Then he takes me to the orangutan enclosure for a demonstration. Shumaker says those scientists must not have spent much time around orangutans.
Mythological elephant predators how to#
So is figuring out how to make a tool - a skill many scientists once thought of as uniquely human. "Kubwa would move the stool around so the calf could stand up on the stool to nurse." "Her last calf was a little smaller than this one and required a step stool to be able to reach her mammary glands to nurse," Littig explains. But things were trickier with Kubwa's previous baby, he says. Kalina has been able to nurse without any help, Littig says. When intelligent animals do use tools, though, they often do so in very creative ways, Shumaker says.Īt the zoo's spacious elephant enclosure, Tim Littig, a senior animal trainer, points toward a baby elephant named Kalina, who is standing next to her mother, Kubwa. Genetic programming is also the reason hermit crabs carry around another creature's shell and ant-lions throw sand at their prey. But all available information tells us that it's completely controlled from this animal's genetic history." In other words, it's programmed behavior, not something the spider figured out. "When an insect flies by, they throw it and it attaches to the insect because it's sticky and they reel them in," he says. The spider's version of the bolas is a ball made from the same silk it uses to spin a web, Shumaker says.
But so do creatures like the bolas spider, which is named after the throwing weapon used by South American gauchos. Of course, some really smart animals do use tools. One of the most widespread myths about tool use is that it is a sign of intelligence. "They hold the sponge on their rostrum, and then they use that as they disturb the sandy bottom to get fish like flounder that are down in the sand." "One is a dolphin that found a piece of tile and took it down to the bottom of their pool and used it to scrape algae off the bottom of their pool and then they ate the algae," he says.Īnd wild dolphins in Australia sometimes flush out their prey with a sponge, he says. But there are anecdotal reports from early Arctic explorers of polar bears using projectiles to hunt. It's less clear whether this sort of tool use occurs in the wild. In zoos, they often throw objects with great force and accuracy. Polar bears offer a powerful rebuttal of that idea, he says. (He is also a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Indiana.)Īs we approach a female polar bear named Tundra, Shumaker says one myth he hopes to deflate is that tool use is limited to monkeys and apes. Shumaker tells me about some of those myths during a walk around The Indianapolis Zoo, where he is vice president of life sciences. And in the new version, the authors try to dispel a number of persistent myths about animals and tools. The book updates an edition published in 1980 by Beck.
Those are just a few examples of animal tool use that appear in the new book Animal Tool Behavior by Robert W. A shrike impales its prey on a sharp thorn. An octopus carries around a coconut shell to hide in.
Mythological elephant predators crack#
A tufted capuchin uses a stone hammer to crack open a nut in Brazil's Parnaiba Headwaters National Park.Ī wasp uses a pebble as a hammer.
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