Everybody has a body – but do animals know about it?

For humans, it is evident that we have a vast knowledge about ourselves – we know what we look like and how our voice sounds, we have an endless amount of memories of our past actions, and we are constantly thinking about ourselves. But what do animals know about themselves? Can they refer to their own qualities and attributes when they plan their next move? Or to put it simply: do animals have self-representation? 

Petra Dobos and Dr. Péter Pongrácz from the Department of Ethology now offer a new approach to this hard-to-capture question. Their concise writing in the prestigious TREE journal summarizes the new results that accumulated over the past few years, showing that various animal species rely on a capacity, known as “body-awareness”, when they negotiate difficult spatial tasks. If one has to decide whether they can fit through an opening, or whether a branch of a tree would bear their weight, this is often such a critical moment where the slightest mistake can cause serious injury or entrapment of the animal. From an evolutionary point of view, it would be highly adaptive if the animal could base its decision on the most relevant reference: on its own size, weight or shape.

The two authors have shown that no matter whether it was a crab, a bumblebee, or mammals such as ferrets, cats or dogs, the ecological needs lead to the development of operational body-awareness capacity in them. The recently unfolding experiments about dogs’ and cats’ self-representation at the Department of Ethology promise many more intriguing results about how these well-known animals use their knowledge about themselves. 

 

Original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2024.10.001

Petra Dobos & Péter Pongrácz (2024). The biological relevance of ‘me’: body awareness in animals. Trends in Ecology & Evolution