By Julia Petzl-Berney, UNE Discovery

Have you ever wondered how animals just seem to know what to do to survive and breed in their given environment? Birds can build nests without completing a course on nest building, koalas can climb trees and know what leaves to eat, seals can swim and fish and find their way home from the vast ocean. In contrast, humans typically send their children to school for years, to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in an increasingly complex human environment.

Some animals know what they need to do by instinct – that is, they are born with the knowledge they need to survive, and might learn from interacting with their environment, but don’t learn from each other. Brush turkeys, for example, hatch from the nest mound where their eggs are incubated and run into the bush. Their parents don’t care for them at all, and they are on their own from day one. Scientists researching the behaviour of young brush turkeys have found that they aggregate (gather together), when they see other young brush turkeys, especially when they are undertaking behaviour that will benefit survival, like pecking. The scientists studied brush turkey chicks, using brush turkey robots and static models of brush turkeys. Static models or robots which just scanned did not attract much attention from the real brush turkeys. However, the brush turkey chicks responded to robotic brush turkeys which were pecking and came over to join in. Presumably, if one brush turkey has found something good to eat, others will benefit from going there and foraging too.

Image Credit: Brush turkey chick – Wikimedia Jenny

A more recent study of learning in mammals provides interesting insights into knowledge transfer from one generation to the next, using what scientists call social learning of behaviour. In other words, the young animals learn skills from their parents and peers. Social learning is common in mammals. A team of scientists from Adelaide University, led by Nathan Angelakis, studied social learning in Australian Sea Lions, by attaching an underwater camera, a GPS tracker and a dive recorder to a mother sea lion to observe her behaviour and her interactions with her pup. When the mother returned to shore from foraging, the scientists retrieved the devices and downloaded the footage.

The sea lion took her pup on an eight-hour foraging trip across different habitats, including sponge gardens, large sandy plains and kelp reefs. The sealcam even filmed her capturing a giant cuttlefish, taking it to the surface and eating it with her pup close by the whole time. The scientists believe that this event was social learning in action, as the mother demonstrated how to find, catch and consume prey. Scientists have observed social learning from mother to offspring in a number of marine mammal species, such as dolphins, orcas and sea otters, but evidence of this behaviour in seal lions has remained elusive. Thanks to sealcam, researchers have gained new insights into how young sea lions learn to hunt. Underwater cameras are a powerful tool that will help scientists expand their understanding of marine mammal behaviour.

Image Credit: Sea Lion – Wikimedia BmH ca