An Asian elephant named Mary living at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers by figuring out how to use a hose to take her morning showers, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. “Elephants are amazing with hoses,” said co-author Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin. “As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.”

Tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins have been observed using sea sponges to protect their beaks while foraging for food, and sea otters will break open shellfish like abalone with rocks. Several species of fish also use tools to hunt and crack open shellfish, as well as to clear a spot for nesting. And the coconut octopus collects coconut shells, stacking them and transporting them before reassembling them as shelter.

Birds have also been observed using tools in the wild, although this behavior was limited to corvids (crows, ravens, and jays), although woodpecker finches have been known to insert twigs into trees to impale passing larvae for food. Parrots, by contrast, have mostly been noted for their linguistic skills, and there has only been limited evidence that they use anything resembling a tool in the wild. Primarily, they seem to use external objects to position nuts while feeding.

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Human beings live every day with the understanding of our own mortality, but do animals have any concept of death? It's a question that has long intrigued scientists, fueled by reports of ants, for example, appearing to attend their own"funerals"; chimps gathering somberly around fallen comrades; or a mother whale who carried her dead baby with her for two weeks in an apparent show of grief.

Philosopher Susana Monsó is a leading expert on animal cognition, behavior and ethics at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain. She became interested in the topic of how animals experience death several years ago while applying for a grant and noted that there were a number of field reports on how different animal species reacted to death. It's an emerging research field called comparative thanatology, which focuses on how animals react to the dead or dying, the physiological mechanisms that underlie such reactions, and what we can learn from those behaviors about animal minds.

"I could see that there was a new discipline that was emerging that was very much in need of a philosophical approach to help it clarify its main concepts," she told Ars. "And personally, I was turning 30 at the time and became a little bit obsessed with death.  So I wanted to think a lot about death and maybe come to fear it less through philosophical reflection on it."

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