Think animals don't have emotion or caring?

She Told The Chimp She Had Lost Her Baby. What The Chimp Did Next Was Heartbreaking

From the Wikipedia article on Washoe:

One of Washoe's caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:

People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder--her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don't shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences

You have to admit, this is really kind of cute

Chimpanzee Bottle Feeds Tiger Cubs

Okay, I resisted, but I will post an incredibly cute animal video

It is up to you to decide whether you want to play it.

Ah, youth. When chimpanzees and tiger cubs are both adorable, before they grow up to maul you. [Most people see adult tigers and expect them to be dangerous, but we see chimpanzees on television almost always in their babyhood/youth because they're easier to manage. Until the one lady was mauled so terribly by one, many folks didn't realise what a full-grown chimpanzee was capable of, or that they could be dangerous, which I don't get, because they share 98% of our genes and we're dangerous, and they're stronger when grown.]

Hmmm....

Girl Chimpanzees May Use Sticks as Dolls

Kibale’s chimps used sticks to probe holes containing water and honey. They used sticks to hit and threaten each other. They played with them. And, finally, they carried sticks — holding them under their arms or in their laps, for hours at a time, even while walking and climbing and feeding and resting.

“Regular stick-carrying has no discernible function,” wrote Wrangham and Kahlenberg, yet it accounted for more than one-third of all stick use.

Carried sticks were shaped differently than sticks used as weapons or probes, and “unlike other types of stick use, carried sticks were regularly taken into day-nests … where individuals rested and were sometimes seen to play casually with the stick in a manner that evoked maternal play,” wrote the researchers.

Stick-carrying was also most frequent in juveniles, particularly juvenile females. With parenthood it invariably ceased.

Some of the news I'm reading

Chimps kill chimps ... for their land: Rival gangs murder each other in turf wars, scientists say

Chimp-on-chimp attacks in the wild are very common, especially among small packs of males on patrol. Now research suggests the motive for these crimes is to gain territory.

Ancient Egyptian city located in Nile Delta by radar

An ancient Egyptian city believed to be Avaris, the capital of the Hyksos people who ruled 3,500 years ago, has been located by radar, Egypt's culture ministry says.

Lucy's 'great-grandfather' found

Anthropologists say they have discovered the 3.6 million-year-old partial skeleton of a creature that came from the same species as Lucy, but was 400,000 years older and at least as good at walking upright.

Cassini Skims Through Titan’s Upper Atmosphere

The flyby took Cassini within 547 miles of Titan’s surface, about two and a half times the altitude of the International Space Station. Although this distance shaved only 43 miles off the next nearest approach, the flyby was the first to take the spacecraft below Titan’s ionosphere, a layer of charged particles in the upper atmosphere. The ionosphere shielded the spacecraft from Saturn’s much larger magnetic field, allowing scientists the first hints of whether Titan has a magnetic field of its own.

Archaeologists find remains of Nevern Castle in Wales

Archaeological excavations on the site of Nevern Castle in Wales has revealed a large group of buildings thought to date from the 12th century. It is hoped that the discovery will provide new details on the history of the Norman fortress that was built in 1108.

7th-graders discover mysterious cave on Mars

The 16 students from teacher Dennis Mitchell's 7th-grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., found what looks to be a Martian skylight — a hole in the roof of a cave on Mars.

The intrepid students were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University. The program allows students to frame a research question and then commission a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image to answer their question.

E-Reader Prices Are Slashed

Barnes and Noble started a price war by slashing its 3G Nook to $199 and its Wi-Fi-only Nook to $149. Amazon has responded by reducing the Kindle from $259 to $189. I so want a Kindle, and this only increases the temptation. But for now, I'm concentrating on bills....

Do our primate cousins mourn the death of their companions, too?

Video: Chimpanzees Mourn Their Dead

Two reports of chimpanzees tending their dead provide poignant examples of how humanity’s closest relatives grieve for the dead, a behavior once thought unique to humans.

In one report, two mothers in a chimpanzee colony in Guinea carried the dead bodies of their infants for weeks. In the other, chimps at a safari park in Britain cared for an elderly female in her final days.

“We propose that chimpanzees’ response to death has been underestimated,” wrote researchers led by University of Stirling psychologist James Anderson in a paper published April 26 in Current Biology.

Chimps 'feel death like humans'

"Several phenomena have at one time or another been considered as setting humans apart from other species: reasoning ability, language ability, tool use, cultural variation, and self-awareness, for example," said James Anderson from Stirling University, who led the research team looking at the death of the elderly female.

"But science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are nowhere near to being as clearly defined as many people used to think.

"The awareness of death is another such psychological phenomenon."

Chimps face death in humanlike ways: New papers provide rare glimpses of chimp rituals

"In the days before Pansy died, the others were notably attentive towards her, and they even altered their routine sleeping arrangements to remain by her, by sleeping on the floor in a room where they don't usually sleep," lead author James Anderson told Discovery News.

Blossom, another elderly female, and Pansy's daughter, Rosie, both stroked and groomed the dying Pansy, and sometimes just sat, subdued, beside the elderly female. Blossom's son Chippy checked to see if Pansy was alive by manipulating her arms and trying to open her mouth.

All of the chimps tossed and turned at night, much more than normal, during the dying female's final few days.

"As she died, all three were closely gathered around her, and they paid especially close attention to her face," said Anderson, who is in the Psychology Department at the University of Stirling. "After some lifting and shaking of her head and shoulders, all three moved away from her, and there was no more such contact at all."

After Pansy died, however, overhead video cameras captured Chippy jumping onto the platform with Pansy's body. He leapt into the air, brought both hands down and pounded on Pansy's torso. He later sat by the corpse, and gently removed straw from the face.

"It is possible that it was an attempt to arouse Pansy, or a serious test of whether she was able to respond," Anderson said.

In the case of captive apes, it may mean a difference in how humans care for elderly creatures near death:

In light of all of the findings, Anderson and his colleagues suggest it might be better to not remove ailing elderly or terminally ill chimpanzees from their groups before they die, if the chimps are not contagious. At present, such individuals are often taken away and put to sleep.

"In some cases," Anderson and his team conclude, "it might be more humane to allow elderly apes to die naturally in their familiar social setting than to attempt to separate them for treatment or euthanasia."

More on our tool-wielding cousins

Chimps use cleavers and anvils as tools to chop food

But different tribes of chimps process food differently, some using tools, or different tools, and some not at all, indicating that tool use is culturally learnt. :) Nifty, eh?

Wow

I really have to admire Charla Nash' will to live, despite the chimpanzee attack that left her blind and horribly mangled. I hope so much that she and her daughter prosper, and that her story shows the dangers of keeping exotic animals as pets.

See The Will to Live, where she appeared on Oprah, revealing the damage done to her face, which she keeps veiled normally. I hope that people accept her despite the changes, because she is, inside, the same woman as before the attack. I hope she can get a face and hand transplant, and lead as normal a life as possible. I offer her my best wishes.

Interesting

Women may have invented weapons

Scientists have found that not only do chimpanzees use tools to hunt other primates, the ones who tend to do this are largely female and occasionally immature males--the ones that, being smaller, cannot kill as easily with their bare hands.

There's been a tendency to believe that men, who historically are associated with weapons, must have been the originators of the tools. But this study suggests that women may, indeed, have created tools for hunting and war.

Which bears out my theory that big guys who think they're invulnerable just need one bullet in them from a small woman to equalise things. (Not that I'm advocating it; I just remember one of my former friends who was 6'5", really big, and who thought no one would mess with him because of his size--which would be good, as I rather doubt he'd do well in a fight size or no--but I pointed out that all it would take is a gun and his theory would go out the window. He couldn't really argue with that.)