Topic
The scientific study of how non-human animals perceive, learn, remember, and solve problems, examined both in labs and in the wild.
Federico Veronesi's photo of an elephant carrying a dead calf in Namibia won Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026. Veronesi learned from researchers who recognised her that it is not certain the calf was hers.
Reality
Bánszegi and Szenczi's team found that all 22 analyzable axolotls in a 24-animal doorway test preferred the larger of two openings. The researchers say the skill held in complete darkness, yet a choice between two passable holes is a narrow test of quantitative reasoning.
Reality
Parma researchers found dogs looked more at a round shape on hearing 'bouba' and a spiky one on hearing 'kiki', in tests on 70 dogs. Dogs have co-evolved with people for thousands of years, so the result cannot yet say whether the link is old or learned.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Wild African savanna elephants gesture intentionally, finds an Animal Cognition study that logged about 840 gestures in two South African parks. Its behavioural tests of intent put elephants, a lineage evolutionarily distant from primates, beside the apes in research on how gesture evolved.
Reality
Wild orangutan mothers travel farther around the days their infants play with peers, according to a 15-year study of 31 mother-infant pairs in Borneo. The researchers say solitary life leaves mothers supplying social contact on top of food and safety.
Reality
UC Berkeley researchers found chimpanzees stole pineapple in 61% of trials with friends and 70% with nonfriends. Friendship trimmed theft without stopping it, and the team argues both parties' emotional reactions show chimps expect better treatment from friends.
Reality
Female gray tree frogs got slower and worse at picking an attractive mating call as rival calls multiplied, a 60-frog lab study in iScience found. The authors trace the decline to how females weigh options, though its effect on which males mate in a wild chorus has not been tested.
Reality
Sydney residents weight their bin lids and jam the hinges, and the birds still get in, so Lucy Aplin's team has taken a plexiglass box of unfamiliar latches to the Royal Botanic Garden to see what one cockatoo can work out alone.
Reality
A Budapest group logged 226 half-minute EEG recordings from 14 dogs and found frontal theta stronger while the animals obeyed a command than while they sat idle. That undercuts the reflex account of obedience; deliberation is a further claim the recordings do not support.
Reality
At a Sierra Nevada field station, feeders that open for a single banded bird have tested up to 250 mountain chickadees a winter since 2013, which lets a memory score be matched against which birds actually survive.
Reality