The surprising culture of the animal kingdom

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Hello, and welcome to the BBC Inside Science podcast, you lovely, curious-minded listeners.

I'm Victoria Gill, and today I am with a live audience at the Hay Festival in Powys, Wales.

Thank you very much.

And while this event celebrates an incredible range of human culture, we are here to discuss the cultures of a very different kind.

The culture, society, and communication in the animal kingdom.

And with the help of an expert panel of scientists, each of whom have traveled the world in their efforts to understand the inner lives of species that we share our planet with, we will be finding out some of the latest intriguing behavioral discoveries and what they tell us about the world that we live in and the species we share it with.

So let me introduce you to the people who are going to bring us these multi-species insights.

We have Dr.

Manon Schweinfoot, who is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews and runs a laboratory investigating the evolutionary and psychological origins of cooperation.

Hello, Manon.

Hello, thank you so much.

Lovely to have you.

Well, you are very, very welcome.

Came all the way down from St Andrews to Hay.

Thank you so much.

We have Jemima Scrace, who is finishing her PhD at the University of Sussex, investigating the matriarchal leadership in African elephants.

She spent most of the last few years out in the field in Kenya, but is here in today, just in the UK for a couple of months.

She's working in collaboration with the charity Save the Elephants Hegemon.

Hello.

And Andy Radford is professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Bristol, studying social behavior and communication, particularly how vocalisations are used to mediate cooperation and conflict, and how the noise that we make affects animal behavior and communication.

Hi, Andy.

Hello.

Please welcome our guest panel, everyone.

So, I wanted to start asking for something really surprising that you have learned to share a bit of your experience and insight of watching, observing, studying the species that you study.

Tell us one of the most surprising things you've learned in your studies of the species that you focus on.

Manon, can I start with you?

Yeah, I think with every study, I learn something new and I'm constantly surprised by the animals.

You know, sometimes it's just little things, so sometimes I train ratties to perform this who task, and then you see those personality differences.

Much like us, you know, some rats pick it up very quickly, you know, the stars, and others might take a little bit longer in that frustration in their little faces.

And they are so close to a delicious oat flake, but they just can't figure it out yet how to get there.

So sometimes it's those minor differences, sometimes it's bigger things, like you run a study with chimpanzees in Africa and they completely outsmart you and find a gazillion of different strategies to solve a task.

Jemima, you study animals that seem to surprise us with their cognitive abilities.

You study elephants.

Give us some insight into what surprises you as a scientist.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I've spent the last three or four years studying leadership in African elephant societies.

And something that's continually surprising is elephants' reliance on the wisdom and knowledge of an older female.

So elephants live in female family groups, the boys disperse when they're adolescents.

And through my research, looking in different contexts of decision-making, repeatedly it's the eldest female that emerges as the one who's putting herself forward to make decisions, and the other family members are really influenced by the decisions that she makes.

And it's thought that it's her age and the knowledge that she's acquired over years of experience that gives her that influence as a leader.

So, that's, I think, surprising to most that in the animal kingdom, we can also have leaders that emerge from wisdom and from kind of a knowledge gradient.

That's lovely.

Andy, how about you?

You've been studying multiple species for a long time, haven't you?

What surprises you still?

So I guess, like Manon, I'm constantly surprised by what non-human animals are capable of doing the more we study them.

So one example relatively recently we found is that various bird species, we studied those in Australia, so things like superb fairy wrens, they're capable of eavesdropping on the communication communication of other species.

And in fact, we've discovered that they can learn the calls of another species and use those.

So effectively they're translating a foreign language and then using that information to their benefit.

That's extraordinary.

But the one I really want to focus on is so we also study groups of animals that live together mostly in a sort of permanent stable structure.

So one of the species in particular we study are dwarf mongooses, Africa's smallest carnivore.

And they do all sorts of cooperative cooperative behaviors, helping one another out, one of which is to climb up and look out for danger while the rest of the group are foraging.

And they announce that they're doing that, so the rest of the group know.

And what we've recently found is the group store up that information about who's been helpful during the day, and then when they get back to the burrow in the evening, before going to bed, they reward those cooperators with lots of extra grooming, which is something that they like.

So they track these cooperative acts during the day through the vocalizations and then reward the best, most helpful individuals at the end of the day, which I'd like to think we do as humans too.

Can we talk about human activity and its impacts on animal behavior?

If I can come to you, Andy, because I know this is something that you specifically study, isn't it?

About human-made noise and the disruption or impact on animal behaviour.

Can you just tell me a little bit about what you're finding out there?

Yeah, so if you think about the world, ever since the Industrial Revolution, we've added lots of noise to the environment through our activities.

And some of that's deliberate, so if you think about seismic gun arrays or sonar, but a lot of our noise is just an accidental byproduct from activity, so urbanization, traffic, wind farms, for example.

And it's been known for a long time that this extra noise detrimentally affects us as humans.

But only relatively recently have we bothered to think, well, what about wildlife?

So it's really only in the last couple of decades that we've been exploring that.

And we've done that both with our mongooses and various bird species, but predominantly we've been looking at it in the ocean on coral reefs.

And that's surprising in a way because if we go diving, we can't hear anything naturally.

But if you put an underwater microphone, called a hydrophone down near a coral reef, it's this orchestra of sound.

So there's the snapping shrimps and the fish producing lots of different vocalizations.

But noise from, say, motorboats has lots of detrimental effects on that wildlife.

It can mask those sounds so that others can't hear them properly.

It can distract you, it can make you stressed.

And the consequence is that you see behavioural changes, developmental changes, physiological ones, reproductive ones.

And there's all this kind of negativity going on because of the noise generated by our activities in lots of different environments around the world.

And I understand just briefly that you're kind of flipping that around as well in terms of restoration, using sound to bring species back and restore a reef.

How does that work?

Yeah, so there's two reasons for hope, really, with this.

It's not all negative.

The first is that you can do positive things with human noise to mitigate it.

So you can use electric boats rather than petrol ones, which are quieter.

Around pile driving units, you can put bubble curtains that lessen the sound.

So, we've been investigating how those mitigation effects can benefit wildlife and lessen our impact.

Is that literally blowing bubbles to create a barrier?

Exactly that.

And then there's the wider issue of coral reef degradation.

So, lots of you will have heard about the bleaching that goes on through the warming of the seas, and the corals are dying off, and they they go white, hence the bleaching.

And what we've found is that that leads to a reduced soundscape as you'd expect as species leave, it's quieter, doesn't sound as attractive.

And lots of marine creatures use the sounds of a reef to return home from where they were first hatched, having been out in the open ocean.

But that's lessened on these degraded reefs.

And around the world, there are lots of coral reef restoration projects on the go, so coral gardening, you know adding corals and things to try and help them what we've been trying is to add sound of healthy reefs to draw back those creatures that then accelerate the initial restoration programs so you're not bringing them back like a pied piper to a horrible place alone you're bringing them back to more restored areas but those returning fish help clean the algae off the corals and accelerate their recovery and growth you were speeding it up with with that natural sound.

Exactly, so we're using sound in a positive sense to enhance coral reef restoration where we can.

You hear so much about noise pollution, it's lovely to hear it being sort of scientifically turned on its head.

And, Jemima, how does what you're learning about elephants inform?

It's quite a challenge to coexist with those large animals.

There is a lot of conflict, isn't there?

Things like crop raiding, and you know, you can understand sort of communities being somewhat afraid of living living alongside elephants.

How does what you're understanding about their behaviour inform and help coexistence?

Yeah, absolutely.

So one of the big challenges that people and elephants are facing in the African continent, as you say, is crop raiding.

So a farmer who has a field and they've grown up tomatoes and then elephants might come in the night and eat that crop.

I'm actually looking at a slightly different form of conflict.

Up in the north of Kenya, it's a very arid environment and people's livelihoods are often dependent on livestock.

So, the main source of competition between humans and elephants in that ecosystem is you're bringing your cattle down to a tiny water hole, but there's elephants there, and then you're competing over that last bit of water.

But, similarly, looking at sounds and kind of in the reverse direction, I've been looking at how elephants listen to people and try to understand human cues as they're coming down to drink.

And I found that elephants are very relaxed when they hear human voices, very sort of conversational voices.

But as soon as local humans that they're familiar with start to use a deterrent call, so a sound that's saying, Okay, go away, elephants, now I want to bring my cows in to drink, then the elephants will startle quite quickly and move away from that water source.

So it seems like with communities that have a long, long history of living alongside elephants, not only have people started to learn or evolved to learn potentially about elephant behavior, but elephants are also learning how to interpret human behavior, and through that, you can then partition your landscape and access resources potentially in a more peaceful way if you can structure it.

Paying attention to what the elephants are understanding about how humans are communicating as well.

Really interesting.

Now, I just wanted to bring in the audience.

So, sir.

Yeah, I was just wondering about the democratic process that elephants have to select a matriarch.

Is it just on an age, or is there something formal about the way it's done?

Yeah, that's a really great question.

Thank you.

So, in some animals, you can end up with an almost democratic process where you'll wait to accumulate votes.

For example, if you're deciding which direction to move in and there's a conflict in interest, one animal wants to go in one direction, another in another, you might wait until the majority has moved to follow one individual.

I have found that in the elephant societies, it's more similar to a despotic system in that the old female seems to have the most influence over her group, but she's not physically persuasive in that, so it's more that individuals choose to defer to her than she's forcing kind of a vote towards her leadership.

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You are listening to Inside Science, and today we are at the Hay Festival with a live audience.

We're looking at what we might be able to learn about ourselves by looking more closely at the animal kingdom.

So, let me ask you about asking the right questions.

You're trying to understand non-human animals, gain some insight about their world, their society, their social structure.

So how do you frame a study from an animal's perspective?

You know, so that you are asking a question that you're going to gain insight from that species.

But maybe Manon,

I can come to you first.

When you're studying cooperation, how do you know that you're really seeing cooperation?

Yeah.

So first of all, we try to put ourselves into the shoes of our animals as much as we can.

That means we try to learn about their natural history, we try to observe them under natural conditions, we try to just let them do their thing and see what they do and start from there really.

And then when we design studies, you know, we integrate little control conditions.

So we want to know are they actually motivated to take part?

Is it interesting?

Is it fascinating?

Is it rewarding for them?

And then the next thing is, especially when we try to present them with artificial tasks, we sometimes have to do that.

Do they understand a thing?

Or have they just learned a correlation in their daily life?

But if you present them with something novel, like an apparatus, for instance, or a puzzle, do they understand what we want them to understand?

And we can do that by having little check-in tasks, basically.

What sort of tasks would you give them to try and understand, you know, if they're grasping it and if they're cooperating?

Yes, so for instance, what we do is we study their food-sharing behavior.

So rats are omnivorous, they eat all sorts of things, but they also share food with each other, even high-quality food, like meat, for instance.

And in captivity, what we can do is we can train them to operate a food-polling platform.

So, that means there is a cage with two chambers, a rat in each, and in front of that cage, there is a movable platform connected to a stick.

And by pulling the stick, the platform moves into the experimental cage.

It comes with a dilemma.

You can only provide food to your partner.

So you're helping someone else.

So what's the benefit for the actor?

Well the hope that the rat will be nice and return the favor and that's what they do.

But the question is now could they for instance they might be very motivated to pull the platform but because it's fun.

So one of the task understanding check-ins that we do is okay you've experienced a very cooperative partner providing food to you and now it's your turn to provide food back But we remove the partner, so now they can pull the platform, but it's to the benefit of no one because it's an empty chamber, and they don't do that.

So, that's a sign for us that they are not just pulling the platform for fun, but that they want to reward a specific partner on the other side.

Interesting, they are genuinely trying to be cooperative, they're genuinely trying to be cooperative.

We're not trying, we are very cooperative.

I'm learning so much about rats.

Jemima, it seems from my kind of non-expert point of view, that it's difficult not to anthropomorphise, not to kind of have a human perspective when it comes to looking at elephant society because we see them as so intelligent, as you know, with such kind of advanced social structures.

How do you know that the conclusions you draw, the questions that you ask, come from kind of the elephant's point of view?

Yeah, we try and be as systematic as possible in our approach to studying their behavior.

So Manon's just described some beautifully detailed experiments that you're able to work with rats in captivity.

With elephants, it's a lot harder.

We can't put out puzzle boxes for them, or you can, but there's obviously always a risk that those puzzle boxes are going to get damaged.

So, my work takes two forms.

Some of it's observational, and you design a checklist of things that you're looking out for in their behavior, but the other side is experimental.

And the main form of experiment I use is something called a playback, and this has been used commonly across studies of elephant behavior but also other species.

And that involves getting a big speaker, like you might see in a club or a party, and playing sounds to the elephants.

And then you can monitor how they react.

And by using that, you can control the context in which elephants are exposed to those sounds.

So, the study that I mentioned earlier, looking at how elephants respond to human vocalizations, was using this setup.

So, a big speaker, play the sound of human voices and also livestock sounds, and then monitor how the elephants respond to that.

But a

key consideration in that study design is: as humans, we are

most familiar with our sense of vision and our sense of hearing.

Whereas for elephants, they rely on their sense of hearing and their sense of smell.

So, for example, when I was playing back sounds of livestock, so cattle footfall and cattle bells, where do you place that speaker in relation to the elephant group?

Well, if you place it upwind from the elephants, then they'll be expecting an olfactory signal, so a scent of a big livestock herd when they hear the sound of the livestock herd.

And for an elephant, that's really important.

If they could hear them but they couldn't smell them, that would seem really odd, and you might elicit a behaviour that's more of a, I'm confused, what's going on here.

So it was really important in that experiment for me to place the speaker downwind from the elephant group.

So when they heard them, they weren't expecting to be able to smell them.

And then you're seeing more of a behavioural reaction to the sound of the livestock, not some weird, confused response.

And Andy, you you know, how much of a problem or a challenge is it to overcome that kind of human-centric point of view when you're trying to tune in to other species?

You know, when you see what you see, drawing a conclusion that means something to understanding that animal society rather than just means something to us?

Yeah, I mean, it's tricky.

We can't stop being humans, and also we have a shared evolutionary history to some extent.

So we're not unique in many respects.

So it's not completely dangerous to think like we do when when we're looking at other animals.

The key is trying to think as much about your animal, but also to present things to them that are relevant to them as much as we can understand that to be.

And now one way you learn to do that is by spending lots of time with a given species.

So the dwarf mongooses and the meerkats that we study, for instance, we've studied for decades in the natural environment.

And so you come to know those creatures and their natural habits really really well which i think helps you get towards you know something that's relevant to them uh i mean we use playbacks as well in the wild just like jemima does and that's because the mongooses for instance are incredibly vocal that's an integral part of their lives and by doing that with that playback you isolate the importance of that vocalization away from everything else.

So just as one very quick example, during the day the mongooses have little negative interactions as well as positive ones.

So a subordinate might dig up a juicy prey item and a dominant individual wanders over, hip slams it out the way, gives a growl and the subordinate squeals when giving up that prey item.

So what we did was played back the growls and squeals of two individuals during an afternoon and those are recognizable to the rest of the group because their calls are individually distinct, like our own voices are.

And then, when they got back to the borough that evening, they shunned the bully.

It received less grooming than it would otherwise do, and indeed less grooming than the other dominants in the group.

So they don't just hate dominance that day.

They've targeted that particular individual because of that vocal information they've received during the afternoon, but then acted out on it that evening before going to bed.

This is not a very scientific reaction to that, but that is adorable.

That is lovely.

Now, I just want to bring in the audience again.

I can hear the rain getting slightly heavier outside, so let's stay hunkered in here and talk science, shall we?

I think we heard a question from you, sir, didn't we, in the second row?

Yes, thank you.

I hope you don't mind me saying, but Malone, you speak with a real mixture of accents.

And I wonder if the panel has any examples, particularly interesting ones, of how localised behaviour or accent matters in the natural world.

Interesting.

Is there evidence of accents within animal societies?

So there are lots of songbird species where different populations have distinct dialects just like we do as humans.

Because these are isolated populations there are slightly different pressures and evolution works in slightly different directions so now we see differences going on.

And those population differences are not just vocal.

There are lots of cultural ones too.

I mean, a real favorite of mine from the chimpanzees is you've probably heard that some of them termite fish.

So, this is very carefully stripping leaves off a twig, inserting it into a termite mound, pulling out the termites.

And various populations do that.

There are at least a couple of populations that don't bother.

They just take a whacking great log and knock the top off the termite mound.

And that's culturally inherited.

So the youngsters learn up with that.

So the populations differ in those different ways.

And perhaps the closer circle here, so we see that many birds and also other mammals have dialects, and if they, like me, come into a different population, they then also mimic that dialect.

So, yeah.

Jemima, I feel like it's easy to be awestruck by the animals that you study, by elephants, but you know, there's also sort of some real conservation problems, aren't there, and some struggles.

Why do you think it's important to have an understanding of how that elephant world works?

Yeah, I think elephants are incredibly charismatic animals.

I often meet people and they say elephants are their favourite animals, so kindred spirit, because they're also mine.

But it's, yeah, not only about sharing stories of elephants and how captivating they are, but also being able to learn about their leadership systems can also play into their conservation.

So, for example, if elephants have an understanding of humans and how to interact with humans, then if that knowledge is held in the eldest female, then it's really important to conserve those old females.

She acts as a repository of knowledge and let's say a population was subject to poaching or environmental disasters that means the older females are dying out.

That's a huge loss and it's not just an individual and her sort of demographic capacity, it's also her knowledge and her wisdom that's being lost.

So better understanding their leadership systems better and who holds that knowledge and how that impacts successful decision-making is critical for the species as they're trying to adapt and navigate a changing environment.

Thank you.

And the other thing is about animal behaviour that it can just be amazing, amusing, entertaining.

And, Manon, I want to pick you up on something that we were talking about when we were preparing for this panel, which is the fruit juice fountain.

Yeah.

Which is such a lovely story.

If you would share.

Yes, Yes, yeah.

So as I said, I studied cooperative behaviors and I used to work with chimpanzees in an African sanctuary.

And so I wanted to study whether they cooperate and reciprocate.

So with chimpanzees, you need to come up with big, sturdy apparatuses.

So basically I cemented a button into the ground of their enclosure, which was connected underground via garden hoses to a juice fountain.

So by pushing the button, juice was released over there.

There was one problem, and scientists are mean, let's call it right.

By pushing the button, juice was released, but the second you stopped pushing the button, the juice flow stopped.

And the juice flow was so far away that you could not provide juice for yourself.

You could only provide juice to the group.

And I predicted if chimpanzees reciprocate, right, that you know, one would push the button, the other one would drink, and then they take turns.

Long story short, they came up with all sorts of different strategies.

We had Jack, the classic cheater.

So, whenever someone was pushing the button, he would just casually wander by, dart towards the fountain, drink the juice.

I've never ever seen him a single time pushing the button for someone else.

So, then we had Barbie.

She is a fantastic mother, having a whole dynasty in that group.

She would be very happy to push the button and produce juice, but the second someone else and her kids were sitting on the other side, she would just stand up and leave.

Then we had Bobby.

So, Bobby is very popular amongst the youngsters, and he would often play with them.

And out of that play, I thought, ooh, look at this, this is peculiar.

He was playing with one of the youngsters, and at some point, roll them towards the button.

And at some point, he took the youngster and placed him on the bottom, walk over to the juice, and was requesting.

And so, when chimpanzees request, they stretch out their hand and blow raspberries

until that youngster provided juice to him.

Sometimes when they didn't want to and were trying to run away, you know, he would grab them, retrieve him, put him back.

For my own sanity, I should also point out that there were also individuals who beautifully reciprocated.

So there was this one diet of two youngsters who, you know, would come together to the apparatus.

One would sit at the button, the other one would sit at the juice, looking at each other, pushing the button, waiting until the other one drank, then taking turns.

But yeah, a huge variety of different strategies.

What a picture you paint.

Sadly, we've just about run out of time.

So let me say thank you very much indeed to our panel and this lovely BBC tense at Hay Festival.

Jemima Scrace, Man on Schweinfurt, and Andy Radford.

A round of applause for our panel.

And thank you too to our lovely, curious audience here at Hay Festival with some wonderful questions.

So thank you for those and for exhibiting your own exemplary cooperative behaviour.

Please do join us again on Inside Science next week, where we'll be bringing you up to date for the latest news from the wonderful world of science.

But until then, thank you very much and goodbye.

You have been listening to BBC Inside Science from the Hay Festival.

With me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Dan Welsh, Claire Salisbury, and and Jonathan Blackwell and the program was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

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