DailyDirt: Hatching Some Intelligent Creatures

Studies

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There’s no guarantee that life will evolve any kind of intelligence. However, given the numerous examples of smart animals in nature, while we’re worried about hyper-intelligent robots rising up, we’ll miss the genius bird/lizard/ape revolution. Or maybe we’ll just be left behind by space-faring dolphins. In any case, check out a few of these curiously smart animals.

• Baby turtles, specifically Giant South American river turtles, that haven’t hatched from their eggs yet can apparently communicate with other turtles to coordinate when to hatch. If you record the sounds coming from turtle eggs, the baby turtles seem to start talking up to three days before they break out of their shells. [url]
• Newly hatched baby chickens prefer to count ascending numbers left to right — just like most people, some monkeys and some birds do. This discovery could mean that number space mapping in our brains is somehow hard-wired rather than learned. [url]
• Crows have been known to be pretty clever, but now we know they can understand some analogies. These birds aren’t going to ace the SAT verbal section, but some five year old kids haven’t figured out analogies yet. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: chicks, crows, intelligence, smart animals, thinking, turtles