When the sound of running water was played for them through a loudspeaker on concrete, the beavers still built their dam over the dry floor. Even when presented with a clear pipe that showed water (silently) escaping through their dam and a speaker that played them the sound of running water, they chose to build over the speaker and ignore the clearly visible leak.
Instincts are so weird. And it’s not just animals that do stupid shit based on instinct, or rather it’s not just non-human animals; humans have tons of occasionally counterproductive instincts / cognitive biases too.
I laughed. Good one.
Fucking stupid beaver :
Instincts are so weird. And it’s not just animals that do stupid shit based on instinct, or rather it’s not just non-human animals; humans have tons of occasionally counterproductive instincts / cognitive biases too.
Edit: found this delightfully 90’s-looking page on the subject of human instincts
Makes it sound like we stopped evolving at some point. I could be convinced 😅
I use dark reader on firefox, and instead of making the page darkmode, it just changed the text to a very similar color as the backround lol
Ha yeah same, I had to switch it to static mode for the site so my eyeballs wouldn’t catch on fire