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Altruistic Leopard Cares For Baboon Baby

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Altruistic Leopard Cares For Baboon Baby

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In this video, a leopard is caring for an orphaned baboon. He does this and puts the baby in front of himself. Therefore, caring more for the animal than itself. This form of altruistic behavior can risk the life of the leopard. This is sometimes irrational in the sense that the animal who is helping, can't even provide for itself.

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Incredible leopard and baby baboon interaction

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Hippos Have Been Observed Saving Animals From The Clenches Of Crocodiles

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Hippos Have Been Observed Saving Animals From The Clenches Of Crocodiles

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Watering holes are often exciting places to watch animals interact, and new video from Kruger National Park in South Africa doesn't disappoint.

While touring the massive park, a couple happened upon a wildebeest that had just been bitten by a crocodile. It's likely the herbivore had approached the water for a drink when it was ambushed from below. The wildebeest struggled to free itself but the crocodile kept a firm grip on the slender leg in its powerful jaws.

For nearly eight minutes, the wildebeest and crocodile were engaged in a ferocious game of tug-of-war, and eventually the wildebeest appeared to tire.

Slowly the crocodile began to drag the wildebeest under water. Crocodiles, with their long, heavy bodies and stubby legs, have the biggest advantage over large prey like wildebeest when submerged.

As the wildebeest becomes more and more overwhelmed by the water and the crocodile's persistent pull, two hippopotamuses approach from offscreen. Suddenly, they charge toward the crocodile, causing it to lose its grip on the wildebeest. The mammal broke free. But with a likely broken leg, it may not survive long.

So did the hippos rush in to "save" a wildebeest in need?

Not likely, says Douglas McCauley, a National Geographic explorer and professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Despite the fact that they're herbivores too, hippos can be extremely aggressive. Earlier this month, a sleeping hippo in Kenya was startled by a lion and snapped the big cat's neck.

McCauley offered two theories for why the hippos, likely sub-dominant males, incidentally "freed" the wildebeest.

The first is that the crocodile had encroached too closely on the hippos' territory. Hippos and crocodiles, which both frequent watering holes, generally are wary of each other. Hippos are too big and powerful for crocodiles to eat and hippos generally confine their prey to vegetation. But when a crocodile gets within about two meters (six feet) of a hippo, the territorial mammals may snap or charge, says McCauley.

McCauley's second hypothesis, the one he says is more likely in this case, is that the wildebeest's splashing prompted the hippos to stake their territory.

"My best guess is that the hippos are acting very aggressive toward anything that tries to enter the water. They'll come charging in and try to drive you away," he explained. (Watch what happens when a hippo attacks a boat.)

In other words, while the hippos appear to be "rescuing" the wildebeest in the video, it's more likely they were aggressively claiming their territory.

So even though the video doesn't necessarily show a case of hippo altruism, McCauley says it's a great example of how animals co-habituate and share space in the wild.

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Hippos Save a Wildebeest From Crocodile's Jaws

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Watering holes are often exciting places to watch animals interact, and new video from Kruger National Park in South Africa doesn't disappoint. While touring the massive park, a couple happened upon a wildebeest that had just been bitten by a crocodile. It's likely the herbivore had approached the water for a drink when it was ambushed from below.

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An organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring.

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An organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring.

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Biological Altruism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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The fact that correlation between donor and recipient is the key to the evolution of altruism can be illustrated via a simple 'one shot' Prisoner's dilemma game. Consider a large population of organisms who engage in a social interaction in pairs; the interaction affects their biological fitness.

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Good Nature Travel Blog | Stories are made on adventures

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Recently, when a group of sperm whales about a thousand miles off the coast of Lisbon, Portugal, took in an adult bottlenose dolphin, behavioral ecologists were puzzled. While cross-species interactions are not uncommon among terrestrial animals, sperm whales are not known for forging nurturing bonds with other species. Such an alliance had never been witnessed before.

For eight days, the dolphin traveled, foraged and played with the adult whales and their calves. When it rubbed its body against the whales, they would sometimes even return the gesture. What makes this story even more fascinating is that the dolphin had an S-shaped, spinal deformity.

Apparently, there was no benefit to the whales of forming this bond with the handicapped dolphin. Could this be evidence that animal altruism is real?

Empathy for others

Some wildlife researchers believe that altruism-defined as an act in which an animal sacrifices its own well-being for the benefit of another animal-is a well-documented behavior. Those who say animal altruism exists cite examples such as dolphins helping others in need or a leopard caring for a baby baboon.

In fact, in 2008, a bottlenose dolphin came to the rescue of two beached whales in New Zealand and led them into safe waters. Without the dolphin's guidance, the whales surely would have died. In another incident in New Zealand, a group of swimmers were first surprised when dolphins began circling around them, tighter and tighter, splashing in the water. The swimmers initially thought the dolphins were displaying aggressive behavior, but it turned out that they were warding off sharks.

In the recent case of the dolphin and the sperm whales off Portugal, ecologists speculate that the dolphin's peculiar spinal shape may have caused it to be unable to keep up with its own group of dolphins or perhaps it was picked on by other group members. That could have made the animal more likely to initiate an interaction with the large and slower-moving whales.

But what's even more intriguing to ask is why the whales accepted the lone dolphin. One theory is that the dolphin may have been regarded as nonthreatening and that it was taken in by default because of the way adult sperm whales "babysit" their calves. The whales alternate their dives, always leaving one adult near the surface to watch the juveniles. The presence of the calves, which cannot dive very deep or for very long, allowed the dolphin to maintain contact. Marine biologist John Francis, vice president for research, conservation and exploration at the National Geographic Society, however, postulated that the whales could just be satisfying a desire for the company of other animals.

Helpful acts-with selfish benefits

Other researchers point out that representing selflessness as an organizing principle of animal behavior-when in reality, it's only a small part-is dishonest. Animals are only altruistic when it promotes their survival. It's quite a stretch, they say, to believe that animals are capable of the complex thinking required to save a life.

For example, a cuckoo bird will lay an egg in the nest of a host bird of another species, usually one with similar-looking eggs to its own. The host bird then looks after the egg as if it were its true offspring. While some say this happens because other birds aren't able to distinguish cuckoo eggs, others have shown that cuckoos periodically return to nests where they've left their eggs to see if all is well. If their young are still there, they will leave the nests alone. If not, cuckoos will destroy the nests and kill any of the host birds' eggs and chicks that happened to survive. So taking care of a cuckoo's offspring may just be a way for a host bird to protect what she has left.

Bernd Heinrich, a biology professor at the University of Vermont, was hiking through the Maine woods one day when he happened upon a group of ravens feasting on a dead moose. They were unusually noisy and making a loud call that Heinrich had never heard before-a call that seemed to attract even more ravens to the scene.

The behavior stymied Heinrich, because, in his view, ecological theory stipulates that a food bonanza should be defended, not shared. But the birds were sharing-to the point that some of the ravens even returned to their roost to recruit more birds. This odd incident inspired Heinrich to conduct a series of field studies, which he eventually published in the book Ravens in Winter (1989).

Heinrich's helpful ravens became the classic example of animal altruism, says Jeff Stevens, a psychology professor at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany. But like most examples of animal altruism, what seemed to be a selfless act had selfish benefits. The sharing ravens were juveniles that had found the moose carcass in a mature raven's territory. By bringing other young ravens to the feast, they avoided being chased off by the territory-holding bird.

Stevens believes that for any behavior to survive natural selection, it needs to help an animal or its genetic material. True altruism is not very common because it wouldn't make much sense biologically.

But try telling that to one special bottlenose dolphin in New Zealand.
Do you think that animals are capable of true altruism? Or are they just naturally doing what's best for their own species?
Here's to finding your true places and natural habitats,

Candy

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Some wildlife researchers believe that altruism is a well-documented behavior among various animal species.

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In January of 2009, the marine ecologists Robert Pitman and John Durban were aboard a research vessel off the West Antarctic Peninsula when they encountered a strange and marvelous sight.

As they recently described in Marine Mammal Science, the researchers were observing a pod of eleven killer whales attacking a Weddell seal that had sought refuge on an ice floe. That wasn't the strange part, though-seals are a mainstay of killer whales' diets. The strange part was that, as Pitman and Durban watched, two massive humpback whales surged into the middle of the action.

This was no effort to be sociable. Killer whales are humpbacks' natural enemies, and the two species do not normally intermingle. Nor were the humpbacks, who eat only tiny shrimp and fish, joining in the hunt.

No, by all appearances, the humpbacks were helping the seal.

The killer whales eventually succeeding in breaking up the seal's ice floe, dumping it back into the water. The seal then swam straight toward the humpbacks. When it reached them, Pitman and Durban watched in astonishment as one of the humpbacks rolled over onto its back and swept the seal up onto its belly with a nudge of its flipper. There, the seal briefly rested in safety as though lying atop a slick, blubbery ice floe.

The presumably befuddled seal (Pitman and Durban described it as "freaked out") soon swam off to find a more conventional resting place. But the ecologists, and we, are left to wonder why this strange episode happened in the first place. Was it altruism?

For biologists, altruism includes any behavior that benefits another individual at a cost or risk to the altruist. So biologically speaking, the whale's behavior was altruistic. It sacrificed its own energy and safety and the only obvious beneficiary was the seal.

Why would one animal ever make sacrifices to help another?

Many acts of animal altruism can be explained via two established theories. Kin selection dictates that animals will preferentially help their relatives, thereby benefiting the altruist's own genetic legacy. Kin selection can explain many acts of altruism among animals that live in groups. For example, prairie dogs are more likely to bark out risky warning calls to alert their relatives to seek shelter. But kin selection cannot explain why a whale would help a member of a different species. Neither can the other major biological theory of altruism, reciprocity, which dictates that help will be given to those who have helped in the past, or who may in the future. But a seal can't possibly help a whale in return for its protection.

But an explanation is clearly needed. What the humpback whales did was no fluke-it was one of over 70 recorded episodes of humpbacks intervening in killer whale attacks on unrelated species. And humpbacks are not the only species known to help other animals. There are many stories of dolphins rescuing humans, dogs, and each other from sharks and fishing nets, and documented episodes of apes helping injured animals and even human children who fall into their enclosures.

Is it possible that acts of interspecies altruism like these can result from genuine psychological altruism-the motivation to improve another's welfare?

It was once believed that psychological altruism required a level of cognitive complexity that only humans possess. It's true that no other species can match humans' ability to think abstractly, reason, or use grammatical language. But none of these abilities appear to be necessary for altruism.

Felix Warneken and his colleagues have demonstrated that children as young as 18 months old will provide help to adults in need. And several research groups have demonstrated that a range of animal species, from bonobos to the humble rat, will act altruistically to help others. In one study, laboratory rats, worked to free trapped, distressed cagemates from restrainers, even if it meant giving up chocolate for themselves.

This suggests that altruistic motivation springs not from high-level concerns about justice and morality-which are the purview of humans-but from lower level emotional processes that humans share with many other animals, from rats to whales. Activity in emotional brain structures like the amygdala, insula, and striatum, support empathy, which is the ability to understand when others are in need or distress, and caring, which is the desire to alleviate that state. These processes may suffice to motivate altruism in humans and non-humans alike. Our own research has linked variations in the size and activity of the amygdala to empathic sensitivity and extraordinary acts of human altruism, like donating a kidney to a stranger. The amygdala has also been linked to prosocial behavior in bonobos and rats.

Because non-human animals cannot talk, it is impossible to know for certain what motivates their behavior. Did the humpbacks who rescued the Weddell seal understand that it was in distress, and genuinely desire to help it? Once upon a time, this interpretation would have been considered hopeless anthropomorphism-the projection of humanlike qualities onto animals. But the primatologist Frans de Waal argues that " anthropodenial", the denial that humans and animals share many abilities and traits, is an equally serious mistake.

When a humpback whale swims into a pod of attacking killer whales and rescues a seal, it is reasonable to consider a variety of possible causes for this behavior.

But what is not reasonable is to deny that altruism is one of them.
Written with assistance from Katie O'Connell, B.S.

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New research describes how humpback whales protect seals from harm.

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Bernd Heinrich was on a hike through the woods of New England when he observed something which would go on to change our perception of animal psychology.

A group of ravens had gathered to feed on a dead moose. But rather than choosing to keep the bounty for themselves, they were making a strange call, one which seemed to be deliberately attracting more ravens to the feast.

A biologist at the University of Vermont, Heinrich was initially confused. By helping their competitors, the ravens appeared to be defying all natural biological instinct. But as it transpired, their motivation was actually deeply selfish. The birds were juveniles who had discovered the moose in an adult raven's territory. By inviting other ravens to join them, their intrusion was more likely to go unchallenged.

Last month, an astonishing video emerged of a rhesus macaque successfully resuscitating another of its species which had been electrocuted at a train station in India. It is tempting to describe the sustained display of persistence and apparent concern as almost human. But there is a danger in viewing animal behaviour through the misty lens of human emotion. What both Heinrich's "sharing ravens' and the macaques of Kampur do provide is a window into the gradual evolution of one of the most human of traits - altruism.

Altruism in its purest form should be an entirely selfless action. "If there's any kind of selfish interest at stake, like secretly hoping for a return favour or even doing it deliberately because you know it will make you feel good, then that doesn't really count at all," says psychologist Michael Platt of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, North Carolina.

Perhaps the only creatures on the planet capable of this, apart from ourselves, are among the simplest. Insects such as ants or honeybees are almost certainly not neurologically advanced enough to feel emotions such as empathy but are extremely altruistic, regularly sacrificing themselves for the sake of their colony. But this isn't conscious choice, more an evolutionary drive. Ants do not reproduce as individuals, instead the colony reproduces. It renders their own survival immaterial and means they're programmed to do whatever's necessary to enhance the survival of the group. Their actions can be thought of as simply genetic reflexes.

There are different levels of altruistic behaviour until you reach the higher spheres of thought and emotion which only humans are capable of. Some creatures never display these traits at all, particularly the almost ubiquitously solitary reptile family.

In the majority of creatures, altruism is mostly driven by inherently selfish motives linked to survival. Vampire bats need to feed at least once every 36 hours otherwise they die but it's common for female bats to share their spoils with roost mates who are low in nutrition and in need. Like much of animal altruism, this is actually a long-term insurance policy, a favour which is expected to be reciprocated when the time comes.

However it's unclear whether the bats or even Heinrich's ravens are consciously choosing to behave in this manner. It's likely that they are born with such tendencies, replicating what their kin have always done for generations. Forms of altruism are hardwired into all creatures who live in social groups, in the same way that deep evolutionary instincts drive parents to quite extreme behaviour to ensure the survival of their offspring.

"The first animals to develop social behaviour did so because being in a group makes it easier to survive than leading a solitary existence," Platt says. "And behaviours which helped the group such as altruism would be selected for genetically and passed down through the generations. But these apparently caring, helping behaviours are motivated by mutually beneficial interests - we're going to do better together than alone."

In the case of the bats, the type of altruism on offer is fairly limited. But some animals such as dolphins, elephants and in particular the primate family, are capable of forming social bonds to a far stronger extent and actually make conscious decisions to help members of their group with whom they feel a greater affinity. This is believed to be through an increased ability to feel emotion. It's demonstrated especially strongly in some of our closest relatives. Male chimpanzees form particularly tight-knit friendships.

"Monkeys certainly have emotions and probably the ability to display empathy," Heinrich says. "The macaque in the video is likely to have initially been acting out of curiosity and then perhaps alarm."

But compared to even the most empathetic macaque, what makes humans unique is our willingness to go out of our way to help complete strangers, often putting ourselves in harm's way in the process.

"There's no known animal out there who has set up an Oxfam charity so other members of their species could donate," Platt says. "And animals almost always display altruism to a member of the same group. But we do things for complete strangers that are quite extreme. Somebody gets pushed in front of a subway and suddenly you find yourself jumping down there and sheltering them as the train goes roaring overhead. From a purely biological standpoint, this type of behaviour doesn't make much sense."

Why we do this is due to a gradual chain of events, both sociological and neurological which have taken place over the past one million years. In the past two decades, studies of the neurobiology of social behaviour have identified a network of regions which have evolved to help us interact with other individuals, remember information about them, deduce what they might be likely to do, and most importantly understand their internal state and think of things which might help them. These regions form what we call the "social brain" and there are two in particular which are critical for altruism. The temporoparietal junction is involved in understanding how another might be feeling and seems to be linked to charitable giving. The anterior cingulate gyrus has been associated with empathy.

However there are other primates who share very similar brain networks and researchers are trying to to work out exactly why our own neural structure makes us so much more predisposed to this behaviour. The social parts of our brain are certainly larger than those of our closest relatives but is it merely greater size which makes us more altruistic?

Perhaps the answer also lies in the powerful social forces driving the evolution of modern humans. "At some point in our history, the identity of the group to which you belonged became as potent a force as individual biology," Platt says.

"If you lived in a group where everyone was very helpful to each other, behaved altruistically, and your group could then dominate other groups, then those altruistic tendencies would increase in frequency and the number of groups displaying those capacities would increase."

But even today, there is great individual and cultural variation to how altruistically minded we are, and some controversial theories have put this down to our genes.

Powerful hormones such as oxytocin are involved in bonding between friendship groups and the levels of these chemicals may contribute towards how much you can feel of another individual's pain and how motivated you are to take an action based on that.

"Some people might be very good at understanding another person's mental state but not necessarily act on that behaviour," Platt says. "There are studies which suggest genes affecting oxytocin signalling might be associated with differences in altruistic behaviour. We showed that if you give it to monkeys, they're then much more likely to offer another monkey a treat. But it's still too premature to draw any concrete conclusions."
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Rationing ravens to merciful monkeys: can animals be altruistic?

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Bernd Heinrich was on a hike through the woods of New England when he observed something which would go on to change our perception of animal psychology. A group of ravens had gathered to feed on a dead moose.

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I personally feel like this might be a nice and kind behavior, but not practical by natural selection. When helping each other, I believe it should occur within a species. When a predator helps out their prey, it would lengthen the life of the prey. However, is it necessarily what was intended?

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Altruistic behavior interferes with