Some animal behaviorists argue that certain animals can remember past events, anticipate future ones, make plans and choices, and coordinate activities within a group. These scientists, however, are cautious about the extent to which animals can be credited with conscious processing. Explanations of animal behavior that leave out any sort of consciousness at all and ascribe actions entirely to instinct leave many questions unanswered. One example of such unexplained behavior: Honeybees communicate the sources of nectar to one another by doing a dance in a figure-eight pattern. The orientation of the dance conveys the position of the food relative to the sun's position in the sky, and the speed of the dance tells how far the food source is from the hive. Most researchers assume that the ability to perform and encode the dance is innate and shows no special intelligence. But in one study, when experimenters kept changing the site of the food source, each time moving the food 25 percent farther from the previous site, foraging honeybees began to anticipate where the food source would appear next. When the researchers arrived at the new location, they would find the bees circling the spot, waiting for their food. No one has yet explained how bees, whose brains weigh four ten-thousandths of an ounce, could have inferred the location of the new site. Other behaviors that may indicate some cognition include tool use. Many animals, like the otter who uses a stone to crack mussel shells, are capable of using objects in the natural environment as rudimentary tools. One researcher has found that mother chimpanzees occasionally show their young how to use tools to open hard nuts. In one study, chimpanzees compared two pairs of food wells containing chocolate chips. One pair might contain, say, five chips and three chips, the other our chips and three chips. Allowed to choose which pair they wanted, the chimpanzees almost always chose the one with the higher total, showing some sort of summing ability. Other chimpanzees have learned to use numerals to label quantities of items and do simple sums.

Why are otters and mussel shells included in the discussion in paragraph 3?

Câu hỏi liên quan

• The latter half of the last sentence in paragraph 3, “or one tourist for every person living in Spain” means .........

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ZUNIA12

• The passage mainly discusses Rachel Carson’s work ............

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• How is slang defined by the author?

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