by Grania
I’m a science groupie, so I can’t even pretend to write about science subjects, but I can recommend some articles I read this week.
The first is in Scientific American, Monkey See, Monkey Speak which is I think really exciting, a breakthrough in understanding actual vocabulary of Campbell’s monkeys. They aren’t going to be typing out Shakespeare any time soon, but it is quite amazing that there are actual words that are not human in origin.
Krak is leopard, Hok is eagle and boom means quite the opposite of what it means in Humanspeak: all clear.
(that’s going to cause some confusion when the Planet of the Apes revolution begins).
Second up is one tweeted by Ed Yong, a fascinating piece by Lizzie Wade on the problems of breeding in captivity to preserve a threatened species: in this case condors hand-reared by puppets turned into rebels without a cause once released into the world:
Around the same time, condors released near the Grand Canyon posed for photographs and swooped past hotel balconies to wild applause from the guests. They lurked along the edges of trails and lunged at passing hikers, ripping off their shoelaces. A field crew in Arizona told The New York Times in 2003 that they’d seen four condors experimenting with what appeared to be group sex. The scientists tasked with keeping the young birds in line (and away from people) compared the job to running a rowdy middle school.
As amusing as that is, the ramifications are not: the breeding program has had to have a serious re-think about their methods as well as whether they are having a positive effect at all.
Lastly, in contrast to the States-side problems, Europe has had a resounding success in reintroducing carnivores back into the wild in the form of wolverines, lynxes and brown bears.
A new study finds that Europe’s other large carnivores are experiencing a resurgence in their numbers, too — and mostly in nonprotected areas where the animals coexist alongside humans. The success is owed to cross-border cooperation, strong regulations and a public attitude that brings wildlife into the fold with human society, rather than banishing it to the wilderness, according to study leader Guillaume Chapron, a professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences’ Grimsö Wildlife Research Station.
See more wonderful pictures here.
As always, please share your links if you’ve seen a good article to read.
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As for the condors, I would hope that the 2nd or 3rd generation would start to behave better.
I wanted to make this footling comment on the Scientific American site but it kept coming up with a weird string of code instead of posting it so I couldn’t so instead I’m going to inflict my pathetic need to have someone somewhere know the following:
This is fascinating and wonderful but I just want to make a very tiny weeny correction regarding ‘the word “pants” can mean fancy slacks to an American but, in Britain, it means long underwear’ -it doesn’t mean Long underwear in Britain, it means any pants, like y-fronts, French knickers, briefs, g-strings- Any!
Thank you- sorry for being a pest!
From an English person.
Pants=undies
Y-fronts=jockey shorts
“I’m a science groupie, so I can’t even pretend to write about science subjects…”
Boy, I wish some other people felt this way.
If I may indulge in a canid-oriented link, The return of the wolves has improved Yellowstone’s ecosystem
Not news, but interesting. Even eagles and trees have benefited.
Oy, thank you for posting that, I saw it a couple of months ago and it’s fantastic.
Here’s a beautiful video about this – can’t remember if I’ve posted it before, and I do hope this doesn’t embed:
great video. thanks!
The Scientific American article about the monkey calls isn’t really a breakthrough. It has been known for a long time that some species of monkeys use a set of differing calls to alert their monkey buddies to various dangers, with specific calls being used for specific dangers. I think the first paper on this was published in 1980.
Note that the Sci Am article goes way too far when it says that the recent paper’s findings “imply that some monkey dialects can be just as sophisticated as human language.” I doubt very much that the paper (available at the link below) makes any such statement; I’ve only glanced at the paper, but it says up front, “[W]e do not take a stand on the relation that these systems bear to human language; to say that they can be studied as formal systems does not imply that they share non-trivial properties with human language, nor that they share an evolutionary origin with it.” And the suggestion that “monkey dialects can be just as sophisticated as human language” is nuts.
As Geoffrey Pullum has said on Language Log, “[animal calls] concretely tied to present dangers apparent in the immediate spatiotemporal environment cannot bear a very strong relation to natural use of a human language. The things we say are not just long sequences of “Watch out!”, “Fore!”, “Timber!”, “Stop thief!”, “Hey!”, “Ouch!”, and so on. (At least, not for me; not on a good day.)” http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2000
Link to the paper discussed in the Scientific American article: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001792/current.pdf
Yeah I had a look at the paper and they say nothing of the sort in it.
You’re saying that animal calls are comparable not to human language in general, but maybe to teenagers on their phones?
Whales can learn to ‘speak’ dolphin or seal: http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/killer-whales-learn-speak-dolphin.html
It was one of the more amusing sub-dogmas of the overall Blank Slate orthodoxy that consciousness cannot exist in animals. One of the “proofs” was that they had no language, and so couldn’t formulate intelligent thought or a concept of self. I guess that’s yet another sub-dogma for the garbage heap of history.
I wonder why humans evolved to have a language based on sound, and not on signs.
I vaguely remember to have read an article that showed that in chimps the same brain areas are active during their sign language as during speaking in humans, subject/meaning related even.
That’s generally a very bad idea; humans don’t mix well with other large carnivores, and it’s the animals who suffer for it.
Considering the continued growth in the human population, either we human learn to coexist with large carnivores or the carnivores go extinct. I know what I prefer.
If it’s what I prefer, I suspect we’re in a small minority.
And it’s been long known that “tantor” means “elephant” and “numa” means “lion.”
Although I cannot quite get as excited about felids as some others do here, there is no doubt that the lynx is an utterly beautiful animal.
Will be interesting to see if the monkey-speak hypothesis holds up. I am curious but excitement must wait a while.
A science groupie ok sometimes i’ve thought Lawrence Krause was kinda cute other times not so much.
Brian Cox is definitely cute;-)