Now let’s tell you something that you probably never thought about. Do you know that elephants not only communicate with each other, but do they also have their dialects? Here, imagine when a specimen is moved from his home for reasons of protection, and perhaps catapulted into a different and unknown group: Is it possible that he struggles to make himself understood, since he has, so to speak, another accent?
It is one of the many questions behind the birth of the The Animal Culture Database project, presented in a study published on Scientific date from a team of the University of Arizona.
What is and how ACD works. The idea of the Animal Culture Database was born from the consideration that we tend to ignore the social and cultural aspects of Protected speciesfocusing only on pure conservation. In reality, many species, not only elephants, have complex social systems and communicate in equally intricate ways, and it must be taken into account when you decide how to act on a species. Studies on Culture and communication in the animal world They have been going on for decades, but the authors of the database pointed out that so far no one had tried to summarize them in a single resource.
To create the database, therefore, the team first reviewed thousands of studies on animal behavior, and has selected more than 1,000 to be shown at the database itself. At the moment, the ACD contains information from 121 of these studies, relating to about sixty species in total. The idea, of course, is to expand it in the coming years, and also to give other scientists the opportunity to enrich it.
Cultures in the world. The short -term goal is to process another 600 studies among the 1,000 who have been selected. Already now, however, the database is full of information, and it is also relatively simple to use and explore. In addition to studies on individual species, the database includes among other audio and video material that allows you to see certain behaviors in action. Are you already curious and you want to know which animals are there in the database? This image contains all the species currently present:
As you can see, the 61 species (30 mammals, 30 birds and an insect) are scattered all over the world (with the exception of Antarctica). There are the already mentioned elephants and different records, including Bonobo, Gorilla and Chimpanzé. There are, as predictable, several populations of orche, sperm whale and gray whales, and obviously birds of all kinds. But there are also unexpected animals, like the rats of Jerusalem who have learned to peel the pine cones.
