And here’s the clincher: The effect of the sugar water disappeared when the bees were given a drug that blocks the receptors for the natural brain chemical dopamine—the neurotransmitter that is associated with pleasure and motivation in humans and animals. Bees possess the same neurotransmitters as humans do. Why shouldn’t they have similar emotions?
In another experiment at the same university and published in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE, researcher Lars Chittka watched bumblebees figure out how to use string to retrieve a snack. Artificial flowers filled with sugar water were placed under Plexiglas and tied to a string sticking out from under the plastic. Eventually a particularly insightful bee would figure out that by yanking the string with his (or her) front legs, he could retrieve the flower and sip the liquid.
What happened when Chittka allowed unsuccessful bees to watch the insightful one was even more exciting. Most of them learned the new behavior by watching—and when these student bees were introduced to new colonies who had never seen the string-pulling technique, the learned behavior spread from bee to bee. Soon almost everyone was pulling the strings to get to the sugar water.
Sadly, just as scientists and adults are starting to appreciate the fuzzy, gentle bees we loved as children, bumblebee populations are crashing across the United States and Europe. In March 2017, the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the rusty patched bumblebee, once common throughout the Northeast and Midwest, as federally endangered. It has lost 95 percent of its population since 1990 and now only lives in twelve states, including Maine and Massachusetts.
The rusty patched is not the only one of the 50 species of bumblebee in the United States and 250 species of bumblebee worldwide to be threatened—at least 4 others are in serious decline. (The rusty patched is just the one whose decline is best documented.) Pesticides, global climate change, loss of favorite wild food plants, and a fungal gut disease imported from Europe are all implicated.
Invertebrate ecologist Timothy Hatten, a consultant and adjunct faculty member at the University of Idaho, is among the researchers trying to help save the bumblebees, but his findings have only deepened the mystery. His team surveyed bumblebees along Canadian highways of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory and found many bees carrying the European fungus called Nosema bombi. Yet mysteriously, despite the infection, in these northerly locations the bees seemed to be doing fine.
Bumblebees deserve our protection. “Bumblebees are among the most important of all pollinators,” says Hatten. Unlike honeybees (who are mostly Italian imports), our native bumblebees forage throughout the growing season, and their thick pile coats render them especially well adapted to cool climes like those in New England. If we lose them, we forfeit an essential link in our food chain.
But perhaps just as tragic would be the loss of a childhood icon—a friendly, fuzzy bee who enticed so many of our young selves to explore and observe the natural world.
Water Bears
— Liz —
If one writes about black bears, as I have sometimes done, one should also write about water bears—animals that look something like black bears but are smaller. A black bear can be eight feet long and weigh five hundred pounds, but the biggest water bear is only 0.02 inch long (if that) and could almost be said to weigh nothing. No weight has been established for any water bear as far as I know. It’s hard to imagine how to weigh them. You can’t even see them. If your eyes are exceptionally good, you might observe one as the tiniest possible dot, but most people need a good microscope to spot them.
I’ve had a lifetime fascination with water bears, ever since I was in college and my dad lent me a binocular microscope so I could watch the life of a nearby swamp. One day I was watching some algae floating around when suddenly a monster appeared and charged straight at me. Shocked, I threw myself backward. My chair tipped over, and I fell on the floor. The monster was a water bear, something I’d never seen before or heard of. But when I remembered I’d observed it through a microscope, I knew it was too small to be dangerous, so my courage returned. I went back to the microscope and watched it for hours as it moved through the drop of water.
Through its transparent “skin” I could see that it was eating algae, and toward its hindquarters I saw some roundish shapes that I thought could be eggs. The possibility was good enough for me—I decided she was a girl water bear. I put her back in my jar of swamp water but was concerned about her well-being and that of her infants in the eggs (if they were eggs) perhaps soon to be born, so later I returned her to the swamp.
Later I learned she was almost certainly a female and the round shapes at her rear were almost certainly eggs, but she wasn’t going to lay them. They would fall away from her with her “skin” when she shed it as a snake would do. So she wasn’t as bearlike as her name suggests. But she walked with her head low and her “shoulders” high, so she resembled a bear, or so thought the scientist who named these animals.
They’re also known as tardigrades, which evidently means “slow walkers.” Otherwise they look vaguely like caterpillars with their segmented bodies. But instead of six legs and ten prolegs like most caterpillars, water bears have eight legs, each leg with four toes, each toe with a claw. Their little heads have tiny snouts and two eyespots. They have sensory whiskers on their bodies. They also have brains so they probably think, but what they think about is hard to imagine, as their world is so different from ours.
These are animals? Yes, and of all the animals in the world including us, they are certainly the most successful. Interestingly, most of them are female. Males exist but aren’t needed for reproduction, although they do offer genetic variety now and then. Otherwise a female reproduces without a male, and her offspring are females. Water bears have been on earth for more than 500 million years (we humans have been here for 200,000 years), they now have more than a thousand surviving species (we great apes have five surviving species, four of which are in decline), and depending on what species the water bears belong to, they are found in every imaginable environment—from almost absolute zero to far above the boiling point of water, in the deepest parts of the oceans, on the highest mountains, and everywhere in between. They favor moist environments such as swamps and damp moss, but they can also live in outer space where some water bears, probably all females, were taken in 2007 as part of a biological experiment. There they were exposed to vacuum conditions (meaning no atmospheric pressure) and intense ultraviolet radiation, only to recover and reproduce successfully because vacuum conditions don’t seem to bother them and they can withstand literally one thousand times more radiation than we can.
If a water bear is injured she folds herself up until she recovers, but if conditions are very bad—no moisture, maybe—she pulls her head and legs inside her body, squeezing out the water that was in there, so that she vaguely resembles a microscopic mouse dropping. In that condition she can live for many years (some say for a hundred years) while waiting for improvements. The condition she’s in is called cryptobiosis, meaning “hidden life,” and the form she assumes is called a tun, because whoever called her that thought she looked like a tiny wine barrel.
We think of ourselves as the ultimate species. We’ve spent the last eight thousand years forcing the natural world to meet our needs while water bears, in contrast, made the necessary adjustments. They hit bingo 500 million years ago, then ignored all the ice ages, droughts, and extinction periods and are here today to show what is meant by successful evolution. If we should cause a mass extinction with our wars and pollutions, a few female water bears could repopulate the planet as a dominant species and the planet would be in better hands—or if not actually hands, then at least with better toes with claws.
Part Six
Animal Abilities
When we consider the abilities of other species, we often use them to define the animal. The first nonhuman ability that usually comes to mind is a dog’s sense of smell. We all
know about it, and many of us bring it up when dogs are under discussion. Or anyway I always do, mentioning a certain dog used by police for tracking suspects. Once when the search for a suspect was in progress, the dog not only directed the police down an interstate highway but knew which exit the suspect had taken—all this while riding in a police car going sixty miles an hour. Thanks to the dog, the suspect was found and arrested. Yes, we put a man on the moon, but that dog accomplished something equally surprising and without heavy machinery and a team of scientists to help.
As far as the animal is concerned, its own use of such abilities is equally important but not always on our radar. Here I remember a bomb-sniffing dog I met in an airport. He would slowly sniff a passenger until he knew no bomb was present and then would move on to examine the next person. This constant sniffing, of course, was important for air-travel safety, but the findings were of little interest to the dog himself. Or not until he came to me. Although I’d never owned a bomb, let alone transported one, he took at least three times as long to examine me as he did anyone else.
At the other end of the leash, the security guard seemed puzzled and began to appear suspicious. So I believe that the dog and I were the only ones who knew what he was doing—without changing his expression or deportment, he was learning about my dogs, but in a regular, businesslike, unrevealing manner. When he’d learned I had three dogs, a male and two females, and that none of them were present but all were in good health, instead of sitting down in front of me as he would if he’d found a bomb, he moved on to the next passenger as if he’d seen no reason not to answer his own questions as well as the airline’s. He didn’t lift his leg and mark my shoe to send my dogs a message—an act traditional to dogs when they’ve finished their olfactory investigations—but he did give my shoe a backward glance as if he’d thought about it.
Sometimes we see human abilities in other animals. If we do, we don’t marvel that the animal has some of ours as well as his own; instead we judge the animal as if he were a person. An August 28, 2015, article about Koko the gorilla in The Atlantic said, among other things, that Koko had “the ability of a three-year-old child.” The comparison of animals with human children has been applied to virtually every animal who exhibits some human ability. And it’s normally a three-year-old child, rather than, say, a four-year-old child, so one must assume that those who offer this statistic are getting it from one another.
If a rabbit was judged by a weasel’s abilities, would that tell us something? Could Einstein, Lincoln, or Shakespeare have found a culprit by sniffing the air as they sped down a highway? Most animals have abilities that those gentlemen seriously lacked, so if one measures the abilities of one species by comparing them with another, a dog might credit those above-mentioned gentlemen with the abilities of a very young pup.
If an animal can travel through the air at night, navigating by the stars and the sound of the ocean to find an exact spot hundreds of miles away, we tend to dismiss it as “instinct” and leave it at that. Yet it’s hard to imagine the equipment—the aircraft and all it requires plus the maps or the GPS systems—that we would require if we were to do the same. What it must be like to jump up in the air and somehow find a distant spot unaided is beyond our understanding.
There was a time when we understood other species more deeply. Alas, that was thousands of years ago when we lived as hunter-gatherers. Far more work and attention were needed to obtain this understanding than most of us, consumed as we are with all our little gadgets, are willing to use today. Here I’ll use information obtained from the San of the southern African savanna, who until as recently as the 1960s lived by hunting and gathering and had little contact with the “developed” world. These were the first people. They gave rise to the rest of us. And like most other vertebrates who lived in the old way, they understood the abilities of those with whom they shared the environment. Thus their name for themselves, which means “people,” seems to be a species designation.
They knew what we no longer know, that the animals around them were not unlike themselves, with abilities that required serious attention. They regarded other species as those species regarded them, knowing one another through empathetic study, watching their habits and reactions and assuming (correctly) that they had plans, imaginations, memories, and emotions much as we do, realizing that we have much the same feelings and communicate with similar signals if in somewhat different forms.
As for observation, consider this example: One morning after my field was mowed, a young doe, born that spring, came out of the woods to investigate. What happened here? her cautious manner said. She explored as carefully as a scientist, examining the now-short grass, and perhaps from frustration because she couldn’t figure out what had happened to it, she ran in a big circle and came back to try again.
As for imagination, Sy’s dog Thurber barks at a bone and dances around it. He knows perfectly well it isn’t animate—he’s just pretending.
And as for understanding, during the time my husband was seriously ill and in bed, I’d sit beside him holding his hand. One night as his health was declining, his cat jumped up on his bed, put his paw on top of ours, and held it there, quietly joining the three of us together.
After knowing our fellow animals for 200,000 years, we humans lost touch with them. We drew the haughty conclusion that God looks like us and wants us to dominate the world. Both concepts are unlikely, but the latter is no different from the concept held by a large group of lions who once surrounded a tent harboring a few unfortunate tourists. The lions engaged in polyphonic roaring, terrifying the tourists. Many things are frightening, but nothing is more frightening than the polyphonic roaring of lions, especially if they’re near, as the continuous blast of multiple deafening voices can last for twenty minutes that seem like twenty hours. Your eyes fly wide, your skin prickles, your teeth chatter, you can’t hear yourself think. The lions are telling you that the place where you pitched your tent is theirs and you must go somewhere else. And you do, as fast as you can. The tourists did, so in this case, lions were dominating their part of the world; they knew very well what their noise would accomplish, and they did what they thought was right.
The journalist Roc Morin, who wrote the article about Koko, adds to this. Comparison with a three-year-old child wasn’t his idea—he was just quoting—and the ending of his fascinating article says it all. “I thought of all the radio equipment and telescopes perpetually aimed at the sky,” he wrote, “scanning the heavens for the faintest glimmer of intelligent life. All this, while we are still so far from truly understanding the intelligent life here at home.”
—Liz
Abandoned Acrobats
— Liz —
One day not long ago, Sy learned that a show called Stunt Dog Experience would perform in a nearby city and immediately bought two tickets, one for her and one for me. The day of the event, the theater was jammed, but our seats were good and we watched in wonder as the dogs did things we wouldn’t have imagined possible. One dog, not a big dog, jumped over a barrier that was 5 feet 8 inches tall, almost from a standing position, which for a person would be like suddenly leaping into the air to clear a barrier about 20 feet tall. Another dog stood on his hind legs to skip rope, keeping it up for what seemed like forever. Then two dogs together, both on their hind legs, skipped the same rope. Dogs ran through tunnels and zigzagged through barriers to catch a Frisbee that was already in the air, or they walked on their front legs, crawled on their stomachs frontward and backward, then jumped to their trainers’ shoulders where they stood up straight on their hind legs, their front paws waving.
Many of these dogs were Australian cattle dogs or border collies, or at least had a parent who was such, but one little dog, perhaps part Chihuahua, jumped to her trainer’s arms and then to his shoulder, at which point the trainer held one hand up high. The little dog jumped to the palm of his hand and stood on her front legs, six feet or mor
e above the stage, holding her position for what seemed a long time in perfect confidence. We in the audience cheered so loudly we could have been heard for blocks.
We all know that dogs can do tricks, but those tricks? We’d never even imagined dogs doing anything like what those dogs were doing. But what fascinated Sy and me the most, since we’re both dog lovers, were the dogs’ facial expressions and body language. They loved what they were doing! A dog who was supposed to catch a Frisbee—to be thrown away from him, not toward him—stood waiting at full attention with a tense little smile, his eyes wide, his ears up, his teeth chattering with anticipation, his body poised to run, until the Frisbee flew with him right behind it. He ran faster than the Frisbee and caught it, then rushed with it to his trainer in delight.
All the dogs would wait on high alert for their turn to do a trick, smiling and quivering with excitement because they knew they could do what was expected and couldn’t wait to start. After a successful trick, the dog would jump into her trainer’s arms and kiss him. She would receive a tiny snack about the size of a kibble as a reward, but she hadn’t done her trick so she could eat a kibble, she had done it because she could, because she loved her trainer, because she knew she was doing something very important—however extraordinary, however difficult—and found joy in her success.
Who wouldn’t want a dog who might accomplish so much, who might do what seems impossible with such skill and joy and grace? Here’s the answer: the millions of people who every year discard roughly 3.5 million dogs. Maybe their new apartment doesn’t allow pets, or maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t like animals, or maybe they find their dog to be a nuisance, barking at noises or needing to be walked and provided now and then with food and water. The best of these millions took their dogs to a shelter—not necessarily to a no-kill shelter—and the worst of them simply turned a dog loose somewhere, maybe driving her out to the country and pushing her out of the car.
Tamed and Untamed Page 14