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BORN TO BE FOOLED
Apes may be able to manipulate humans with tools, enticing us with a piece of straw and circumventing our security measures with a little bit of wire, but our own pets don’t need any additional technology. They just have to use our own biology against us:• Those puppy-dog eyes that make you forgive your dog for bad behavior trigger the same neurotransmitter involved in pairbonding with your mate and maternal behavior toward your offspring.
• Cats are much better at ordering us around than vice-versa: There’s a special combination meow–purr some cats use to demand service, and it’s acoustically similar to the cry of a human infant. We perceive it as less annoying than a meow—so the cat doesn’t get kicked out of the bedroom—but has an urgency we find hard to ignore. A researcher says that this particular sound is a natural one, but “we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans.”
• The parasite toxoplasma, when it infects a rat, overwhelms its fear of cats and makes it actually feel attracted to them, with predictable results for the rodent. (It then infects the cat, which is where it really wants to live.) Humans infected with toxo also show mental changes: They have an increased risk of traffic accidents, and there’s a correlation with schizophrenia. But the most frightening possibility: If it makes rats attracted to cats, does it do the same to people? As one researcher observes of people infected with toxo, “We have a parasite in our brain that is trying to get transmitted to a cat. This changes an individual’s personality.”
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In fact, if you dream of a society where everyone is helpful and kind to others, biologists have some bad news for you: That may be an impossible dream. One researcher, who studied how low-ranking capuchin monkeys use alarm calls to chase high-ranking bullies away from tasty bananas, says we shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of thing. It’s exactly what’s expected, based on the theory that creatures get smarter because group living is all about competition. That idea is called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, and says the capuchin scientist: “One of the predictions of the hypothesis is that deception should be a common behavior.”
HEY, BABY, IT’S COLD AND DANGEROUS OUTSIDE
Someone once wrote a book called Dogs Never Lie About Love. That’s the sort of thing people like to believe. But think about it: The two most basic requirements for survival of a species are food and sex. So if animals lie about food, of course they lie about love as well. It’s too important not to.
Some animals have figured out that since an alarm call works to shoo your neighbors away from an attractive food source, it’ll also work to keep them away from an attractive lady. Swallows that have read Chapter 3 of this book or who have otherwise learned that their wives can’t be trusted may make alarm calls when there’s no predator around as a way to frighten off any males from making advances on their mate.
An even more underhanded strategy is that of the male topi antelope. When his date shows signs of losing interest, he’ll look in the direction her eyes are wandering, prick up his ears, and snort, using the sound that means he’s caught sight of a lion or other predator. A scientist who caught them in the act thought the ruse was pretty lame:It made me laugh. It’s such an obvious lie—clearly there’s no lion.
Obvious, maybe, but apparently it works. When they played recordings, the researchers discovered that females couldn’t tell the difference between lying snorts and truthful ones. A snorting male would get two or three more chances at mating, and the guys weren’t reluctant to milk it—their snorts were lies nine times more often than they were true.
Alarm calls aren’t the only ways animals tell lovers tales. A rooster will make the call that means he’s found food when it’s really some other object, to attract females to come closer to him. He’s careful to make sure she’s far enough away that she can’t tell that’s only a peanut shell on the ground.
And some truly despicable animals do it the other way around, lying about love to get food. Ever watched fireflies on a summer night and wondered what was the point of that magical display? It’s firefly singles night. Males fly around announcing their availability, a female perched in the grass responds with the particular flash of their species, and he flies into her arms and together they make little baby fireflies.
Most of the time, that is. Some females will instead mimic the flash pattern of a different species of firefly, one that they can’t mate with. Scientists call these “femme fatales,” because when the hopeful male responds to her counterfeit invitation, he doesn’t get lucky, he gets to be her meal.
SINS OF OMISSION
Animals can lie by not communicating as well. Low-ranking vervet monkeys who see a predator make alarm calls much less often than high-ranking ones do; like the ill-paid staff of bullying bosses, maybe they figure they get treated the same no matter how much effort they make. The monkeys play favorites, too—males are more likely to call to warn a female than another male. And there’s also alarm-call nepotism: Females are more likely to warn their own offspring of a threat than other kids of the same age. Ground squirrels, likewise, also often don’t bother to warn neighbors of danger if there aren’t any relatives nearby.
And by the way, even animals themselves know that this sort of thing is wrong. Some rhesus monkeys don’t make the “come to dinner” call when they find food, trying to keep it all to themselves. But if they’re caught, they’re punished for it: Their troop members beat them up.
APE VS. APE
I know what you’re thinking: All of this behavior could still be instinctive. Some ancestral antelope with bad vision accidentally made the lion alarm call when it saw a blurry tan shrub, and he got to leave more of his genes behind by mating with the lady who was afraid to wander away.
But that won’t help explain away the orangutans who play tricks on their keepers: One hid an orange in a hand, pretending she hadn’t gotten her share. However, once she got a second one, the keeper caught on, and the ruse stopped working. The next day, another orangutan instead hid his orange under a foot so he could show the keeper his innocently empty hands.
In fact, apes that try to fool humans don’t seem to have much respect for our allegedly superior intelligence. Long-time chimp observer Frans de Waal tells the story:When unfamiliar people are allowed near the sleeping quarters, Jimmie always tries the same dirty trick to lure them. She pokes a blade of straw though the bars and looks up at the stranger with a perfect poker face. The stranger takes the straw, thinking that this is a friendly gesture. At that moment Jimmie’s other hand flashes through the bars and grabs hold of her victim. Then the only way to loosen her grip is with someone else’s help.
De Waal says they’d never try this on another ape.
“They know each other too well to get away with it. Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”
While chimps like to play pranks, lazy orangutans lie to get people to do their work for them. A recent study announced the breakthrough that orangutans use pantomime to communicate—and revealed that another way to communicate gives them another way to fool us. One orang pretended it couldn’t get termites out of a nest with a stick, and another that it couldn’t open a coconut, using gestures to dramatize their sad helplessness. You can’t really blame them, since the strategy seems to work: After half heartedly hitting the coconut with a stick, the second ape handed it to a human and mimed a familiar gesture, and the helpful human opened it for her with a machete.
LET SNEAKING DOGS LIE
Despite these obvious examples, scientists have a hard time proving animals are deliberately trying to trick us, but they’re working on it.
One study showed that macaques know exactly what they’re doing when sneaking food. Researchers put grapes in two identical clear containers, one with bells that jingled when it was opened, the other, where the bells had the clappers removed. Whe
n a nearby person was watching, the monkeys would try to get the treats from either container equally often, but when the observer wasn’t looking, they’d take the grapes only from the silent one to avoid attracting attention.
Dog owners may be interested to know that the same experiment done with dogs got the same result. Of course, this probably comes as no surprise to most of us, the lead author of the study included. When her pug steals something, he’ll run to another room if chewing it would make noise, but stay put if it’s soft and quiet to gnaw. As one dog-owning reader commented on this research, “tell us something we don’t already know!”
TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES
Perhaps there is one insurmountable boundary for animal liars: They’ll never be able to type well enough to pretend they’re young and skinny on an Internet dating site. But that doesn’t mean they can’t use technology to bend the truth.
Some background may be in order, because if you still believe that humans are the only tool-using animal, I’m afraid that’s yet another way your knowledge of technology is behind the times. Animals not only use tools, they even make them, and with an impressive attention to detail.
Chimps, for instance, gather tasty termites using a sharp stick to poke a hole in the nest and a frayed one to collect the insects. They’re particular about their materials, preferring wood from two different species of tree to make the two different tools. Chimps also make spears to kill adorable little bush babies for meat—“I was flabbergasted,” said the touchingly naive researcher who observed this—and they use cooking implements, described as stone and wooden cleavers and stone anvils, to chop food into bite-size pieces.
It seems like it’s only a matter of time before we find chimps cooking s’mores over a campfire, but they’re not the only primates that use tools to prepare their food. The capuchin monkey uses rocks as hammer and anvil to crack open nuts. They’re fussy about their tools too, using the same particularly good sandstone slabs repeatedly, and testing the hammer rocks before use. They’ll pick up a stone and heft it, and if it doesn’t seem right, toss it away and look for another.
It’s not just our close relatives who share these skills, either: There’s a species of crow that might be even better than chimps at tool making. One New Caledonian crow became famous when scientists found she would make hooks out of straight pieces of wire to get at unreachable food. In the wild, these same crows create devices out of twigs and leaves to probe holes and crevices for insects:Crows snip into the leaf edges and then tear out neat strips of vegetation with which they can probe insect-harboring crevices. These tools have been observed to come in three types: narrow strips, wide strips and multi-stepped strips—which are wide at one end and, via a manufacturing process that involves stepwise snips and tears, become narrow at the opposite end.
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INVERTEBRATE INTRIGUE
Primates may dominate the tool-use stories in this chapter, but it’s not only the animals most closely related to us that can use technology to make trouble. Eight flexible legs are almost as useful as opposable thumbs:• Staff at the Santa Monica aquarium came to work one day to find the place flooded with a couple hundred gallons of seawater. No, not an equipment failure: Their octopus had disassembled a valve, and “grabbed the tube that pulls out the water and caused it to spray outside the tank,” said an employee.
• Another octopus caused trouble not just for humans but for his fellow aquarium residents as well. Otto the octopus in Germany was known to juggle his hermit crab roommates and damage the glass of his tank by throwing stones. However, when the aquarium suffered mysterious recurring blackouts, no one suspected a connection. Then Otto was caught climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water at an overhead lamp, short-circuiting it and causing the power to shut down—along with the life-support systems for all his fellow creatures. The light was moved, but Otto constantly demanded new toys to keep him out of trouble—a chess board entertained him for a while, said the director, “But then, he was like, no, I don’t want the chess board. And he just threw it out of the aquarium.”
• Occasionally these mischievous cephalopods are too clever for their own good. An octopus in San Pedro, California, managed to remove a plastic drainpipe glued in place with silicon sealant. She was found dead in the morning, all the water drained out of her tank.
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In fact, even much more simpleminded animals can learn to use tools, if you’ve got nothing better to do than take the time to teach them. Japanese researchers have trained degus, which are cute little Chilean rodents, to reach under a fence with a tiny rake to get a sunflower seed. They claim that “after learning the basic skill of simply pulling the tool, the degus spontaneously devised more flexible, efficient and versatile use of the tool,” moving it in an “elegant trajectory.” (We probably don’t have to worry about degus taking over our gardening jobs, though: Not only are they tiny, it took about twenty-five hundred trials over two months to train them.)
TOOLS FOR TROUBLE
So if animals can use tools, of course they use them to behave badly. Our cousins the orangutans (who we’ve already noted making objects to use for sexual pleasure) are perhaps the champions of this. One expert on animal tool use puts it this way: If you happen to forget a screwdriver in the gorilla cage, the animals will hesitantly approach it, briefly sniff it, and subsequently ignore it.
Leave it in a chimp cage, and it will be used in vigorous display, thrown about, and forgotten.
But if you leave it in the orangutan cage, one of the animals will unobtrusively pick it up, hide it, and use it to let itself out when you’ve left for the day.
There’s no way to know how often episodes of the latter sort occur; when an orang lets itself out into the keeper area, it’s best to try to keep it quiet or heads are going to roll. However some of these apes have used their tool-using abilities to make more public breakouts, such as two that figured out how to avoid getting shocked by the electrified wires around their exhibits:■ At the Audubon zoo in New Orleans, an orang named Berani escaped his exhibit using only a T-shirt. He scaled a ten-foot wall, stretched the shirt out, wrapped it around the hot wires, swung himself over the wires, and climbed the railing.
■ At a zoo in Australia, an orangutan disabled the hot wires surrounding her exhibit with a stick, then made a pile of leaf litter and debris and climbed over the wall. Some claimed the escape attempt was due to grief over the loss of her mate, but she’d done the same sort of thing before without the inspiration of tragedy. “We’ve had issues with her before in normal day-to-day operations where she tries to outsmart the keepers. She’s an ingenious animal,” said one curator. And a zoo spokesperson admitted, “She has shorted hot wires before, but just to get food.”
Being intelligent animals, both orangs realized quickly that leaving climate-controlled homes that served free meals wasn’t such a great idea after all. Karta, the Australian, “sat on top of the fence for about 30 minutes before apparently changing her mind about the escape and climbing back into the enclosure.” Berani hung out for about ten minutes, says a zoo spokesperson: “He wanted to explore a little bit and figured it was time to get back home because his zookeeper was yelling at him.”
Perhaps these apes have learned their lesson, but the Louisiana zoo decided for safety’s sake to change their choice of enrichment materials, realizing that screwdrivers aren’t the only things one needs to avoid leaving in the orang cage: “We gave them T-shirts every day,” the zoo spokesperson said. “Not anymore.”
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Most of this primate badness so far seems fairly spontaneous. This is significant because planning for the future is another of those things we used to think divided humans from other animals. Yet at least as far as primates go, we were wrong about that one too. Combine the ability to plan ahead with the ability to use tools, and you get Santini, a chimp at a zoo in Sweden. He’d occasionally thrown stones at visitors, and why not? As the re
searchers dryly note, “Stone throwing toward a crowd of people has an instant and dramatic effect.”
Anyone who’s worked at a zoo full of annoying tourists can empathize with Santini’s urge to pitch a projectile, but at one point, the attacks increased to such an extent that staff had to take action. Searching the exhibit, they found caches of stones along the shore of a pond facing the public area. Observing the chimp in secret, they found that before the zoo opened, when no one was watching, he’d collect these stones to use later in the day.
Santini also used the primate tool-making ability to add to his store of weapons: He’d knock on concrete parts of the exhibit till he detected the hollow sound that meant the concrete was damaged by the cold, then hit harder to break off a piece. Sometimes he’d break these chunks into smaller pieces to make more suitable projectiles. At the time, the scientist who reported the situation said:It’s very hard to stop him because he can always find new stones, and if he can’t find them he manufactures them. It’s an ongoing cold war.
Later the zoo did come up with a new strategy. Hoping to calm the ape, they decided to castrate him.
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