Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
There are certain skills that once acquired, such as riding a bike or looking both ways before crossing a street, rarely have to be relearned. Most studies on learning and long-term memory in the wild focus on a handful of animal species. Now, in a paper published in Current Biology, U.S. National Science Foundation–supported researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute share the first report of long-term memory in frog-eating bats (Trachops cirrhosis).
"Frog-eating bats are an excellent emerging model organism for studying cognitive and sensory ecology," says biologist May Dixon, lead author of the paper. "Learning plays a big part in their lives."
The bats' ability to retain information means that when they are hunting frogs, their main prey, they don't have to continuously relearn which frog calls indicate that a frog is good to eat, poisonous or too big to carry.
Dixon and colleagues trained 49 wild bats to respond to cellphone ringtones played through speakers. Bats responding to two of the tones found a baitfish reward on the speaker every time, but when they responded to three other tones, they were not rewarded. They quickly learned to fly to the speaker when ringtones indicated a snack, and not to respond to the other tones. The bats were then microchipped and released back into Panama's Soberania National Park.
Researchers recaptured eight of the bats one to four years later, and when they played the experimental ringtones again, the bats recognized and responded to the two rewarded ringtones even four years later. The experiment included 17 untrained frog-eating bats that did not fly to the sounds.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 03 2022, @02:02PM (3 children)
I think it is the bats which learn the ringtones.
It is the frogs which fail to learn to look both ways before crossing the street. See the extremely violent video game: Frogger.
Some people fail to learn basic things like not to say "Balm" in an airport. "I packed a little balm in my carrion."
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 03 2022, @02:41PM (2 children)
Who calls it lip balm anyway? It's chapstick. That may be a brand, but it's a brand, like Kleenex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday August 03 2022, @04:24PM
In this case I'm picking on the iPhone users because my experience is that the vast majority do not change the default ringtone/notification/alarm sounds. It would be a harder trick to pull on Android users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2022, @09:31PM
Lip balm or chapstick, either way TSA took it away from me when I tried to carry it on--the agent said it was a liquid(!)
This was in the early days of "no liquids" carried onto a plane. Later the rules were relaxed to allow small quantities.