Most researchers found no mirror self-recognition in macaques, but Maria Boccia argued that these investigations were flawed. They used infants, or macaques raised in isolation and hence socially abnormal, or they didn’t give them enough mirror time. Although Boccia thought that mirror self-recognition was probably “at the upper limit of macaques’ cognitive ability,” she also thought that if you tested a lot of normal adults, and particularly if you gave them a chance to see other macaques looking in mirrors, you just might get something. More anecdotally, she had also noticed pigtail macaques flirting by looking at each other in mirrors. She let 15 adult female pigtail macaques and 7 teenaged macaques look in mirrors all day every day. These macaques had grown up around mirrors. Most of them showed behavior hinting at mirror self-recognition, and one female passed with flying colors, swiping at the mark on her face in an attempt to wipe the red dye off and, in a subsequent test, grabbing at the precise spot on her ear that had been marked.
Through the looking-glass
Barash, a young chimpanzee who had been exposed to a mirror outside his cage for six weeks and then hadn’t seen it for a year, was given the mark test. He expressed curiosity about the marks, but what really got his interest was his teeth. The teeth that weren’t there. Barash was four years old, and some of his baby teeth had fallen out since the last time he saw a mirror, and his adult teeth hadn’t come in yet. He stared at the mirror with mouth wide open, stuck his finger in the gap, stuck his tongue in the gap, backed away, looked again, backed away, “vocalizing repeatedly” in apparent distress. My teeth!
The chimpanzees Sherman and Austin, at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center, have been known to use mirrors to apply marks—to put on makeup. Even better than mirrors are video monitors. The apes are often videotaped, and there are live monitors. Sherman and Austin have learned to make test motions to determine when they are seeing themselves live and when they are seeing an old tape. Sherman likes to dress up in fur shawls that make him look large and impressive, and to watch his enormous furry self bob and weave on-screen. Austin is more of a Food Channel viewer. He likes to watch himself eat on the monitors and likes to have the camera moved so that he can look down into his own throat, aided by a flashlight, which he shines into his mouth.
Also at Yerkes, the bonobo Matata, despite the fact that no one admits having said a word to her about her appearance, uses mirrors to pluck out her chin hairs. Her son Kanzi uses his image to assess his progress at blowing bubblegum bubbles and inflating balloons, and her daughter Panbanisha likes to gaze at her own face, particularly her large and fearsome canine teeth.
Anybody else?
When Chantek, the signing orangutan, was six, he was given a pair of sunglasses. He went into the bathroom, put them on, and examined the effect from various angles.* At the age of seven he used the bathroom mirror and his foster mother’s eyelash curler in an attempt to curl his own eyelashes, simultaneously showing imitation, mirror self-recognition, and a hankering after chic.
Most gorillas are said to fail at mirror self-recognition. But Koko, the gorilla who was taught to sign by Penny Patterson, knows all about mirrors. A remotely operated video camera captured Koko enthusiastically brushing her teeth in front of a mirror. Afterward Koko inspected her gleaming teeth. But wait! What’s this? Koko detected a black spot on one of her back teeth. This was a spot of black pigment, and perfectly normal but, owing to its remote location, Koko had never noticed it before. Leaning into the mirror, she touched it. She tried to brush it off with the brush end of her toothbrush. She poked at it with the handle end. It wouldn’t come off. Patterson, knowing nothing of all this, entered the room. Koko rushed over, pried Patterson’s mouth open, and carefully inspected her back teeth for a similar spot. Koko apparently has a theory of mind plus a theory of dentistry.
Not much of an ape
Gibbons, classified as “lesser” apes, did not pass mark tests. A group of researchers installed mirrors in the cages of gibbons in three European zoos, and got varying results. Buci, an aged white-handed gibbon in the zoo in Jászberény, Hungary, who had lived alone most of her life, seemed apprehensive about the mirror. She would not meet the gaze of the ape in the mirror and tended to sit sideways to it.
Todi, an adolescent wild-born red-cheeked gibbon in the Nyíregyháza Zoo in Hungary, spent a lot of time with the mirror. At first he carried food away from it (in case the gibbon in the mirror tried to take it?), but later he ate in front of it. He performed experiments such as raising one leg in the air, or doing a slow backward hanging somersault, peering in the mirror as he did so. One day he glanced in the mirror and instantly removed a speck of banana from his lip, a speck which had been there for a minute and half before he looked into the mirror.
Dodo, an adult wild-born white-cheeked gibbon in the Budapest Zoo, went wild for the mirror. At first he was startled by the sight of his own canines when he yawned, and he carried food away from it. After he relaxed, he spent a lot of time in experimental actions such as leg lifts, looking back and forth between parts of his body and their mirror reflection, and stepping back and forth in front of the mirror. He compared the mirror reflection with that in a puddle on the floor. He looked over his shoulder at his back.
Each gibbon got the mark test, and the researchers managed without anesthetizing them. An experimenter secretly put whipped cream on Buci’s forehead while grooming her. Buci did not touch her face or try to remove the cream when she looked in the mirror. For Todi and Dodo, experimenters gave them a deep plastic cup with whipped cream at the bottom, which also had Day-Glo cosmetic cream on the rim. When the gibbons licked the whipped cream out of the cup, they got Day-Glo cream on their faces. Neither showed any reaction when they looked in the mirror, which is scored as failure. But they also got Day-Glo cream on their hands, and they didn’t touch that or try to wipe it off.
The researchers arranged for Fadoro, a one-and-a-half-year-old siamang gibbon living with a family in Zürich, to be surreptitiously marked on the forehead while he was being brushed. Ten minutes later, he was offered a mirror. He glanced into it, paused, wiped his forehead (removing most of the mark), looked at his hand, looked back in the mirror, and went on his way.
Fadoro passed the test, perhaps because of his upbringing in a human family. But whether that says more about his theory of mind or his feeling that you don’t want to have visible gunk on your fur is unknown. Dodo, the mirror addict, didn’t pass, but the reason may have been his differing attitude toward personal grooming. Similarly Todi may take the view that gunk on your face is of no concern, but a fleck of banana on your lip means that you may have missed some food—and that’s important.
Who’s the most streamlined of them all?
After all the to-do about how only the very most elite of apes have mirror self-recognition, it’s refreshing to hear that bottlenose dolphins have it. Diana Reiss and Lori Marino worked with two dolphins at the New York Aquarium, 13-year-old Presley and 17-year-old Tab. They were housed in a pool with three semireflective glass walls, and later in a pool with an actual mirror on one wall. The dolphins were trained to be handled in a process that allowed Reiss and Marino to make marks on the dolphins. Sometimes they were marked (with a nontoxic temporary black marker), and sometimes they were sham-marked with a marker filled with water. Reiss and Marino drew triangles, circles, and cross-hatches on different parts of the dolphins.
First the researchers used the sham marker on Presley, with no effect. Then they made genuine marks on various parts of his body—over his eye, on his flipper, on his tail—which definitely got his attention. From spending around 8 seconds glancing at his reflection, he went to nearly 10 minutes at a time. If marked under his chin, he would go to the glass wall and stretch his neck upward repeatedly, and if marked behind his left pectoral fin, he would repeatedly present his left side to the glass and peer at his image. After he realized that sometimes the researchers were drawing on him, he’d rush right to his reflection and scan the
parts of his body they had touched with the marker. Tab also used reflective surfaces to inspect marks drawn on his body.
Once, after the formal experimental sessions were over, one of the researchers made a mark on Presley’s tongue, which they had never done before. Presley rocketed to the mirror and opened and closed his mouth in front of it, something he had never been seen to do.
How to get smarter
Is it possible to make animals smarter or to make animals learn better by providing them with an enriched environment? It’s worth noting that most laboratory animals live in devastatingly impoverished, infantilizing conditions, from a physical and a social point of view.
Experimenters raised two groups of rats, one group in cages where they could see cardboard with circles and triangles on it, and one group that could only see plain cardboard. The rats with the wacky wallpaper did much better in later life at choosing between a circle and a triangle to get a rat chow reward. Okay, they did better on tests, but does that mean their lives were better?
Gorillas who were in stark conditions of captivity and did not reproduce began breeding when they were moved to an enriched enclosure. Jo Fritz, writing about taking in unwanted chimpanzees at the Primate Foundation, noted that of apes who came from laboratories, zoos, and circuses, the ones who had been performers were often the best adjusted. They did not rock back and forth, pluck themselves bald, eat their own dung, or mutilate themselves. “Dressing up and turning somersaults cannot be a prerequisite to chimpanzee social life, but the stimulation and occupation that is associated with training and learning (even circus-type tricks) may be one of the most important factors in understanding the differences seen among the singly reared, asocial chimpanzees.”
Everybody loves Kermit
In a captive chimpanzee colony, there were initially two males, Darrell and Kermit. Occasionally they spent time with a female, Sheba. Darrell was large, aggressive, and dominant. When he saw Sheba he was very aggressive. Lowly, puny Kermit would protect Sheba with his body when Darrell tried to bite or strike her. Although chivalrous, Kermit was a poor student. The chimpanzees were being taught number concepts, and Kermit did badly. Researchers felt he had attention deficit disorder. After about six years of training that made little headway with Kermit (the others did better), all three were moved into more spacious, renovated quarters along with an older female, Sarah, and a new male, Bobby. There was a new touch-frame testing device.
All of a sudden Kermit could do number concepts. Maybe it was the new testing device, or maybe he’d matured, or maybe it was the fact that he had grown much larger, and in the new social environment, where the females liked and supported him, he was now the dominant male. That’s enrichment.
Enrichment is a popular notion in zoos today, and that’s good, but sometimes enrichment is overly focused on what looks enriching to visitors and not what’s actually enriching for animals. An animal in a small cage with a rain forest scene painted on the walls is no better off than an animal in a small cage with plain walls. Zoos that have gone to great lengths to create “natural” enclosures for their animals, complete with uneven surfaces and real or fake trees and plants, are sometimes reluctant to bestow unnatural-looking “enrichment” on their animals. They are like doctrinaire counterculture parents—no plastic toys for you.
Who is smart?
This chapter has been dominated by primates, in whose intellect we take a nepotistic interest. Researchers invariably fall in love with the animals they study, no matter how repulsive others find them, so you can find scientists rhapsodizing about cockroaches and leeches. Often the paeans to unpopular animals consist of praise for how well adapted the creature is. But many researchers also make impressive cases for the intellectual capacities of nonprimates.
So who have we been wrongly underestimating? Even among the primates there are candidates. Robert Shumaker complains that the African ape model ignores the abilities of orangutans, and Anne Russon grumbles that “orangutans were sidelined once chimpanzees took center stage.”
Gibbons have their grievances. Muriquis have been neglected. But let’s look further.
Birds
Ornithologist Peter Marler, in a paper entitled “Are Primates Smarter than Birds?” doesn’t answer directly but he matches up the feats of primates and the equally amazing feats of birds, throws in a thing or two birds do that nonhuman primates don’t, and lets us make up our own minds. “Almost everyone has heard of Imo,” grouses Marler, but he puts the titmice learning to open milk bottles up against Imo’s macaque troop. Tool use, he points out, is as common in birds as in monkeys and apes. Cooperative hunting? Double-crested cormorants and white pelicans herd fish schools in groups, eagle and falcon pairs flush prey for each other, and ask any jackrabbit whether Harris’s hawk families hunt cooperatively. Social learning? Many birds learn about enemies, foods, and foraging methods that way. Social intelligence? Get this: chickens can recognize up to 100 flock-mates, and so, probably, can acorn woodpeckers. And vocal learning is “a social skill that, so far as we know, no non-human primate possesses.” Bowerbird bowers—primates have nothing like bowers!
Cetaceans
As mentioned in chapter 4, the study of dolphin and whale cognition is still recovering from overblown claims made in the past for cetaceans as spiritual, altruistic, oceangoing geniuses. It’s awkward to make the transition from brilliant angel to merely smart and nice. In addition, they live in the water and many employ ultrasonics in ways we only partially understand, so studying them involves more technology than studying primates. Following chimpanzees through the rain forest is easy compared to following dolphins through the sea. Nevertheless, we know that they are extremely social, are eminently capable of mimicry (including vocal learning), can hunt cooperatively, may teach their young, show tool use, and often display a twisted sense of humor.
Hyenas, octopuses, buffalo, bees
In 1984, Lawrence Frank startled attendees at an international conference on primatology with a paper called “Are Hyenas Primates?” in which he pointed out that hyena society has many of the socially complex and sophisticated aspects of, for example, macaque society.
Biologist Roland Anderson is in there boosting the octopus as “the most intelligent invertebrate in the world.” Octopuses don’t have some of the usual traits that correlate with intelligence. They don’t live long, and the young don’t spend time with their parents, either learning from them or being protected during a learning period. They appear to have no social lives. Yet they have versatile behavior, are capable of observational learning, and show individuality. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that cephalopods have unusually complicated bodies to run, what with tentacles and suckers and siphons and chromatophores, not to mention larval forms.
John Byers sticks up for the ungulates. Sort of. “I am going to argue that the ungulates are smarter than previously believed, but that their cognitive abilities are specialized, and most likely limited to just a few kinds of situation,” he writes.
Writing of honeybees, citing their use of cognitive maps, discrimination learning, and dance language, James and Carol Gould extol their mental powers. To a point. “Despite a widespread unwillingness to take indications of insect intellect at face value, there is good evidence that even a few milligrams of highly specialized neural wiring can accomplish a limited set of individually impressive cognitive tasks essential to the natural history of the animal in question.”
Fish brains
In a restrained 2002 paper, researchers Redouan Bshary, Wolfgang Wickler, and Hans Fricke note that theorists of cognition generally neglect to contemplate fish intellect, and are derelict in not doing so: “Most phenomena of interest for primatologists are found in fish as well…. We think that on [a] descriptive functional level, we are able to provide fish examples for almost all phenomena that are currently being discussed in the context of primate intelligence.”
There are fish, they point out, who recognize other fish as in
dividuals, fish who know each other’s voices, fish who live in extended families, fish who appease higher-ranking fish in their group, fish who keep track of whether other fish are playing fair, fish who copy other fish in food choice or in mate choice, fish who learn traditional sites and routes from other fish, fish who can tell people apart, fish who apparently learn foraging techniques from other fish, fish who join other fish in ganging up on predators, and fish who remember landmarks they have not seen for at least six months. (These are not all the same fish.) Also, they note, fish as a group are far superior to primates at building structures such as nests. Not that anyone is keeping track.
Noting that “cooperative hunting has been cited as one of the hallmarks of hominid evolution,” Bshary, Wickler, and Fricke describe cooperative hunts involving giant moray eels and groupers (lunartail groupers or red sea coral groupers). The groupers swim up to a cave in the coral where a moray is resting and shake their bodies in an exaggerated way. On about half the occasions that this was observed, the moray came out of the cave, and “the two predators would swim next to each other, searching for prey.” Often they swam with their sides touching. When they found a prey fish hiding in the coral, the moray would prowl through holes in the coral, while the groupers waited to strike the fish the moray chased out.
Stylings by Mr. Fish
If Machiavellian intelligence is important in the development of primate brainpower, Bshary, Wickler, and Fricke suggest that cleaner fish are another place to look. Cleaner fish are fish of various species who nibble other fish clean of parasites, dead skin, and infected flesh. They typically wait at a known cleaning station* for fish to come by in search of their services. This is a source of food for them and a source of improved health and comfort for the “client” fish. Some fish clean other fish as a sideline and others are specialized to do nothing else. Cleaner wrasse may groom 2,300 fish a day, and they have been seen cleaning fish of more than 100 species. There is evidence that cleaner fish distinguish and discriminate between client fish that can’t go to another cleaning station (because their territory or home range includes only that one) and clients who have other options. The clients with other options get cleaned first. Sometimes cleaner fish cheat and nibble off some perfectly healthy flesh, and if clients detect this, they can go into a frenzy of consumer outrage, chasing the cleaner. Cleaner fish are more obsequious to clients from predatory species, hovering above them and touching the client’s dorsal fin with their own pelvic and pectoral fins—and they are more apt to do this if they get a second chance with a client who previously attacked them for cheating, a form of reconciliation. Cleaner fish behave better toward clients if other prospective clients are watching, especially if the waiting clients have the option of going elsewhere. Client fish use what they learn from watching to decide whether to keep their appointment or swim off and take their patronage elsewhere. In short, the cleaner-client relationship is complicated, with plenty of room for negotiation, and the better a fish is at keeping track of the behavior of other fish, the better off it will be. “Full-time cleaners will probably turn out to be the ultimate Machiavellian strategists among fish.”
Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Page 41