Week 4 Reflection

The CAVE MAN

McGOWAN, KAT. “The CAVE MAN.” Audubon, vol. 118, no. 2, Mar. 2016, pp. 24–31. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=113442982&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

This article is written by John Marzluff. This is the speaker of the Ted Talk I chose to watch, and he is one of the experiment designers of this experiment of crows. I found this article by his name. This research article tested on crows in an university campus. First, a person with a cave man mask on walks around the campus with no attention from the crows. Then, that person caught a crow and let it go. Then, when he walks in the campus with the mask on, crows would dive on him and warn other crows of the potential threat. No matter the person is wearing a hat or putting the mask upside down, crows can recognize him and send warnings. Even after 8 years, the offspring of the original crows would still recognize the mask and send warnings. The study helps us better understand that crows can memorize others' behaviors and pass down knowledge by communication and observation.

Parrots joins tiny club of species that are helpful

Page, Michael Le. “Parrot Joins Tiny Club of Species That Are Helpful.” New Scientist, vol. 245, no. 3265, Jan. 2020, pp. 16–18. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/s0262-4079(20)30107-x.

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=141235219&site=ehost-live&scope=site

I found this article by typing in the keyword PARROTS. This is about an experiment of helping each other and being selfless of African Grey parrots. Scientists taught two parrots that they can exchange tokens for foods by giving them to a human through small holes on the wall. After they learned and get used to it, they are separated, and two parrots are kept in different rooms which one of them has tokens and the other doesn't. The one room with tokens does not have hole to a human, but is connected to the room with the hole but without tokens. 7 out of 8 parrots were able to pass tokens to the other one, while the other one gives tokens to human and give a part of the reward back to the one with tokens. This proved that African Grey parrots understand that by giving up short term benefits and cooperate with others can give them greater benefits. This is helping me understand that parrots are clever animals that they understand to trust and collaborate with other parrots.

By exploring around in the library database, I found that this is an effective tool for me to help on future researches. By reading the intro, I can quickly get a general idea of what the article is about and decide whether I want to read it or not. Besides, it is also helpful that the cite provides me with different kinds of citation formats, which I can directly copy and paste to my essay as reference.