Jesse Rogerson

Yeah, that one penguin is doing great.

Yes.

this is, I love studying intelligence in animals.

I mean, I don't study it.

I love reading about intelligence in animals because I think that humans tend to think that we're like the only smart thing on the planet and we're like, we're such geniuses.

We have this hubris.

We're such geniuses that we've been able to uncover the rules of nature and been able to uncover how the sun moves in the sky when really it's just because we're an animal, we're a species that's been living in this environment for hundreds of thousands of years and

Knowledge gets built into the biology.

Knowledge gets built into the patterns, into the social structures.

And this is a great example of it.

It's a group of spider monkeys that were being followed by a group of scientists.

And they were interested in how knowledge transfers from one to the other.

So they did this from 2012 to 2017.

They literally went into the forest and followed them, followed these spider monkeys.

They're known for forming little groups and then breaking off into smaller groups and then coming back to their big groups again.

So they have these social structures that are kind of like friend groups that cycle, break off into smaller ones and then come back together.

And they were interested how the breaking apart and reforming of the social group affects the knowledge transfer.

So they followed them around and they noticed that the spider monkeys were like going out and investigating portions of the forest, of the trees, of the canopy and recognizing where good food sources are.

And then they would come back, share the knowledge with the group somehow through communicating with them.

And then the entire group would know where the good food was and where it wasn't, even if not all members of the group had visited those places in the forest.