Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. For decades, self-awareness has been guarded as a very ...

Gorillas may have greater self-awareness than scientists previously thought. A new study finds that gorillas perform just as well as chimpanzees in tests that require awareness of their own bodies. A ...

Cleaner wrasse have revealed a remarkable new side of fish intelligence. Marked with fake parasites, they used mirrors to inspect and remove the spots—far faster than seen in earlier tests. Even more ...

Awareness, especially self-awareness, is very difficult to study. Self-awareness evolved among our animal ancestors and is found in their descendants today. Its presence can be detected using the ...

Humans are well known for looking in the mirror and responding to their reflections. Interestingly, scientific research has revealed that it is a rare trait among animals, with only a few species ...

Source: Bert de Tilly, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Since the 1970s, scientists have employed the mirror test as an assay of self-awareness. If an animal or child ...

Adélie penguins seem to have passed a portion of the mirror test, in which animals that see their reflection in a mirror appear to recognise that they are seeing themselves and not another individual.

A shrimp scrap drifted down the face of a mirror, and a small reef fish tracked it like it was watching a slow-motion experiment. The fish, a blue-streak cleaner wrasse, had carried the shrimp upward, ...

In theory, a reaction to an out-of-place mark in a reflection is assumed to be evidence of self-recognition for other animals as well. Chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins are just some that have ...