The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  Early one morning, I stopped by the firehouse at McMurdo Station to pick up a radio, file a foot plan, and check out with the responder on duty. I stuck close to the wind-frayed flags planted every 20 feet along the route. The day was staggeringly bright and, like everywhere in Antarctica, devoid of smell. There were snowfields in every direction, and I could hear my boots with each step, pressing into snow so cold and dry it squeaked like Styrofoam. When I reached the end of the ice, I began climbing, pulling myself up along the twisted preset ropes. My boots gripped the cold igneous rock below me, once lava in the vent of an ancient volcano. As I ascended onto the peak, I fell on my knees, exhausted and sweating inside my big red coat. I gazed across the Ross Ice Shelf toward the South Pole. Behind me towered Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. In front soared the Royal Society Range, and to the east, the open sea, riddled with tabular icebergs.

  The whole of the sprawling base—the labs, the dorms, the helicopter pads—had disappeared into a bewildering sea of white. I thought of the photograph of Earth taken by Voyager I from the edge of the solar system. From 3.7 billion miles away, the whole of our world—everything human—was less than a pixel across. After a while, I spotted the trail leading back to McMurdo Station, just a faint strand tracking toward the horizon. The same year as the Challenger accident, two Americans fell into a fissure of ice 75 feet below. A search and rescue team tried frantically to pulley them to the surface, but they were wedged in too tightly to budge. The team heard them crying as the hours passed, then wailing and screaming until their voices finally stopped.

  What is it that drives us to places like these—to the nothingness of the poles, the vast void of outer space? At the edge our world recedes, but we can’t escape the brittle cold, the throbbing legs, the grating of mechanical parts, the absurdity of those O-rings. But perhaps this is why we strive. Perhaps, in the midst of such immensity, when we are faced with the irreducible fact of us, the firmities of reason and rationality give way. In the muscle of this great paradox, even a scientist is capable of believing in bigger things. The stronger the contradiction, the tauter the bow, the farther we can shoot.

  Standing in the piercing air, I began to feel incredibly cold. My skin was damp, and snow had found its way into the crevices of my wrists. On top of Castle Rock, with my breath tumbling down the peak, I took one last look at the vast expanse that surrounded me. There was total stillness except for the faint whirr of a distant helicopter. The Terra Nova and Discovery huts were out there somewhere, frozen and timeless, holding steady against the winds. I took hold of the fraying rope at my feet and began my descent.

  BARBARA J. KING

  When Animals Mourn

  FROM Scientific American

  ON A RESEARCH VESSEL in the waters off Greece’s Amvrakikos Gulf, Joan Gonzalvo watched a female bottlenose dolphin in obvious distress. Over and over again, the dolphin pushed a newborn calf, almost certainly her own, away from the observers’ boat and against the current with her snout and pectoral fins. It was as if she wanted to nudge her baby into motion—but to no avail. The baby was dead. Floating under direct sunlight on a hot day, its body quickly began to decay; occasionally the mother removed pieces of dead skin and loose tissue from the corpse.

  When the female dolphin continued to behave in this way into a second day, Gonzalvo and his colleagues on the boat grew concerned: in addition to fussing with the calf, she was not eating normally, behavior that could be risky for her health, given dolphins’ high metabolism. Three other dolphins from the Amvrakikos population of about 150 approached the pair, but none disrupted the mother’s behavior or followed suit.

  As he watched the event unfold in 2007, Gonzalvo, a marine biologist at the Tethys Research Institute in Milan, Italy, decided he would not collect the infant’s body to perform a necropsy, as he would usually have done for research purposes. “What prompted me not to interfere was respect,” he told me earlier this year. “We were privileged to be able to witness such clear evidence of the mother-calf bond in bottlenose dolphins, a species that I have been studying for over a decade. I was more interested in observing that natural behavior than interrupting it by abruptly interfering and disturbing a mother who was already in obvious distress. I would define what I saw as mourning.”

  Was the dolphin mother truly grieving for her dead calf? A decade ago I would have said no. As a biological anthropologist who studies animal cognition and emotion, I would have recognized the poignancy of the mother’s behavior but resisted interpreting it as mourning. Like most animal behaviorists, I was trained to describe such reactions in neutral terms such as “altered behavior in response to another’s death.” After all, the mother might have become agitated only because the strange, inert status of her calf puzzled her. Tradition dictates that it is softhearted and unscientific to project human emotions such as grief onto other animals.

  Now, though, especially after two years’ research for my book How Animals Grieve, I think Gonzalvo was correct in his judgment that the mother dolphin was mourning. In the past few years a critical mass of new observations of animal responses to death has bubbled to the surface, leading me to a startling conclusion: cetaceans, great apes, elephants, and a host of other species ranging from farm animals to domestic pets may, depending on circumstances and their own individual personalities, grieve when a relative or close friend dies. That such a broad range of species—including some quite distantly related to humans—lament the passing of loved ones hints that the roots of our own capacity for grief run very deep indeed.

  Defining Grief

  Since Charles Darwin’s day, two centuries ago, scientists have debated hotly whether some animals display emotions beyond those associated with parental care or other aspects of survival and reproduction. Darwin thought that, given the evolutionary connection between humans and other animals, many emotions must be similar across species. He granted to monkeys, for instance, grief and jealousy, as well as pleasure and vexation. But the attribution of emotions such as these to animals fell increasingly out of mainstream scientific favor. By the early twentieth century the behaviorist paradigm held sway, with its insistence that only observable behavior of animals, not their interior lives, could be studied with rigor. Gradually the scientific embrace of animal emotion has revived, thanks originally in part to anecdotes from long-term field studies on large-brained mammals. From Tanzania, Jane Goodall recounted in heart-wrenching detail the young chimpanzee Flint’s decline and death from grief only weeks after the death of his mother, Flo. From Kenya, Cynthia Moss reported that elephants attend to dying comrades and stroke the bones of deceased relatives. Field biologists and anthropologists began to ask questions about whether, and how, animals mourn.

  To study and understand grief among animals, scientists need a definition that distinguishes it from other emotions. Whereas “animal response to death” embraces any behavior by an individual following the death of a companion animal, researchers may strongly suspect grief only when certain conditions are met. First, two (or more) animals choose to spend time together beyond survival-oriented behaviors such as foraging or mating. Second, when one animal dies, the survivor alters his or her normal behavioral routine—perhaps reducing the amount of time devoted to eating or sleeping, adopting a body posture or facial expression indicative of depression or agitation, or generally failing to thrive. For his part, Darwin conflated grief with sadness. But the two differ, primarily in intensity: the grieving animal is more acutely distressed, possibly for a more prolonged period.

  This two-part definition is imperfect. For one thing, scientists lack a metric for evaluating exactly what counts as “more acutely distressed.” Should the criteria for grief differ according to species, and might grief in other animals assume forms that are difficult for humans to recognize as mourning? The data are not yet available on these questions. Furthermore, mothers or other caretakers that constantly provide food or protection to infants that subsequently die cannot be said to have met the f
irst criterion (going beyond survival-oriented behaviors), yet they remain among the strongest candidates for suffering survivor’s grief.

  Future studies of animal mourning will help refine this definition. For now, it furthers our critical assessment of responses made by animals when others around them die. For instance, baboon and chimpanzee mothers in wild African populations sometimes carry the corpse of the dead baby for days, weeks, or even months—a behavior that on the surface of things might look like grief. But they may not exhibit any significant outward indicator of agitation or distress. When the animals carry on with their routine behaviors, such as mating, their behavior does not meet the criteria for mourning.

  A Menagerie of Mourners

  A wide range of species do exhibit behaviors that fit the two-part definition of grief, however, elephants among them. A particularly compelling example of elephant mourning comes from Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants and his team at Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, who in 2003 tracked elephants’ responses to the dying matriarch called Eleanor. When Eleanor collapsed, a matriarch named Grace from another elephant family immediately came to her aid, using her tusks to support Eleanor back onto her feet. When Eleanor fell again, Grace stayed with her, pushing on her body, for at least an hour, even though her own family moved on. Then Eleanor died. During the course of the week that followed, females from five elephant families, including Eleanor’s own, showed keen interest in the body. Some individuals appeared upset, pulling at and nudging the body with trunk and feet or rocking back and forth while standing over it. Based on the females’ reactions (at no point during this period did a bull elephant visit the carcass), Douglas-Hamilton concluded that elephants show a so-called generalized response to dying and death—grieving not only for the loss of close kin but for individuals in other families.

  Wild cetaceans also seem to exhibit a generalized grief response. In the Canary Islands in 2001, Fabian Ritter of Mammal Encounters Education Research observed a rough-toothed dolphin mother pushing and retrieving her dead calf’s body in much the same way that the Amvrakikos dolphin mother had done with her baby’s corpse. She was not alone: two adult escorts swam synchronously with her at certain periods, and at other times a group of at least fifteen dolphins altered their pace of travel to include the mother and dead baby. The mother’s persistence was remarkable, and when on the fifth day it began to wane, the escorts joined in and supported the infant on their own backs.

  Giraffes, too, appear to grieve. In 2010 at the Soysambu Conservancy in Kenya, a female Rothschild’s giraffe gave birth to a baby with a deformed foot. The baby walked less and remained more stationary than most calves. During the youngster’s four weeks of life, wildlife biologist Zoe Muller of the Rothschild’s Giraffe Project, based in Kenya, never saw the mother more than 20 meters away. Although individuals in a giraffe herd often synchronize their activities, foraging together, for example, the mother deviated from this pattern, preferring to stay close to the baby. Like the dolphin mother in the Amvrakikos Gulf, she may have risked her own health in doing so—though in this case for a living offspring.

  One day Muller discovered the herd engaged in highly atypical behavior. Seventeen females, including the calf’s mother, were vigilant and restless as they stared into a patch of bush. The calf had died in that spot about an hour before. All seventeen females showed keen interest in the body that morning, approaching and then retreating from it. By the afternoon twenty-three females and four juveniles were involved, and some nudged the carcass with their muzzles. That evening fifteen adult females clustered closely around the body—more closely than they had been during the day.

  Throughout the following day numerous adult giraffes attended the infant’s body. Some adult males approached for the first time, although they showed no interest in the carcass, instead focusing on foraging or inspecting the reproductive status of the females. On day three Muller spotted the mother giraffe alone under a tree about 50 meters from where the calf had died. The body itself, however, was no longer in its resting spot. Following a search, Muller located it, half devoured, in the spot under the tree where the mother had been earlier. By the next day the body was gone, taken by hyenas.

  Giraffes are highly social animals. After caching a newborn out of sight for about the first four weeks of life, the mothers sometimes engage in a crèche system in which one looks after the infants while the others forage. Muller does not use the words “grief” or “mourning” in describing the incident she witnessed. Yet this case is especially instructive. Not only the mother’s behavior but also that of many of the females in her herd changed significantly in the wake of the infant’s death. Although it is impossible to rule out an alternative explanation, the fact that the females had mounted a protective response against predators taking the baby makes it overwhelmingly likely that grief was involved at some level.

  Detailed observations of wild populations of animals, such as the ones Muller reported, are still relatively rare, for several reasons. Scientists may not be at the right place at the right time to observe post-death responses by survivors. And even when they are present, no remarkable grief behaviors may ensue. Especially at this early stage of research into animal grief, observations from sanctuaries, zoos, and even our own homes may supply needed clues.

  I cannot imagine describing the behavior of Willa the Siamese cat without invoking the word “grief.” For fourteen years Willa lived with her sister, Carson, at the home of Karen and Ron Flowe in Virginia. The feline siblings groomed each other, lazed together in favorite parts of the house, and slept with their bodies entwined. If Carson was taken from the house to visit the vet, Willa acted mildly agitated until she reunited with her sister. In 2011 Carson’s chronic medical issues worsened, and the Flowes took her again to the vet, where she died in her sleep. At first Willa acted as she did when her sister was away for a brief period. Within two or three days, though, she began to utter an unearthly sound, a sort of wail, and to search the spots she and Carson had favored together. Even when this startling behavior faded, Willa remained lethargic for months.

  Of all the instances of animal grief I have compiled, the most surprising came from a sanctuary setting. In 2006 three mulard ducks arrived at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. They suffered from hepatic lipidosis, a liver disease caused by force-feeding of the birds at a foie gras farm. Two of the rescued ducks, Kohl and Harper, were in bad shape physically and emotionally. Very afraid of people, Kohl had deformed legs, and Harper was blind in one eye. The two forged a fine supportive friendship for four years. Ducks are social birds, but even so, the intensity of their bond was unusual. When Kohl’s leg pain increased and he could no longer walk, he was euthanized. Harper was allowed to observe the procedure and to approach his friend’s body afterward. After pushing on the body, Harper lay down and put his head and neck over Kohl’s neck. There he stayed for some hours. In effect, Harper never recovered from his loss. Day after day, he snubbed other potential duck friends, preferring to sit near a small pond where he had often gone with Kohl. Two months later Harper died as well.

  The Sorrow Continuum

  It is logical to think that long-lived species whose members partner most closely with others in tight-knit pairs, family groups, or communities may more readily mourn the deaths of loved ones than other species do. But researchers do not yet know enough about animal grief to make such a claim. We need to test this hypothesis by systematically comparing responses to death in a variety of animal social systems, from gregarious ones to those in which animals come together only seasonally for food or mating.

  Still, species-level differences in grieving will not be the whole story, because variation in the immediate social contexts and personalities of individual survivors will complicate matters. For instance, whereas the practice of allowing a survivor to view the body, as Harper did with Kohl, sometimes seems to prevent or reduce a period of distressed searching and vocalizing by the surviving animal, at o
ther times it seems not to help at all—attesting to the degree of individual variation in death responses within species. Likewise, evidence for grief in wild monkeys that live in cohesive social units is surprisingly limited so far, whereas in more solitary species such as domestic cats, bonds may develop between two or more kin or friends such that grief responses rival those of much more social animals. I would predict that field observations will show that some monkeys across varied social systems visibly mourn as much as some domestic cats. Indeed, in How Animals Grieve, I recount examples from cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, and birds, as well as the other animals discussed here. In each species I find a grief continuum, with some individuals seeming indifferent to a companion’s death and other individuals appearing distraught over such a loss.

  Cognitive differences also play a role in animal grief. Just as there are different levels of empathy expressed by different species and even across individuals within a species, there must be varying levels of comprehension when animals grieve. Do some animals grasp death’s finality or even have a mental concept of death? We simply don’t know. No evidence suggests that any nonhuman animal anticipates death in the way we humans do, a capacity that underlies so much of our compelling literature, music, art, and theater—and that costs our species a great deal in terms of emotional suffering.

  Indeed, the capacity to mourn may become quite costly for any animal in both physical and emotional terms, especially in the wild, where alert high-energy behavior is needed for foraging, predator avoidance, and mating. Why then did grief evolve in the first place? Perhaps the social withdrawal that often accompanies an animal’s grief, if not taken too far, allows time for rest and thus an emotional recovery that in turn leads to greater success in forging a new close bond. Or, as John Archer writes in The Nature of Grief, it may be that “the costs involved in grief can be viewed as a trade-off with the overall benefits conferred by separation responses” seen when two individuals are keenly attached but forced apart from each other. Under such circumstances, the missing partners may search for each other and thereby reunite and live to see another day. What is adaptive, then, may not be grief itself but instead the strong positive emotions experienced before grief comes into the picture, shared between two or more living animals whose level of cooperation in nurturing or resource-acquisition tasks is enhanced by these feelings.