vampire bats can starve to death after only two days. if a bat fails to find food, it will lick the face of one of its friends and that friend will regurgitate some blood into its mouth. the bats remember this and will help that friend in return in the future.

they thought it was only related bats who did this, but they did a study and it didn't depend on genetics. some individual bats pretty much just have a policy of helping each other regardless of relationship.

crows do this too (not the vomiting blood, obviously). if a crow gets an injured wing or something, its fellow crows will feed it and protect it on the ground until it's able to fly again. they also adopt orphaned young crows, rather than leaving them to die.

social animals tend to be wired this way. in The Moral Lives of Animals, Peterson describes a researcher observing a troop of baboons when a young baboon approached him. the baboon stared him in the face and then looked pointedly near his feet,

whereupon the researcher realized he was sitting almost on top of a dangerous viper.

the baboon got absolutely nothing out of this. didn't increase its chances of survival in any way. it was just being a good guy.

I wish I could see humans from the eyes of other animals. we suck in many ways but we can be pretty good for this stuff. they'd be like "Bro I saw a human gently removing drowning bugs from a swimming pool "

lol scientists trying to write about this stuff without "anthropomorphizing" sound so goofy.

"being nice to other baboons reduced aggression" yeah man that's called being friends

imagining writing about human relationships in this way and losing my mind.

"the offspring sometimes engage in cleaning of the nest in return for continued support from their parents even into adulthood"

"some adults are seen caring for large numbers of unrelated young. this sacrifice reduces the fitness of these adults, while allowing dozens of other adults to acquire more resources to rear larger numbers of young themselves"