Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb. Today we have another vault episode for you.
Speaker 1: This is going to be The Well Connected Animal with
Speaker 1: Lee Alan Dugatkin. This is an interview episode that originally
Speaker 1: published five fourteen, twenty twenty four. You'll learn all about
Speaker 1: the complex social networks of vampire bats, dolphins, bees, and more.
Speaker 1: Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. Today I have an interview episode for you.
Speaker 1: I recently spoke with Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of
Speaker 1: evolution and behavior at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: He is the author of the new book The Well
Speaker 1: Connected Animal, Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.
Speaker 1: This book comes out this Thursday, so wherever you get
Speaker 1: your books, in whatever formats, you can probably go ahead
Speaker 1: and pre order it. If not, grab it on Thursday.
Speaker 1: It's a delightful read, and this was a delightful chat.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed talking with Lee. Let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: jump right into the interview. Hi, Lee, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: So you're an evolutionary biologist, a historian of science, and
Speaker 1: an animal behaviorist. How do these classifications triangulate on your
Speaker 1: work and how did you get involved in your field?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I got involved in a sort of securitous way.
Speaker 3: I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Even
Speaker 3: when I was in college. I happened upon the study
Speaker 3: of animal behavior and evolution, and a friend of mine
Speaker 3: mentioned a book he was reading, and before I knew it,
Speaker 3: I was in graduate school studying evolution and behavior and
Speaker 3: non humans because I just fell in love with the
Speaker 3: topic and I thought it was sort of the ultimate
Speaker 3: kinds of questions one could ask about life on the planet.
Speaker 3: And so early on, a lot of my work was
Speaker 3: experimental work with animals. I looked at the evolution of
Speaker 3: cooperation and the evolution of aggression and so on for
Speaker 3: many many years in my laboratory. And then about fifteen
Speaker 3: years ago or so, after I had been doing this
Speaker 3: for a couple of decades, I started getting much more
Speaker 3: interested in the history of the subjects that I was
Speaker 3: working on. So it turns out that all of the
Speaker 3: people early on who were studying the evolution of cooperation
Speaker 3: were really fascinating characters in and of themselves, how they
Speaker 3: came about it, the environment and the kind of social
Speaker 3: atmosphere in which they developed their ideas. And I began
Speaker 3: because I'm much more interested in that aspect of the work.
Speaker 3: And so all these areas dovetail in the sense that
Speaker 3: I still do work on studying evolution and animal behavior,
Speaker 3: but I also have added this component of it's worth
Speaker 3: stopping for a minute and realizing that, you know, in
Speaker 3: the late eighteen hundreds or something like that, here's how
Speaker 3: these ideas came about. Here are the people who did it,
Speaker 3: and here's the kind of social environment in which it happened.
Speaker 3: And I think it makes the study of science itself
Speaker 3: much richer to do it that way.
Speaker 1: The new book is The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks
Speaker 1: and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. Could you walk
Speaker 1: us through what a social network is and say, sociology
Speaker 1: and anthropology and how and when the concept enters into
Speaker 1: contemplation of non human animals.
Speaker 3: Sure, And you know, I should say that there are
Speaker 3: many many different definitions of social network, uh, depending on
Speaker 3: exactly what discipline you're interested in and how mathematical you
Speaker 3: want to get for me, and I think from I
Speaker 3: think this is a reasonable general definition. Is a social
Speaker 3: network is just a group of individuals through which information travels,
Speaker 3: and it may travel directly and it may travel indirectly.
Speaker 3: And it's also a group of individuals who somehow or
Speaker 3: another affect one another in a real way. And again
Speaker 3: that could happen either directly by your interaction with Steve,
Speaker 3: or it could happen indirectly because you interact with Steve,
Speaker 3: and Steve interacts with Nancy, and so Nancy is affected
Speaker 3: by what you have done to Steve. And so generally
Speaker 3: it's this information flow and effect on others in your network.
Speaker 3: That's that for me, is the key to social network.
Speaker 3: You know, humans are in all sorts of social networks,
Speaker 3: Facebook and that sort of thing. But we're also embedded
Speaker 3: in them in almost everything we do in life. Our
Speaker 3: families or one kind of social network, the people we
Speaker 3: work with or another, our friends or another, and so on,
Speaker 3: and they all overlap. Now in terms of the history
Speaker 3: of the subject, I mean, anthropologists and particularly sociologists have
Speaker 3: been interested in this in humans for quite some time.
Speaker 3: It was you know, in the nineteen forties and nineteen
Speaker 3: fifties where people first began to get serious about trying
Speaker 3: to understand the details of what we now would refer
Speaker 3: to as social networks, how they work in humans. And
Speaker 3: that involved a lot of mathematics terms of understanding what
Speaker 3: it means if I interact with you and you interact
Speaker 3: with somebody else, and that somebody else is affected by me,
Speaker 3: and who is who are the key individuals in the
Speaker 3: social network, the ones that have the most impact, and
Speaker 3: are there cliques where certain individuals tend to interact with
Speaker 3: each other more? And that really began to flourish, I
Speaker 3: would say in the nineteen forties and fifties in anthropology
Speaker 3: and sociology what we now refer to as as social
Speaker 3: network I think that language became much more common in
Speaker 3: the late nineteen hundreds and into the early two thousands.
Speaker 3: Now when it comes to studying social networks and non humans,
Speaker 3: we can trace it back quite far in the sense
Speaker 3: that even in Darwindnesday and a little bit late so
Speaker 3: the late eighteen hundreds, people were beginning to think that
Speaker 3: the same kind of social tools that can be used
Speaker 3: to study human behavior can be used to study animal behavior,
Speaker 3: and so there are people who were basically arguing that
Speaker 3: animal societies were structured very much like human societies. And
Speaker 3: even though the word social network wasn't around, the idea
Speaker 3: that we could study non humans like we study humans
Speaker 3: was there. It really began to flourish more again around
Speaker 3: the same time as early work in humans did. That is,
Speaker 3: in this case, maybe the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: when primatologists, people who study monkeys and apes, began to
Speaker 3: think in terms of social networks. They began to realize
Speaker 3: that information was flowing through these non humans groups, again
Speaker 3: mostly primates, in a way that was similar to the
Speaker 3: way it flows through human groups. And it really mattered
Speaker 3: in a group of chimpanzees, if one chimpanzee groomed the
Speaker 3: other and got bugs and parasites off it back, it
Speaker 3: really mattered who they groomed and who that individual groomed,
Speaker 3: and how that kind of grooming social network developed. So
Speaker 3: it first started with non human primates, which kind of
Speaker 3: makes sense because there are closest evolutionary relatives, and then
Speaker 3: it began to branch out in the nineteen eighties and
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties when people began to study it in all
Speaker 3: sorts of organisms. In fact, the two classic studies early
Speaker 3: on were done in dolphins and in birds. So it's
Speaker 3: been around in a serious way in the animal behavior
Speaker 3: literature for you know, on the order of twenty to
Speaker 3: thirty years.
Speaker 1: Now, okay, the roots go back a bit deeper, but
Speaker 1: it's really taken off in recent decades.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely, In fact, right now, the study of social
Speaker 3: networks and non humans is probably is one of the
Speaker 3: most active areas in the entire field. I mean, anytime
Speaker 3: you open up a journal on behavior and non humans,
Speaker 3: you're likely to find an article about social networks. And
Speaker 3: those networks are important in almost every context for non humans.
Speaker 3: There are networks about feeding. There a mating networks, there
Speaker 3: are traveling networks, there are cooperation networks, there are power networks.
Speaker 3: Everywhere you look. Now that we've started to actually explore
Speaker 3: it in depth, we're finding it. And this is sort
Speaker 3: of what happens in animal behavior a lot. We tend
Speaker 3: to think of things initially as strictly human, and then
Speaker 3: when we begin to probe deeper, we see similar sorts
Speaker 3: of things in non humans, and once we begin to look,
Speaker 3: we begin to see it everywhere.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, like with humans, we're talking about
Speaker 1: multiple social networks being in place for a given individual
Speaker 1: or a given group. But the same is true of
Speaker 1: these various animal examples as well. Right, We're not talking
Speaker 1: about just like the social network of the macaque. We're
Speaker 1: talking about like the multiple interconnected social networks.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. So it might be that you're studying networks in
Speaker 3: the sense of who's going around feeding with who, and
Speaker 3: who's sharing food with who, But in that same species,
Speaker 3: you might be looking at who's being aggressive towards who,
Speaker 3: and who's traveling together, and who's being nice to who,
Speaker 3: and all of those are overlapping networks in the same
Speaker 3: sense as in humans.
Speaker 1: Now, is there still any kind of like pushback from
Speaker 1: I guess human exceptionalists that argue that animals can't non
Speaker 1: human animals can't or don't demonstrate this kind of complexity.
Speaker 3: Well, not within I would say the scientific community really
Speaker 3: isn't much of that pushback anymore. Initially there was when
Speaker 3: people first began studying social networks and non humans. Many
Speaker 3: people in who were animal behaviorists were leery that the
Speaker 3: notion was that animals are complex and their societies are complex,
Speaker 3: but they're but they're not social network complex that that was.
Speaker 3: You know, even in the early two thousands, there there
Speaker 3: were still some of that. I interviewed a bunch of
Speaker 3: people for this book, and I had stories of people
Speaker 3: telling me that in the early two thousands, when they
Speaker 3: would put in grant applications to study social networks and
Speaker 3: non humans, they would get this kind of pushback that was,
Speaker 3: you know, it can't be this complex. You're you're making
Speaker 3: it more complex than it needs to be, and we're
Speaker 3: not ready to kind of give you money to do this.
Speaker 3: But the more that people were able to do it
Speaker 3: on their own, the more that it became part and
Speaker 3: parcel of what people were looking for, the less less
Speaker 3: the pushback. I mean, you're going to get pushback from
Speaker 3: outside the scientific community, from people who who just want
Speaker 3: to live in a world of human exceptionalism. That tends
Speaker 3: to fall apart eventually. I mean, you know, we used
Speaker 3: to think that was true about tool use in in
Speaker 3: in in animals, that you know, only humans could use tools.
Speaker 3: Then we find that animals can use tools only humans
Speaker 3: have culture. Well, no, it turns out animals have culture,
Speaker 3: only humans have social networks. No, in fact, non humans
Speaker 3: have social networks. So the pushback is nowadays not as
Speaker 3: bad as it used to be.
Speaker 1: I like that you mentioned the tool use. You know
Speaker 1: this This is one of those areas where when we
Speaker 1: think of tool use use in animals, a lot of
Speaker 1: people instantly think of examples involving say like chimpanzees, or
Speaker 1: or or or or certain you know birds come to mind.
Speaker 1: And especially when we think of culturally trans submitted tool use,
Speaker 1: we may think of the chimpanzee example, But you discuss
Speaker 1: examples involving dolphins and whales, can you describe the tools
Speaker 1: they seem to be using.
Speaker 3: Sure? So there's this wonderful study on bottomnosed dolphins. It's
Speaker 3: been going on in Australia in a place called Shark
Speaker 3: Bay for the last thirty or forty years, and so
Speaker 3: they know literally thousands of dolphins that are swimming around
Speaker 3: in Shark Bay individually, and we've learned a tremendous amount
Speaker 3: about sort of culture, how complex they are socially. But
Speaker 3: it wasn't until the last couple of decades that this
Speaker 3: idea that tool use in dolphins was going on. And
Speaker 3: in dolphins the tool is actually another living organism. So
Speaker 3: basically what they do is they put a sponge on
Speaker 3: the end of their rostrum, their their face, where their
Speaker 3: mouth is. They put this sponge over that when they're
Speaker 3: looking for food. And the reason that they do that
Speaker 3: is that oftentimes they're probing the bottom of the bay
Speaker 3: that's very rocky and gravelly, and it hurts to pound
Speaker 3: down on there, and what they're doing is they're trying
Speaker 3: to find fish that are hiding under the gravel and sand.
Speaker 3: So if you stick this soft sponge on top of
Speaker 3: your mouth, then probing down there allows you much more
Speaker 3: flexibility and a lot less pain. And it turns out
Speaker 3: that dolphins are very particular about the sponges that they use.
Speaker 3: Once they find one that works, they keep it for
Speaker 3: a long time. So they'll go around probing on the
Speaker 3: bottom for food, and if they find a fish that's hidden,
Speaker 3: they drop the sponge and they go and they catch
Speaker 3: that fish. Then they come back and they look for
Speaker 3: the sponge they had before, because if it worked once,
Speaker 3: it's likely to work again. They pick it up, they
Speaker 3: put it back well, they put it back onto their face,
Speaker 3: and then they go looking for more things at sort
Speaker 3: of hiding in the bottom of the sand. And they
Speaker 3: learn this, they learn how to sponge from their mothers.
Speaker 3: So if you watch calves, dolphin calves, they're basically learning
Speaker 3: the technique of how to find a good sponge, put
Speaker 3: it on, and hunt with it. And so the actual
Speaker 3: learning is through mother child interaction. It's not genetic, but
Speaker 3: it's rather they learn from their parents. Now, in terms
Speaker 3: of the networking, it's actually complex. So basically when they
Speaker 3: have these sponges on, they are hunting alone, and so
Speaker 3: you wouldn't think that the sponging had anything to do
Speaker 3: with social networks, but in fact it does. And the
Speaker 3: reason that it does is dolphins often carry these sponges
Speaker 3: around when they're not hunting because, as I say, if
Speaker 3: they find a good sponge, they like it. Dolphins know
Speaker 3: who else are spongers. Not everyone's a sponger, only a
Speaker 3: small subset of them actually use these tools. And so
Speaker 3: what the researchers did was they started trying to understand
Speaker 3: whether or not individuals who did use these sponge tools
Speaker 3: hung out with each other when they actually weren't going
Speaker 3: around looking for food, and it turns out they were.
Speaker 3: There are these clicks of dolphins that use the sponge
Speaker 3: tools that hang out with each other when they're not
Speaker 3: actually down on the bottom looking for food. And the
Speaker 3: reason we think they do this is if you hang
Speaker 3: out with others spongers, you're likely to get information about
Speaker 3: where the good places to sponge are, and so you
Speaker 3: network with them so that you can take these sponges
Speaker 3: and use them in the best possible locations. And the
Speaker 3: sponges are really great tools. The ganet man who ran
Speaker 3: this study, she and her colleagues actually thought, you know,
Speaker 3: we should see if sponging really works. It kind of
Speaker 3: looks like it works when you watch the dolphins. They
Speaker 3: put sponges on their hands and they went around under
Speaker 3: the water using the sponges on their hands the way
Speaker 3: dolphins used them on their snouts. And it turns out
Speaker 3: you really do kick up a lot of prey items
Speaker 3: things to eat when you use these sponges. And so
Speaker 3: networking allowed us to kind of understand this cultural tool
Speaker 3: use in a much more general way, not just this
Speaker 3: dolphin does it or that dolphin does it, but that
Speaker 3: they hang around together if they do it, and they
Speaker 3: get all sorts of information from each other when they
Speaker 3: do this.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it's a wonderful long term study of an
Speaker 3: incredibly complex organism. I mean dolphins. Everybody loves dolphins. Their
Speaker 3: sociality is over the top in terms of the sorts
Speaker 3: of things we typically see in nature.
Speaker 1: Now, in the book, you divide the chapters up by
Speaker 1: specific networks and needs. You know you alluded to this earlier,
Speaker 1: you know, food reproduction, power, safety, travel, communication, health, and culture.
Speaker 1: What areas were you either most surprised about or do
Speaker 1: you think will be most surprising to readers in these chapters?
Speaker 1: You know, because I feel like for a lot of
Speaker 1: general readers, you know, we can easily think of non
Speaker 1: human animals engaging in some level of food reproduction or
Speaker 1: power dynamics. You know, we've seen enough documentaries or engage
Speaker 1: with enough animal content. But communication and health don't always
Speaker 1: instantly come to mind, I imagine, not with like the
Speaker 1: number of species that are covered in the book.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, so communication is a great one in terms
Speaker 3: of the kinds of things that might surprise readers. There
Speaker 3: is wonderful work that's been done on communication in chimpanzees,
Speaker 3: for example. So in chimpanzees, when they're communicating with each other,
Speaker 3: they can communicate in all sorts of different ways, and
Speaker 3: some of those ways are much more visual, and some
Speaker 3: of them are much more physical and tactile that involve touching.
Speaker 3: And it turns out that again, social netw work thinking
Speaker 3: allows us to probe really deep into these communication networks
Speaker 3: that exist in chimpanzees. And so, for example, there's this
Speaker 3: population of chimpanzees called the Suns population that's been studied
Speaker 3: for a very long time, and it turns out that
Speaker 3: when you look at the kind of gestural communication that
Speaker 3: goes on in these chimpanzees, you see something very different
Speaker 3: when individuals are interacting with friends in their social networks
Speaker 3: rather than with others who they don't know quite as well.
Speaker 3: So if you look at communication between chimpanzees who know
Speaker 3: each other well and who have done things like cooperative
Speaker 3: hunting together, they tend to use visual communication. And this
Speaker 3: kind of visual communication. Other people have found that this
Speaker 3: kind of really lowers their heart rates and reduces the
Speaker 3: amount of stress that the chimpanzee itself feels. The individual
Speaker 3: who's the recipient of the communication calms down, they have
Speaker 3: a lower heart rate. This is when communication goes on
Speaker 3: between friends, But when communication is going on between individuals
Speaker 3: who don't know each other as well, maybe haven't interacted
Speaker 3: as much in the past. Then you tend to see
Speaker 3: a different kind of communication. You tend to see it
Speaker 3: being very physical and tactile, with them touching each other.
Speaker 3: And the researchers who did this work, Anna and Sam Roberts,
Speaker 3: have argued that visual communication works perfectly well between friends
Speaker 3: because you know each other and there's a large level
Speaker 3: of trust that's already in place. But when you don't
Speaker 3: know each other very well, visual communication doesn't work well
Speaker 3: because it's not as clear, it's not as as salient
Speaker 3: as auditory and tactile communication, where you're really up front,
Speaker 3: right in the face of the individual touching them, then
Speaker 3: they can really understand what it is that you're trying
Speaker 3: to communicate. And that's important because chimpanzee networks break up
Speaker 3: and they come back together. And so when you're interacting
Speaker 3: with individuals that you don't know very well, you really
Speaker 3: want to make sure that your communication is clear. And
Speaker 3: these kind of auditory and physical communication gestures are much
Speaker 3: better at that. And so you see it among individuals
Speaker 3: who don't know each other very well.
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
Speaker 3: But here's the thing, you know, So chimpanzees are our
Speaker 3: closest living relatives and they have very large brains, right,
Speaker 3: But you can go and find communication networks and honeybees,
Speaker 3: and a former student of mine has been studying that
Speaker 3: in a research field station outside of London where they
Speaker 3: have these experimental honeybee hives, and so in honeybees, the
Speaker 3: primary way that they communicate is actually by something known
Speaker 3: as the waggle dance. So here the bees are trying
Speaker 3: to communicate to one another where a new food source is.
Speaker 3: And the way that they typically do this is if
Speaker 3: you find a new food source and you go back
Speaker 3: to the honeybee hive, you do this particular kind of
Speaker 3: dance known as the waggle dance, and the waggle dance
Speaker 3: basically involves moving very very quickly and shaking your abdomen
Speaker 3: as you're moving through the hive. And we know from
Speaker 3: prior work that this gives various types of information to
Speaker 3: others in the hive about where the food source is.
Speaker 3: For example, how long you dance gives information about how
Speaker 3: far away the hive is, and there's a really nice translation.
Speaker 3: Every tenth of a second of dancing translates into the
Speaker 3: food being this many feet away from the hive. They
Speaker 3: also dance at a certain angle, and the angle they
Speaker 3: dance it, believe it or not, is the angle between
Speaker 3: the sun, the hive and where the food is. So
Speaker 3: they're communicating all of this information through the dance. Now,
Speaker 3: in terms of networking, it turns out that there are
Speaker 3: other ways to communicate information about new food sources. They
Speaker 3: can communicate this information when they transfer food from themselves
Speaker 3: to another individual in the hive. They can also communicate
Speaker 3: information about the food when they basically take their antennas
Speaker 3: and connect to the antennas of another bee in the hive.
Speaker 3: This also gives them information. So what has been done
Speaker 3: in terms of the networking is people have asked, well,
Speaker 3: they can get this information in all these different ways,
Speaker 3: how do they do it? When do they decide if
Speaker 3: they're going to transfer the information by dancing or moving
Speaker 3: food from one mouth to another or touching antenna. So
Speaker 3: what researchers did was they set up this experiment where
Speaker 3: they had these hives that were placed out in a
Speaker 3: field and they knew where the hives were, and they
Speaker 3: controlled how much food was going into the hives. And
Speaker 3: what they found was and so I should say they
Speaker 3: marked all of their bees thousands of them, so they
Speaker 3: knew who these bees were. And it turns out when
Speaker 3: you look at communication networks and the bees, you find
Speaker 3: this wonderfully complex system in place. If the sun is
Speaker 3: out there, they used dancing to communicate because they can
Speaker 3: transfer information about food using the angle of the sun
Speaker 3: compared to the hive and the food source. But in
Speaker 3: London there are many many days when it's not sunny,
Speaker 3: and when it's not sunny, the communication network focuses on
Speaker 3: the transfer of food or the touching of antenna. So
Speaker 3: they have these kind of multiple communication networks, and if
Speaker 3: one of them is down because the sun isn't out,
Speaker 3: then they move to a second kind of communication network.
Speaker 3: And so what this tells us is that you know,
Speaker 3: you can have a brain the size of a honeybee
Speaker 3: or the brain the size of a chimpanzee, and you
Speaker 3: can still get complex communication networks in non humans. You
Speaker 3: were also asking about disease. I think for me this
Speaker 3: was one of the more surprising components of social networks
Speaker 3: and animals, the way that they relate to disease transmission. Here,
Speaker 3: what's kind of cool is that in almost all of
Speaker 3: the other behaviors that we're talking about feeding and communication
Speaker 3: and cooperation. Really it's individuals, animals and the network that
Speaker 3: are the key. But when you cut when it comes
Speaker 3: to disease, what's basically going on is the disease is
Speaker 3: hitchhiking on the social networks that the animals have in place.
Speaker 3: So the animals don't want to transfer disease from one
Speaker 3: individual to another, but the social networks are in place
Speaker 3: in terms of for example, aggression and power struggles. What
Speaker 3: that means is diseases can use those networks to move
Speaker 3: from one individual to another. And I think my favorite
Speaker 3: example of this is this bizarre disease that has been
Speaker 3: studied in Tasmanian devils. And if you can't picture a
Speaker 3: Tasmanian devil in your head, think back to the Bugs
Speaker 3: Bunny cartoons, because there was this wonderful cariacture of a
Speaker 3: Tasmanian devil in there. And in Tasmanian devils they have
Speaker 3: this thing called facial tumor disease, and this is one
Speaker 3: of the very rare instances that we know of in
Speaker 3: which cancer is transmitted from one individual to another. The
Speaker 3: sort of worst case scenario when we think about human
Speaker 3: cancers would be if we could actually transmit cancer from
Speaker 3: one individual to another. It doesn't happen, but in certain
Speaker 3: species like Tasmanian devils, it does. And what happens is
Speaker 3: if they are infected with this cancer and they bite
Speaker 3: somebody really hard, right, they can transmit that cancer to
Speaker 3: the other individual. So here's where social networks come into play.
Speaker 3: Tasmanian devils fight, and they fight a lot, particularly during
Speaker 3: mating season. Males will fight intensely to gain access to mates.
Speaker 3: Sometimes when they fight, if you have facial tumor disease
Speaker 3: and you bite somebody else, you can transfer that disease
Speaker 3: to that individual. Again, the tumor is actually hitchhiking on
Speaker 3: the power social network structure that's in place in the
Speaker 3: Tasmanian devils. And so it's not surprising, for example, that
Speaker 3: males transmit this disease much more often to one another
Speaker 3: than females. And that's because males fight a lot during
Speaker 3: mating season, and it's only through bites that this disease
Speaker 3: can be transmitted. It's more complex, and what we're discovering
Speaker 3: are strange things like even though males are more likely
Speaker 3: to transmit the disease, females also get facial tumor disease,
Speaker 3: and they tend to get it from males who are
Speaker 3: defending them. But in the context of courtships, sometimes it
Speaker 3: gets a little too rough and you get some biting
Speaker 3: and females can get infected with this disease. Now what's
Speaker 3: weird is if you look at female Tasmanian devils, usually
Speaker 3: it's individuals who are in the weakest health state that
Speaker 3: are most susceptible to getting disease. But in the Tasmanian devils,
Speaker 3: it's the healthiest females who end up getting this cancerous
Speaker 3: disease by being bitten by males. Why well, if you
Speaker 3: do a social network analysis, what you find is the
Speaker 3: healthiest females are the ones that the males prefer as mates.
Speaker 3: That means they're the ones that are most likely to
Speaker 3: get bitten, even unintentionally by males during courtship, and so
Speaker 3: they the healthiest ones end up being most likely to
Speaker 3: get the cancer, which is something that we can possibly
Speaker 3: have really understood without a social network analysis.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was going to ask about
Speaker 1: the Tasmanian devil example. That one definitely stood out to
Speaker 1: me when I was reading another one was the vampire bats.
Speaker 3: Oh, yes, vampire bats are wonderful. They're a textbook example
Speaker 3: of social behavior and in this case, cooperation. So let
Speaker 3: me just tell you a little bit about what goes
Speaker 3: on in the world of vampires. So, vampire bats do,
Speaker 3: in fact suck blood, right, but they don't suck human blood.
Speaker 3: They suck the blood of cows and other kind of
Speaker 3: domesticated species. And it turns out that if you're a
Speaker 3: vampire bat, or if you're just a bat in general,
Speaker 3: it's a really expensive way of living for a mammal.
Speaker 3: So bats are mammals, and most mammals don't fly, but
Speaker 3: if you fly, it's energetically extremely expensive. And what people
Speaker 3: have found is if a vampire bat doesn't get a
Speaker 3: blood meal about every two days, it can starve to death. Now,
Speaker 3: what the vampire bats do is they have this social
Speaker 3: network in place where they transfer blood from one back
Speaker 3: to the other. So if you take a camera and
Speaker 3: you go inside a vampire bat roost, what you will
Speaker 3: find sometimes is that one bat will come up to
Speaker 3: another bat and it'll start licking its face in a
Speaker 3: very kind of stereotypical manner. What that bat is doing
Speaker 3: is it's trying to get the other bat to regurgitate
Speaker 3: some of the blood that it has in its gut
Speaker 3: so that the solicitor, the one that's licking the face,
Speaker 3: can actually survive long enough to go out and get
Speaker 3: its own blood meal. So it's hungry, it's starving. It
Speaker 3: goes up to a bat that has a really distended
Speaker 3: big gut, which means it has lots of blood. It
Speaker 3: licks its face trying to get that bat to regurgitate
Speaker 3: some of the blood to it. They will do that
Speaker 3: for one another, but only when they know that it's
Speaker 3: a trustworthy partner. So if one bat goes up to
Speaker 3: another and tries to get blood regurgitated, the only way
Speaker 3: it'll work is if in the past that blood that
Speaker 3: bat who's hungry who needs the blood, has helped and
Speaker 3: given blood to the bat that it's now asking for
Speaker 3: blood from. So they're basically keeping track of who gave
Speaker 3: them blood in the past when they were hungry, and
Speaker 3: if that bat now comes up and tries to get
Speaker 3: some blood you to regurgitate some blood, then you're much
Speaker 3: more likely to do it. So that's the basic structure
Speaker 3: that's in place in these vampire bat roots. Networking comes
Speaker 3: into place, because it turns out again that it really
Speaker 3: matters not just sort of who gave you blood when
Speaker 3: you were hungry, but also who you go out with
Speaker 3: and look for blood when there's a nice night out
Speaker 3: there to go out and fly and look for an
Speaker 3: unsuspecting cow. So what researchers have done is they have
Speaker 3: placed little what are known as pit tags on these bats.
Speaker 3: And so basically all a pittag is is this little
Speaker 3: tiny one ounce less than one ounce device if they
Speaker 3: put on a bat, and it allows them to track
Speaker 3: every bat in the roost when the bat goes out
Speaker 3: and looks for food. And the way it works is
Speaker 3: they have all of these receivers that have been placed
Speaker 3: out in the fields with the cows, and so you
Speaker 3: can know where the bats are because the little things
Speaker 3: they have on their bat are transmit are transmitting information
Speaker 3: to these receivers that are in the field, so you
Speaker 3: know everything about what the bats are doing. What's more,
Speaker 3: these little pit tags that the bats have on their
Speaker 3: back talk to each other. That is, if two vampire
Speaker 3: bats come close enough to one another, these little pit
Speaker 3: tags light up and you know that vampire bat one
Speaker 3: and vampire bat two are on the back of a
Speaker 3: cow together sucking blood. Now, these things are not easy
Speaker 3: to set up, but after you have this system in place,
Speaker 3: you can test all sorts of incredible things, like is
Speaker 3: it the case that this kind of network of blood
Speaker 3: sharing that goes on inside the roost translates into who's
Speaker 3: hanging out with who when they're actually going out and
Speaker 3: looking for blood. That's a really hard thing to do
Speaker 3: because you never know when bats are going to leave
Speaker 3: their roost, and they fly and they're really hard to follow.
Speaker 3: But when you have these tags and these transmitters and
Speaker 3: responders in the field, you can do this and lo
Speaker 3: and behold. Basically, the network of blood sharing that goes
Speaker 3: on inside the roost is a very good predictor of
Speaker 3: who will be found on the back of the same
Speaker 3: cow sucking blood when they go out. They go out,
Speaker 3: The bats go out and start flying independently, but they
Speaker 3: find their favorite partners one way or another, and they
Speaker 3: end up tending to be found on the back of
Speaker 3: some unsuspecting cow in the field. And we can only
Speaker 3: know how complex all this is when we realize that
Speaker 3: it's all embedded in these social networks that the bats
Speaker 3: have built around blood sharing.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's incredible. And the technology that goes into these studies.
Speaker 1: I was just ord by numerous examples in the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, so the study of social networks and
Speaker 3: animals has just absolutely exploded in part because of these
Speaker 3: technological advances. So you have these talking sensors like I
Speaker 3: just mentioned to you, where when the animals come close enough,
Speaker 3: they both sensors light up and you know they're together
Speaker 3: wherever they are. That's one thing. Then basically in other studies,
Speaker 3: what they do, what individuals do, is they attach the
Speaker 3: equivalent of kind of a GPS device to the back
Speaker 3: of an animal and they can track it then over
Speaker 3: really long distances. And my favorite example here is white
Speaker 3: stork behavior. So white storks are these beautiful animals, right,
Speaker 3: but they migrate thousands of miles in the winter, and
Speaker 3: we know almost nothing about the tells of their migration
Speaker 3: because it's really hard to follow birds that are flying
Speaker 3: a thousand feet above the ground and traveling thousands of miles.
Speaker 3: But if you put GPS transponders on their back, then
Speaker 3: you have the possibility of doing this. So people who
Speaker 3: have worked with these white storks, Andrea Flack is a
Speaker 3: researcher at the Max Plank Institute. So she put all
Speaker 3: of she put these giant GPS trackers on the backs
Speaker 3: of these white storks and she basically would follow them
Speaker 3: as they were making them migration. As I'm making them migration,
Speaker 3: they kind of come down every night to rest, and
Speaker 3: she would kind of try and track them for hundreds
Speaker 3: of miles if she could on her own. And so
Speaker 3: she was trying to follow them, but at the same time,
Speaker 3: she could know what the birds were doing when they
Speaker 3: were a thousand feet above the ground because the GPS
Speaker 3: devices were so sensitive that she could know where a
Speaker 3: bird was in the flock as they were flying these
Speaker 3: thousands of miles. And it turns out that what that
Speaker 3: allowed her to do was built a social network of
Speaker 3: the flock as it was flying these south thousands of miles.
Speaker 3: And what she found was that in this network, this
Speaker 3: travel network, there were certain white storks that were the leaders.
Speaker 3: They were the ones that were determining when the flock
Speaker 3: would move this way or that way. So if you
Speaker 3: look at a bird of flocks, a flock of birds
Speaker 3: like geese, you can tell there are certain leaders that
Speaker 3: are the ones that are determining the movement of the flock.
Speaker 3: But you can't do that with white storks when they're
Speaker 3: that far above the ground unless you have these GPS devices.
Speaker 3: So there are these leaders and followers in the white
Speaker 3: stalk travel networks, and it it really matters. The leaders
Speaker 3: are very very good at finding up drafts. So when
Speaker 3: you're flying as a bird, what you want is to
Speaker 3: expend as little energy as you can, and there are
Speaker 3: these updrafts, these wins that come that allow you to
Speaker 3: fly at very low energy levels. The leaders are tremendously
Speaker 3: good at finding these, and in fact, what they were
Speaker 3: able to do, what the researchers were able to do,
Speaker 3: was demonstrate not just that there were leaders and followers
Speaker 3: in these flocks, but that the leaders were actually able
Speaker 3: to migrate further than the followers because they were so
Speaker 3: good at finding these updrafts. So it really mattered who
Speaker 3: was a leader and a follower in these networks. And
Speaker 3: this kind of study would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
Speaker 3: I mean, without the technology, you simply cannot do this
Speaker 3: sort of thing. You can move from flying a thousand
Speaker 3: meters above the ground to swimming many many feet below
Speaker 3: the water and find the same thing and there's this
Speaker 3: wonderful study done on mant rays in the South Pacific
Speaker 3: where they've done exactly this. They they've tagged them so
Speaker 3: they can study what the manta rays are doing. And
Speaker 3: in addition to that, they fly these drones over groups
Speaker 3: of manta rays that are swimming close to the water surface.
Speaker 3: The drones then videotape the interactions between the manta rays.
Speaker 3: And the mantrays have these sort of very unique color
Speaker 3: and patterns that allow the researchers to know who's who,
Speaker 3: so you can study them by the drones watching them
Speaker 3: from above, and the little pit tags and various other
Speaker 3: GPS like devices under the water, they'll let you know
Speaker 3: where they are all the time, which means you can
Speaker 3: build social networks. You can look at in the case
Speaker 3: of the manta rays, they look at who's a key
Speaker 3: hub in a social network. So a key hub is
Speaker 3: an individual through which a lot of information travels. So
Speaker 3: if you think about Facebook, for example, key hubs are
Speaker 3: like public figures where if you want to sort of
Speaker 3: track the way that information flows, these individuals really matter. Well,
Speaker 3: it turns out in manta rays there are key hubs
Speaker 3: as well, individuals through which information travels. In this case,
Speaker 3: it turns out that juvenile manta rays are the hubs
Speaker 3: in social networks associated with feeding. They're the ones that
Speaker 3: are the key to understanding how individuals swim around looking
Speaker 3: for food underwater. Again, without the technology, these are just
Speaker 3: pipe dreams. But now they're are going on. All these
Speaker 3: kind of studies are going on all the time in
Speaker 3: non humans.
Speaker 1: It's also fascinating, and again we've only been able to
Speaker 1: really touch on some of the examples from the book.
Speaker 1: The book is loaded with excellent examples and fascinating timbits
Speaker 1: about the methodology and technology that goes into studying them.
Speaker 1: In the in the afterward of the book, you write
Speaker 1: that quote, it's time to scratch off another item from
Speaker 1: the what makes humans Unique? List? So I thought I
Speaker 1: was just wondering, you know, obviously the book is primarily
Speaker 1: about what we're learning about these non human animals and
Speaker 1: their social networks. But do you think to any degree
Speaker 1: you were able to like turn some of these revelations
Speaker 1: around to better understand, like what human social networks are.
Speaker 1: I have only just to remind us that we're not special.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think at the most general level, it
Speaker 3: does remind us that we're not special and yet another way,
Speaker 3: so we talked about tools and culture were things that
Speaker 3: we used to think we were unique, and we're not.
Speaker 3: We're not unique in social networks. But in terms of
Speaker 3: like perhaps the lessons that we could learn by studying
Speaker 3: social networks and non humans, I think there are some.
Speaker 3: You know, you always have to be careful when you
Speaker 3: do this sort of thing, but let me give you
Speaker 3: just one example that I think helps in terms of
Speaker 3: what we might learn. So there's this great study that
Speaker 3: was done on Reese's macaque monkeys and their social networks
Speaker 3: on this little island in Puerto Rico. And I won't
Speaker 3: get into the details of the social network study per se,
Speaker 3: but basically the thing about this study was that they
Speaker 3: had been studying these macaques on the island for a
Speaker 3: very long time. They knew a lot about their social networks.
Speaker 3: Then Hurricane Maria came through and absolutely devastated the island
Speaker 3: where these macacus lived. And obviously it also decimated Puerto
Speaker 3: Rico and had all sorts of impacts on our own species,
Speaker 3: but it basically destroyed the island that they lived on,
Speaker 3: the mechacs lived on, and what that allowed the researchers
Speaker 3: to do was study how social networks respond to disasters.
Speaker 3: This kind of study was also done in mice, how
Speaker 3: they respond to catastrophic events, how social networks respond to
Speaker 3: catastrophic events. I think that the more information we get
Speaker 3: that on that from non humans, the more we might
Speaker 3: be able to understand ways that we might expect social
Speaker 3: networks to respond to natural disasters in our own species.
Speaker 3: One thing that I think studies and animal behavior allow
Speaker 3: us to do is this, If really your primary interest,
Speaker 3: and it's perfectly reasonable, would be social networks and non humans,
Speaker 3: and you're not all that interested in social networks and
Speaker 3: non humans, here's a reason you might want to rethink that.
Speaker 3: If you think about this at the species level, we
Speaker 3: have a species count of one if we only focus
Speaker 3: on humans. But if these social networks are as complex
Speaker 3: as they appear to be in non humans, that means
Speaker 3: that we have this treasure chest of information about how
Speaker 3: social networks work. How does a what does it mean
Speaker 3: to be a hub in a social network? How much
Speaker 3: does it matter what your friends do versus what your
Speaker 3: friends of friends do. It turns out friends of friends
Speaker 3: really matter and not in non human social networks. How
Speaker 3: do these things work at a most general level. We're
Speaker 3: if we only think about humans, our sample sizes one species,
Speaker 3: But if we think about it in dolphins and humpback
Speaker 3: whales and manta rays and honeybees and chimpanzees and so
Speaker 3: many other species, then all of a sudden, maybe we
Speaker 3: can pick up some patterns about social networks that we
Speaker 3: wouldn't have picked up otherwise. And so I think that's
Speaker 3: potentially a very powerful implication of studying this in non humans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. I have one last question that relates
Speaker 1: to an earlier book that you wrote. There was two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine Mister Jefferson and the Giant Moose, Natural
Speaker 1: History in Early America. I was not familiar with the
Speaker 1: history referenced in the title. As if nothing else, is
Speaker 1: just a teaser for listeners who might be interested, could
Speaker 1: you just briefly tell us why Thomas Jefferson was obsessed
Speaker 1: with a giant moose?
Speaker 3: Sure? What had happened was the world's leading naturalists in France,
Speaker 3: a guy by the name of Count Ufond written this
Speaker 3: giant encyclopedia of natural history, and one of the things
Speaker 3: that he did in the encyclopedia was promote this idea
Speaker 3: called the degeneration hypothesis. And what this natural historian said
Speaker 3: was that all life in the New World, particularly in America,
Speaker 3: was degenerate compared to life other places, that all the
Speaker 3: animals in the United States or even before that, the
Speaker 3: colonies were weak, feeble, and diminished compared to species in
Speaker 3: other places in the world. And Jefferson became obsessed in
Speaker 3: demonstrating to Count Bufond why he was wrong. In fact,
Speaker 3: the longest chapter in the book, the only book that
Speaker 3: Jefferson ever wrote, the Notes on the State of Virginia,
Speaker 3: is all about proving how wrong this degeneracy hypothesis is.
Speaker 3: And one of the key pieces of information that he
Speaker 3: wanted Buffon to see was our moose, which was you know,
Speaker 3: it's massive, right, So Jefferson wanted to send Buffon a
Speaker 3: giant moose to show him how wrong he was about
Speaker 3: this theory of American degeneracy. And so he spent an
Speaker 3: extraordinary amount of time and effort getting this moose and
Speaker 3: then shipping it over to Bufon. And so that's where
Speaker 3: the moose and the title comes from.
Speaker 1: Fascinating. I'm gonna have to put this on on my
Speaker 1: to read list. I was instantly fascinated.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you, Yeah, I mean it was a tremendously
Speaker 3: fun project.
Speaker 1: Well, Lee, thanks again for coming on the show. The
Speaker 1: new book, The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks and the
Speaker 1: Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies is out this week, so
Speaker 1: encourage all of our listeners to go check that out.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it
Speaker 3: very much.
Speaker 1: Thanks once more to Lee Alan Dugatkin for taking time
Speaker 1: out of his day to chat with me about the
Speaker 1: new book. That new book, again is The Well Connected Animal,
Speaker 1: Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. It
Speaker 1: is out this Thursday, so go grab yourself a copy.
Speaker 1: Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing
Speaker 1: this episode. And if you would like to get in
Speaker 1: touch with Joe or myself, if you have suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, If you
Speaker 1: have interview suggestions you'd like us to consider, write in
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from. You can email us
Speaker 1: at contact a's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app
Speaker 2: Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 3: A PO