Why scientists are also watching animal YouTube videos

What do Asian elephants, peacock spiders, and a cockatoo have in common?

The stars of online videos have tens of millions of views. The behavior captured in some of the videos has been scientifically significant.

The conclusions of the study were drawn from the videos on the internet.

Sanjeeta has only witnessed one case of the death of an elephant in three years of intensive field work.

Elephants were filmed trying to revive a dead family member with kicks. They gathered next to the remains.

He said that the most striking thing was calf carrying. There have been cases of a female elephant carrying her dead calf.

Sanjeeta said it's difficult to say whether this can be described as the elephant equivalent of grief or mourning. Their interest in death says something about how intelligent they are. There are rare displays of animal intelligence in the seemingly endless video library on the internet.

You don't have to be an animal researcher to find online animal videos. Scientists are increasingly using this source of video data. Scientific insights are being drawn from online footage.

Prof Ximena Nelson from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand said that her favourite is a crow using a plastic lid as a snowboard on a roof.

The window of a building in a Russian town was used to film the clip. A crow slides down a snowy roof while standing on a jar lid. It flies back up and does the same thing again. It seems to be having fun.

It is playing, but it is also using a tool for fun. I think that says a lot about how smart that crow is, but also that it can innovate in a very unusual scenario.

Thousands of researchers spending hours outside trying to make observations of crows might never witness such behavior - let alone record it.

Animals playing with other species, or with unusual objects, is a popular online genre of video.

This fun can provide insight into the function of play, which is actually something of a biological enigma. There is no obvious purpose for play. It is not going to provide you with food or babies, at least not directly.

Many researchers turned to online video platforms for information during the last two years of lockdowns.

One of my students was looking for instances of play in animals that hadn't been described before and went down a rabbit hole.

There is more footage available for study. There are fewer people uploading videos of insects. The peacock spider dancing appears to be its own category. It's helpful to have a window of access to difficult locations.

Rich and lucky wildlife tourists who travel to the farthest reaches of the earth have uploaded videos of their encounters with animals.

They might film predatory behavior in orca, which is a rare behavior, and you have to be there at the right time.

The animal stars of these films are not always rare.

The personality traits of red and grey squirrels were found on the video sharing website. His study showed that grey squirrels were more aggressive than the reds, and that these videos accurately reflected what scientists have seen in the wild.

Lukasz said that it was a novel approach to behavioural studies that could save researchers time.

In some cases, only one animal is required.

The Harvard-based study concluded that it isn't only humans that enjoy music with a beat.

Researchers wrote in a paper published in Current Biology that parrots share the same response to music as humans.

Sanjeeta says that the videos may make people feel more connected to nature and other species.

I see emotion when I see elephants. Sanjeeta says that she sees that they might be grieving.

When people feel connected to these animals and feel emotional, hopefully that can help elephants.

Video research and production by a woman.

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More on the animal behavior mysteries can be found on Inside Science.