TITLE: Great Apes Joke Around, Suggesting Humor Is Older Than Humans
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/great-apes-joke-around-suggesting-humor-is-older-than-humans/
EXCERPTS: Over the past several years my colleagues and I have been studying teasing in humans and great apes to figure out why—and when—this behavior evolved. Teasing exists in a gray area between play and aggression. It can sometimes lead to bullying and ostracism. But it can also be loving and even endearing. For humans, playful teasing—which includes clowning, pranking and joking—provides a wonderful space to learn about social relationships. It can test those relationships by gently stretching the boundaries of social norms and seeing what one can get away with. And it can advertise the strength of those relationships to others (imagine watching a group of friends playfully insult one another). We think much the same is true for the other great apes. Although scholars have traditionally viewed humor as a uniquely human trait, our findings suggest that it has surprisingly deep roots.
Social cognition is difficult to study, particularly in animals as complicated as great apes. Researchers studying humans can use questionnaires to ask people what they think about others’ intentions or beliefs. But studies of nonhuman apes and human infants must measure subjects’ thinking without language—for example, by observing and coding natural interactions or by measuring the behaviors individuals produce when presented with sounds, images or puzzles.
We developed a coding system for teasing that builds on those used to study ape communication. Behavioral coding systems are the most common way to study interactions between animals or people when you are observing them from a distance. They consist of a set of codes (basically, labels) and a set of rules about how to apply those codes. Systematic application of the codes according to the rules turns messy real-world interactions into quantifiable variables that can be analyzed statistically. It also can be used to confirm that behaviors seen by one person are also seen by others, giving researchers a way to bolster the reliability of their observations. This approach helps to ensure that the phenomenon is not merely in the eye of the beholder.
In developing our coding system, we made sure to include things such as the identity of the teaser and target, the teaser’s actions, whether the teaser waited for a response from the target, whether there were any repetitions of behavior, and whether interactions were primarily one-sided or reciprocal. We also coded for elements of play, including facial expressions, gestures, relaxation, and evidence of mutual enjoyment (for instance, both parties willingly continuing an interaction).
Our final coding system identified five main characteristics of playful teasing: a provocative behavior, a mainly one-sided provocation, an element of surprise (such as the teaser approaching the target from behind), a look from the teaser toward the target’s face, and repetition or elaboration of the provocative behavior. Very few of the examples we observed had all five of these traits, but 129 examples had at least three of the five.
The four kinds of great apes we studied live in very different social groups and natural environments in the wild. Orangutans are largely solitary and spend most of their time up in the trees. Gorillas live on the ground in social groups made up of one adult male and multiple adult females and young. Chimpanzees and bonobos spend time both in the trees and on the ground, and they live in big communities composed of multiple males and multiple females. But whereas chimpanzees have male-dominated societies with relatively high levels of aggression between adults, bonobos live in mostly matriarchal societies and tend to respond to conflict not with fighting but with sex.
Despite these profound differences in their ways of life, all four species playfully teased one another in largely similar ways. They poked, hit, pushed, pulled and tickled one another. There was a lot of swinging and waving of arms, legs and objects. A teaser might grab another’s hand or foot to stop their activity. Sometimes apes hid under objects when teasing, popping a hand out to pull someone’s hair or somersaulting into another individual while inside a burlap sack.
The presence of playful teasing in all four of our great ape cousins suggests that it benefits them in important ways. We can look to this behavior in humans to see how it might be advantageous. Playful teasing provides a rich opportunity to learn about others’ minds. The teaser has to predict the target’s response and adjust their behavior based on how the target is likely to respond. Things that might be received well by a close friend would not be by a stranger. You can call your best friend a slut, a punk or a weenie, and they might playfully insult you back, but you are unlikely to get the same response from your boss or a tax auditor. Even within close friendships, someone’s response might vary from day to day or from hour to hour depending on the person’s mood and your previous interactions. Learning to predict how others will respond to you is a critical skill for highly social animals like humans and other apes. Who will have your back if you get into a fight? Who will give you the benefit of the doubt if your actions or intentions are ambiguous? Playful teasing provides a relatively low-risk environment in which to develop and refine your social prediction skills.
Being able to predict and understand the goals, intentions, knowledge and desires of others is the basis for human language and culture. Although nonhuman apes do not have language, they do share some of these foundational skills—and playful teasing provides a window onto them. Most animals play, but playful teasing may offer an opportunity to move from physical to mental play: from playing with bodies to playing with minds.
We’re only just beginning to understand teasing and how it relates to social cognition in creatures other than humans. Can apes predict whether someone will be surprised? My colleagues and I are using methods such as eye tracking to study what apes pay attention to when watching others interact. Do apes get excited when they anticipate a strong reaction in a social interaction? We’re using thermal imaging to measure changes in blood flow around the eyes and ears—a physiological sign of excitement—when we expect a social scene may be funny, scary or exciting to an ape. We’re still collecting and analyzing data for these projects, but a small pilot study using thermal imaging with bonobos suggests at least some apes get excited when they see another ape get tickled, for instance. By combining biological measures such as eye position and blood flow with behavioral measures such as an ape’s preference for different partners in a game, we can develop a more complete picture of how attention, memory, mood and prediction combine when apes are thinking about others.
Although playful teasing has been systematically studied only in humans and other apes, we suspect that other animals do it, too. If it provides a way to build, test and show off relationships, as well as an opportunity to practice predicting others’ behavior, then we might expect it to evolve in other highly social animals with big brains, few predators and long childhoods. Parrots, dolphins, elephants, whales and dogs are all good candidates. Our group is studying a few of these nonprimate species, but it will take many more observers to get a clear understanding of what playful teasing looks like across the animal kingdom. To get more people involved, we recently surveyed zookeepers in more than 100 zoos, and we are now collecting stories about animal teasing from folks around the world. If you have stories or recordings of animals playfully teasing you or other animals, we invite you to share them on our website: www.observinganimals.org/teasing.
Getting a big picture of playful teasing across the animal kingdom will inform how we study the origin and evolution of this behavior. Already observations of teasing in all the great ape species suggest the roots of human humor may go back 13 million years or more to the last common ancestor of Aisha the orangutan and the bored child in the checkout line. They may not get a Netflix comedy special, but teasing apes provide strong evidence the first joke is far older than the early human who extended a hand in the firelight and said, “Pull my finger.”
TITLE: More sentient than we imagine
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1272988-more-sentient-than-we-imagine
EXCERPTS: The news earlier this month about the orca (killer whale) named by marine scientists as Tahlequah carrying its dead calf off the coast of Washington State in the US stirred global attention as it did in 2018 when she carried another dead calf for 17 days across 1,000 miles.
That extraordinary act of grieving – carrying the substantial weight of her offspring, which likely caused significant physical strain – spoke volumes about the emotional depth of animals. Tahlequah’s poignant journey forces us to confront a fundamental question: Do animals grieve as we do?
Orcas are far from alone in displaying behaviours that suggest grief. Elephants, chimpanzees, giraffes, and baboons have all been observed mourning their dead, while certain bird species, like crows and magpies, appear to hold their own versions of memorials. These behaviours challenge our assumptions about the emotional lives of non-human creatures and call into question the age-old tendency to deny them experiences akin to human emotions.
Consider the documented cases of animals mourning their dead. In a National Geographic video posted on YouTube, a herd of elephants in northern Kenya stops to examine the skeletal remains of a matriarch named Victoria. The elephants use their trunks to touch and explore her bones, standing silently in a way that is strikingly unusual for creatures that typically spend 20 hours a day foraging to meet their nutritional needs. Such behaviour – breaking routine to acknowledge a loss – suggests more than mere curiosity.
Or take the haunting video from BBC Earth of a female tiger in India wailing for her missing mate, who had been poisoned by a farmer protecting his livestock. Her mournful calls, echoing through the forest, convey a sense of profound loss. While we may hesitate to call it grief with all its human connotations, the tiger’s distress is undeniable.
The question of sentience – the ability to experience feelings such as pain and pleasure – is central to understanding animals’ emotional lives. Philosopher Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics, who advised the UK government on animal welfare legislation, defines a sentient being as “a system with the capacity to have valenced experiences.”
The everyday experiences of pet owners provide abundant evidence of animal sentience. Dogs’ exuberant greetings after an absence or cats’ excited frisking when anticipating a treat reveal their capacity for joy. Conversely, pets exhibit signs of grief when they lose a companion, be it another animal or a human caregiver. Changes in appetite, vocalisations, and behaviour – such as plaintive barking or restless pacing – are common manifestations of their sorrow.
Sceptics might argue that attributing grief or sorrow to animals is a form of anthropomorphism, the projection of human characteristics onto non-human beings. Yet, as philosopher and ethicist Susana Monso explains in her book ‘Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death’, our reluctance to anthropomorphise can lead us to an equally flawed position: anthropectomy, or the mistaken denial of any human-like traits in animals. By ignoring the evidence of animals’ emotional capacities, we risk missing the profound connections we share with them.
TITLE: Exploring Consciousness in the Animal Kingdom
https://atmos.earth/overview-animal-consciousness-exploring-consciousness-in-the-animal-kingdom/
EXCERPTS: A study in Royal Society Publishing last year found that animal behavior researchers are now attributing consciousness and emotions to a wide range of nonhuman species, a massive shift from even a decade ago.
In April of last year, a group of scientists and philosophers came together to collaborate on a statement declaring scientific evidence for consciousness being widespread among other animals. Part of it states: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”
Although they make up 40% of living species, we rarely give insects a second thought. A trillion are estimated to be farmed every year, with quadrillions wiped out by pesticides. But even animals as small as these may demonstrate sentience, it turns out. Studies in recent years have suggested that some insects feel pain and joy, have rich and complex inner lives, and display intelligence. Why is it so hard to see ourselves reflected in their kaleidoscopic eyes?
TITLE: Do Insects Feel Pain?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/do-insects-feel-pain
EXCERPT: Most of us do not think much about their inner lives, and our laws do not usually consider their welfare. Insects are small, they don’t scream or bleed red, and many are considered pests; we tend to kill or mutilate them without pause. “The default view of the vast majority of the general public, as well as many of my colleagues, is that insects are largely reflex machines,” Lars Chittka, a behavioral biologist who researches bees at Queen Mary University of London, told me. If humans seriously considered the possibility that insects are sentient, he said, we would need a “completely different connection with the natural world.”
Several years ago, Tilda Gibbons, an early-career scientist with shaggy blond hair, came across an opening for a Ph.D. student in Chittka’s lab. As an undergraduate, she had studied chronic-pain pathways, using mice as a model for humans, but she had never worked with insects. When she typed four words into Google—“Do insects feel pain?”—the search engine suggested that the answer was no. Still, Gibbons was intrigued by the question, and she joined Chittka’s team in the fall of 2019. A few months later, the U.K. went into a pandemic lockdown.
When Queen Mary University closed its laboratories, Gibbons visited campus and picked up a cardboard box with about a hundred bees. She carried it onto the London Underground and back to her apartment in East London, where she planned to study how machinelike bees really were. The box droned noisily next to her bed; her cat examined it cautiously. “It kept me awake for the first few nights,” Gibbons told me. “Then I just got used to it.”
Gibbons set up a plastic arena that contained two color-coded bee feeders. One feeder was room temperature; the other was heated to a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, roughly the temperature of hot coffee. When she filled them both with the same sugar water—four parts sugar, six parts water—the bees reliably chose the cool one. When Gibbons reduced the sugar content in the cool feeder, however, the bees sought out the hot one.
At first, the bees found ways to drink the sugar water without coming into direct contact with the hot feeder. “They were really cheeky,” Gibbons said. But, when she redesigned the feeders, forcing the bees to make contact with the heated surface if they wanted the liquid, they continued to choose the sweeter liquid in the heated feeders.
The bees in Gibbons’s experiment had satisfied at least one of the criteria developed for the Sentience Act: an animal may be sentient if it responds to “motivational trade-offs.” The bees reacted to heat in a way that was more than automatic. They put up with the heat to get a better reward. Gibbons was impressed.
The other seven criteria consider neurobiology and behavior. If an animal seeks out painkillers, or can learn based on associations with painful stimuli, that can suggest sentience. So can nociceptors, nerve cells that sense harmful stimuli—especially if the nociceptors are integrated with other sensory systems in the brain. In 2022, Gibbons worked with … other colleagues to review research into six orders of insects, including juvenile and adult cockroaches, termites, bees, ants, butterflies, and crickets.
The literature showed insects to be far more sophisticated than one might expect of an automaton. Many have nociceptors that send signals to other parts of the insect brain, such as the central complex (associated with spatial navigation and locomotion) and the mushroom bodies (linked to learning, memory, and sensory integration). Cockroaches have a nervous-system pathway that leads up from the body to the brain and back again. In a 2019 study, researchers exposed cockroaches to a hot stimulus and a neutral stimulus; the neutral stimulus prompted a weaker signal from the body to the brain, and the hot stimulus led the roaches to try and escape. (Unsettlingly, cockroaches without heads responded to the heat but did not try to escape.) A recent genomic study of mantises, which are notorious for eating their mates during and after sex, found genes that code for nociceptive ion channels—proteins that respond to pain.
Gibbons and her colleagues ultimately found “strong evidence for pain” in adult flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites. Such insects did not appear to be at the bottom of a hierarchy of animals; they met six out of eight criteria developed for the Sentience Act, which was more than crustaceans. Other insects, like bees and butterflies, met three to four of the criteria, showing “substantial evidence” for pain. “We found no good evidence that any insects failed a criterion,” the researchers wrote.
Shelley Adamo, a professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University, in Canada, is worried enough about the experiences of insects that, when she experiments on them, she first administers anesthesia. “All the behavioral work demonstrates the richness of the behavior,” she told me. Still, she remains skeptical that insects, with their small brains, can be said to feel pain. “The ability to have subjective experiences is likely to require additional neuronal resources,” Adamo has written. Although the mushroom bodies, in insect brains, allow them to learn, Adamo doesn’t see an analogue for the amygdala, which is associated with emotional experiences in humans. Insect brains are “not going to have the same depth, and the same sort of cognitive components, and all of the things that make pain so horrific in humans,” she said. What would be the use of pain for a cricket?
Chittka has argued that a small brain doesn’t necessarily mean a lacking one. “No one would seriously suggest that a bigger computer is automatically a better computer,” he has written. Andrew Barron, a comparative neurobiologist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, have compared insect brains to human brains and concluded that some regions could facilitate a subjective experience. (They define subjectivity in a generous way—as a minimal level of bodily sensation or something resembling an awareness of the environment, which doesn’t necessarily come with higher-order thoughts.) Klein believes that insects probably experience rudimentary sensations like hunger and thirst, which drive them to seek out food and water. Pain could be a comparable sensory experience that helps an insect to avoid harm. But he acknowledged that humans may never know how much of the animal kingdom can be said to experience suffering.
[A]n entomologist at Indiana University at Indianapolis named Meghan Barrett considers how we ought to act toward insects given the concern that they might suffer. Last year, Barrett, slim and commanding, presented data at a London workshop on the treatment of farmed insects. She said that preliminary findings suggest black soldier flies prefer molasses, which may help them produce more eggs than water alone can—an example of welfare considerations that align with the goals of farming. (Larvae are a common protein source for livestock and pets.) She also spoke bluntly about how larvae are killed: in microwaves and ovens, for example, or by grinding, boiling, or freezing. A larva may survive for more than a minute in a hot oven, she said, disapprovingly. My breakfast turned in my stomach as she showed slides of ground larvae. “Larvae can have one of two experiences going through a grinder,” she said. Depending on the size of holes in its metal plates, they can be killed immediately or get stuck. Her recommendation, to minimize their potential suffering, was to put pieces of a potato through the grinder to push the remaining larvae through.
Barrett cited a 2021 survey of American adults, which found that fifty-two to sixty-five per cent supported the notion that insects such as honeybees, ants, and termites were capable of feeling pain. She did not say outright that she agreed. Neither did any of the scientists or philosophers I spoke to. But she argues that the idea’s plausibility should push us toward new ways of farming, studying, and managing insects, just as concerns about farm animals have gradually pushed society toward more humane practices. When Barrett was asked in a recent podcast interview whether insects are sentient, she said, “I think it’s likely enough that I’ve changed my whole career based on it.”