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Many animals show apparently innate fears. For example,
small
prey
animals seem "programmed" to take cover at the sight of a
hawk,
but not of a duck. Rabbits, in my experience, will take
cover
when
a dog appears, but are untroubled by sheep.
Although some of these behaviours may
be learned, many
have
been
shown to be inborn, and hence are probably encoded
genetically or
epigenetically. They also persist, even in populations which
are
no
longer exposed to the original threat.
Now.
One of the problems with palaeontology is that we cannot,
in
general, ascertain details of the outer appearance of
extinct
species.
What colour was T. rex, for example? We have no idea.
Yes, you're ahead of me on this one. If animals fear
predators
innately, then some residue of this fear should remain even
if the
predator is extinct. (After all, mice will still fear kestrels,
even if
all kestrels are exterminated.)
So.
We need to get a bunch of potential prey animals together
in a
field.
We'll choose species which have colour vision. Then, we
make a
few
life-sized T. rices, and paint them different colours - red,
blue,
violet, black... Each T. rex will be wheeled out into the
field (or,
better yet, will walk out animatronically).
With luck, we will find that the prey animals will flee
fastest in
response to a particular colour, and then we will know what
colour
T. rices actually were.
Similar approaches might be used to determine the calls
made by
extinct species (another piece of information which is not
preserved
in the fossils). For instance, serious consideration should
be
given
to the possibility that the wolves from which domestic dogs
descended were actually predated by an animal which
sounded
like a
vacuum cleaner.
shape or colour?
http://www.flickr.c...lickery/5062443119/
[po, Oct 08 2010]
Purple Dinosaur
http://www.google.c...f&q=purple+dinosaur
Truly frightening [csea, Oct 09 2010]
Dinosaurs playing hide and seek with children
http://en.wikipedia...iki/Creation_Museum
as depicted at the Creation Museum (only in Kentucky) [xenzag, Oct 10 2010]
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Annotation:
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afraid of smurfs? unlikely. its more likely to be shapes that cause anxiety. |
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Yes, you're probably right. But in animals with colour vision,
colour might well be significant. Frinstance, a predator in
dense undergrowth will be more recognisable by colour than
by outline. |
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Great idea for an experiment, but weren't there
very few mammals extant during the reign of
dinosaurs? So, how would this innate fear of T.Rex
(or whatever) have developed? |
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Now that I think about, I wasn't alive then, either
(just missed it) but I'd be afraid of anything that big
and scary-looking... |
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Maybe humans were once hunted by creatures with
white faces and red bulbous noses, orange
hair...I'm getting the creeps just writing about
them. |
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True, but our distant ancestors were around then. Or at
least, we ought to be able to tell what colour sabre-toothed
tigers were... |
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Based on my own experience with this, I can tell you that T-Rexes were plastic, mottled green and yellow-brown. |
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I was groping around in the dark in my brother's log cabin, feeling for the matches and candle that I had seen on my last visit. I struck a match and discovered that he'd set up an inflatable dinosaur on the table. It was looming over me in the flaring light, and the fear was deeply innate. [+] |
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And oddly specific. I knew it for a dino, and knew it was a killer. It also felt like seeing a predator in a cave by torchlight. It really felt like an ancestral memory, but the dino in a torch-lit cave bit could never have happened. Maybe I was conflating cave bears and scuttling through the Jurassic undergrowth. Or just flashing on an old bad movie. |
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(My brother later switched to using a lighter for that candle holder, and he left the lighter leaning against the burning candle once. Just once.) |
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// weren't there very few mammals extant during the reign of dinosaurs? // |
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The way I understand it, our mammal-like ancestors pre-dated the dinosaurs. They spent the entire reign of the dinosaurs hiding in the bushes, running and hiding, running and dying, and just generally getting stepped on. They were small and fast-living, and subject to selection pressure, which changed them to pure mammals, then split them into different groups. At the end of the Cretaceous, our direct ancestors were shrew-like, but fiercely adapted and adaptable. |
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The dinos reigned for about twice as long as they have been gone. Since they left, we humans have gotten bigger and much slower in our generations. I venture to say that over ninety percent of our ancestors since they were recognizably mammalian spent their lives hiding from dinosaurs. |
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I don't think there is any doubt that we are all
innately afraid of large, toothy things. That makes it
hard to determine if we have a particular aversion to
colors or calls. |
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But, [MB]'s idea wasn't to test humans. It might still
work for other prey animals. Anyone got any spare
prey animals and some BIG pieces of cardboard? |
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Might also want to throw in one painted bright
day-glow pink, a color that doesn't appear in
nature. |
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If they freak more at the pink one they might just
be reacting to the resultantly more easily seen
shape,
but you'll know that you're not necessarily getting
an accurate read of color's effect on fear stimulus
and response. |
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Unless they really were day glow pink. And if that
did happen to be your finding, I'd keep it quiet if
you ever wanted to get another research grant. |
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[+] for the interesting idea. |
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Hey, [Boomer], maybe we could use some old movie theater cardboard stand-up advertising... Do you think they'd be afraid of Shrek? |
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And, [MB], I will donate my neighbor's back yard for all of those prey animals. Do try to hustle all of them in there before he gets home, eh? Throw in a few of your moles. |
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+ for the concept. But, purple dinosaur? [link] |
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[Grog]//Do you think they'd be afraid of Shrek?// |
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Cardboard cutouts might work for dumber prey
animals than me (hmm...I never thought of myself
as a prey animal before.) |
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But, a REAL Shrek? I'd shit myself getting under the
bed. I can tell the difference between cardboard
and *real* green skin. |
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Or did you mean a cardboard Shrek for the sheep?
(I got carried away there...) |
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I've found from being around prey that you can set them at ease by acting as they do. Many of them are only a few years old so the inate fear of predators seems to be tied mostly to direct dual eye contact.
If you turn your head side-to-side to look (like they do) at them while chawing something other than meat it puts them at ease because you are mimicing their behaviour and they think you are an herbivore. |
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If something is looking at you with both eyes and licking its lips...run...or fight. |
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Colour, feathers, scales, or fur matters little. |
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//look (like they do) at them while chawing
something other than meat// |
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Loved this...but, how would they know? |
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//If something is looking at you with both eyes and
licking its lips...run...or fight.// |
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Something nonhuman, you mean? Then, yeah,
brother, I get that! |
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in the last 500 years deer have become simultaneously unafraid of human habitations and the proximity of humans but at the same time afraid and effectively cognizant of firearms, it seems very clear that adaptions of this sort are very fluid and thus very unlikely to apply to stimuli that no longer have selective action in the environment. In no case do I believe that animals contain trace fears of extinct threats. Fear is too expensive a thing to waste. Humans being a special case of a sort, very very wasteful. |
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further you could largely discredit this theory by proving that an entirely artificial stimulus could cause an identical response. We cannot determine the color of three meter wide butterflies, no matter how terrifying they are to our test subjects. They must have been GREEN!! (false proof fallacy) |
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//Something nonhuman, you mean? Then, yeah, brother, I get that!// |
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I recall reading a few years back that some clever-boots person made a styrofoam cut-out of a sort-of T-shaped bird-like shape, and towed it around on a long string behind a radio-controlled model plane. |
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When they towed it with the top of the T forward, it looked like a certain bird pf prey with a trailing tail. When they towed it with the foot of the T forward, it looked like a goose with its neck outstretched. Or at least so the critters on the ground seemed to think. |
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Most animals have an innate fear of snakes. |
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The nearest I can think of that might go close to this idea is our natural aversion to eating bright blue food. There are very few bright blue things that are edible, apart from the fruit of two or three fruiting plant species. |
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[2 fries] //Not from my experience.// |
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Something lost in translation here [2 fries], on my
end, at least. |
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If something human looks at me with both eyes,
licking its (her) lips, maybe I should run, but I doubt
that I would...is all I was saying. |
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No loss of translation [boomershine].
//licking its (her) lips, maybe I should run//
Yep...hard and fast. <gazes into distance and zones out while remembering past vixens> Oh. it might be a little slice of bliss for a while but, if she's predatory, it's just *never* good news.
If it's a he, then scrap for sure, and if it's the four legged kind, then run right at it. They don't seem to know what to make of that. : ] |
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[2 fries]. Indeed. I do see your point. I have a feeling
we've grown a bit cynical in our dotage (mine,
anyway). I probably would run, no matter gender or
how many legs. |
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I live in Montana, btw, where we have grizzly bears
and mountain lions. Have you actually tried this
'running right at them' thing? |
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Most large predators (particularly the large cats, but also
bears and wild boars), if they see you as prey or as a threat,
are sort of hard-wired to flee if you run directly at them with
confidence. |
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Or was it "kill you"... I can never remember. |
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//Have you actually tried this 'running right at them' thing?// |
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It's helpful to have a rifle in your hands when you do this, if only for self-confidence. |
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//Have you actually tried this 'running right at them' thing?// |
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Three times so far,...well four if you count walking at a black bear and clapping loudly.
A moose cow with her calf charged me in a bog and I had no where to run but at her.
A gaurd dog broke it's chain and attacked me in the middle of the night as I was cutting through someone's yard going to a party once. (That one still gives me nightmares, all I saw of the dog was the glint of his eyes coming around the corner. When it bit into my leg I smashed the butt end of my six-pack of beer into the side of its head repeatedly. That's right, I am one of very few people who can say with all honesty that beer saved my life).
The other one was a black angus bull that didn't want to go up a style. |
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Somehow I think if a large, aggressive, predator were
to encounter this group of annotators, *I* would
be the one mostly likely to wind up in the jaws of the
beast.
You people are great! |
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Btw, does anyone know of another website where a
conversation starting with behavioural palaeontology
might wind up *anything* like this? I mean, are we
*alone* out here? |
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// are we *alone* out here?// |
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Probably. Most people repond to medication. |
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//Most people repond to medication// |
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I so desperately want to believe that to be true... |
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I so desperately want to believe you two both
*reponded* this way on purpose. |
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Getting back on track, mammals all apparently evolved from the therapsid lineage of the synapsids, which rose to terrestrial dominance from about 320MYA to the Permian extinction. They lay low for a long time, as dinosaurs (reptiles, ornithopods, theropods and a handful of others) dominated for about 160 MY until the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. |
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Mammals took advantage of the rise of angiosperms (flowering plants) while dinosaurs remained reliant upon gymnosperms (conifers and cycads and perhaps gnetales, which are mostly liana species). It is thought that angiosperms flourished because of temperature and atmospheric composition changes. |
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Mammals probably developed some sort of threat recognition "software" to survive as long as they have. This might be the explanation for their instinctive reaction to certain threatening events, such as shadows passing over them, and sudden movement. |
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Somehow, based on observation of existing carnivorous predators, I doubt that any major predator that existed would have been any colour other than that best suited to blending into the background. i.e. Polar bears are white, lions and other big cats are buff/brown/mottled/striped to give them an ambush capability. |
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None of which explains why raptors are not uniformly blue/grey. |
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Nor why sharks are not transparent. |
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//Getting back on track// |
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[infidel] Whoa there! Easy up on the throttle. You've
given me whiplash! |
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[Max] I believe you meant "Or maybe some *is*",
didn't you? |
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(just doing a bit of grammar police work here...) |
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Select: Obsessive mode > OFF |
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What exactly is the antidote to pot? Does anyone
know? |
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Oh ... sorry, not that game, then. Antonym, antidote, sooooo easy to get confused .... |
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[MB]//What exactly is the antidote to pot? Does
anyone know?// |
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Life is the antidote to pot? Are you sure it's not the
other way around? |
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//antidote to pot// Rimonabant, apparently. |
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Are you sure that isn't a real word pronounced backwards? |
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But they employed fairly rudimentary technology, [Ian_T], like clams' eyes in place of CCDs. They only recorded light and dark, rather than any shading that might be used to infer colour/s. |
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Color vision is fairly recent in our development--since we threw out those low-class New World monkeys, certainly. |
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We would have no instincts about, say, lemon-yellow T-Rexes if all our ancestors ever saw was a pale reddish-brown. |
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// [Max] I believe you meant "Or maybe some *is*", didn't you? // |
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No. "Some" is a plural noun, and requires the plural verb "are." |
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[Boomershine], you are welcome to join the ranks of the grammar police, but please try to avoid spurious corrections. |
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[csea] I would have thought, by the fact that [Max]
hasn't commented on that anno, that everyone
understood that I was joking. Stupid joke maybe, but
not malicious or pedantic, I hoped. I think I'm on the
Most Wanted list of the Grammar Police. |
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I probably deserve a tumbleweed. It was presumptive
of me to think that I have the credentials around here
to get away with such nonsense. Apologies. I is sorry. |
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We have to ask ourself, "Is our children learning?" |
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[Boomershine]
Sorry, I didn't get the joke, and was in reactive mode. (Given the idea, probably my reptilian brain?) No harm done. |
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Has Tim Rice been around long enough to be a dinosaur? |
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[baconbrain] rabbits are mammals, evolved from
the mammal-like reptiles which in turn, evolved
from the reptiles an off-shoot of which were the
dinosaurs. |
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So, rabbits might just have some innate reaction
to the outline of the T-Rex since the rabbits
ancestors were just about extant with the
dinosaurs. |
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But I fear that your prey animals are likely to have
a reaction to the shape and not the colour or at
least, it might be hard to differentiate the
reaction from each element. |
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I also think that T-Rex was unlikely to be of
uniform colour so you'd have to do a lot of
testing. |
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Do prey animals see in colour? |
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Lastly, you might need to measure the degree of
fear that the rabbit demonstrates in order to hone
your palaeontological model. |
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I'm not sure it's likely to work, but I wish it would. |
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Just ask any "Young Earth Creationist, born again Christian" because they believe that dinosaurs were amongst the animals brought on to Noah's Ark, so the descriptions must have been handed down somewhere. (see link) |
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Which begs the question as to how they managed to be exterminated and buried deep in hillsides and such without getting a mention in the big book. |
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There certainly seems to be enough hubris written into the description of creation and a few systematic exterminations of anti-christian armies and enemies, to expect that completely destroying somewhere between 500 and 2000 species would get a mention. Particularly so, if the creator then went to the trouble of pressing so many of them like flowers in "fake" sedimentary rock formations, after the rocks had been laid down. That's not to mention ferns and other plants in deeply buried coal beds. |
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I'd be happy to accept christianity if it could be comclusively proven that was what was done. |
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[Infidel] Not sure how many people these days remember
_Strata_ the book Terry Pratchet published *before* the first
Diskworld one. In it, he invents an entire deist cosmology --
unique, AFIK, and self-consistent, starting with the point you
raise. |
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I always assumed that mammals evolved from drummers. |
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Drummers? 1880s travelling salesmen? I don't get it. |
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// mammals evolved from drummers // |
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Tautology. Drummers can't evolve, they are an evolutionary dead end. The only reason they exist is that they occupy an environmental niche that no other species is even slightly tempted to try and occupy. |
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//By the Cretaceous you couldn’t swing a cat// |
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Of course you couldn't. They weren't invented for another 55 million years, or thereabouts. |
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Drummers are living proof of devolution. |
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// weren't invented for another 55 million years // |
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Being so late to market, we wonder why they ever caught on the way they have. |
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I wonder how many deeply innate things there are that scare us, or other creatures. |
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I'm not convinced that the brains of animals are wired up that way. At birth, there are a lot of sensory cues that are simply accepted, imprinted and used to form the heuristical foundation of a general understanding. So a child knows what's warm, and what's familiar, and what's different. Difference is generally considerd to be something to be feared - whether it's snakes, spiders, aliens or foreigners - it's all based on stuff that's counter to what we become used to at an early age. |
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If you took a baby rabbit and reared it along with a hatchling Veloceraptor, they'd probably get along fine - just like if you take any baby creature of type X and rear it alongside another baby creature of type Y. |
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You might get more out of looking into the sensory matrices of non-mammals. I'm not so sure about insects and creatures with more compact processing units - but then we don't know if/whether they feel such emotions as fear - they probably feel stress, as an analogue, but fear? So what you gain in the potential nature over nurture argument, you lose in the ability to determine stimulus/response by watching behavior - i.e. how can you tell whether a mollusc was scared of a Blackbird, or a crab scared of an octopus? |
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//I wonder how many deeply innate things there
are that scare us// |
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7.whatever the hell lives under my kid's bed,
AND...(wait for it...) |
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8. Being asked to sing in public. |
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"Thank you, ladies and gentleman..<bowing and
pointing to him>...Mr [MaxwellBuchanan]!!! Give us
a song, [Max]?" <crowd cheers uproariously> "SONG,
SONG, SONG!!!"" |
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[MaxwellBuchanan] is suddenly taken drunk as a result of
drinking a bad martini, and is escorted off stage. |
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"Well, that's fine then, [Max]. We all hope you feel
better soon! Let's give another big hand to Mr
[MaxwellBuchanan], all the way out here tonight
from the Cambridge Rehabilitation Centre!!!" <loud
applause and cheering from the crowd muffles the
sound of [Max] retching back stage.> |
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sp: centre (in Cambridge anyway) |
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Actually, I've barely finished habilitation. One step. |
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Usually an intransitive verb. [To undergo] an involuntary spasm of ineffectual vomiting. |
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One of the best halfbakery ideas of all time. |
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//Being asked to sing in public.// Years ago, at a seminar on
physiological responses to emotional stress, I recall one
speaker described an experiment which required a reliable,
reproducible means of inducing anxiety in human subjects.
They used public speaking. |
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[MB] //habilitation// You're a Privatdozent? Cool! |
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Speaking - no problemo. Singing - I would (just) prefer to
have my fingers broken. |
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//Singing - I would (just) prefer to have my fingers
broken.// |
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Aw [Max], everyone says that at first. After the third
or
fourth busted digit they start singing like birds. |
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//sp: retch// Thanks,[po] and [infidel]. I was a bit
slow on the uptake there. (Something like that can
ruin a good thread.) |
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This comment added just to be silly. |
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Well, I am going to take it seriously, anyhow. |
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I was mortally afraid someone was going to say that. I'm terrified of correctly predicting the future. |
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// in the last 500 years deer have become
simultaneously unafraid of human habitations and the
proximity of humans but at the same time afraid and
effectively cognizant of firearms// |
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Does anyone have proof of this? |
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I know that every deer hunting season the female deer wander down into the suburbs with impunity knowing we don't shoot them then. There is never an antler to be seen. |
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An annual mass migration into cities for a certain
period of time would make a fascinating paper. |
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Every year there are fields with hundreds of does on the outskirts of the city. It may be normal pre-winter feeding behaviour that just happens to coincide with hunting season, but it appears that the males do seem to know what time of the year we hunt them. |
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Two somewhat related anecdotes: |
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1. I was watching a hunting black-shouldered kite - a large and fearsome predator - recently. Other birds just a few metres away were not at all bothered by its presence. If it had been a falcon or an eagle there would have been a right kerfuffle. |
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2. One of my geese recently hatched some goslings. Her nest is right next to the pen's fence. On at least three occasions, she hissed and extended her neck just as I was walking past to check the fence. Each time, I got a severe fright, and immediately thought 'Snake!'. So why can't I find any references to geese mimicking snakes? |
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If this idea were true, I'd be pretty sure the vast
majority of ancient predators looked like bicycles. |
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An animal on the side of the road will often let a car
drive right past them. I've seen even ignore
pedestrians on occasion, and then the same animal
will run when a cyclist passes by. |
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That would be in the "fear of accidentally being stepped on" category. |
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Actually, it may be an interesting field of study, although as
far as I know, studies have been made on mice that do not
show fright of snakes until introduced to the reaction of other
mice. (Read it in Temple Gerandin's book) |
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I have a friend who owns a couple of backyard ducks. They freeze with one eye on the sky whenever an airplane goes over. |
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Probably an early life luggage handling incident or something. |
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Or perhaps the ancestral duck was heavily predated
by a sort of tubular-bodied hawk. |
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//heavily predated// Are you talking tens of millions of years there? |
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//So why can't I find any references to geese mimicking snakes?// |
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Good question. The only cross-species mimicry I can find are related to insects and plants or insects to other insects. |
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// If this idea were true, I'd be pretty sure the vast majority of ancient predators looked like bicycles.// |
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Bicycles freak animals out because they appear to move without moving, like a snake. |
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//couple of backyard ducks. They freeze with one eye on the sky whenever an airplane goes over.// |
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The sky is growling!
Every critter recognizes the sound of thunder. |
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Given how much cats are freaked out by cucumbers our cave-man gardens must have really been something to see. |
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Actually Kate Wilhelm, it turns out. I got only two results
from Google with "Wilhem". |
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the dinos with feathers pics came from a
Herpetologist, so wash your hands after clicking the
link. |
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Yes: reptiles can carry salmonella. Wouldn't want to catch
that from carelessly tapping a tweet. |
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