Meet the Brit proffesor who taught tortoise how to yawn to prove others can’t
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Meet a British professor, who has won a gong for training a tortoise how to yawn.
Dr Anna Wilkinson, 30, at the University of Lincoln spent six months train a red-footed tortoise called Alexandra to yawn on command, while proving that other tortoises could not do the same.
The resulting study, entitled ‘No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise’, last week won the physiology award at the Ig Nobels, handed out by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research for studies that “first make people laugh, then think”.
Wilkinson said the award would ‘contribute significantly to raising the profile of research into tortoise and other reptile behaviour.’
The reptile expert and her team then spent weeks getting the tortoise to perform its new party piece in front of other tortoises to see if the reptiles felt the urge to respond with a yawn of their own - a process dubbed ‘contagious yawning’, reports the Daily Mail.
Wilkinson said current research, mainly with primates and dogs, suggests that contagious yawning may require empathy and therefore was only likely to occur in creatures with high level intelligence.
“After running many experiments with eleven other tortoises we found no evidence of contagious yawning at all, and so it does suggest that it may be controlled by a high level mechanism. Though what that exact mechanism is remains unclear,” she added.
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