Wild Things: Yeti Crabs, Guppies and Ravens
Tree killers and the first beds ever round up this month in wildlife news
- By T.A. Frail, Laura Helmuth, Joseph Stromberg, Erin Wayman And Sarah Zielinski
- Smithsonian magazine, February 2012
(Yva Momatiuk & John Eastcott / Minden Pictures)
The corvids—jays, crows and ravens—make tools, cooperate and hide food from potential thieves. Now researchers in the Austrian Alps have observed ravens gesturing. In male-female pairs, one bird picked up a stick or bit of moss and pointed or waggled it. The other then approached. It’s a first for non-apes, the biologists say, evidence that corvids “rival even primates in many social cognitive domains.”
Additional Sources
“The roles of hydraulic and carbon stress in a widespread climate-induced forest die-off,” William R. L. Anderegg et al., PNAS, December 13, 2011
“Dancing for Food in the Deep Sea: Bacterial Farming by a New Species of Yeti Crab,” Andrew R. Thurber et al., PLoS ONE, November 30, 2011
“The use of referential gestures in ravens (Corvus corax) in the wild,” Simone Pika and Thomas Bugnyar, Nature Communications, November 29, 2011
“Middle Stone Age Bedding Construction and Settlement Patterns at Sibudu, South Africa,” Lyn Wadley et al., Science, December 9, 2011
“Social preferences based on sexual attractiveness: a female strategy to reduce male sexual attention,” Josefine B. Brask et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B, December 7, 2011
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