Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(62)

The observed role division comes naturally to two predators with different hunting styles. What is truly spectacular is that the entire pattern—two actors who seemingly know what they are going to do and how it will benefit them—is not one we usually associate with fish. We have lots of cognitively high-level explanations for our own behavior and find it hard to believe that the same might apply to animals with much smaller brains. But lest one think that the fish are showing a simplified form of cooperation, Bshary’s recent work challenges this notion. Coral trout were presented with a fake moray eel (a plastic model capable of performing a few actions, such as coming out of a tube) that was able to help them catch fish. The setup followed the same logic as the pulling tests in which chimpanzees recruit help when needed, but not if they can complete the task alone. The trout acted in every way similar to the apes and were equally adept at deciding on their need for a partner.51

One way to look at this outcome is to say that chimpanzee cooperation may be simpler than we thought, but another is to say that fish may have a better understanding of how cooperation works than we have been willing to assume. Whether all this boils down to associative learning by the fish remains to be seen; if it does, then any kind of fish should be able to develop this behavior. That seems doubtful, and I agree with Bshary that a species’s cognition is tied to its evolutionary history and ecology. Combined with field observations of cooperative hunting between coral trout and moray eels, the experiment suggests a cognition that suits the hunting techniques of both species. Since the trout takes most of the initiatives and decisions, it may all depend on the specialized intelligence of only one species.

These exciting excursions into nonmammals fit the comparative approach that is the hallmark of evolutionary cognition. There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species’s cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival. Distant species that face similar needs may arrive at similar solutions, as also happened in the domain of Machiavellian power strategies. After my discovery of divide-and-rule tactics in chimpanzees, and Nishida’s confirmation of their use in the wild, we now have a report on ravens.52 It is perhaps no accident that it came from a young Dutchman, Jorg Massen, who spent years with the chimps at Burgers’ Zoo before he set out to follow wild ravens in the Austrian Alps. There he observed many separating interventions in which one bird would interrupt a friendly contact between others, such as mutual preening, either by attacking one of them or by inserting itself between them. The intervener gained no direct benefits (there was no food or mating at stake) but did manage to ruin a bonding session between others. Bonds are important to ravens, because as Massen explains, their status depends on them. High-ranking ravens are generally well bonded, whereas the middle category are loosely bonded, and the lowest birds lack special bonds. Since interventions were mostly carried out by well-bonded birds targeting loosely bonded ones, their main goal may have been to prevent the latter from establishing friendships in order to rise in status.53 This begins to look a lot like chimpanzee politics, which is exactly what one would expect in a large-brained species with a healthy power drive.


Jumbo Politics

We tend to think of elephants as matriarchal, and this is entirely correct. Elephant herds consist of females with young, occasionally followed around by one or two grown bulls eager to mate. The bulls are only hangers-on. It is hard to apply the term politics to these herds, since the females are ranked by age, family, and perhaps personality, all of which traits are stable. There isn’t much room for the status competition and the opportunistic making and breaking of alliances that marks political strife. For this, we have to go to the males, also in the elephant.

For the longest time, bull elephants have been viewed as loners who travel up and down the savanna and occasionally get behaviorally transformed by the state of musth. Jolted by a twentyfold increase in testosterone, a bull changes into a sort of spinach-eating Popeye, a self-confident jerk ready to fight anyone in his path. Not many animals have such a physiological oddball thrown into their social system. But now we learn from the work by American zoologist Caitlin O’Connell in Estosha National Park, in Namibia, that there is more going on. African elephant bulls are far more sociable than assumed. They may not move in herds like the cows—who stick together to keep predators from bringing down their young—but they know one another individually and have leaders, followers, and semipermanent associations.

In some ways, O’Connell’s descriptions remind me of primate politics, but at other times they sound odd due to the strange ways elephants communicate. For example, a leading bull wary of another may drop his penis during a butt-jiggling retreat. What is going on here? He is awkwardly walking backward while his penis—which is pretty obvious in an elephant—serves as a signal. Why not retract it at such moments? They drop it in submission, or as O’Connell calls it, “supplication.”

On the dominance side as well, their behavior is highly unusual. Here a description of a musth display:

He was so agitated that he walked over to the place where Greg had previously defecated and performed a dramatic musth display over the offending pile of feces, dribbling urine and curling his trunk over his head, waving his ears and prancing with his front legs in the air, mouth wide open.54

It used to be thought that the older and larger a bull, the higher-ranking he’d be. If so, this system would be rather inflexible. O’Connell, however, documented status reversals. One leading male gradually lost his ability to rally followers. He would fan his ears and emit a let’s-go rumble, but no one would pay any heed the way they had done in earlier years. His coalition was falling apart, whereas it previously had shown impressive cohesion. One sign of an intact “boys’ club” is that the dominant bull’s vocalizations are echoed by the bulls around him. A subordinate’s call starts at the moment the dominant’s call ends, followed by yet another subordinate, and yet another, resulting in a cascade of repeated calls among the bulls that signal to the rest of the world that they are tight and united.