a rift

nemertea:

fuckyeahherpetology:

the-shark-whisperer:

fuckyeahherpetology:

aspidelaps:

thundertwig:

aspidelaps:

Hey guys just so you are all aware, cuz I see those notes there in the corner and I know the vast majority of them are ignorant to this: this animal is not expressing pleasure.

The noise is a sound of distress and submission in crocodilians this size. It is not affectionate. The tight shut eyes, pathetic squeaking, heaving sides and head held high are actually all signs of stress. This alligator is trying to be submissive to the touches because she feels bullied and is trying to persuade her owner that it is not a threat worth bothering with. She’s saying with all the signals she can possibly send “Alright I submit! I am smaller than you and harmless! Please stop, I don’t like it!”

Normally I would have no trouble with someone doing something like this to showcase a behavior, but the fact that the owner says this is her ‘gator “showing her content” and seems to be confusing the squeak for a form of affection for a mother instead of a distress, identification, and submission sound is fucking disgusting. Someone who grossly misunderstands the psychology of something as intelligent and dangerous as crocodilians shouldn’t own them.

Reptile behavior is completely different from mammalian and even avian behavior.

As archosaurs, crocodilians  are more closely related to dinosaurs (and thus, birds). In fact, they have more in common with birds (including behaviour) than with most other reptiles.

The sound being demonstrated here is a call made to communicate the mother of the alligator, similar to the bark or meow of wild dogs or cats (as the barking and meowing domestic animals make is a neotenic trait to improve communication with their owners). I’m not sure if this alligator is calling for its real mother or not, and it very well may in distress, but I feel it’s important to note that crocodilians are the most vocal and social of all reptiles, with their behaviors more akin to dinosaurs than most other reptiles :)

It is not calling for its mother in an affectionate way or using this noise to display affection for something it has confused for its mother. That is specifically what I was saying is wrong with the owner’s shit view of their animal! The owner is under the illusion that Penny is saying “Oh golly momma I sure do like pets” when she squeaks. That’s why I mentioned it at all.

They do not have more in common with birds than with other reptiles. That is a completely ludicrous statement. Speaking from experience, I’ve not really seen anything other than “it squeaks sometimes” to compare an alligator to a bird. While they are impressive minded beasts in comparison to other herps, this video is a prime example of why they need to be grouped with reptiles and not mammals/avians: These reactions, vocals aside, are the exact same ones you would see in lizards. If a bird chirped and leaned in to scratches, it is most certainly not saying NO I HATE THIS MAKE IT STOP.

I also would not call crocodilians social, or say they are the most vocal. There are lizards far more social than crocodilians. There are lizards that use their voices far more (and far older!) than crocodilians. Having ways to dominate and/or submit to another of your own species when you are forced to share resources (food, basking spots, waterways) with them definitely doesn’t put them at “most social.” Especially not when there are lizards that stay in tight-knit family groups for their entire lives.

They do not make this noise to communicate with mothers specifically - it is a distress sound. When they experience stress, they make this sound. They do not make the conscious connection between making this sound and bringing mom, it is not something they do specifically to summon a protector, it is just a stress response. The fact that mother alligators come to it is a separate behavioral response from a separate animal. In gators this size, it becomes a part of submissive displays purely because enough stress is placed on them to inspire a distress call.

Your entire reply was so off the mark and irrelevant that I am having trouble thinking of a polite way to close here, so I’m just going to leave this at that and consider it conversation over.

Ok, I don’t give a rats buttocks about this argument, but I HAVE to speak up when someone says “crocodilians do not have more in common with birds than other reptiles”.

The term “reptile” is totally ambiguous and almost means nothing in science anymore. Why? Turtles are in their own lineage, lizards and snakes are on their own, and archosaurs are on their own (including birds, crocodilians, and extinct dinosaurs).  And, if you were not aware, birds evolved from small sauropod dinosaurs. And crocodilians are not closely related to lizards.

“There are lizards that use their voices far more (and far older!) than crocodilians.” Far older? Crocodilians were around wayy before majority of lizard species. Nothing was even remotely older in lizards compared to crocodilians. There is also no indication of when these behaviors evolved, so if you’re guessing that lizards became vocal before crocs, then that is a far-reaching guess with little-no evidence to support you. Also unlikely considering the types of vocalizations in crocodilians are much more complex than in lizards. Despite what you are saying, crocodilians are still one of the only “reptiles” to have significant parental care for long periods of time, involving complex communication systems between babies and mothers to the point that mothers can discriminate which babies are their own by their calls.  There is no indication of anything as complex in lizards.

I’m not saying this isn’t a stress response. It very well may be. However, when I worked with young alligators, they seemed far more stressed when getting injections than in this video… in which they thrashed and gaped as well as make loud distressing mom calls.

Crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards. This has been supported over and over with molecular evidence, fossil evidence, and anatomical evidence. Just because they look similar to you does not mean they are closely related (like how Dimetrodon and pterosaurs are not dinosaurs). Behaviorally I would say crocodilians are unique in their own right from lizards and aves, but due to their lineage they are more likely to have similarities with aves than lizards. If they have seemingly “similar” behaviors to lizards, than it is a result of convergence and evolved multiple times.

I’m not an expert at all, but from what I saw in her videos, the way she handles her gator is not okay ( small tank resulting in agressive behaviors, letting the kid feed and play with them ).

There’s another video when she pets another little one, but it’s even worse than here because she doesn’t even pet it, she literally strokes it as hard as possible to force it to make those sounds because it’s ” cute “.

I’m not a expert, as I said, but I’m not comfortable at all when I see those videos, even I can clearly see there’s something wrong.

Also, the fact that she disabled the comments possibly shows that people were trying to make her realize the problem, but she just didn’t give a fuck about it.

Aye, I agree with this. (I also noticed the comment thing). I was mostly discussing the evolutionary relationships between aves and crocodilians, but her practices seem sketchy.  At the center I worked at the babies were in much nicer conditions and were handled much differently.  The only time they were under significant stress is when we received rescues that needed medical care.

So, as someone who has spent time working with both wild and captive crocs, and who has read every single crocodilian paper ever written for their master’s thesis, I feel the need to say stuff about this.

1) This is a baby gator in distress. The sounds it is making are noises designed to attract its mum so that she will rescue it and give the creature tormenting her baby a hell of a hard time for doing so. Any person who deliberately induces this sort of behavior is practicing poor husbandry, and that ain’t cool.

2) While crocodilians’ closest living relatives are birds, they last shared a common ancestor with birds in the Triassic — which means that over two hundred million years separate crocodilians from birds. Contrary to popular beliefs, crocodiles are not ‘less evolved’ or ‘more primitive’ than birds. They are simply very, very different with a highly derived physiology and behavioral suite.

The common ancestor of crocs and lizards lived around three hundred million years ago, just for reference — which means that any shared behaviors, anatomy or physiology seen between lizards and crocs is either something that was derived from a common ancestor (meaning that it’s very, very old — e.g. the presence of scales) or something that evolved multiple times (like cold-bloodedness in crocs, whose ancestors were almost certainly warm blooded).

Complex parental care  seems to be ancestral to archosaurs (birds + crocs), as both male and female crocodilians not only guard their young, but have also been observed feeding their babies; some species even form creches, in which adult females care for unrelated babies

3) Baby crocodilians *do* vocalize to each other and to their parents when they are not distressed. (Or at least in some species. Other species are really precocious and basically take off once they’re born, wih no parental care). In Nile crocodiles, the vocalizations start before they are hatched, and indicate to a momma croc that she needs to dig up her nest. Once the hatchlings are out of the nest, these calls continue; they help to keep babies together in a pod that can be easily protected. The sounds change as the babies grow, which means that parents can change their behavioral patterns depending on whether they are interacting with a hatchling or an older baby (since crocodilians require parental care for several years, this is very useful). This, however, is not what’s happening here.

4) Finally, crocs are a lot smarter than you might think. They can be very readily clicker trained in captive environments. They have demonstrated play behaviors. They participate in complex group hunts, establish mammal-like social hierarchies, display dominance and submission to each other, and are able to adapt their behaviors in response to observing prey (this, for example, is why people living near crocodiles are advised to switch up the times and locations that they visit water sources, because crocs *will* figure out that you always go to the same spot at the same time). They are very, very clever, and just because they don’t display a mammal-like or bird-like response to petting doesn’t mean that they are reacting stupidly. (And, really, it makes sense that birds and mammals like to be petted, while reptiles don’t. Birds and mammals have complex fucking integument that needs lots of grooming. Petting a cat or a dog is intimately connected to maternal and social grooming instincts, while petting a bird is essentially allopreening, which is a huge part of bird social life. Crocs have scales which must be groomed very differently than feathers and fur; there is no evolutionary reason for these animals to have positive reactions to petting.)

Oh, and be careful about invoking ‘consciousness’ in animals that aren’t humans. That’s anthropomorphizing, sloppy thinking.

(via moreanimalia)