@Haggunenons this reminds me a bit of the cat/cucumber prank.
There is plenty of footage of cats freaking out if you quietly put a long cucumber next to them. I have never found or seen evidence of it working on any cat in New Zealand, where there are no snakes.
How interesting! That does seem like the same sort of thing. I imagine that not all of these cats that are scared of cucumbers have actually seen snakes before, so it’s likely that it is hardwired in them. Just like how in the article they got some response from the warblers that hadn’t been around cowbirds for 6,000 years, but then no response for the 300,000 year ones. It’s so crazy that something could be passed through so many generations like that. I wonder how many generations cucumber cat fear can be passed. That’s a really cool connection, Thank You!
@Haggunenons thank you, I really liked your article.
Intergenerational transmission is fascinating. The Washington crows mask experiment seems to indicate that crows at least can somehow tell each other about threats, sight unseen.
It’s very interesting that not only were the crows still mobbing the dangerous masks 5 years after capture, but they were mobbing the masks more and more as time went on.
It seems like the crows needed to either witness a capture or a mobbing event involving the mask in order to learn to themselves react to the mask. Am I understanding this correctly, or do you see somewhere that it says they were able to learn without having directly witnessed the dangerous mask?
@Haggunenons I think they did have to witness someone else scolding the mask. I initially read this and misunderstood how the horizontal transmisdion works.
Ah, I see. The book they mention in that article, Gifts of the Crow, looks good. I’m adding it to my list.
@Haggunenons yes it does! I really wish we had crows in my country. I would definitely be trying to do gift exchanges with them.
