First black and white spots to reduce mosquito bites, now artificial eyespots to reduce predation. By the end of decade, the cattles will look like mutants from a glance.
I live in an area with native Cougar and Bear. Local hunters told me a couple decades ago the best thing to do in the woods when you are alone is to put your sunglasses on the back of your head. They explained that large cats typically attack from behind. When the glasses are on the back of your head it confuses the cat as to which direction you are looking and makes them hesitate (therefore less likely) to attack you.
It always made sense to me. This study seems to reinforce their advice.
This reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin, having read about this practice, makes his own mask to protect himself from Hobbes' pouncing.
I heard the exact same from a shark expert in the Great Barrier Reef. Rather than using a cage or anything we'd normally associate with shark diving, he puts a set of googly eyes on the back of his head and had been safely shark diving professionally for 2 decades.
I don't think sharks have the same cognitive capacities as felines plus felines imply a lot of things about their prey when they do this like : there are only two eyes, facing the same direction, prey can only move in 2d etc... which are not true under water
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Vitaly Nikolayenko?
"He spent 33 years living with the brown bears (Ursus arctos) native to the Kamchatka peninsula (...) For over 20 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up to sleep just a few feet from him."
I listen to Joe Rogan podcasts and he always mentions bears being very different than people think. He said they do all kinds of terrible things, even their own kind. (think how much food a large bear has to eat to stay alive)
Looks like 9 paragraphs to me. For comparison, we have MRI scans of human beings orgasming. Most of what we know about wild shark reproduction comes from observing a single population of nurse sharks living in the Dry Tortugas. That's a single population, of a single species, in one place on earth, at one time of year (summer). That's about it.
Awesome! This is similar to dazzle camouflage from WW1, the idea being to disguise the heading of the ship. I'm not sure it was ever shown to actually work though.
Dazzle was meant to fool coincidence rangefinders. The method of operation of such a rangefinder is that you see two halves of a picture, and your job as the operator is to adjust a range knob until the two halves "line up" and produce a single picture. By making parts of the ship easy to mistake for other parts, dazzle made this hard.
Dazzle fundamentally failed at this task because the primary opponent, Imperial Germany, did not use coincidence rangefinders. Instead, they used stereoscopic rangefinders, against which Dazzle had little effect. (Incidentally, the Germans also went to war with a naval camouflage paint scheme that was best designed to defeat their own instruments, and was notably less effective against the Royal Navy.)
This has me really curious about a bigger topic: “what are some massive wartime expenditures (money, resources, attention) that ended up being completely ineffective?”
Soviet anti-tank dogs [0] in WW2. Although in truth the expenditure wasn't massive.
> the Soviets used their own diesel engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks which had gasoline engines.[5] As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks
It work on magpies. When they nest, Maggies "swoop" at people, dogs and such that get too close. In australia (where all birds are much bolder), people do the sunglasses trick.
My second day in Australia I had one swoop me about 5 times and then finally peck or claw my scalp and it was a bloody mess. I went into the trailer I was staying in and the bird perched on a branch and evil eyed me for 30 minutes. Those birds are gangster.
Later I saw kids waiting for the school bus with ice cream boxes on their head with two dots drawn on the back. Definitely not a fashion thing.
The locals got I good laugh from me getting pecked because they all know the tricks after the first warning swoop.
The magpies near me never swoop me, I've somehow made friends with them. They used to swoop my dog, until they saw me and my dog outside together, now they leave her alone. I love them though, they're friendly to other birds (but they have no tolerance for bullies), and they'll even chase off invasive species (Indian Myna birds). They are certainly the dons of my garden.
Could just be that you were new to the area. I walk everywhere so the magpies see me all year round, and by the time it's swooping season they know I'm not a threat. I only get swooped when I take a different path to normal and come across an unfamiliar family.
I came to a different conclusion after watching footage of
a family hunting together at night.
There is also a third very similar white dot on the tip of the tail which is very much more dynamic that the two fixed points on the ears.
By moving the tail relative to the ears I would swear the ones in front could at least communicate their own intents to the ones behind them if not issue perfectly silent directives
Interesting theory, Tigers not know to hunt in packs, but you might be right thats it's a way to counter their own camouflage. Do you remember the footage.
Some sunglasses (probably not all) kinda look like 2 dark circles with a gap between. If you can make the cat second guess it sometimes is all it takes to make it look for other game. They really don't like to eat us anyways from what I hear.
kinda of like avoiding any opportunist predator
spammer, hacker, advertising ...
If you do anything chances are really good they will just move one to something that is not.
Depends. If there isn't a strong enough selection pressure (there is plenty of wild prey, they only rarely attack cattle) then they wouldn't learn to ignore the eyespots for many generations.
In India, Tigers attack and eat people on a regular basis. Villagers wear specially made face masks on the back of the head to confuse and dissuade attacks from the back.
There is evidence that prehistoric cats preyed on humans enough to have evolved specialized incisor teeth for crushing human sculls.
High caliber firearms could be cost prohibitive, or simply illegal in that jurisdiction. Alternatively, firearms are only as useful as you are aware and capable of reacting...
If pouncing on villagers routinely resulted in catching a 12ga slug (buddy system when doing high risk things will do a pretty good job of guaranteeing that) then the tigers that live long enough to pass on their genes would be the ones that don't make a habit of pouncing on villagers.
It only takes a few generations for animals to become afraid of or lose their fear of humans. You see this in all sorts of species when hunting pressure is applied/removed.
You don't have to get them every time just often enough that they stop doing it It's about making it statically much riskier for the tigers to misbehave, not saving everyone.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attack the majority who attack humans are infirm and desperate. Doubt taking them out of the gene pool would do any long-term good.
It's sort of like grizzlies in Northern America National Parks. Your ideal situation is you aren't encountering a half-ton apex predator so if you dissuade the encounter and you also avoid it, it's much better than attempting to perform Pavlovian training.
To get any firearm in India, you need to prove immediate danger from other humans, plus average basic daily income is $2 or something, so firearms are basically for rich people with enough connections.
Attacks "on a regular basis" means a few dozen times per year in a country with hundreds of millions of people. Like pretty much all big predator attacks, the risk is really, really small; it's just so viscerally frightening that people get worked up about them.
I live in the US and hear far more concern about mountain lions than deer, even though people here are hundreds of times more likely to be killed by a deer. And do you know what helps control deer overpopulation? A healthy predator population.
> Although no known contemporary mammals display anti-predator eyespots, the effects of eye patterns and gaze have been shown to modify behaviour in this Class including in humans, domestic and wild canids, and domestic cats.
Is there a reason mammals don't/haven't evolved this way? With cattle and other domestic animals I can understand that humans have been knowingly and unknowingly interfering with evolution so I suppose that isn't surprising. But why haven't deer or bunnies, for example, evolved to have white patches on their rear ends the way insects and birds have?
Maybe there's not enough evolutionary pressure from predation to necessitate it. For deer and rabbits, they seem to be optimizing for speed and agility which makes other deterrence modes less necessary.
I'd guess possibly time? Insects have had a lot more generations filled with more frequent predation attempts and they've been doing it for longer. There is a lot more variation across insects than across mammals.
>Is there a reason mammals don't/haven't evolved this way?
Zebra is likely the closest adaptation. That's more of an optical illusion than eye logic.
I suspect it has to do with how fast big predators learn. If you put a fake snake in a fruit tree for example it takes about a month before the birds learn. Big apex predators learn even faster presumably. So that's just too fast on a evolution time scale.
The article conjectures that the function of these is to be a super-salient signal for a predator's visual system, so they attend to the wrong end of the prey in a chase. Maybe tracking the back end gives a degraded cue to the predators prey-motion-model. But the high-contrast patches are hard to ignore, like chaff for radar.
This is probably a different effect than false eyes have on cats, since cats sneak up on prey that aren't looking.
It might be one of those things that fools predators for a few generations, and then starts having the opposite effect. Lions learn to look for the massive eyes, cos they're the tastiest bit of a cow...
I've heard years ago that wearing googly eyes on the back of your helmet is a good way to cut the chance of a cougar attack on a bike. Just like you I think I'll go grab some today!
I'm wondering if the same effect applies to humans. For example adding pictures of staring managers/bosses in offices, painting faces/eyes reduce certain behavior. A cool experiment would be paintings of police men reducing graffiti
Looks like the cross marked cattle faired better than unmarked as well (though not as well as those with false eyes). I wonder the significance of that.
Indeed, there are lots of stories about the effect of eye contact in human behavior, charisma and persuasion. Sam Harris has a few stories about this, and [writes a bit in this post](https://samharris.org/look-into-my-eyes/). Try to catch Osho, the guru in the video, blinking. He doesn't, he barely moves his eyelids 1/4 of the way down once a minute or so. It's fascinating.
it goes straight to the amygdala - the "lizard" or the "fight or flight" brain - see the brain scans in the link below for example. It is very short connection path from retina, something like right past the primary visual cortex, right beyond the last layers of simple/automatic pattern matching.
not surprisingly as it is usually the last thing one see before being attacked, so no wonder that amygdala starts to fire well before your conscious comes up with upper level decision whether there is any danger.
I'm kind of thinking that this wouldn't scale. If some of the cattle have eye spots and others in the same area don't, the predators might be intimidated, or they might just say "that's weird, I'll hunt something else". But if all of the cattle have eye spots added, the cougars might just think "f it, I'm hungry".
I bet if you painted a picture of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) on the cow, not only would the carnivores not eat the cows, they would probably bring the cows food.
It’s interesting to relate this to adversarial attacks on computer vision systems. Something “low-tech” like this that works on mammal predators might protect against predator drones one day.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadIt's not bad though.
We already have mutant cattle, and dogs, and mice.
It always made sense to me. This study seems to reinforce their advice.
EDIT: Yeap, here's NYT article from 1989 https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-t...
[1] https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/23
The outcome of Calvin's "experiment"
"He spent 33 years living with the brown bears (Ursus arctos) native to the Kamchatka peninsula (...) For over 20 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up to sleep just a few feet from him."
Eventually he died of a bear mauling.
Moral of the story: it works until it doesn't.
Wow, same year and two months later than Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Treadwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark#Reproduction
Interesting how universal these tricks seem to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_CF-18_Hornet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
Dazzle fundamentally failed at this task because the primary opponent, Imperial Germany, did not use coincidence rangefinders. Instead, they used stereoscopic rangefinders, against which Dazzle had little effect. (Incidentally, the Germans also went to war with a naval camouflage paint scheme that was best designed to defeat their own instruments, and was notably less effective against the Royal Navy.)
> the Soviets used their own diesel engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks which had gasoline engines.[5] As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules
Cost billions; more than the Manhattan project. Obsolete soon after deployment due to ICBMs.
(Taking your "war time" to include cold war time)
They really need a second study that paints big gnarly WW2 fighter teeth on cows to see what effect it has.
sadly not genuine dazzle camo but in the ballpark
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9179/does-weari...
Later I saw kids waiting for the school bus with ice cream boxes on their head with two dots drawn on the back. Definitely not a fashion thing.
The locals got I good laugh from me getting pecked because they all know the tricks after the first warning swoop.
https://www.mindenpictures.com/cache/pcache2/00539194.jpg
There is also a third very similar white dot on the tip of the tail which is very much more dynamic that the two fixed points on the ears. By moving the tail relative to the ears I would swear the ones in front could at least communicate their own intents to the ones behind them if not issue perfectly silent directives
[]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Kingdom
Some sunglasses (probably not all) kinda look like 2 dark circles with a gap between. If you can make the cat second guess it sometimes is all it takes to make it look for other game. They really don't like to eat us anyways from what I hear.
Worked as far as I could tell.
Q: Cubs! If you attack a horned prey animal from the front, what will happen to you?
A: You will be gored.
Q: Cubs! How do we know which end of the animal is the back?
A: The back end has no eyes.
Q: Cubs! What happens to us if we do not pay attention to prey eyes?
A: We will not reproduce.
Is that a quote?
On an evolutionary timescale, there would probably be an arms race of sorts leading to an equilibrium of predator/prey phenotypes.
Went looking for images, the article did not disappoint: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01156-0/figures/1
Went in expecting a couple of crude round spots for eyes
Got ACTUAL EYES with the whites, iris\pupil, darkened rims, even a suggestion of tear ducts
There is evidence that prehistoric cats preyed on humans enough to have evolved specialized incisor teeth for crushing human sculls.
It only takes a few generations for animals to become afraid of or lose their fear of humans. You see this in all sorts of species when hunting pressure is applied/removed.
So rather than avenge your buddy and improve the tiger gene pool, you’d get killed too.
* A protected endangered species
* Hard to track
* Better to not encounter than to fight
It's sort of like grizzlies in Northern America National Parks. Your ideal situation is you aren't encountering a half-ton apex predator so if you dissuade the encounter and you also avoid it, it's much better than attempting to perform Pavlovian training.
I live in the US and hear far more concern about mountain lions than deer, even though people here are hundreds of times more likely to be killed by a deer. And do you know what helps control deer overpopulation? A healthy predator population.
Is there a reason mammals don't/haven't evolved this way? With cattle and other domestic animals I can understand that humans have been knowingly and unknowingly interfering with evolution so I suppose that isn't surprising. But why haven't deer or bunnies, for example, evolved to have white patches on their rear ends the way insects and birds have?
As for other animals, the RNG probably just didn't spin that way.
Zebra is likely the closest adaptation. That's more of an optical illusion than eye logic.
I suspect it has to do with how fast big predators learn. If you put a fake snake in a fruit tree for example it takes about a month before the birds learn. Big apex predators learn even faster presumably. So that's just too fast on a evolution time scale.
"it is recommended that the technique be applied periodically, when predation rates are higher, also to avoid predator habituation."
With their bigger brains, perhaps cats and wolves can learn or visually identify discrepancies better than birds.
They have. Bunnies famously have distinct white tails that bob up and down as they run.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/08/why-rabbits-have-white-...
And some deer have distinct white/dark patches on their backside:
https://krahnpix.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/t6c8813.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/6JZdQBz.jpg
The article conjectures that the function of these is to be a super-salient signal for a predator's visual system, so they attend to the wrong end of the prey in a chase. Maybe tracking the back end gives a degraded cue to the predators prey-motion-model. But the high-contrast patches are hard to ignore, like chaff for radar.
This is probably a different effect than false eyes have on cats, since cats sneak up on prey that aren't looking.
Don't know if it works, but they must at least think it does.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watching-eye_effect
And to keep people from trying to buy cigarettes while underage.
Eyes are magic. Pattern recognition that reaches down deep, maybe past the reptilian. Getting looked at can cause anxiety.
Maybe this adds to the appeal of masks.
it goes straight to the amygdala - the "lizard" or the "fight or flight" brain - see the brain scans in the link below for example. It is very short connection path from retina, something like right past the primary visual cortex, right beyond the last layers of simple/automatic pattern matching.
http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-strange-brain-of-the-wor...
> Getting looked at can cause anxiety.
not surprisingly as it is usually the last thing one see before being attacked, so no wonder that amygdala starts to fire well before your conscious comes up with upper level decision whether there is any danger.
I'm uncertain if it prevents shoplifting, but it sure pisses off people like me who were browsing and prevents actual shopping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_map
Cellular automata and reaction-diffusion is well observed in biology as morphogenesis.
I'm curious, is there a color-specific advantage to monochromatic patterns that can be explained by theory?
https://www.telerama.fr/sites/tr_master/files/styles/simplec...