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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 10, 2026, 12:22 AM

    Koalas' brain cases are only about 40% full of brain, the rest is fluid and fatty tissue. Their brains themselves are completely smooth, lacking most of the cortical structure normally associated with higher cognitive functions in mammals. A crocodile's brain is more highly structured than a koala's, and there are lizards that outperform them in problem solving and learning ability. They understand context so poorly that they don't recognize an eucalyptus leaf as food if it's been plucked from the branch.

    But no koala has ever claimed that filling static floating-point numbers into a high-dimensional matrix is just like how a human child learns.

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  • brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:brib@bribstodon.xyz
    Oct 10, 2026, 9:08 AM

    @datarama You might wonder "how did the koala get so stupid??? Isn't evolution about survival of the fittest??" and yeah but in this context "fittest" means "most fit for its ecological niche" not "smartest/strongest/whatever".

    Intelligence costs energy and eucalyptus doesn't provide energy but it is abundant. (I think there are a couple of other niche advantages of eucalyptus but can't quite remember what they are, probably that it's not really used by other animals or something). Evolution's "solution" (insofar as any of this is goal directed, which it isn't) is to reduce the energy consumption of their brains to the bare minimum... so the smooth brain and lack of higher cognitive structure is actually an evolutionary adaptation. The side benefit, of course, is not naming your fake robot girlfriend "Claudia".

    Humans, meanwhile, with their fully-wrinkled brains, have invented multiple kinds of tech that threaten to wipe out most life on Earth, including themselves.

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 10, 2026, 11:35 AM

    @brib The main advantage of eucalyptus is that it's poisonous. The oil is lethal to most animals even in small amounts.

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 10, 2026, 6:50 PM

    @brib In general, and on a species level, animals tend to be as smart as they need to be. Brain matter is a terribly expensive energy sink.

    I poked a lot of fun at the comically small-brained stegosaurs yesterday, but they were obviously smart enough to get by. They just walked around hoovering up ferns and cycads, and occasionally bashed an allosaur's face in with the thagomizer. They were around for about 10 million years, which is a pretty respectable evolutionary tenure.

    A question I've sometimes been asked is why elephants are so smart when stegosaurs were so dumb. They have a lot of superficial similarities: They're slow-moving herbivores who mainly protect themselves by being enormous and having access to some scary pointy implements. But elephants have trunks they can use to manipulate objects, and that tends to select for co-evolving a sophisticated brain - and also, elephants are highly social, and need to be able to understand rather complex social dynamics. Also, a modern-day African savannah is a much more complex and dangerous place than a Jurassic floodplain: A stegosaur never had to face a cooperating pride of lions or a gang of cunning hyenas (both of which absolutely will attack vulnerable elephants). Elephants have to deal with water scarcity, and their energy requirements are estimated to be around three times higher than a stegosaur's.

    An elephant is a lot smarter than a stegosaur *because it has to be*.

    (Both elephants and stegosaurs encountered crocodiles, though. How's that for evolutionary tenure?)

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 11, 2026, 10:56 AM

    @brib "fun" fact: We used to think that Aldabra and Galápagos giant tortoises (and their various relatives on other islands) were pretty much textbook examples of island giantism. There were virtually no giant tortoises on continental mainlands, but we found them on islands, so that seems open-and-shut island giantism, right?

    It turns out that there were giant tortoises on every continent except Antarctica - their extinctions closely tracked paleolithic human migration patterns. The reason those on the islands survived was that we couldn't get to them.

    (There is one exception: The sulcata tortoise. But they are native to the same regions of Africa where early humans lived, and they're adapted to humans. Notably, they breed *a lot* faster than any other giant tortoise, and they spend much of their time in tunnel systems some 3-5 meters underground (where humans can't easily get to them).

    Adult sulcatas have, as far as anyone knows, never had other predators than humans. So these are almost certainly specifically adaptations to survive human predation.)

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  • Álex Córcoles (coding)coder@alex.femto.pub
    Oct 10, 2026, 9:12 AM

    @datarama heh, I got "koala" as my nickname in university. Lately I'm more into capybaras, but a critter that sleeps seems so much more intelligent than us.

    To make it fair, maybe you should have included in the list animals that hurt severely their peers, if there are any...

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 10, 2026, 1:18 PM

    @coder @dl2jml I think humans have mastered some specific kinds of self-destructive shortsighted stupidity that no other animal on the planet can aspire to.

    Komodo dragons sometimes cannibalize their young. But I'm pretty sure that no komodo dragon has ever thought it was a good idea to build a nuclear stockpile. And no komodo dragon has ever asked ChatGPT to write its blog.

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  • Jeromedl2jml@mastodon.radio
    Oct 10, 2026, 3:01 PM

    @coder @datarama Several animals cannibalize their young (rabbits or bees come to mind). There are several evolution scenarii where it makes sense (like replacing someone's else offspring by yours).

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 10, 2026, 6:30 PM

    @dl2jml @coder In komodo dragons' case, it's a lot simpler: They're hungry and don't have kin recognition. Anything that's small enough to easily take out in a fight is food.

    This isn't to say that komodo dragons are dumb in general - they're definitely not. They can count, recognize familiar individuals (though they don't have a concept of "kin", hence they'll readily eat their own children), they hunt strategically rather than rely on simple brute force, and they readily learn how to interact with humans. When they're small, they adapt to living in treetops and masking their own scent to avoid being eaten by their parents. They almost certainly outsmart both ostriches, koalas, cane toads and programmers!

    But, well, there's the cannibalism. They'll eat their own kids because they're just prey to them! That seems like a pretty self-destructive impulse.

    (This isn't universal to monitor lizards. Timor monitors, for example, only very rarely cannibalize each other, apparently only if they're starving. Nile monitors will lay eggs in termite mounds and return 8-9 months later to make an escape hole for the hatchlings (but provide no further parental care). But to a komodo dragon, one's own young are just food.).

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 10, 2026, 6:31 PM

    @dl2jml @coder (And lest we forget, no komodo dragon ever shared a thinkpiece about the AI-powered future of work on Hacker News.)

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