Asking the right questions.
Derive hypotheses and predictions from the
following observations, and discuss possible ways of testing the predictions:
- Some bird species hide and hoard food during su 252l1116c mmer, and
retrieve it during winter. The hippocampus (a brain region) is on average
larger in species which hoard than in other species. In some hoarding
species, the hippocampus is larger in females than in males.
- If you mix pigs which are unfamiliar to each other, there will
usually be substantial fighting. However, it appears that there is less
fighting when you mix young piglets (less than five weeks of age).
- When chicks grow up under stressful conditions, there seem to
be adverse effects on their spatial learning ability (i e, learning "to
find their way around"). It was noted that the offspring of stressed
chickens were also poorer at spatial learning tasks, even when the eggs
were hatched in an automatic incubator.
- Chimpanzees in the wild often use tools for different purposes.
For example, they will use a stone to smash a nut open, after having
placed the nut on another, flat stone. This is wide-spread in different
populations, but not in all. Some populations in the north-western part of
the range of the species have never been observed to utilise this
particular tool use.
