Some researchers say that time is an abstract notion only humans can comprehend. William Roberts, an animal cognition researcher, says animals are “stuck in time,” living, as the Buddhists exhort us all to do, only in the moment.
Yet it’s undeniable that animals possess their own versions of internal clocks and calendars. Some of these are obvious. Sally, like most dogs, knows when it’s dinnertime and barks at 5:01 p.m. if we haven’t filled her bowl. One could argue that her emptying stomach is her hourglass.
But many dog owners who work outside the home report that their dogs not only know the dinner hour but anticipate the time the owners are coming home from work each day. Some cats, too, wait by a window or door at the appointed hour. Rupert Sheldrake, the controversial English biologist, has known parrots who announce verbally, in English, when their owner is about to return. He’s convinced they do it telepathically, and that it has nothing to do with timekeeping.
Another possibility, in dogs at least, is just as intriguing as telepathy: that they smell time. Dogs’ sense of smell is legendary. With up to 300 million olfactory receptors in the nose (humans have a paltry 6 million), dogs can use their super-sense of scent to find bedbugs, identify diseased beehives, and locate corpses underwater.
A few years back, the BBC aired a show on which animal behaviorists investigated this question with a hound named Jazz. One of his owners, Christine, always came home at 4:00 and fed and walked Jazz. She had noticed that each day at 4:40, Jazz leapt onto the couch and stood at attention, twenty minutes before husband John came home, as if he were waiting for him. And indeed the BBC crew filmed this happening over and over for four days of the workweek. Was it possible that as John’s scent decayed with time, scent molecules—not stomach or bladder contents—were the sand in Jazz’s hourglass?
On Friday researchers tested the theory. That day, after work, Christine swung by John’s football club and picked up some of his T-shirts, redolent with his sweat. She wafted these around the living room, spreading fresh scent—and turning back Jazz’s olfactory clock. That afternoon, at 4:40, Jazz stayed dozing on the dog bed and didn’t get up till he heard John open the door. Jazz rushed to greet him as if his arrival were a happy surprise.
Our pets, of course, are not the only animals who track time. Creatures as small as bees do so, as Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch (who discovered that honeybees have color vision and communicate the location of nectar via dance) observed as early as 1953. One of his students, Ingeborg Beling, trained bees to visit a site at a given time, and found their internal timekeepers to be accurate to within fifteen minutes—even when shielded from environmental cues, in experiments with constant temperature, light, and humidity. University of London researchers found that despite constant sunlight in the Arctic summer, bumblebees there stick to a daily schedule, returning to their underground nests well before midnight.
For a food reward, a rat can be trained to press one lever every two seconds, and a different lever every eight seconds. Squirrels understand that with time, some foods spoil; that’s why they dig up perishable food items first. Crows, rats, orangutans, and pygmy chimps have been shown to differentiate between now and later. The classic experiment goes like this: The animal is shown two jars, each with a treat, but one of them—say, a frozen cube of juice—disappears within a short period of time. After five minutes, the animals are allowed to choose one jar to open; they get a second chance in an hour. After just a few trials, the animals all chose the vanishing treat first, realizing they could save the other for later.
Without clocks or numbers, how do animals “count” time? Time was not the invention of humans. Time is nothing but regular cycles of motion: the tick-tock of a clock or metronome; the earth’s spin; the vibrations of the cesium-133 atom (from which we get the atomic second). Time can also be measured by the decay of a scent, by daily fluctuations of the strength of the earth’s magnetic field (which may be how bees do it), or by some other method we have yet to discover.
But what does time feel like to another species? Researchers can test how different species perceive, for instance, what is called critical flicker frequency—the point at which an intermittent light seems steady because we cannot process the flicker (similar to the way we don’t see the image on our TVs as a bunch of pixels but as a whole image). Trinity College researchers trained animals of different species to behave one way when they see a flickering light and another way when they see a steady shine. They found that small-bodied animals with fast metabolic rates perceive more information in a unit of time. A fly, for instance, can see 250 flashes per second. Larger animals tend to experience action more slowly. A leatherback sea turtle can only see 15 flashes per second.
I pray that for Sally, time flies while we’re apart. But before I leave, I’m sealing my dirty gym clothes in plastic bags. My husband can open them for her as needed.
Octopus: The MENSA Mollusk
— Sy —
Everyone wanted to pet Octavia.
And no wonder. She was beautiful, graceful, and affectionate. The fact that she was boneless, slimy, and living in painfully cold, 47°F water deterred none of us.
What thrilled us—me, New England Aquarium volunteer Wilson Menashi, and four visitors from the environmental radio show Living on Earth—was the surprising fact that Octavia, who clearly wanted to be petted, was a giant Pacific octopus.
When her keeper, Bill Murphy, opened the top of her exhibit, Octavia had recognized Wilson and me immediately; we’d been working with her for several weeks. Turning red with excitement, she flowed over toward us from the far side of her tank. When we put our hands in the water, her arms rose to meet ours, embracing us with dozens of her strong, sensitive, white suckers. Occasionally Wilson handed her a fish from the plastic bucket perched on the edge of her tank.
Soon the Living on Earth crew joined in. People were tentative at first. In movies and stories, octopuses are portrayed as monsters, and the giant Pacific is the largest and strongest of them all. A single sucker on a large male can lift thirty pounds, and the animal has 1,600 of them. Octavia’s were strong enough to leave hickeys on our arms. But she was so curious and friendly that no one could resist the chance to touch her skin, which was soft as custard. We stroked her much as we would a dog, enchanted with the spectacle of her color-changing skin, the sensation of her suckers, the acrobatics of her many arms.
Then, as Menashi reached for another capelin to feed her, we realized the bucket of fish was gone.
While no fewer than six people were watching, and three of us had our arms in her tank, Octavia had stolen the bucket right out from under us.
“Octopuses are phenomenally smart,” Menashi says. And he should know: He has worked with them for twenty years and is expert in keeping these intelligent invertebrates occupied. Otherwise, they become bored. Aquariums design elaborate escape-proof lids for their octopus tanks, and still they are often thwarted. Octopuses not infrequently slip out of their exhibits and turn up in other tanks to eat the inhabitants. Many aquariums give their octopuses Legos to dismantle, jars with lids to unscrew, and Mr. Potato Heads to play with. Menashi, a retired inventor, designed a series of nesting Plexiglas cubes, each with a different lock, which Boston’s octopuses quickly learned to open to get at a tasty crab inside. And just recently, aquarists at Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium in New Zealand teamed up with Sony engineers to teach a female octopus named Rambo to press the red shutter button on a waterproofed camera to take photos of visitors, which the aquarium sells for $2 each to benefit its conservation programs. Though there’s no evidence that Rambo realizes the end product of her photography, she learned to work the gadget in just three attempts.
Intelligence so like our own may seem surprising in a creature so unlike us. “Short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science,” says neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale of the University of Chicago, octopuses and their kin “are the only
example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain.”
The octopus brain looks very different from a human’s. Our brain sits like a nut in the shell of our skull. Octopuses lack bones of any kind, and their brains wrap around the throat. Our brain is organized into four lobes. Theirs has fifty to seventy-five lobes, depending on how you count them. Most of our nerve cells are in our brain. Three-fifths of an octopus’s nerve cells are in the arms.
The wonder is that octopuses and humans may think, in many ways, alike. We both enjoy learning new things, solving puzzles, meeting new friends. And possibly, we both enjoy a good joke: When Octavia stole the bucket, she didn’t eat any of the fish in it. When we finally realized she had taken it, we saw she had wrapped it in the webbing between her arms, as if she was purposely hiding it from us. As long ago as the turn of the third century, Roman naturalist Claudius Aelianus wrote of the octopus that “mischief and craft are plainly seen to be the characteristics of this creature.” Perhaps Octavia especially enjoyed her caper for having outwitted us humans.
“So if an octopus is this smart,” one of our guests asked her keeper, “what other animals are out there that could be this smart—that we don’t think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all those things?”
An excellent question indeed.
Acknowledgments
This book was born thanks to friendships. Coauthors Liz and Sy have been best friends for thirty years. The editor of this book, Joni Praded, has been Sy’s friend almost as long, and was responsible for editing four of her books and one of Liz’s. One essay in this book tells the remarkable experiences of another dear friend, Katy Payne, and is included thanks to her generosity. The writer of our book’s preface, Vicki Croke, is also a treasured friend, and in fact was the person who suggested we write most of these stories for the Boston Globe, in the form of a regular column, in the first place.
For editing those columns, and for sharing them with tens of thousands of readers, we’re grateful to our Boston Globe editors, Hayley Kaufman, Amanda Katz, and Linda Matchan. We’re thankful to our literary agent, Sarah Jane Freyman, for her encouragement and support. In addition, we are grateful for the help and support of the following people and one organization: Howard Mansfield, Steve Thomas, Richard and Runi Estes, Anna Estes, Charles DeVinne, Joel Glick, Gary Galbreath, Selinda Chiquoine, Jody Simpson, Judy and Robert Oksner, Saibhung Singh and Saibhung Kaur Khalsa, Nampal Khalsa, Stephanie Thomas, Robert Kafka, and the New England Aquarium.
From three lions and a shark to a bee and a water bear, we thank the animals who appear in these essays. And for the deepest of friendships, we thank the animals who shared our lives during the years that we gathered the material and who appear in some of the essays. We owe special gratitude to Tess, Mika, Octavia, and Thurber, to Christopher Hogwood and Sally, to Pearl, Sundog, Georgia and Sheilah, to Kafka and Čapek, Claude and Lilac, and also Coaly and Shy.
Illustration Credits
Unless noted below, all images are in the public domain.
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page 12iStock.com/Andrii-Oliinyk
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page 50Louis Figuier, Reptiles and Birds: A Popular Account of the Various Orders: With a Description of the Habits and Economy of the Most Interesting (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1869): 467
page 110Angela Boyle, angelaboyle.flyingdodostudio.com
page 121Charles L. Stuart, Everybody’s Cyclopedia (New York: Syndicate Publishing Company, 1912)
page 124William Dwight Whitney, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (New York: The Century Co., 1911)
page 130Angela Boyle, angelaboyle.flyingdodostudio.com
page 139Buel P. Colton, Zoology: Descriptive and Practical (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1903): 132
page 149Charles L. Stuart, Everybody’s Cyclopedia (New York: Syndicate Publishing Company, 1912)
page 153Angela Boyle, angelaboyle.flyingdodostudio.com
page 168William Dwight Whitney, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (New York: The Century Co., 1911)
page 174S. G. Goodrich, The Animal Kingdom Illustrated, Arranged after Its Organization: Forming a Natural History of Animals, and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy (New York: A. J. Johnson & Co., 1885): 154
page 177Angela Boyle, angelaboyle.flyingdodostudio.com
page 183Charles L. Stuart, Everybody’s Cyclopedia (New York: Syndicate Publishing Company, 1912)
page 186S. G. Goodrich, The Animal Kingdom Illustrated, Arranged after Its Organization: Forming a Natural History of Animals, and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy (New York: A. J. Johnson & Co., 1885)
About the Authors
Saibhung Singh Khalsa
“Part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson,” as the Boston Globe describes her, Sy Montgomery is an author, naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and radio commentator who has traveled to some of the world’s most remote wildernesses for her work. She is the author of numerous award-winning books, including her memoir, The Good Good Pig, an international best seller; The Soul of an Octopus, both a best seller and a 2016 National Book Award finalist; and numerous award-winning books for children and young adults. She lives in Hancock, New Hampshire, with her husband, the writer Howard Mansfield; their dog, Thurber; and eight hens.
One of the most widely read authors on anthropology and animals, wild and domestic, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has observed dogs, cats, elephants, and human animals during her half-century-long career, all of which was inspired by her lengthy trips to Africa as a young woman. Her many books include Dreaming of Lions, The Hidden Life of Dogs, The Social Lives of Dogs, The Tribe of Tiger, The Old Way, and The Hidden Life of Deer. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, with her dogs, Capek and Kafka; and cats, Coaly, Claude, and Shy.
the politics and practice of sustainable living
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