I bet they also take drugs :-)

When is a behaviour play, and not something else? And why do animals do it?

Current perspectives on the biological study of play: signs of progress

Interesting thread (on Yahoo groups!) about play behaviour and its scientific investigatability.

"We review the observations and the basic laws describing the essential aspects of collective motion -- being one of the most common and spectacular manifestation of coordinated behavior. Our aim is to provide a balanced discussion of the various facets of this highly multidisciplinary field, including experiments, mathematical methods and models for simulations, so that readers with a variety of background could get both the basics and a broader, more detailed picture of the field. The observations we report on include systems consisting of units ranging from macromolecules through metallic rods and robots to groups of animals and people. Some emphasis is put on models that are simple and realistic enough to reproduce the numerous related observations and are useful for developing concepts for a better understanding of the complexity of systems consisting of many simultaneously moving entities. As such, these models allow the establishing of a few fundamental principles of flocking. In particular, it is demonstrated, that in spite of considerable differences, a number of deep analogies exist between equilibrium statistical physics systems and those made of self-propelled (in most cases living) units. In both cases only a few well defined macroscopic/collective states occur and the transitions between these states follow a similar scenario, involving discontinuity and algebraic divergences."

We have shown1 that animals compare their own rewards with those of others, and accept or reject rewards according to their relative value. Our aim was not to demonstrate that capuchin monkeys make a human response to inequality, but rather to elucidate evolutionary precursors to inequity aversion. We use this term as in ref. 2 — “people resist inequitable outcomes; that is, they are willing to give up some material pay-off to move in the direction of more equitable outcomes” — and specifically focus on “disadvantageous inequity aversion”2. The monkeys in our experiment could not change the reward division, and hence could not actively avoid inequality, but we wanted to determine whether they would at least recognize inequality if subjected to it. We found that the capuchins reacted negatively, refusing to complete the interaction.

Nice piece by Lynda Sharpe on animal play and its possible functions

Sperm whales have names apparently. Yo @spermwhale whassup? http://bit.ly/fE6XnX [from http://twitter.com/wholehandlin/statuses/47419584965378050]

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973 - #vonfrisch #lorenz #tinbergen #ethology

I wonder why any ethologist would ever work on play since it appears to be both controversial and intractable to rigorous hypothesis development or testing.

Good old Paul Griffiths

The cultural life of whales - http://bit.ly/gSNa56 interesting speculation about the moral codes of whales #ethology #whales<br />
– Glyn Moody (glynmoody) http://twitter.com/glynmoody/status/31644266715414529

Direct link to PDF file