The honey hunters

One of the things I learned from 32 years of teaching biology is that many non-human animals are way smarter than we give them credit for -- and its corollary, which is that we humans are not as far separated from the rest of the natural world as many of us would like to think.

A charming piece of research in Science this week illustrates this point brilliantly.  It's about a species of African bird, the Greater Honeyguide (its scientific name, which I swear I'm not making up, is Indicator indicator).  It's found in open woodland in most of sub-Saharan Africa, and has a very specialized diet -- it lives on bee eggs, larvae, and wax (it's one of the few known animals that can digest wax).

Illustration of a Greater Honeyguide by Nicolas Huet (1838) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Because of its diet, local residents have developed a mutualistic relationship with honeyguides, a relationship that is what gives the birds their common name.  People living in the region listen for the bird's call and then follow it to find the bees' nests it was attracted to.  The people tear open the nests and take the honey -- and the bird gets the larvae and the wax.  Many cultures that live in the honeyguides' range have developed specific calls to attract the birds when they're ready to go on a honey hunt.

The study, led by ecologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge, looked at the fact that honeyguides seem to learn the specific calls used by the people they live near.  Initially, it was uncertain if the people had figured out what the birds responded to, or if the reverse was true and the birds had learned what noises the people made.  So she and her team decided to test it; they used recordings of individuals from two cultures that are known to use honeyguides, the Hadza of Tanzania and the Yao of Malawi and Mozambique.  The Hadza employ a complex series of whistles to summon their helpers, while the Yao make a "brrr-huh" sound.

Both signals work just fine, but only in particular regions.  When a recording of the Hadza signal is played in Malawi, or a recording of the Yao signal is played in Tanzania, the birds don't respond.  The birds have evidently learned to recognize the specific calls of their partners in the region where they live -- and don't "speak the language" used elsewhere.

Spottiswoode's team also found there are two places where the symbiotic relationship is falling apart.  In more urban areas, where commercial sugar is widely available, there are fewer people engaged in honey hunting, so the birds have decided they're better off working as free agents.  Even more interesting, in some areas in Mozambique, the Yao discovered that if they destroy the wax and the rest of the hive, the honeyguides will stay hungry and look for other nests.  But... the birds are learning that their human partners are stiffing them, and they're becoming less likely to respond when called, so the human honey hunters are having less overall success.

So even birds can recognize when they're getting a raw deal, and put a stop to it.

The more we find out about the other life forms with which we share the planet, the more commonality we find.  Everything in the natural world exists on a continuum, from our physiology and our genetics to characteristics many thought of as solely human traits, like emotion, empathy, and intelligence.

So be careful when you throw around terms like "bird-brain" -- they're not as far off from us as you might like to believe.

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Checkmate

I am a truly dreadful chess player.

I know how all the pieces move, and have no difficulty comprehending the basic gist of the game.  My problem is that I have zero ability at strategy.  My understanding is that excellent chess players have an above-average capacity for assessing control of the board holistically -- i.e., they're not simply looking forward and predicting their opponent's moves, they're evaluating the entire layout and planning their moves based on a judgment of what will improve their overall position.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jyothis, Chess Large, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Wherever this capacity comes from, I don't have it.  My strategy when playing chess is "KILL KILL KILL."  I focus on attacking particular pieces, and therefore walk blindly into traps set by even mediocre players.

True story: I participated in a chess tournament when I was at the University of Louisiana.  It was a single-elimination tournament, but with a twist; the goal of the tournament was to find the worst chess player at the University.  So after a game, the winner was eliminated, and the loser went on to the next round.

I came in second.

The only game I won was the final game, against a player so catastrophically bad she exceeded even my level of strategic incompetence.  At one point, I had (accidentally, of course) put my queen in danger of being taken by her bishop.  I honestly hadn't seen it until I'd already made the move.  So I was sitting there, waiting for her to pounce.  And sure enough, she picked up the bishop, moved it...

... and set it down exactly one space before the queen.

This prompted one of the spectators, who were strictly enjoined against making commentary or helping the players, to burst out in helpless frustration, "What in the fuck are you doing?"

She looked up, gave him a perplexed smile, and said, "What do you mean?"

So.  Yeah.  Her I won against.  Missed getting the trophy by that much.

It's an odd thing, really.  I'm fairly confident that I have a decent brain, and am a reasonably analytical thinker.  But anything involving strategy is absolutely beyond me.  It's why I also suck at most card games.  Games like poker -- where you have to decide your own next move based on what you know about your opponents' cards, and there's a good chance at least some of them are bluffing -- are baffling to me.  I have a great poker face, though.  I'm really good at keeping my expression blank.  But it's not because I've got this great strategy and am keeping it secret.

My expression is blank because most of the time, I have no idea what the hell is going on.

The reason this comes up is a paper in the journal Genes that found a single gene locus -- KIBRA -- that correlates with chess-playing ability (and, the authors suggest, ability in science and technology).  The authors write:

The kidney and brain expressed protein (KIBRA) plays an important role in synaptic plasticity.  Carriers of the T allele of the KIBRA (WWC1) gene... C/T polymorphism have been reported to have enhanced spatial ability and to outperform individuals with the CC genotype in working memory tasks.  Since ability in chess and science is directly related to spatial ability and working memory, we hypothesized that the KIBRA T allele would be positively associated with chess player status and Ph.D. status in science.  We tested this hypothesis in a study involving 2479 individuals (194 chess players, 119 Ph.D. degree holders in STEM fields, and 2166 controls; 1417 males and 1062 females)...  We found that frequencies of the T allele were significantly higher in... chess players compared with ethnically matched controls.  In addition, none of the international chess grandmasters (ranked among the 80 best chess players in the world) were carriers of the CC genotype (0 vs. 46.3%; OR = 16.4, p = 0.005).  Furthermore... Ph.D. holders had a significantly higher frequency of CT/TT genotypes compared with controls.  Overall, this is the first study to provide comprehensive evidence that the rs17070145 C/T polymorphism of the KIBRA gene may be associated with ability in chess and science, with the T allele exerting a beneficial effect.

I find this fascinating from a couple of standpoints.  The first is that it's astonishing a single gene locus can have an effect on a complex set of behaviors such as spatial perception and strategy.  Second, it's interesting that there's also a correlation to attainment of a Ph.D., which is another thing that is beyond my grasp.  I spent some time in my early college days aiming toward a career in research science -- which would have pretty much necessitated my attaining a doctorate -- and after switching around from field to field, finally had the epiphany that the problem wasn't the specific field I was in, it was that I simply didn't have the capacity for narrow, laser focus required to do research.  Nor did I have the ability to synthesize techniques and concepts from disparate fields you see in truly original research -- something that has a lot in common with the holistic strategizing you see in the best chess players.

Put simply, my brain just doesn't work that way.  I'm a raging generalist; someone once described my knowledge, accurately if not particularly kindly, as "a light year across and an inch deep."  I'm positively in awe of people who do scientific research and are blessed with the ability to see dazzlingly brilliant solutions to questions about the universe...

... but I am not one of them.

It's okay, really.  I'm not unhappy with my CC genotype; being an inquisitive sort with a broad general knowledge background is part of what made me a successful teacher.  I have had my pangs of envy when I read about scientists doing amazing work, but deep down, I know I could never have made it as a researcher, any more than I could be a chess grand master.

And at least I can comfort myself in knowing there was one person I went to college with who was worse at that sort of thing than I am.

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Inside an animal's mind

There's a doggy intelligence test that most dogs can't pass -- for an interesting reason.

The test involves placing a treat on the floor, stepping ten feet or so away, and letting the dog into the room.  You point to the treat, and the dog has to use that information to find the treat (i.e., not just sniff around until they blunder on it).

It may seem simple, but success at this requires a remarkable degree of sophistication.  What the dog has to be able to do is to look at you, understand the concept of "pointing," and then think, "If I were where (s)he is, what direction would his/her finger appear to be pointing at?"  In other words, the dog has to realize that another individual is seeing things from a different perspective, and has different information about how the world looks.

Success at this test shows the rudiments of a theory of mind -- an understanding that all sentient individuals see what's around them from their own personal point of view.  Most dogs in this scenario will respond by coming up and sniffing the person's hand, or by becoming confused and simply wandering around because they don't have any idea what the owner is expecting them to do (and usually finding the treat accidentally, so in some sense, they win anyhow).

Only one of the many dogs I've known was able to pass the Theory of Mind Test.  She was a neurotic, hyperactive half border collie, half coonhound named Doolin.  Doolin is far and away the smartest dog I've ever known.  She figured out how to unlatch the slide bolts on our gates with her teeth -- simply from watching us do it.  She not only passed the Theory of Mind Test, she also had no problem with the Mirror Test -- when she saw her reflection, she knew it was her and not another dog.  The first time she saw her reflection in a full-length mirror, she barked -- once.  Then she sort of went, "Oh, ha-ha, that's me, I get it" and never did it again.

Doolin the Canine Genius.  Yes, she did always look this fretful.  I guess being that smart means you've got a lot on your mind.

On the other hand, one of our current dogs, Lena -- who, and I say this with all due affection, has the IQ of a lint ball -- spends hours entertaining herself by standing at the end of our dock and barking at her own reflection in the pond.  ("There's that damn water dog again!  She's a pretty wily one, that water dog, but I'll get her this time!")

Lena, whose perpetually happy expression communicates either "What, me worry?" or else, "Derp."

This comes up because of a cool study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called, "Great Apes Use Self-Experience to Anticipate an Agent’s Action in a False-Belief Test," by Fumihiro Kano, Satoshi Hirata, and Masaki Tomonaga (of Kyoto University), and Josep Call and Christopher Krupenye (of the University of St. Andrews).  What the researchers did was to show half of their ape test subjects a test box with an opaque barrier and half a box with a transparent barrier, then they were allowed to observe a human interacting with the barrier from a distance where it was impossible to tell whether the barrier was opaque or transparent.  In other words, they had to interpret the behavior of another individual not based on what they themselves were seeing, but what they could infer about what the individual himself saw.

And they did it flawlessly.  When the ape saw that an object had been moved behind an opaque barrier, they guessed that the human trying to look through the barrier wouldn't know it'd been moved -- and the ape's eyes tracked in the direction of where it expected the human to reach (i.e., where the object was before the barrier was lowered).  From these results, it's clear that apes understand that each individual -- ape or human or otherwise -- has his or her own perspective, and they're not all the same.  Like us humans, they recognize that we don't all have access to the same information.

What this immediately brings up for me is our treatment of non-human animals.  My Animal Physiology professor in college -- one of the only college teachers I had who was truly an asshole -- scoffed at the idea that animals had emotions or could experience pain in the same way a human did.  With the perspective of time, I now realize that he hadn't come to this conclusion based on any scientific evidence, but because it made it much easier for him to rationalize hurting animals "in the name of science" without it putting a ding in his conscience.  We now know that many species grieve the death of one of their fellow creatures, bond strongly to their owners, and remember both good and bad treatment (if you don't believe this last one, take a look at this short video of a lion who was reintroduced to the wild, and then a year later remembered the people who'd rescued him -- a video that never fails to bring me to tears).

So we need to throw out this silly dichotomy of "human versus animal."  First, humans are animals.  Second, all the things we think of as being quintessentially human -- emotions, bonding, logic/problem solving, and ability to take another's perspective -- are not either/or, "we've got 'em and you don't" characteristics.  They exist on a spectrum, and our determination to see ourselves as qualitatively different from the rest of the animal kingdom should be jettisoned as the wrong-headed nonsense it is.  Any difference between us and our non-human cousins is purely quantitative -- and the quantities involved are appearing to be, on the whole, exceedingly small.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The face in the mirror

One of the most relied-upon tests of animal intelligence is the mirror test.  The idea is to see if an animal realizes that its reflection in a mirror is itself, or if it thinks it's another animal.  A lot of primates pass the mirror test -- if you put a mark on a chimp's cheek and show it its reflection, it will immediately reach toward its cheek to wipe off the mark rather than reach toward the reflection.

Most dogs don't pass the mirror test, but some can.  My hyper-intelligent but emotionally-conflicted border collie/coonhound cross, Doolin, barked at her own reflection -- once.  Confronted with a full-length mirror, she went into attack-the-intruder mode, for about five seconds, then fell silent, and kind of did a doggie shrug.  "Oh," she seemed to think.  "I get it.  That's me."  And she never barked at her reflection again.

My bluetick/redbone hound Lena, though -- who is, to put it kindly, on the opposite side of the intelligence spectrum from Doolin -- spends many hours in the summer entertaining herself by barking at her own reflection in our pond.  "I'll get you, Water Dog!  Get out of my pond immediately!"

She also spent a long time barking furiously at something out in the yard last summer.  I went to investigate, thinking she might have cornered a groundhog or something, and it turned out to be a stick.

To be fair, it was a pretty threatening-looking stick, but still.

In general, most other animals can't pass the mirror test.  Male betta fish, for example, will hurl themselves at a reflection until they injure themselves.  But new research from Osaka City University, led by behaviorist Masanori Kohda, suggests that some fish might be a good bit cleverer.

Cleaner wrasses (Labroides spp.) are a group of small marine fish that make a living picking and eating parasites from other fish.  Such behavior isn't necessarily indicative of intelligence; there are also cleaner shrimp that do the same thing and don't show any particular sign of extraordinary brainpower.  But the wrasses in Kohda's aquarium showed an interesting response when confronted with a mirror.  First, they attacked the reflection, but that behavior died down after a few days (it never does with bettas).  But instead of simply ignoring the reflection -- which might indicate they'd just given up trying to chase the intruder off -- the wrasses began swimming upside down in front of the reflection, as if they were inspecting themselves from another angle.

Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse [Image is in the Public Domain]

So Kohda and his team wondered if this might be an indication that wrasses could pass the mirror test.  They took some wrasses and marked the underside of their throats, and put them in front of a mirror.  Instead of trying to pick the mark off their reflection, they scraped their throats on the bottom of the tank -- as if they'd recognized the mark was on themselves and were trying to rub it off.

Not all scientists are convinced by this evidence, however.  "True, self-scraping is not a behavior one would expect if these fish interpret their reflection as another individual, but is this enough reason to conclude that they perceive the fish in the mirror as themselves?" wrote Frans de Waal, the brilliant Dutch animal behaviorist in a response to the Kohda et al. study.  "After all, the most compelling evidence for the latter would be unique behavior never seen without a mirror, whereas self-scraping, or glancing, is a fixed action pattern of many fish.  We may need an in-depth study of this particular pattern before we can ascertain what it means when performed in front of a mirror."

The study is pretty suggestive, though, and it's to be hoped that there'll be more research to see if it's supported, or if (as de Waal mentions) it might just be a complex fixed action pattern.  In any case, I need to wrap this up, because Lena is outside barking her head off.  Maybe she's cornered a highly vicious leaf or something, I dunno.

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Humans have a morbid fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  Look at the number of movies made and books written about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, not to mention hordes of predatory dinosaurs picking people off the streets.  But in the "horrifically dangerous" category, nothing can beat black holes -- collapsed stars with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape.  If you fell into one of these things, you'd get "spaghettified" -- stretched by tidal forces into a long, thin streamer of goo -- and every trace of you would be destroyed so thoroughly that they'd not even be theoretically possible to retrieve.

Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them.  Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

So no wonder there are astrophysicists who have devoted their lives to studying these beasts.  One of these is Shep Doeleman, whose determination to understand the strangest objects in the universe is the subject of Seth Fletcher's wonderful book Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable.  It's not comfortable reading -- when you realize how completely insignificant we are on the scale of the universe, it's considerably humbling -- but it'll leave you in awe of how magnificent, how strange, and how beautiful the cosmos is, and amaze you that the human brain is capable of comprehending it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Human rights for chimps

There's now a lawsuit making its way through the U. S. judicial system demanding "legal personhood" for chimpanzees.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

A non-profit organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed three separate suits in a New York State court claiming that chimps are "a cognitively complex autonomous legal person(s) with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned."  The suits were filed on the behalf of four chimps who are so "imprisoned" -- two by private, licensed owners, and two by research labs at the State University of New York in Stonybrook.

The lawsuits are extremely likely to be thrown out, and it has nothing to do with whether or not holding chimps in such situations is ethical or not.  They are not human -- and the framing of most laws are explicit in giving rights to humans ("men and women," or "people"), not to non-human animals.  The organization filing the lawsuits might have been better off making the claim based on animal cruelty laws; that an animal as "cognitively complex" as a chimp is undergoing abuse simply by virtue of being imprisoned, even if nothing is explicitly done to hurt it.

It does open up the wider question, though, of what our attitude should be toward other species.  The whole issue crops up, I think, because so many humans consider themselves as disconnected from the rest of the natural world.  I find that a great many of my students talk about "humans" and "animals" as if humans weren't animals themselves, as if we were something set apart, different in a fundamental way from the rest of the animal world.  A lot of this probably comes from the fact that much of our cultural context comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which Homo sapiens wasn't even created on the same day as everything else -- and is, therefore, the only being on earth with sentience, and an immortal soul.

Once you knock down that assumption, however, you are on the fabled and dangerous slippery slope.  There is a continuum of intelligence, and sentience, in the animal world; it isn't an either-or.  Chimps and the other anthropoid apes are clearly highly intelligent, with a capacity for emotions, including pain, grief, loss, and depression.  Keeping such an animal in a cage is only dubiously ethical, even if (as in the case of the chimps at SUNY-Stonybrook) you might be able to argue it on a "greater good because of discoveries through research" basis.

But if we have an obligation to treat animals compassionately, how far down the line would you extend that compassion?  Spider monkeys are less intelligent than chimps, by pretty much any measure you choose -- but not a lot less.  We keep pigs in horrible, inhumane conditions on factory farms -- and they are about as intelligent as dogs.  Down the scale it goes; fish can experience pain, and yet some people will not eat chicken on the basis of its causing another creature pain, and yet will happily devour a piece of salmon.

Douglas Hofstadter, the brilliant writer and thinker who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and I Am a Strange Loop, proposes a "unit of sentience" called the "huneker."  (He named the unit after James Huneker, who said of one Chopin étude that it should not be attempted by "small-souled men.")  He is well aware that as neuroscience now stands, it's impossible to assign numerical values to the quality of sentience -- but, he says, few are in doubt that humans are more sentient, self-conscious, and intelligent than dogs, dogs more than fish, fish more than mosquitoes.  (Hofstadter says that a mosquito possesses "0.0000001 hunekers" and jokingly added that if mosquitoes have souls, they are "mostly evil.")  But even though he is talking about the whole thing in a lighthearted way, he bases his own decisions about what to eat on something like this concept:

At some point, in any case, my compassion for other “beings” led me very naturally to finding it unacceptable to destroy other sentient beings... such as cows and pigs and lambs and fish and chickens, in order to consume their flesh, even if I knew that their sentience wasn't quite as high as the sentience of human beings.

Where or on what basis to draw the line? How many hunekers merit respect? I didn't know exactly. I decided once to draw the line between mammals and the rest of the animal world, and I stayed with that decision for about twenty years. Recently, however — just a couple of years ago, while I was writing I Am a Strange Loop, and thus being forced (by myself) to think all these issues through very intensely once again — I “lowered” my personal line, and I stopped eating animals of any sort or “size”. I feel more at ease with myself this way, although I do suspect, at times, that I may have gone a little too far. But I'd rather give a too-large tip to a server than a too-small one, and this is analogous. I'd rather err on the side of generosity than on the other side, so I'm vegetarian.

Although I agree with Hofstadter, I've never been able to give up eating meat -- and I'm aware that the choice is based mostly upon the purely selfish consideration that I really enjoy it.  We belong to a local meat CSA that raises the animals under humane, free-range conditions, which assuages some of my guilty feelings when I'm eating a t-bone steak.

The issue is not a simple one, but I've tried to make my decisions based upon an effort not to cause needless suffering.  Locking up a convicted murderer probably causes him suffering, but refusing to do so on that basis is hardly a reasonable choice.  Ending an animal's life in a quick and humane way to provide me with dinner is, in my opinion, acceptable as long as the animal was treated compassionately while it was alive.  And I extend that qualifier of need all the way down the scale.  I'll scoop up spiders in cups and let put them outside rather than stomp them.  There is no need for me to kill harmless spiders -- however far down the sentience scale they may be.

In the case of the "imprisoned" chimps, there is almost certainly suffering, and (as far as I can tell) little need.  Unless research is of immense and immediate value to humanity, an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a chimp should not be used for it.  There are a great many reasons not to keep animals like chimps in captivity.

Calling them "persons," however, is not one of them.