Life on Earth Appreciation Thread

[firestar464]

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found Will in the wild

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Scientists watch sperm whales work as a team to assist a birth

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/nx-s1-57 ... ls-science

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

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[Yuli Ban]

Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in vicious 'civil war', say researchers

The world's largest known group of wild chimpanzees has split and been locked in a vicious "civil war" for the last eight years, according to researchers.

It is not clear exactly why the once close-knit community of Ngogo chimpanzees at Uganda's Kibale National Park are at loggerheads, but since 2018 the scientists have recorded 24 killings, including 17 infants.
"These were chimps that would hold hands," lead author Aaron Sandel said. "Now they're trying to kill each other."

I know ants wage war too, but this is more recognizable. I wonder what level of social intelligence is necessary for "war" to emerge as a behavior. It's not like chimps are almost human level intelligence; they're actually surprisingly far below us, and I'd put dolphins and elephants above them.,
Humans are freakishly, almost paranormally intelligent for what we are in comparison to Earth life, so war makes some sense for us: we can create abstract understanding of scarcity and future planning, which leads to organized violence. Only dolphins really come even remotely close, and I don't want to claim that dolphins don't wage war (we didn't even know or believe chimpanzees could until the 70s and there was controversy that Jane Goodall's team accidentally agitated them; this particular civil war is the first time where it's unambiguously nothing to do with humans— ergo it's entirely plausible that dolphins do wage war, but we haven't seen it, which is exponentially harder to observe underwater than it is on land to begin with), but this does seem to be one of those "you need a higher theory of mind to get it"

Then again, as I said, ants wage war, so who knows

[Yuli Ban]

On the topic of complex social intelligence, let me repeat something I think I mentioned earlier in this thread, many many pages ago

Octopolis and Octlantis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopolis_and_Octlantis

Octopolis and Octlantis are two non-human settlements occupied by gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) in Jervis Bay, in New South Wales, Australia. The first site, named "Octopolis" by biologists, was found in 2009. Octopolis consists of a bed of shells (mainly scallop shells) in an ellipse shape, 2–3 meters diameter on its longer axis, with a single piece of anthropogenic detritus, believed to be scrap metal, within the site. Octopuses build dens by burrowing into the shell bed. The shells appear to provide a much better building material for the octopuses than the fine sediment around the site. Up to 14 octopuses have been seen at Octopolis at a single time. In 2016, a second settlement was found nearby, named "Octlantis," which includes no human-made objects and can house similar numbers of octopuses.[2] Both sites are within Booderee National Park. Some media accounts have described these sites as octopus "cities," but researchers who have worked on the sites view this as a misleading analogy.

[firestar464]

https://bsky.app/profile/beachrelaxin.b ... cles35ts2q

[firestar464]

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[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

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