Reconnect With Nature Blog

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.

A New View of Dog Domestication: Human-Canid Co-evolution

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This post is written by guest commentator Randall Johnson.  Once involved in river dolphin research and preservation, Randall Johnson lives in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where he works as a Portuguese-English translator. His household includes three dogs, two of which were adopted off the streets, and he's active in a local group that rescues stray dogs and works to find them good homes. For another post by Randall Johnson on a difference between wolves and dogs, see the Dog Behavior Blog at http://www.dogbehaviorblog.com

     For millions of people around the world, their dogs provide not only an important source of companionship, but also offer a daily way of reconnecting with nature, if for no other reason than they force us to get off our backsides and take them outside for a walk. The intense bond between humans and dogs is an old one, perhaps going back as far as 135,000 years, and we may well ask how it all got started.

     Although a number of theories have been advanced, Austrian ethologist Wolfgang Schleidt, a disciple of Konrad Lorenz, offers an elegant view that emphasizes companionship and cooperation over human domination (see Schleidt, W.M.and Shalter, M.D. Co-evolution of humans and canid: An alternative view of dog domestication: HOMO HOMINI LUPUS? Evolution and Cognition 9(1) 57-72, 2003.). Instead of perpetuating the traditional view that dogs are the products of our ancestors’ ingenuity, Schleidt proposes that the initial contact between humans and gray wolves—from which dogs descended—was mutual and that the impact of the wolves’ social ethics on our own may equal or surpass our impact on their having become dogs. He sees the various changes that occurred both in humans and wolves as a process of co-evolution.

     One of the most intriguing aspects of Schleidt’s scenario is that wolves had a powerful influence on the social ethics of the early human groups through a kind of ‘lupification’ of human behavior or, to put it another way, the ‘humanization of the ape’. Wolves, as pack animals, survive by cooperation and teamwork. They hunt together, raise pups together, share food, and share risks. On the other hand, the social life of chimpanzees, our closest biological relative, is opportunistic, almost Machiavellian in nature, with chimps looking out for ways to get the better of each other. If we look for the biological roots of those traits we value as being especially humane, like group loyalty and cooperation for the common good, we don’t find them in apes. Instead, we find them in the social canids, like the gray wolf.

     At some point after humankind separated from a chimpanzee-like ancestor around six million years ago and spread across Eurasia and into North America, the sociality of human groups stopped completely resembling the primate model and began reflecting elements of the canid model. Based on new paleontologic, biogeographic, and genetic evidence, Schleidt suggests that this shift coincided with the time humans came into close contact with wolves after moving into their domain. Wolves were not only top predators, but also nature’s first ‘pastoralists’, living off of vast, migrating herds of ungulates, e.g., reindeer and bison. During the last Ice Age, these human groups learned how to co-exist with wolves, adopting their pastoralist lifestyle and even some of their pack behavior (learning to cooperate as a group, share risks, extending relationships beyond immediate kinship, etc.). This was also the period during which early humans (i.e. Neanderthals) gave way to modern humans and dogs began separating from wolves.

     Of course, this is an extremely simplified version of one facet of a richly-detailed theory. For those who want to see the ‘big picture’, I urge them to visit the following site and read the full article: www.uwsp.edu/psych/s/275/science/coevolution03.pdf.

--Randall Johnson

Animal Language Institute

This week marks the opening of the online Animal Language Institute.

The Animal Language Institute (ALI) is a website designed to promote interest in animal communication research, especially where it touches upon the cognitive capabilities of animals. With the Internet extending past barriers of geography, politics, and economics, the Animal Language Institute is an ideal way to bring together researchers, students, and curious laypeople from around the world to share ideas and information that will deepen our understanding about the communication systems of other species.

The Animal Language Institute website hopes to be the most extensive and easily accessible repository of information about research into the communication and cognitive abilities of various species of animals. Towards this end, ALI is amassing a core collection of outstanding scientific papers, that will be available to any registered visitor.

The Institute website currently has four major sections: 1) A database of papers published on animal communication; 2) A listing of people who are doing important work in the field; 3) Equipment and software reviews; 4) Interactive tutorials.

ALI will maintain open access to the webpages of the Animal Language Institute for the next month, so that anyone can access any page without registering. After that, ALI will ask people to register in order to access some parts of the website. Registration is free, and can be done at any time. ALI is asking people to register so that it can keep track of how many people are using the resources of the site.

ALI’s website is: http://www.animallanguageinstitute.org. Its mission statement is expressed in detail on its home page, and all doors to other sections are currently open. Go to the website, wander around the pages, and see what you think. If you like what you see, go ahead and register so that you can continue to get access to the site.

A Tribute To Washoe And Alex

They were pioneers, and they died within a few weeks of each other. Like all pioneers, they pointed the way to new discoveries and new ways of thinking. And like all pioneers, they bore the brunt of skepticism from the naysayers, the folks who do not want our vision of the world to change.

They did not ask to be pioneers. That job was thrust on them by others. But during their lives, they showed the world a different view, a different perspective, a different reality from the comfortable one that has lasted for thousands of years.

They were Washoe the chimpanzee and Alex the parrot.

Washoe showed that a chimpanzee can learn a number of signs in American Sign Language and use those signs to communicate with people.  Not only that, but she showed that she could teach these signs to other chimps, and could communicate with other chimps, using the signs.

Alex showed that he could tell the differences between shapes and colors, and could use perfectly-enunciated words to communicate these differences to the people around him.

Washoe and Alex were both taught by careful scientists who went to great lengths to remove subjectivity from their analyses. But neither Washoe nor Alex was merely a “lab subject,” taken out just for experiments but otherwise ignored. The people around them cared deeply about their welfare.

As pioneers, both Washoe and Alex showed that animals have the cognitive capacity to use language in meaningful ways.  Because the scientists were very careful with their studies, it is difficult for the skeptics and naysayers to discount the results, although it appears to be the nature of skeptics and naysayers to keep trying.

And as pioneers, Washoe and Alex pointed the way to a different world. A world where we humans acknowledge that animals could have sentience and cognitive capacities that could include language. A world where we see animals as intelligent beings, rather than as objects that exist merely for our convenience. A world where animals are no longer considered as things to be used, but fellow creatures to be respected.

Reconnect With Nature On The Internet

     Many people these days are stuck in cities, where there is a limited amount of nature that they can see. Granted, there are still lots of spiders, insects, birds, and a few mammals that are typically found in cities, but the ambiance is not quite the same as being out in the woods or a mountain meadow in the middle of nowhere.

     Some of the flavor of being lost in nature can be captured through programs on TV. But TV provides the sights, and not the smells, the feel of the wind in your face, the taste of rain on your tongue.

     When I told my parents that I was going to spend more than half a year in Africa studying the behavior of hyraxes, my mother’s response was, why are you going there when you can see the same thing on TV?  She was right that I could see some video clips of hyraxes on TV, but she was wrong about the whole experience.

     Being in the wilds of Kenya was a completely different experience from watching it on TV.  A TV program cannot capture the different sensory inputs: the constant smell of wood smoke from cooking fires, the raucous chatter of baboons, the bell-like trumpeting of elephants, the slithering sound of black mambas on a rocky surface, the high-pitched buzz of African honeybee foragers hovering in front of your face, the cacophony of sound from the dawn chorus of birds, the roars of lions, the bellowing of hippos, the feel of Anopheles mosquitoes biting your arm. While there, I practiced the principles discussed in my website, www.reconnectwithnature.com.

     Even though these things have to be experienced in person, an alternative is to read nature blogs on the internet. Although the blogs cannot provide the sensory input, they can provide some commentary that gives a sense of what a place is like, or a sense of what some animals are doing.

     Two of my favorite nature blogs are Camera Trap Codger and BunyipCo. Camera Trap Codger is a blog written by Chris Wemmer, who is an eminent conservation biologist. Wemmer uses a camera trap to photograph a variety of animals in the foothills of the California Sierra Nevada mountains, and discusses the habits of the animals and the general environment. A recent post comments on the smoke from a nearby wildfire, and the memories that the smoke evokes of previous places visited around the world by Wemmer. BunyipCo is a blog written by Dave Rentz, an eminent orthopterist. Rentz lives in the rainforest of Queensland, Australia, and discusses some of the animals that can be found in the immediate vicinity. A recent post discusses the sounds made by the call of the Australian Riflebird and by the feathers as the bird flies.

     Both blogs present a flavor of what it is like to be with nature. They present the sights and sounds and feelings of the places that are discussed.

     If you feel that you need to get out into nature, you can’t go wrong by getting out into nature through either of these blogs.

Living Harmoniously

For the past two years, I have been greeting a house spider (Kukulcania arizonica) who has been living in my garage. She has taken up residence in a crack in the frame of the door leading into the house, and every evening as I go into the garage to get a can of food for my dog, I say “Hi Spider!” She usually responds by scuttling away into her crack, probably because of the vibrations of my voice on her web.

Sometimes, however, when she has caught something, she sits on her web eating, oblivious to my presence. Then I can crouch down to within a few centimeters of her and study her in detail. She is a satiny black, with long legs and a somewhat bulbous abdomen. Although she usually comes out only at night, when she is lost in her food she can keep feeding into the daylight hours, engrossed in sucking out every last scrap of fluid as if she did not know where her next meal was coming from.

The last winter was pretty cold in the garage, and I would see her sitting on her web night after night, waiting patiently for some unwary insect to stumble in. But there were no insects out in the cold. She seemed to shrink in size as the months passed, causing us to worry about her. I thought of trying to feed her, but then decided that I should let nature take its course and let her survive by her own efforts. Fortunately, she made it. Now that it is summer, insects are in plentiful supply, and many evenings I see her munching on a cricket or a beetle that she has snared in her web.

She is the longest animal resident that I know about, but there are many other animals who share our house. Little black ants (Monomorium minimum) have a nest somewhere underneath the foundation, and occasionally make their unwelcome presence known by marching in long columns through the kitchen in search of food when there is nothing to eat outside. Tree Lizards (Urosaurus ornatus) run around on the outside walls, retreating into crevices and spaces under the roof as the cold of winter sets in. An Ash-Throated Flycatcher family (Myiarchus cinerascens) nests in a hole under the eaves, with the parents faithfully bringing back an astounding number of insects for the hungry nestlings. Paper wasps (Polistes) have nests in places where the eaves have slightly come apart. I am sure that there is a plethora of other animals who live in the house without my seeing them or knowing that they are there.

Our houses provide habitat for whole communities of animals. Most of the time, everyone lives in relative harmony, until and unless the population of a particular species grows out of control, much like a disease infecting a person. Then things get out of balance for a while, but the community regains its equilibrium in relatively short order, and harmony is restored.

And when you think about it, our bodies have the same kind of function for a variety of organisms. We have a number of bacteria living in our guts and elsewhere. We have fungi occupying various parts of our bodies. We have mites living in places such as our eyebrows. Most of the time, we are not aware of any of these residents, unless the population of a species using us for food or shelter spirals out of control. Then our immune system kicks in and restores the harmony of coexistence in our bodies.

Just like my house, my body provides food and shelter for lots of different organisms. We all live in harmony, sharing the natural world.

Do Ants Think?

Sometimes the days are gorgeous, balmy and calm with the sky a cloudless soft baby-blue. On such days, I am often stuck in a dark windowless auditorium, lecturing to about 100 university students in my animal behavior class. The pull of the day affects us all. I am somewhat less enthusiastic in talking about the computer-generated slides that I am showing, and the class is restless, anxious to get outside to enjoy what is left of the day.

At such times, I switch into discussion mode. I start asking the class questions that can stimulate a conversation and bring out some opinions. The students usually perk up, particularly if the subject is one that really interests them.

One of my favorite topics is the question: do animals think? I start off by asking, how many people believe that humans think? Usually all the hands go up, except for a few contrarians who are not convinced that anyone is capable of thought.

Then I ask, how many people believe that their dog thinks? About half the hands go up. How about cats? Interestingly, perhaps a third of the hands go up. Somehow, dogs seem to have more followers than cats in the thinking category.

Next I ask: how many believe that an ant can think? Almost no hands go up. Virtually everyone seems convinced that ants cannot have any thoughts.

And finally, I ask: how do you know? This generates a lot of discussion that usually revolves around the difficulty of proving that anyone, human or animal, can think. The argument usually follows along these lines: I know that I can think, so by extension, I am willing to concede that perhaps other humans can think. Can I prove it? No, not really. I can provide a battery of problems to solve that seem to require thought, but I cannot conclusively rule out a stimulus-response explanation that would not require thinking. But, because I am human, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to my fellow humans.

So why are many people not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to their fellow animals? The students in my class who have dogs usually tell stories of their dogs doing things that seem to require thought. Can they prove that their dogs think? No, not really. But they can identify with the world that dogs live in and the problems that dogs face, and are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But almost no one is willing to give the benefit of the doubt to ants. My students cannot imagine the world of an ant or the problems that ants might face, and are willing to accept that ants do not think. Can they prove it? No, not really.

And here is the key. We are willing to accept that people think, without much proof. We are unwilling to accept that other animals think, also without much proof. Where we can put ourselves into the mind of another animal, we are much more willing to accept that the animal thinks. Otherwise, we assume that there is no thought.

The assumption that animals do not think can be dressed up with all kinds of alleged scientific evidence: The brain is too small, there is no cerebral cortex, the cortex is too small, there are no frontal lobes, and so on.

But the bottom line is, how do we know that an ant does not think? The answer is, we don’t. Unless we are willing to argue from definition. We can define thinking as only a human property, and then we can sit back in great satisfaction that we have solved the problem of animal thinking once and for all.

Tenebrionid Headstands

Doug Von Gausig has very kindly provided two pictures of tenebrionid beetles doing headstands. Both are species of Eleodes. One species has grooves along the elytra (the fused front wings of the beetle -- remember, these are flightless beetles that walk around on the ground), and the other one has smooth elytra. Each species has defensive secretions. The grooves probably help the defensive secretions spread out across the elytra, coating them with quinones and hydrocarbons that repel predators. Interestingly, some tenebrionids have receptors that are sensitive to the breath of mammals. When these receptors register the heat, moisture, and odors of mammalian breath, the glands evert, spilling out their noxious substances.  Here's a challenge for some of you beetle fans: Can you identify these two species of Eleodes?

   

Beetle Defensive Secretions

Chris Wemmer, a distinguished mammalogist and conservation biologist, suggests that it might be interesting to taste an Eleodes beetle (see comment). I don’t think that this would be a good experience. Some years ago, I was doing a study of biodiversity on one of the islands in the Gulf of California. As part of the study, I was trying to count the number and species of Tenebrionid beetles on the island. Because desert animals switch to being nocturnal during the heat of the summer, the beetles were active only at night. I set up a 200 meter transect, and walked along this transect every 30 minutes, counting the number of beetles that I saw and identifying each species. Since it was quite dark at night, I set up the transect between two large Cardon cacti (Pachycereus pringlei) that served as landmarks for me to steer by.

Around midnight I stopped to pick up an Eleodes beetle that I could not identify to species. I inspected the beetle in my flashlight beam, then set it down and watched it scuttle away. During the time I was holding it, the beetle must have sprayed my fingers. I could smell the pungent, almost sweet smell of defensive secretions, but I thought that the beetle had gotten the secretions on its own body, and not on me.

It was a hot July night, and sweat was pouring down my face. Without thinking, I brushed my fingers across my moustache, wiping off the sweat. Suddenly it felt like a sledge hammer hit my sinuses. It was like eating a huge dollop of Japanese wasabi (Eutrema wasabi), the green horse radish-like herb that comes with sushi, but much worse. My eyes started tearing, and liquid was flowing copiously out of my nostrils. I could barely breathe.

After a few minutes, my sinuses settled down, but the worst was still to come. As I tried to walk the transect, I found that I could not steer in a straight line. I could see the Cardon at one end of the transect, and I tried to walk toward it, but I kept drifting off to either the right or the left from the straight line, without being able to control where I was walking. I tried for about half an hour, and finally gave up, sitting down in the dirt with my head in my hands.  Two hours later the effect seemed to go away, and I was able to get back to my camp and roll into my sleeping bag. The next morning I was fine.

Having smelled the defensive secretions of a number of different species of Tenebrionids, I can say that not all secretions have that effect. Some merely cause a watering of the eyes and a tanning response in which the skin that has been sprayed turns brown.  But some defensive secretions are apparently quite potent. I try to imagine what it would have been like to taste the secretions of that beetle. Somehow, my imagination fails me.

Watching Snake Behavior

Doug Von Gausig (see previous post and comment), who is an accomplished photographer and nature recordist, sent me a video of a patch-nosed snake (Salvadora hexalepsis) excavating a burrow (watch the video).  In this video, you can see some fascinating behavior.  The snake goes into the burrow, apparently loops its body around some sandy soil, emerges holding on to the soil with a coil of its body, and releases the soil away from the burrow.  This is an elegant solution to excavation. I have often wondered how snakes manage to dig burrows without having hands. Now I know.

As I was watching the video, I was reminded of watching Sphecid wasps (genus Ammophila) excavating burrows. A wasp would go into the burrow, apparently use its legs to scrape up some dirt, put the dirt between the coxae of her hind legs, back out of the burrow, fly up into the air for about one meter, and release the dirt, which blew away in the wind as a fine plume. The wasp would do this over and over, making sure that no dirt was piled up at the entrance to the burrow as a tell-tale sign of activity for predators and parasites to notice.

I tried to photograph this activity. I found a wasp that was just starting to dig her nest and set up my camera. After a few of her forays in dropping the dirt, I realized that I had a better camera angle if I moved around to the other side of the burrow. I set up the camera again and waited for the wasp to emerge. She did, and instead of flying back, she flew around on the other side of me and started searching for her burrow. At first I was puzzled, but then I remembered the classic Tinbergen experiments with wasps and pine cones. She was using me as a landmark to find her burrow, and did not realize that the landmark had moved. So she was completely disoriented. Needless to say, I moved back to my original position, and she promptly found her burrow.

But back to the patch-nosed snake. I found it very interested that after emerging, the snake spent some time looking around, apparently watching for potential predators. Digging burrows must be a dangerous activity for snakes. A predatory bird or mammal could sneak up on the snake when its head was inside the burrow and grab it before it had a chance to react.

Watching animals like this is an excellent way of reconnecting with nature. Not only do you get a sense of what their behavior is like, but you also can get a sense of what might be important in their lives. And then you can ask yourself the question, are similar problems important to your life?