Mongooses remember and reward helpful friends

May 28, 2018, University of Bristol

Dwarf mongooses remember previous cooperative acts by their group mates and reward them later, according to new work by University of Bristol researchers, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Market trade was once considered the domain of humans but the exchange of goods and services is now widely recognised in other animals. What the new research shows is that mongooses have sufficient cognitive ability to quantify earlier acts of cooperation and to provide suitable levels of delayed rewards.

Senior author, Professor Andy Radford from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, said: "Humans frequently trade goods and can track the amount they owe using memories of past exchanges. While nonhuman animals are also known to be capable of trading cooperative acts immediately for one another, more contentious is the possibility that there can be delayed rewards."

Lead author, Dr. Julie Kern, also from Bristol, added: "There have been hardly any suitable experimental tests on wild animals, especially non-primates. By working with groups of dwarf mongooses habituated to our close presence, we could collect detailed observations and conduct experimental manipulations in natural conditions."

The study is the first to provide experimental evidence in a wild non-primate population for delayed contingent cooperation—providing a later reward to an individual for the amount of cooperation it has performed. It also offers convincing evidence of cross-commodity trading, whereby individuals reward one type of cooperative behaviour with a different cooperative act. In this case, grooming was traded for sentinel behaviour, which involves an individual adopting a raised position to look out for danger and warning foraging groupmates with alarm calls.

Read more at: 

Elephant seals recognize each other by the rhythm of their calls

Date: July 20, 2017

Source: Cell Press

Summary: Every day, humans pick up on idiosyncrasies such as slow drawls, high-pitched squeaks, or hints of accents to put names to voices from afar. This ability may not be as unique as once thought, researchers report. They find that unlike all other non-human mammals, northern elephant seal males consider the spacing and timing of vocal pulses in addition to vocal tones when identifying the calls of their rivals.

Continued

Black bear links real objects to computer images

Date: July 14, 2016

Source: Springer

Summary:American black bears may be able to recognize things they know in real life, such as pieces of food or humans, when looking at a photograph of the same thing. This is one of the findings of a study which involved a black bear called Migwan and a computer screen.

American black bears may be able to recognize things they know in real life, such as pieces of food or humans, when looking at a photograph of the same thing. This is one of the findings of a study led by Zoe Johnson-Ulrich and Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in the US, which involved a black bear called Migwan and a computer screen. The findings are published in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.

The study forms part of a broader research project into the welfare of bears in captivity. It aims to find out how the animals themselves rate the environment in which they are held, and the facilities, food and features provided to them. The goal is to assess this by presenting bears with photographs of objects. To do so, the research team first had to assess whether bears are in fact able to recognize 2-D images of objects and people familiar to them when these are presented to them on a touch screen.

With this in mind, the researchers tested the responses of an American black bear named Migwan. The bear was born in the wild, but was rescued at a very young age and rehabilitated due to injuries. She had previously received several months of training on an unrelated task using photographs of food items from her normal diet. In this study, Migwan was first presented with two sets of objects new to her. Her ability to recognize these later, when presented with photographs including the items she had learned, was then assessed. In a reverse task, she was also trained on the photographs of two different sets of objects and tested on the transfer to real objects.

Read more ...

Fish Can Recognize and Remember Human Faces

By Jeanna Bryner, Live Science Managing Editor | June 7, 2016 02:01pm ET

A wee-brained tropical fish can distinguish between human faces in a lineup, researchers have found. This is the first time such an ability has been shown in fish.

Recognizing human faces is a difficult task. Because nearly all human faces have the same basic attributes, recognizing a face requires distinguishing subtle differences in facial features, said Cait Newport, a zoologist and Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Oxford.

In fact, past research has shown that a select few animals — including horses, cows, dogs and even some birds, such as pigeons — can successfully complete such a task. All of those animals, however, have a neocortex, or neocortex-like structures. The neocortex is a part of the brain that contains a visual-processing region as well as the fusiform gyrus, which is thought to be heavily involved in facial processing, the researchers noted. 

"Most animals tested possess a neocortex and have been domesticated, and may, as a result, have experienced evolutionary pressure to recognize their human [caregivers]," Newport and her colleagues wrote in today's (June 7) issue of the journal Scientific Reports.

To see whether an animal with a simpler brain — one lacking a neocortex — could recognize faces, the researchers turned to archerfish (Toxotes chatareus). This species is known for relying on vision to detect flying land animals, such as insects, and proceeding to spit jets of water at the aerial prey to knock it down, the researchers wrote.

Newport and her colleagues trained archerfish to select the "correct" image of a human face on a computer screen above their aquarium; for this fish, spitting a jet of water at an image is akin to pointing at it.

- See more at: 

How bats recognize their own 'bat signals'

Researcher discovers unique mechanism bats use to overcome communication interference in the wild

Date: January 28, 2016

Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Individual bats emit sonar calls in the dark, using the echo of their signature sounds to identify and target potential prey. But because they travel in large groups, their signals often "jam" each other, a problem resembling extreme radar interference. How do bats overcome this "cocktail party" cacophony to feed and survive in the wild?

A new Tel Aviv University study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences identifies the mechanism that allows individual bats to stand out from the crowd. The research, by Dr. Yossi Yovel of TAU's Department of Zoology, finds that individual bats manage to avoid noise overlap by increasing the volume, duration and repetition rate of their signals.

According to Dr. Yovel, unlocking the mystery of bat echo recognition may offer a valuable insight into military and civilian radar systems, which are vulnerable to electronic interference.

Cocktail party chatter

"Imagine you are at a cocktail party where everyone is uttering the same word over and over again, and you are expected to recognize the echo of your own utterance to identify the location of the punch bowl," Dr. Yovel said. "Now imagine that this is tantamount to your survival. This is the bat experience. Bats often fly in groups and rely on sounds -- very similar sounds -- to find their food. They deal with two challenges: They need to detect weak echoes in a cluster of noise, and if they manage to receive the echo, they need to recognize it as their own."

Read on ...

Monkeys Recognize Family, Even if Separated at Birth (Op-Ed)

By Anwesha Ghosh, University of Rochester | August 09, 2014 03:08am ET

This article was originally published at The Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Macaque monkeys grow up with their mothers and are often not familiar with their fathers. But they can recognise the paternal side of the family even without ever being introduced to them, according to a study published in the journal Current Biology. The researchers suggest that just looking at another monkey is enough to know whether they are related.

“There is some evidence that non-human primates can recognise facial resemblances between two other individuals, just like us,” Dana Pfefferle, lead author and post-doctoral researcher at Duke University, said. “We found that the macaques could detect their own relatives without being familiar with members of that side of the family.”

Continued

Dogs Recognize Familiar Faces from Images

Dec. 18, 2013 — So far the specialized skill for recognizing facial features holistically has been assumed to be a quality that only humans and possibly primates possess. Although it's well known, that faces and eye contact play an important role in the communication between dogs and humans, this was the first study, where facial recognition of dogs was investigated with eye movement tracking.

Main focus on spontaneous behavior of dogs

Typically animals' ability to discriminate different individuals has been studied by training the animals to discriminate photographs of familiar and strange individuals. The researchers, led by Professor Outi Vainio at the University of Helsinki, tested dogs' spontaneous behavior towards images -- if the dogs are not trained to recognize faces are they able to see faces in the images and do they naturally look at familiar and strange faces differently?

Continued

List of Asian Species at Conservation Crossroads Released by Wildlife Conservation Society

ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2012) — Will the tiger go the way of the passenger pigeon or be saved from extinction like the American bison?

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) today released a list of Asian species that are at a conservation crossroads calling for governments to take immediate action with The Three R's Approach: Recognition, Responsibility, Recovery.

The list includes: the tiger, orangutans, Mekong giant catfish, Asian rhinos, Asian giant river turtles, and Asian vultures. The announcement was made at the IUCN's World Conservation Congress convening in Jeju, South Korea through Sept. 13.

WCS says that each species can follow the path of the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in the early 20th century, or the bison, which was saved using the 'three R's' approach. In the case of the bison, which was decimated by overhunting, its plight was recognized, responsibility was taken, and recovery resulted with more than 30,000 wild individuals in existence today. WCS was directly involved in saving the bison by breeding animals in the Bronx Zoo and working with partners to reintroduce them into protected areas in the early 1900s.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120905134828.htm

Birds Can Recognize People's Faces and Know Their Voices

ScienceDaily (June 22, 2012) — New research suggests that some birds may know who their human friends are, as they are able to recognize people's faces and differentiate between human voices.

Being able to identify a friend or potential foe could be key to the bird's ability to survive.

Animal behaviour experts from the University of Lincoln in the UK and the University of Vienna worked with pigeons and crows in two separate studies.

Research published in Avian Biology Research shows that pigeons can reliably discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans, and that they use facial features to tell people apart.

The team trained a group of pigeons to recognise the difference between photographs of familiar and unfamiliar objects. These pigeons, along with a control group, were then shown photographs of pairs of human faces. One face was of a person familiar to the birds whilst the other was of someone they had not seen before.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120622163056.htm