- Victoria Gill
- Science journalist, BBC News
22 minutes ago
Image source, Chester Zoo
Internet videos provide researchers with additional evidence of elephant intelligence
Do you know what is common to Asian elephants, peacock spiders, and the cockatoo?
All of them are stars who attract tens of thousands of viewers in internet videos. The behaviors of those creatures recorded in some of these videos are considered scientifically significant.
Sangeeta Sharma Pokarel and Nachiketa Sharma of the Indian Institute of Science, in their latest study, examined the reaction of elephants to death by keeping recordings taken from YouTube videos.
“In three years of intensive field work, I had only one chance to see the elephant’s reaction to the death event. It was very rare,” says Sangeeta. But nowadays almost everyone has a camera in their hand. By searching for terms such as “elephant death”, “elephant reaction to death,” they discovered 24 different types of records in which various creatures could interact with dead bodies.
To aid in the study YouTube Videos
Elephants are videotaped tapping or kicking dead members of their herd with their trunks. They also gathered near the corpses. “Plus, we’ve heard sounds like low-pitched sounds we have never heard before,” says Nachiketa.
“The most notable thing to me was that one of the elephants was carrying his calf. Elephants sometimes dragged a dead calf by their trunk. There were occasions when a female elephant used ivory to lift her dead calf,” he said.
Sanjita said it was difficult to decide whether this could be described as a way of expressing elephant grief. The reason for their curiosity about how these creatures react to death is that those behaviors show their cognitive ability. Evidence of such rare intelligence has also been found through recordings found on YouTube, which is full of videos.
One does not have to be a wildlife researcher to get lost in the wildlife related videos available on the internet. But scientists are also increasingly using this apparently available video data source. Scientific intelligence is also collected in Internet videos that are uploaded for entertainment.
Image source, Prof. Raman Sukumar
A mother elephant dragging her dead baby trunk
Skiing crow
Simena Nelson, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, recalls, “My favorite video was of a crow skiing using a plastic lid, like a snowboard on the roof.”
The video, cited by Simena, was recorded through the window of a building in a Russian city. The crow stood on a plastic lid and slid down on the icy roof. It flew up again and did it again and again. While it’s fun to watch, the video shows the ingenuity of a crow using a tool.
“While it’s playing, it also uses a tool innovatively. This is just one example of using a tool for fun. It gives a lot of details about how clever that crow is.
Simena notes that thousands of researchers who spend many hours trying to understand crows may not even have the opportunity to videotape such behavior and even watch it live.
Videos like “Wildlife playing” with other creatures or unusual objects are popular on the Internet.
While funny videos like Creatures Game can be entertaining, they can also provide insights into the activities of the creatures present in such videos. There is no obvious purpose for what they are playing for. As Simena puts it, “this activity is not going to play a role in their diet or reproduction.”
Image source, THE DODO
Horse playing with a rubber toy
The science of curfew
YouTube and other Internet video sites have been a source of information for many researchers over the past two years.
“One of my students, for example, searched for the hitherto unexplained activity of the creatures during the curfew. The student said that he could not go to the field during the curfew and collect the data and that is why he was collecting it from YouTube,” says Simena.
And there are more videos that can be used to study many bird species. Fewer people upload pictures of videos of insects or other invertebrates. It is also very helpful in accessing difficult places and creatures that may be difficult to access for research.
An example of this is the videos uploaded by lucky and wealthy tourists who can go to Antarctica and see the wildlife.
“They can record scenes that show the behavior of predators in Orca. It can be rare behavior. To record it, you have to be there at the right time. At a huge cost, the chances of scientists getting to that place at the right time are very slim,” says Simena. Therefore, such videos help to understand them.
At the same time, the wildlife seen in these videos, and the fame through them, is not always rare.
Image source, Irena Schulz/Bird Lovers Only
Snowball The Dancing Cockatoo under Harvard study
Lukas Tylevsky, of the Bosnab University for Life Sciences in Poland, used YouTube to find evidence for the personality traits of red and gray squirrels. His study showed that gray squirrels are more aggressive than red squirrels. These videos confirmed it more accurately than what scientists have seen in the wild.
“This is a new approach to biological behavioral studies that can save researchers’ time.
The video, Snowball The Dancing Cockatoo, inspired his own Harvard study.
In a study published in Current Biology in 2019, he wrote, “Snowball responds to music with significantly different spontaneous movements using different body parts. In this way, parrots seem to share this reaction with humans.”
Sanjita says that while these videos have scientific properties, they also make people a little more connected with nature and other creatures.
“Personally, when I look at elephants, I look at their emotions. I see that they are miserable, but of course my science needs more evidence,” says Sangeeta.
At the same time, he says, “when people feel emotional about being associated with these creatures, I hope it will also help the conservation of elephants.”
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