Inside Animal Minds: The New Science of Animal Intelligence (3 page)

“Sometimes the human cognitive psychologists can be so fixed on their definitions that they forget how fabulous these animal discoveries are,” said Clive Wynne of the University of Florida, who has studied cognition in pigeons and marsupials. “We’re glimpsing intelligence throughout the animal kingdom, which is what we should expect. It’s a bush, not a single-trunk tree with a line leading only to us.”

Some of the branches on that bush have led to such degrees of intelligence that we should blush for ever having thought any animal a mere machine.

In the late 1960s, a cognitive psychologist named Louis Herman began investigating the cognitive abilities of bottlenose dolphins. Like humans, dolphins are highly social and cosmopolitan, living in subpolar to tropical environments worldwide; they’re highly vocal; and they have special sensory skills, such as echolocation. By the 1980s, Herman’s cognitive studies were focused on a group of four young dolphins—Akeakamai, Phoenix, Elele, and Hiapo—at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Hawaii. The dolphins were curious and playful, and they transferred their sociability to Herman and his students.

“In our work with the dolphins, we had a guiding philosophy,” Herman says, “that we could bring out the full flower of their intellect, just as educators try to bring out the full potential of a human child. Dolphins have these big, highly complex brains. My thought
was, OK, so you have this pretty brain. Let’s see what you can do with it.”

To communicate with the dolphins, Herman and his team invented a hand- and arm-signal language, complete with a simple grammar. For instance, a pumping motion of the closed fists meant “hoop,” and both arms extended overhead (as in jumping jacks) meant “ball.” A “come here” gesture with a single arm told them to “fetch.” Responding to the request “hoop, ball, fetch,” Akeakamai would push the ball to the hoop. But if the word order was changed to “ball, hoop, fetch,” she would carry the hoop to the ball. Over time, she could interpret more grammatically complex requests, such as “right, basket, left, Frisbee, in,” asking that she put the Frisbee on her left in the basket on her right. Reversing “left” and “right” in the instruction would reverse Akeakamai’s actions. Akeakamai could complete such requests the first time they were made, showing a deep understanding of the grammar of the language.

“They’re a very vocal species,” Herman adds. “Our studies showed that they could imitate arbitrary sounds that we broadcast into their tank, an ability that may be tied to their own need to communicate. I’m not saying they have a dolphin language. But they are capable of understanding the novel instructions that we convey to them in a tutored language; their brains have that ability.

“There are many things they could do that people have always doubted about animals. For example, they correctly interpreted, on the very first occasion, gestured instructions given by a person displayed on a TV screen behind an underwater window. They recognized that television images were representations of the real world that could be acted on in the same way as in the real world.”

They readily imitated motor behaviors of their instructors, too. If a trainer bent backward and lifted a leg, the dolphin would turn on its back and lift its tail in the air. Although imitation was once
regarded as a simpleminded skill, cognitive scientists in recent years have revealed that it’s extremely difficult, requiring the imitator to form a mental image of the other person’s body and pose, and then adjust his own body parts into the same position—actions that imply an awareness of one’s self.

“Here’s Elele,” Herman says, showing a film of her following a trainer’s directions. “Surfboard, dorsal fin, touch.” Instantly, Elele swam to the board and, leaning to one side, gently laid her dorsal fin on it, an untrained behavior. The trainer stretched her arms straight up, signaling “Hooray!” and Elele leaped into the air, squeaking and clicking with delight.

“Elele just loved to be right,” Herman said. “And she loved inventing things. We made up a sign for ‘create,’ which asked a dolphin to create its own behavior.”

Dolphins often synchronize their movements in the wild, such as leaping and diving side by side, but scientists don’t know what signal they use to stay so tightly coordinated. Herman thought he might be able to tease out the technique with his pupils. In the film, Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from the side of the pool, circle together underwater for about ten seconds, then leap out of the water, spinning clockwise on their long axis and squirting water from their mouths, every maneuver done at the same instant. “None of this was trained,” Herman says, “and it looks to us absolutely mysterious. We don’t know how they do it—or did it.”

He never will. Akeakamai and Phoenix and the two others died accidentally years ago. Through these dolphins, he made some of the most extraordinary breakthroughs ever in understanding another species’ mind—a species that even Herman describes as “alien,” given its aquatic life and the fact that dolphins and primates diverged millions of years ago. “That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for
intellect,” Herman said. “We don’t share their biology or ecology. That leaves social similarities—the need to establish relationships and alliances superimposed on a lengthy period of maternal care and longevity—as the likely common driving force.”

“I loved our dolphins,” Herman says, “as I’m sure you love your pets. But it was more than that, more than the love you have for a pet. The dolphins were our colleagues. That’s the only word that fits. They were our partners in this research, guiding us into all the capabilities of their minds. When they died, it was like losing our children.”

Herman pulled a photograph from his file. In it, he is in the pool with Phoenix, who rests her head on his shoulder. He is smiling and reaching back to embrace her. She is sleek and silvery with appealingly large eyes, and she looks to be smiling too, as dolphins always do. It’s an image of love between two beings. In that pool, at least for that moment, there was clearly a meeting of the minds.

Rico the border collie’s ability to recognize and remember the names of some 200 objects became apparent when he began helping one of his owners around the house. Other border collies have demonstrated similar abilities. Chaser, a border collie in South Carolina, is now able to recognize over 1,000 words
.

(Fritz Reiss/Associated Press)

The western scrub jay, a species of jay native to western North America, has been known to outwit neighboring birds by rehiding its own food after sensing that an original hiding place has been compromised
.

(Lukich/Shutterstock)

Dolphins often synchronize their movements in the wild, such as leaping and diving side by side
.

(Studio 37/Shutterstock)

D
aybreak is sudden and swift, as though an unseen hand had simply reached out and raised a dimmer switch. Cued by the dawn, 34 chimpanzees awaken.

They are still in the nests they built the previous night, in trees at the edge of an open plateau.

A wild chimpanzee does not get out of bed quietly. Chimps wake up hollering. There are technical names for what I’m hearing—pant-hoots, pant-barks, screams, hoos—but to a newcomer’s ear, it’s just a crazy, exuberant, escalating racket. You cannot listen without grinning.

These are not chimps you’ve seen before. They’re savanna-woodland chimps, found in eastern Senegal and across the border in western Mali. Unlike their better-known rain forest kin, savanna-woodland chimps spend most of their day on the ground. There is no canopy here. The trees are low and grow sparsely. It’s an environment very much like the open, scratchy terrain where early humans evolved. For this reason, chimpanzee communities like the Fongoli group—named for a stream that runs through its range—are uniquely valuable to scientists who study the origins of our species.

By 8 a.m., my chintzy key-chain thermometer says it’s 90 degrees. Our shirts are marked by the same white salt lines that appear on people’s boots in winter. Here, it’s salt from sweat. The plateau we’re crossing is a terrain of nothing, of red rocks and skin cancer, with no trees to break the fall of equatorial sun. In our backpacks, we each carry three liters of water. It was cool when we set out. By
noon, it will be hot enough to steep tea.

I’m not complaining. I’m making a point. Life on the savanna—even so-called mosaic savanna, tempered by patches of lusher gallery forest along the streambeds—is exceptionally harsh. If you are a primate used to greener terrain, you must adjust your behavior to survive. Our earliest hominin (meaning bipedal ape) ancestors evolved more than five million years ago during the Miocene, an epoch of extreme drying that saw the creation of vast tracts of grassland. Tropical primates on the perimeter of their range no longer had plentiful fruits and year-round streams and lakes. They were forced to adapt, to range farther in their search for food and water, to take advantage of other resources. In short, to get creative.

In 2007, Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist at Iowa State University, reported that a Fongoli female chimp named Tumbo was seen two years earlier, less than a mile from where we are right now, sharpening a branch with her teeth and wielding it like a spear. She used it to stab at a bush baby—a pocket-size, tree-dwelling nocturnal primate that springs from branch to branch like a grasshopper. Until that report, the regular making of tools for hunting and killing mammals had been considered uniquely human behavior. Over a span of 17 days at the start of the 2006 rainy season, Pruetz saw the chimps hunt bush babies 13 times. There were 18 sightings in 2007. It would appear the chimps are getting creative.

There are individuals who are uncomfortable with Pruetz’s tales of spear-wielding chimps, and not all of them are bush babies. Harvard professor of biological anthropology Richard Wrangham, who has studied chimpanzee aggression in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, has been skeptical. Wrangham is widely known for his “demonic male” theory, which holds that the savage murders male chimps carry out while policing their turf are suggestive of a violent nature at the core of man. Primatologist Craig Stanford, author of
The Hunting Apes
, also downplays the importance of Pruetz’s findings.
“This behavior is fascinating, but the observations are so preliminary that it merits only a short note in a journal.”

The report ran in the major journal
Current Biology
, and people seemed to find it interesting. In the week that followed, Pruetz’s findings were featured in more than 300 news and science outlets, including
New Scientist
, the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and NPR’s
Science Friday
. The Smithsonian Institution requested one of the spears. In short, it was the most widely talked about primatology news since the reports of infanticide and cannibalism at Jane Goodall’s site at Gombe in the 1970s.