Zoobiquity

  We humans don’t literally flock or herd or school. But perhaps, if we listen carefully enough to our own adolescents’ cries to fit in, we can hear faint echoes of an evolutionary past in which conspicuousness attracted danger. Perhaps this suggests that before parents condemn a child’s desperate plea for the “right” Nikes or jeans as materialistic—or dismiss it as overly conforming—they consider a different perspective: the powerful adolescent drive to fit in may represent a precious and ancient protective evolutionary legacy.

  Whether it’s the Moss Landing otters erupting into a rough-and-tumble wrestling session, Tanzanian gorillas walloping each other in a game of tag, or pink salmon learning to school, peer groups give adolescent animals the chance to practice social behaviors and assess their place in the group. Like high school students figuring out whether they will be jocks and cheerleaders or drama geeks and mathletes, animals go through a similar sorting process. They get a sense of their competition and their community—what it takes to fit in and what it takes to win.

  But groups have a troubling flip side. Although they can be safe, pleasant, and necessary, peer groups are not passive sanctuaries that simply shelter young humans and animals until they’re ready to burst into the adult world. Groups are elaborate social laboratories, places for young animals to practice adult behaviors. And for social animals, and perhaps especially long-lived social mammals, one of the most important things they’re sorting out is social status.

  Sometimes the biggest risk for animal adolescents comes not from outside predators but from members of their own species. Susan Perry notes in Manipulative Monkeys, her entertaining book about her decades studying capuchin monkeys in the forests of Costa Rica that “the main cause of mortality in capuchins is conflicts with other capuchins.” Rival gangs vying for territory, mates, and resources account for much of this violence. But peer groups pose other unique dangers. They tempt, cajole, and shame individuals into doing things that, on their own, they would never do. She told me about monkeys she’d observed that had “extremely high social intelligence” and “great interpersonal skills” whose behavior deteriorated into violent mayhem when they became part of a bachelor group of other adolescents.

  She followed one monkey in particular—a youth named Gizmo, who fell in with a gang of seven other males her research team called the Lost Boys. As a young monkey, Gizmo had been appropriately socially deferential and seemed to be headed for a stable, if exactly not illustrious, life in a capuchin troop. But as he emerged from childhood, Gizmo started getting drawn into dangerous situations. Egged on by his socially impulsive brother, Gizmo would end up in brawls with larger, older males. He invariably got soundly thrashed.

  As Gizmo accumulated scars and broken bones, his gang also began attracting new members. Soon they totaled eight, each boy more battle scarred and unsuccessful in love than the next. It spiraled out of control. They kept roving and terrorizing the neighborhood, never able to settle down into a coed, mixed-age stable family group. When Perry told me about the Lost Boys, she spoke with the resignation of a high school teacher who can only watch sadly as some of her students inevitably slide into delinquency.

  “Their problem,” Perry said, “was that their group was just too big. The other troops of capuchins seriously resisted their immigration attempts when they saw eight adolescent male monkeys coming.” Perry emphasized that migration by all-male groups is a normal and necessary life stage—there’s no safe way to do it, yet they all have to go through it. What was striking about the Lost Boys was that, because their group was so big, they got stuck in the transition stage. Shunned from capuchin society, Gizmo ended up dying a pariah, never having achieved useful social status within the larger group.

  And so it goes for human teens, too. “Delinquency and criminal behavior … are more likely to occur in groups during adolescence than they are during adulthood,” writes Laurence Steinberg, an adolescence expert at Temple University. Drinking, risky driving, sexual risk taking—all are more prevalent, more dangerous, and more likely to occur in groups of adolescents.

  For animals and humans alike, falling in with—or afoul of—the wrong crowd can have deadly consequences.

  In September 2010, six teens—Raymond Chase, Cody J. Barker, William Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi, and Asher Brown—all died of the same cause. Although they ranged in age from thirteen to nineteen and lived in different states, their deaths were linked by one sad commonality: all six had killed themselves after being bullied.

  Their deaths were added to the rolls of the several thousand other teen suicides in the United States in 2010. Suicide is a major adolescent human health threat—among eight- to twenty-four-year-olds nationwide, it’s the third most common cause of death.

  Like adults who commit suicide, teens who kill themselves usually have an underlying mental illness—in particular, depression or depressed mood. However, one familiar aspect of the adolescent emotional profile may make this age group especially vulnerable to suicide: their increased impulsivity. With access to physical and pharmacological weapons of self-destruction, an impulsive teen can tip a difficult situation into a deadly one.

  Psychological “autopsies,” the extensive interviews and investigations conducted by psychiatrists after suicides, have shown that the triggers for teen suicide are remarkably similar across cases. Loss—such as the death of a close friend or family member. Or a best friend’s moving out of town, especially for teens who have few friends. Rejection—by a girl- or boyfriend. Deep embarrassment—being kicked off a team, failing an important exam, enduring a humiliating public reprimand by a teacher.

  Loss, rejection, embarrassment. The kinds of experiences that are triggers for human suicide also occur within animal groups. But animal behaviorists give them different names: isolation, exclusion, submission, and appeasement. Along with loss, rejection, and embarrassment, these terms describe the complex mixture of reactions and behaviors that contribute to the dynamics of social status within animal groups.

  Determining and maintaining status occupies much of the activity within groups of social animals. Aggression by dominants against subordinate members of the group is seen commonly, in animals including sea otters, sea birds, wolves, and chimpanzees. And social hierarchies are in constant flux. A position at the top is never secure. As many animal behaviorists have pointed out, picking on subordinates is a useful, public way for dominant animals to display and preserve their top-dog positions. Although not every animal can be an alpha, top-tier rank carries important benefits, often including exclusive control of mates, food territories, and shelter.

  In humans, we see dominants aggressing against subordinates all the time, but we use a more colloquial term: bullying. For years the rap on bullies was that they were insecure, the kids who “feel bad” about themselves. Picking on others, it was believed, momentarily raised their self-esteem. But recent research suggests that bullies feel, on the whole, pretty good about themselves. Their self-esteem is just fine. In fact, bullies often sit comfortably at the top of the social food chain, surrounded by hangers-on, wannabes, and silent bystanders who are more than happy just to be out of the bullies’ line of fire.

  If animal and human bullying share some common purpose, it may be exactly that: a demonstration of strength and dominance, and a cautionary lesson to anyone who might challenge the status quo. This cross-species perspective on bullying offers insights into why bullies often emerge from the top, not the bottom, of human social hierarchies.

  Animals can also help us understand how human bullies choose their victims. In some animal groups, being different can increase an animal’s vulnerability.

  Not unlike animal predators, human bullies are constantly on the lookout for something that makes their victims stand out a little from the crowd. In North America, a common target of bullies is boys who are—or are perceived to be—gay. In fact, the six September suicides of 2010 had another thing in common besides month and year. All six teens ki
lled themselves after being harassed for appearing to be gay.

  How much actual “bullying” occurs among animals is hard to say exactly. If we define bullying as aggression by a dominant animal on a subordinate, then quite a lot. Wildlife biologists and veterinarians frequently characterize male-on-male roughhousing in which no serious injury occurs as “playing.” Indeed, when you watch groups of young animals in rough-and-tumble play, whether they’re sea otters, dolphins, horses, capuchins, condors, kittens, or puppies, the line between “play fighting” and “bullying” may be unclear. Just as bullying can be invisible to an adult parent, some of the “sparring” or “mock fighting” we see in animal groups may be more intense and purposeful than we have previously thought.

  Among animals, peer oppression sometimes comes at the claws or beaks of siblings. The Oxford zoologist T. H. Clutton-Brock described the formative impact of bullying in blue-footed boobies in his Nature article “Punishment in Animal Societies.” Blue-footed boobies are normally born two to a nest. The first egg to hatch is usually the dominant sibling, a power he or she lords over the second-born by fierce authority displays involving pecking and jostling. Even if the younger chick eventually grows larger than its tyrannical nest mate, their early, in-nest dominance relationship remains for life.

  That a propensity to bully may be transmitted across generations was recently explored in another bird, the Nazca booby. When the parents of these Pacific seabirds leave to feed, older, unrelated boobies fly to the unprotected nests and abuse the chicks. Grabbing the youngsters’ necks and heads in their orange-and-black beaks, the larger birds squeeze with nutcracker intensity as the small chicks pull away submissively, hiding their bills in their downy chests. Biologists have observed a particularly interesting pattern of abuse: the birds that were attacked the most frequently as chicks were later, as adults, the most likely to attack other youngsters. These Pacific seabirds may be nature’s example of “the victimized becoming the victimizer.”

  The human depression linked to bullying may be uniquely dangerous for impulsive teens. Yet in animals, muted, submissive, perhaps even depressed responses to being picked on may actually make some animals safer. Following a violent conflict over hierarchy, the losing animal may be smart to withdraw and not push his luck with repeated challenges. Numerous animal studies have demonstrated that failing to cry uncle results in escalating attacks by the dominant.

  While every movie and comic book involving bullies ends with the victim fighting back and often taking the bully down, such revenge fantasies don’t often get played out in the animal kingdom. Slinking off to lick your wounds and perhaps find another path often makes more sense than running back and fighting the same bully again and again.

  Comparing animal and human behaviors will not bring us to a prescription for “solving” or “curing” complicated human social interactions like bullying. But a species-spanning approach might be able to show us where to start looking.

  As far as we know, when an unprotected seabird is victimized, or an unpopular vervet ostracized, or a curious young otter killed during its first solo foraging trip, few adult tears are shed—except, perhaps, by an empathetic field biologist observing through binoculars. But parental care does occur across species. Whether it’s a hagfish excreting a protective coating of slime over a clutch of eggs and just swimming away or a Gombe chimp demonstrating a termite-fishing technique to a juvenile, animal parents of all kinds are invested in how their transitioning offspring fare.

  Even when they’re old enough to live and breed on their own, some animals receive parental care long after they are capable of feeding themselves. The parents of Kloss’s gibbons, for example, help defend a child’s territory until that offspring can find a mate. Three-toed sloth mothers, like arboreal, insect-eating helicopter parents, vacate a portion of their own territory to assist their offspring in starting its own mature life.

  Of course, the parents of an adolescent narwhal, bowerbird, or otter will interact very differently with their transitioning offspring than a human parent will—whether a Japanese ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mom), Russian mat’ geroina (hero mother), or North American tiger mother. Brains are different. Social structures are different. Development, genes, and environments are all different. Species are different. But a zoobiquitous consideration of parenthood uncovers an embedded reality for mothers and fathers of all species: a parent’s genetic legacy depends on its offspring’s survival and reproductive success.

  For some incredibly unlucky human parents, adolescent risk taking and impulsivity will result in tragedy. Early exposure to alcohol and drugs will put their children in the path of injury, accidental death, and addiction. And the social minefields their children must traverse may exact casualties in the form of severe depression—or even suicide.

  If you’re a parent, this knowledge won’t shrink the lump in your throat while you try to suppress an angry outburst following a missed curfew. It may not stop your fingers from brushing eye-obscuring hanks of hair off your adolescent’s face. It’s doubtful it could quell the pounding in your chest when you open the e-mail containing your teen’s SAT scores. And it’s very unlikely to squelch the involuntary screams flying out of your mouth in the final seconds of your child’s sports tournament.

  But when you find yourself emotionally activated by your teen’s behavior, appearance, or prospects, a species-spanning approach might save you a trip to a psychotherapist’s office. Instead of blaming “culture” or looking for the early childhood experiences in your own life that contributed to your overreaction, perhaps take a moment to peer much, much further “left” on the evolutionary timeline—and consider the ancient animal roots of your parenting.

  And you might take heart from the story of Robert’s son, Charley. At sixteen, Charley seemed to be off on a bad course. Bored and unmotivated, he was on the verge of academic collapse. Teachers bemoaned his lack of focus; they said he made no effort unless the topic personally interested him. To make matters worse, Charley preferred riskier pursuits: joyriding and target shooting. When Charley finally enrolled at a university, drinking and smoking became his trademark among his peers.

  Robert was in despair. Time after time, he’d tried to get his son to buckle down, to focus on school and on life beyond age twenty. He put together an “emergency plan” to try to salvage his son’s future. In one weak but memorable moment, he told Charley, “You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

  But don’t worry about Charley. He didn’t suffer too badly from his risk taking, his rebelliousness, his refusal to accept the world as his elders taught and thought it should be. In fact, he parlayed his iconoclastic nature into one of the most storied careers in the history of science. The mature Charley—Charles Darwin—even later forgave his father’s tough parenting, saying, “My father, who was the kindest man I ever knew and whose memory I love with all my heart, must have been angry … when he used such words.”

  Modern parents can take comfort from the fact that most of our teenagers come through adolescence, too—perhaps a little bruised, maybe a little humiliated, but stronger for the journey.

  After all, most capuchin monkeys don’t go off with a gang and die alone. Most salmon figure out how to school; most vervets get into a new group; most gazelles learn to flee lions and go on to raise young gazelles of their own. And most California sea otters survive, and eventually leave behind, the Triangle of Death.

  *Parental provisioning can take many forms across species. The kind of parenting we associate with our own species is seen in many birds, mammals, and other animals. In fish and other egg-laying animals, parental investment is provided through protective coatings, shelter, or nutritionally rich eggs that they lay and then abandon. Insects have a similar strategy.

  †Human infancy is a particularly dangerous phase of life around the world. In a zoobiquitous parallel, the animal newborn is also at increased risk of death, largely from predation, starvation, or accident
al injury.

  ‡In some parts of the world, HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death in all age groups.

  §Female wild horses disperse from their birth herd, too—either on their own volition or after being chased out by their fathers. Instead of forming all-female groups, however, pre-adult mares integrate themselves into nearby herds, where, as the last to join, they are lowest-ranked.

  ‖Notorious periods of markedly raised testosterone and dangerous behavior in adult male elephants are referred to as “musth.” Distinctive physical features of musth include the foul-smelling, tarry sludge that drains from the temporal glands, next to the eyes. Young male elephants may experience “honey musth”—a milder prelude of adult musth, with lighter-colored, sweeter-smelling gland drainage.

  aThanks to the Los Angeles Zoo, the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park, and Mexico’s Chapultepec Zoo, California condor rehabilitation has come a long way since those early days. Hand-reared condor chicks are now exposed to adult mentors in mixed-age groups and are socialized extensively in preparation for release. The wild California condor population now numbers around two hundred and stretches across California, Arizona, and northern Baja California.

  TWELVE

  Zoobiquity

  When crows by the hundreds began hobbling around and dropping dead on the sidewalks of Queens, New York, in the summer of 1999, Tracey McNamara felt a stab of dread. Rarely does a single species get sick and suddenly die off without other nearby animals coming down with symptoms, too. A few weeks later, the exotic birds under her care at the Bronx Zoo started falling like flies. McNamara knew an avian killer was on the loose. If she didn’t identify it, and fast, it could wipe out her zoo’s entire bird population.