Prairie Dogs and Parrots

Prairie Dog Twang
Through a variety of birdlike chirping sounds, prairie dogs alert each other to approaching creatures. They demonstrate a surprisingly complex communication system, and even have dialects specific to their particular colony. "It's like hearing different people speak from California, Texas and Vermont," says Constantine Slobodchikoff, a professor of biology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. In his 25 years studying Gunnison's prairie dogs, he's recorded them vocalizing ten nouns including hawk, deer and coyote, a number of adjectives to identify color, size and shape, and even some verbs to indicate speed. Thus a prairie dog might alert its colony by chirping "a tall human in yellow shirt is approaching fast."

But Slobodchikoff suspects that prairie dogs may have an even larger vocabulary. In an ongoing study, he and student researchers built black, wooden silhouettes of animals, as well as geometric shapes -- ovals, triangles and stars -- and flashed them over a prairie dog colony. The reaction? "The prairie dogs manufactured new words to describe the shapes," says Slobodchikoff. "Their brain contains a very extensive vocabulary that they can pull out at will."

Eventually, Slobodchikoff hopes to talk to the animals, although early attempts have made for less than scintillating conversation. "I used my best prairie dog imitation to say coyote, and they just looked at me in disgust," says Slobodchikoff. "It looked like I had said a bad word."

Ivy League Parrot
The term birdbrain is considered an insult, but some birds actually are pretty brainy. One African grey parrot in suburban Boston is said to have the cognitive abilities of a five-year-old child. Alex (for Avian Learning Experiment) is a 29-year-old bird that's been tutored most of his life by Irene Pepperberg, PhD, a Harvard-educated professor now teaching at Brandeis University. Alex can identify 50 different objects, seven colors, five shapes, quantities up to six, and the concepts of bigger, smaller, same and different. "And he said, 'I'm sorry,'" reports Pepperberg. "He knew what was appropriate to say."

Pepperberg insists that Alex makes reasoned decisions -- meaning he possesses language abilities once thought to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. During an experiment in 2004, researchers gave Alex different-colored blocks in sets of two, three and six. When asked which color group had five blocks, Alex replied, "None." And he repeated the answer in duplicate tests. Although Alex had previously learned the term to describe the difference between two identically sized objects, he apparently interpreted the concept of "none" as an absence of quantity all on his own.

"The important thing was not just that he understood a zero-like concept," says Pepperberg, "but that he was able to take information from one domain and apply it to another. That's a lot like a high school student answering questions on a quiz show."

Such feats have made Alex a celebrity. If you Google his name (plus African grey parrot) you'll get 207,000 hits, almost as many as another knowledgeable Alex -- Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek.

Bees, Octopuses and Crows

Buzzing Prodigies
It's hard to imagine something as small as a bug having much in the brain department. But the humble honeybee possesses the second-most complex language, after humans. When a honeybee returns to a hive after dining on flower nectar, it performs a complex waggle dance to tell other bees whether the meal is worth a trip. "The honeybee can send 10,000 messages, providing the distance, direction and quantity of food," says James Gould, PhD, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. "Not even chimps or dolphins can say as many things."

Some critics argue that bee dances reflect innate behavior rather than intelligence, but Gould insists that the bees are brainy. If they sense a storm coming, they'll stop their dance so other bees won't get caught in the rain while searching for food. And when they're looking for a new Home, honeybee scouts who've found a dry spot will suddenly change their dance if an observer pours a glass of water inside. "They're a lot like people judging whether to buy a house," says Gould.

Smart Suckers
Octopuses may be spineless, but they're not brainless. At the Seattle Aquarium, marine biologist Roland Anderson, PhD, reports that giant Pacific octopuses (GPOs) are not only intelligent creatures but also loaded with personality. One female was named Emily Dickinson because she was so shy she used to hide in a narrow space behind the tank's backdrop. A frisky male became Leisure Suit Larry, due to his fondness for groping volunteers who wandered too close to his tank. "If he were a man, he'd have been cited for sexual harassment," says Anderson.

Last year, Anderson devised an unusual intelligence test. He put some crayfish into a plastic jar with a wide-mouth screw top and gave them to seven different GPOs. Most of the octopuses had trouble opening the jars. But after Anderson drilled holes in the jar tops so the GPOs could smell the crayfish, the octopuses performed better. Then he smeared the outside of the jars with frozen herring to keep the GPOs' interest, and this time, they quickly opened the lids. "A sign of their intelligence," says Anderson.

Clever Crows
Tool use was once thought to separate man from beast, but scientists report there are many animals that use implements. Tanzanian vultures throw rocks at ostrich eggs to break them open. Green herons drop pebbles into lakes to lure fish to the top. But that pales in comparison to crows, according to Candace Savage, author of Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys. She writes of New Caledonian crows that chew the ends of sticks to fashion elaborate, hooked tools for snaring grubs out of rotting trees. And this ability isn't limited to the wild. During a study at Oxford University, captive crows taught themselves to create tools out of wire to get food from wood crevices -- an impressive example.

Orangutans and Elephants

Cultured Orangutans
Because orangutans and humans share 97 percent of the same DNA, it's no surprise that the primates exhibit impressive brainpower. Take Chantek, a 28-year-old living in Zoo Atlanta. Raised like a human child by anthropologist H. Lyn Miles, PhD, Chantek learned to use a toilet, clean his room and receive an allowance, which he spent on trips to McDonald's. Today he knows more than 150 words in sign language and can comprehend spoken English. Likened to a four-year-old child, he can also make necklaces, play Simon Says, and sign that he wants a car ride to the park.

"We can have a conversation and play games together," says Miles, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. "He might sign 'bed sleep hug' if he wants a nighttime hug before going to sleep." Miles says Chantek has even invented some new words, signing "tomato toothpaste" for ketchup, and "eye drink" for contact lens solution. Chantek calls himself an "orangutan person" to distinguish himself from others.

Emotional Elephants
Known for their legendary memories, elephants also exhibit jumbo-sized compassion. When one elephant in a herd is slowed from injury, the rest will wait until it catches up. And if an elephant gets stuck in a mud hole, others help. "They'll try to get under the elephant like a forklift," says Marc Bekoff, PhD, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Then they'll push it out."

Bekoff, author of Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues, notes that after an elephant dies, the others in its herd will grieve. He observed a group of elephants in northern Kenya after the death of their matriarch. "They were just moping around with their heads and tails low," says Bekoff. "Clearly they were in mourning."

Elephants also demonstrated their sensitivity and compassion before the 2004 tsunami slammed into the coast of Thailand. Eyewitnesses reported that elephants were screaming and running for higher ground. But on the way, they used their trunks to scoop up and save about a dozen tourists.