Reconnect With Nature Blog

Desert Ants That Count

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of posts to this blog and to the Dog Behavior Blog.

Given that RWNB ended 2009 with a post about ants, it seemed fitting to start the New Year with another post featuring these fascinating insects.

A study done by German scientists, led by Harald Wolf, professor of neurobiology at the University of Ulm, suggests that desert-dwelling ants may have "pedometer-like" cells in their brains that enable them to count their steps and that they use this unique navigational skill to find their way back to the nest after foraging for food.

But why desert ants? Because most ants live in places that allow them to lay a scent trail on the ground that show other ants how to get to food and back home.  Scent trails, however, don't work in the desert; the constantly shifting sand scatters smells almost immediately.

So how do these ants find their way back to their nest with such unerring accuracy? It's already known that ants can use the position of the sun and the pattern of polarized light as a kind of 'celestial compass', but that doesn't explain how they determine distances with such precision.

To try to unravel this mystery, Wolf and his assistant, Matthias Whittlinger, trained two groups of Sahara desert ants to find a food site 10 meters from their nest. While the ants were busy eating, the scientists removed them and divided into three groups.

One group was left alone. The second group had pre-cut pig bristles superglued to each of their six legs, effectively giving them stilts. Ants in the third group had their lower leg segments cut off, thus making each leg shorter. (This part of the experience has since drawn some criticism. It should be noted, though, that in the wild, these segments often dry up and break off naturally without interfering with the ants' ability to walk long distances.)

The ants were then released to make their way back to the nest. The scientists watched to see what would happen. If there really was a step-counting mechanism at work, then the ants whose strides had been altered would have their calculations thrown off.

And that’s exactly what happened.  The normal ants walked right up to the nest and went inside. The stilt-leg ants, using giant steps, walked past the entrance and stopped 15 meters away. The stump-legged ants, using baby steps, stopped short of the entrance by almost 5 meters. Yet, all three groups had walked exactly the same number of steps back from the food site.

Interestingly, when the ants went out again in search of food, the two groups with altered gaits had no trouble judging the correct distance back to the nest.

Of course, this doesn't mean Sahara ants are actually counting their steps as "one, two, three, four, five," and so forth, the way we would. More likely, Wolfe explains, there is a neural mechanism at work that converts the motor excitation caused by each stride into a measure of distance.

Still, it's an ingenious solution to not being able to lay scent trails and it shows there is still much to be learned from even the humblest of creatures.

The Compassionate Ant

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of posts and comments to this blog.

I remember growing up hearing and reading about the proverbial wisdom of ants. If you check the Old Testament, Proverbs 6:6-8 tell us: “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.”

And let’s not forget Aesop’s fable, “The Ant and Grasshopper”, which depicted the ant as a forward-thinking planner that gathered food in preparation for the coming winter while the grasshopper danced and played his fiddle, seemingly oblivious to future. This fable was, and still is, used to teach the virtues of hard work and saving and the perils of improvidence.

In the realm of ethology, ants have long been known for their complex cooperative behavior, including simple forms of rescue behavior, i.e., sand digging, which date back to 1874. [Belt T (1874) the Naturalist in Nicaragua. London: Murray].

Now, a new study, Nowbahari E, Scohier A, Durand J-L, Hollis KL (2009) Ants, Cataglyphis cursor, Use Precisely Directed Rescue Behavior to Free Entrapped Relatives. PLoS ONE 4(8): e6573. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006573, shows just how sophisticated this kind of behavior is.

In a total of 54 tests, the authors experimentally mimicked a natural situation involving an ant restrained by collapsing sand and debris. Hidden underneath the sand was a nylon snare that held the ant in place. If the captive ant was from a different colony or of a different species, the rescue ants ignored it. However, if the captive was a nestmate, the rescuers responded by excavating the sand, exposing the nylon thread, carrying sand away from the snare, and then biting at the snare itself.

These experiments demonstrated that the rescuers were somehow able to recognize what has holding their nestmate in place and direct approach behavior toward that specific object. This shows that rescue behavior is “far more exact, sophisticated, and complexly organized than previously observed,” unlike simpler actions such as digging and limb pulling, which could be triggered by a chemical distress signal.

The tests further showed that rescue behavior is directed exclusively toward a nestmate and it depends on an actively produced eliciting stimulus, most likely a pheromone that contains a component that is unique to each colony. However, pheromones alone don’t explain how the rescuers were able to find the precise location of the nylon thread and target their bites to the thread itself.

The authors distinguish rescue behavior from other types of cooperative acts in that the rescuing ants risk being trapped under the falling sand and there is no reward for the rescuers other than the benefits of kinship relationship.

Obviously, the ‘wise’ ant holds onto more secrets and surprises that might inspire new proverbs and fables.

Note: The PLoS ONE article includes two videos of these experiments.

Lessons from a Turkey

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of guest posts and comments to this blog.

A few weeks ago, I came across a news item that got me thinking about the extremes our current level of separation from the natural world can sometimes carry us.

It seems a small town in Massachusetts acquired an unofficial mascot a few months ago in the form of a wild turkey, which the townspeople named ‘Freddy’. He strutted around town freely, visiting local businesses, going in and out of stores, and getting hand-outs along the way. He became something of a local celebrity, having attracting local media attention through his ‘friendly’ behavior.

However, in early August, the local police found it necessary to apprehend and euthanize Freddy after he was declared a public safety hazard for having attacked motorcyclists and passersby. Afterwards, the town held a memorial service for its beloved bird, with mourners leaving flowers and notes. One resident even set up a Facebook page in Freddy’s honor with over 1,500 friends and counting.

What the townspeople may not have known is wild turkeys can be aggressive when they lose their fear of people and, after several months of urban living, Freddy had become pretty much fearless. As such, he wasn’t an ideal candidate for relocation, as was pointed out by local wildlife officials.

Now, there was nothing unusual or out-of-the-ordinary about Freddy’s behavior, considering he’d become habituated to humans and vehicular traffic. However, the fact that some of the town’s citizens organized and participated in a memorial service for him gave me pause for reflection. It struck me that the energy and emotion that went into this act of mourning was disproportionate to the situation.

Granted, wild turkeys are the official game bird of Massachusetts.

Granted, by 1851, they had been wiped out from the state as a result of hunting.

However, in 1972-1973, the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife launched a successful reintroduction program, starting with 37 turkeys. Today, the turkey population in Massachusetts is somewhere between 20,000-25,000!

So, they’re not threatened with imminent extinction, unlike the 16,300 or so plant and animal species that appear on the World Conservation Union’s 2007 Red List of Threatened Species.

Let’s put this into perspective even more.

Wild turkeys grow to be 4 feet tall and weigh around 20 pounds. Not exactly lightweights! Following their reintroduction, they surprised everyone—including wildlife officials—by being adaptable to residential, even urban, living, with thriving populations in Boston and Cambridge. They are opportunistic feeders, eating everything from bird seed to gutter trash, and then depositing large amounts of ‘scat’ all over the place.

Some residents report being happy to see a bit a nature strolling around, whereas others are wary, even afraid, of what these sometimes ornery birds might do, especially when children are around. More than a few people have even reported being terrorized by them, prompting local police to issue guidelines about what to do—and not to do—should people meet a wild turkey on the sidewalk.

It strikes me that reintroduction programs can be a double-edge sword. Yes, Massachusetts got its turkeys back after more than one hundred ‘turkey-less’ years. But now many of the state’s communities have a new public health and safety issue to deal with that the Fisheries and Wildlife biologists hadn’t counted on.

At the individual level, some people’s need for contact with nature leads to maudlin displays of sentimentality that make for good headlines but that’s about all.

There’s no question that we need to exercise a healthy dose of compassion in our treatment of other species. After all, humans are now the leading cause of extinction. But in addition to using our hearts, we also need to use our heads.

 

 

 

RECONNECTING WITH NATURE…THROUGH AESOP’S FABLES?

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of guest posts and comments to this blog.

Reconnecting with nature may take some unexpected twists and turns along the way, but who would have thought Aesop’s Fables would turn out to one of them? That’s right. The ancient Greek story-teller credited with collecting such timeless fables as “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, each with a moral lesson at the end, may also have been a keen observer of bird behavior.

In “The Crow and the Pitcher”, a thirsty crow comes across a pitcher with water at the bottom, beyond the reach of its beak. After failing to push the pitcher over, the crow drops in pebbles, one by one, until the water rises to the top, allowing the bird to drink. (The moral of the story: Necessity is the mother of invention.)

Well, it turns out that this is more than just an old fable. Researchers Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan Emery of Queen Mary University of London have reported in the current issue of Current Biology that rooks, another corvid and a relative of the crow, are able to use stones to raise the level of water in a plastic container to reach a floating worm.

Bird and Emery experimented on four rooks by presenting them with a clear tube partly filled with water and a worm floating on top, and a nearby pile of stones of varying sizes. The birds spontaneously dropped stones into the water and seemed to estimate how many stones would be needed. They also quickly learned bigger stones worked better than smaller ones.

Although some species of crows have been proven to use tools in the wild, rooks do not. They don’t have to as they have easy access to food, like carrion. But in an experimental situation like this one, they easily figured out how to use the stones to reach the worm.

Says Mr. Bird, “It was a remarkable combination of some understanding of the task with really rapid learning.”  In the summary of their published paper, Bird and Emery state, “This behavior demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.”

The more we take time to watch animals, the better we see how much we share in common with them, including brain power, and how this common thread firmly and solidly connects us to the natural world that supports us all.

Now, I seem to recall Aesop also told a story about the goose that laid golden eggs. Well, if such a fabled fowl should also exist and find its way to my door, that’s one story you won’t read about in Current Biology. I’ll keep that one all to myself.

Wild Hearts, Free Spirits

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Randall Johnson, who has been a frequent commentator on this blog, as well as a frequent guest author and commentator on the Dog Behavior Blog.

Finding a way to reconnect with nature can take place on a grand scale by walking through a tropical rainforest and feeling, rather than seeing, the immense variety of life it supports, swimming with free-ranging dolphins, or, say, coming face-to-face with a great whale. However, more often than not, it’s the everyday, seemingly mundane, events happening around us that have the power to call us back from our artificial steel-and-concrete world and ‘ground’ us, as it were, in the natural world.

A few years back, my wife and I bought a weekend / vacation home in her hometown, Lagoa da Prata, a small town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.  At the time, we were living in Belo Horizonte, the state capital, working as teachers and translators and coping with the all the stress that goes along with big city life.

The house was part of a new development on a large tract of land that used to be part of the town’s biggest dairy farm and the setting clearly reflected its past: a long stretch of dirt road ran in front of the house led to the colonial-style farm house and then into a patch of dense forest. On one side of the road, there was a wide expanse of open meadow and on the other side, behind the house, a huge fenced-in cow pasture.

 Shortly after buying the house, we were ‘adopted’ by a scrawny little street dog with short dull gray fur that my wife decided to call Suzie. Following a couple of days of eating kibble and drinking fresh water, Suzie  underwent an amazing transformation:  her gray fur was replaced by a glossy, uniformly black coat.  (She was later identified by a friend of mine as a miniature pinscher, although with a non-standard color pattern.)

We soon discovered Suzie had a friend—a short scruffy male who looked a bit like Toto from The Wizard of Oz , except his fur was dirty-white. After trying several names, including Toto, we settled on Toby.  Unlike Suzie, though, Toby showed no interest in being adopted.  He hung out with us while we were at the house and we gave him food and water.  Sometimes, he took an afternoon nap inside the house, but he rarely slept there at night.

Anyway, my wife and I got into the routine of taking a walk down the dirt road early in the morning and again in the evening, right before sunset. Suzie and Toby invariably accompanied us.  

As we strolled along, I watched Suzie and Toby as they ran through meadow, Suzie leaping through the tall grass like a gazelle. Toby was less graceful, but he kept up as they chased after butterflies and small birds. Sometimes it looked as they were running for the sheer joy of it.  Once in while, they teamed up to harass the cows on the other side of the road, yapping and lunging at them, and then they’d take off again. It looked like a pleasant diversion (from their perspective, not from the cows’), maybe even a kind of adrenalin rush, because if a bull happened to be nearby, he wouldn’t hesitate to charge after them.

These were moments of boundless exhilaration. They were being themselves, having fun, unfettered by other worries or concerns, enjoying the “here and now”, which is something we 21^st century humans often have trouble doing, even in small, rural towns. They were wild hearts and free spirits, very much part of the world we share together, but more viscerally attuned to it.  

Walking down that country road was one way of seeking a reconnection with nature, but the active ingredient, the ‘bridge’ that made the connection real, was watching Suzie and Toby’s innocent, high-spirited capers as they gave me a glimpse of a purer, more primal connection that I myself cannot feel with the same intensity. Still, occasional glimpses have been enough to keep me grounded, and by reminding us that we are, first and foremost, products of the natural world, our companion animals may yet have another useful service to offer us.

--Randall Johnson

 

Watching Harry Potter Is Like Watching Paint Dry

Last night I went to see Harry Potter and found the movie to be completely boring. I had read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince when it came out in 2006, so I had some idea of the story. A couple of friends who came with me to the theater had never read the book, found themselves clueless, and left half-way through (perhaps that’s where the Half comes in).

Even though I knew the general story line, I found the progression of the scenes to be tedious. I guess I expect a movie to actually have a story that takes the viewer through from beginning to end, and not just a collection of scenes that are a trip down memory lane.

Even with knowing the general story, I found it hard to figure out why one scene followed another. Gone was the richness of plot found in the original book. Gone were some of the interesting characters. Gone was a sense of action and vitality.

But since this is a blog about reconnecting with nature, I started to think about the parallel between this film and watching nature. For some, watching nature can be excruciatingly boring. For others, it can be very exciting. Same thing with the Potter film.

So why is watching nature really exciting for me, while watching Potter was extremely boring?

My answer is simple. In my opinion, movies are supposed to have a story. I don’t go to movies to watch a bunch of unconnected scenes that flash across the screen. I expect to have an organized plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that resolves the problem or situation posed at the beginning.

Watching nature is completely different. There is no plot that we can see. There may be a beginning, a middle, and an end, but we don’t know what it is. There may be a plot, but again we have no idea what it is.

Animal and plant lives are shrouded in mystery. Same for the weather. Same for the earth. We can describe animal and plant species and identify them by name, and we can describe ecological, geological, and climatological processes, but that doesn’t always give us a complete picture of what is happening around us as we sit and watch nature at work.

I know nothing about the bee that comes to collect pollen from a flower. Yes, I can often tell you the scientific name of the bee and the scientific name of the flower, but I know nothing about the rest of their lives. Where does this bee live? What does the bee do all day? What challenges does the plant with the flower face from other species of plants? These are all mysteries.

And so I can watch nature in the “Now” moment, observing what is going on without any expectations. Being in the “Now” moment allows me to be at peace with my surroundings, and witness without criticizing what I am seeing.

On the other hand, when I go to a Harry Potter film, I expect to be entertained by a plot, and I criticize when I am not. I still consider myself a Harry Potter fan, so I’m going to look forward to the next film after this one, but in the meanwhile I find watching nature much more interesting and engaging.

As Below, So Above

For several days now, as I have been taking my dog for a walk around a pond at the local state park, I have been assaulted by a deer fly (family Tabanidae). The fly always starts buzzing me in the same 30 meter (100 feet) stretch of path, where the acacia trees provide some shade and the winds blow gentle puffs of air.

The fly seems to have a very circumscribed territory. Once I get out of that 30 meter stretch, he breaks off his attack and disappears, only to reappear during my next circuit on that path.

I try to put myself into the world of this fly. I am guessing that his world is encompassed in a plot of land that has a diameter of 30 meters. This is all that he knows. This is all that he sees. At random unpredictable times, potential meals move into range, triggering a hunger response. Outside that range, potential meals vanish, as if they never existed.

With my superior vision, I can see the whole pond, and I can think that it is very quaint that the fly cannot realize that simply going outside his 30 meters would give him more potential meals. He is limited by his perception, in ways that I am not.

But then I think, how much are we humans limited by our perception? Many years ago, I met a farmer who had not traveled more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from where he had been born 70 years previously. Now many of us travel around the globe fairly effortlessly, and we can use electronic means of perception to see what is happening anywhere in the world.

But our solar system is huge, our galaxy is larger, and our universe is larger still. We can’t see anything of what is happening there, with a few paltry exceptions of Hubbell telescopes and rockets sent to other planets.

Like the fly, our world is circumscribed. We can see much more than the fly, but in the larger scheme of things, our perception does not extend out much more than his, in terms of cosmic distance.

To paraphrase a Hermetic saying, “As below, so above.”  We and the fly have much in common. We both can only see a very small portion of reality. And as we delve into quantum physics, we are not very sure what really is reality. Perhaps there are intelligences greater than ours who think that it is very quaint that we cannot realize that by simply going beyond the limits of our current perception we can see a greater reality. Or perhaps not.

I don’t know if the fly worries about such questions. Current scientific thought would suggest that he is not capable of such thoughts.  And perhaps we too are not capable of thoughts that would transcend our reality, allowing us to see a larger world.

So what to do? In my case, I am simply going to enjoy my moment in Nature, and even though the fly wants to suck my blood, I am going to enjoy his buzzing, even as I wait for my steps to take me out of his range.

Groundhog Day 365

February 2 was Groundhog Day, when Groundhog Chuck bit Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York and Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow in Pennsylvania. Groundhog Day is also immortalized in the film of the same name, where Bill Murray is doomed to repeat the day over and over again until he emerges as a kinder and gentler person.

In the West, some organizations such as the Prairie Dog Coalition and WildEarth Guardians celebrated the day as Prairie Dog Day, in honor of the iconic symbol of the western grasslands and plains. As I was preparing to attend a Prairie Dog Day celebration sponsored by the Denver Zoo, a person asked me: “Groundhogs and prairie dogs do something for people one day of the year. What do they do for us the rest of the time?”

On one level, this question has an easy answer. Prairie dogs and groundhogs dig into the soil, creating in the case of prairie dogs extensive burrow systems. The burrowing helps bring up to the surface nutrients that are locked in the ground, allowing those nutrients to be used by plants on the prairies. The burrows also allow rainwater to percolate into the ground, helping to recharge the aquifers on which we all depend for the water we drink.

Prairie dogs serve as keystone species in grassland ecosystems, helping to support a large web of predators, herbivores, and detritivores that depend to a large extent on the burrows for shelter, the plants that grow in prairie dog towns and the prairie dogs themselves for their daily food. If we eliminate these keystone animals, we have no idea what that is going to do to the energy flowing through grassland ecosystems. Certainly the populations of other species will crash, and it is very likely that a number of other species will go extinct.

The grasslands that prairie dogs live in make up about 40-50 percent of the land surface of the United States. These grasslands, and all the species of plants and animals that live there, provide a number of important ecosystem services, such as sequestering carbon and nitrogen, controlling erosion, and facilitating the percolation of water through the soil. On an economic scale, my coauthors and I estimate in our newly-released book, Prairie Dogs, that these ecosystem services bring in between $275 to $539 per hectare (about 2.5 acres) into our economy. As keystone species, prairie dogs play a major role in maintaining the ecological health of the grasslands.

On another level, however, the question of what groundhogs and prairie dogs do for us has a much more difficult answer. We humans tend to have an anthropocentric view of the world, seeing everything from our own perspective. Many times, that perspective does not see the value of the plants and animals that share our world. For example, prairie dogs have declined to about 2 percent of the population size they had 100 years ago, largely due to human actions and activities. As such, they join the 20 percent of mammalian species around the world that are heading toward extinction. From a self-interest standpoint, we should be concerned about this. Ecological studies have shown us that there is a delicate balance between all of the organisms living within an ecosystem. Perturbations that lead to disturbances of the energy flowing through a ecosystem, as well as changes in hydrologic, nitrogen, and carbon cycles, can lead to instabilities that are difficult to predict. We know that eliminating prairie dogs from grasslands can lead to higher local surface temperatures. As with the “Butterfly Effect,” can it also lead to greater climatic instability in our western plains states? The short answer is, we don’t know.

Yet we persist with our activities as if we knew all the answers, and like Bill Murray’s character in “Groundhog Day,” we do not seem to learn much day after day as species after species goes extinct. There is hope, however. In the end, Bill Murray’s character started to learn about the value of becoming a kinder, gentler person. We too should learn that there is value in all the living organisms that inhabit this earth, and treating them with gentle kindness all 365 days of each year might help our long-term survival on this planet.

Con Slobodchikoff, together with Bianca Perla and Jennifer Verdolin, are authors of the book Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society, newly-released on February 2, 2009 by Harvard University Press.

 

 

 

 

 

A Conversation On Anecdotal Evidence

This is an email conversation between Randall Johnson and Con Slobodchikoff on the value of anecdotal evidence in biology.

Randall Johnson:
I've submitted a new Dog Behavior Blog comment (http://www/dogbehaviorblog.com) in response to your latest entry, "A Dog's Concern for a Cat". Focus: anecdotal evidence as a useful source of information.

Comment on Dog Behavior Blog: This incident joins a long list of other reported observations that clearly show that dogs are capable of feelings we associate with empathy and sympathy and that they extend these feelings toward other species.  If we had only a handful of stories like this one, then we could say this is anecdotal evidence, but when there are hundreds of stories reporting similar behavior, we no longer have anecdotal evidence, but rather a solid body of observational evidence. Since the human environment is the dog’s natural habitat, then these reports can also be considered as field observations, which is a respected source of data-gathering. I don’t know if anyone has decided how many anecdotes it takes to cross over to the realm of observational field data, but if this hasn’t been done yet, it’s high time some kind of marker was devised. And, in defense of anecdotal evidence, Hungarian ethologist Vilmos Csányi of the Eötvös Loránd University, who has devoted more than a decade to investigating dogs’ cognitive abilities, has used anecdotes on many occasions to inspire more formal experimental investigations.

Con Slobodchikoff:
Thank you for your insightful comment, which I published on the dog behavior blog.  As you know, "anecdotal evidence" can sometimes be used as a convenient way to sweep inconvenient evidence under the proverbial rug. There surely has to be some kind of standard for how much anecdotal evidence constitutes proof, but I don't know of any standards. However, if you go back to the papers in biology journals of 60-70 years ago, much of what was presented there was in the form of anecdotal evidence. Where would science be today if we discounted such evidence?

Randall Johnson:
While writing my comment, I was pretty sure there was no standard for anecdotal evidence. You raised a good point about this kind of evidence having played an honorable role in science in the past.
Somewhere along the way, it was stripped of some of its original credibility and we need to get it back or devise some clear guidelines for its use as a source of evidence.

I am submitting a brief comment in response to the "Are We Unique?" essay on the Reconnect With Nature blog. (I'm surprised this one hasn't generated more responses.)

Con Slobodchikoff:
First, thanks for your comment on Are We Unique. As usual, a great comment! I have posted it, and I hope that it raises some discussion or at least some thoughts on the part of the readers.

For the anecdotal evidence part, it seems to me that biologists have bought into the idea that experimentation is the only way to obtain valid biological data. This is fine for lab studies, but experiments are often difficult to do in nature, under field conditions, and a lot of the time we are left with observations that cannot be quantified or even repeated. In my mind, this does not make them any the less valid. I think we need to come back to a point where a certain quantity of similar observations is accepted as proof of the validity of a particular behavior or biological circumstance.

Randall Johnson:
My question, at the beginning of this discussion, was: At what point does an observed behavior stop being treated as anecdotal evidence and be recognized as observational data? Most definitions I’ve looked at stated that anecdotal evidence is limited to one or a small number of cases, but no one, so far, has said, “Well, if you have 10 cases of “X” behavior, it’s anecdotal, but if you have 11 cases, it’s observational data.” Maybe it’s not all that important, but considering science strives for precision, there’s a big fuzzy area here that’s calling out for better definition.

However, the larger issue is still related to the credibility of anecdotal evidence. In the late 19th century, it fell under some heavy criticism, largely because George Romanes, Charles Darwin’s protégé and an eminent biologist in his own right, relied heavily on anecdotal methodology to develop his theory of comparative psychology and, to this day, there still seems to be a lingering ‘cloud of doubt’ hanging over it.

Then, the other day, I came across a news item from 2005 on the Science Week web site that I found particularly insightful. In discussing numbers and counting in chimpanzees, the writer pointed out that one problem with investigating non-human primates is that experiments can’t be done on large populations because such populations either don’t exist or are prohibitively expensive to maintain. The result is that reported experiments are often "anecdotal", i.e., experiments involving only a few or even a single animal subject. The writer then stated: “But anecdotal evidence can often be of great significance and have startling implications: a report, even in a single animal, of important abstract abilities, numeric or conceptual, is worthy of attention, if only because it may destroy old myths and point to new directions in methodology.”

The debate continues. Although I’m not a gambling man myself, I’m willing to bet that, in the end, anecdotal evidence will regain its former luster and that the academic / scientific community will universally recognize it as a valid—and valuable—source of data. Let’s face it. There are still lots of old myths out waiting to be slain.

Con Slobodchikoff:
Yes, it is true that many experiments cannot be done on multiple animals because of the cost or the lack of animals. I was talking just the other day to someone about Alex, the parrot (see earlier post: A Tribute To Washoe And Alex), and the person I was talking to pointed out that we can’t generalize from only one parrot to say that parrots might have language-like abilities or the cognitive skills to count and identify colors and shapes: Alex might have been a genius among parrots, a feathered Einstein. That might very well be true, and Irene Pepperberg is doing careful experiments with other parrots to test for this possibility. However, Pepperberg’s extensive experiments with Alex show that not all parrots are incapable of complex cognitive skills.

Unlike Pepperberg’s work with Alex, many observations cannot be repeated on command. Does that invalidate them? I guess it depends on the credibility of the observer and the relative novelty of the observation.  If I say that I saw my dog burying a bone in my back yard, no one would question this anecdotal observation. However, if I say that I saw my dog surfing the internet on my computer, lots of people would probably discount that as pure fantasy, because it does not fit the current dogma of what dogs are capable of doing and no one else has reported this (and no, my dog does not surf the internet).

But we have to be careful about discarding observations that do not fit our preconceived notions. If an observation comes from a credible source and can be documented, then that observation can have the seeds of changing our thinking about the world around us.

As William James once said, you need only one white crow to disprove the assertion that all crows are black.

A Wasp Tale

At the beginning of summer, my wife opened up our outdoor grill, only to find that paper wasps (Polistes arizonensis) had built a nest hanging from the upper grill shelf. The nest formed a disk that was about 5 cm (about 2 inches) in diameter. She quickly closed the grill cover and came to ask me to do something about the wasps.

We did not want to kill them, so I thought that if I left the grill cover open, the heat of our summer days would drive the wasps to abandon the nest.  I opened the grill cover in the early morning, when the temperature was still cool and the wasps were not active. Since the temperature really soars during the heat of the day, I thought it would take the wasps only a few days to leave their nest.

Every day I watched them through our kitchen window to see what they would do. Rather than abandoning the nest, the wasps took their exposure to the sun in stride. During the heat of the day, they would all cluster on the underside of the nest, in the shade. As the sun started going down and the temperature started cooling off, they would crawl up to the topside of the nest and absorb some heat for the coming cooler night.

For the next month, I watched the wasps building up and maintaining their nest. The diameter of the nest is now about 13 cm (about 7 inches), and the wasps show no inclination to slow down their activity.

But now the Arizona monsoon is gathering. This is a time of violent rainstorms and thunderstorms. Each morning during the monsoon the day dawns clear and sunny, but by noon the clouds gather and the rain starts, lasting in fitful bursts of moisture through the early evening hours, and sometimes throughout the night.

I know that the rains are coming, and when they arrive, the paper construction of the wasp nest will be destroyed. Yet the wasps continue unfazed by the coming prospect of losing their nest.

I can say that the wasps are operating on sheer instinct and have no prior knowledge of the coming debacle that will engulf their home.   But then I think of how we humans do exactly the same thing, even though we supposedly are aware of the consequences. I remember watching villagers build houses of out lava on the slopes of a still-rumbling and smoking volcano in Guatemala. And I lived in San Francisco, where everyone knows that a big earthquake is going to arrive someday, but everyone hopes that it won’t be during their time.

We humans live in perilous places and we hope for the best. Perhaps the wasps are also hoping for the best. (I’m sure that some dogmatic scientists will say that wasps are not capable of hope, to which my reply is, how exactly do you know this, other than through your unverified opinion?).

But it does show that we humans and the wasps have something in common: We all are reluctant to leave behind the place that we call home.