June 14, 2025 • 51 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with evolutionary biologist and historian of science Lee Alan Dugatkin about his new book “The Well-Connected Animal: Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.” You'll learn about the complex social networks of vampire bats, dolphins, bees and more. (orignally published 5/14/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. Today we have another vault episode for you.
This is going to be The Well Connected Animal with
Lee Alan Dugatkin. This is an interview episode that originally
published five fourteen, twenty twenty four. You'll learn all about
the complex social networks of vampire bats, dolphins, bees, and more.
Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today I have an interview episode for you.
I recently spoke with Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of
evolution and behavior at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
He is the author of the new book The Well
Connected Animal, Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.
(01:04):
This book comes out this Thursday, so wherever you get
your books, in whatever formats, you can probably go ahead
and pre order it. If not, grab it on Thursday.
It's a delightful read, and this was a delightful chat.
I really enjoyed talking with Lee. Let's go ahead and
jump right into the interview. Hi, Lee, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
So you're an evolutionary biologist, a historian of science, and
an animal behaviorist. How do these classifications triangulate on your
work and how did you get involved in your field?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yeah, so I got involved in a sort of securitous way.
I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Even
when I was in college. I happened upon the study
of animal behavior and evolution, and a friend of mine
mentioned a book he was reading, and before I knew it,
(02:00):
I was in graduate school studying evolution and behavior and
non humans because I just fell in love with the
topic and I thought it was sort of the ultimate
kinds of questions one could ask about life on the planet.
And so early on, a lot of my work was
experimental work with animals. I looked at the evolution of
(02:20):
cooperation and the evolution of aggression and so on for
many many years in my laboratory. And then about fifteen
years ago or so, after I had been doing this
for a couple of decades, I started getting much more
interested in the history of the subjects that I was
(02:40):
working on. So it turns out that all of the
people early on who were studying the evolution of cooperation
were really fascinating characters in and of themselves, how they
came about it, the environment and the kind of social
atmosphere in which they developed their ideas. And I began
because I'm much more interested in that aspect of the work.
(03:03):
And so all these areas dovetail in the sense that
I still do work on studying evolution and animal behavior,
but I also have added this component of it's worth
stopping for a minute and realizing that, you know, in
the late eighteen hundreds or something like that, here's how
(03:24):
these ideas came about. Here are the people who did it,
and here's the kind of social environment in which it happened.
And I think it makes the study of science itself
much richer to do it that way.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
The new book is The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks
and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. Could you walk
us through what a social network is and say, sociology
and anthropology and how and when the concept enters into
contemplation of non human animals.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Sure, And you know, I should say that there are
many many different definitions of social network, uh, depending on
exactly what discipline you're interested in and how mathematical you
want to get for me, and I think from I
think this is a reasonable general definition. Is a social
network is just a group of individuals through which information travels,
(04:18):
and it may travel directly and it may travel indirectly.
And it's also a group of individuals who somehow or
another affect one another in a real way. And again
that could happen either directly by your interaction with Steve,
or it could happen indirectly because you interact with Steve,
(04:40):
and Steve interacts with Nancy, and so Nancy is affected
by what you have done to Steve. And so generally
it's this information flow and effect on others in your network.
That's that for me, is the key to social network.
(05:01):
You know, humans are in all sorts of social networks,
Facebook and that sort of thing. But we're also embedded
in them in almost everything we do in life. Our
families or one kind of social network, the people we
work with or another, our friends or another, and so on,
and they all overlap. Now in terms of the history
(05:24):
of the subject, I mean, anthropologists and particularly sociologists have
been interested in this in humans for quite some time.
It was you know, in the nineteen forties and nineteen
fifties where people first began to get serious about trying
to understand the details of what we now would refer
(05:49):
to as social networks, how they work in humans. And
that involved a lot of mathematics terms of understanding what
it means if I interact with you and you interact
with somebody else, and that somebody else is affected by me,
and who is who are the key individuals in the
(06:12):
social network, the ones that have the most impact, and
are there cliques where certain individuals tend to interact with
each other more? And that really began to flourish, I
would say in the nineteen forties and fifties in anthropology
and sociology what we now refer to as as social
(06:33):
network I think that language became much more common in
the late nineteen hundreds and into the early two thousands.
Now when it comes to studying social networks and non humans,
we can trace it back quite far in the sense
(06:55):
that even in Darwindnesday and a little bit late so
the late eighteen hundreds, people were beginning to think that
the same kind of social tools that can be used
to study human behavior can be used to study animal behavior,
and so there are people who were basically arguing that
(07:18):
animal societies were structured very much like human societies. And
even though the word social network wasn't around, the idea
that we could study non humans like we study humans
was there. It really began to flourish more again around
the same time as early work in humans did. That is,
(07:40):
in this case, maybe the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
when primatologists, people who study monkeys and apes, began to
think in terms of social networks. They began to realize
that information was flowing through these non humans groups, again
(08:00):
mostly primates, in a way that was similar to the
way it flows through human groups. And it really mattered
in a group of chimpanzees, if one chimpanzee groomed the
other and got bugs and parasites off it back, it
really mattered who they groomed and who that individual groomed,
(08:21):
and how that kind of grooming social network developed. So
it first started with non human primates, which kind of
makes sense because there are closest evolutionary relatives, and then
it began to branch out in the nineteen eighties and
nineteen nineties when people began to study it in all
(08:41):
sorts of organisms. In fact, the two classic studies early
on were done in dolphins and in birds. So it's
been around in a serious way in the animal behavior
literature for you know, on the order of twenty to
thirty years.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Now, okay, the roots go back a bit deeper, but
it's really taken off in recent decades.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Absolutely, absolutely, In fact, right now, the study of social
networks and non humans is probably is one of the
most active areas in the entire field. I mean, anytime
you open up a journal on behavior and non humans,
you're likely to find an article about social networks. And
those networks are important in almost every context for non humans.
(09:27):
There are networks about feeding. There a mating networks, there
are traveling networks, there are cooperation networks, there are power networks.
Everywhere you look. Now that we've started to actually explore
it in depth, we're finding it. And this is sort
of what happens in animal behavior a lot. We tend
to think of things initially as strictly human, and then
(09:49):
when we begin to probe deeper, we see similar sorts
of things in non humans, and once we begin to look,
we begin to see it everywhere.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
And to be clear, like with humans, we're talking about
multiple social networks being in place for a given individual
or a given group. But the same is true of
these various animal examples as well. Right, We're not talking
about just like the social network of the macaque. We're
talking about like the multiple interconnected social networks.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Absolutely. So it might be that you're studying networks in
the sense of who's going around feeding with who, and
who's sharing food with who, But in that same species,
you might be looking at who's being aggressive towards who,
and who's traveling together, and who's being nice to who,
(10:38):
and all of those are overlapping networks in the same
sense as in humans.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Now, is there still any kind of like pushback from
I guess human exceptionalists that argue that animals can't non
human animals can't or don't demonstrate this kind of complexity.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Well, not within I would say the scientific community really
isn't much of that pushback anymore. Initially there was when
people first began studying social networks and non humans. Many
people in who were animal behaviorists were leery that the
notion was that animals are complex and their societies are complex,
(11:18):
but they're but they're not social network complex that that was.
You know, even in the early two thousands, there there
were still some of that. I interviewed a bunch of
people for this book, and I had stories of people
telling me that in the early two thousands, when they
would put in grant applications to study social networks and
(11:42):
non humans, they would get this kind of pushback that was,
you know, it can't be this complex. You're you're making
it more complex than it needs to be, and we're
not ready to kind of give you money to do this.
But the more that people were able to do it
on their own, the more that it became part and
parcel of what people were looking for, the less less
(12:04):
the pushback. I mean, you're going to get pushback from
outside the scientific community, from people who who just want
to live in a world of human exceptionalism. That tends
to fall apart eventually. I mean, you know, we used
to think that was true about tool use in in
in in animals, that you know, only humans could use tools.
(12:27):
Then we find that animals can use tools only humans
have culture. Well, no, it turns out animals have culture,
only humans have social networks. No, in fact, non humans
have social networks. So the pushback is nowadays not as
bad as it used to be.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I like that you mentioned the tool use. You know
this This is one of those areas where when we
think of tool use use in animals, a lot of
people instantly think of examples involving say like chimpanzees, or
or or or or certain you know birds come to mind.
And especially when we think of culturally trans submitted tool use,
we may think of the chimpanzee example, But you discuss
(13:03):
examples involving dolphins and whales, can you describe the tools
they seem to be using.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Sure? So there's this wonderful study on bottomnosed dolphins. It's
been going on in Australia in a place called Shark
Bay for the last thirty or forty years, and so
they know literally thousands of dolphins that are swimming around
in Shark Bay individually, and we've learned a tremendous amount
(13:32):
about sort of culture, how complex they are socially. But
it wasn't until the last couple of decades that this
idea that tool use in dolphins was going on. And
in dolphins the tool is actually another living organism. So
(13:53):
basically what they do is they put a sponge on
the end of their rostrum, their their face, where their
mouth is. They put this sponge over that when they're
looking for food. And the reason that they do that
is that oftentimes they're probing the bottom of the bay
(14:16):
that's very rocky and gravelly, and it hurts to pound
down on there, and what they're doing is they're trying
to find fish that are hiding under the gravel and sand.
So if you stick this soft sponge on top of
your mouth, then probing down there allows you much more
flexibility and a lot less pain. And it turns out
(14:40):
that dolphins are very particular about the sponges that they use.
Once they find one that works, they keep it for
a long time. So they'll go around probing on the
bottom for food, and if they find a fish that's hidden,
they drop the sponge and they go and they catch
that fish. Then they come back and they look for
(15:00):
the sponge they had before, because if it worked once,
it's likely to work again. They pick it up, they
put it back well, they put it back onto their face,
and then they go looking for more things at sort
of hiding in the bottom of the sand. And they
learn this, they learn how to sponge from their mothers.
(15:25):
So if you watch calves, dolphin calves, they're basically learning
the technique of how to find a good sponge, put
it on, and hunt with it. And so the actual
learning is through mother child interaction. It's not genetic, but
it's rather they learn from their parents. Now, in terms
(15:49):
of the networking, it's actually complex. So basically when they
have these sponges on, they are hunting alone, and so
you wouldn't think that the sponging had anything to do
with social networks, but in fact it does. And the
reason that it does is dolphins often carry these sponges
(16:13):
around when they're not hunting because, as I say, if
they find a good sponge, they like it. Dolphins know
who else are spongers. Not everyone's a sponger, only a
small subset of them actually use these tools. And so
what the researchers did was they started trying to understand
whether or not individuals who did use these sponge tools
(16:38):
hung out with each other when they actually weren't going
around looking for food, and it turns out they were.
There are these clicks of dolphins that use the sponge
tools that hang out with each other when they're not
actually down on the bottom looking for food. And the
reason we think they do this is if you hang
(16:59):
out with others spongers, you're likely to get information about
where the good places to sponge are, and so you
network with them so that you can take these sponges
and use them in the best possible locations. And the
sponges are really great tools. The ganet man who ran
(17:22):
this study, she and her colleagues actually thought, you know,
we should see if sponging really works. It kind of
looks like it works when you watch the dolphins. They
put sponges on their hands and they went around under
the water using the sponges on their hands the way
dolphins used them on their snouts. And it turns out
(17:44):
you really do kick up a lot of prey items
things to eat when you use these sponges. And so
networking allowed us to kind of understand this cultural tool
use in a much more general way, not just this
dolphin does it or that dolphin does it, but that
they hang around together if they do it, and they
(18:06):
get all sorts of information from each other when they
do this.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah, No, it's a wonderful long term study of an
incredibly complex organism. I mean dolphins. Everybody loves dolphins. Their
sociality is over the top in terms of the sorts
of things we typically see in nature.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Now, in the book, you divide the chapters up by
specific networks and needs. You know you alluded to this earlier,
you know, food reproduction, power, safety, travel, communication, health, and culture.
What areas were you either most surprised about or do
you think will be most surprising to readers in these chapters?
You know, because I feel like for a lot of
(18:57):
general readers, you know, we can easily think of non
human animals engaging in some level of food reproduction or
power dynamics. You know, we've seen enough documentaries or engage
with enough animal content. But communication and health don't always
instantly come to mind, I imagine, not with like the
number of species that are covered in the book.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Sure, yeah, so communication is a great one in terms
of the kinds of things that might surprise readers. There
is wonderful work that's been done on communication in chimpanzees,
for example. So in chimpanzees, when they're communicating with each other,
(19:42):
they can communicate in all sorts of different ways, and
some of those ways are much more visual, and some
of them are much more physical and tactile that involve touching.
And it turns out that again, social netw work thinking
allows us to probe really deep into these communication networks
(20:07):
that exist in chimpanzees. And so, for example, there's this
population of chimpanzees called the Suns population that's been studied
for a very long time, and it turns out that
when you look at the kind of gestural communication that
goes on in these chimpanzees, you see something very different
(20:32):
when individuals are interacting with friends in their social networks
rather than with others who they don't know quite as well.
So if you look at communication between chimpanzees who know
each other well and who have done things like cooperative
(20:52):
hunting together, they tend to use visual communication. And this
kind of visual communication. Other people have found that this
kind of really lowers their heart rates and reduces the
amount of stress that the chimpanzee itself feels. The individual
(21:15):
who's the recipient of the communication calms down, they have
a lower heart rate. This is when communication goes on
between friends, But when communication is going on between individuals
who don't know each other as well, maybe haven't interacted
as much in the past. Then you tend to see
a different kind of communication. You tend to see it
(21:36):
being very physical and tactile, with them touching each other.
And the researchers who did this work, Anna and Sam Roberts,
have argued that visual communication works perfectly well between friends
because you know each other and there's a large level
of trust that's already in place. But when you don't
know each other very well, visual communication doesn't work well
(22:00):
because it's not as clear, it's not as as salient
as auditory and tactile communication, where you're really up front,
right in the face of the individual touching them, then
they can really understand what it is that you're trying
to communicate. And that's important because chimpanzee networks break up
(22:22):
and they come back together. And so when you're interacting
with individuals that you don't know very well, you really
want to make sure that your communication is clear. And
these kind of auditory and physical communication gestures are much
better at that. And so you see it among individuals
who don't know each other very well.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Fascinating.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
But here's the thing, you know, So chimpanzees are our
closest living relatives and they have very large brains, right,
But you can go and find communication networks and honeybees,
and a former student of mine has been studying that
in a research field station outside of London where they
(23:05):
have these experimental honeybee hives, and so in honeybees, the
primary way that they communicate is actually by something known
as the waggle dance. So here the bees are trying
to communicate to one another where a new food source is.
And the way that they typically do this is if
(23:26):
you find a new food source and you go back
to the honeybee hive, you do this particular kind of
dance known as the waggle dance, and the waggle dance
basically involves moving very very quickly and shaking your abdomen
as you're moving through the hive. And we know from
prior work that this gives various types of information to
(23:51):
others in the hive about where the food source is.
For example, how long you dance gives information about how
far away the hive is, and there's a really nice translation.
Every tenth of a second of dancing translates into the
food being this many feet away from the hive. They
also dance at a certain angle, and the angle they
(24:13):
dance it, believe it or not, is the angle between
the sun, the hive and where the food is. So
they're communicating all of this information through the dance. Now,
in terms of networking, it turns out that there are
other ways to communicate information about new food sources. They
(24:34):
can communicate this information when they transfer food from themselves
to another individual in the hive. They can also communicate
information about the food when they basically take their antennas
and connect to the antennas of another bee in the hive.
This also gives them information. So what has been done
(24:58):
in terms of the networking is people have asked, well,
they can get this information in all these different ways,
how do they do it? When do they decide if
they're going to transfer the information by dancing or moving
food from one mouth to another or touching antenna. So
(25:18):
what researchers did was they set up this experiment where
they had these hives that were placed out in a
field and they knew where the hives were, and they
controlled how much food was going into the hives. And
what they found was and so I should say they
marked all of their bees thousands of them, so they
knew who these bees were. And it turns out when
(25:41):
you look at communication networks and the bees, you find
this wonderfully complex system in place. If the sun is
out there, they used dancing to communicate because they can
transfer information about food using the angle of the sun
compared to the hive and the food source. But in
(26:04):
London there are many many days when it's not sunny,
and when it's not sunny, the communication network focuses on
the transfer of food or the touching of antenna. So
they have these kind of multiple communication networks, and if
one of them is down because the sun isn't out,
(26:24):
then they move to a second kind of communication network.
And so what this tells us is that you know,
you can have a brain the size of a honeybee
or the brain the size of a chimpanzee, and you
can still get complex communication networks in non humans. You
(26:44):
were also asking about disease. I think for me this
was one of the more surprising components of social networks
and animals, the way that they relate to disease transmission. Here,
what's kind of cool is that in almost all of
the other behaviors that we're talking about feeding and communication
(27:08):
and cooperation. Really it's individuals, animals and the network that
are the key. But when you cut when it comes
to disease, what's basically going on is the disease is
hitchhiking on the social networks that the animals have in place.
So the animals don't want to transfer disease from one
(27:31):
individual to another, but the social networks are in place
in terms of for example, aggression and power struggles. What
that means is diseases can use those networks to move
from one individual to another. And I think my favorite
example of this is this bizarre disease that has been
(27:53):
studied in Tasmanian devils. And if you can't picture a
Tasmanian devil in your head, think back to the Bugs
Bunny cartoons, because there was this wonderful cariacture of a
Tasmanian devil in there. And in Tasmanian devils they have
this thing called facial tumor disease, and this is one
(28:17):
of the very rare instances that we know of in
which cancer is transmitted from one individual to another. The
sort of worst case scenario when we think about human
cancers would be if we could actually transmit cancer from
one individual to another. It doesn't happen, but in certain
(28:38):
species like Tasmanian devils, it does. And what happens is
if they are infected with this cancer and they bite
somebody really hard, right, they can transmit that cancer to
the other individual. So here's where social networks come into play.
(29:00):
Tasmanian devils fight, and they fight a lot, particularly during
mating season. Males will fight intensely to gain access to mates.
Sometimes when they fight, if you have facial tumor disease
and you bite somebody else, you can transfer that disease
to that individual. Again, the tumor is actually hitchhiking on
(29:25):
the power social network structure that's in place in the
Tasmanian devils. And so it's not surprising, for example, that
males transmit this disease much more often to one another
than females. And that's because males fight a lot during
mating season, and it's only through bites that this disease
(29:48):
can be transmitted. It's more complex, and what we're discovering
are strange things like even though males are more likely
to transmit the disease, females also get facial tumor disease,
and they tend to get it from males who are
defending them. But in the context of courtships, sometimes it
(30:11):
gets a little too rough and you get some biting
and females can get infected with this disease. Now what's
weird is if you look at female Tasmanian devils, usually
it's individuals who are in the weakest health state that
are most susceptible to getting disease. But in the Tasmanian devils,
(30:34):
it's the healthiest females who end up getting this cancerous
disease by being bitten by males. Why well, if you
do a social network analysis, what you find is the
healthiest females are the ones that the males prefer as mates.
That means they're the ones that are most likely to
(30:56):
get bitten, even unintentionally by males during courtship, and so
they the healthiest ones end up being most likely to
get the cancer, which is something that we can possibly
have really understood without a social network analysis.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was going to ask about
the Tasmanian devil example. That one definitely stood out to
me when I was reading another one was the vampire bats.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Oh, yes, vampire bats are wonderful. They're a textbook example
of social behavior and in this case, cooperation. So let
me just tell you a little bit about what goes
(31:43):
on in the world of vampires. So, vampire bats do,
in fact suck blood, right, but they don't suck human blood.
They suck the blood of cows and other kind of
domesticated species. And it turns out that if you're a
vampire bat, or if you're just a bat in general,
it's a really expensive way of living for a mammal.
(32:07):
So bats are mammals, and most mammals don't fly, but
if you fly, it's energetically extremely expensive. And what people
have found is if a vampire bat doesn't get a
blood meal about every two days, it can starve to death. Now,
what the vampire bats do is they have this social
(32:31):
network in place where they transfer blood from one back
to the other. So if you take a camera and
you go inside a vampire bat roost, what you will
find sometimes is that one bat will come up to
another bat and it'll start licking its face in a
(32:51):
very kind of stereotypical manner. What that bat is doing
is it's trying to get the other bat to regurgitate
some of the blood that it has in its gut
so that the solicitor, the one that's licking the face,
can actually survive long enough to go out and get
its own blood meal. So it's hungry, it's starving. It
goes up to a bat that has a really distended
(33:14):
big gut, which means it has lots of blood. It
licks its face trying to get that bat to regurgitate
some of the blood to it. They will do that
for one another, but only when they know that it's
a trustworthy partner. So if one bat goes up to
another and tries to get blood regurgitated, the only way
(33:36):
it'll work is if in the past that blood that
bat who's hungry who needs the blood, has helped and
given blood to the bat that it's now asking for
blood from. So they're basically keeping track of who gave
them blood in the past when they were hungry, and
if that bat now comes up and tries to get
(33:56):
some blood you to regurgitate some blood, then you're much
more likely to do it. So that's the basic structure
that's in place in these vampire bat roots. Networking comes
into place, because it turns out again that it really
matters not just sort of who gave you blood when
(34:17):
you were hungry, but also who you go out with
and look for blood when there's a nice night out
there to go out and fly and look for an
unsuspecting cow. So what researchers have done is they have
placed little what are known as pit tags on these bats.
(34:42):
And so basically all a pittag is is this little
tiny one ounce less than one ounce device if they
put on a bat, and it allows them to track
every bat in the roost when the bat goes out
and looks for food. And the way it works is
they have all of these receivers that have been placed
out in the fields with the cows, and so you
(35:03):
can know where the bats are because the little things
they have on their bat are transmit are transmitting information
to these receivers that are in the field, so you
know everything about what the bats are doing. What's more,
these little pit tags that the bats have on their
back talk to each other. That is, if two vampire
(35:25):
bats come close enough to one another, these little pit
tags light up and you know that vampire bat one
and vampire bat two are on the back of a
cow together sucking blood. Now, these things are not easy
to set up, but after you have this system in place,
you can test all sorts of incredible things, like is
(35:48):
it the case that this kind of network of blood
sharing that goes on inside the roost translates into who's
hanging out with who when they're actually going out and
looking for blood. That's a really hard thing to do
because you never know when bats are going to leave
their roost, and they fly and they're really hard to follow.
But when you have these tags and these transmitters and
(36:11):
responders in the field, you can do this and lo
and behold. Basically, the network of blood sharing that goes
on inside the roost is a very good predictor of
who will be found on the back of the same
cow sucking blood when they go out. They go out,
The bats go out and start flying independently, but they
(36:32):
find their favorite partners one way or another, and they
end up tending to be found on the back of
some unsuspecting cow in the field. And we can only
know how complex all this is when we realize that
it's all embedded in these social networks that the bats
(36:53):
have built around blood sharing.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Wow, that's incredible. And the technology that goes into these studies.
I was just ord by numerous examples in the book.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, I mean, so the study of social networks and
animals has just absolutely exploded in part because of these
technological advances. So you have these talking sensors like I
just mentioned to you, where when the animals come close enough,
they both sensors light up and you know they're together
wherever they are. That's one thing. Then basically in other studies,
(37:28):
what they do, what individuals do, is they attach the
equivalent of kind of a GPS device to the back
of an animal and they can track it then over
really long distances. And my favorite example here is white
stork behavior. So white storks are these beautiful animals, right,
(37:51):
but they migrate thousands of miles in the winter, and
we know almost nothing about the tells of their migration
because it's really hard to follow birds that are flying
a thousand feet above the ground and traveling thousands of miles.
But if you put GPS transponders on their back, then
(38:13):
you have the possibility of doing this. So people who
have worked with these white storks, Andrea Flack is a
researcher at the Max Plank Institute. So she put all
of she put these giant GPS trackers on the backs
of these white storks and she basically would follow them
(38:35):
as they were making them migration. As I'm making them migration,
they kind of come down every night to rest, and
she would kind of try and track them for hundreds
of miles if she could on her own. And so
she was trying to follow them, but at the same time,
she could know what the birds were doing when they
were a thousand feet above the ground because the GPS
(38:59):
devices were so sensitive that she could know where a
bird was in the flock as they were flying these
thousands of miles. And it turns out that what that
allowed her to do was built a social network of
the flock as it was flying these south thousands of miles.
(39:20):
And what she found was that in this network, this
travel network, there were certain white storks that were the leaders.
They were the ones that were determining when the flock
would move this way or that way. So if you
look at a bird of flocks, a flock of birds
like geese, you can tell there are certain leaders that
(39:43):
are the ones that are determining the movement of the flock.
But you can't do that with white storks when they're
that far above the ground unless you have these GPS devices.
So there are these leaders and followers in the white
stalk travel networks, and it it really matters. The leaders
are very very good at finding up drafts. So when
(40:06):
you're flying as a bird, what you want is to
expend as little energy as you can, and there are
these updrafts, these wins that come that allow you to
fly at very low energy levels. The leaders are tremendously
good at finding these, and in fact, what they were
able to do, what the researchers were able to do,
(40:27):
was demonstrate not just that there were leaders and followers
in these flocks, but that the leaders were actually able
to migrate further than the followers because they were so
good at finding these updrafts. So it really mattered who
was a leader and a follower in these networks. And
this kind of study would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
(40:52):
I mean, without the technology, you simply cannot do this
sort of thing. You can move from flying a thousand
meters above the ground to swimming many many feet below
the water and find the same thing and there's this
wonderful study done on mant rays in the South Pacific
(41:15):
where they've done exactly this. They they've tagged them so
they can study what the manta rays are doing. And
in addition to that, they fly these drones over groups
of manta rays that are swimming close to the water surface.
The drones then videotape the interactions between the manta rays.
(41:38):
And the mantrays have these sort of very unique color
and patterns that allow the researchers to know who's who,
so you can study them by the drones watching them
from above, and the little pit tags and various other
GPS like devices under the water, they'll let you know
(41:59):
where they are all the time, which means you can
build social networks. You can look at in the case
of the manta rays, they look at who's a key
hub in a social network. So a key hub is
an individual through which a lot of information travels. So
if you think about Facebook, for example, key hubs are
(42:23):
like public figures where if you want to sort of
track the way that information flows, these individuals really matter. Well,
it turns out in manta rays there are key hubs
as well, individuals through which information travels. In this case,
it turns out that juvenile manta rays are the hubs
in social networks associated with feeding. They're the ones that
(42:48):
are the key to understanding how individuals swim around looking
for food underwater. Again, without the technology, these are just
pipe dreams. But now they're are going on. All these
kind of studies are going on all the time in
non humans.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
It's also fascinating, and again we've only been able to
really touch on some of the examples from the book.
The book is loaded with excellent examples and fascinating timbits
about the methodology and technology that goes into studying them.
(43:26):
In the in the afterward of the book, you write
that quote, it's time to scratch off another item from
the what makes humans Unique? List? So I thought I
was just wondering, you know, obviously the book is primarily
about what we're learning about these non human animals and
their social networks. But do you think to any degree
you were able to like turn some of these revelations
around to better understand, like what human social networks are.
(43:50):
I have only just to remind us that we're not special.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
Yeah, So I think at the most general level, it
does remind us that we're not special and yet another way,
so we talked about tools and culture were things that
we used to think we were unique, and we're not.
We're not unique in social networks. But in terms of
like perhaps the lessons that we could learn by studying
social networks and non humans, I think there are some.
(44:16):
You know, you always have to be careful when you
do this sort of thing, but let me give you
just one example that I think helps in terms of
what we might learn. So there's this great study that
was done on Reese's macaque monkeys and their social networks
on this little island in Puerto Rico. And I won't
(44:39):
get into the details of the social network study per se,
but basically the thing about this study was that they
had been studying these macaques on the island for a
very long time. They knew a lot about their social networks.
Then Hurricane Maria came through and absolutely devastated the island
(45:00):
where these macacus lived. And obviously it also decimated Puerto
Rico and had all sorts of impacts on our own species,
but it basically destroyed the island that they lived on,
the mechacs lived on, and what that allowed the researchers
to do was study how social networks respond to disasters.
(45:24):
This kind of study was also done in mice, how
they respond to catastrophic events, how social networks respond to
catastrophic events. I think that the more information we get
that on that from non humans, the more we might
be able to understand ways that we might expect social
(45:47):
networks to respond to natural disasters in our own species.
One thing that I think studies and animal behavior allow
us to do is this, If really your primary interest,
and it's perfectly reasonable, would be social networks and non humans,
and you're not all that interested in social networks and
(46:09):
non humans, here's a reason you might want to rethink that.
If you think about this at the species level, we
have a species count of one if we only focus
on humans. But if these social networks are as complex
as they appear to be in non humans, that means
(46:31):
that we have this treasure chest of information about how
social networks work. How does a what does it mean
to be a hub in a social network? How much
does it matter what your friends do versus what your
friends of friends do. It turns out friends of friends
really matter and not in non human social networks. How
(46:53):
do these things work at a most general level. We're
if we only think about humans, our sample sizes one species,
But if we think about it in dolphins and humpback
whales and manta rays and honeybees and chimpanzees and so
many other species, then all of a sudden, maybe we
can pick up some patterns about social networks that we
(47:15):
wouldn't have picked up otherwise. And so I think that's
potentially a very powerful implication of studying this in non humans.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, absolutely fascinating. I have one last question that relates
to an earlier book that you wrote. There was two
thousand and nine Mister Jefferson and the Giant Moose, Natural
History in Early America. I was not familiar with the
history referenced in the title. As if nothing else, is
just a teaser for listeners who might be interested, could
(47:46):
you just briefly tell us why Thomas Jefferson was obsessed
with a giant moose?
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Sure? What had happened was the world's leading naturalists in France,
a guy by the name of Count Ufond written this
giant encyclopedia of natural history, and one of the things
that he did in the encyclopedia was promote this idea
called the degeneration hypothesis. And what this natural historian said
(48:15):
was that all life in the New World, particularly in America,
was degenerate compared to life other places, that all the
animals in the United States or even before that, the
colonies were weak, feeble, and diminished compared to species in
(48:36):
other places in the world. And Jefferson became obsessed in
demonstrating to Count Bufond why he was wrong. In fact,
the longest chapter in the book, the only book that
Jefferson ever wrote, the Notes on the State of Virginia,
is all about proving how wrong this degeneracy hypothesis is.
(48:57):
And one of the key pieces of information that he
wanted Buffon to see was our moose, which was you know,
it's massive, right, So Jefferson wanted to send Buffon a
giant moose to show him how wrong he was about
this theory of American degeneracy. And so he spent an
(49:17):
extraordinary amount of time and effort getting this moose and
then shipping it over to Bufon. And so that's where
the moose and the title comes from.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Fascinating. I'm gonna have to put this on on my
to read list. I was instantly fascinated.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Oh thank you, Yeah, I mean it was a tremendously
fun project.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Well, Lee, thanks again for coming on the show. The
new book, The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks and the
Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies is out this week, so
encourage all of our listeners to go check that out.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it
very much.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Thanks once more to Lee Alan Dugatkin for taking time
out of his day to chat with me about the
new book. That new book, again is The Well Connected Animal,
Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. It
is out this Thursday, so go grab yourself a copy.
Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing
(50:14):
this episode. And if you would like to get in
touch with Joe or myself, if you have suggestions for
future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, If you
have interview suggestions you'd like us to consider, write in
we would love to hear from. You can email us
at contact a's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app
Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
A PO
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. Today we have another vault episode for you.
This is going to be The Well Connected Animal with
Lee Alan Dugatkin. This is an interview episode that originally
published five fourteen, twenty twenty four. You'll learn all about
the complex social networks of vampire bats, dolphins, bees, and more.
Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today I have an interview episode for you.
I recently spoke with Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of
evolution and behavior at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
He is the author of the new book The Well
Connected Animal, Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.
(01:04):
This book comes out this Thursday, so wherever you get
your books, in whatever formats, you can probably go ahead
and pre order it. If not, grab it on Thursday.
It's a delightful read, and this was a delightful chat.
I really enjoyed talking with Lee. Let's go ahead and
jump right into the interview. Hi, Lee, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
So you're an evolutionary biologist, a historian of science, and
an animal behaviorist. How do these classifications triangulate on your
work and how did you get involved in your field?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yeah, so I got involved in a sort of securitous way.
I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Even
when I was in college. I happened upon the study
of animal behavior and evolution, and a friend of mine
mentioned a book he was reading, and before I knew it,
(02:00):
I was in graduate school studying evolution and behavior and
non humans because I just fell in love with the
topic and I thought it was sort of the ultimate
kinds of questions one could ask about life on the planet.
And so early on, a lot of my work was
experimental work with animals. I looked at the evolution of
(02:20):
cooperation and the evolution of aggression and so on for
many many years in my laboratory. And then about fifteen
years ago or so, after I had been doing this
for a couple of decades, I started getting much more
interested in the history of the subjects that I was
(02:40):
working on. So it turns out that all of the
people early on who were studying the evolution of cooperation
were really fascinating characters in and of themselves, how they
came about it, the environment and the kind of social
atmosphere in which they developed their ideas. And I began
because I'm much more interested in that aspect of the work.
(03:03):
And so all these areas dovetail in the sense that
I still do work on studying evolution and animal behavior,
but I also have added this component of it's worth
stopping for a minute and realizing that, you know, in
the late eighteen hundreds or something like that, here's how
(03:24):
these ideas came about. Here are the people who did it,
and here's the kind of social environment in which it happened.
And I think it makes the study of science itself
much richer to do it that way.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
The new book is The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks
and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. Could you walk
us through what a social network is and say, sociology
and anthropology and how and when the concept enters into
contemplation of non human animals.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Sure, And you know, I should say that there are
many many different definitions of social network, uh, depending on
exactly what discipline you're interested in and how mathematical you
want to get for me, and I think from I
think this is a reasonable general definition. Is a social
network is just a group of individuals through which information travels,
(04:18):
and it may travel directly and it may travel indirectly.
And it's also a group of individuals who somehow or
another affect one another in a real way. And again
that could happen either directly by your interaction with Steve,
or it could happen indirectly because you interact with Steve,
(04:40):
and Steve interacts with Nancy, and so Nancy is affected
by what you have done to Steve. And so generally
it's this information flow and effect on others in your network.
That's that for me, is the key to social network.
(05:01):
You know, humans are in all sorts of social networks,
Facebook and that sort of thing. But we're also embedded
in them in almost everything we do in life. Our
families or one kind of social network, the people we
work with or another, our friends or another, and so on,
and they all overlap. Now in terms of the history
(05:24):
of the subject, I mean, anthropologists and particularly sociologists have
been interested in this in humans for quite some time.
It was you know, in the nineteen forties and nineteen
fifties where people first began to get serious about trying
to understand the details of what we now would refer
(05:49):
to as social networks, how they work in humans. And
that involved a lot of mathematics terms of understanding what
it means if I interact with you and you interact
with somebody else, and that somebody else is affected by me,
and who is who are the key individuals in the
(06:12):
social network, the ones that have the most impact, and
are there cliques where certain individuals tend to interact with
each other more? And that really began to flourish, I
would say in the nineteen forties and fifties in anthropology
and sociology what we now refer to as as social
(06:33):
network I think that language became much more common in
the late nineteen hundreds and into the early two thousands.
Now when it comes to studying social networks and non humans,
we can trace it back quite far in the sense
(06:55):
that even in Darwindnesday and a little bit late so
the late eighteen hundreds, people were beginning to think that
the same kind of social tools that can be used
to study human behavior can be used to study animal behavior,
and so there are people who were basically arguing that
(07:18):
animal societies were structured very much like human societies. And
even though the word social network wasn't around, the idea
that we could study non humans like we study humans
was there. It really began to flourish more again around
the same time as early work in humans did. That is,
(07:40):
in this case, maybe the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
when primatologists, people who study monkeys and apes, began to
think in terms of social networks. They began to realize
that information was flowing through these non humans groups, again
(08:00):
mostly primates, in a way that was similar to the
way it flows through human groups. And it really mattered
in a group of chimpanzees, if one chimpanzee groomed the
other and got bugs and parasites off it back, it
really mattered who they groomed and who that individual groomed,
(08:21):
and how that kind of grooming social network developed. So
it first started with non human primates, which kind of
makes sense because there are closest evolutionary relatives, and then
it began to branch out in the nineteen eighties and
nineteen nineties when people began to study it in all
(08:41):
sorts of organisms. In fact, the two classic studies early
on were done in dolphins and in birds. So it's
been around in a serious way in the animal behavior
literature for you know, on the order of twenty to
thirty years.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Now, okay, the roots go back a bit deeper, but
it's really taken off in recent decades.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Absolutely, absolutely, In fact, right now, the study of social
networks and non humans is probably is one of the
most active areas in the entire field. I mean, anytime
you open up a journal on behavior and non humans,
you're likely to find an article about social networks. And
those networks are important in almost every context for non humans.
(09:27):
There are networks about feeding. There a mating networks, there
are traveling networks, there are cooperation networks, there are power networks.
Everywhere you look. Now that we've started to actually explore
it in depth, we're finding it. And this is sort
of what happens in animal behavior a lot. We tend
to think of things initially as strictly human, and then
(09:49):
when we begin to probe deeper, we see similar sorts
of things in non humans, and once we begin to look,
we begin to see it everywhere.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
And to be clear, like with humans, we're talking about
multiple social networks being in place for a given individual
or a given group. But the same is true of
these various animal examples as well. Right, We're not talking
about just like the social network of the macaque. We're
talking about like the multiple interconnected social networks.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Absolutely. So it might be that you're studying networks in
the sense of who's going around feeding with who, and
who's sharing food with who, But in that same species,
you might be looking at who's being aggressive towards who,
and who's traveling together, and who's being nice to who,
(10:38):
and all of those are overlapping networks in the same
sense as in humans.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Now, is there still any kind of like pushback from
I guess human exceptionalists that argue that animals can't non
human animals can't or don't demonstrate this kind of complexity.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Well, not within I would say the scientific community really
isn't much of that pushback anymore. Initially there was when
people first began studying social networks and non humans. Many
people in who were animal behaviorists were leery that the
notion was that animals are complex and their societies are complex,
(11:18):
but they're but they're not social network complex that that was.
You know, even in the early two thousands, there there
were still some of that. I interviewed a bunch of
people for this book, and I had stories of people
telling me that in the early two thousands, when they
would put in grant applications to study social networks and
(11:42):
non humans, they would get this kind of pushback that was,
you know, it can't be this complex. You're you're making
it more complex than it needs to be, and we're
not ready to kind of give you money to do this.
But the more that people were able to do it
on their own, the more that it became part and
parcel of what people were looking for, the less less
(12:04):
the pushback. I mean, you're going to get pushback from
outside the scientific community, from people who who just want
to live in a world of human exceptionalism. That tends
to fall apart eventually. I mean, you know, we used
to think that was true about tool use in in
in in animals, that you know, only humans could use tools.
(12:27):
Then we find that animals can use tools only humans
have culture. Well, no, it turns out animals have culture,
only humans have social networks. No, in fact, non humans
have social networks. So the pushback is nowadays not as
bad as it used to be.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I like that you mentioned the tool use. You know
this This is one of those areas where when we
think of tool use use in animals, a lot of
people instantly think of examples involving say like chimpanzees, or
or or or or certain you know birds come to mind.
And especially when we think of culturally trans submitted tool use,
we may think of the chimpanzee example, But you discuss
(13:03):
examples involving dolphins and whales, can you describe the tools
they seem to be using.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Sure? So there's this wonderful study on bottomnosed dolphins. It's
been going on in Australia in a place called Shark
Bay for the last thirty or forty years, and so
they know literally thousands of dolphins that are swimming around
in Shark Bay individually, and we've learned a tremendous amount
(13:32):
about sort of culture, how complex they are socially. But
it wasn't until the last couple of decades that this
idea that tool use in dolphins was going on. And
in dolphins the tool is actually another living organism. So
(13:53):
basically what they do is they put a sponge on
the end of their rostrum, their their face, where their
mouth is. They put this sponge over that when they're
looking for food. And the reason that they do that
is that oftentimes they're probing the bottom of the bay
(14:16):
that's very rocky and gravelly, and it hurts to pound
down on there, and what they're doing is they're trying
to find fish that are hiding under the gravel and sand.
So if you stick this soft sponge on top of
your mouth, then probing down there allows you much more
flexibility and a lot less pain. And it turns out
(14:40):
that dolphins are very particular about the sponges that they use.
Once they find one that works, they keep it for
a long time. So they'll go around probing on the
bottom for food, and if they find a fish that's hidden,
they drop the sponge and they go and they catch
that fish. Then they come back and they look for
(15:00):
the sponge they had before, because if it worked once,
it's likely to work again. They pick it up, they
put it back well, they put it back onto their face,
and then they go looking for more things at sort
of hiding in the bottom of the sand. And they
learn this, they learn how to sponge from their mothers.
(15:25):
So if you watch calves, dolphin calves, they're basically learning
the technique of how to find a good sponge, put
it on, and hunt with it. And so the actual
learning is through mother child interaction. It's not genetic, but
it's rather they learn from their parents. Now, in terms
(15:49):
of the networking, it's actually complex. So basically when they
have these sponges on, they are hunting alone, and so
you wouldn't think that the sponging had anything to do
with social networks, but in fact it does. And the
reason that it does is dolphins often carry these sponges
(16:13):
around when they're not hunting because, as I say, if
they find a good sponge, they like it. Dolphins know
who else are spongers. Not everyone's a sponger, only a
small subset of them actually use these tools. And so
what the researchers did was they started trying to understand
whether or not individuals who did use these sponge tools
(16:38):
hung out with each other when they actually weren't going
around looking for food, and it turns out they were.
There are these clicks of dolphins that use the sponge
tools that hang out with each other when they're not
actually down on the bottom looking for food. And the
reason we think they do this is if you hang
(16:59):
out with others spongers, you're likely to get information about
where the good places to sponge are, and so you
network with them so that you can take these sponges
and use them in the best possible locations. And the
sponges are really great tools. The ganet man who ran
(17:22):
this study, she and her colleagues actually thought, you know,
we should see if sponging really works. It kind of
looks like it works when you watch the dolphins. They
put sponges on their hands and they went around under
the water using the sponges on their hands the way
dolphins used them on their snouts. And it turns out
(17:44):
you really do kick up a lot of prey items
things to eat when you use these sponges. And so
networking allowed us to kind of understand this cultural tool
use in a much more general way, not just this
dolphin does it or that dolphin does it, but that
they hang around together if they do it, and they
(18:06):
get all sorts of information from each other when they
do this.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah, No, it's a wonderful long term study of an
incredibly complex organism. I mean dolphins. Everybody loves dolphins. Their
sociality is over the top in terms of the sorts
of things we typically see in nature.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Now, in the book, you divide the chapters up by
specific networks and needs. You know you alluded to this earlier,
you know, food reproduction, power, safety, travel, communication, health, and culture.
What areas were you either most surprised about or do
you think will be most surprising to readers in these chapters?
You know, because I feel like for a lot of
(18:57):
general readers, you know, we can easily think of non
human animals engaging in some level of food reproduction or
power dynamics. You know, we've seen enough documentaries or engage
with enough animal content. But communication and health don't always
instantly come to mind, I imagine, not with like the
number of species that are covered in the book.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Sure, yeah, so communication is a great one in terms
of the kinds of things that might surprise readers. There
is wonderful work that's been done on communication in chimpanzees,
for example. So in chimpanzees, when they're communicating with each other,
(19:42):
they can communicate in all sorts of different ways, and
some of those ways are much more visual, and some
of them are much more physical and tactile that involve touching.
And it turns out that again, social netw work thinking
allows us to probe really deep into these communication networks
(20:07):
that exist in chimpanzees. And so, for example, there's this
population of chimpanzees called the Suns population that's been studied
for a very long time, and it turns out that
when you look at the kind of gestural communication that
goes on in these chimpanzees, you see something very different
(20:32):
when individuals are interacting with friends in their social networks
rather than with others who they don't know quite as well.
So if you look at communication between chimpanzees who know
each other well and who have done things like cooperative
(20:52):
hunting together, they tend to use visual communication. And this
kind of visual communication. Other people have found that this
kind of really lowers their heart rates and reduces the
amount of stress that the chimpanzee itself feels. The individual
(21:15):
who's the recipient of the communication calms down, they have
a lower heart rate. This is when communication goes on
between friends, But when communication is going on between individuals
who don't know each other as well, maybe haven't interacted
as much in the past. Then you tend to see
a different kind of communication. You tend to see it
(21:36):
being very physical and tactile, with them touching each other.
And the researchers who did this work, Anna and Sam Roberts,
have argued that visual communication works perfectly well between friends
because you know each other and there's a large level
of trust that's already in place. But when you don't
know each other very well, visual communication doesn't work well
(22:00):
because it's not as clear, it's not as as salient
as auditory and tactile communication, where you're really up front,
right in the face of the individual touching them, then
they can really understand what it is that you're trying
to communicate. And that's important because chimpanzee networks break up
(22:22):
and they come back together. And so when you're interacting
with individuals that you don't know very well, you really
want to make sure that your communication is clear. And
these kind of auditory and physical communication gestures are much
better at that. And so you see it among individuals
who don't know each other very well.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Fascinating.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
But here's the thing, you know, So chimpanzees are our
closest living relatives and they have very large brains, right,
But you can go and find communication networks and honeybees,
and a former student of mine has been studying that
in a research field station outside of London where they
(23:05):
have these experimental honeybee hives, and so in honeybees, the
primary way that they communicate is actually by something known
as the waggle dance. So here the bees are trying
to communicate to one another where a new food source is.
And the way that they typically do this is if
(23:26):
you find a new food source and you go back
to the honeybee hive, you do this particular kind of
dance known as the waggle dance, and the waggle dance
basically involves moving very very quickly and shaking your abdomen
as you're moving through the hive. And we know from
prior work that this gives various types of information to
(23:51):
others in the hive about where the food source is.
For example, how long you dance gives information about how
far away the hive is, and there's a really nice translation.
Every tenth of a second of dancing translates into the
food being this many feet away from the hive. They
also dance at a certain angle, and the angle they
(24:13):
dance it, believe it or not, is the angle between
the sun, the hive and where the food is. So
they're communicating all of this information through the dance. Now,
in terms of networking, it turns out that there are
other ways to communicate information about new food sources. They
(24:34):
can communicate this information when they transfer food from themselves
to another individual in the hive. They can also communicate
information about the food when they basically take their antennas
and connect to the antennas of another bee in the hive.
This also gives them information. So what has been done
(24:58):
in terms of the networking is people have asked, well,
they can get this information in all these different ways,
how do they do it? When do they decide if
they're going to transfer the information by dancing or moving
food from one mouth to another or touching antenna. So
(25:18):
what researchers did was they set up this experiment where
they had these hives that were placed out in a
field and they knew where the hives were, and they
controlled how much food was going into the hives. And
what they found was and so I should say they
marked all of their bees thousands of them, so they
knew who these bees were. And it turns out when
(25:41):
you look at communication networks and the bees, you find
this wonderfully complex system in place. If the sun is
out there, they used dancing to communicate because they can
transfer information about food using the angle of the sun
compared to the hive and the food source. But in
(26:04):
London there are many many days when it's not sunny,
and when it's not sunny, the communication network focuses on
the transfer of food or the touching of antenna. So
they have these kind of multiple communication networks, and if
one of them is down because the sun isn't out,
(26:24):
then they move to a second kind of communication network.
And so what this tells us is that you know,
you can have a brain the size of a honeybee
or the brain the size of a chimpanzee, and you
can still get complex communication networks in non humans. You
(26:44):
were also asking about disease. I think for me this
was one of the more surprising components of social networks
and animals, the way that they relate to disease transmission. Here,
what's kind of cool is that in almost all of
the other behaviors that we're talking about feeding and communication
(27:08):
and cooperation. Really it's individuals, animals and the network that
are the key. But when you cut when it comes
to disease, what's basically going on is the disease is
hitchhiking on the social networks that the animals have in place.
So the animals don't want to transfer disease from one
(27:31):
individual to another, but the social networks are in place
in terms of for example, aggression and power struggles. What
that means is diseases can use those networks to move
from one individual to another. And I think my favorite
example of this is this bizarre disease that has been
(27:53):
studied in Tasmanian devils. And if you can't picture a
Tasmanian devil in your head, think back to the Bugs
Bunny cartoons, because there was this wonderful cariacture of a
Tasmanian devil in there. And in Tasmanian devils they have
this thing called facial tumor disease, and this is one
(28:17):
of the very rare instances that we know of in
which cancer is transmitted from one individual to another. The
sort of worst case scenario when we think about human
cancers would be if we could actually transmit cancer from
one individual to another. It doesn't happen, but in certain
(28:38):
species like Tasmanian devils, it does. And what happens is
if they are infected with this cancer and they bite
somebody really hard, right, they can transmit that cancer to
the other individual. So here's where social networks come into play.
(29:00):
Tasmanian devils fight, and they fight a lot, particularly during
mating season. Males will fight intensely to gain access to mates.
Sometimes when they fight, if you have facial tumor disease
and you bite somebody else, you can transfer that disease
to that individual. Again, the tumor is actually hitchhiking on
(29:25):
the power social network structure that's in place in the
Tasmanian devils. And so it's not surprising, for example, that
males transmit this disease much more often to one another
than females. And that's because males fight a lot during
mating season, and it's only through bites that this disease
(29:48):
can be transmitted. It's more complex, and what we're discovering
are strange things like even though males are more likely
to transmit the disease, females also get facial tumor disease,
and they tend to get it from males who are
defending them. But in the context of courtships, sometimes it
(30:11):
gets a little too rough and you get some biting
and females can get infected with this disease. Now what's
weird is if you look at female Tasmanian devils, usually
it's individuals who are in the weakest health state that
are most susceptible to getting disease. But in the Tasmanian devils,
(30:34):
it's the healthiest females who end up getting this cancerous
disease by being bitten by males. Why well, if you
do a social network analysis, what you find is the
healthiest females are the ones that the males prefer as mates.
That means they're the ones that are most likely to
(30:56):
get bitten, even unintentionally by males during courtship, and so
they the healthiest ones end up being most likely to
get the cancer, which is something that we can possibly
have really understood without a social network analysis.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, I was going to ask about
the Tasmanian devil example. That one definitely stood out to
me when I was reading another one was the vampire bats.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Oh, yes, vampire bats are wonderful. They're a textbook example
of social behavior and in this case, cooperation. So let
me just tell you a little bit about what goes
(31:43):
on in the world of vampires. So, vampire bats do,
in fact suck blood, right, but they don't suck human blood.
They suck the blood of cows and other kind of
domesticated species. And it turns out that if you're a
vampire bat, or if you're just a bat in general,
it's a really expensive way of living for a mammal.
(32:07):
So bats are mammals, and most mammals don't fly, but
if you fly, it's energetically extremely expensive. And what people
have found is if a vampire bat doesn't get a
blood meal about every two days, it can starve to death. Now,
what the vampire bats do is they have this social
(32:31):
network in place where they transfer blood from one back
to the other. So if you take a camera and
you go inside a vampire bat roost, what you will
find sometimes is that one bat will come up to
another bat and it'll start licking its face in a
(32:51):
very kind of stereotypical manner. What that bat is doing
is it's trying to get the other bat to regurgitate
some of the blood that it has in its gut
so that the solicitor, the one that's licking the face,
can actually survive long enough to go out and get
its own blood meal. So it's hungry, it's starving. It
goes up to a bat that has a really distended
(33:14):
big gut, which means it has lots of blood. It
licks its face trying to get that bat to regurgitate
some of the blood to it. They will do that
for one another, but only when they know that it's
a trustworthy partner. So if one bat goes up to
another and tries to get blood regurgitated, the only way
(33:36):
it'll work is if in the past that blood that
bat who's hungry who needs the blood, has helped and
given blood to the bat that it's now asking for
blood from. So they're basically keeping track of who gave
them blood in the past when they were hungry, and
if that bat now comes up and tries to get
(33:56):
some blood you to regurgitate some blood, then you're much
more likely to do it. So that's the basic structure
that's in place in these vampire bat roots. Networking comes
into place, because it turns out again that it really
matters not just sort of who gave you blood when
(34:17):
you were hungry, but also who you go out with
and look for blood when there's a nice night out
there to go out and fly and look for an
unsuspecting cow. So what researchers have done is they have
placed little what are known as pit tags on these bats.
(34:42):
And so basically all a pittag is is this little
tiny one ounce less than one ounce device if they
put on a bat, and it allows them to track
every bat in the roost when the bat goes out
and looks for food. And the way it works is
they have all of these receivers that have been placed
out in the fields with the cows, and so you
(35:03):
can know where the bats are because the little things
they have on their bat are transmit are transmitting information
to these receivers that are in the field, so you
know everything about what the bats are doing. What's more,
these little pit tags that the bats have on their
back talk to each other. That is, if two vampire
(35:25):
bats come close enough to one another, these little pit
tags light up and you know that vampire bat one
and vampire bat two are on the back of a
cow together sucking blood. Now, these things are not easy
to set up, but after you have this system in place,
you can test all sorts of incredible things, like is
(35:48):
it the case that this kind of network of blood
sharing that goes on inside the roost translates into who's
hanging out with who when they're actually going out and
looking for blood. That's a really hard thing to do
because you never know when bats are going to leave
their roost, and they fly and they're really hard to follow.
But when you have these tags and these transmitters and
(36:11):
responders in the field, you can do this and lo
and behold. Basically, the network of blood sharing that goes
on inside the roost is a very good predictor of
who will be found on the back of the same
cow sucking blood when they go out. They go out,
The bats go out and start flying independently, but they
(36:32):
find their favorite partners one way or another, and they
end up tending to be found on the back of
some unsuspecting cow in the field. And we can only
know how complex all this is when we realize that
it's all embedded in these social networks that the bats
(36:53):
have built around blood sharing.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Wow, that's incredible. And the technology that goes into these studies.
I was just ord by numerous examples in the book.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, I mean, so the study of social networks and
animals has just absolutely exploded in part because of these
technological advances. So you have these talking sensors like I
just mentioned to you, where when the animals come close enough,
they both sensors light up and you know they're together
wherever they are. That's one thing. Then basically in other studies,
(37:28):
what they do, what individuals do, is they attach the
equivalent of kind of a GPS device to the back
of an animal and they can track it then over
really long distances. And my favorite example here is white
stork behavior. So white storks are these beautiful animals, right,
(37:51):
but they migrate thousands of miles in the winter, and
we know almost nothing about the tells of their migration
because it's really hard to follow birds that are flying
a thousand feet above the ground and traveling thousands of miles.
But if you put GPS transponders on their back, then
(38:13):
you have the possibility of doing this. So people who
have worked with these white storks, Andrea Flack is a
researcher at the Max Plank Institute. So she put all
of she put these giant GPS trackers on the backs
of these white storks and she basically would follow them
(38:35):
as they were making them migration. As I'm making them migration,
they kind of come down every night to rest, and
she would kind of try and track them for hundreds
of miles if she could on her own. And so
she was trying to follow them, but at the same time,
she could know what the birds were doing when they
were a thousand feet above the ground because the GPS
(38:59):
devices were so sensitive that she could know where a
bird was in the flock as they were flying these
thousands of miles. And it turns out that what that
allowed her to do was built a social network of
the flock as it was flying these south thousands of miles.
(39:20):
And what she found was that in this network, this
travel network, there were certain white storks that were the leaders.
They were the ones that were determining when the flock
would move this way or that way. So if you
look at a bird of flocks, a flock of birds
like geese, you can tell there are certain leaders that
(39:43):
are the ones that are determining the movement of the flock.
But you can't do that with white storks when they're
that far above the ground unless you have these GPS devices.
So there are these leaders and followers in the white
stalk travel networks, and it it really matters. The leaders
are very very good at finding up drafts. So when
(40:06):
you're flying as a bird, what you want is to
expend as little energy as you can, and there are
these updrafts, these wins that come that allow you to
fly at very low energy levels. The leaders are tremendously
good at finding these, and in fact, what they were
able to do, what the researchers were able to do,
(40:27):
was demonstrate not just that there were leaders and followers
in these flocks, but that the leaders were actually able
to migrate further than the followers because they were so
good at finding these updrafts. So it really mattered who
was a leader and a follower in these networks. And
this kind of study would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
(40:52):
I mean, without the technology, you simply cannot do this
sort of thing. You can move from flying a thousand
meters above the ground to swimming many many feet below
the water and find the same thing and there's this
wonderful study done on mant rays in the South Pacific
(41:15):
where they've done exactly this. They they've tagged them so
they can study what the manta rays are doing. And
in addition to that, they fly these drones over groups
of manta rays that are swimming close to the water surface.
The drones then videotape the interactions between the manta rays.
(41:38):
And the mantrays have these sort of very unique color
and patterns that allow the researchers to know who's who,
so you can study them by the drones watching them
from above, and the little pit tags and various other
GPS like devices under the water, they'll let you know
(41:59):
where they are all the time, which means you can
build social networks. You can look at in the case
of the manta rays, they look at who's a key
hub in a social network. So a key hub is
an individual through which a lot of information travels. So
if you think about Facebook, for example, key hubs are
(42:23):
like public figures where if you want to sort of
track the way that information flows, these individuals really matter. Well,
it turns out in manta rays there are key hubs
as well, individuals through which information travels. In this case,
it turns out that juvenile manta rays are the hubs
in social networks associated with feeding. They're the ones that
(42:48):
are the key to understanding how individuals swim around looking
for food underwater. Again, without the technology, these are just
pipe dreams. But now they're are going on. All these
kind of studies are going on all the time in
non humans.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
It's also fascinating, and again we've only been able to
really touch on some of the examples from the book.
The book is loaded with excellent examples and fascinating timbits
about the methodology and technology that goes into studying them.
(43:26):
In the in the afterward of the book, you write
that quote, it's time to scratch off another item from
the what makes humans Unique? List? So I thought I
was just wondering, you know, obviously the book is primarily
about what we're learning about these non human animals and
their social networks. But do you think to any degree
you were able to like turn some of these revelations
around to better understand, like what human social networks are.
(43:50):
I have only just to remind us that we're not special.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
Yeah, So I think at the most general level, it
does remind us that we're not special and yet another way,
so we talked about tools and culture were things that
we used to think we were unique, and we're not.
We're not unique in social networks. But in terms of
like perhaps the lessons that we could learn by studying
social networks and non humans, I think there are some.
(44:16):
You know, you always have to be careful when you
do this sort of thing, but let me give you
just one example that I think helps in terms of
what we might learn. So there's this great study that
was done on Reese's macaque monkeys and their social networks
on this little island in Puerto Rico. And I won't
(44:39):
get into the details of the social network study per se,
but basically the thing about this study was that they
had been studying these macaques on the island for a
very long time. They knew a lot about their social networks.
Then Hurricane Maria came through and absolutely devastated the island
(45:00):
where these macacus lived. And obviously it also decimated Puerto
Rico and had all sorts of impacts on our own species,
but it basically destroyed the island that they lived on,
the mechacs lived on, and what that allowed the researchers
to do was study how social networks respond to disasters.
(45:24):
This kind of study was also done in mice, how
they respond to catastrophic events, how social networks respond to
catastrophic events. I think that the more information we get
that on that from non humans, the more we might
be able to understand ways that we might expect social
(45:47):
networks to respond to natural disasters in our own species.
One thing that I think studies and animal behavior allow
us to do is this, If really your primary interest,
and it's perfectly reasonable, would be social networks and non humans,
and you're not all that interested in social networks and
(46:09):
non humans, here's a reason you might want to rethink that.
If you think about this at the species level, we
have a species count of one if we only focus
on humans. But if these social networks are as complex
as they appear to be in non humans, that means
(46:31):
that we have this treasure chest of information about how
social networks work. How does a what does it mean
to be a hub in a social network? How much
does it matter what your friends do versus what your
friends of friends do. It turns out friends of friends
really matter and not in non human social networks. How
(46:53):
do these things work at a most general level. We're
if we only think about humans, our sample sizes one species,
But if we think about it in dolphins and humpback
whales and manta rays and honeybees and chimpanzees and so
many other species, then all of a sudden, maybe we
can pick up some patterns about social networks that we
(47:15):
wouldn't have picked up otherwise. And so I think that's
potentially a very powerful implication of studying this in non humans.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, absolutely fascinating. I have one last question that relates
to an earlier book that you wrote. There was two
thousand and nine Mister Jefferson and the Giant Moose, Natural
History in Early America. I was not familiar with the
history referenced in the title. As if nothing else, is
just a teaser for listeners who might be interested, could
(47:46):
you just briefly tell us why Thomas Jefferson was obsessed
with a giant moose?
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Sure? What had happened was the world's leading naturalists in France,
a guy by the name of Count Ufond written this
giant encyclopedia of natural history, and one of the things
that he did in the encyclopedia was promote this idea
called the degeneration hypothesis. And what this natural historian said
(48:15):
was that all life in the New World, particularly in America,
was degenerate compared to life other places, that all the
animals in the United States or even before that, the
colonies were weak, feeble, and diminished compared to species in
(48:36):
other places in the world. And Jefferson became obsessed in
demonstrating to Count Bufond why he was wrong. In fact,
the longest chapter in the book, the only book that
Jefferson ever wrote, the Notes on the State of Virginia,
is all about proving how wrong this degeneracy hypothesis is.
(48:57):
And one of the key pieces of information that he
wanted Buffon to see was our moose, which was you know,
it's massive, right, So Jefferson wanted to send Buffon a
giant moose to show him how wrong he was about
this theory of American degeneracy. And so he spent an
(49:17):
extraordinary amount of time and effort getting this moose and
then shipping it over to Bufon. And so that's where
the moose and the title comes from.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Fascinating. I'm gonna have to put this on on my
to read list. I was instantly fascinated.
Speaker 3 (49:30):
Oh thank you, Yeah, I mean it was a tremendously
fun project.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Well, Lee, thanks again for coming on the show. The
new book, The Well Connected Animals, Social Networks and the
Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies is out this week, so
encourage all of our listeners to go check that out.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it
very much.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
Thanks once more to Lee Alan Dugatkin for taking time
out of his day to chat with me about the
new book. That new book, again is The Well Connected Animal,
Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies. It
is out this Thursday, so go grab yourself a copy.
Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing
(50:14):
this episode. And if you would like to get in
touch with Joe or myself, if you have suggestions for
future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, If you
have interview suggestions you'd like us to consider, write in
we would love to hear from. You can email us
at contact a's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app
Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
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