Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb. Today I have an interview episode for you.
Speaker 2: I recently spoke with Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of
Speaker 2: evolution and behavior at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Speaker 2: He is the author of the new book The Well
Speaker 2: Connected Animal Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.
Speaker 2: This book comes out this Thursday, so wherever you get
Speaker 2: your books, in whatever formats, you can probably go ahead
Speaker 2: and pre order it. If not, grab it on Thursday.
Speaker 2: It's a delightful read. And this was a delightful chat.
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed talking with Lee. Let's go ahead and
Speaker 2: jump right into the interview.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 2: Lee, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
Speaker 2: So you're an evolutionary biologist, an historian of science, and
Speaker 2: an animal behaviorist. How do these classifications triangulate on your
Speaker 2: work and how did you get involved in your field?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I got involved in a sort of circuitous 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: to become much more interested in that aspect of the work.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: All these areas dovetail in the sense that I still
Speaker 3: do work on studying evolution and animal behavior. But I
Speaker 3: also have had this component of it's worth stopping for
Speaker 3: a minute and realizing that, you know, in the late
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds or something like that, here's how these ideas
Speaker 3: came about. Here are the people who did it, and
Speaker 3: 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 2: The new book is The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks
Speaker 2: and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. Could you walk
Speaker 2: us through what a social network is and say sociology
Speaker 2: and anthropology and how and when the concept enters into
Speaker 2: 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 networks, depending on exactly
Speaker 3: what discipline you're interested in and how mathematical you want
Speaker 3: to get for me, and I think from I think
Speaker 3: this is a reasonable general definition. Is a social network
Speaker 3: 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 are
Speaker 3: other 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 networks.
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. Are
Speaker 3: our families or one kind of social network? Are the
Speaker 3: people we work with or another, our friends or another,
Speaker 3: and so on, and they all overlap. Now, in terms
Speaker 3: of the history of the subject, I mean, anthropologists and
Speaker 3: particularly sociologists have been interested in this in humans for
Speaker 3: quite some time. It was, you know, in the nineteen
Speaker 3: forties and nineteen fifties where people first began to get
Speaker 3: serious about trying to understand the details of what we
Speaker 3: now would refer to as social networks how they work
Speaker 3: in humans. And that involved a lot of mathematics in
Speaker 3: terms of understanding what it means if I interact with you,
Speaker 3: and you interact with somebody else and that somebody else
Speaker 3: is affected by me, and who is Who are the
Speaker 3: key individuals in the social network, the ones that have
Speaker 3: the most impact, and are there cliques where certain individuals
Speaker 3: tend to interact with each other more? And that really
Speaker 3: began to flourish, I would say, in the nineteen forties
Speaker 3: and fifties in anthropology and sociology what we now refer
Speaker 3: to as a social network. I think that language became
Speaker 3: much more common in the late nineteen hundreds and into
Speaker 3: the early two thousands. Now when it comes to studying
Speaker 3: social networks and non humans, we can trace it back
Speaker 3: quite far in the sense that even in Darwindnesday and
Speaker 3: a little bit later, so the late eighteen hundreds, people
Speaker 3: were beginning to think that the same kind of social
Speaker 3: tools that can be used to study human behavior can
Speaker 3: be used to study animal behavior. And so there are
Speaker 3: people who were basically arguing that animal societies were structured
Speaker 3: very much like human societies. And even though the word
Speaker 3: social network wasn't around, the idea idea that we could
Speaker 3: study non humans like we study humans was there. It
Speaker 3: really began to flourish more again around the same time
Speaker 3: as early work in humans did. That is, in this
Speaker 3: case maybe the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties when primatologists
Speaker 3: people who study monkeys and apes, began to think in
Speaker 3: terms of social networks. They began to realize that information
Speaker 3: was flowing through these non human groups, again mostly primates,
Speaker 3: in a way that was similar to the way it
Speaker 3: flows through human groups. And it really mattered in a
Speaker 3: group of chimpanzees, if one chimpanzee groomed the other and
Speaker 3: got bugs and parasites off it back, it really mattered
Speaker 3: who they groomed and who that individual groomed, and how
Speaker 3: that kind of grooming social network developed. So it first
Speaker 3: started with non human primates, which kind of makes sense
Speaker 3: because there are closest evolutionary relatives, and then it began
Speaker 3: to branch out in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties
Speaker 3: when people began to study it in all sorts of organisms.
Speaker 3: In fact, the two classic studies early on were done
Speaker 3: in dolphins and in birds. So it's been around in
Speaker 3: a serious way in the animal behavior literature for on
Speaker 3: the order of twenty to thirty years. Now.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the roots go back a bit deeper, but
Speaker 2: it's really taken off in recent decades.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely in fact, right now, the study of social
Speaker 3: networks in 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 are 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 2: And to be clear, with humans, we're talking about multiple
Speaker 2: social networks being in place for a given individual or
Speaker 2: a given group. But the same is true of these
Speaker 2: various animal examples as well. Right, We're not talking about
Speaker 2: just like the social network of the macaque. We're talking
Speaker 2: about like the multiple interconnected social networks.
Speaker 3: Right, absolutely, So it might be that you're studying networks
Speaker 3: in the sense of who's going around feeding with who,
Speaker 3: and 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 2: Now, is there still any kind of like pushback from
Speaker 2: I guess human exceptionalists that argue that animals can't non
Speaker 2: human animals can't or don't demonstrate this kind of complexity.
Speaker 3: Well, not within I would say the scientific community. There
Speaker 3: really isn't much of that pushback anymore. Initially there was
Speaker 3: when people first began studying social networks and non humans.
Speaker 3: Many people in who were animal behaviorists were leery that
Speaker 3: the notion was that animals are complex and their societies
Speaker 3: are complex. They're but they're not social network complex. That was,
Speaker 3: you know, even in the early two thousands, They're There
Speaker 3: was 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, you're,
Speaker 3: you're making it more complex than it needs to be,
Speaker 3: and we're not ready to kind of give you money
Speaker 3: to do this. But the more that people were able
Speaker 3: to do it on their own, the more that it
Speaker 3: became part and parcel of what people were looking for,
Speaker 3: the less less the pushback. I mean, you're going to
Speaker 3: get pushback from outside the scientific community, from people who
Speaker 3: who just want to live in a world of human
Speaker 3: exceptionalism that tends to fall apart eventually. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: we used to think that was true about tool use
Speaker 3: in in in in animals, that you know, only humans
Speaker 3: could use tools. Then we find that animals can use
Speaker 3: tools only humans have culture. Well no, it turns out
Speaker 3: animals have culture, only humans have social networks. No, in fact,
Speaker 3: non humans have social networks. So the pushback is nowadays
Speaker 3: not as bad as it used to be.
Speaker 2: I like that you mentioned the tool use. You know,
Speaker 2: this is one of those areas where when we think
Speaker 2: of toolse do some in animals that a lot of
Speaker 2: people instantly think of. Examples involving say like chimpanzees or
Speaker 2: or certain you know, birds come to mind. Especially when
Speaker 2: we think of culturally transmitted tool use, we may think
Speaker 2: of the chimpanzee example, but you discuss examples involving dolphins
Speaker 2: and whales, can you describe the tools they seem to
Speaker 2: 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 how sort of culture, how complex they are socially.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't until the last couple of decades that
Speaker 3: this idea that tool use in dolphins was going on.
Speaker 3: And in dolphins the tool is actually another living organism.
Speaker 3: So basically what they do is they put a sponge
Speaker 3: on the end of their their rostrum, their their their
Speaker 3: face where where where their mouth is. They they put
Speaker 3: this sponge over that when they're looking for food. And
Speaker 3: the reason that they do that is that oftentimes they're
Speaker 3: probing the bottom of the bay that's very rocky and
Speaker 3: gravelly and it and it hurts to pound down on there.
Speaker 3: And what they're doing is they're trying to find fish
Speaker 3: that are hiding under the gravel and sand. So if
Speaker 3: you stick soft sponge on top of your mouth, then
Speaker 3: probing down there allows you much more flexibility and a
Speaker 3: lot less pain. And it turns out that dolphins are
Speaker 3: very particular about the sponges that they use. Once they
Speaker 3: find one that works, they keep it for a long time.
Speaker 3: So they'll go around probing on the bottom for food
Speaker 3: and if they find a fish that's hidden, they drop
Speaker 3: the sponge and they go and they catch that fish.
Speaker 3: Then they come back and they look for the sponge
Speaker 3: they had before it because if it worked once, it's
Speaker 3: likely to work again. They pick it up, they put
Speaker 3: 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're hunting alone, and so you
Speaker 3: wouldn't think that this sponging had anything to do with
Speaker 3: social networks, but in fact it does. And the reason
Speaker 3: that it does is dolphins often carry these sponges around
Speaker 3: when they're not hunting because, as I say, if they
Speaker 3: find a good sponge, they like it. Dolphins know who
Speaker 3: else are spongers. Not everyone's a sponger, only a small
Speaker 3: subset of them actually use these two 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 cliques 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 other 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 use 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 2: 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 2: Now, in the book, you divide the chapters up by
Speaker 2: specific networks and needs. You know, you alluded to this earlier,
Speaker 2: you know, food reproduction, power, safety, travel, communication, health, and culture.
Speaker 2: What areas were you either most surprised about or do
Speaker 2: you think will be most surprising to readers in these chapters?
Speaker 2: You know, because I feel like for a lot of
Speaker 2: general readers, you know, we can easily think of non
Speaker 2: human animals engaging in some level of like food reproduction
Speaker 2: or power dynamics. You know, we've seen enough documentaries or
Speaker 2: engage with enough animal content. But communication and health don't
Speaker 2: always instantly come to mind, I imagine, not with like
Speaker 2: the 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 network thinking allows
Speaker 3: us to probe really deep into these communication networks that
Speaker 3: exist in chimpanzees. And so, for example, there's this population
Speaker 3: of chimpanzees called the sun so 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 it
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
Speaker 3: Roberts have argued that visual communication works perfectly well between
Speaker 3: friends because you know each other and there's a large
Speaker 3: level of trust that's already in place. But when you
Speaker 3: don't know each other very well, visual communication doesn't work
Speaker 3: as well because it's not as clear, it's.
Speaker 4: Not as as salient as auditory and tactile communication, where
Speaker 4: you're really up front, right in the face of the
Speaker 4: individual touching them.
Speaker 3: Then they can really understand what it is that you're
Speaker 3: trying to communicate. And that's important because chimpanzee networks break
Speaker 3: up and they come back together, and so when you're
Speaker 3: interacting with individuals that you don't know very well, you
Speaker 3: really want to make sure that your communication is clear.
Speaker 3: And these kind of auditory and physical communication gestures are
Speaker 3: much better at that. And so you see it among
Speaker 3: individuals who don't know each other very well.
Speaker 2: 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've a new food source and you go back to
Speaker 3: the honeybee hive, you do this particular kind of dance
Speaker 3: known as the waggle dance, and the waggle dance basically
Speaker 3: involves moving very very quickly and shaking your abdomen as
Speaker 3: you're moving through the hive. And we know from prior
Speaker 3: work that this gives various types of information to others
Speaker 3: in the hive about where the food source is. For example,
Speaker 3: how long you dance gives information about how far away
Speaker 3: the hive is, and there's a really nice translation. Every
Speaker 3: tenth of a second of dancing translates into the food
Speaker 3: being this many feet away from the hive. They also
Speaker 3: dance at a certain angle, and the angle they dance at,
Speaker 3: believe it or not, is the angle between the sun,
Speaker 3: the hive and where the food is. So they're communicating
Speaker 3: all of this information through the dance. Now, in terms
Speaker 3: of working, it turns out that there were other ways
Speaker 3: to communicate information about new food sources. They can communicate
Speaker 3: this information when they transfer food from themselves to another
Speaker 3: individual in the hive. They can also communicate information about
Speaker 3: the food when they basically take their antennas and connect
Speaker 3: to the antennas of another bee in the hive. This
Speaker 3: also gives them information. So what has been done in
Speaker 3: terms of the networking is people have asked, well, they
Speaker 3: can get this information in all these different ways, how
Speaker 3: do they do it? When do they decide if they're
Speaker 3: going to transfer the information by dancing or moving food
Speaker 3: from one mouth to another or touching antenna. So what
Speaker 3: researchers did with they set up this experiment where they
Speaker 3: had these hives that were placed out in a field
Speaker 3: and they knew where the hives were, and they controlled
Speaker 3: how much food was going into the hives. And what
Speaker 3: they found was and so I should say, they marked
Speaker 3: all of their bees, thousands of them, so they knew
Speaker 3: who these bees were. And it turns out when you
Speaker 3: look at communication networks and the bees, you find this
Speaker 3: wonderfully complex system in place. If the sun is out there,
Speaker 3: they use dancing to communicate because they can transfer information
Speaker 3: about food using the angle of the sun compared to
Speaker 3: the hive and the food source. But in London there
Speaker 3: are many many days when it's not sunny, and when
Speaker 3: it's not sunny, the communication network focuses on the transfer
Speaker 3: of food or the touching of antenna. So they have
Speaker 3: these kind of multiple communication networks and if one of
Speaker 3: them is down because the sun isn't out, then they
Speaker 3: move to a second kind of communication network. And so
Speaker 3: what this tells us is that you know, you can
Speaker 3: have a brain the size of a honeybee or the
Speaker 3: brain the size of a chimpanzee, and you can still
Speaker 3: get complex communication networks in non humans. You were also
Speaker 3: asking about disease. I think for me this was one
Speaker 3: of the more surprising components of social networks and animals,
Speaker 3: the way that they relate to disease transmission. And 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 cut when it comes to disease,
Speaker 3: what's basically going on is the disease is hitchhiking on
Speaker 3: the social networks that the animals have in place. So
Speaker 3: the animals don't want to transfer disease from one individual
Speaker 3: to another, but the social networks are in place in
Speaker 3: terms of, for example, aggression and power struggles. What that
Speaker 3: means is diseases can use those networks to move from
Speaker 3: one individual to another. And I think my favorite example
Speaker 3: of this is this bizarre disease that has been studied
Speaker 3: in Tasmanian devils. And if you can't picture a Tasmanian
Speaker 3: devil in your head, think back to the Bugs Bunny cartoons,
Speaker 3: because there was this wonderful caricature of a Tasmanian devil
Speaker 3: in there. And in Tasmanian devils they have this thing
Speaker 3: called facial tumor disease. And this is one of the
Speaker 3: very rare instances that we know of in which cancer
Speaker 3: is transmitted from one individual to another. The sort of
Speaker 3: worst case scenario when we think about human cancers would
Speaker 3: be if we could actually transmit cancer from one individual
Speaker 3: to another. It doesn't happen, but in certain species, like
Speaker 3: Tasmanian devils, it does. And what happens is if they
Speaker 3: are infected with this cancer and they bite somebody really hard, right,
Speaker 3: they can transmit that cancer to the other individual. So
Speaker 3: here's where social networks come into play. Tasmanian Devils fight,
Speaker 3: and they fight a lot, particularly during mating season. Males
Speaker 3: will fight intensely to gain access to mates. Sometimes when
Speaker 3: they fight, if you have facial tumor disease and you
Speaker 3: bite somebody else, you can transfer that disease to that individual. Again,
Speaker 3: the tumor is actually hitchhiking on the power show network
Speaker 3: structure that's in place in the Tasmanian Devils. And so
Speaker 3: it's not surprising, for example, that males transmit this disease
Speaker 3: much more often to one another than females. And that's
Speaker 3: because males fight a lot during mating season, and it's
Speaker 3: only through bites that this disease can be transmitted. It's
Speaker 3: more complex, and what we're discovering are strange things like
Speaker 3: even though males are more likely to transmit the disease,
Speaker 3: females also get facial tumor disease, and they tend to
Speaker 3: get it from males who are defending them. But in
Speaker 3: the context of courtships, sometimes it gets a little too
Speaker 3: rough and you get some biting and females can get
Speaker 3: infected with this disease. Now, what's weird is if you
Speaker 3: look at female Tasmanian Devils. Usually it's individuals are in
Speaker 3: the weakest health state that are most susceptible to getting disease.
Speaker 3: But in the Tasmanian Devils, it's the healthiest females who
Speaker 3: end up getting this cancerous disease by being bitten by males.
Speaker 3: Why well, if you do a social network analysis, what
Speaker 3: you find is the healthiest females are the ones that
Speaker 3: the males prefer as mates. That means they're the ones
Speaker 3: that are most likely to get bitten even unintentionally by
Speaker 3: males during courtship. And so they the healthiest ones, end
Speaker 3: up being most likely to get the cancer, which is
Speaker 3: something that we can possibly have really understood without a
Speaker 3: social network analysis.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was going to ask about
Speaker 2: the Tasmanian devil example. That one definitely stood out to
Speaker 2: 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. Right,
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 recurgitate 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 at with
Speaker 3: and look for blood when there's an 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 pit tag is is this little, tiny,
Speaker 3: one ounce less than one ounce device if they put
Speaker 3: on a bat, and it allows them to track every
Speaker 3: bat in the roost when the bat goes out and
Speaker 3: looks for food. And the way it works is they
Speaker 3: have all of these receivers that have been placed out
Speaker 3: in the fields with the cows, and so you can
Speaker 3: know where the bats are because the little things they
Speaker 3: have on their bat are transmit are transmitting information to
Speaker 3: these receivers that are in the field, so you know
Speaker 3: everything about what the bats are doing. What's more, these
Speaker 3: little pit tags that the bats have on their back
Speaker 3: talk to each other. That is, if two vampire bats
Speaker 3: come close enough to one another, these little pit tags
Speaker 3: light up and you know that vampire Bat one and
Speaker 3: vampire Bat two are on the back of a cow
Speaker 3: together sucking blood. Now, these things are not easy to
Speaker 3: 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 count in the field. And we can only
Speaker 3: know how complex all of this is when we realize
Speaker 3: that it's all embedded in these social networks that the
Speaker 3: bats have built around blood sharing.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's incredible. And the technology that goes into these studies.
Speaker 2: I was just floored 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 to
Speaker 3: gather wherever they are. That's one thing. Then basically in
Speaker 3: other studies, what they do, what individuals do, is they
Speaker 3: attach the equivalent of kind of a GPS device to
Speaker 3: the back of an animal and they can track it
Speaker 3: then over really long distances. And my favorite example here
Speaker 3: is white 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 details 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 Planck Institute, So she put all
Speaker 3: of she put these GPS trackers on the backs of
Speaker 3: these white storks, and she basically would follow them as
Speaker 3: 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 really matters. The leaders are
Speaker 3: very very good at finding up drafts. So when you're
Speaker 3: flying as a bird, what you want is to expend
Speaker 3: as little energy as you can, and there are these updrafts,
Speaker 3: these winds that come that allow you to fly at
Speaker 3: very low energy levels. The leaders are tremendously good at
Speaker 3: finding these, and in fact, what they were able to
Speaker 3: do with the researcher were able to do was demonstrate
Speaker 3: not just that there were leaders and followers in these flocks,
Speaker 3: but that the leaders were actually able to migrate further
Speaker 3: than the followers because they were so good at finding
Speaker 3: these updrafts. So it really mattered who was a leader
Speaker 3: and a follower in these networks. And this kind of
Speaker 3: study would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. I mean,
Speaker 3: without the technology, you simply cannot do this sort of thing.
Speaker 3: You can move from flying one thousand meters above the
Speaker 3: ground to swimming many many feet below the water and
Speaker 3: find the same thing. And there's this wonderful study done
Speaker 3: on manta rays in the South Pacific where they've done
Speaker 3: exactly this. They've tagged them so they can study what
Speaker 3: the manta rays are doing. And in addition to that,
Speaker 3: they fly these drones over groups of mantar rays that
Speaker 3: are swimming close to the water surface. The drones then
Speaker 3: videotape the interactions between the manta rays. And the manta
Speaker 3: rays have these sort of very unique color and patterns
Speaker 3: that allow the researchers to know who's who. So you
Speaker 3: can study them by the drones watching them from above,
Speaker 3: and the little pit tags and various other GPS like
Speaker 3: devices under the water. They'll let you know where they
Speaker 3: are all the time, which means you can build social
Speaker 3: networks you can look at In the case of the
Speaker 3: manta rays, they look at who's a key hub in
Speaker 3: a social network. So a key hub is an individual
Speaker 3: through which a lot of information travels. So if you
Speaker 3: think about Facebook, for example, key hubs are like public
Speaker 3: figures where if you want to sort of track the
Speaker 3: way that information flows, these individuals really matter. Well, it
Speaker 3: turns out in manta rays there are key hubs as well,
Speaker 3: individuals through which information travels. In this case, it turns
Speaker 3: out that juvenile manta rays are the hubs in social
Speaker 3: networks associated with feeding. They're the ones that are the
Speaker 3: key to understanding how individuals swim around looking for food underwater. Again,
Speaker 3: without the technology, these are just pipe dreams, but now
Speaker 3: they are going on. All these kind of studies are
Speaker 3: going on all the time in non humens.
Speaker 2: It's also fascinating. And again we've only been able to
Speaker 2: really touch on some of the examples from the book.
Speaker 2: The book is loaded with excellent examples and fascinating tibots
Speaker 2: about the methodology and technology that goes into studying them.
Speaker 2: In the word of the book, you write that quote,
Speaker 2: it's time to scratch off another item from the what
Speaker 2: makes humans unique? List? So I thought I was just wondering.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously the book is primarily about what we're
Speaker 2: learning about these non human animals and their social networks.
Speaker 2: But do you think to any degree you were able
Speaker 2: to like turn some of these revelations around to better
Speaker 2: understand like what human social networks are? You have only
Speaker 2: 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 can learn by studying
Speaker 3: social networks and non humans, I think there is 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 mecacus 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 mecacs 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 in mice,
Speaker 3: how they respond to catastrophic events, 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 not in non human social networks. How do
Speaker 3: these things work? At a most general level, we're if
Speaker 3: 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 and manter rays and honey bees and chimpanzees
Speaker 3: and so many other species, then all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: maybe we can pick up some patterns about social networks
Speaker 3: that we wouldn't have picked up otherwise, and so I
Speaker 3: think that that's potentially a very powerful implication of studying
Speaker 3: this in non humans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. I have one last question that relates
Speaker 2: to an earlier book that you wrote was two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine, Mister Jefferson and the Giant Moose, Natural History
Speaker 2: in Early America. I was not familiar with the history
Speaker 2: referenced in the title, as if nothing else, is just
Speaker 2: a teaser for listeners who might be interested, Could you
Speaker 2: just briefly tell us why Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with
Speaker 2: 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 Bufon, had written
Speaker 3: this giant encyclopedia of natural history, and one of the
Speaker 3: things that he did in an encyclopedia was promote this
Speaker 3: idea called the degeneration hypothesis. And what this natural historian
Speaker 3: said was that all life in the New World, particularly
Speaker 3: in America, was degenerate compared to life other places, that
Speaker 3: all the animals in in the United States or even
Speaker 3: before that, the colonies were weak, feeble, and diminished compared
Speaker 3: to species in other places in the world, and Jefferson
Speaker 3: became obsessed in demonstrating to Count Buffon why he was wrong.
Speaker 3: In fact, the longest chapter in the book, the only
Speaker 3: book that Jefferson ever wrote, The Notes on the State
Speaker 3: of Virginia, is all about proving how wrong this degeneracy
Speaker 3: hypothesis is. And one of the key pieces of information
Speaker 3: that he wanted Buffon to see was our moose, which
Speaker 3: was it's massive right. So Jefferson wanted to send Buffon
Speaker 3: a giant moose to show him how wrong he was
Speaker 3: about this theory of American degeneracy. And so he spent
Speaker 3: an extraordinary amount of time and effort getting this moose
Speaker 3: and then shipping it over to Buffon. And so that's
Speaker 3: where the moose in the title comes from.
Speaker 2: Fascinating. I'm going to I'm gonna have to put this
Speaker 2: on my to read list. I was instantly fascinated.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you, Yeah, I mean, it was a tremendously
Speaker 3: fun project.
Speaker 2: Well, Lee, thanks again for coming on the show. The
Speaker 2: new book, The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks and the
Speaker 2: Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies is out this week, so
Speaker 2: encourage all of our listeners to go check that out.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed you
Speaker 3: very much.
Speaker 2: Thanks once more to Lee Alan Dugatkin for taking time
Speaker 2: out of his day to chat with me about the
Speaker 2: new book. That new book, again is The Well Connected
Speaker 2: Animal Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.
Speaker 2: It is out this Thursday, so go grab yourself a copy.
Speaker 2: Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing
Speaker 2: this episode and if you would like to get in
Speaker 2: touch with Joe or myself, if you have suggestions for
Speaker 2: future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, If you
Speaker 2: have interview suggestions you'd like us to consider, write and
Speaker 2: we would love to hear from you. You can email us
Speaker 2: at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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