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Capuchin Monkeys
When it comes to intelligence, human beings are the top dogs of the animal kingdom. Or so we tell ourselves. But in recent years, scientists have been documenting surprising intelligence and emotional depth in animals ranging from humble honeybees to thundering elephants. Through studies in labs and in the wild, researchers have found animals communicating complex ideas, solving problems, using tools and expressing their feelings -- behaviors once thought to be uniquely human. The intelligence we're talking about is more than, say, training a dog to detect cancer in humans, a feat that may save many lives. It's the ability of the animal to use an innate trait for a complex purpose. Think of Lassie using her sense of sound to save Timmy from an avalanche. Here are some amazing examples.Artistic Monkey Business
When Janet Schmid became executive director of the Little River Zoo in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1996, she learned a lot about the intelligence of capuchin monkeys. She and her husband adopted a young male who had a mischievous personality, and named him Mr. Bailey. The capuchin particularly liked taking car rides, insisting that he insert the ignition key and ride shotgun in the passenger's seat. "He loved to duck below the window as we'd come to an intersection," Schmid recalls. "When we'd stop, he'd jump up and laugh at the car next to us, just to get a rise out of the passengers."
Now 12 years old (capuchins live to about 40), Mr. Bailey has become an avid painter. He uses a variety of brush strokes to create colorful, abstract canvases and, like any temperamental artist, prefers not to be disturbed while creating his art. "He'll paint steadily for almost an hour and won't let anyone interrupt him until he puts down his brush," says Schmid. "He's amazing to watch because you can tell there's a thought process occurring. When we raised him, we quit watching TV because he was so entertaining."
Prairie Dog Twang
Through a variety of birdlike chirping sounds, prairie dogs alert each other to approaching creatures. They demonstrate a surprisingly complex communication system, and even have dialects specific to their particular colony. "It's like hearing different people speak from California, Texas and Vermont," says Constantine Slobodchikoff, a professor of biology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. In his 25 years studying Gunnison's prairie dogs, he's recorded them vocalizing ten nouns including hawk, deer and coyote, a number of adjectives to identify color, size and shape, and even some verbs to indicate speed. Thus a prairie dog might alert its colony by chirping "a tall human in yellow shirt is approaching fast."
But Slobodchikoff suspects that prairie dogs may have an even larger vocabulary. In an ongoing study, he and student researchers built black, wooden silhouettes of animals, as well as geometric shapes -- ovals, triangles and stars -- and flashed them over a prairie dog colony. The reaction? "The prairie dogs manufactured new words to describe the shapes," says Slobodchikoff. "Their brain contains a very extensive vocabulary that they can pull out at will."
Eventually, Slobodchikoff hopes to talk to the animals, although early attempts have made for less than scintillating conversation. "I used my best prairie dog imitation to say coyote, and they just looked at me in disgust," says Slobodchikoff. "It looked like I had said a bad word."
Ivy League Parrot
The term birdbrain is considered an insult, but some birds actually are pretty brainy. One African grey parrot in suburban Boston is said to have the cognitive abilities of a five-year-old child. Alex (for Avian Learning Experiment) is a 29-year-old bird that's been tutored most of his life by Irene Pepperberg, PhD, a Harvard-educated professor now teaching at Brandeis University. Alex can identify 50 different objects, seven colors, five shapes, quantities up to six, and the concepts of bigger, smaller, same and different. "And he said, 'I'm sorry,'" reports Pepperberg. "He knew what was appropriate to say."
Pepperberg insists that Alex makes reasoned decisions -- meaning he possesses language abilities once thought to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. During an experiment in 2004, researchers gave Alex different-colored blocks in sets of two, three and six. When asked which color group had five blocks, Alex replied, "None." And he repeated the answer in duplicate tests. Although Alex had previously learned the term to describe the difference between two identically sized objects, he apparently interpreted the concept of "none" as an absence of quantity all on his own.
"The important thing was not just that he understood a zero-like concept," says Pepperberg, "but that he was able to take information from one domain and apply it to another. That's a lot like a high school student answering questions on a quiz show."
Such feats have made Alex a celebrity. If you Google his name (plus African grey parrot) you'll get 207,000 hits, almost as many as another knowledgeable Alex -- Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek.
See Alex in this video clip.
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