Are the most social animals the most innovative?

Innovation, that is, the ability to find solutions to new problems or innovative solutions to known problems, provides crucial benefits for the adaptation and survival of humans and animals as well. What characteristics make specific species or animals more innovative?

A study from the University of Barcelona (UB) has analyzed this cognitive ability in ungulates, a group of mammals such as dromedaries, horses or goats, characterized by walking on the ends of their fingers, generally with nails or hooves.

The results of the study show that the individuals who were less integrated in the group and those who were less afraid of new objects were the best at solving a challenge posed by the researchers: opening a container containing food.

“These findings are in line with recent scientific literature on wild and captive primates, and demonstrate that less socially integrated individuals are less likely to obtain resources such as food, but also more likely to overcome neophobia – the aversion to new things – to try to improve their situation. In addition, they confirm that ungulates are a promising taxon to test evolutionary theories with a comparative approach”, explains Álvaro López Caicoya, pre-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and the Institute of Neurosciences (UBneuro) of the UB, and co-author of the study.

In this sense, the researcher points out that the majority of comparative studies on the evolution of cognitive abilities have been carried out in birds and primates, but that the evolutionary pressures to which they are subjected may be different from those of other species. Thus, including other taxa —such as ungulates— in future research is “essential to understand the limits and generalizability of specific evolutionary hypotheses.”

The professor at the Faculty of Psychology and UBneuro researcher Montserrat Colell has also participated in the study, together with other experts from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Leipzig, both institutions in Germany.

An experiment with a hundred animals in captivity

The experiment was carried out with 111 animals of 13 different species, including goats, dromedaries, Przewalski’s horses, giraffes, llamas, sheep and deer, among other ungulates, which lived in captivity in the Barcelona, ​​Barben ( France) and Nuremberg and Leipzig (Germany). Each of these groups of animals had to face a test that consisted of opening a type of container that they did not know and that contained the favorite food of each species.

Previously, all the animals had been classified according to various aspects that could influence their problem-solving abilities, such as fear of new objects, diet and social integration in the group. The objective was to identify the individual and socioecological characteristics of the animals with the greatest success in the face of the challenge posed by the researchers.

Alvaro Lopez Caicoya. (Photo: Bibiana Álvarez)

Participation in the experiment varied greatly between species: while 100% of the dromedaries approached the containers, only 33% of the sheep did. But the species that interacted the most with the containers were the domesticated ones and those that had a greater fission-fusion dynamics (those that are part of complex groups that join and separate depending on the environment and the moment). However, these characteristics were not indicative of a greater capacity to solve the challenge they faced. “The domestication process might have specifically selected for traits and abilities that facilitate interactions with humans (and human artifacts), but not for cognitive abilities that enable more efficient problem solving,” the researchers argue.

Finally, of the hundred animals that participated in the experiment, only 36% managed to open the container and access the food at least once. “The species with the highest percentage of individuals that achieved it were dromedaries and goats, with 86% and 69% respectively,” highlights Álvaro López Caicoya.

In the success cases, the researchers also evaluated the diversity of resources used to solve the challenge. «Most opened the containers with their nose, muzzle or lips; only nine of these forty animals used more than one strategy to solve the challenge, such as gently lifting the lid with their lips or throwing the glass to the ground,” they explain in the study.

A pioneering study

This publication is pioneering work in research on ungulate cognition, as “there are only a handful of studies” similar to these species. “Traditionally they have been considered cattle and have not been interested in their behavior or understanding. Thanks to this and other studies, we are beginning to see that they are also animals with complex behaviors that are worth studying”, highlights Álvaro López Caicoya.

In this sense, the UB researcher underlines the need to carry out more research that includes more species and individuals, both in captivity and in the wild, and more complex challenges, in order to generalize the findings. “Ungulates are an exceptional model for comparative research and this study is just a first look at cognition in these species,” he concludes.

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The study is entitled “Innovation across 13 ungulate species: problem solvers are less integrated in the social group and less neophobic”. And it has been published in the academic journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Source: UB)