A garter snake flicks its tongue to discover by scent
Vince F/Alamy
Some snakes appear to reply in another way to their very own scent when it has been altered, which hints that they’ve some type of self-recognition.
A handful of animals, together with roosters, horses and cleaner fish, have proven indicators of self-awareness in what is named the mirror take a look at. This includes placing paint on an space of their physique that they will’t see with out a mirror, equivalent to their brow. If the animal touches the mark when trying within the mirror, it means that they’re conscious that the reflection is of themselves, and never a picture of one other individual.
“But snakes and most reptiles primarily interact with their world through scent,” says Noam Miller at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. So he and his colleagues challenged them to another, smell-based model of the mirror take a look at.
The staff members collected the scents of 36 japanese garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) and 18 ball pythons (Python regius) by wiping cotton pads alongside their pores and skin.
They then introduced every snake with 5 scents: their very own, their very own with a little bit of olive oil added, simply olive oil, one in all one other snake of the identical species and one in all one other snake with a little bit of olive oil.
The garter snakes carried out extra lengthy tongue flicks in response to their very own modified scent in contrast with the remainder of the scents.
“They only do long tongue flicks when they’re interested in or investigating something,” says Miller, which means that the garter snakes can recognise when one thing about themselves doesn’t scent fairly proper. “They may be thinking: ‘Oh, this is weird, I shouldn’t smell like this.’”
Ball pythons, then again, responded in the identical technique to all of the scents. Garter snakes are way more social than ball pythons, says Miller, so it could be that social species usually tend to have self-recognition.
The findings are the primary proof of potential self-recognition in snakes, says Miller. “There’s this assumption that snakes, and nearly all reptiles, are these sluggish, instinctive, non-cognitive animals, and that is definitely not true.”
However, Johannes Brandl on the University of Salzburg in Austria questions whether or not this ought to be interpreted as self-recognition. “This interpretation only becomes plausible if a correlation with social behaviour can be established,” he says. Otherwise, it may very well be argued that some snake species are merely extra inclined to work together with the experiment.
Topics:
- animals/
- animal intelligence
