

Summary:

New research looking at how goats express subtle positive emotions could lead to greater understanding of animal welfare. While there has been a great deal of research into negative emotions and stress in animals it is often hard for those who work with animals to know when they are in more subtle positive states.

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Elephants are sensitive and very social, but there is no evidence they cry

An elephant that supposedly cried tears when it was being rescued from an abusive home where it had been captive for 50 years created much excitment on social media. The experience of being cut loose from the vicious-looking spikes and heavy chains that we see in the short video clip was one of intense emotion for Raju, the elephant in the video. This is not the first time that a story of a weeping elephant has done the rounds on the internet. Animals that seem to be behaving in human-like ways certainly generate great interest.

Humans usually cry for emotional reasons: pain, fear, sadness, or loneliness. So perhaps it is natural to interpret animal tears as having an emotional reason, too. However, scientists studying the underlying cognitive processes of animal behaviour have found no evidence to suggest that elephants, or any other species for that matter, have an emotional reason for producing tears.

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Crayfish may experience form of anxiety

By Rebecca MorelleScience Correspondent, BBC News

Crustaceans may be able to experience some emotions, a study published in the journal Science suggests.

Researchers in France have found that crayfish seem to show anxiety, a feeling previously thought to be too complex for these primitive animals.

It follows a number of studies that suggest that crustaceans can also feel pain.

Some experts say the seafood industry may need to rethink how it treats these creatures.

Dr Daniel Cattaert, from the University of Bordeaux, who carried out the research, said: "Crayfish are primitive, they have been around for hundreds of millions of years.

"The idea that this animal could express some anxiety didn't seem possible, but with our experiments we're more and more convinced that this was the case."

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