[embedded content]Not a Human, but a Dance, Atlantic Daily, Ed Yong, September 19, 2019 I do not know about you when you receive a magazine you subscribe to; but when I get mine, I read it from cover to cover. I also send a copy to one who is incarcerated to read and it makes the rounds amongst the inmates. Since I chased prisoners in the service, it is not unusual for me to look after some of them. Me: This bird has more rhythm than I do.
Topics:
run75441 considers the following as important: climate change, Hot Topics
This could be interesting, too:
Peter Radford writes AJR, Nobel, and prompt engineering
Joel Eissenberg writes The business of aging
Angry Bear writes And It Makes No Difference Whether the Needed Fifth Vote is Missing Because . . .
Angry Bear writes A Proposal to Address the Housing Crisis
Not a Human, but a Dance, Atlantic Daily, Ed Yong, September 19, 2019
I do not know about you when you receive a magazine you subscribe to; but when I get mine, I read it from cover to cover. I also send a copy to one who is incarcerated to read and it makes the rounds amongst the inmates. Since I chased prisoners in the service, it is not unusual for me to look after some of them.
Me: This bird has more rhythm than I do. Not a Human, but a Dancer
Among the video’s 6.2 million viewers was Aniruddh Patel and he was was blown away by what he saw. A neuroscientist, Patel had recently published a paper asking why the near – universal trait among human of dancing was seemingly absent in other animals. Some species will jump excitedly to music; but, they are not in time with the music and lack rhythm.
Me: Recently on the show (my wife was watching) “Dancing With the Stars,” Nancy Wilson was asked if she had rhythm and could dance by her partner Her reply was; “I am Black” or of course I do fool. Some people are more equal than others. This definitely plays against my natural skill set as I must admit I lack rhythm and am also envious.
Some animals can be trained to perform dancelike actions such as in canine freestyle, but they do not do so naturally. Some birds will make fancy courtship “dances;” but “they’re not listening to another bird laying down a complex beat,” says Patel, at Tufts University. True dancing is a spontaneous rhythmic movement to external music. Our closest companions, dogs and cats, can not do such. Neither do our closest relatives, monkeys and other primates.
Patel reasoned dancing requires strong connections between brain regions involved in hearing and movement and such mental hardware would only exist in vocal learners or in animals capable of imitating the sounds they hear. That elite club excludes dogs, cats, and other primates, but includes elephants, dolphins, songbirds, and parrots.
Patel: “When someone sent me a video of Snowball, I was primed to jump on it.”
In 2008, he tested Snowball’s ability to keep time with versions of “Everybody” that had been slowed down or sped up. In almost every case, the parrot successfully banged his head and lifted his feet in time. Much like human children, he often went offbeat, but his performance was consistent enough to satisfy Patel.
Snowball was going through his own dance- dance revolution when another team led by Adena Schulz kept exposing him to new music, and learned that he likes Pink, Lady Gaga, Queen, and Bruno Mars.
Patel: “Dancing in human cultures isn’t a purely arbitrary invention,” Instead, he suggests that it arises when animals have a particular quintet of mental skills and predilections which Snowball the parrot exhibits also.
The Quiet Disappearance of Birds in North America, The Atlantic, Science, Ed Yong, September 19, 2019
If the pigeons disappeared from your local park, would you notice? What if the neighborhood finch stopped coming to the feeder? The starling no longer perched on the power line?
According to a new report, birds are disappearing and in large numbers. The total North American avian population has decreased by an approximate 29 percent over the past half century. There are there are 3 billion fewer birds today than when there were in 1970.
It is not a case of rare birds getting rarer either as the hardest hit species include every day birds such as swallows, sparrows, and starlings. 90 percent of the losses have come from 12 bird families. With the decreased numbers birds, we lose the function they bring to nature such as insect eaters controlling their numbers, plant pollination, those early morning songs, and more.
Researchers plan to investigate what is causing the drop; but, the condition of their habitat such as pollution and the reductions of it due to encroachment of the grasslands and wetlands by humans will probably play a big role. There are also the more mundane (and often preventable) threats, like running into windows and being killed by cats.
I can see the pollution part of it in my own neighborhood where grass clippings and leaves besides fertilizer residue are blown into the subdivision streets and washed down the drains leading to the wetlands surrounding us. And when I explain why they should not do such, they get indignant about it with the old “this is my land.” Except when your actions cause harm to the environment, the water supply, and the people around you, your ownership of the land and actions are not exempt. It is called community.
“It is as if all birds are canaries and the entire world their coal mine.”