Species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to anothe...
Hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don’t understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it...
Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together.
At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball...
Being friends with an octopus-whatever that friendship meant to her-has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom
I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only want toys or food the way a plant wants the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does...
In all religions, as in all legal systems. people find ways to skirt the rules. We obey the letter of the law without honoring its spirit, and then reassure ourselves of our righteousness.
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 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 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...
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds— can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy. Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an ana...
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds—can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.
The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as theory of mind.
Normally a prolonged stare from a gorilla is a threat. But Digit’s gaze bore no aggression. He seemed to say: I know. Dian would later write that she believed Digit understood she was sick.
Octopus slime is sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way. And it’s very useful. It helps to be slippery if you’re squeezing your body in and out of tight places. Slime keeps the octo...
Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s s...
As he did with the electric eels, Scott is trying to figure out a way to induce the toads to show themselves. How? You need to get within the mind of the toad, he says.
Humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness and that nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [i...
Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the b...
A voltmeter picks up the fish’s electric pulse. A light, actually powered by the eel’s electricity, flashes across a panel built on top of the tank to show when the eel is hunting or stunning prey, an...
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