Twitter this week was one of the best source for initiating research; twitter had ample tweets about my research interests, and those tweets led me to researchers and links which would have been difficult to find otherwise.
Further on twitter I tweeted a thread about my research on cognitive abilities of lions. The lions despite having a smaller brain than the tigers, have higher cognitive abilities, thanks to their social interactions. It was enlightening to know that despite having a bigger skull than the tiger, the lion has a smaller brain, as the jaw muscles of the lion are larger. This fact made one thing clear: a bigger brain doesn't always mean a bigger mind.
My twitter also include tweets from various news and other informative sites, as I was browsing for research purposes. If not for twitter it would have been extremely difficult to do my research as fast as I done now, and not to forget, I get to share my research with others, and maybe make a small difference in this huge world. I especially thank our Professor Dr. Lynda Haas for choosing such an interactive and effective methodology for our class.
This week we also read an article about cetaceans by Dr. Toni Forhoff and Lori Marino. This article talked about Interspecies Collaborative Research and its benefits. But, what struck out the most was how animals experience stress, and stress based diseases because of captivity. I hope the new ICR methodology will help improve the life of such animals.
Finally coming to the blog posts of my fellow classmates, I commented on the blogs of Arman, Raffi, and Chengyu. Arman has focussed his research on wolves, while Raffi is focussing on dogs, his motivation being his pet dog, and Chengyu is now focussed on whales. In my replies I talked about how Raffi and Chengyu could have focussed a bit more on the Safina readings in their end of week 3 blogs, while for Arman, I really appreciated how he dug out a photo of the wolf called Six from the Safina reading.
Hey Harsh,
I enjoyed reading your progress on your research. It is very interesting to know that lions have good cognitive skills despite their biological features.
When you mentions the benefits of ICR, I was hoping to know more about this new approach and why it is so significant.