Good morning.
The Whitewater forecast calls for a partly sunny day, with a high of eighty-five.
Over at Science News, there’s a story about how even lizards — previously considered not-so-smart — can learn new tricks. In Learnin’ Lizards, Susan Milius writes that
“These guys are smarter than people say,” reports behavioral ecologist Manuel Leal of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Cognitive scientists have studied birds’ and mammals’ powers to solve unexpected problems and learn new rules, but research on lizard cognition has been limited.
Yet several Anolis evermanni lizards collected from Puerto Rico and brought into the lab coped with devices not seen in nature that were modeled on tests of avian brain power, Leal and Brian Powell, also of Duke, report in an upcoming issue ofBiology Letters. In a series of tests, four out of six lizards figured out how to remove plastic lids firmly stuck on a food box and how to ignore lids with other colors introduced as possible distractors. Two lizards eventually were able to undo their previous training and choose the “wrong” color because researchers had reversed the rules.
Yet, despite the lizards’ prowess, there’s no reason for mammalian concern:
Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University in England, who studies cognition in New Caledonian crows, was not exactly wowed by the Anolis lizards, though. The ability to discriminate among options, and reverse that learning, is also known in fish, flies and bees, among other animals, he says. “It may well be that lizards do have the same flexibility shown by other taxa,” Kacelnik says, “but the results shown here are nowhere near what we know in birds and mammals.”
Rest easy.