Top Quotes: “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” — Frans de Waal

Background: De Waal explains how our understanding of animal intelligence was very anthrocentric in the past — essentially judging other animals by human standards, instead of studying their intelligence in a more neutral way. He walks through some recent findings from a variety of species from birds to monkeys to octopi — this book is chock full of fun facts and a very fun read, especially for animal lovers.

“It is undeniable that humans are animals. We’re not comparing two separate categories of intelligence, therefore, but rather are considering variation within a single one. It is not even clear how special our intelligence is relative to a cognition distributed over eight independently moving arms, each with its own neural supply, or one that enables a flying organism to catch mobile prey by picking up the echoes of its own shrieks.”

“We attach immense importance to abstract thought and language, but in the larger scheme of things this is only one way to face the problem of survival. In sheer numbers and biomass, ants and termites may have done a better job than we have, focusing on tight coordination among colony members rather than individual thought. Each society operates like a self-organized mind, albeit one pitter-pattering around on thousands of little feet. There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial.”

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

“Each organism senses the environment in their own way — a single environment offers hundreds of realities peculiar to each species. The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for 18 years without food, this tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die. Her goal is well-defined and she encounters few distractions.”

“The bat works with plenty of sensory input, even if it remains alien to us. Its auditory cortex evaluates sound bouncing off objects, then uses this information to calculate its distance to the targets as well as the target’s movement and speed. As if this weren’t complex enough, the bat also corrects for its own flight path and distinguishes the echoes of its own vocalizations from those of nearby bats: a form of self-recognition. When insects evolved hearing in order to evade bat detection, some bats responded with ‘stealth’ vocalizations below the hearing level of their prey. What we have here is a most sophisticated information-processing system backed by a specialized brain that turns echoes into precise perception.”

“It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel’s life is about. The squirrel is very good at retrieving hidden nuts, though, and some birds are absolute experts. The Clark’s nutcracker, in the fall, stores more than 20,000 pine nuts, in hundreds of different locations distributed over many square miles; then in winter and spring it manages to recover the majority of them. That we can’t compete with squirrels and nutcrackers on this task — I can’t even remember where I parked my car — is irrelevant since our species does not need this kind of memory for survival the way forest animals braving a freezing winter do. We don’t need echolocation to orient ourselves in the dark; nor do we need to correct for the refraction of light between air and water as archerfish do while shooting droplets at insects above the surface. There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. That is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise.”

“We always try to figure things out, applying our reasoning powers to everything around us. We go so far as to invent causes if we can’t find any, leading to weird superstitions and supernatural beliefs, such as sports fans wearing the same T-shirt over and over for luck, and diasters being blamed on the hand of god. We are so logic-driven that we can’t stand the absence of it.”

“Crows have incredibly sharp eyes; one researcher reported harassment of certain people by crows and was so convinced of their ability to hold a grudge that he disguised himself with a costume whenever he captured and banded them. Another biologist has captured so many crows that these birds take his name in vain whenever he walks around, scolding and dive-bombing him. In contrast, they calmly walk around his students and colleagues who have never captured, measured, banded, or otherwise humiliated them.”

“Homology refers to shared traits derived from a common ancestor — like the human hand and bat wing, which both derive from an ancestral forelimb and carry the exact same number of bones to prove it. Analogies, on the other hand, arise when distant animals independently evolve in the same direction, known as convergent evolution. The parental care of the discus fish is analogous to mammalian nursing but certainly not homologous, since fish and mammals did not share an ancestor that did the same. Convergent evolution is incredibly powerful. It has equipped both bats and whales with echolocation, both insects and birds with wings, and both primates and opossums with opposite thumbs. It has also produced spectacularly similar species in distant geographic regions, such as the armored bodies of armadillos and pangolins, the prickly defense of hedgehogs and porcupines, and the predatory weaponry of the Tasmanian tiger and the coyote. We should not be surprised therefore to find similar cognitive and behavioral traits in species that are eons and continents apart. The same capacity may pop up almost anywhere it is needed.”

“Other species are very capable of communicating inner processes, such as emotions and intentions, or coordinating actions or plans by means of nonverbal signals, but their communication is neither symbolized or endlessly flexible like language. For one thing, it is almost entirely restricted to the here and now. A chimp may detect another’s emotions in reaction to a particular ongoing situation, but cannot communicate even the simplest information about events displaced in space and time. If I have a black eye, I can explain to you how yesterday I walked into a bar with drunken people. A chimp has no way, after the fact, to explain how an injury came about, unless perhaps if his assailant walks by and he screams at him.”

“Power alliances (politics) and the spreading the habits (culture), as well as empathy and fairness (morality) are detectable outside our species. The same holds for capacities underlying language. Honeybees, for example, accurately signal distant nectar locations to the hive, and monkeys may utter calls in predictable sequences that resemble rudimentary syntax. Vervet monkeys on the plains of Kenya have distinct alarm calls for a leopard, eagle, or snake. These predator-specific calls constitute a life-saving communication system, because different dangers demand different responses.”

“The prospect of food activates the caudate nucleus in the canine brain in the same way it does in the brain of a businessman anticipating a monetary bonus. That all mammalian brains operate in essentially the same way has also been found in other domains.”

“A young male chimp trained on a touchscreen can recall a series of numbers from 1 through 9 and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers appear randomly on the screen and are replaced by white squares as soon as he starts tapping. Reducing the amount of time the numbers flash on the screen doesn’t seem to matter to him, even though humans become less accurate the shorter the time interval. The chimp has 80% accuracy, something no human has managed so far.”

“Chimps are quicker than humans at predicting a rival’s moves and countermoves.”

“To determine what is important in a skeleton takes judgment, which allows the subjective coloring of traits that we deem crucial. We make a big deal of our bipedal locomotion, for example, while ignoring the many animals, from chickens to hopping kangaroos, that move the same way. At some savanna sites, bonobos walk entire distances upright through tall grass, making confident strides like humans. Bipedalism is really not as special as it has been made it out to be.”

“No one seems to know how interconnectivity in the brain produces consciousness nor even what consciousness exactly is. And what about the dolphin’s 1.5kg brain, the elephant’s 4kg brain, and the sperm whale’s 8kg brain (compared to our 1.4kg brain)? Are these animals perhaps more conscious than we are? Or does it depend on the number of neurons? In this regard, the picture is less clear. The elephant brain has three times as many neurons as the human brain. If we ever find a way of measuring consciousness, it could well turn out to be widespread.”

“A low-ranking male raven learned to distract his competitor by enthusiastically opening empty containers of food and making as if to eat from them. When the dominant bird found out, ‘he got very angry, and started throwing things around.’ When ravens approach hidden food, they take into account what other ravens know. If their competitors have the same knowledge, they hurry to get there first. But if the others are ignorant, they take their time. All in all, animals do plenty of perspective taking, from being aware of what others want to knowing what others know.”

“At a chimp sanctuary, one female was the first to stick a straw of grass into her ear, letting it hang out while walking around and grooming others. Over the years, other chimps followed her example, with several of them adopting the same look. Fashions come and go in chimps as in humans, but some habits we find in only one group and not in another. Since habits and fashions often spread without any associated rewards, social learning is truly social. It is about conformity instead of payoffs.”

“The elephant trunk is an extraordinarily sensitive smelling, grasping, and feeling organ said to contain 40,000 muscles coordinated by a unique proboscis nerve that runs along is full length. The trunk has two sensitive ‘fingers’ at its tip, with which it can pick up items as small as a blade of grass, but the trunk also allows the animal to suck up eight liters of water or flip over an annoying hippo. Who knows how much of our own cognition is tied to the specifics of our bodies, such as our hands? Would we have evolved the same technical skills and intelligence without these supremely versatile appendages? Some theories of language evolution postulate its origin in mammal gestures as well as in neural structures for the throwing of stones and spears. In the same way that humans and other primates have a ‘handy’ intelligence, elephants may have a ‘trunky’ one.”

“Siamangs — large black members of the gibbon family — burst into spectacular couple duets every morning. Since the song of a pair reflects their marriage, the more beautiful it is, the more their neighbors realize not to mess with them. A close-harmony duet communicates not only ‘stay out!’ but also ‘we’re one!’ If a pair duets poorly, on the other hand, uttering discordant vocalizations that interrupt one another, neighbors hear an opportunity to move in and exploit the pair’s troubled relationship.”

“Teamwork is typical of group hunters, such as humpback whales, which blow hundreds of bubbles around a school of fish which trap them like a net. The whales act together to make the column tighter and tighter, until several of them surface through its center with mouths wide open to swallow the bounty. Orcas go even further, in an action so astonishingly well coordinated that few species, including humans, would be able to match it. When orcas along the Antarctic Peninsula spot a seal on an ice floe, they reposition the floe. It takes a lot of hard work, but they push it out into open water. Then four or five whales line up side by side, acting like one giant whale. They rapidly swim in perfect unison toward the floe, creating a huge wave that washes off the unlucky seal. They must be communicating about it before making their move. It is not entirely clear why they do it, because even though the orcas afterward carry the seal around, they often end up releasing it.”

“Chimps are talented team players who have no trouble suppressing conflicts within their group — their current reputation as violent and belligerent is almost entirely based on the way they treat members of neighboring groups in the wild. Chimps will politely wait their turn when access to food is restricted rather than increasing aggression.”

“When two or more intelligent, cooperative species meet around food resources, the outcome may also be cooperation rather than competition. Fishing cooperatives, in which humans and whales or dolphins work together, are probably thousands of years old. In South America they operate on the mud shores of lagoons. Fishermen announce their arrival by slapping the water, upon which bottlenose dolphins emerge to herd mullet toward them. The fishers wait for a signal from their dolphins, such as a distinctive type of dive, to throw their net. Dolphins also do such herding among themselves, but here they drive the fish toward the fishermen’s nets. The men know their dolphin partners individually.”

“When whaling still occurred in Australia, orcas would approach the whaling station to perform conspicuous breaching and lobtailing that served to announce the arrival of a humpback whale. They would herd the large whale into shallow waters close to a whaling vessel, allowing the whalers to harpoon the harassed leviathan. Once the whale was killed, the orcas would be given one day to consume their preferred delicacy — its tongue and lips — after which the whalers would collect their prizes.”

“Small cleaner wrasses and their hosts, the large fish from which the cleaners nibble away ectoparasites, have much interplay and mutualism. Each cleaner fish owns a ‘station’ on the reef with a clientele, which come and spread their pectoral fins and adopt postures that offer the cleaner a chance to do its job. In perfect mutualism, the cleaner removes parasites from the client’s body surface, gills, and even the inside of its mouth. Sometimes the cleaner is so busy that clients have to wait in queue. Cleaners treat roaming fish better than residents. If a roamer and a resident arrive at the same time, the cleaner will serve the roamer first. Residents can be kept waiting since they have nowhere else to go. Cleaners occasionally cheat by taking little bites of healthy skin out of their client. Clients don’t like this and jolt or swim away. The only clients that cleaners never cheat are predators, which possess a radical counterstrategy: to swallow them. The cleaners seem to have an excellent understanding of the costs and benefits of their actions.”

“In The Red Sea, leopard coral trout and giant moray eel make the perfect match for coordinated hunting. The moray eel can enter crevices in the coral reef, whereas the trout hunts in the open waters around it. Prey can escape from the trout by hiding in a crevice and from the eel by entering open water, but it cannot get away from the two of them together. The two species swim side by side like friends on a stroll. They seek each other’s company, with a trout sometimes actively recruiting an eel through a curious head shake close to the eel’s head. Given the two species don’t share the prey with each other but swallow it whole, their behavior seems a form of cooperation in which each achieves a reward without sacrificing anything for the other. They are out for their own gain, which they attain more easily together than alone.”

“There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species’ cognition is generally as good as what it needs for survival.”

“Apes have an excellent recall of previous meals. If looking for fruit, they mostly check trees at which they had eaten in previous years. If they ran into copious rice fruit, they’d gorge on it and make sure to return a couple of days later.”

“Chimps get up before dawn, something they hate to do, to set off on a long trek to a specific fig tree where they had recently eaten in order to beat the early fig rush. These soft, sweet fruits are favored by many forest animals so an early arrival would be the only way to take advantage of the abundance. Remarkably, the chimps would get up earlier for trees far from their nests than for those nearby, arriving at the same time at both. This suggests calculation of travel time based on expected distances.”

“We may not consider birds to need self-restraint, but many pick up food for their young that they could easily swallow themselves. In some species, males feed their mates during courtship while going hungry themselves. Birds that cache food inhibit immediate gratification for the same of future need.”

“Metacognition — thinking about thinking — is like when contestants on a game show choose the category they know they know the most about. In the same way, I may answer a question by saying, ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue.’ A student raising her hand in class in reaction to a question is also relying on metacognition, because she only does so if she thinks she knows the solution. Dolphins display this — like when one in a study had the option to choose a third paddle if he didn’t know the answer to a question which required him to choose one of two paddles and the third was often chosen. In a test of monkeys and a similar one in rats, the further back their memory was tested, the slower their response was; they seemed to realize their memory had faded.”

“Some animals are now believed to track their own knowledge and to realize when it is deficient. Animals are active processors of the cues around them, with beliefs, expectations, perhaps even consciousness.”

“Reality is a mental construct. That’s what makes the elephant, the bat, the dolphin, the octopus, and the star-nosed mole so intriguing. They have senses that we either don’t have, or that we have in a much less developed form, making the way they relate to their environment impossible for us to fathom. They construct their own realities. We may attach less significance to these, simply because they are so alien, but they are obviously all-important to these animals. Even when they process information familiar to us, they may do so quite differently, such as when elephants react to voices not by what words are said but by whether the tone of the voice is that of an adult male (threatening so they flee or have defensive reactions) or an adult woman or child (less threatening so they don’t flee or react defensively). Even after the natural voices were acoustically transformed so as to make the male voices more female, and vice versa, the outcome remained the same, surprising since the pitch of these voices now had the opposite gender’s qualities. Possibly the elephants identified gender by other characteristics, such as the fact that female voices tend to be more melodious and ‘breathy’ than those of males. Experience played a role, because herds led by older matriarchs were more discriminating.”

“Upon hearing a bee rumble from a speaker, elephants flee with head-shaking movements that would knock insects away, a reaction not shown to the human rumble. In short, elephants make sophisticated distinctions regarding potential enemies to the point that they classify our own species based on language, age, and gender. How they do so is not entirely clear.”

“If an octopus accidentally is fed a rotten egg, it shoots the egg’s smelly remains back at the surprised human from whom it had received it. Given how well they distinguish people, octopi probably remember encounters like these. In a recognition, test, an octopus was exposed to two humans, one of whom consistently fed it, whereas the other mildly poked it with a bristle on a stick. Initially the animal made no distinction, but after several days it began doing so despite the fact that both humans wore identical blue overalls. Seeing the loathsome person, the octopus would withdraw, shoot jets of water, and show a dark bar through its eyes — a color change associated with threats and irritation. It would approach the nice person, on the other hand, without making any attempt at drenching her.”

“The octopus brain is the largest and most complex of all invertebrates, but the explanation of its extraordinary skills may lie elsewhere. Each has nearly 2,000 suckers, every single one equipped with its own ganglion with half a million neurons. That amounts to a lot of neurons on top of a 65 million neuron brain. The brain connects with all these ‘mini brains,’ which are also joined among themselves. Instead of a single central command, it’s more like the internet: there is extensive local control. A severed arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food. A shrimp can be handed from one sucker to the next, as if on a conveyor belt, in the direction of the octopus’ mouth. Their skin may detect light and seems to be able to change color in self-defense. It sounds rather unbelievable: an organism with seeing skin and eight independently thinking arms!”

“The octopus changes color so rapidly that it outchameleons the chameleon. It can camoflauge perfectly, but when a human diver scares an octopus, it turns almost white and speeds away while shooting a dark cloud of ink. The animal then lands on the sea floor and makes itself look huge by spreading all its arms and stretching the skin between them into a tent.”

“Sometimes an octopus mimics an inanimate object, such as a rock or plant, while moving so slowly that one would swear it is not moving at all. It does so when it needs to cross an open space, an activity that exposes it to detection. Imitating a plant, the octopus waves some of its arms above itself, making them look like branches, while tiptoeing on three or four of its remaining arms. It mimics the swaying back and forth of plants on wild days; on a waveless day, it may take twenty minutes to cross a stretch of sea it could have crossed in twenty seconds.”

“The champion of camouflage, is the mimic octopus, a species found off the coast of Indonesia, that impersonates other species. It acts like a flounder by adopting this fish’s body shape and color as well as its typically undulating swimming pattern close to the sea floor. The repertoire of this octopus includes adopting the likeness of a dozen local marine organisms, such as lionfish, sea snakes, and jellyfish.”

“Male cuttlefish courting a female may trick rival males into thinking there is nothing to worry about. The courting male adopts the coloring of a female on the side of his body that faces his rival, so that the latter believes that he is looking at a female. But the same male keeps his original coloring on the female’s side of his body in order to keep her interested.”

“Chimps sometimes develop local dialects which can differ not only from group to group but based on which food they’re eating. When the Edinburgh zoo introduced chimps from a Dutch zoo to its residents, it took those others three years to get socially integrated; by the end, they converged on the same grunts as the locals. They had adjusted their calls so that they sounded more like those of the residents.”

“Dolphins produce signature whistles, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique to each individual, in their first year. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike. Dolphins utter signature whistles especially when they’re isolated, but also before aggregating in large groups in the ocean. When played over speakers, dolphins pay more attention to sounds associated with close kin than to those of others, including some they hadn’t seen for decades. Increasingly, experts view signature whistles as names. They are not just identifiers that individuals produce themselves but are sometimes mimicked. For dolphins, addressing specific companions by their own whistles is like calling them by name. Dolphins sometimes mimic the characteristic call of someone else to draw their attention. If dolphins hear their own whistle, they respond, as if confirming they’d heard themselves being called.”