Quarter Horse

Quarter Horse

This is a quarter horse. What are the other three quarters?

The Triune Katzheit: Klein and Klug and Klaue

A Trinity of Katz

One Katty Essence

Three Katty Persons

I don't know who said this first, but cats must look at people and say, "They feed us. They give us shelter. They take care of our every need. We must be gods!"

Dogs have a different opinion . . .

Ancient Wisdom

Bagged Cat Contemplating Its Great Escape

The cat's out of the bag and drinking the spilled milk it's too late to cry over.

A Rolling Stone, etc.

Moose

Wikipedia

A rolling stone gathers no moose!

I've tried it. It doesn't work. It does tend to angrify their blood, though, and I take refuge with the great Satchel Paige on this point.

Spoonerists on Aminals

Leopard
Google Images

In the great race of life,

a leopard cannot change sit stops . . . .

Animal 'Communication' across Species?

Taxidermied Robotic Northern Pygmy Owl
Jeremy Roberts for The New York Times

In an NYT article, science writer Christopher Solomon reports that "When Birds Squawk, Other Species Seem to Listen" (May 18, 2015), or so he's told by Erick Greene, professor of biology at the University of Montana, who studies animal 'communication.' Professor Greene showed Mr. Solomon what happened when a 'robotic' owl was switched on and began to survey an area for prey:

Greene . . . stepped away from the stand [with the hidden robotic owl] and stood by the home's backdoor. He pressed the fob of a modified garage-door opener. The curtain dropped, unveiling a taxidermied northern pygmy owl. Its robotic head moved from side to side, as if scanning for its next meal. [At that moment, the] yard hushed, then erupted in sound. Soon birds arrived from throughout the neighborhood to ornament the branches of a hawthorn above the mobbed owl and call out yank-yank and chick-a-dee . . . . [Later at] his laboratory on campus, Dr. Greene plugged the recording of the pygmy owl fracas into a computer that he likened to an "acoustic microscope." The calls appeared as a spectrogram - essentially musical notation . . . . One call lasts only a second or three, but can have up to a dozen syllables . . . . [And size matters:] black-capped chickadees embed information about the size of predators into these calls. When faced with a high-threat raptor perched nearby, the birds not only call more frequently, they also attach more dee's to their call. [But not necessarily big size:] Raptors tend to be the biggest threat to birds nearest their own size because they can match the maneuverability of their prey. So a large goshawk might only merit a chick-a-dee-dee from a nimble chickadee, while that little pygmy owl will elicit a chick-a-dee followed by five or even 10 or 12 additional dee syllables . . . . [Moreover,] "squirrels understand 'bird-ese,' and birds understand 'squirrel-ese.'" When red squirrels hear a call announcing a dangerous raptor in the air, or they see such a raptor, they will give calls that are acoustically 'almost identical' to the birds.

I'm not sure what this adds up to so far as animal language in general is concerned, but I am surprised that squirrels mimic bird calls - and vice-versa, I suppose. This article at least shows that some sort of communication is embedded deeply in various 'lower' species, so the possibility that 'higher' species - such as dolphins, orcas, sperm whales, and elephants, not to mention various apes - might engage in relatively complex language is all the more likely.

Why, this might even support the otherwise incredible possibility that human beings can communicate intelligibly, though the preponderance of evidence is much against it.

Theo Jansen - 'Bewildbeasts'?

Strandbeest
Theo Jansen
Wikipedia

I'd heard of this guy Theo Jansen before, but Ferris Jabr, in "Why Nothing Is Truly Alive" (NYT, March 12, 2014), has reminded me of Jansen's mobile sculptures, which Jansen says are "alive":

On a windy day in Ypenburg, the Netherlands, you can sometimes see sculptures the size of buses scuttling across a sandy hill. Made mostly from intricately conjoined plastic tubes, wood and sails, the many-legged skeletons move so fluidly and autonomously that it's tempting to think of them as alive. Their maker, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, certainly does. "Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life," he says on his website. He calls them Strandbeest. "Eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives."

Okay, we see what Jansen thinks, and this is his TED Talk (show and tell?) about these mobile sculptures. Here's Jabr's response:

Poetic, most would say, but Strandbeest are not alive. They are just machines -- elaborate, beautiful ones, but inanimate contraptions nonetheless. A few months ago I would have agreed with this reasoning. But that was before I had a remarkable insight about the nature of life. Now, I would argue that Strandbeest are no more or less alive than animals, fungi and plants. In fact, nothing is truly alive.

I can't see that Jabr has changed his mind about Jansen's Strandbeests; rather, he has changed his mind about "life" due to what he considers his "remarkable" insight:

[I]t's helpful to distinguish between mental models and pure concepts. Sometimes the brain creates a representation of a thing: light bounces off a pine tree and into our eyes; molecules waft from its needles and ping neurons in our nose; the brain instantly weaves together these sensations with our memories to create a mental model of that tree. Other times the brain develops a pure concept based on observations -- a useful way of thinking about the world. Our idealized notion of "a tree" is a pure concept. There is no such thing as "a tree" in the world outside the mind. Rather, there are billions of individual plants we have collectively named trees. You might think botanists have a precise unfailing definition of a tree -- they don't. Sometimes it's really difficult to say whether a plant is a tree or shrub because "tree" and "shrub" are not properties intrinsic to plants -- they are ideas we impinged on them.

Likewise, "life" is an idea. We find it useful to think of some things as alive and others as inanimate, but this division exists only in our heads.

I'm not clear on Jabr's distinction. Does mean to say a mental model is of an individual object and a pure concept is derived from a collection of objects? He needs to clarify his distinction. Anyway, whatever one might think of Jabr's perspective on life, there's remains a different mystery to contemplate, a mystery that Jabr's 'brain language' doesn't leave much room for: consciousness. We can perhaps imagine Jansen's 'beests' as alive, but can we imagine them experiencing an inner life? Do they have qualia? I find that difficult to imagine . . .

Good Ol' Bowhead Whales

Bowhead Whale
Photo by Paul Nicklen
IIP Digital

I found the new information (new for me!) so interesting in this "Old Soul" article (IIP Digital, June 24, 2013) by Lauren Monsen on the lifespan of bowhead whales that I'm excerpting it extensively even though (or maybe because?) I actually know very little about these whales:

[Living i]n the Arctic waters off Alaska's coast, bowhead whales . . . are now thought to be the world's longest-lived mammals . . . . Craig George, a biologist with the North Slope Department of Wildlife Management in Barrow, Alaska, said it wasn't until the 1990s that scientists suspected bowheads can live more than 200 years . . . . [But] a bowhead in 1992 . . . showed signs of advanced age[, so] . . . George . . . examine[d] it.

"Old whales have really tough blubber, and they're heavily scarred . . . . They're marked with killer-whale bites, ice scars and puncture marks" that testify to the long, eventful lives they've led.

The . . . bowhead was determined to be 130 years old through an age-analysis technique developed by Jeffrey Bada, a marine chemist at the University of California, San Diego. Bada studies whales' eye lenses, which contain amino acids that increase at predictable rates over time.

When scientists sent eyeballs from additional . . . Alaska bowheads to Bada's laboratory, Bada found that several came from whales more than 100 years old and judged one whale to be 211 years old.

"Those figures are conservative; the whales are probably older," Bada said.

Bada's findings are supported by additional evidence. Some . . . bowheads . . . [have] antique harpoon tips in their bodies, indicating they survived skirmishes with 19th-century whalers.

According to Wikipedia, this baleen whale can grow to 20 meters long (nearly 70 feet). I have nothing of special interest to say about this whale, given my ignorance. I merely wished to register my astonishment.

Astonishment! At their long lives, I mean . . .

Shan and Shoshanna: In Africa!

Shoshanna and Shan

This is a belated New Year's post -- a solar New Year's post -- but I only yesterday received photos to go with an end-of-the-year report (itself received on January 28, 2013!) from my brother Shan and his wife, Shoshanna, to family and friends, a report that I break into here where Shoshanna describes their Africa trip:

Culminating the year and fulfilling a life dream to visit Africa, we spent 3 amazing weeks in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. The first portion of the trip was spent living in Livingston, Zambia with Gertrude Akapelawa, the visionary founder of Victoria Falls University. After delivering pro-bono leadership training for 100 faculty, teachers, and staff, we headed with our backpacks on foot over the Victoria Falls Bridge across the baboon-lined border into Zimbabwe to join our Intrepid Camping Safari comrades.

For the next two weeks, we traveled with African guides through stunning countryside and coastline, stopping in small African villages and camping along the way. The final leg of the trip was spent in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a stunningly up-close and personal encounter with leopard, lions, hyena, crocodile, monkeys, and huge herds of antelope, zebra, elephants, wildebeest, Cape buffalo, hippo, black and white rhinoceros, and giraffe. Lucky for us, it was just past birthing season, so we were privileged to see and photograph lots of animal babies hugging their mothers' sides.

Now for the photos sent by Shoshanna. First, a picture of Shoshanna, Shan, and a lady whom I take to be Gertrude Akapelawa, founder of Victoria Falls University:

Next, a photograph -- from which country, I don't know -- of two African women, the closer of the two carrying a baby in a sling on her back:

Here's a comfortable view of Victoria Falls, a view better seen enlarged, so click on the image:

Now come the animals (some of them) in the order mentioned by Shoshanna above, a fuzzy leopard first:

And next a lion, studiously ignoring the happy Intrepid Campers:

Also, a lazy lion, though one allowing himself slightly more interest in the passing safari:

And now appears -- as we all know from that eminently trustworthy source of factual information, The Lion King -- the lions' mortal enemy, the hyena:

Far better than that scurrilous creature, a baby zebra with its mother, apparently a unicorn mother zebra:

Not to mention a mother elephant and her baby, her rather big baby:

And a suspicious Cape buffalo (but where's his cape?):

Plus a hippopotamus (and like an iceberg, 90 percent is below the surface, so don't take this image at face value):

Even a rhinoceros, a black rhino (I suppose):

And finally, a condescending giraffe:

And those are all fourteen photos: people, landscapes, animals -- the sought-after African experience, I reckon -- along with Shan and Shoshanna's Africa leadership sessions, likely a wild life itself, but no photos of that, so we can only hope that my brother and his wife stop by and fill us in, and they might want to check out yesterday's blog entry on the African artist El Anatsui.

Meanwhile, I've been traveling all over the world myself, though I have no photos to share since my excursions are solely in the realm of my hyperactive imagination . . .

No Theory of Mind?

Austistic (Yellow) and Non-Autistic (Blue) Brain Activity

Image from Wikipedia

I receive unsolicited emails from all sorts of newspapers and journals allowing me to read their articles for free, perhaps because of my daily blogging, but I'm merely guessing about that. Anyway, an email arrives at least once a week from the Catholic magazine Commonweal, and just this morning -- conveniently for me -- came a copy with an article by Edward T. Wheeler on "Moths and Eyes" (May 14, 2012), dealing with Tolstoy, sort of, but which included a brief passage on autism that caught my attention:

I happened to see an episode of Charlie Rose's show that focused on the brain, in particular the psychology, neurophysiology and the genetics of autism. In the course of the discussions, the researchers gathered around Rose's table agreed that the chief manifestation of autism is the inability of one so affected to create a mental map, a theory of mind, for those with whom they have relationships. Quite simply those with autism do not look in the eyes of another person and cannot anticipate the path or greater map along which a conversation might go. Hence they remain disconnected, isolated, not able to enter properly into dialogue.

Does one need a "theory of mind" to interact with other persons? I can't even say that I have a theory of mind, in the sense of any rationally coherent understanding of what the mind is and how it relates to the brain, but I don't think those researchers meant a theory of mind in that sense. They must have meant that those with autism lack the understanding that others have minds. Autistics thus have no 'theory' that others have minds. A better word than theory is "recognition." The non-autistic of us, at some point in our development, come to recognize that others have minds. And we look into each other's eyes, unlike the autistic among us.

I've noticed that dogs look into our eyes and seem to understand us. Perhaps they also recognize that we have minds. This implies that dogs have minds, but I've never noticed whether dogs look into each other's eyes or not. They seem more focused on humans than on each other, and they not only look at what we point to when we point, they even know to look at what we look at when we look without pointing.

Cats sometimes look into our eyes, but they don't understand pointing or know to look where we look. At least, I've never noticed that they do, but perhaps a reader has experienced this? If so, this would likely be with highly unusual, individual cats, not with cats as a species.

What of other animals? My children have a pet hamster that lives all alone in its cage. I sometimes take it out and let it enjoy the mammalian comfort of being held, but it never stops to gaze into my eyes, nor would it ever look where I point or where I look, other than randomly.

See what I'm pointing at in today's random entry?

Uncle Cran's Ozark Pet: "Macavity - The Mystery Cat"

Mystery Cat?
Lower Left Quarter of Photo
(Click twice for better viewing.)

My Uncle Cran recently managed to obtain a game-camera photo of a mystery cat on his Ozark farm in northern Arkansas. You can see it in the lower left quarter of the picture if you look carefully. Here are a series of emails between Uncle Cran and his son Mark, beginning with Uncle Cran's:

Here is a new picture of our new house cat. If I could just figure out a way to put a collar on him . . .

He is either a large bobcat, lynx, or small bob-tailed cougar.

This is taken by the cave spring pond.

Cran

Mark responded:

Dad

I think that is a bobcat I've been doing a little research the spots on the body and white patches behind the ears are the markings of the North American bobcat. That's just my opinion.

Mark

Uncle Cran replied:

We were pretty sure it was a bobcat. A lynx is longer legged, with a less dense body. Most lynxes are found farther north of the Ozarks.

Part of what I said was a kind of joke, since who ever heard of a bob-tailed cougar?

Dad

Mark replied to that:

Actually, pops, there is a species of bobtail cougar. I found photos of them on the Internet, but they are a solid golden tan or reddish brown.

Mark

Uncle Cran then remarked:

Isn't the internet wonderful? Now, I find that some of my ex cathedra statements are false. I am learning something every day. But I still believe that photo was a bobcat.

Thanks, Mark.

Dad

At this point, I broke into their conversation, requesting a copy of the photo:

Dear Uncle Cran,

Could you send me the photo?

Jeffery

Uncle Cran complied, sending the photo and saying:

Jeffery:

Here is a photo of a bobcat taken by our game camera recently. For the past year or so mountain lions (cougars) have been recorded on film, trapped in a cage, and at least one or two shot and killed in the areas of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Bobcats have always been in this area, and rare sightings of mountain lions have been reported for years. Black bear sightings are reported often, also. I have seen tracks possibly made by bears and mountain lions a few times. Until recently the Game and Fish Commission of both states have denied and even ridiculed such reports, until forced to acknowledge their presence.

So far we haven't seen one on our game cameras.

I'll bet En-Uk would find this interesting.

Cran

I'd always thought that a bobcat (so-called due to its short tail) had a squat, short-legged body, but I've looked on the internet and see that I was mistaken. For purposes of comparison, a bobcat is usually about twice the size of a domestic cat, or so says Wikipedia, but that bobcat in the photo above looks larger than this to me. Maybe Uncle Cran can confirm this? The remaining question is what sort of bobcat this is. The Wikipedia entry offers two likely possibilities:

1. Lynx rufus rufus (Schreber) – eastern and midwestern United States

2. Lynx rufus floridanus (Rafinesque) – southeastern United States and inland to the Mississippi valley, up to southwestern Missouri and southern Illinois

Number two seems most likely, but until we know for sure and have solved this remaining mystery, I'm calling this bobcat "Macavity, the Mystery Cat". Compare with this, too.

Readers' opinions?

Carnivorous Elk and Bipolar Bears?

I've given a lot of thought to 'odd' animal behavior lately, mostly since reading with my students about evidence of intelligence in many animals, but I've always been impressed by the apparently high intelligence of dolphins, and I've since learned that elephants have even larger, more complex brains than dolphins and apes, second only to human brains in complexity -- and a great deal larger!

When animals do things out of character, I therefore take notice -- such as with this 'carnivorous' elk:


That marmot looks to be a goner! So do these two chained huskies as that polar bear approaches:


But there's more going on than meets the eye, for that enormous elk was in fact rescuing the tiny marmot:

Keepers at Pocatello Zoo, Idaho, were worried when they noticed Shooter, a four-year-old elk, acting strangely at his water trough.

Baffled, they watched as the animal -- who is so massive some keepers are afraid to even enter his enclosure -- tried to dip his hooves into his drinking trough, before attempting to dunk his whole head in the water.

But they were amazed as 10ft tall Shooter lifted his head from the trough clutching a tiny marmot -- a kind of large squirrel -- between his jaws.

The gentle giant placed the hapless rodent down and nudged it with his hoof, as if checking it for signs of life, before calmly watching it scamper off into the bushes. ("Elk and safety: Zookeepers stunned as moose rescues drowning marmot from watery death," Daily Mail Online, July 1, 2011 [both photos supplied by Caters News Agency])

The marmot is safely on dry land again:


And as for that 'hungry' polar bear spoiling for a fight, well, he just wanted a hug:

They growled and bared their teeth. But then, instead of fighting, the enemies became firm friends.

First the bear gently nuzzled the husky's neck. The dog responded by rising on its hind legs to lick the bear's face. (Barry Wigmore, "Killer polar bear? I'm just a big teddy, really!" Daily Mail Online, March 31, 2008 [both photos by Norbert Rosing for National Geographic])

Now, that's unexpected!


These sorts of behavior -- cross-species rescue and play, respectively -- suggest that some animals are a lot more humanlike than we usually think. Diane Ackerman, writing "The Lonely Polar Bear" for the New York Times (July 2, 2011), would agree:

My heart goes out to Gus, the famously neurotic polar bear in the Central Park Zoo, who used to swim endless laps around his pool. He'd dive to the bottom in a froth of bubbles, surge across and then surface like a bear obsessed. He'd backstroke to the other side, and with great paws splashing, dive down to the bottom and circle around again. Some wags called him the "bipolar bear," but most zoo-goers sensed that he felt bored, pent-up, out of his element and depressed.

A high-profile animal psychologist, called in by zoo officials, began treating Gus in 1994 with toys, games, more challenging mealtimes and a better designed habitat. Soon Gus seemed like his old self again, lounging and playing with his longtime companion, Ida.

But when Ida died recently from liver disease at the age of 25, Gus grew listless, slouching around his habitat and swimming little, obviously confused and greatly disturbed by her disappearance . . . .

People speak of Gus's grief as if it were anomalous. But what if it's just part of a large suite of ancient urges and instincts we share with hordes of other animals?

A 2005 study of elephant grief, reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, confirmed what experts have long sworn, that elephants pay homage to their fallen, visiting the remains of even long-dead relatives, and gently turning over the bleached bones with trunk or foot. Biologists tell of gorillas banging their chests with yowls of anguish during a wake for a fallen friend, of sea lions wailing when their babies have been mutilated by killer whales, of grief-stricken monkey mothers carrying dead infants around for days, of geese singing both halves of a duet when their partners have died.

That fact about geese is still surprising to me, but less so than it would have been some months back.

Interestingly, however, we're different in a significant way from the mammal closest to us genetically, the chimpanzee, as Natalie Angier tells us in "Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive," New York Times (July 4, 2011):

Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match. As Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has pointed out, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. The advent of agriculture and settled life may have thrown a few feudal monkeys and monarchs into the mix, but evolutionary theorists say our basic egalitarian leanings remain. . . .

Our rise to global dominance began, paradoxically enough, when we set rigid dominance hierarchies aside. "In a typical primate group, the toughest individuals can have their way and dominate everybody else in the group," said Dr. Wilson. "Chimps are very smart, but their intelligence is predicated on distrust."

I wonder if that's also true of bonobo chimpanzees. It's not true of elephants, which are very trusting of one another, and astonishingly cooperative, though we've already seen that elephants are second only to humans in brain complexity. But that alone is insufficient as explanation, and I wonder what accounts for the difference between elephants and chimps, for both have complex brains and live in groups. Where does cooperation come from? But that question aside, the human character of so many animals strikes me ever more clearly the more I look.

Fascinated, I keep looking . . .