Tortoises Yawn-But It's Not Contagious (Via Herp Digest)

Tortoises Yawn-But It's Not Contagious - Ludwig Huber and colleagues earned the 2011 Ig Nobel in physiology for determining that yawning isn't contagious among red-footed tortoises

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A wasabi alarm, beer bottle-loving beetles, and doomsday math were among the scientific advances honored Thursday with 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes.

National Geographic News, 10/6/11- The unique annual awards go to real research "that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think." The scientific celebration, now in its 21st year, was hosted by the Annals of Improbable Research and several Harvard University student groups.

As usual, more than a half dozen genuine Nobel laureates were onstage at Harvard's Sanders Theater to hand out the coveted prizes.

Tortoises Yawn-But It's Not Contagious
Ludwig Huber and colleagues earned the 2011 Ig Nobel in physiology for determining that yawning isn't contagious among red-footed tortoises-perhaps coming a bit closer to understanding what's behind the common but mysterious behavior.

Tortoises that watched another animal detour around an object to get food were able to learn the behavior by observation and duplicate it rather easily, said Huber, of the University of Vienna in Austria. The tortoises also followed the gazes of others, showing that they attend to what their fellow animals are doing.

But the reptiles did not yawn in response to other tortoises yawning [PDF], as humans and other higher primates have been observed to do. Huber says that combination of results is telling: "We can say that contagious yawning is not purely a simple reflex, because otherwise they would have shown it here," he explained. "We might say that it's based on a more complex kind of social behavior."