"The Gorilla King" R.I.P.

BBC reports:

Rwanda mourns most famous gorilla

Titus - the most famous silverback in Africa known as "The Gorilla King" - has died in Rwanda at the age of 35.  He was the subject of a BBC documentary last year, and was studied by naturalists throughout his life - including US expert Dian Fossey. Rwandan officials described him as "possibly the most remarkable gorilla ever known", referring to his long life and his rise to dominance in his group.

Titus was one of only about 700 mountain gorillas left in Africa.The highly endangered animals are found only on the slopes of the Virunga mountains on the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The plight of the mountain gorilla was brought to the attention of the world by Fossey, who lived in the Virunga until her murder in 1985.

"He was born on 24 August 1974 and has been observed closely by researchers throughout his entire life," a statement from the Rwandan national parks office said. "Tragically, he succumbed to old age on September 14."

The life expectancy of a healthy gorilla is about 40.

The silverback's story was featured last year in a BBC documentary called Titus: The Gorilla King.

He rose to become the dominant male in his group despite losing family members and being born underdeveloped.

"Every gorilla death recorded is not only a great loss, but a major setback to conservation efforts of removing the mountain gorillas off the endangered species list," tourism officials said.

Gorilla tracking is now the mainstay of tourism in Rwanda and Uganda. 

© BBC MMIX

Here's a relevant Little Mo poem and illustration, from The Concrete Jungle Book:

Evidence Points To Conscious 'Metacognition' In Some Nonhuman Animals

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2009) — J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University at Buffalo who has conducted extensive studies in animal cognition, says there is growing evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition -- that is, they may share humans' ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.

Smith makes this conclusion in an article published the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Science (Volume 13, Issue 9). He reviews this new and rapidly developing area of comparative inquiry, describing its milestones and its prospects for continued progress.

He says "comparative psychologists have studied the question of whether or not non-human animals have knowledge of their own cognitive states by testing a dolphin, pigeons, rats, monkeys and apes using perception, memory and food-concealment paradigms.

"The field offers growing evidence that some animals have functional parallels to humans' consciousness and to humans' cognitive self-awareness," he says. Among these species are dolphins and macaque monkeys (an Old World monkey species).

Smith recounts the original animal-metacognition experiment with Natua the dolphin. "When uncertain, the dolphin clearly hesitated and wavered between his two possible responses," he says, "but when certain, he swam toward his chosen response so fast that his bow wave would soak the researchers' electronic switches.

"In sharp contrast," he says, "pigeons in several studies have so far not expressed any capacity for metacognition. In addition, several converging studies now show that capuchin monkeys barely express a capacity for metacognition.

"This last result," Smith says, "raises important questions about the emergence of reflective or extended mind in the primate order.

"This research area opens a new window on reflective mind in animals, illuminating its phylogenetic emergence and allowing researchers to trace the antecedents of human consciousness."

Smith, a professor in the UB Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Sciences, is recognized for his research and publications in the field of animal cognition.

He and his colleagues pioneered the study of metacognition in nonhuman animals, and they have contributed some of the principal results in this area, including many results that involve the participation of Old World and New World monkeys who have been trained to use joysticks to participate in computer tasks.

Their research is supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the National Science Foundation.

Smith explains that metacognition is a sophisticated human capacity linked to hierarchical structure in the mind (because the metacognitive executive control processes oversee lower-level cognition), to self-awareness (because uncertainty and doubt feel so personal and subjective) and to declarative consciousness (because humans are conscious of their states of knowing and can declare them to others).

Therefore, Smith says, "it is a crucial goal of comparative psychology to establish firmly whether animals share humans' metacognitive capacity. If they do, it could bear on their consciousness and self-awareness, too."

In fact, he concludes, "Metacognition rivals language and tool use in its potential to establish important continuities or discontinuities between human and animal minds."'

Drawing by Doug Millison
Adapted from materials provided by University at Buffalo.

University at Buffalo (2009, September 15). Evidence Points To Conscious 'Metacognition' In Some Nonhuman Animals. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com  /releases/2009/09/090914172644.htm       

 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914172644.htm

For dogs, "smell tells time"

 "…Dogs, as anyone who has ever met one knows, sniff a lot. They are, says Horo­witz, “creatures of the nose.” To help us grasp the magnitude of the difference between the human and the canine olfactory umwelts, she details not only the physical makeup of a dog nose (a beagle nose has 300 million receptor sites, for example, compared with a human being’s six million), but also the mechanics of the canine snout. People have to exhale before we can inhale new air. Dogs do not. They breath in, then their nostrils quiver and pull the air deeper into the nose as well as out through side slits. Specialized photography reveals that the breeze generated by dog exhalation helps to pull more new scent in. In this way, dogs not 

only hold more scent in at once than we can, but also continuously refresh what they smell, without interruption, the way humans can keep 'shifting their gaze to get another look.'

"Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing 'gaze' also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, 'smell tells time,' she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.' While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, 'including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.' Now that’s umwelt.

"A dog’s vision affects its sense of time, too. Dogs have a higher 'flicker fusion rate than we do, which is the rate at which retinal cells can process incoming light, or 'the number of snapshots of the world that the eye takes in every second.' This is one of the reasons dogs respond so well to subtle human facial reactions: 'They pay attention to the slivers of time between our blinks.') It also helps explain those ­eerily accurate balletic leaps after tennis balls and Frisbees, but Horowitz lets us see the implications beyond our human-centric fascination with our pets. This is more than a game of fetch; it is a profound, existential realization: 'One could say that dogs see the world faster than we do, but what they really do is see just a bit more world in every second.' "

…from: INSIDE OF A DOG: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitw, reviewed by Cathleeen Schine

(Original drawing by Doug Millison.)