About six years ago, a female orca carried her dead baby for 17 days across thousands of miles of the Salish Sea. Last month, the same whale, which scientists named Tahlequah, was spotted carrying another newborn on her head off Seattle, Was Tahlequah acting out of grief? Joe Gaydos, science director of the SeaDoc Society, a marine research organization, told reporters that humans and whales and other large, social mammals that live for a long time have the same neurotransmitters and hormones so they probably share the same emotions. It would be fair to say that Tahlequah “is grieving or mourning,” Gaydos said.
To mourn means having a concept of death and dying. Do animals have that capability?
The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schultz, in a review of the book “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death” by Susana Monsó, noted that, in 2008, “16 chimpanzees at a rescue center in Cameroon huddled together and watched, in utter, un-chimplike silence, as a deceased member of their cohort was wheeled away.” National Geographic published a photo of the scene a year later, which led to “an explosion of sympathy and curiosity, both among the general public and among scientists, psychologists, and philosophers who were interested in ascertaining what exactly those seemingly bereft chimps were feeling.”
Then there is the origin of the phrase “playing possum.” Schultz noted, “A possum that is playing possum keels over to one side, its tongue hanging out, its eyes open and unblinking. Saliva drips from its mouth while its other end leaks urine and feces, together with a putrescent green goop. Its body temperature and heart rate drop, its breathing becomes almost imperceptible, and its tongue turns blue.”
Does such behavior indicate that possums know about death and pretend to be dead or dying to deceive predators? Schultz noted that other creatures do it as well, such as frogs, snakes, spiders, sharks, even octopuses, the elephant, the great horned owl, the house cat, the giant tortoise, the chimpanzee.
There is a lot of interest also, at least among scientists, as to whether some animals talk to one another. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert cited the work of David Gruber, a City University of New York biology professor, whose interests center on sounds which sperm whales make. He and a team drawn from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory eventually created the Cetacean Translation Initiative (ceti), which is based in Rosseau, Dominica. Kolbert described it as “the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated and the most wellfunded effort ever made to communicate with another species.”
And is it possible that when birds are chirping or singing, they are communicating with one another? A study on that subject is being conducted at the Konrad Lorenz Research Center for Behavior and Cognition in Austria that focuses on graylag geese.
Bird ecologist Sonia Kleindorfer has said the geese “give out a departure call when they leave and a contact call after they arrive. They know their allies are there, if the bold geese are there. There is so much information that geese are getting from calls.”
According to The New Yorker’s Rivka Galchen, who wrote about Kleindorfer’s work, “bird vocalizations are usually divided into songs and calls but these are wobbly categories. What is designated a song in one species may be shorter in duration than what, in another species, is termed a call.” But the studies extend beyond birds to other species and focuses on “communication” instead of “language.”
As M.I.T. computational linguist Robert Berwick put it, “I think it’s best to think of language not as speech but as a cognitive ability in the mind that sometimes leads to speech.”
But if birds can communicate with another, perhaps trees do also.
Yes, trees.
Guardian writer Daniel Immerwahr reported that, for the past decade, the belief has been growing that at least some of the planet’s three trillion trees communicate with one another. He credited Peter Wohllenben’s book, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” for launching what Immerwahr called “a new tree discourse which sees them not as inert objects but intelligent subjects” that “have thoughts and desires … and they converse via fungi that connect their roots” which are “like fiber-optic Internet cables.”
Immerwahr also cited the book “The Light Eaters” in which the author, Zoë Schlanger, wrote, “We are standing at the precipice of a new understanding of plant life” after noting that researchers studying the subject have come to regard plants as conscious. “Just as artificial intelligence champions note that neural networks, despite lacking actual neurons, can nevertheless perform striking brain-like functions, some botanists conjure notions of vegetal intelligence,” Immerwahr explained.
In fact, the concept of “networked mother trees,” proposed by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, was featured in James Cameron’s 2009 film “Avatar” which gave a popular boost to what has become known as the “wood-wide web,” Immerwahr noted. And then there are rats. A study started more than a century ago to find ways to kill them yielded pointers to the possible impact of human overcrowding and whether “a new kind of space” should be devised to accommodate population growth. The study is the subject of two books which Kolbert also reviewed: “Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John Calhoun,” by Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, and “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity,” by Lee Alan Dugatkin.”
The study revealed that rats tend to become violent as a result of overcrowding and descend into what Calhoun called a “behavioral sink.”
John Calhoun, an ethologist – one who studies the behavior of animals in their natural environments-suggested in a 1962 article in Scientific Magazine that his findings about rat behavior could eventually provide insights into “analogous problems confronting the human species.” While Calhoun did not specify what problems, it was believed he was referring to over-population and urban decay. Kolbert noted that, in 1600, the world population was half a billion and took take two centuries to double, reaching nearly four billion by the late 1960s. Such projections led University of Illinois researchers to predict that, on Nov. 13, 2026, the population growth would lead to “doomsday” — which is less than two years away and humans already number eight billion.
Humans are not the only species facing extinction. It is already happening in the animal world.
HuffPost’s Nick Visser reported eight years ago that two-thirds of all wildlife will be gone in 50 years, citing a World Wildlife Federation (WWF) report. WWF found “a 55 percent overall decline in vertebrate populations” between 1970 and 2012 and that if that trend continues, “the world could lose more than two-thirds of wildlife by 2020,” Visser reported. In fact, the WWF has since reported that the extinction rate has already reached 73 percent.
In a lighter vein, Kolbert reported that “the animal kingdom is full of con artists,” citing Lixing Sun’s book “The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars.” The Alcon blue, a butterfly native to Europe and Central Asia, is an example of “the slyest, or at least most studied of nature’s scam artists.”
The butterfly’s newborns “con nearby ants into caring for them after they emerge as caterpillars by secreting chemicals similar enough to those of ants to trick them to be taken to the ants’ home and care for them.”
The scam, known as “brood parasitism” or, in some cases, “kleptoparasitism,” is used also by a variety of insects and birds. Sun believes that they follow two “laws.” One, Kolbert explained, is when “an animal exploits another animal’s cognitive weaknesses.” The other is “by issuing false information, or, more plainly, by lying.”
That, of course, is one area where humans and animals definitely have something in common.
But it is ironic, anyhow, that humans are trying to understand the animal kingdom while being unable to understand one another.
This post was originally published on here
