As researchers look more closely at the elaborate dances of prey and predator, brother and sister, seducer and seduced, they are finding a world of complexity rarely suspected by old-school naturalists. With each new revelation, the gulf between the clever, unpredictable behavior of humans and the supposedly routine, almost mechanical actions of other animals seems to shrink just a bit. Take, for example, any one of the items in the following roundup of new research.
Puppies evidently wonder the same thing.
Cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado has found that to keep roughhousing from being misinterpreted, young dogs, wolves and coyotes extend their front legs beseechingly for a second or two, shoulders low, hind quarters high, before bounding back into action. The gesture appears for all the world to be a bow. The animals bow most often, he has found, either just before or just after they bite their partners. He believes bowing is part of a suite of behaviors that an animal learns. Pepper studied an endangered population of glossy black cockatoos on Australia's Kangaroo Island.