A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: animals

The Loneliest Whale in the World

The Loneliest Whale in the World

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This crow is goddamn snowboarding, you guys.

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Pigeons match primates in number sense

Pigeons match primates in number sense

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Whales navigate Northwest Passage for first time in 10,000 years

Whales navigate Northwest Passage for first time in 10,000 years

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Drunken parrot season begins in Darwin, Australia

Drunken parrot season begins in Darwin, Australia

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Duck survives 100km/h car crash, makes full recovery

Duck survives 100km/h car crash, makes full recovery

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Animals: more human than we previously thought?

New Scientist reports that Bengal finches may have grammar:

“What we found was unexpected,” says Abe. The birds reacted to only one of the four jumbled versions, called SEQ2, as if they noticed it violated some rule of grammar, whereas the other three remixes didn’t. Almost 90 per cent of the birds tested responded in this way. “This indicates the existence of a specific rule in the sequential orderings of syllables in their songs, shared within the social community,” Abe told New Scientist.

According to their experiment, it’s not an innate thing either — it’s a learned behavior. Pretty sweet.

Along the same lines, Veronica Greenwood reports that wild parrots have names for each other:

What they found was that parents started making signature calls when the chicks were very young, providing a template that the chicks imitated and added their own flourishes to in order to create their names. The templates were learned, not innate: Chicks’ names were more similar to the names of the parents that raised them than to their biological parents’.

Honestly, I’m pretty bowled over by this. When I was a kid I raised cockatiels — including a breeding pair that had chicks. I wonder if they had names for each other that I didn’t know about.

Finally, this one is just goofy. The Telegraph:

A macaque monkey in Indonesia took a camera from a wildlife photographer before snapping himself in a variety of poses.

By “variety of poses” they mean “MySpace angle”, by the way.

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