Reconnect With Nature Blog

A Winter Butterfly

Yesterday I went to one of my favorite places, a spring-fed stream.  The stream pops up out of the ground from springs and rushes headlong down a gentle slope for perhaps 6 miles (10 km) before it plunges back underground, not to be seen again.

During its journey, the stream gurgles through a canyon that is about 300 feet (100 m) across, with fairly steep walls rising up some 60 feet (20 m) on either side. The stream itself is only about 3 feet (1 m) wide. Along the sides grow large sycamore trees, small willows, and a variety of other riparian vegetation. Outside this narrow canyon is high-desert: cacti, mesquites, crown-of-thorn trees, vegetation that seldom tastes a drop of the water rushing by so near.

Now it is winter, and few animals are about. In summer, the stream is a magnet for desert life seeking water. Flycatchers sit in the branches of the sycamores and swoop down to catch the insects flying in swarms. Desert darkling beetles (Eleodes, in the family Tenebrionidae) wander around the banks, having drunk their fill of the water that they use to stoke the fluids in their defensive glands. Skunks come in at night to eat the darkling beetles, rolling them around in the sand until the defensive secretions are completely depleted and then holding the beetles in their front paws and munching on them as if they were hotdogs at some family picnic. An occasional mountain lion or bobcat comes by to drink furtively. Dragonflies patrol their territories with flashes of metallic blue and glimpses of scarlet, and damselflies daintily flitter from one reed to another, watching for intruders.

In the cold of winter, most of the insects, birds, and mammals are gone. The sycamores stand naked, stripped of their leaves, with only jutting branches reaching up toward the sky.  The lush green grasses found in the summer are dead, yellowed and broken by the wind and an occasional passing deer.

I sat on a rock by the edge of the stream, listening to the water whispering the sounds of half-caught words that echoed from the canyon walls. Suddenly a movement caught my eye. Near me was a butterfly, a Mourning Cloak (Nymphalus antiopa, in the family Nymphalidae), flying up from the ground, its black wings bordered with brilliant yellow gleaming in the sunlight. The butterfly flew over my head several times and then settled back on the ground. I moved a little closer to see what it was doing. It had settled on a flat black rock and had spread its wings, flattening itself as much as it could. On a chilly afternoon, it had found a way to stay warm.

As I approached, the butterfly flew up again, circling around my head, and landed on my outstretched hand. For perhaps 30 seconds, butterfly and human looked at each other, in total peace, trust, and harmony. Then the butterfly flew off and settled back on its rock, oblivious to my further movement.  If I were to commit the sin of anthropomorphism, I would say that the butterfly decided that I was not a threat, and went on with the business of warming up its body.  And if so, the butterfly was absolutely right.

Animal Feelings and Consciousness

I read a review recently of Jonathan Balcombe's book, The Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (MacMillian, 2006). In the book, Balcombe argues that animals might feel pleasure and joy in some of the things that they do, and he presents a large number of results of scientific studies and anecdotes that support this contention. He suggests that just like us, animals might feel pleasure in eating, having sex, touching one another, and playing. The review that I read was cautiously critical of this view (read the review), suggesting that consciousness and emotions are difficult to assess with the scientific method, and that putting forth the view that animals might have both consciousness and emotions leads us down the slippery slope of anthropomorphism, throwing science to the wind.

For those who are not familiar with the concept of anthropomorphism, this involves ascribing human-like qualities to animals, something that is considered one of the deadly sins of animal behavior research. At meetings of animal behaviorists, scientists work hard to avoid having anyone suggest that their interpretation of the behavior that they observed in a particular animal is anthropomorphic. The implication is that someone with an anthropomorphic argument is not following the scientific method, and therefore is not practicing intellectually rigorous scientific thinking.

This is a somewhat mystifying position. Most animal behaviorists believe in evolution and the continuity of life, and are willing to believe that, for example, all the cat species in the cat family and all the dog species in the dog family have common qualities that make them all mammals. And medical researchers believe that mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, cats, and monkeys have enough physiological similarities with humans to warrant the testing of newly-developed drugs on these animals prior to conducting tests on humans. Yet somehow this belief in the continuity of structure and function of animals does not translate into a belief that animals might be like us in other ways, such as having consciousness and emotions.

The review mentions the assertion of J. B. Watson, one of the founders of the school of Behaviorism, that whether or not animals have consciousness, the behavior that we see them perform is not going to be any different, so the question of consciousness is not really important. According to Watson, we have no objective way of knowing whether animals are conscious or have emotions. Behaviorism says such things do not matter because they cannot be accurately measured. This point of view, written in 1913, became a sort of edict that has dominated science's approach to the study of animal behavior ever since.

But much has changed. Nearly a century later, we now have a variety of tools to measure what might be going on inside an animal: fMRI, PET scans, sophisticated blood assays for different hormonal levels, and more refined tools for measuring the electrical activity of animal brains. This still leaves us, however, with arguing by analogy. If other mammal brains show the same patterns as human brains when humans are feeling pleasure, does that mean that animals feel pleasure the same way that humans do?

At some level, animal behaviorists and all humans are comfortable with arguments by analogy. I do not objectively know if any of my colleagues are conscious and have emotions, but I assume that because I have consciousness and feelings, they do too. Does it make a difference in how I assess their behavior? You bet. Extrapolating something about their emotional state and their world-view allows me to predict their behavior much better than if I assumed that they were little robots running on programs of instinct with no feelings or thoughts.

So why are we not willing to extend this same kind of thinking to animals? Part of it seems to be an over-reliance on the scientific method, and a premature dismissal of phenomena that do not readily lend themselves to objective measurements. Merely because something cannot be measured, does not mean that it does not exist. It may just mean that we have not yet devised a way of measuring it.

Many scientists seem to think that if something cannot be proven conclusively by the scientific method, it does not exist. In making this point, skeptical scientists will often assert that there is not a shred of evidence that something is true or possible. By this argument, quantum mechanics did not exist until a variety of physicists formulated the basic theories of the quantum world. Many prominent scientists, including Einstein, did not believe a number of the predictions of quantum theory. Yet we now are developing quantum computers.

Similarly, Donald Griffin, who wrote about animal consciousness for some thirty years before his death, showed some sixty years ago that bats use echolocation to find their way. He once told me that at the time he started investigating bats, no one believed that they were capable of producing sounds that we could not hear. There was not one shred of evidence for high-frequency sound pulses, until Griffin did some key experiments to show how bats echolocate, and now bat echolocation is accepted by everyone.

Another reason, in my opinion, that some scientists are not willing to entertain the notions of consciousness and emotions in animals is that it gives them distance from the natural world. By talking about “subjects,” who are treated the same way that we might treat inanimate objects, some scientists potentially are given license to do things to animals that no one would think of doing to humans. 

While this is often done in the guise of scientific objectivity, the scientific method, and good experimental design, it skirts around the issue that if animals were indeed conscious and felt love, joy, fear, anger, and depression about being confined in cages, there would be ethical issues that would arise similar to the ethical issues involved in using humans in experiments. This would mean that we would have to rethink how we treat animals in experiments, and the kinds of experiments that we are willing to do with them.

The scientific method does not automatically mean that if there is no evidence for a particular hypothesis, it does not exist. It merely means that we have not thought of ways that we can test it, to see whether we can either prove or falsify that hypothesis.  There are probably lots of things in our natural world that exist that we are currently unaware of and that we have not yet tested with our scientific method. By assuming that something does not exist, we limit our possibilities of finding out about the natural world around us. 

Dogs and Our Well-Being

This morning, I was talking on the phone to a friend who recently had surgery. He was telling me what a struggle it was to overcome the pain, to have to move around when everything hurt, and to believe that everything was turning out just fine.  Then he told me that in moments when he was feeling particularly down, he would talk to his dog, and she would listen attentively and then lick his hand until he started to feel better.  He said that his dog gave him more comfort than his family and more comfort than the advice of the medical professionals who were treating him.

After I finished the phone converstation, I thought about what my friend said. In this respect, he was not an isolated case. Many of us talk to our dogs, and feel that we get love and concern, if not actual understanding, for our problems. Studies have shown that people's blood pressure, breathing rate and heart rate go down when they stroke a dog, and they generally become calmer. Other studies have shown that people who have pets tend to live longer than people who do not have any animals in their household. The idea of therapy dogs is relatively new, the idea that dogs can come into hospitals and retirement facilities and interact with residents, but it seems to be paying off in terms of people feeling better when they connect with a dog.  Dogs offer love without any strings attached, and sometimes it is easier to love a dog than it is to love a person.

And yet that love does not seem to extend to other animals. The dog's closest genetic relative, the wolf, is often pictured as an object of fear.  Despite the fact that there are very few documented cases of wolves actually attacking people, the popular conception paints them as animals who are just slavering to tear apart any person who happens to lose his or her way in the woods.  I saw an early 20th century Russian plate recently on TV that depicted a troika (three horses pulling a sleigh) being chased by a pack of fierce wolves, with the driver of the troika frantically flogging the horses so that he would not be savaged by the hungry man-eating predators.

While I have never encountered any wolves in the wild, I have found leopard tracks circling around my tent in Africa, and had lions roar within 100 meters (300 feet) of my camp on starry African nights. All it would have taken would have been a single claw to rip through my tent, or a simple lunge by a lion to grab me while I slept. Yet here I am, still uneaten.

As we huddle in our cities, we are losing our connection with Nature, and are substituting fear of the natural world for a deeper connection that we once might have had. Perhaps our love of dogs is a symbolic vestige of a connection that we once had with all animals, when we might have understood that most animals were concerned with their own lives and were not out to get us.

Ant Colony

The other day, I was walking along a path at the local state park when I came across a colony of harvester ants.  The entrance to the colony was slightly off the path, and directly opposite the colony entrance on the other side of the path was a bench that the park had installed so that someone could sit and enjoy the pond that was on the side of the path away from the ants. I sat down on the bench and watched the ants.

Harvester ant colonies have a nest opening, and a disk-shaped area around the nest where the workers drop plant debris that they bring in from the surrounding area. The workers bring in seeds that they find nearby, sometimes going out some 100 meters (300 feet) away from the colony in their quest for food. The immediate area around the central disk is usually alive with bustling ants, some coming in from their foraging, others leaving to go out, and still others picking over the vegetation that the foragers have dropped and looking for food items that could be carried inside the nest. The ants have a formidable sting that causes an immediate sharp pain and then a large red area that continues to hurt for several days.  Sometimes black desert tenebrionid beetles (often called stink beetles) come and feed on the vegetation that the ants have dropped in the central disk. The beetles have defensive sections consisting of quinones and hydrocarbons, and can squirt these secretions out at anything that disturbs them. If an ant should attack a beetle, the beetle simply puts out a little squirt of secretions, and the ant goes into a frenzy of trying to clean itself while the beetle calmly walks away and continues feeding somewhere else. Usually, the ants and the beetles peacefully coexist without either bothering the other.

I sat and watched the ants for about 15 minutes.  There was a constant stream of activity. I watched the ants touching each other with their antennae, smelling each other with their smell receptors and feeling the contours of each others' bodies. Although the ants have eyes, they probably cannot see more than perhaps 1 meter (3 feet) around them.

As I watched the ants, I reflected on how different is their world and mine. They have only a very limited perspective, compared to what I can see.  They cannot see the nearby pond, nor the mountains in the distance, nor the houses along the state park boundary, nor the cars parked in a nearby parking lot. They have only a very circumscribed world, compared to my own.

Just then, someone else came down the path. Seeing that I was sitting on the bench and facing in an unusual direction (looking toward the path, instead of having my back to the path and looking out toward the pond), the person tried to give me a wide berth, and stepped off the path. In doing so, he stepped directly on the nest opening of the ants, causing the opening to collapse and close. Immediately, all of the ants that were on the surface started milling around, apparently not knowing where to go or what to do, colliding with one another and running in seemingly random directions.

I thought of how much this resembled human disasters. When a tornado or an earthquake hits, we are totally confused and lost, not knowing what to do, completely at the mercy of the elements. Just like the ants, we mill around, our routine disrupted, our homes damaged or lost.

Then I thought about our difference in perspective. I knew what caused the disaster for the ants. The ants had no clue, not knowing that it was the heel of the shoe of a person walking by. And I started to wonder, how limited is our human perspective? We think that we are on top of the world, but we also know that there is so much of the world and of Nature that we cannot see or sense. Radio waves, microwave energy, huge amounts of the radiant energy spectrum, are beyond our capabilities to see or to detect. We can see perhaps 50 kilometers (30 miles) on a good day, but cannot see what is happening on other planets, much less in the universe as a whole.

I started to think, is our perspective just as limited as the ants? Yes, we can see more of the world around us. But not really that much more. And when disasters strike, could it be that our limited perspective does not allow us to see the causes, just like the ants had no way of knowing the cause of their disaster?

Most of the time, we forget that we are little creatures in a big universe. Put in this perspective, perhaps we should be humble about our place in Nature, rather than assuming that we are the top dog in all of creation.