by Guy Murchie
An even more remarkable function of insect government is the matter of police work and executions, which often involve close (and perhaps controversial) decisions as well as very determined action. The mental processes that lead to the action are not yet known but entomologists have noted that ant colonies that tolerate beggars and exploiters in prosperous periods tend to change their attitude in times of famine, when they will suddenly turn on these objectionable ones and kill them. Termites have a comparable practice in their system for reducing the number of their soldiers after a war. When defending themselves against besieging ants at the onset of war they rapidly breed extra guards but, not having any veterans' organization and the specialized guards being nonproductive and unable even to feed themselves, when the siege has been lifted the termitary evidently feels an urgent need to get back to its normal ratio of one guard to a hundred other termites. So the order goes out to destroy certain of these idle and hungry soldiers, which is done by starving them, then eating them. A startling but significant fact in this dire performance, however, is that the victims are individually selected. Then, in the presence of their fellow guardsmen, they are refused food. This is known through many delicate experiments which show that the victims are not picked for being tasty or nutritious, not at random nor, so far as we know, by criterion of age, health or length or quality of service, but simply as surplus troops. Yet why certain individuals, presumably as innocent and worthy as their fellows, are sentenced while others are reprieved seems so far to have eluded all investigators.
The eventual answer may turn out to have something to do with the mysterious group mind of social insects, which has been speculated about by both scientists and philosophers for generations. Who runs an ant or termite city anyhow? Or a school of fish? We will return to this subject later when we take up transcendence in Chapter 19.
GROUP MIND OF BEES
Meantime let us consider the beehive as an organism with its own mind. The fact that an individual bee cannot live apart from his fellow bees longer than two or three days, that two bees together can survive scarcely a week while no number of them less than forty has ever been able to maintain a hive to my knowledge, should establish their colonial nature if not their collective mind. Like other societies of social insects, the hive lends itself to appropriate and serious consideration as a volatile yet integral organism. It weighs about ten pounds in the form of 50,000 cells (bees) ranging over a square mile or more of territory. It breathes, circulates, metabolizes, regulates its temperature, considers, decides, defends itself, eats, drinks, evacuates, mates and procreates. Most remarkable of all, it intracommunicates with itself in a formal coded dance (with sound and smell effects) that amounts to the most abstract and specific animal language yet discovered by man.
This bee language was pieced together little by little in the I920s and 1930s by Karl von Frisch, the famous Austrian zoologist who has gradually become so intimate with his subjects that, as he says, he literally senses a hive from the inside and "feels himself a bee." It is a language used primarily by bee scouts who have discovered a source of nectar too far away to be readily findable by smell or sight and who want to share it with their fellow workers. They tell about the new nectar by doing a very precise dance on the honeycomb inside the hive, which consists of quivering the abdomen while going through a curious figure eight maneuver. But the meaning of this dance, so painstakingly translated by von Frisch, is that the middle axis of the figure eight gives the direction of the nectar in relation to the direction of the sun, which (replacing light with gravity for the purpose of the dance) is assumed to be straight up or exactly above the top of the comb. Thus if the dancing bee moves up the comb at an angle 270 to the right of vertical, she is telling her sisters to fly 27° to the right of the sun to find something good to make honey out of and, after they have "read" the message several times and understood it, they actually go out and fly the designated course. Even in cloudy weather a bee can usually see the sun's position through her awareness of ultraviolet and polarized light. As to how far bees are to follow the course, that instruction is imparted by the tempo of the dance, a near destination being indicated by faster dancing and a far one by slower dancing, always in direct ratio. And the kind of nectar is also revealed in the dance, this time by smell since the scout inevitably has picked up a sample of it on her legs and body. Besides that, she hums quietly, and not just to herself, the tone intermittently coming from her wing beats at 250 cycles a second which, with mystic appropriateness, turns out to be the key of B. I said "intermittently" because the bee hums audibly only during the middle or "straight run" portion of her figure eight dance which, being a fixed percentage of the whole dance, has a duration in direct proportion to the distance to the new nectar source and therefore tips off all the bees who hear her as to how far away it is.
Sight being scarcely possible in the dark interior of the hive, the bee scout's message is not read visually like seeing black ink upon a white page but more as a blind person "reads" Braille: by the sense of touch. Usually several curious bees cluster eagerly around the dancing scout, feeling her with their palpitating paips, noticing everything: how fast she moves, what she tastes like and, above all, the exact angle of her path across the comb. Incredible as it seems, the observing bees take in every detail and remember them so well they have been seen to fly minutes later within ten or fifteen degrees of the designated course, an acceptable margin of accuracy at the ranges involved. And, like all competent aerial navigators, they steadily shift their flight directions to match the movement of the sun through the sky, this obviously by instinct with the aid of their version of the biological clock. And they even make corrections for the wind by heading just far enough to the right or left of their assigned course so that the wind blows them back to where they would have been if they had headed exactly on course in a dead calm. But, as if wind correcting were not remarkable enough, they always uncorrect their headings when doing the dance, so the witnesses receive the simple sun angles, leaving it to each bee to apply her own wind adjustment according to the weather conditions of the moment.
It would seem only natural for a society with such a highly developed language to use it in governing itself. And that is what beehives actually do. When the bees decide to move to a new location, an operation called swarming, they begin by sending scout bees out looking for building sites, inspecting hollow trees, holes in the ground, boxes and other possibilities. Then, instead of choosing one of these locations by some sort of "marathon" voting system as do ants, the bees hold what might be called a nominating convention in the hive, each scout describing where her favorite spot is by her waggle dance language, and expressing the strength of her feeling by the number of times she repeats it. Then, having narrowed the choice down to two or three places, the scouts go out again for a final look at the most popular sites. After that they meet in a conclusive plenary session where, by conversation and genuine persuasion, they almost invariably reach a unanimous agreement and fly to the new home. I say "almost" because I've heard of one case in which a swarm conferred for two whole weeks yet still couldn't make up its mind about two equally attractive sites. Then on the fifteenth day the bees finally gave up - and gave up so utterly that their strange solution amounted to hive suicide. They actually turned erratic and built a new hive in an obviously unsheltered spot in the nearest bush, where they froze to death the following winter.
If one of the marks of a sophisticated language is its propensity to diversify into dialects, the bees' language must qualify. For von Frisch found many dialects of it in use by the various kinds of bees. Primitive dwarf bees, for example, dance on a horizontal comb outdoors, aiming the straight run of their figure eight directly at the destination, which obviates any need for transposing the angles of light and gravity. Most honeybees substitute a round dance for the figure eight when the nectar is near, and Italian bees do a rather sickleshaped figure eight dance to indicate middle distances. But different races o
f bees use these `scripts" differently, Italian bees doing the round dance to indicate nectar within 30 feet, a sickle dance for ranges between 30 and 120 feet, and the figure eight dance beyond, while Austrian bees do the round dance all the way to about 500 feet and dance all their dances noticeably faster. Indian bees, on the other hand, do the figure eight to within 10 or 12 feet of the hive and much more slowly than the European bees. Which has the consequence that bees of different species, when mixed, often misunderstand each other, an Austrian bee, for example, taking an Italian bee's figure eight dance (completed every two seconds) to indicate the nectar is 1000 feet away when the Italian bee meant to say only 700 feet.
SOME OTHER ANIMAL LANGUAGES
Other examples of animal language are hardly less extraordinary, and a few even depend on writing. Best known is probably that produced by the spider who spins a circular web that "writes" a silken script through which he converses with his neighbors, his mates, victims and, in some degree, with whoever passes by. He does it not with eyesight but by feel and instinct, usually at speed and in the darkness before dawn, measuring and adding a new rung to the orb every second and making two complete revolutions around it every minute, the whole taking less than half an hour.
Of course there are many kinds of orb webs (not to mention webs shaped like funnels, bowls, domes, tubes and purses), each of which represents but one of the thousand cobweb designs or dialects these little creatures have evolved in the last hundred million years. And though indelibly fixed in their genes, the designs outwardly express the spiders' inward moods and minds, being somehow influenced by
every environmental factor from weather to diet. In fact a surprisingly potent influence on webs is any drug the spinner may recently have absorbed. If he was fed coffee, for instance, his next web will be a loose, ragged array of crooked, unfinished spokes. A Benzedrine web is more organized but rather one-sided. A marijuana orb lacks outer threads. A scopolamine or mescaline one is smooth but disoriented, while one spun under chloral hydrate, the barman's "Mickey Finn," is barely begun before the spider passes out. And the remarkable thing about all drug-affected webs is that they so clearly characterize each causative ingredient that research laboratories have started domesticating spiders for the sole purpose of using their webs to test drugs.
Grasshoppers are not known to write, nor does one usually think of them as linguists, but entomologists have discovered they have a vocabulary of twelve calls appropriate to twelve situations, notably courting, in which subtle variations of dialect are the main difference between one species and another, a difference implemented by prevention of mating through inability to comprehend and respond to another's love notes. Some male butterflies have a clicking language to which not only other butterflies but occasionally birds respond. And some can speak both when they are caterpillars and while pupating inside a cocoon. Even earthworms talk to each other in faint crackly voices, and some ants emit dainty squeaks, while tree ants drum with their heads to converse tree to tree, although the ten-word ant vocabulary, as presently known, contains more words of smell (such as "I'm one of yours" or "Beware!") than of sound. All in all there are estimated to be at least ten thousand species of singing insects, each with its own language that is identifiable to almost no one but closely related insects, each kind tuned to its unique individual cadence of "words" and intervals.
Fish have a surprising range of voices, though not all of them hear well. The horse mackerel grunts like a pig, the doras growls like a wolf and, more appropriately, the electric catfish hisses like a cat. The maigre, a large Mediterranean fish, has the most varied vocabulary of all, being known on different occasions to purr, buzz, whistle and bellow. And evidence that his finny audience really grasps the meanings of such utterances of the deep comes from experiments in recording and replaying them, like the study of damselfish language by Arthur Myrberg in Bahamian waters in 1969. Having learned the meaning of damselfish words, Myrberg found he could play a chirp and make one of these fish go into a spawning dance involving a 450 twist followed by a U-shaped dip. A slightly different call would persuade the fish to change color. Myrberg also discovered a low-pitch tone that is a potent lure for sharks, bringing dozens of the big marauders out of "nowhere" in less than a minute. And now the U.S. Navy is testing the idea of mobilizing a shark patrol to protect ships against enemy frogmen and perhaps developing a technique for talking them away from sinking ships in the interest of human safety.
Such examples of explicit animal language are obviously but a few out of the planetary proliferation in every meadow, barnyard, desert, sea or forest on Earth. As Carl Sandburg once put it, the horse utters "the whicker of expectancy, the whinny of excitement, the neigh of love." Comparably the lion coughs, grunts, sniffs and roars, while his lioness moans to control her whining cubs. And the tiger may have a bigger vocabulary: a gentle moan of disappointment and a louder groan of warning of his approach, a barklike "pooking" to a fellow tiger, a cough to frighten scavengers from a kill, a whistled mating call, a deep confident roar, a higher, wilder roar of anger that announces his charge, and an imitation of the mating cry of the sambar stag by which the tiger lures a hind within range, the only instance I can think of where a nonhuman predator uses aural camouflage to influence his prey.
Some animal talk is revealed in their social games too, which are often similar to those of human children. Lambs and gibbons are fond of playing "follow the leader" with various bleatings and chortles. Young deer and otters prefer "hide and seek." Badgers like "king of the castle," and almost all young animals enjoy "tag." Solitary games are common also like the favorite of young hippos who love to blow a floating leaf high into the air from under water accompanied by gleeful gurgles, sometimes repeating the trick a dozen times just for the fun of it.
BIRD LANGUAGE
As for birds, they have probably evolved more languages than any other class of animals despite their bird brains that are often smaller than their eyes. Even chickens, not noted for wit among birds, enjoy a vocabulary with several explicit clucks and calls for their chicks: to summon them, admonish them, alert them to danger, tell them about things to eat. And, in adult relations, they utter words of menace, of suspicion, challenge, triumph, fear, submission, affection - about thirty expressions in all.
Bird language in fact ranges all the way from conversations between eggs (page 143) to the ultrasonic subtleties of the antiphonal love duet (page 636) and is usually used quite judiciously. If a sea gull finds a small piece of food, for example, he may eat it without a word, but if he discovers a large supply, he generally utters the food call that brings dozens of other gulls to share his good fortune. Also birds evolve local dialects in the different places where they live and ones that migrate need to learn these variations if they expect to communicate fluently on their travels. Crows in North America have very definite alarm calls that tell other crows to fly away from danger, a cry for help when caught and an assembly call for when they sight an owl or large hawk or perhaps a prowling cat they would like to mob. If such language is played on a high-fidelity recording in American woods, any crows present have been found to recognize and respond to it. But if played in France they obviously misunderstand it. In fact French "crows" (including rooks and jackdaws) assemble rather than flee when they hear the "scram" alarm of Pennsylvania crows. Pennsylvania crows, in turn, do not respond normally to the cawings of Maine crows if they have been confined and deprived of contact with strangers, but crows free to migrate between the two areas soon get to understand both dialects, and some Pennsylvania crows, shipped to France, have even learned to converse with French jackdaws.
The same goes for gulls, French herring gulls making neither head nor tail of the conversations of American herring gulls. Yet ocean birds that visit both continents understand not only the dialects of all closely related species but many of the languages of quite alien ones. And there are countless known instances of one order of animal standing sentinel for another or telli
ng another where to find food. The classic case is that of the black-throated honey guide (Indicator indicator) of Africa and southern Asia who loves honey but fears getting stung by bees. This alert little bird is adept at finding wild bees' nests, presumably by following the bees. But once he has discovered such a nest, instead of going after the honey directly he looks for someone to do it for him. The someone usually turns out to be a man and the bird flutters around him uttering such desperate cries reinforced by such unbirdy behavior that the man cannot help realizing the creature must be purposely attracting his attention. When the bird in turn recognizes that the man realizes what he is up to, he immediately flies toward the bees' nest still crying out his version of "If you want honey, follow me," and returning again and again to make sure he is being followed, his excitement steadily rising as the man gets nearer the honey. Of course the man is usually a native who understands the bird's intention, honey guides being well known in Africa, and naturally he has been taught how to open the nest and help himself to honey, gratefully leaving a well-earned commission for the bird.
In cases where the honey guide cannot locate a man, he usually seeks out a species of badger called a ratel instead and tells him about the honey in the same fluttery language of which the ratel also has an inborn understanding and an appetite that makes him more than glad to cooperate, including his inevitably if inadvertently leaving behind more honey than the bird can eat. To sum up, the honey-guide language is so well known in Africa today that, if a man or any articulate animal imitated the bird in front of a ratel, the ratel would almost surely be reminded of the honey guide and would presumably follow him, visualizing a hive full of honey.
