A quick read, but you're bound to learn something new about animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, anatomy, lifestyles, natural history

During the era of "natural philosophy" every naturalist could draw and paint. There was no photography; later it was possible but too costly. The best naturalists still draw for their notebooks and paint for their publications.

These two notebook pages are examples produced a century apart, in 1806 and 1915. The Eulachon fish was drawn by Meriwether Lewis in Oregon, and the contour map was drawn by Joseph Grinnell in California.

The book Wildlife Anatomy: The Curious Lives & Features of Wild Animals Around the World was written and illustrated by Julia Rothman. On the cover she notes "With help from Lisa Hiley", which refers to helping with research.

The subject is anatomy in the broadest sense, because here we learn also about life habits and environments, tools and architecture. "Architecture?", one might say. Yes, beavers and mound-building termites are architects, as are nest-making birds. The level of consciousness may vary, but the creativity cannot be denied.

Here is one 2-page spread that is about anatomy per se. There are sections on antlers, teeth, claws, wings, etc., also.

Well under half the page space is taken up by text, and some spreads are wordless, so if one is strictly reading, this is a very fast read. But it is worth dwelling on the features of the illustrations. This is no novel to race through.

For a writer who is so sparse with words, Ms Rothman packs plenty of meaning into every sentence. And what, one may say, did I learn that was new to me? Several things, but the most fun is the tidbit that star-nosed moles smell underwater "by blowing out and quickly re-inhaling bubbles of air." For a blind mole that hunts by smell, that is an advantage.

If you want to be a naturalist, I suggest learning to draw at a very early age, and keeping at it as long as you live. If you feel you lack artistic talent, take classes; the little bits of artistic talent found in all of us can be shaped and trained. Meriwether Lewis was no Michelangelo, but he didn't need to be. Once you've seen his drawing of a Eulachon fish (a type of smelt), when you see one, you'll recognize it.

Behavior is as behavior does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, animals, behavior, evolution, nature-nurture debate

A fellow showed up half an hour late for his regular poker game with friends, and found they'd started without him. For a fourth, they'd recruited the host's dog. The man told the host, "Wow! That's some talented pup!!" "Oh," he replied, "Old Groaner isn't so great. Whenever he has an ace he wags his tail."

We are amused by pictures or stories of animals doing "human" things (or the converse!). Yet until recently, while most people with pets seem to easily understand that the animals have feelings and purposeful behaviors, scientists have been slow (by centuries!) to come around.

Marlene Zuk's new book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters, drives lots of new nails into the coffin of the Animal-as-Automaton view. Let me state at the outset that, for two good reasons I hold that animals, even the rather elementary ones we call "bugs", all fit along at least three scales (none of them is the scala naturae, the "natural ladder" so beloved of ignorant biologists). Firstly, as to consciousness, one end might be called "Human-level self consciousness" (assuming it's truly the end point; maybe toothed whales are beyond us, for example); the other end we can call "barely conscious of more than the basic drives of hunger and the 'urge to merge'". Secondly, as to emotion, just as some animals have abilities we don't, there ought to be some that can have feelings we don't have. Thirdly, considering behavior, which is often divided into "purposive" (the scientific jargon for "purposeful") and "instinctive" (which really means "purely genetic"): everything living behaves. Animals are practically defined by behavior. It is what they ARE. "Lower animals" are the product of 4 billion years of evolution, the same as humans. So are the things that they DO.

Somewhere on my bookshelves I have the seminal volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men by E.C. Tolman, published in 1932. This book is not referenced by Dr. Zuk, more's the pity. If she's not an intellectual descendant of Tolman, she's at least a grandniece. He was far ahead of his time, as witness the still-nearly-pervasive use of the canard "anthropomorphism" to discredit much work on animal behavior.

My two reasons: To hard-line creationists, many of whom also hold the Calvinist position that God has no emotions, I would say, "Are we not created in the image of God? Did our emotions and behaviors come from nowhere? Are they not part of that image?" Of course, some would double down to say that all such things are part of "original sin" or whatever Protestants call it. (Though I am a believer, I am neither Catholic nor Protestant.) They are fools. To take a further step, "If we have feelings and behaviors that are something other than automatic, why would God deny such abilities to animals?"

To hard-line Skinnerian scientists I would say, "I subscribe to evolution, as carried out by natural selection. Do you? If so, you must realize that our feelings came from somewhere. Where? Of course, from our nonhuman ancestors. We emote and behave because they did." So much for anthropomorphism. And as I said before, animals that are attuned to greatly different environments than humans could survive (without costly technology) are likely to have feelings and behaviors that are so foreign to us that we are unlikely to recognize them as such.

So, a bit about the book—which I urge everyone to read!—what is the Dead Man Test? Some, wishing a less macabre moniker, call it the Teddy Bear Test: If a Teddy Bear can do it, it isn't behavior. Substitute Dead Man for Teddy Bear if you prefer. Definition by exclusion.

How does behavior evolve? Just like anything else! Behavior is a physical attribute. It is just as real as height, eye color, and whether your ring finger is longer or shorter than your middle finger. These things, plus all other "genetic traits" are influenced by environmental factors. This is the central emphasis of the book. Genes alone don't determine anything. Neither does environment alone. Everything is a mix, an intertwining of the two. She has to say it over and over, because many folks won't get it otherwise!

For an example of this intertwining: One of my great-grandfathers was prone to drink. The family was Methodist, and Methodists were, until the 1960's, required to sign a Pledge that they would not touch alcohol. Great-grandpa Joe fought his addiction mightily, but he would go on a bender on occasion. His daughters kept their Pledges; it helped that they never tasted "the sauce" as young people, and that they took their father as a cautionary example. Having a strict mother helped. My mother was also raised to be a teetotaler, as was I. But in college some friends persuaded me to have a beer to celebrate my 18th birthday (I lived in a state that allowed 18-year-olds to drink "low beer"). I soon found a way to get harder stuff, and I was off, headed for a life as an alcoholic! Except, I couldn't afford it. Also, returning home after the school year, back in a teetotaling home, I took a hard look at myself, and decided not to use "anything that hinders thinking clearly". At that time I didn't know about Joe. Later one of my brothers became more of an alcoholic than I had been. His own story is fascinating, but won't fit here. He and I are both "recovering"; one never fully "recovers".

Why weren't my mother and her mother alcoholics? In a different environment they'd have been so. We have a kind of protein that turns ethanol into a heroin-like addicting substance. Fortunately, it is kind of rare. Yeah, I know there are lots of alcoholics; some of them have this same genetic situation. But they are a small fraction of the whole of humanity.

I'll leave it to you to get the book and allow Dr. Zuk to lead you down many a lane and garden path, with her stories of dancing cockatoos (do they have something to dance to in nature? Neither do elephants, and I've also seen videos of them responding to music); of octopuses punching fish, apparently out of irritation; of how animals from flies to flying foxes vary in their behaviors based on still-inscrutable combinations of their genetic endowment and their past and present environment. This sure is an enjoyable book!

Sociality – a winning combination

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, biology, social behavior, sociality

Some animals socialize only within their own "nuclear family", and live solitary lives when not raising their young. Some animal parents work together to raise young (such as red foxes like the cubs shown here); for others only the female raises them alone (think tigers).

Over the full spectrum of animal types, some are primarily solitary, some are a little social, some are very social (such as wolves or starlings), and a small number are eusocial (bees and termites are the prototypes).

With thousands of mammal species, more than 10,000 species of bird and 30,000 species of fish, and on to the millions of species of insect, there is a lot of room for evolution to have produced more patterns of sociality than we can imagine. In The Social Lives of Animals, Ashley Ward reveals the breadth of social life and social patterns among animals.

If an animal is the apex predator in an ecosystem, such as the tiger throughout the East (historically, anyway), being a solitary hunter that meets a mate for perhaps an hour, and then raises her cub or cubs alone, can make sense. Other apex predators, such as wolves, live in packs. Prey animals are more likely to live in herds: there is safety in numbers, and a swirling flock can confuse a predator.

It's funny: Having read the book, and enjoyed it greatly, I don't find a series of stories I want to repeat, which is my frequent pattern. I find myself musing on a philosophical point. I'll set it up this way. There is a range of social patterns found within any particular social species. For example, the stereotypical wolf pack has an alpha pair that does all the breeding, and the other wolves help raise their cubs. This view is outdated; some packs do seem to work that way, but it is much more common for only certain pack members, such as the omega male and omega female, to be prevented from mating, while some or many of the middle-ranking animals can mate. Another pattern is seen in most prides of lions, which includes only one fully adult male who mates with all the females, and drives away any young fellow who tries to cuckold him. Now, what about humans?

I find a greater range of patterns of sociality among humans than among any particular animal species. However, the extreme of eusociality is apparently not seen in human societies (although the Chinese Communist Party is trying to mold the Chinese people into a hive society…but they don't seem to be working toward having one "Queen bee"). A few cases:

• It has been my misfortune to be acquainted with a few psychopaths. Not all psychopaths are criminally-minded, but they all are devoid of empathy, and use sociality only for the purpose of gaining advantage. Anyone who trusts one of them can expect to be betrayed at any time. Some are happiest with little to no human contact. Some are so self-focused they cannot even bear to raise their own child. This isn't just living like a tiger; it is beyond that.
• Near the other end of the spectrum, long ago I subscribed to Utne Reader. In an editorial, Eric Utne self-servingly described his "quasi-commune" and wrote that he and his wife were the "designated breeders", while the others helped them raise their children. This sounds like the stereotypical wolf pack.
• My brothers and I grew up in a nuclear family, raised by two parents who remained married for life, nearly 60 years. It is reflected in the lives of geese, which usually mate for life. While this was the norm in America in the 1950's and '60's, things are changing. 
• Our parents both grew up in extended-family environments, with aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins and second cousins all around. There was little need for "friends" because family provided so many built-in friends. This is similar to the way Orcas and some other cetaceans live.
• Churches that become close-knit become like tribes. Many members find they are closer to fellow believers than to their own nuclear family members. I am not sure what animal model this may resemble.

In some directions, human associations go beyond anything found in the animal realm. The TV show "Modern Family" explored a few such relationships, and there have been reports of groups practicing polyamory: polygamy plus polyandry with multiple partners of both sexes, and probably both gay and straight "activities". Presumably, whatever children are produced are raised by everybody.

That's a few of the ideas that ran through my head as I read the book, and then contemplated its messages.

Animals and Law

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, laws, legal system, humor

Mary Roach make serious subjects both interesting and humorous. In Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, she writes of animals who cause problems to people (besides ants at picnics or in the kitchen), and the various officers who must deal with them. We're talking serious problems here, from killings to theft, and, in later chapters, "invasions" such as the imported rabbits in Australia and rats in New Zealand.

On the scale of danger:cuteness ratio, bears rank right at the top. A young cub like the one shown here is probably just curious. However, the mother is likely to be nearby, and will object to her baby being this close to a dangerous human. It seldom occurs to us that bears consider us a risk; we're big enough to do them damage, and too big to be worthwhile prey. I wonder what followed this moment. Most likely, the mother made a "Whuff!" sound, at which the cub ran to her, and they trotted off together. I hope so.

Bears are too smart to be predictable. They are also loners, and get cranky if someone gets too close without permission. A cranky bear can slap you as he or she would another bear, and it'll take your head right off. Then, surprised at the result, after some thought, the bear could opt to take advantage of the free meal. Now we have a "killer bear". What is a forest ranger to do with it? There's a chapter on that. Guess what: relocating, whether bear or squirrel, just makes room for another to move in…and so does killing the offender.

Bears are most likely to kill unintentionally. Not so carnivores such as leopards, nor elephants. Each rates a chapter, and the stories range from quirkily funny to spine-chilling. While in India learning about leopard attacks, one evening the author heard a ghastly scream that she concluded came from a leopard's prey being killed. She and those with her decided to wait, to check it out in the morning, leaving matters to resolve themselves overnight. The villagers called it a case of demon possession, which she took for a double entendre, because the villagers had also told her that any leopard that had killed at least two people was considered a demon. Well, whoever died that evening was definitely "possessed" by that leopard at that point!

I haven't been the subject of an attack by anything bigger than a jaybird. But that can be painful enough! I found a blue jay chick in the driveway once, and picked it up to put in a nearby bush. A parent bird bombed me. Had I not been wearing a hat, it would have drawn blood. I've managed to avoid sea gull attacks by eating only inside at the beach! This fellow, according to advertising copy, was trying out a gull repellent method that obviously isn't working. I did note that two species of gull are shown here. That's typical at almost any American beach.

A lot of the book deals with the futility of not just trying to eradicate unwanted species (such as invasive rats on islands), but even counting them to know how big the problem is. Cougars (AKA pumas or panthers) are so elusive that animal "control" officers' most effective method is scanning an area for feces, called "scat". Unlike domestic cats, cougars just "drop and walk off". With experience, the officers can estimate how old a scat is, so with a little knowledge of scat-dropping frequency and a bit of math, they can estimate how many cats frequent a certain parcel of land.

The next-to-last chapter gets into humane killing. It's not quite an oxymoron, but killing most animals "so they won't notice" is nearly impossible, and anything less abrupt than the killing bar on a classic mousetrap will entail a period of suffering, from seconds to minutes to hours. Thus the last chapter deals with genetic methods. The scariest is the gene drive. Scientists working on this have figured out how to "fix" the genes in a female mouse so she will have only female offspring. Ordinarily, releasing a lot of such mice is self-limiting, and won't eradicate them. But the gene drive somehow guarantees that all her daughters will have the same trait. Thus, any male mice remaining will get older and older, as few males get born, and eventually none. A generation later, the oldest females die, and Presto!, no mice. (At least, I think that is how it works. I may have something backwards. Anyway, they all eventually die out.)

Very late in the book, the author writes of a farmer who has a more phlegmatic attitude: Do your best to keep from spilling food all around, and live with a little "shrinkage", just as stores know they can't eliminate all shoplifting, but reduce it as much as they think reasonable, and adjust to it.

Animals don't know they are breaking human laws. I suspect if they could know somehow, they wouldn't care. After all, they were here first. We're the invaders, breaking "their" laws! The cynic's Golden Rule applies: Them that has the gold, makes the rules.

Is one percent of a mind still a mind?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, zoology, animals, experience

The title and cover art (a Leafy Dragon, a kind of seahorse) of MetaZoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, by Peter Godfrey-Smith promise good thing inside, and that promise is abundantly kept. Thinking about thinking is the highest human art, and while Sturgeon's Dictum ("90% of everything is junk") holds especially true in this field, when the right ideas come together, the synergy is wonderful.

Dr. Godfrey-Smith has a prior book particularly on the mind of the octopus, Other Minds, and the work there is a springboard to his thinking about the full range of cognition, from the first evolution of neurons onward. MetaZoa begins with the eukaryotic cell—it could have begun with prokaryotes, but that would have added little and taken much more space—, a cell that senses and reacts to the environment, and is complex in its own right. However, there seems to be nothing we can do (so far) to determine whether amoebas, or critters like Euglena and Paramecium, have "experiences" or a "sense of being" in any way comparable to ours. Thus, the discussion proper begins with the simplest metazoans, those without nervous systems (so far as we know): sponges and placozoans.

A sponge is a metazoan—a multicellular creature—at its most basic: a collection of cells of three (some say four) types of cells, that produce spicules composed of either calcite or silica to stiffen a roughly vase-shaped "body". There seems to be a very simple system of cell-to-cell communication that allows the animal to react, quite slowly, to certain stimuli, perhaps including light. We still don't know much about sponges. Working with them is very difficult. 

A placozoan is one of nature's great secrets: an animal typically smaller than one millimeter in diameter and 1/10 millimeter thick, that creeps among sand and silt grains using cilia for locomotion. This also implies some kind of cell-to-cell communication to coordinate the cilia. There are no cells with long projections that could serve as nerves for longer-range communication across the body. They eat by creeping atop a bit of algae and excreting enzymes to digest it outside the body, absorbing the products of digestion directly. These are even harder to work with than sponges.

The book doesn't discuss that favorite of experimenters, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (usually C. elegans), which is less than 1/10th the mass of a placozoan but is much better organized. About a third of its 959 cells constitute its nervous system, including a 56-cell brain. The author chose instead to move right along to coral polyps and to cnidarians in general, which have a minimal nervous system (in terms of percent of body mass), a neural net (no brain) that coordinates swimming motions in swimming polyps and grasping motions in sessile polyps, and also feeding behaviors.

A point the author makes repeatedly in the first several chapters: we shouldn't think of sponges, placozoans, corals or jellyfish (or any other animals) as "primitive". They have four billion years of evolution in their history, the same as we do. They are successful in their environments, or they'd have been eliminated.

With these simple animals, their similarities and contrasts, we begin a journey around (not necessarily "up"!) the tree (or network) of life. The author wished to puzzle out the origin of experience. Looking from "our" end of things, we, and a number of other animals (maybe a very large number), have something we call "consciousness", sometimes described as a "here I am" feeling. Are there animals that don't have this feeling? The smaller an animal is, the less we think it is "like us", and therefore capable of consciousness. Is this so?

Our pet calico cat is rather touchy, even peevish: it doesn't take much of a transgression on my part for her to give me a hurt look and stalk off. Another cat I had long ago would run across a carpeted room onto the linoleum in the hallway, and find himself skidding past the turn into the bedroom. Once he came to a stop, he would stroll, the picture of dignity, in the direction of the skid, as though he'd intended to go there all along. Unflappable aplomb! These animals have a definite sense of being "who they are". I call it consciousness, even if it is simpler than a human's.

Now, let us jump almost to the other extreme. A honeybee has much more brain than a nematode, about a million neurons. Even though the bee brain is tinier than a pinhead, it is well organized. This drawing, from an article in ResearchGate by Eleni Vasilaki and others, has this title: 

"Basic anatomy of the honey bee brain showing the major pathways involved in odor classification and olfactory learning."

Think about that: olfactory learning. It sounds like a lot can go on in the brain of a honeybee. But does the bee have a sense of "here I am" or "this is me"? While it cannot have such a sense at a human level, or even a mammal level, perhaps it does.

An aspect that Dr. Godfrey-Smith turns to in the last two chapters is gradualism. My statement above, "…even if it is simpler…" is along this line. Much is made of the phrase, "the lights are on". Some claim consciousness is like pregnancy: "Can you be a little bit pregnant?" I think to take such a purist attitude is misguided. 

There may be a threshold effect. Is the neural net of a coral polyp (there is no brain) enough to generate a sense of presence, of "I am here"? Are the 56 neurons of a C. elegans brain enough? The million neurons of a honeybee's brain? Right in the middle of such a spectrum is the octopus, which has half a billion neurons.

The octopus's brain is quite different from a vertebrate brain. A ring of nerve tissue surrounding the gullet contains about 140 million neurons. A ganglion near the big end of each arm has about 45 million; those 360 million (45x8) plus those in the ring brain add up to 500 million. There is a lot of text in MetaZoa about whether this is a 1+1 situation, or 1+8, because the eight arms seem to act semi-independently. As I read, I remembered that 75% or more of human brain neurons are in the cerebellum, which runs the body, the "autonomic system". Our vaunted reasoning abilities, plus systems for vision, speech, sound, and the interpretation of our senses use 20% or so (16-18 billion neurons), and our emotions primarily reside in the limbic system, which has around a billion neurons. That in itself indicates that, if our feelings are entirely in the neurons, and primarily those of the limbic system (this is by no means certain), we use two whole octopus nervous systems to run our emotional being. So of course, octopus emotions (and they definitely have some!), belong to a much smaller set of neurons. But the octopus does behave as we'd expect of an animal that has a sense of self. Does a fish, or a bee? We can't say "Definitely not." Not yet, anyway.

Here I lean a lot on a concept I developed over many years. It is not anthropomorphism to attribute feelings and thoughts to animals. I look at it from the other end. The reason humans have feelings, thoughts, a sense of presence, and so forth is because our genetic ancestors had them, as do the other descendants of those ancestors. Have we developed all these things further than the rest? Some of them, at least, but perhaps not all!

This sense of being we have, which I consider belongs also to many animals, how far back does it go? When did an animal first experience it? We get a hint from electrical activity in brains themselves. When any neuron-containing animal is idle, a kind of synchronized cycling occurs throughout the nervous system. In humans, when we close our eyes we soon enter a state called "alpha", characterized by an overall brain rhythm around 10 Hz (it ranges from 8-13). Open the eyes, and the frequency roughly doubles to the "beta" rhythm. Pay attention to something, or get into problem-solving mode, and it doubles again, or more; the "delta" rhythm ranges from 30-140 Hz, usually centering around 40Hz. Do these patterns have meaning?

I immediately thought of regeneration and superregeneration in radio receivers (I am a radio amateur). Regeneration occurs when a tuned system oscillates in the absence of a signal. That is bad for radio reception, though it is what we want to happen in the signal generator of a radio transmitter. Regeneration also happens if a weak signal arrives in a system tuned to nearly self-oscillate; it is quickly triggered to oscillate. The stronger the incoming signal is, the more rapidly the oscillation begins. A superregenerative radio receiver is set to just barely self-oscillate, but the power supply is interrupted frequently (in old CB radios, this "squelch" occurred 30,000 times per second). During each short period, the oscillation's strength depends on the strength of the weak signal the receiver is tuned to detect. The resulting series of little peaks is filtered to remove the high frequencies (usually, above 5,000 or 10,000 Hz), and what comes through the filter is the audio that was carried on the incoming signal. This may sound complicated, but it is a cheap way to make a very sensitive receiver. It is an example of the use of a "keep alive" signal to enhance the system's performance. I suspect the various brain rhythms are akin to this, the beta rhythm being the main "detector". It is well known that our basic reception is limited to noticing fewer than 20 things per second, and the beta rhythm may be why.

I want to comment on one other matter. Vertebrate brains in particular are divided, at least in their upper sections, the cortex in mammals for example (the limbic system is only partly divided). When the connections between the cerebral hemispheres are cut, as is sometimes done to treat epilepsy, a split-brain person sometimes behaves as if there are two minds in one body. Certainly, if the brain of any smaller animal has sufficient "heft" to support a mind, there is room in half a human brain for a distinct mind. In an endnote to the chapter on the octopus, the author mentions a neuroscientist, Semir Zeki, who defends the view that we have several, or even many, distinct consciousnesses. Whether that is so, it does open the door to considering what happens in dissociation, in which a person develops "extra personae" as a response to extreme abuse. This used to be called multiple-personality disorder, but is now called dissociative disorder. The notion of true multiple personalities is mostly pooh-poohed, but it does seem to exist in some cases.

This and all notions that one brain can host multiple consciousnesses lend weight to gradualism. If there is a threshold below which a brain cannot support consciousness, it must be less than one-third of the 16-18 billion neurons of the typical human cortex, based on The Three Faces of Eve by Thigpen and Cleckley. I wouldn't have a clue where to place such a threshold, and Dr. Godfrey-Smith also declines to do so. He points out that, if lab rats and other smaller animals have a sense of self, we need to develop a better set of ethical standards for how we treat them. We have come a long, long way from the day René Descartes kicked a dog at a lecture and claimed that its cries of distress were "automatic" and did not signal pain or suffering.

It is worth considering that a smaller brain may actually be capable of thoughts that we would consider very high level, but they just take a lot longer to occur, given the smaller amount of "machinery" involved. However, time and time again our author expresses that more is going on than raw computation, and he explicitly denies strong AI, and equally denies that "uploading" the contents of a brain to a supercomputer will allow someone's consciousness to continue to run, unimpeded by having been removed from the body. Maybe we must have the computer also simulate all the rest of the body (endocrine systems at least!) for uploading to work, but I don't think so even then. That is a philosophical end of things that gets beyond how the mind came to be. It'll take another book (I hope he will) to delve into the future of the mind.

Animals you never knew about

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals

Bestiaries of the past combined natural history, legend, speculation and moral instruction. Based on better science, and including rich commentary instead of crude moralizing, Caspar Henderson has produced The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary.

He goes through the alphabet, sometimes in a surprising way, including two "X" chapters. I am endlessly fascinated by natural history, but I'll keep this shorter by just touching on three special animals, and where his riffs upon them take us.

Barrel Sponges include the Giant Barrel Sponge, Xestospongia muta, which can live more than 2,000 years. Sponges were apparently the first animals to reach sizes larger than a few aggregated cells. They are most sophisticated than they look. There are apparently several (perhaps six) kinds of cells with semi-specialized functions, but no tissues as we would consider them. A small sponge can be forced through a sieve and thoroughly disaggregated to loose cells. It will re-form itself as it originally was.

Henderson discusses the concepts of multicellularity at some length, including some ways it goes wrong, as was seen with the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, who suffered the continuous growth of portions of his body. It is still quite mysterious how an animal body, whether sponge or starfish or surfer, keeps its parts proportional. From there the riff goes on to the development of life, once the Bacteria and Archaea split, and creatures that we call Eukaryotes, composed of large, nucleated cells were split off from the Archaea (or descended from one of them by engulfing some bacteria and keeping them as "pets" that are now termed mitochondria and chloroplasts). Every visible creature is a Eukaryote, but they (we) are outnumbered (trillions-to-one) and even greatly outweighed by non-Eukaryotes.

Nautilus, a genus of cephalopod (an order that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and others). They and their kind, the Ammonites, were the primary predators in the pre-Dinosaur-age oceans. Today, these are rare and getting more rare. Cephalopods have two kinds of appendages, arms and tentacles. A nautilus has 90 slender arms, without suckers on them. An octopus also has only arms, eight of them, but the arms are well equipped with suckers along their entire length. Squids, cuttlefish and some others have both arms and tentacles. The two tentacles are longer than the arms and have a pad at the end with suckers on it, and only there.

I show this image a little bigger than the others to make the eye more visible. Other cephalopods have eyes with lenses, but this eye has a small pupil with no lens. It is like a "pinhole camera", and it makes a very blurry image. That seems to be enough, along with the animal's tactile and chemical senses, to track down its prey and avoid predators.

Venus Girdle (see video below of Cestum veneris) is a surprisingly lovely type of salp. Salps and other "comb jellies" look kind of like jellyfish, but are in a different phylum, the Ctenophora (ten-o-fore-uh); jellyfish, corals and sea anemones are in the phylum Cnidaria. The "comb" of a comb jelly refers to the rows of cilia that it uses for locomotion. Ctenophores are the largest animals to move about primarily using cilia.

Taking off more from the name Venus (goddess of "love", that is, lust), than from the animal itself, Henderson spends a page or so on sex, and the indications that nearly all animals seem to enjoy it. (I would except those females of species in which the male's "member" actually pierces or spears the female's body to deposit its load somewhere inside!). Comb jellies reproduce very fast, so perhaps the Venus association is actually rather apropos. Where their predators are eliminated, they can rapidly take over an ecosystem and turn a large chunk of ocean into a teeming mass of gooey critters.

One other animal has a rather sideways association with sex in its name, Gonodactylus, the Mantis Shrimp. The scientific name arose when the naturalist who described it thought the paired forelimbs, when held at the ready, looked a lot like a pair of testicles, so the name means "gonad hand". However, those "hands" can move faster than any part of any other animal, when the mantis shrimp clobbers its prey, or even causes cavitation (a kind of shock wave) in the water to stun nearby prey. But I was much taken by the description of their eyes. Humans and most primates have three-color vision. The millions of colors we can see are a mix of the sensations caused by light received by three kinds of cells. Mantis shrimp have around ten different color sensitive cells. In the very brightly-colored and visually confusing environment of a coral reef, they can more clearly distinguish color differences that help them pick out what they need to see.

A book like this is great fun to read, and it is equally great fun to learn of the myriads (millions!) of different animals with which we share this planet.

Animal personality comes out of hiding

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

The rat-runner's motto:

Given any combination of feeding, temperature, and light level, the rat will do what the rat wants to do.

There is a word I'd like to abolish from the scientific dictionary: Anthropomorphize. In common understanding, to anthropomorphize is to talk about some thing or animal as though it were human. We do this all the time: "My phone thinks it knows better than I do," or "My cat loves to have his belly rubbed." But in a scientific article, to speak of any animal as having emotions, feelings, or intentions; indeed, to speak about an animal in any way other than as a piece of automatic machinery that is operating according to (never-to-be-properly-defined) "instinct", was forbidden for decades, upon pain of losing tenure and being blackballed from the hallowed halls of getting published in "good" journals.

John A. Shivik is one of many researchers who are doing away with this blinkered perspective. In his new book, Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes: The Science of Animal Personalities, he explains his own shift of viewpoint and presents many examples of animals that have been proven to have personalities, from familiar dogs, cats, coyotes, horses, and cougars to mosquito fish, spiders, and even protozoans. Yes, an amoeba can have a personality! No brain, but the tiny critters have their preferences.

Here is an example of a familiar sight. The kittens all look the same. They are a purebred litter, bred under controlled circumstances so there's no chance of multiple fathers here. It looks like they are all ready for a nap, but Roger, there, has a different idea. I suspect that seconds later he scampered off. Maybe you've been to the SPCA to adopt a puppy. One comes right to you, and her litter mate hangs back looking shy (Me, I'd pick the shy one, as long as she was friendly when I went over to her).

In Mousy Cats the author explains in some detail how the anti-humanizing trend became a straitjacket for biological researchers. He tells us of his own experiences with coyotes—including one much more wolf-like than he wished!—and other animals; even more, he tells of the work of a growing number of researchers who work with all kinds of animals to demonstrate their differences in personality and how they shape the lives of the individual animals and their species' survival.

We might step back and ask, "Why does there need to be such a wide array of personalities, not only among people but among animals? Why doesn't evolution, or God, or something just produce the 'perfect' animal?" Nature isn't static. The average rainfall where I live is a very solid 3 inches per month (sometimes manifested as 3 feet of snow). But a few years ago the precipitation for the year was not 36 inches, as expected, but about 25. The governor issued orders against lawn watering and washing cars. And then this Spring we had an entire year's rainfall in two months; mold grew in unusual places, such as the rafters in my attic.

More to the point with animals, a litter of coyote pups with a bold, calm disposition will do well when there are plenty of prey to eat and few dangers, but if a pack of wolves moves into the neighborhood, they'd better beware. Wolves kill coyotes, and it's better to be more timid. A litter of coyote pups with a variety of styles of personality, some more bold and adventuresome, and some more retiring and watchful, are more likely to have at least one or two that survive the present environment and go on to gain a mate and have offspring of their own. Sometimes, the bold ones can safely adventure here and there, finding more prey and growing up faster than their more retiring litter mates. During such times they'll have more offspring. Sometimes, all the bold ones are killed off by wolves, and the shy ones manage to avoid that fate. The pendulum never stops swinging.

Varied and changing environments are behind the evolution of varied personalities. You look at a bunch of orb-weaver spiders; my favorite is the Golden Garden Spider. They all look the same. They spin webs that look a lot alike. Scientists have gathered spiders by the dozens to test if they have different personalities. They might take 60 of a particular species and raise them in individual terrariums. How do you test the startle response of a spider? To be simple, you sneak behind it and poke its rear with a pencil eraser! Nearly all the spiders run off the web and hide. How long will it be before each one comes out of hiding? How long before they are back on the web? The researchers will wait a day or two, so the spiders are hungry, and then drop a small cricket into each web. How long does it take for each spider to dash out and attack the cricket? It should come as no surprise that the spiders who take the longest to "recover" from being poked by a pencil eraser also take the longest, and are most cautious, when approaching and attacking the cricket, even when they are famished.

Well, if spiders have personalities, however rudimentary, it follows that any more complex animal ought to have one as well. Indeed, whether we keep pets or not, we all know somebody's cat or dog or cockatiel or whatever, if not our own. We know that each is a unique individual. The researchers that the book highlights are proving it, scientifically. It is about time the scientists caught up with what we all knew all along.

So I repeat what I've said before: It's not that animals are like us, the important point is that we are like them. We have personalities because they have personalities.

The warmest and fuzziest -- with big claws!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, pets, wildlife

It takes extraordinary experiences to set the stage for a wild animal to become bonded to a person. In the case of a bobcat, soon to be named Trooper, these experiences included being the only survivor of his family's massacre by coyotes and getting stuck in a patch of cholla; for Johnson, they included a life that led to particular love for wild places and wildlife, and a temperament that just matched the bob-kitten's need. Basically, Johnson found the dying kitten, extracted him from the cholla (a most dangerous cactus), and took him to a veterinarian who was able to meet his medical needs and, even more, knew just how to prepare the kitten and Johnson for a life together in and around the home Johnson and his wife had created. Thus begins Trooper: The Bobcat Who Came in from the Wild by Forrest Bryant Johnson.

Years later, when a self-styled animal activist accused Johnson of "imprisoning" the cat, he was able to show her that Trooper came and went as he pleased and was never caged except when he needed to be taken to see the vet. Trooper loved the vet, just not the car ride. He also preferred to sleep snuggled against Johnson's arm.

At the risk of spoiling, although Trooper was a gentle companion and friendly to people, he kept enough of his wild nature to kill a coyote that began to stalk him and other animals around the Johnson mini-ranch. It was a collaboration: Johnson and neighbors first killed all the coyotes but one of a small pack that "moved into the neighborhood" and began preying on pets and even stalking children. Trooper finished off the last one.

In the years between, Trooper and Johnson learned from each other. Johnson ruminates, somewhat ruefully, that he knew Trooper thought of him as a rather inept cat. Not for Trooper the notion of being a "person". The book is full of stories of cat and man, and the man's wife, grown daughter and other family members. Of the time his wife good-naturedly tried to hire a "home-call" grooming service to "bathe" Trooper, and the way Trooper so thoroughly intimidated the groomer, without harming him in the slightest, that the groomer simply turned and left. Of the time a great horned owl knocked itself silly against a window, and Trooper brought it inside, not to eat, but perhaps hoping for a new kind of playmate; it was a job and a half getting the irate owl back out the door! Of the time the alarm service kept phoning Johnson that there was an intruder tripping the light beam in the house's hallway, but nobody was ever found. What was found? Trooper and another (ordinary) cat that had come to live there, jumping off furniture and interrupting the beam; the alarm company removed that particular sensor.

There are still many people who say animals are totally instinctual and cannot think, or plan, or feel pain. Such people have never owned a pet, never watched it plan, perhaps for days, how to attack a particular kind of prey or enemy. They've never thought through the fact that animals seem to easily learn a number of our spoken words, but we learn hardly any of theirs, or none at all. Even the most inbred, bred-for-looks-not-for-smarts Pomeranian pup or Persian cat shows these attributes. Johnson found that a bobcat, that must live by its wits, had quite a lot going on in that big, fuzzy head of his.

This book gets my Heart-Warming, Heartstring-Tugging, Drippy-Nose Award for the year!

A wilder look at wildlife

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals

The book title is The Truth About Animals: Stones Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife. It is by Lucy Cooke, who does know a thing or two about animals. But if the title were anything close to accurate, the book would amount to millions of pages. Nonetheless, it is a fun romp.

The thirteen chapters spin out stories of thirteen animals, misconceptions about them—and how those were debunked—, and a strong dollop of "down and dirty", usually about their sex lives. For example, sex seems to be the only thing a sloth does quickly...over and over again (The author, a real sloth fanatic, is the first person to film sloth sex). Even their bathroom habits are quite a bit slower than a snail's pace: roughly one defecation weekly, for which the poor beast must make its way down the tree to drop the evidence of its existence on the ground and cover it with detritus.

The "lovelorn hippos" of the title refer to male hippos in Colombia, offspring of a small pack of them imported by Pablo Escobar in his heyday. Since the patriarch drives out all his sons once they reach puberty, they disperse around the countryside, looking in vain for mates among other packs of hippos.

The chapter on frogs dwells quite a bit on Xenopus, the African Clawed Frog, which used to be used for pregnancy testing. Only many years after the method was developed, and after it had become obsolete (replaced by the blue strip of monoclonal antibodies now in use), did it become clear that the frogs, millions of them, had brought with them "chytrid", a fungus parasite that is gradually destroying most other frog and toad species around the world. Xenopus is immune to chytrid; not so for most other amphibian species.

Oh, by the way, should you ever get close enough to a vulture to try to catch it, you ought to know that they keep cool on hot days by defecating on their legs and feet. Who knows, maybe the smell of fresh poop is also a real turn-on to the opposite sex! (Hmm, is this in any way related to a phrase from a love letter from Napoleon to Josephine, when he planned to return early from a battle, "I'll be home tomorrow – don't bathe!")

I really can't think of how to describe more without giving too much away. All the animals in the book, a fish, 8 mammals, 3 birds, and an amphibian, are vertebrates. There are 40,000 species of them in thousands of categories, so there's lots of room for sequels if the author is so inclined. And then, should she decide to tell us about some invertebrates, there are, so far, at least a couple of million species, though most are insects. But, hey, some are "bigger than a bedbug", such as squids, giant African tree snails, and six-foot Australian earthworms. A fun book.

Animals are like us because we are like them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

A few minutes ago I saw a video on Facebook, in which a mother pit bull brings her newborn pups, one by one, to her owner to hold, until the young woman's lap is full of puppies. Then the dog rests her head in the woman's lap also, enjoying the cooing and cuddling, apparently showing utter trust in her. "Trust?" Can a dog feel trust? Why not? If we humans can (even when we find it hard to define the word), it must have come from somewhere.

The first sentence of the epilogue of The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief and Compassion, by Peter Wohlleben, reads,

When I look at animals, I like to make analogies to people, because I cannot imagine that animals feel so very differently from us, and there's a good chance I'm right. (p. 244)

This is the author's second published book, the first being The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World … guess what is the next book I'll look for?

In the meantime, I have had a delightful read of the lucid translation from the German, by Jane Billinghurst. Mr. Wohlleben manages a municipal forest near Hümmel, Germany. He has ample opportunity to witness animal behaviors across the spectrum of woodland habitats, from weevils in the leaf litter to the rodents, deer, and other mammals and birds that abound there. His book's 41 chapters are part essay, part story, and part lyrical musing.

Did you ever have the thought to consider happiness in an insect? Is such a thing possible? In the chapter "Alien Worlds", one animal he writes of is a weevil barely 2mm long (0.08") that feeds on fallen leaves. Having no wings, and being slow, weevils have predators aplenty. Their only defense is to be still; they are well camouflaged, looking like a bit of broken leaf stem. So they must know fear. Perhaps they feel happy when they are not fearful.

The more that scientists delve into animal communications, the more they realize that they have rather rich vocabularies, so, as mentioned in various ways in several chapters, we can have a pretty good idea that, when a horse or cat or dog greets us, they really are happy to see us (or not!). The scientists have finally figured out what most of us already knew.

Many animals raise their young, in larger numbers than was known when I was first learning Biology 50+ years ago. While many things do seem to be innate, a matter of "instinct" (one of the least-understood words out there), many things do need to be learned: bird songs, the best paths to take, the kind of nesting material to use, the most effective way to gather or kill one's next meal.

I am particularly taken with bird songs. I can recognize just a few—the "cheerio! cheerio!" of a territorial Robin or the "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee" of a Chickadee—but even the Robin has dozens of other calls (the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has quite a library of them). We all know that mockingbirds and catbirds and others such as the Brown Thrasher mimic the songs of many other birds. They learn them; they aren't born with them. But many birds have hundreds to thousands of songs and song variations. The ones we usually notice are the territorial defense calls, the equivalent of "This is MY tree!" We pay less attention to the little "chip chip" sounds that are actually more frequent. Those are the warning sounds the birds make to each other because we are there. People have paid attention to bird warning sounds. The birds' calls differ depending on whether the intruder is a hawk, snake, or cat, for example. There are also calls for different kinds of food, for keeping in contact when relatives are out of each other's sight, and other "relationship" sounds.

But there is much, much more. For example, animals (furred or feathered) of all sorts deceive one another. When you are watching a squirrel busily digging to bury acorns in the yard, and you are visible to it, it will make hole after hole, but few of those holes contain an acorn! Most are decoys, to frustrate you if you are planning to steal the acorn. They also use decoy holes when being observed by other squirrels, perhaps even the more: they don't know whether you'll steal acorns, but they know a rival squirrel will! Both deceiving and thieving are problem-solving behaviors, that is, cognitive thinking.

In this book you'll find example after example of animals that exhibit reasoning and emotions…I almost wrote, "just like ours." But really, our reasoning and emotions are like theirs. Perhaps some of our thinking is deeper and so forth, but it is similar in principle. As the author writes in "Artificial Environments", our own emotions and senses are somewhat blunted because of the built environment in which most of us live. It is hard to enjoy a starry sky when you may never see one (lifelong residents of mega-cities can go a lifetime and never see a star, not one). Few of us understand Napoleon's love letter to Josephine, telling her he expected to return home the following day, asking her, "Don't bathe!". Our noses are so overwhelmed with artificial perfumes, air "fresheners" (contaminants, I call them), and such, that we have lost the ability to detect smells that could provide warning, or enhance a joyful reunion, and many other things.

I have had a good dose of animal stories, in this book and the last. Very gratifying. Knowing the depth of feeling that even a barnyard chicken has, however, is not likely to make me into a vegan. Rather, it gives me pause, that perhaps it would be well to follow the example of some Native Americans of earlier generations, that thanked a deer for offering itself to feed his family, or a grouse for the same, even thanking a netful of fish. We may think "more" than other animals (at least some of us do), but it is not certain that we think "better". Time will tell.

A turning point in psychozoology

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

Those who care enough to read the keyword list will note the term "animal psychology". Not so many years ago this was considered a serous error. No biologist would admit that animals could think or feel pain, and one must never, ever impute emotions to them. Thankfully, that is changing, and the new book Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by researchers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, celebrates this sea change in the "professional" understanding of what animals feel and think…or even that they do feel and think.

I hope we never again are subjected to cries of "Anthropomorphism!" when describing a pet, domestic animal, or any animal in the wild as "wanting", "loving", or even "planning". As the authors note, even paramecia (single celled, rather largish protozoa) can remember and plan. To recall a motto from an earlier post of mine:

We are like Them because We came from Them

The supposed "sin" of Anthropomorphism is to consider an animal as being in some way like a human. That takes it backwards. Everything in our psychology is based on animal psychology, and even to some extent on protozoan psychology.

The 54 essays in the book range across the Kingdom Animalia, though I don't think they managed to touch on every one of the 9 animal phyla. The majority of the stories are of vertebrates (Phylum Vertebrata, animals with an internal, bony skeleton), the next largest number are of octopuses (formerly octopi or octopodes), which are mollusks (Phylum Mollusca and class Cephalopoda). If playfulness is a sign of high intellegence, compared to creatures that don't play, the ordinary octopus is as playful as a cat or dog (or deer or horse or otter). One section does delve into other invertebrate phyla, with stories of slugs (also Mollusca), worms (Phylum Annelida), bumble bees (Phylum Arthropoda), and water bears (Phylum Tardigrada), plus the vertebrates known as amphibians, mainly frogs.

Can a bumble bee feel cheerful or downcast? Indeed it can, based on some clever research using sugar water, colored signs, and a chemical that blocks dopamine, the "happy" neurochemical. Charles Darwin wrote, "Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy and love." Biologists pooh-poohed this for 150 years. You might say that "human chauvinism" held back psychozoology by more than a century!

Of course, we are more prone to expect sorta-human responses from "charismatic megafauna" such as horses, tigers and elephants, and "charismatic mesofauna" such as typical house pets and other animals of a size that we can pick up, if they are tame enough to permit it (my cat hates being picked up and held; how tame is she?). What about chickens? One of the essays, titled "Chicken Indestructible", chronicles the day a beloved but elderly hen went missing. When she showed up a few days later, after much worry on Ms Montgomery's part about the many predators and other dangers she might have succumbed to, a little detective work showed that on a suddenly squally day, the intrepid hen had taken refuge in a hayloft until the stormy weather passed, happily eating whatever bugs were to be found there.

Wonderful stories abound in this enjoyable book, and I won't ruin any more of them by repeating them here. It's worth anybody's while to curl up with this one and devour it from end to end.

Skyborne Jewels

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, birds, hummingbirds, animal rescue, animal rehabilitation

Terry Masear rehabilitates distressed hummingbirds. She operates one of a handful of hummingbird rehabilitation "clinics" that is not run by the state of California. Her book Fastest Things on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood mingles powerful narrative with lyrical writing while taking us through a typical season.

Dr. Masear is a professor most of the year. By the middle of her Spring semester, baby hummingbirds begin being blown from nests, or they and their nests are inadvertently (or callously) cut out of trees during "spring cleanup", or adult birds amid full-tilt chick-raising duties bang into windows and cars and sustain other surprises. Various concerned folk bring them to her for care. Her home and its different levels of caged care, and a "graduating bird" aviary, fill up with as many as 50-100 birds at a time, as 150 or more pass through her routines of care on their way to full strength and release. At least, most of them do; a certain percentage are too badly injured or suffer radically improper "care" before desperate "rescuers" bring them to her as a last resort. Caring for hummingbirds is her summer "job", a costly one in terms of money and emotional stress and sheer physical labor.

Did you know that a growing baby hummingbird needs to eat at least 100 to 150 fruit flies daily to get adequate protein? The sugar water they get from backyard hummingbird feeders helps them keep up their energy levels for catching prey, as does the nectar they so avidly consume. Nectar, though, contains some protein and often has an extra amount from pollen that drops in. Sugar water? Nope. So they have to catch even more fruit flies. But the fast energy of sugar water has contributed to the booming population of these little jeweled flyers, particularly in temperate places like the Los Angeles basin.

The trouble comes when someone finds an injured bird and wants to help it get better, but feeds it only sugar water. It drinks it readily enough, but wastes away nonetheless. Or, possibly worse, someone who knows the bird needs protein tries to feed it house flies. They are too coarse and harsh. It'll snap them up, but its crop will fill up and get plugged, and without quick, expert action, it will starve to death. Only someone willing to buy browning bananas and let them rot and attract (and breed) fruit flies, and then lets the bird snatch them up, can hope to restore the bird's strength. Terry and her colleagues have a feeder mix with the right balance to feed them properly.

The bottom line? Call Terry or another specialized hummingbird shelter and take it there. I used the phrase "various concerned folk" above, and I do mean Various! The author has a chapter and more on her continual surprise at the people who bring her birds that need help…and some that won't. She spends at least as much time on the phone with people as she does with the birds in her care. Some people need to be talked through the best way to get a fallen or cut-off nest back to as nearly the same location where it was before. Others need to learn how to keep a bird alive overnight until they can bring it to her. Some need to be scolded for unconcern if they are too self-absorbed to do anything, saying, "Oh, well, maybe I'll just let nature take its course." Her retort, not always aloud, is "If you fell and broke a leg and were lying in the gutter, would you want every passer-by to "let nature take its course" until you died and were eaten by crows?"

The fact is, hummingbirds have hazards enough in their lives in places without people. They have a great many more hazards in our suburbs and cities. Why let "nature take its course" when the bird's need for help was not "natural" in the first place? Who cut the branch out of the tree? Who put up a house with large, almost invisible windows for birds to crash into? Wildlife of all kinds dies more often in our presence than in places we are not.

Near the end of the summer "distressed bird" season, the state-run bird shelters have a policy to take in no new fledglings. So Terry and the other private facilities get them all. A mixed blessing, just as she is getting ready to teach a new semester. But by late Fall, her cages have emptied and she can devote herself to her students.

I don't know what it is like to hold a two-ounce hummingbird in hand; by the author's account it is enthralling. The only bird I rescued was a seagull caught in fishing line, and that's a bird strong enough to do some damage if it doesn't agree with being handled. But people of all kinds, of all social strata and niches, seem to have a specially soft place in their heart for hummingbirds. They fall under the bird's spell, bring it to someone like Terry, and often get positively teary with thanks for her help. She wrote of getting a call from Pomona, and the guy said he'd "be right there". It is usually about an hour's drive. He got there in 20 minutes, roaring up her driveway in a big motorcycle. She asked how he came so fast, and he said, "Carpool lane," handed her a spark plug box with a tiny injured bird inside, and roared off.

Hummingbirds are spellbinding. So is Dr. Masear's writing. Excellence in action.

We came from them and we are like them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

Consider the vivisection theater. Hundreds of years ago curious investigators began tying or nailing down animals such as dogs and cutting them open to see how their organs worked. But sometime in the 1700's such dissections began to be carried out in public theaters, as part of the scientific lecture circuit which had become popular as the "renaissance" and "enlightenment" eras unfolded. Some investigators, after a single such experience, forswore the practice, being horrified at the barbarities inflicted on animals whose suffering was so obvious to them. Others, claiming that only humans could truly feel pain, forged ahead. Their descendants are with us even today, still claiming that while the shot deer or elk may "feel" the arrow or bullet, it does not "suffer" because they have no existential feelings; still claiming that it is OK to put various noxious chemicals into the eyes of rabbits clamped in a frame, for the sake of learning which ones cause inflammation, all the while saying that of course the rabbit may flinch but that it is not "feeling pain", only "exhibiting a physiological response to nerve impulses"; claiming that catch-and-release does no harm to a fish, that fish can't possibly "suffer" from having a hook stabbed through a jaw or even caught in the lining of the stomach; and so it goes. I say beware of people who use "only" too frequently.

Of course, considering with what callous indifference so many humans are treated by other humans, it really seems that the ability to be "humane" is seldom to be found, and in many it is entirely lacking. Animals in general may be amoral, but humans seem to have a corner on evil and wickedness. When you think your housecat is playing with a mouse in some cruel way, think again. It is getting the mouse too tired to bite back when the cat's sensitive mouth goes in to bite the neck and kill it.

Among the "core curriculum" required of all Arts and Sciences students in the 1960's were courses in Anthropology and Archaeology and other Humanities, but nothing in a realm remotely like Animal Husbandry. Only in a Biology course was the matter of animal behavior brought up, and then primarily in a negative way. Only "observed actions" could be reported, and then in the most dry and objective of terms. To mention, even to whisper, that any animal might have any purpose, thoughts, emotions, or make decisions, was "anthropomorphism" and was a much more serious sin than mere robbery or adultery (unless it was with one of the professor's children).

I did not like this attitude from the beginning, but I didn't know what to do about it. A copy of Edward Tolman's 1932 classic, Purposive Behavior in Rats and Men, came into my hands after I graduated, in Geology not in a life science: I could hit rocks without "hurting" them. Dr. Tolman was reviled in his day. Now we know that he was nearly always right. His writing helped me grow a little more. Finally, in much more recent years, I concluded: We have been looking at this backward all along! Of course anthropomorphism is incorrect, but only because the animals we observe live in a different world than we. In those parts of our shared world, where our experiences and theirs can overlap, we and they are very similar. But it is not because "they are like us." No, no no no, it is because we are like them, because we came from them.

Take that in. Make it a motto:

We are like Them because We came from Them

Why do you have emotions? Because your ancestors had emotions. Not just your parents, but your hominid ancestors of 5 million years ago, your tiny primate ancestors of 25 million years ago, your pre-mammal ancestors of 300 million years ago, even the tiny chordates of millions of years before that had emotions.

Why can you plan? Because your ancestors could plan, all the way back to half a billion years ago. Because with careful observation, we can discern that not only to warm, fuzzy animals plan, but so do turtles, fish, worms, even insects. A tiny nematode with less than 1,000 cells in its entire body, only about one-fifth of them making up its nervous system, can plan. Nematode plans are simple, but they exist.

It has been demonstrated that noxious stimuli are just as painful for a spider as they are for you. Animals right up and down the "evolutionary scale" feel pain, fight for their lives, and either enjoy or suffer in accord with things that help or harm them. But don't take any comfort in the notion of the "evolutionary scale". It is a deceptive concept. Evolution began on Earth about four billion years ago. You are the product of four billion years of evolution. But so is a hamster, a bumblebee, a swallow, or a brook trout. There is an odd fish called a Coelacanth, the "poster child" of "living fossils." Specimens caught since they were re-discovered in 1938 look just like fossils of 65 million years ago. Prior to 1938, scientists thought they'd gone extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. No fossils of Coelacanth bones younger than 65 million years had been found. But just because they look so much like their ancestors of so long ago, don't think evolution left them behind. Many aspects of their environment in the sorta-deep ocean have remained stable, but not all, and they have continued to evolve along with everything else. It just didn't change their skeleton very much.

Three types of animal were chosen by Carl Safina, to study and to learn from, in his quest to see just how similar we and they might be: Elephants, Wolves, and Killer Whales. He has written Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Fortunately, very early in his research, he met Cynthia Moss, who works with elephants. When he asked her what the elephants might teach us about humanity, he got a gentle answer that turned his question on its head. In part, she said, "Comparing elephants to people—I don't find it helpful. I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself." (p 12).

When we look at an elephant as an elephant, what do we see? Firstly, observing a single elephant is like observing a goblet and trying to infer what the rest of the place setting might be like with its plates, flatware, and so forth. Cynthia Moss and others observe elephant families and groups of families. An elephant has a social life as rich as yours (ignoring the 478 Facebook "friends" you've never met and who have no measurable impact on your life). Elephants don't rank themselves the way most primates do. But each family group has a Matriarch, a "Mom", whose accumulated wisdom earns her immense respect from the rest. Elephants together are a lot like big cows. But life is about more than eating and drinking. They play at times, even adults, and can be quite silly. When one member has been away for some reason, they enjoy very emotional reunions.

What do they experience differently from humans? They have two voices. We are familiar with the trumpeting calls they make, at frequencies humans can hear. Those are usually for sounding some kind of alarm, or for loud greetings when another is nearby. We are not familiar with their other voice, which is pitched too low for our ears. But if you happen to stand close to an elephant who is talking to another who happens to be 100 yards away, you might feel the voice. It'll make your chest shake. Most of their communication goes on in infrasound, and without special equipment, we can't even discover what elephant "words" sound like! They have worse eyesight than we, but a better sense of smell. Their thick hides prevent them from feeling quite as keenly as we do over most of their bodies, but the tip of the trunk is as sensitive as your tongue. It is also dexterous as a thumb and finger; I've seen an elephant peel and eat a tangerine, in less than a second. That's faster than I can do it!

A lot of things "everyone knows" about elephants was learned from elephants in captivity, or in family groups devastated by the loss of all the older family members because they were poached for their large tusks. A lot of what "everyone knows" about elephants comes from anecdotes about elephants who were mourning such losses, or driven almost mindless from boredom. Mr. Safina defines consciousness as the thing that feels like something. (p 21, his emphasis) The evident feelings of elephants and other animals must cause us to move the boundary of "consciousness" way, way back into the past. Consciousness isn't a unitary item, that you have or you don't. It is a scale, a spectrum, like fainter or brighter light. An elephant or killer whale has a larger brain than any human. Perhaps there's just as much, or more, "extra gray matter" in there, and their consciousness shines brighter than ours. Until we learn their languages, we'll probably never know.

Spending a good part of a winter watching wolves in Yellowstone, Safina learned more about consciousness. Seeing how wolves cooperate to hunt elk, on one hand communicating clearly with their fellow hunters while working equally hard to deceive their prey, it is easy to see how they plan and coordinate, solving problems on the fly (unless, of course, you are an anti-anthropomorphistic professor of animal behavior). He writes again about consciousness: "People who play with a dog—or a squirrel or a rat—and then believe that the animal lacks consciousness, themselves lack a certain consciousness." (p 288)

Just because other animals don't talk in human languages, doesn't mean they can't communicate. It is interesting, how many tame and domestic animals learn some human words, sometimes dozens of hundreds!, yet we never learn any of their words, and they must resort to the crudest pantomime to communicate with us. Who is the smarter one? D'you have a pet dog? He or she can make several dozen distinct sounds. Why not learn what some of them mean? About all most of us can learn is the sound of an angry growl (but we usually confuse it with an offended growl or a play-growl) and maybe the begging whine (and there are a few kinds we don't bother to distinguish).

Wolves have social lives more like elephants than like the Akela-Alpha-led wolves that sprang from the mind (certainly not the experience) of Rudyard Kipling. You know the drill. When the Alpha misses his first kill, the other wolves kill him and a new Alpha takes his place. Actually, the Alpha female has more status than her mate. He can't have pups; she can. And when food is abundant, other females are allowed to breed, and not always with the Alpha male only. Wolves do have some habits that prevent excessive inbreeding. And a wolf misses about 80% or more of its attempted kills. It takes persistence and continual practice and exercise to bring down deer or elk frequently enough to avoid starvation. Every wolf in a pack is equivalent to an Olympic athlete. But some hunt better than others. So they take the lead in a hunt, and they share their kills. Wolves care for each other. The notion of "dog eat dog" is a human concept, not a canine or lupine one.

Before going on to the killer whales, Mr. Safina dives into seven chapters that make up a section titled "Whines and Pet Peeves", in which he eloquently and convincingly takes on seven myths about the supposed lack of consciousness and so forth among nonhuman animals. This is the most powerful section of the book. Put extra-simply: if animals didn't have a "theory of mind", if they didn't have powerful social emotions (even the so-called solitary ones like tigers), if they didn't have a way to distinguish "me" from "not me" in their own thoughts, if they couldn't plan, and several other skills we tend to think we have in a monopoly, they would quickly become extinct. Every one of them.

We can plan because trilobites and worms and clams figured that out half a billion years ago, and animals ever since have been refining it. We just have the brain power to make extra-detailed plans. One thing after another. We came from them. Thus we are like them.

Killer whales. Makes you shiver, does it? All most of us ever knew of them was that they kill baleen whales, eat the tongue and let the rest sink. Steely-eyed, remorseless killers, these killer whales, even if they have been called the more fashionable term Orcas in recent years. Now we find there isn't only one worldwide species of killer whales. There are at least five and maybe 12 to 20. Some do indeed prey on non-toothed whales. Some prey only on fish. Members of one population, currently numbering 81 (more or less; it may have changed in the past year), feed only on salmon. Some prey only on sea lions or large seals. Some live in a home range of a few dozen or a few hundred square miles. Some range much more widely, and when they pass through the home range of another group with its different diet, they ignore them, and the home group ignores the passers-by.

They are matriarchal, like elephants. It's interesting, that all the really social animal species are matriarchal, except humans. Maybe patriarchy is why we have wars. Has any country on Earth that has a female leader (President or Prime Minister), caused a war? Of course a couple have fought defensive warfare, including Margaret Thatcher. Another side thought: I've had both male and female supervisors and managers, and the females generally were better leaders.

So back to the whales. People remember the few times (probably only twice) that a killer whale in captivity has killed a human. No wild killer whale, of any of the known groups (species?) has ever killed a human, nor deliberately threatened one. Maybe when our Prince of Peace returns, Jesus will come as a whale. Just like elephants, just like wolves, just like animals in general, killer whales are gentle with everything they don't intend to eat. They are playful, They love sex. They clearly love each other. They are emotional, they have personalities: some are more shy and some more outgoing; some are more playful and some seem rather monkish or contemplative.

But whales are whales. They are not "like us". They are descended from thinking, emoting, planning, playful animals just as we are. There is no justification for granting them "human rights", because they are not human. Suppose we found ourselves needing to be granted "wolf rights" or "whale rights" in order to get along with them?

Many folks are deathly afraid of "space aliens", who "abduct" some humans, perform "experiments" on them, perhaps with a reproductive intent, and even plant mysterious machines in their bodies. Isn't that what we do throughout nature? We have done this to almost every kind of animal out there, and there is a tiny radio transmitter that can be pasted on the back of a honeybee! I think all the fear of space aliens is a form of guilty displacement: we are afraid of ourselves, not because of what we might do, but because of what we have done and are doing. Including to people. The quintessential space alien of the early Twentieth Century was Josef Mengele, who abducted people, mostly Jews and homosexuals, and did all kinds of barbaric experiments on them. Do we need to destroy in order to learn? One would hope not. But tens of thousands of scientists would say, more or less reluctantly, that we must. Sad but true.

The author's point is not some anti-human, liberal rant. Even in the "rant chapters", section three, he is hopeful that we will figure out how to preserve and conserve and live with the biosphere before we heedlessly eliminate it. But drawing his book to a close, he wrote, "For every ballerina there are thousands of soldiers." The more I learn about it, the more I think hope is all we have.

Who is really at sea, the character or the reader?

kw: book reviews, fiction, novels, animals, shipwrecks, mysticism

A friend gave me a paperback copy of Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This may be the most difficult book to review that I've encountered. It is described by the author in his introduction as a story to "make you believe in God." I would say, for anyone who thinks belief in God is a possible thing, it will make that possibility inevitable, and for anyone who thinks belief in God is either impossible or wrong, it will confirm that impossibility.

Near the end of the Revelation given to John, the last book in the New Testament, the angel's final words to John are:

Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy. (Rev 22:10b-11, NIV)

Earlier in the vision another angel had said, "There will be no more delay" (10:6), which the King James Version renders, "There will be time no longer." Together these passages show that once the end times truly arrive, it is too late to repent. Of course, the vile and the wrongdoers believe in neither end times nor in repentance.

Young Pi, the nickname for Piscine (French for swimming pool), leaves nothing to chance. Having an open heart and a keen desire to know God, he has accepted and diligently practices Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. During the major section of the book, which tells the story of his nine months at sea in a lifeboat in the company of a tiger, Pi credits his triple faith for his survival.

The core idea of the story is ambiguity, even irrationality. But "irrational" has two meanings. As a schoolboy, Piscine Molitor Patel, tired of hearing his name mispronounced as "pissing", begins a new school year by insisting that he is to be called Pi, writing on the blackboard of every classroom, "Pi ≈ 3.14". Pi (shown in formulas as π) is the most irrational of the so-called irrational numbers; they are those quantities that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers. In fact, π is the leading member of a special class of irrational numbers called "transcendental numbers", because they are not the result of any simple operations but themselves form the basis for operations: they are sources, not productions. They transcend algebra.

The first number proven to be irrational is the square root of 2, shown as √2. It is the first member of the other class of irrational numbers, the algebraic numbers. Algebraic and Transcendental: these are the two kinds of irrational numbers. And the other meaning of "irrational"? A sort of synonym, even an evil twin, of "illogical".

The transcendental numbers intrigue me. Though few are known, they seem to outnumber all other kinds of numbers. And so I recall Isaiah 45:15, "You are a God who has been hiding Himself." As metaphors, they are even more fascinating, because "transcendental" is a kind of good-angel twin of "divine". If in reading Life of Pi we believe his story throughout (at least, prior to the second half of Chapter 99), he becomes a kind of god to us. Or, at least, an avatar leading us to God. Mr. Pi Patel becomes transcendental. If, instead, we believe the second half of that chapter, seemingly fabricated on the spot to satisfy overly-rational shipping-disaster investigators, we fall from heaven to earth.

Perhaps this story cannot make absolutely everyone believe in God. But it makes a reader clear that the choice of heaven or hell is ours to make, and we will surely attain our choice.

And you thought sharks were dangerous

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal rights, performing animals, orcas

What is black and white, smarter than a chimpanzee, but can't walk? It is the apex predator of the oceans, the orca or "killer whale". Until about 90 years ago, an orca was called a "grampus" by many whalers; that's the word used in Moby Dick. Others called them "blackfish".

I once recalculated the Encephalization Quotient of various whales and porpoises, based on subtracting out the blubber so they'd be more comparable to land mammals. Human EQ ranges from 7 to nearly 8, for fit persons (Take a bright individual with an EQ of 7.5, but a sweet tooth. If he fattens up and his weight doubles, his EQ will drop below 7). Porpoises and other "small" toothed whales have EQ's mostly above 4. But even the fittest bottlenose is 40% blubber, so divide 4 by 0.6, and you get – surprise! – something above 6.6! Raw EQ for orcas ranges from nearly 3 to nearly 4, but their percentage of blubber is a bit less, so I'd put their "real" EQ into the 4.5-6.5 range.

I've been to SeaWorld to see orcas perform, including "rocket hop" stunts that throw a human trainer 30+ feet above the water. This was before 2010 when a widely-publicized killing of a trainer led to a ban on human trainers (who are also performers) entering the water with orcas throughout the US.

How is it even possible for humans to work with these creatures? We need some comparisons, and John Hargrove, an orca trainer for 14 years, provides them in his new book Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish, written with Howard Chua-Eoan. John was one of several orca trainers interviewed in the film Blackfish, which probed the real story of the death of Dawn Brancheau.

After a performance in February 2010, tensions were high between several orcas, for reasons not clear to the trainers, and Dawn was not in the water, but on a platform next to the pool right at water level, talking to Tilicum, when he moved forward, bit her arm and pulled her into the pool. He didn't try to eat her, but rammed and bit her body repeatedly. She didn't live long, and was partly dismembered. She was the third trainer that Tilicum had killed, but the first to be made known publicly, because this took place in public view.

Do orcas consider us prey? Not really. We don't resemble any of their usual pray animals. Seas around the world are inhabited by a dozen or more loosely related populations of orcas. Some prefer seals, some attack primarily baleen whales, and others eat mainly fish. Being quite a bit smarter than sharks, orcas can tell we aren't seals when they encounter swimming humans, and typically leave them alone. That is in their natural environment. A theme park is hardly a natural environment!

The salt water tanks at SeaWorld parks are big, really big, from our perspective. Roughly the size of a football field, and 40 feet deep, they hold 10-20 million gallons of water, each. But a mature male orca is 30 feet (9m) long and he can weigh 10 tons, though the heaviest male in captivity weighs 6 tons. Take that 6-ton animal, compared to a 200# (90kg) man: the ratio is 60:1. The length ratio is about 5:1. A 15 million-gallon tank sounds like a lot; that is about 1.8 million cubic feet, but:

• Comparison 1: 1.8 million cu.ft / 60 = 30,000 cu.ft. (850 cu.m.)
• Comparison 2: 300 ft (football field length) / 5 = 60 ft (18m)

The average house in my neighborhood is a 3-bedroom, 1- or 2-bath bungalow, colonial style, with a full basement but no garage. Indoor volume is about 15,000 cu.ft. The two largest houses on this block are 4-bed and include an attached 2-car garage. Their volume is just under 25,000 cu.ft. That's similar to Comparison 1. On a length basis (Comparison 2), the usual house around here is 30-35' long (10m or less), and the two large houses are 40 ft long (12m). So a captive orca in a SeaWorld park has a pretty big "house" to live in, one might think. Almost a McMansion, perhaps. But he can never go out into the yard. It is perpetual house arrest. A free orca often swims 50-100 km daily, and may dive to 1000 ft (~300m) after prey. You, in house arrest, might take advantage of a treadmill or StairMaster. They don't make those for orcas.

The book has another apt analogy. For about 70 years, some people who fear "flying saucers" or ET's have expressed anxiety over "alien abductions" and "experiments", including breeding experiments, being done by aliens on human captives. Now imagine, you are suddenly subject to imprisonment in your own home, by captors the size of Guinea Pigs…except they are smarter than you are, they have weapons you can't understand, and they control your food supply. Oh, and they teach you silly "behaviors" that you must perform 4, 5, 6, even 7 times daily. They take away your children, subdue you to perform artificial insemination, and take away the children that result, once they are weaned. They also bring in, from time to time, other children and adults with whom you are supposed to share your living space and "all get along." Except these others don't speak your language and have cultural habits you can't fathom. We're not talking moving a Frenchman into an American home. More like tossing Mr. Joe Sixpack in with a warrior from the New Guinea uplands, a Congolese tribeswoman who has never heard the English language, and Quechua-speaking twin toddlers from Peru.

I analyzed orca intelligence above in terms of EQ. The batch of disparate humans described in the prior paragraph would soon develop some kind of patois so they could communicate, and the young twins would probably learn all three other languages available. Orcas in "forced communities" in SeaWorld parks never seem to learn one anothers' languages. Those captured wild were just a year or two old, so they were never raised or socialized by parents. Those born in the parks were, if they were very lucky, somewhat "raised" by their mothers, at least for a couple of years, but were typically moved to another park by year 5, only partway through whatever socialization their mother could teach them. Captive orca groups are thus socially abnormal, extremely so. They cannot communicate vocally to defuse emotional tensions, so they are more violent among themselves than wild orcas.

It is a testament to their intelligence, curiosity, and general good nature, that captive orcas tolerate humans swimming with them at all. If you were in the house described above, and a Guinea-Pig-sized ET came within arm's reach, do you think it would live long? The incidence of "aggressive incidents" and trainer deaths caused by orcas is actually stunningly small.

John tells us there are at present 30 orcas in captivity at SeaWorld parks. Contrary to park press releases, the typical captive orca has a life span of 15-20 years, if they survive beyond a year or two, which half don't. Wild orcas live 30 (male) to 50 (female) years. But a few captive orcas are in the range of 30+ years old. Even if orca "performances" become outlawed, the captive orcas cannot be put into the ocean. They don't know how to behave around wild orcas and would be either shunned, and thus die of loneliness, or killed outright. So we have a 20-to-40-year commitment to these animals, to provide some kind of living for their lifetimes. They are roughly half as intelligent as we are, perhaps more. But that intelligence is different. We cannot ethically keep them as performers, and especially, we cannot keep breeding them. The day must come when no whales are captives in tiny tanks ("tiny" meaning smaller than the Gulf of Bothnia).

John Hargrove loves the whales. He details his life, learning what he had to learn to qualify as an apprentice trainer, getting opportunities that rapidly moved him up the ladder until he was Senior Trainer. A couple of years in France, training orcas who had not yet learned how to work with humans in "their" water…and training the French trainers. He does not stint from telling of the occasional problems with an aggressive or angry orca. I am again impressed that these animals have levels of self-control, and an ability to cool down quickly, that beats nearly any human I've known. John tells of the injuries and traumas, physical and mental, that led him to take a medical leave and then to resign from training, as badly as that hurt him emotionally.

He is deeply conflicted, wishing he could be with the whales, yet knowing that, were SeaWorld management truly ethical, there could be no further human-orca contact beyond caretaking, and many people he loves would lose their jobs. He has become an advocate for the whales. They are the real victims here. No human has yet learned to communicate in depth with an orca or any other sea mammal, in spite of the fact that orcas not only have language among themselves, but several languages around the world. So we have little hope of learning the language of space aliens if any ever show up. Meanwhile, in this "alien encounters of the third (or even fourth!) kind"scenario, we are the aliens, and our captives are totally dependent on us. We have them in a space they cannot escape, and have changed them so they cannot be introduced to "normal" society, anywhere on this globe.

Every one of us needs to spend a few minutes daily pondering that fact.