Do animals recognise themselves in mirrors?

Admit it, you've probably tried showing your dog or cat a mirror, just to see what would happen. And chances are they either completely ignored it, or freaked out thinking it was another dog or cat to attack - or play with. There's no shortage ofadorable videos starring puppies versus mirrors, but the antics don't really explain whether an animal can actually recognise itself in the mirror.



At first the chimps treated their reflections as they would another chimp in a social setting. But within a few days, their behaviour changed. "They’d use the mirror to look at the inside of their mouths, to make faces at the mirror, to inspect their genitals, to remove mucous from the corner of their eyes," Galluptold Chelsea Wald at Nautilus.

In other words, the chimps appeared to have learnt to recognise their reflections. To be sure, Gallup tested this notion by going one step further - each animal was gently anesthetised and received some markings in the shape of red paint on one of their eyebrow ridges, and a tip of the ear. "It seemed pretty obvious that if I saw myself in a mirror with marks on my face, that I’d reach up and inspect those marks," said Gallup.

The removable red dye couldn't be smelled or felt by touch (the team actually tested this by painting their own faces first and waiting for 24 hours to see if they could feel it). Once returned to their mirrors, the chimps went on to do exactly what Gallup predicted - they inspected their new markings, even rubbing them with their hands and then checking their fingers to see if whatever had been painted on them was coming off.

Ecotourism May Negatively Affect Animals

A paper published on Friday in the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution raises questions about how the presence of humans affects wild animals and their susceptibility to predators. For the paper, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) examined data of observed animal behavior from scientists around the world. Dan Blumstein, professor and chair of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, is the corresponding author of the paper, “How Nature-Based Tourism Might Increase Prey Vulnerability to Predators.”



With ecotourism, or nature-based tourism, Blumstein told Outside on Monday, there is evidence that animals can become more tolerant of humans. “The question we’re asking is, ‘Does this mean they become more vulnerable to predators?’” he said. “The degree to which animals become dumb around humans is a really interesting question.”

The paper examines the link between wild animals’ gradual domestication through interaction with humans in high-traffic areas like wilderness preserves. Due to their close proximity to humans, these animals live in a kind of protective net from predators. As they breed, they pass down domestic traits, changing the species generation by generation. Blumstein’s paper asks whether this poses a danger to the animals both immediately and in the long-term, especially if the protection that human presence provides from predators is removed.


While these changes may not seem as critical for species like deer or squirrels, the stakes are higher when dealing with already-stressed populations, specifically endangered species. For at-risk populations, the loss of several animals (due to domestication and its impact on the animal’s ability to escape predators) could result in a stable population moving into decline, Blumstein said. He also said that the paper’s results call for additional research to discover a timeline of when these changes take place.

A special badger – with very special protectors

Despite the whispering, our excitement was palpable. “There’s a white one,” one of the volunteers from the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust said. Not white, as it turned out, although in the half-light of a misty pre-dawn it seemed that way.

Standing closer, the badger appeared more gingery brown, the head’s usual contrast of humbug stripes almost absent. The eyes were a marmalade colour, pretty and rather gentle. This wasn’t an albino but an erythristic badger, lacking black pigment in its fur through a genetic mutation. Their distribution in Britain is patchy; there are more in north Shropshire, for example, but very few in Derbyshire; this was the first badger experts in the county had heard about.

Badgers in humane traps react in all sorts of ways, sometimes hissing or growling; later that morning I’d see one fast asleep. This one remained still, head cocked, waiting to see what would happen next. The head was slim, even a little elongated and the tail somewhat stubby and round, the hallmarks of a female.

Debbie Bailey, taking a career break from nursing to help protect badgers, was busy around the trap, wiggling the fingers of one hand near the badger’s face while the other guided a hypodermic needle towards the badger’s ample rear end, vaccination against tuberculosis. The badger didn’t react as the needle went in but as Debbie clipped fur from the badger’s back, it finally complained. applied a dot of stock spray, so that if this badger were trapped again she would know it.

I could only stand and marvel: at the badger, but also at the dedication of those working on her behalf. It had taken days of patient effort – and lots of peanuts – to treat this badger with the minimum of stress. Procedure complete, Debbie opened the trap and gently coaxed the badger backwards. It paused, tawny snout sniffing the air, and then was off, sprinting in a wide arc round the back of us, bustling through a stand of trees into undergrowth.