Just a quick one today as a bit under the weather. Radio Four (or "the wireless" to many of us who never tune in to any other channel) this week has a couple of fun programmes looking at the less fluffy beasts:
The Infinite Monkey Cage has a nice program (series 17, episode 5, which discusses why a scientist made pants for frogs (and ended up adding braces to stop the frogs taking them off). More details here - but sorry, no pictures :(
In Our Time has a nice chat about cephalopods (where apparently women opt for the SEPHalopod pronunciation, whereas the men go for KEPHalopod), including how octopus arms have their own light sensors, to help with camouflage.
Which just made me think of how many times humans have tried to test animal intelligence in inappropriate ways. After all, why SHOULD a dolphin (whose main imaging system is sonar) recognise its optical reflection in a mirror to prove to us that it is self aware?
So I was inspired to draw a (quite bad) cartoon:
When cephalopods invent intelligence tests!
