I keep saying this and people say I’m crazy, but whales, elephants, and some other animals for sure have religion (a codified mythos of spirituality passed down through generations). Our experience is not remotely unique.
Recent studies show that birds, whales, and many other animals use consistent grammar and have accents. They’re not just making mindless sounds, they’re communicating with purpose. We’ve documented empathy in several other species. Some other species outperform us in memory and certain cognitive tests.
And many animals have been observed objectively playing and having fun. It’s pretty narcissistic to think we’re that much more advanced than other animals. Just because our culture places great emphasis on our ability to manipulate our environment doesn’t mean those that don’t aren’t as ‘evolved’ as we are. That’s very egotistical, and has led to some of our subcultures oppressing even other humans that lived nomadically or with nature as ‘subhuman’.
Wanting our cheese wrapped in plastic doesn’t make us more highly evolved. We’re just as evolved as everything else alive right now, and of course it’s probable that some other animals appreciate fun. It’s a concept even our newborns understand. It’s ludicrous to assume otherwise, imo.
Some pods of whales will revisit certain coordinates yearly, or on longer timelines that are extremely regular, where there’s no discernible reason (no food, they’re not mating, etc). They hang out for a while, then leave. They don’t do anything special there but vocalise more, and they’ll put off hunting for this social interaction. It’s reminiscent of early human history when we were nomadic and would sometimes gather, foregoing hunts in favour of sharing stories, often in the form of legends. Our earliest mythologies and spiritualism grew from this, and there’s no reason to discount their behaviour as so different from early hominins.
Elephants have been known for revisiting the bones of family members for decades, and a recent paper has been submitted with evidence they’ve been observed burying their dead on purpose – carrying babies for miles to man-made trenches. They obviously can’t do that with their larger dead, but they appear to prefer their dead to be protected from predation if possible, and they stay with the bodies for days, trumpeting. That strongly suggests they have some kind of opinions surrounding death, which again, in our own ancestors is inextricable from spirituality.
I personally think some other animals have religion – I have no real evidence as that’s just my opinion. I think we vastly underestimate animals and overestimate our relative importance.
While I cant explain the slug, I just want to point out that a reason these small animals might be attracted to it migh include exercising in a confined space. Just running kind of works against many creatures hiding instincts. And running in place is practice for running in a chase.
This just reminds me that bumble bees will play with small wooden beads if they’re left out, mostly just rolling them about aimlessly and sometimes jumping on them because apparently they are amused by it rolling over with them on top of it.
In all seriousness, the graph shows different species as fraction of total uses recorded. Since the paper is mostly about mice, and behavioural differences under different circumstances, it being unfair to the slugs is probably not such a big deal here.
The one snail “I dont get it, why’s everyone getting on this thing, its jus…oh god I’m sinking through these gaps! What devil made this contraption!!!”
the graph for mice on the left has a break between .10 and .80. see the little squiggly thing? if that break was not there, the mice bar would be wayyyy higher than the other bars.
Oooooh shit yeah it really does make it look a little closer that it was! Still, nice to know the mice (and occasional frog etc) were having a nice time
It looks to me as if 0.10 to 0.80 takes up as much vertical space as 0.01 to 0.02. They “yadda yadda‘d” the middle values because mouse was the only one that went that high.
They chopped out the middle section of the chart, so slugs actually look 12x larger than they should. In fact, all the other bars are 12x larger than they actually should be v
Every farmer queues his cows up in one line. So there are several lines of cows. Now one rich farmer owns a lot more cows than the other, poor farmers.
Someone wants to make a photo from above and has a problem: Either the long lines of the rich guys cows wont fit in the picture or he has to zoom out so far that the short lines arent really visible anymore.
So now if you leave out a bunch of cows from the long line and add a indicator, that there are left out cows. The numbers on the left make it that it still is correct and readable altho the longest line/bar is shorter.
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