Incidentally, the other parrots in that experiment never got the language knowledge of Alex and don't seem to ask existential questions. Alex also prompted his teachers into asking him a "how many?" question where the answer was "zero". He used "none" for zero, but he independently came up with the concept of zero-as-a-number, something which took humanity thousands of years to do. He also would sometimes deliberately answer wrong, tried to offer corn to an upset researcher, helped the younger parrots with their language skills and once interrupted another parrot's counting lesson by butting in with adding. Giant uplifted spiders?
...oh my god. And yeah it was a giant uplifted spider computer thing. It lived in a giant space web thing and data was stored on the threads if I remember right? The thing knew a whole hell of a lot and people were terrified of it. Got you good work though.
The precious movie only fans do not know thebdepths of our sin. Chewbacca is only the start. Theres like 20 cat people races first off.
Oh, and there's a book series my mom has. Um... the Spellsinger books by Alan Dean Foster. That world is populated by furries. Just... all the animals are 4 foot tall people. And the humans are short so they're close to the height of the others. But I'm not sure if that's sci-fi or fantasy. I mean, it does have a bard doing magic with rock music...
You are a giant nerd. (This is a compliment. I love speculative xenoecology.) The planet in question is very earthlike, about 98% our gravity, very close to the same stellar age. Quite a bit drier than earth though. And also there's no way to tell what's naturally evolved, what's a genetics experiment left over by the precursors, and what's an artificially grown synthetic murder-critter. Uplifted dung beetles?
wow. so, alex was essentially a genius, in parrot terms? damn. now i wish someone had cloned him or something or tried to dissect him or read his genes or something to figure how his brain worked, what made him different from all the other parrots.
There were attempts to make getting a genius parrot less likely, but it seemed they got really lucky/unlucky and got a genius parrot. He was a pet store parrot, originally.
I remember reading about a study with some small and common bird (starlings?) where it seemed 50/50 as to whether they would recognize themselves in a mirror (as determined by putting a dot of colour on their head and seeing if the bird investigated it upon seeing their reflection). Which birds recognized themselves was always consistent, but they didn't know what made them different (it didn't seem to be sex or age). Anyone interested in birds and cognition should definitely read The Thing With Feathers, which is v accessible but also gives sources for further reading.
By the way, is it OK if I use some of these in a story? Obviously not the joke ones, like the tarigrades or the gut flora, but like. The lobsters or the chickens.
Yay! I don't know about the chickens, but the lobsters were Charlie Stross' idea, not mine. If you want to do sea creatures, may I suggest zebrafish? They've been studied to death and they're a perfect model organism to work with for genetic tinkering.
... Unrelated sci-fi trope, but I just thought of a thing. You know that "alien females look basically like color-swapped human ones" trope? What if we took it to the extreme. Like. 6th-dimensional planet-sized eldritch abomination that makes you go mad if you look at it even from a sensors screen. And their women are just, IDK, conventionally-attractive-to-huge-nerds human-like women who just happen to have blue skin.
