Think Like a Goat: The Wildly Smart Ways Animals Communicate, Cooperate and Innovate
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ALL KINDS of Intelligence Humans are pretty smart We learn at every stage of life whether it's how to walk or how to run a business We invent cool tools and systems like scooters backpacks ice cream trucks the internet to solve all sorts of problems We use complicated languages to communicate with each other hey look we're doing that right now in this book We remember our past experiences and plan for future ones It's no wonder we consider ourselves the most intelligent creatures on our planet But are we really Scientists who study animal behavior are asking us to think again All kinds of animals have smarts that might surprise us Did you know that an octopus can imitate a jellyfish a sea snake or even a plant to avoid being eaten by predators Chimpanzees use rocks and sticks as tools to help them crack open nuts and get termites out of logs Sparrows find their way to their winter homes even if they start 3700 km 2300 mi away from their normal flight route Oh and get this crows recognize human faces remember them for years and warn other crows about dangerous people These and other fascinating discoveries are helping us understand that many creatures from the tiny rock ant to the enormous blue whale are more intelligent than we once believed To truly appreciate how smart other animals are we shouldn't look at what they can do compared to us but at how they've evolved to solve problems and survive in their own unique environments Humans think and learn in impressive ways for sure But other creatures with their different brains and special skills have so many interesting things to teach us
ALWAYS Evolving What do beetles blue jays porcupines and people all have in common We're all connected to one another and to every other thing that's ever lived through the processes of evolution In the 1800s naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin developed his theory that species change or evolve gradually over many generations Observing finches and other animals during his travels around the world he noticed that there were small physical differences between creatures of the same species Darwin's Finches A. geospiza magnirostris B. geospiza parvula C. geospiza fortis CHAPTER ONE D. geospiza olivacea Parrot like bill In the wild animals of the same species compete for limited resources such as food and space Darwin realized that the animals with traits that give them a competitive advantage will survive and reproduce Think of polar bears which have thicker fur to protect them from the cold or lizards that can change skin color to blend in with their surroundings The surviving individual animals of a species pass these helpful traits on to their babies Darwin called this process natural selection A ground finch with a short thick beak that's especially useful for crushing large seeds will have baby finches that also have short thick beaks and eventually those finches babies will inherit short thick beaks too In this way helpful characteristics become more common in a species over time a very long time Continued gradual changes over many generations can eventually produce an entirely new species Grasping bill Probing bill Crushing bill
BRANCHING OUT Over millions of years evolution has created an astonishing variety of creatures on Earth each with its own unique set of traits and abilities Could you store thousands of individual seeds in lots of different places and then remember where they are six months later Birds can Would you think to carry shelter around with you so you could hide whenever you sense danger Octopuses do Many other animals also have special kinds of intelligence that make sense for the world they live in It's difficult to understand the behaviors of other animals and humans are tempted to think that we've evolved to be the smartest of them all But evolution is not like a ladder with humans at the top it's more like a bushy tree All species evolve in different directions as they learn to solve their own unique problems
