Voles make up 85 percent of the diet. (One feature of vole biology that inadvertently helps out hawks is that these rodents mark their territories with urine, which Scandinavian researchers recently d...
But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the I that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it...
In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: You are standing be...
The self, Blackmore writes, is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self, she argues, only multiple parallel processes that give ri...
The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evid...
They don’t want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we’re the same. They know what it’s like to have an itch. They can imagine what it’s like to be a mother. This brief enc...
For more than a year and a half, since meeting Athena, since coming to know Octavia and now Kali, each time I’ve reached into the tanks where we have brought these creatures into our world, I’ve longe...
But I am also aware that in animals, as well as people, there is an inborn temperament, a way of seeing the world, that interacts with the environment, and that shapes personality. There’s nobody else...
There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glitt...
Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy, and sadness, are highly conserved across taxa, Jennifer said. This means that whether you’re a person or a...
I was warmly amused at the way each one tried to outdo the others in showing how her ape was the most human—trying to win the audience over to favor her animal. Orangutans, Biruté said, seemed the mos...
The study of a language . . . allows its students to hear a people's 'interpretation (or misinterpretation) of messages from environment to human.' The spoken word reveals, upon reflection, that to wh...
The word compassion means with suffering. To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering—to show those you love that you will not let them suffer
She’s looking right at you, Scott says. As I hold her glittering gaze, I instinctively reach to touch her head. As supple as leather, as tough as steel, as cold as night, Hugo wrote of the octopus’s f...
Teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear thei...
Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it.
There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank, he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers’ dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by on...
Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T.
Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another’s joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating—they were bred to...
At California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octo...
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