Crittercam videos from National Geographic are always amazing, but this footage of the never-before-seen eating habits of the Australian sea lion chasing down a tasty meal of octopus is the best yet!

I saw this amazing ad from Optus, Australia’s second largest telecommunications company, and I couldn’t help but share it with you all:

After sharing this video on Facebook, someone asked me if the ad was real, so I decided to do a little research. The ad was inspired by Humpback Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC), collaborative project between researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO), and the University of Queensland (UQ).  The goal of HARC is to investigate how whales interact with the environment in the presence of anthropogenic noise.

Male humpback whales are known for the ‘love songs’ that they compose to serenade the females. Each composition contains up to 20 vocalizations, which are combined to make a unique song that can last hours, and the song evolves throughout the singing season.

The Whale Song project for Optus was led by Noise Creative Director Bruce Heald, who used musicians familiar with their instruments to perform element of real whale songs that could be recognizably musical to humans. He then composed a song that would demonstrate the possible overlap in what humans and whales might consider beautiful music.

This has got to be one of the coolest projects I have ever seen! Kudos to all those involved.

In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that monkeys are able to think “could-have, would-have, should-have.”

The researchers created a “Let’s Make A Deal” style game for their two rhesus monkeys, in which the experimenters offered the monkeys an array of hidden awards.  During each trial, the monkeys choose from one of eight white squares arranged in a circle.  Each square had a color underneath, and each color had a corresponding reward.  In this game, the rewards were different amounts of juice.

After weeks of the game, the monkeys were trained to associate green with a high-value reward, and other colors with a low-value reward.  After receiving a reward, the monkeys were shown the other rewards he missed.

The researchers watched individual neurons in a region of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which monitors the consequences of actions and mediates resulting changes in behavior.

The researchers saw that the neurons in the ACC responded in proportion to the reward, and a greater reward elicited a greater neural response.  The same neurons responded when the monkeys saw the rewards they missed.

In the second part of the study, the researchers kept the high-value reward in the same position 60 percent of the time, or moved it one position clockwise.  The monkeys began to learn this pattern, choosing targets next to potential high-value targets more often (37.7 percent) than those next to low-value targets (16.7 percent).  People are more likely to gamble if they see the opportunity to win big.  Likewise, the monkeys were willing to take a risk in order to win a greater reward.  The researchers believe that the ACC neurons help the  monkeys make better choices in the future, which may be crucial in complex social environments.

Hayden, B., Pearson, J., & Platt, M. (2009). Fictive Reward Signals in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex Science, 324 (5929), 948-950 DOI: 10.1126/science.1168488

So you think dancing is just for humans?  Well up until recently, many scientists would have agreed with you.

“For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans,” said Adena Schachner of Harvard University, who led one of two studies published today in Current Biology.

It turns out, dancing is for the birds.  The two studies show that vocal-mimicking animals, particularly parrots, are able to dance–they can bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway to the beat of the music.

Don’t believe me?  The video below shows a cockatoo named Snowball dancing to his favorite song, “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys.  When the researches changed the tempo of the music, Snowball would adjust the tempo of his dancing so stay synchronized with the music.

The theory was that natural selection for vocal mimicry resulted in a brain mechanism that was also needed for moving to a beat, and that only animals that can mimic sound should be able to keep a beat.

One of the two research teams watched over 1,000 videos of dancing animals on YouTube, and analyzed the videos frame-by-frame.  Potentially fake videos were omitted, in which the animal was following a visual cue or the music was added in during post-production.

“Our analyses showed that these birds’ movements were more lined up with the musical beat than we’d expect by chance,” says Adena Schachner, a researcher in the study, in a press release. “We found strong evidence that they were synchronizing with the beat, something that has not been seen before in other species.”

Only the vocal mimics (14 species of parrot and 1 species of elephant) showed evidence of being able to keep a beat.

The researchers now suspect that the parrots’ dancing skills are related to another ability they share with humans, vocal learning, implying an evolutionary link between the two abilities.  This suggests that keeping a beat to music relies on the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning, which requires a tight link between auditory and motor circuits in the brain.

“Our data suggests that some of the brain mechanisms needed for human dance originally evolved to allow us to imitate sound,” says Schachner.

The human ability to keep time with music may have also evolved as a byproduct of vocal mimicry–the cognitive processes needed for both actions are related.  Both abilities require you to take in auditory input, and monitor your output and sound input at the same time, which allow you to fix your output and line up better with what you hear.

So what I want to know is….where do I sign up for a job like this???

Aniruddh D. Patel, John R. Iversen, Micah R. Bregman, Irena Schulz (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology, 19 (10), 1-4
Adena Schachner, Timothy F. Brady, Irene M. Pepperberg, Marc D. Hauser (2009). Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species Current Biology, 19 (10), 1-6

Dear Doctor,

I think I have the nerd infection.  As I am writing you, I am in lobster pajama pants and an African bush prints t-shirt.  I wish I had a pair of fish pants.  I’m pretty sure I’ve had the infection for awhile, the Nerdicus contagium maritimus variety.  I attended Zoo Camp at the Bronx Zoo as a child, and spent several summers at Seacamp in Big Pine Key, Florida.

I’m pretty sure I have been to seven zoos and 17 aquariums.  In fact, I’ve seen the world’s only two live kelp exhibits (one at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, and one at the Two Oceans Aquarium in South Africa).

I am either a joy or a nightmare to take to an aquarium.  If you want to learn, then I am your girl, as I can identify 90-something percent of Caribbean reef fish and know facts about many of them.  If you like to speed through an aquarium….well, you would probably flee.  My cousin is guilty of having done this.

In fact, I am definitely an aquarium bum.  I interned at the Florida Aquarium, and logged over 270 hours in under 6 months.  If I wasn’t at class, I was at the aquarium!

I have pet penguins, been spit on by a walrus, been grabbed by an octopus, and have had fish or shrimp and their juices in my hair, on more than one occasion.  I’ve owned fish (freshwater and saltwater), hamsters, guinea pigs, frogs, lizards, snakes, cats and dogs….what can I say?  I love animals.

Nearly every place I have travelled (Caymans, Grenadines, Fiji, South Africa) has been because of a desire to see the natural world of that country.  All of the places I want to go (Tanzania, Great Barrier Reef, Belize, etc) are because I want to explore the environment there.

My bookcase speaks for itself:

In fact, I got so excited when I saw the “Little Book of Pandemics” book, I’m certain if there was video footage of that moment, the diagnosis would be very fast.

My TV habits also tend to veer more towards the sciences as well…CSI, Eleventh Hour, Bones and NCIS are my favorite shows!  I have crushes on fictional characters from many of these shows….Greg Sanders, Dr. Jacob Hood, Timothy McGee.  And I would definitely be friends with Abby Sciuto and Dr. Temperance Brennan!

My nerd-love extends into my real life too.  I have developed crushes based on the fact that someone was a fish-nerd.  Nerds are hot!!!

Please report back quickly, as I hope to be diagnosed as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Allie Wilkinson

P.S.  I think my friend Christie is infected as well. After all, she started this site.