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Cat-astro-phe t1_j9le7bg wrote

I feel like we are seeing a substantial amount of animals participating in behaviors that humans don't expect from them. Do you feel the same and do you feel that there is an evolutionary aspect to this, or do you think they have been participating in the activities all along and we just see so much more now because of the prolifration of videography and photography and the internet.

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nationalgeographic t1_j9ll70j wrote

I'm willing to bet that social media has a lot to do with what we're seeing, and that most of these behaviors are not new. That being said, human changes to the environment (even subtle changes) can create new situations that animals have to adapt to or may behave differently around.

On a more philosophical note, scientists/people in general often try to put things into neat boxes, and nature doesn't operate like that! Folks might think behaviors are new just because scientists of the past have not written about them due to the behaviors not fitting into our neat boxes. A great example: all of the homosexual and gender-bending behaviors in the animal kingdom that have been poorly studied or largely just ignored or written off as flukes.

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