breekee

Maybe you could encourage her momma bear instincts by showing her the consequences of the diseases the vaccines prevent.

 

Some swans would drive the fishes out of the way, and these swans don't. The behaviour is similar to humans tolerating other species, like throw crums for dogs & cats.

 

A swan specialist site gave this reply -

http://www.stanley-park-swans.com/cgi-bin/ask/index.pl?read=7215

The internet "specialist" said the same thing I did. Just because the swans are tolerating the intrusion of the fish doesn't mean they are feeding them, which is what people are assuming from the video. That's the end of it.

Actually it is not. The problem is that these observations are individual events and can be interpreted any way. In other words, the data is "wooly" but not the concept.

In population studies an altruic behyavior is essentially someething that decreases the fitness of the actor, while increasing that of the recipient. The problem is that it is not trivial to determine when such fitness increases or decreases actually occur.

Well said! That is why I'd say the bear's behavior could be sympathy, which figures into altruism but isn't the same thing. It's not readily apparent if the bear is seeing a decrease in fitness by saving the bird (unless a scratch on the face qualifies). However, a bear showing sympathy may also be able to express altruism under the right circumstances. The important thing is that it could be tested.

Another thing to consider is why altruistic behavior is relevant. It becomes a philosophical discussion fairly quickly, even if it can be precisely defined. Altruism is woolly that way. It forces us to reconsider our imposed boundaries (species to species, stranger to stranger, self to others, kin to not kin) and in a way the concept of altruism modifies our views of fitness.

This one's striking and quite a species jump:

 

Swans like to wet their food before they eat it. It's not feeding the fish (if you look close, you can tell the fish are trying to snatch the bread and the swans aren't dropping it for them).

The bear sees something unusual in the water, pulls it out for a better look, gets pecked, drops it and goes away.

What altruism?

OK, but why?

Bears are intelligent enough to be inquisitive so that's an entirely plausible explanation.

Saying it's due to compassion or empathy requires evidence that bears have the capacity to feel those things.

Occam's razor is on the side of simple curiosity.

The bear plainly does something- It takes the trouble to pull the bird from the water.

The question of altruism is one (as I said earlier) of intent,

Did it do it because it was curious or because it didn't want a dead bird in the pool or because it felt sorry for the bird.

It's not clear how we could hope to know from that video clip.

Disagreeing on what you think the bear's motivations are (curiosity vs. sympathy) isn't simplifying or following any better evidence. If you think that bears are intelligent enough to be inquisitive, why aren't they intelligent enough to understand when an animal is in peril? It would be a shame and a waste to disregard this "rescue" as a fluke or useless because we can't ask the bear why he/she did it. Since we have a lot to learn about how bears think, this video is a great starting point for the question of "do bears/animals show empathy or sympathy towards other creatures?".

Another instance of cross-species altruism (or rather sympathy, a precursor to altruism) is the Indian elephants that avoid harming human children while rampaging. There were a few reports of this, such as an elephant moving a child out of the way before crashing down a street, and here is one where a baby was involved:

http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/elephant-stops-rampage-to-save-crying-baby/

 

 

The 10-month-old’s parents, Dipak Mahato and wife, Lalita, were interrupted during their dinner when they heard a loud “cracking” noise coming from their bedroom. They ran over and were surprised to see their wall in ruins and the tusker standing over their child. The baby was lying in its cot surrounded by pieces of rubble. The elephant started to move away to continue its rampage through the village, but when the child began to cry, the tusker stopped and returned to the scene. It started to lift the pieces of wall out of the way with its trunk to free the child. The elephant carefully removed every bit of mortar, brick and stone away from the crib before returning to the forest.

In theories of sexual selection, male strategies revolve around soliciting as many females as possible, while female strategy is to be "choosy" or highly selective of males she'll engage with for reproduction, as costs of pregnancy/caring for offspring is often higher for females than males [sexual antagonism in evolutionary biology is really interesting, if anyone wants to look into it]. So, following that logic, you can see why males might prefer sexual activity involving multiple females more than females would for males. Although, you know, there is a lot of variation.