Get the latest tech news
Do Animals Know That They Will Die?
An existential mystery
In 350 B.C.E., he wrote about a pair of dolphins that he’d seen gliding beneath the surface of the Aegean Sea, supporting a dead calf, “trying out of compassion to prevent its being devoured.” Most of the literature in comparative thanatology consists of anecdotes like these. Alecia Carter, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University College of London, told me that she has identified a colony of more than 1,000 rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago, an island off Puerto Rico, that would be perfect for such a study. At the June meeting in Kyoto, an urban entomologist at LSU named Qian Sun presented a paper on the corpse-management practices of the eastern subterranean variety.
Or read this on Hacker News
