Featured – Cultured Scene

Dolphins mind the shell: About an innovative foraging strategy that spreads beyond the mother-calf bond

August 6, 2020 Stefanie Gierszewski

Being part of the ‘Dolphin Innovation Project’, Sonja Wild was privileged to study the fascinating behaviour of the Shark Bay dolphins in Western Australia. To Cultured Scene, Sonja provided some insight into her study on ‘shelling’, a novel foraging strategy that is transmitted via social learning. The whole study by Sonja and her colleagues has recently been published in Current Biology.

Common cuttlefish learn to master the “prawn-in-the-tube” test by observing conspecifics

July 28, 2020 Stefanie Gierszewski

Eduardo Sampaio shared his newest findings on social learning in the mostly solitary common cuttlefish with Cultured Scene. The whole study has recently been published in Animal Cognition.

Featured How Research Works

Why experiments are stupid but we need more of them

July 8, 2020 Dominik Deffner

Most of us are excited about social learning in the real world. How do the dolphins of Shark Bay learn to fish with sponges, do chimpanzee mothers teach their young how to crack open nuts, can starting moves in the […]

Featured Pitch to Publication

Of sharks and their ability to learn from others

May 13, 2020 Stefanie Gierszewski

Catarina Vila Pouca spoke to Cultured Scene about her findings on social learning in juvenile Port Jackson sharks that have been published in Animal Behaviour earlier this year.

Featured Interviews Research during a Pandemic

A tribe of poets answered me

May 12, 2020 Beki Hooper

An unfortunate side effect of undertaking a PhD is that hobbies are often left by the wayside. We have every intention of carrying them with us on our long and winding academic roads, but somehow they fall from our pockets. By the time we have noticed, the hike back to them can appear too arduous to be worth the effort.

Featured Interviews Research during a Pandemic

The ‘art’ of keeping sane: a PhD caught in a pandemic

May 1, 2020 Meenakshi Poti

To think that a month ago, I lived happily amidst a few people, starting my days early in the sticky warmth of tropical sunshine, enjoying cups of chai, watching for birds, picking up and playing with wind-dispersed seeds. All of […]

Featured Interviews Research during a Pandemic

Fieldwork in times of Corona

April 30, 2020 Natalia Fedorova

Like everything about this global crisis, this winter’s field trip was two parts surreal, one part seemingly arbitrary decisions. The surreal yolk was, and is, the tension between reality and my lived experience, between daily news and my own comforts, […]

Featured Interviews

The Single Body Problem

March 6, 2020 Lauren Robinson

You might have heard of the Two Body Problem. In this essay, Dr Lauren Robinson discusses the challenges of the Single Body Problem.

Featured Interviews

Forager Child Studies: An Interdisciplinary Research Collective

January 10, 2020 Rachel Harrison

Forager Child Studies is a research collective founded by early-career researchers. Cultured Scene interviewed some of its members to find out more about FCS’s goals and achievements.

Featured Interviews

The PanAf project: studying chimpanzee culture across Africa

November 1, 2019 Alba Motes

Ammie Kalan tells us about her work on the PanAf project.