Bekoff designed what became known as the “yellow snow” experiment. Over a period of years, Bekoff picked up samples of snow that had been urinated on by any number of dogs, including Jethro himself. (Not to worry: He used gloves.) These snow samples were moved to new locations without Jethro watching. Then Bekoff measured the amount of time Jethro spent checking out the various samples. It turned out that Jethro spent almost no time over the sample of his own urine, but considerable time over the other samples. Doesn’t this, Bekoff asks, show that Jethro recognized himself?
If it takes creative thinking to design a test like that for a dog, an animal with which we are pretty familiar, designing tests that look at intelligence and self-recognition in cephalopods will take a mammoth effort.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SMART SKIN
Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent
and reinvigorate it.
—ROBERT SAPOLSKY, NEUROSCIENTIST
o it’s difficult to say exactly what intelligence is. Scientists, philosophers, and educators have been debating the question, sometimes expansively and sometimes explosively, for several thousand years. Interested parties have yet to achieve a peaceful entente.
That’s because, like some of science’s most basic but non-quantifiable inquiries, there’s a political component attached to the problem. Teasing out aspects of human intelligence that are inherited from aspects that may be socially dependent has a great deal to do with the basic human enigma of why we are alive. Do we have a purpose on earth? Is there a God, and does that entity endow each human being with specific, predetermined intellectual abilities? Is it possible to quantify those abilities scientifically? Wouldn’t such quantification lead to a nondemocratic society?
In these matters, reason rarely prevails. Consider, for example, the British Sir Francis Galton, who claimed to have found a way to measure human intelligence and ended up instead giving birth to the horrific pseudoscience of eugenics. Galton claimed that it would be possible to breed for human intelligence; his ideas ended up as part of the foundation for Nazism.
Only a few decades ago, there was a famous debate between two intellectual giants from Harvard—the left-wing evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson. Very simply put, Wilson believes there is an important heritable aspect to intelligence, while Gould, who died of cancer in 2002, insisted on the importance of social circumstances. Their bitter battle reinvigorated the old nature vs. nurture question (the phrase was coined by Galton, in fact), albeit dressed up in new clothing. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould contended that attempts to quantify human intelligence would lead to rigid social stratification. Many scientists felt quite strongly about this: At one point, E. O. Wilson had a pitcher of water dumped on his head at a scientific conference by a member of the International Committee Against Racism.
There is nothing new under the sun. The Greeks debated pretty much the same issue, couched in different language: Are we subject to the whims of the gods, or are we able to determine ourselves what will happen to us in life? Can we be all that we can be? The prevailing American political and social point of view is that we are able to determine our own futures and that intelligence can be developed by hard work and a good education. Given these emotionally charged beliefs and the accompanying politics, the scientific study of human intelligence is sometimes dangerous territory.
So it’s not surprising that much of the two-decade-old revolution in our understanding of intelligence has come instead from the less-risky field of animal behavior, where we needn’t have philosophies like Marxism and Calvinism at odds with each other. Several very influential academic books have been published in the field, among them a breakthrough work on the subject written decades ago by my friend Don Griffin: Animal Minds. Recently, bestsellers like Irene Pepperberg’s Alex and Me, a book in tribute to Pepperberg’s verbally communicative parrot, have popularized some of these ideas and brought the public in on some of the behind-the-scenes debate. Pepperberg believes that her research proved that Alex was more than a talking parrot: He was a thinking parrot.
I’m willing to grant that Alex could probably “think” on some level. After all, Mark Norman’s coconut-shell-carrying octopus can apparently plan for the future by toting around an emergency shelter, just as we would carry a tent on our backs for a camping trip. But the problem is that just as we can’t define “intelligence,” we can’t define precisely the meaning of “thinking.” We just haven’t made much progress. There does, though, seem to be a kind of general agreement on the attributes of intelligence and thought, just as there was agreement in the nineteenth century on what electricity could do long before scientists figured out that loose electrons created the phenomenon.
Attributes of intelligence seem to include the ability to learn from experience, to adapt behavior, to solve problems, to plan, and to carry out complex tasks. Intelligence seems to involve the quality of curiosity or willingness to explore—all of these, many researchers agree, appear to be signs of this ephemeral and elusive quality of the mind.
A meditative cuttlefish
If those are the criteria, then cuttlefish seem to belong on the list of intelligent species. I find cuttlefish as intellectually intriguing as orangutans and chimpanzees, and I can watch them for hours on end. I suspect that I like watching these animals because they watch back. And as they watch, they seem to me to be contemplating. Stand at a cuttlefish window at an aquarium and watch the hovering animals. Unless there’s something more interesting going on in their tank—mating, feeding, or a dominance battle—chances are high that these odd little animals will swim up to the glass and notice you noticing them. Like cats, cuttlefish seem to pass the time with eyes half-open, staring out at the world in a kind of Zen meditation trance.
I’m not alone in my fascination. As I traveled to various aquariums to research this book, I noticed that many visitors asked first where the octopus tank was located, then quickly tired of watching the octopus sleep and moved on to the cuttlefish exhibit. Few were familiar with cuttlefish—the first remark was often “What are these?”—but then people often stood hypnotized. After all, we humans love making eye contact not just with each other, but with other species as well.
It’s difficult to come away from that two-way visual encounter without the impression that cuttlefish not only watch you, but think about what they’re watching. This may only be an illusion created by our own brain design, but the aquarists who care for the animals feel that sense of “thinking” more and more as they continue to interact with their cuttlefish charges.
At the Georgia Aquarium, the bottom of the cuttlefish exhibit is covered with sandy-colored pebblelike material. It has black-and-white checkerboard patterns in several places. When a cuttlefish hovered just above the pebbles, its skin took on the color and texture of sand and pebbles. If it moved a bit and hovered over one of the checkerboard patterns, squares of black and white appeared on its skin. The neon-light-like skin-color changes took only a second or so. Visitors stood and watched, entranced. When the docent was present to explain the details of the cuttlefish light show, the eager crowd asked question after question.
Fascinated by the expressive W-shaped pupils of the cuttlefish, one visitor asked the docent about what the animals were able to see.
“Their vision is in some ways superior to ours, because they don’t have a blind spot,” he answered. “But they’re color-blind. They can do all these crazy camouflage things, and they can’t actually see color.”
The most common lay question: “Do they do this on purpose?” Is the color change intentional, an expression of intelligence, a conscious decision? Or is it a skill that is mostly hardwired and represents little more than automatic responses to the setting around them? Scientists around the world are asking themselves the same question, but they are still struggling to find ways to tease out the answer in a scientifically valid way.
I asked Amy Rollinson, th
e Georgia Aquarium’s keeper of cuttlefish and someone who has intimate knowledge of her charges’ daily lives, what she thought. “There’s a lot going on in those little cephalopod brains,” she said. “When I give them a new enrichment, a lot of times there’s only one or two that will take the dare. But the others watch, to see what happens. They really are very, very smart animals.”
In all my travels to research this book, I didn’t find one person familiar with cuttlefish who disagreed with Amy’s view, despite the current lack of scientific evidence.
There are more than one hundred species of cuttlefish in the shallower regions of the world’s oceans, although none occur naturally on the East Coast of the United States. Cuttlefish are a common food source in some parts of the world. They are generally smaller than octopuses and squid, although some species may be as long as three feet. The cuttlefish body plan is similar to that of squid: They have a large mantle containing most of the necessary body organs like the stomach, eight arms, and two feeding tentacles attached to the head around the mouth area. When cuttlefish hover, watching and seeming to meditate, their comparatively short arms sometimes dangle. They look to me like bearded old sages, contemplating the meaning of the universe. And in fact, several popular movies have created humanoid characters with cuttlefish-like curlingflesh arms in place of beards.
Amy dropped some food into a tank so I could see the cuttlefish eat. Their feeding tentacles flashed out from their hiding place among the dangling arms. With laser-quick energy, the cuttlefish grabbed the morsels of food and brought them back to their mouths. The speed of the motion was hypnotizing. If the animal were human-size, it also might have been frightening. The precision of the aim left no doubt that this animal is closely related to predatory squid. Seeing the cuttlefish, small though they are, grab the food reminded me of the description by Japanese scientist Kubodera of the behavior of the feeding tentacles of Architeuthis: that they seemed to coil like a python.
Like their cousins the octopus and the squid, cuttlefish live very short lives before undertaking their mating rituals. Then their flesh begins to decay and fall off, and they die a natural death, unless in their senescent state they’re eaten first by marauding whales or dolphins. Despite their short life span, cuttlefish have highly developed capacities for communication, particularly expressed through their skin.
Research from a number of scientists implies that cuttlefish sometimes use their skin the way that we sometimes use our mouths. Because we have a facile tongue, teeth, larynx, and lips, we can form words. Over the eons, we have learned to form those words into sentences, and those sentences into concepts. We communicate these concepts to one another, and learn from the information we get back. Now it turns out that cuttlefish may do the same thing, using their skin instead of tongue, lips, and larynx.
Unfortunately for us, we are able to understand only a glimmer of their language and even the meaning of those glimmers we cannot be entirely sure of. But the little we know easily leads to flights of fancy. As I began to think about the changes in skin color and skin texture as possibly being highly sophisticated language, I imagined some cuttlefish frequenting waters often visited by people. I imagined a group of them contemplating human behavior, and sensing the sound of human speech and wondering what all the noise was about.
Then, suddenly, a few thoughtful cuttlefish have an intellectual breakthrough: The noise made by human mouths is like skin-coding, they realize. “They’re communicating!” the startled cuttlefish flash to each other. “Maybe humans are smart!”
Jean Boal of Pennsylvania’s Millersville University is one of the few daring scientists trying to tackle the daunting question of learning and cephalopod intelligence. Her results have been tantalizing. Boal started by asking herself if she was smart enough to find out what the shape-shifting cuttlefish knows. Would she be able to design an experiment that would reveal whether cuttlefish are capable of particular kinds of learning?
First she tested for social recognition. Being able to recognize various individuals in one’s own species is considered a sign of intelligence, particularly among mammals. Boal showed that cuttlefish do not recognize each other as unique, distinctive individuals. Into each of two separate tanks, Boal put one male and one female. Each pair mated. The male began to guard the female. Then Boal exchanged males. Each male was put in the other tank, so that the male and female in each tank had not mated. Even though both males were in tanks with females with which they had not mated, they guarded the females, behaving as though they were protecting their own sperm. Boal concluded that the males did not recognize various cuttlefish females as unique individuals. If they had recognized their mates, they wouldn’t have wasted energy guarding the wrong female, she concluded. “But they went right on guarding,” she told me. “They were responding to their own physiology.”
The cuttlefish maze
This would seem to imply a certain lack of intelligence, but another of Boal’s experiments shows that the question is not so easily dismissed. She created a very simple maze containing a problem the cuttlefish had to solve. She released a cuttlefish into a small, round tank with a diameter of only about three cuttlefish body lengths.
If you think of the tank as a clock face, the cuttlefish swam into the tank at the six-o’clock point. To the animal’s right, at three o’clock, was one escape door. To the animal’s left, at nine o’clock, was another. Each time an animal swam into the tank, one of these doors was open for escape, while the other was closed off with clear plastic. The plastic blocked the escape, but wasn’t visible to the cuttlefish.
The first thing an animal saw when it swam into the tank was a “cue” straight ahead at twelve o’clock. The animal had to learn to “read” the cue at twelve o’clock in order to know which way to turn. If the animal swam through the entrance door into the tank and saw algae at the twelve-o’clock point, could it learn to turn right 90 degrees for the escape door? If it saw a brick, could it learn to turn left 90 degrees for the escape door?
“They had to learn to interpret the cue as to which door was going to be open,” Boal told me. “And it turned out they could learn to do this. In everyday English, this was an if-then situation: If there’s a brick, turn left. If there’s algae, turn right.”
For human beings, this would be the first step in the development of logic and our ability to use reason in decision-making. I asked Boal what she thought.
“We don’t know if they are actually conceiving this the way that we would conceive of it. We would conceive of it as two possibilities: turn right, or turn left. But we don’t know if that’s what the cuttlefish are doing. You could imagine a robot that’s just programmed: Every time I see this, I turn right. Every time I see that, I turn left.
“It would take more working to find out what kind of thinking process the cuttlefish are using, but it does show context sensitivity to their learning. In other words, I don’t enter a maze and always turn right. Sometimes I enter a maze and turn right, and sometimes I enter a maze and have to turn left.
“We don’t know if they’re interpreting the problem using logic. We don’t know anything about the thinking process here. All we know is the outcome.”
Boal’s finding was enticing. Showing that the cuttlefish, easier to study in this way than the squid or octopus, is capable of responding to much more than simple stimulus-response experiences provides a small insight into the cephalopod brain, structured so differently from our own.
While discussing her work, I pointed out to Boal the similarities between our human neurons and cephalopod neurons, and asked if that meant that we might share certain abilities. Or were invertebrates just not capable of doing what we can do with our brains?
“There’s a lot of chauvinism about vertebrates and intelligence,” she told me. “The concept of intelligence certainly shouldn’t be constrained to just vertebrates.”
Perhaps, some suggest, since brains may be products of the evolutionary arms race, intell
igent life is a cosmic principle and some characteristics of intelligence, like frustration, may be present in a wider array of animal life than was once expected. This has implications for whatever kind of intelligent life we may find elsewhere in the universe.
But how do we recognize intelligence when we see it in an alien animal? Will we recognize it as such? Or will we have a language barrier, like the communication barrier between humans and cuttlefish? One long-term supposition has been that intelligent life elsewhere will be able to communicate to us through mathematics, supposedly a universal truth.
Perhaps we can practice here on earth by trying to decode some of the basic behaviors of animals like the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish don’t do math, at least not a system of mathematics that we understand, although they do use some kind of code with each other. But, suggests comparative psychologist Jesse Purdy of Texas’s Southwestern University, maybe we can use some simple responses as a kind of Rosetta stone, a foundation for a deeper understanding of what goes on in the “mind” of a cuttlefish.
Take, for example, frustration. Most of us have experienced that response when we put coins into a vending machine and do not receive a can of soda in return. Many of us consider kicking the soda machine. A few of us actually do it. Most of us eventually just give up and either put more coins in the machine or walk away.
Comparative psychologists have studied frustration for close to a century and have worked out a series of research protocols so that responses from a variety of species can be compared with each other. It turns out that most of the world’s species don’t seem to experience frustration. Fish, for example, can be trained to strike an object to get a food reward. If the food reward stops coming, the fish will very quickly give up and move on.
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