The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Downtime for Beasts

To attract wildlife, we've historically offered water, food, and salty snacks. Hunters and ecotourists can both be found hanging around waterholes. Some people put out bird feeders to watch birds. Others put out cheap corn to attract deer year-round so they'll be available in hunting season. Animals have always been drawn to salt licks. That draws people, which is why there were all those early settlements called French Lick, Boone's Lick, Blue Lick, etc. So some people put out salt blocks.

I propose a new way of attracting animals: spa weekends.

Okay, animals don't much observe the work week, so let's just say spa vacations. Spas. Places animals could visit for food, water, salty snacks – and a nice back-scratch, mudbath, massage, or pedicure.

Animals are always trying to get their backs scratched, rubbing against trees, fences, and one another in the attempt. They'd flock to a spot where toothed surfaces were mounted at convenient heights and angles. There'd be rubbing, and groaning, and clouds of fur, and great happiness.

It might take a little more ingenuity to get animals to make pedicure and massage appointments, but a nicely-scratched back ought to lower their sales resistance, to say nothing of a good hot soak.

Most animals love a nice bath, and while they are typically envisioned frolicking in a crystalline lake or a mountain stream, they gladly take hot water when they can get it. The famous Japanese snow monkeys (a species of macaque) appear to spend most of the winter in hot springs.

In the mid-90s, a cinnamon bear (a black bear with natural auburn coloring) was raiding garbage cans and fruit trees in Monrovia, California. While on the prowl he discovered the pleasures of jacuzzis. After he ate, he'd relax in a hot tub. Some people didn't like a scum of coarse black hair and bear grease in their tubs, but Connie and Gary Potter took advantage of the photo-op and videotaped the bear, called Samson, luxuriating in their tub.

One day the Potters saw Samson rolling in agony on their lawn. Concerned, they called Fish & Game to help. By the time the wardens came, Samson, who had incautiously eaten a plastic bag, felt better. Because he was a known “nuisance bear,” they trapped him. They found that he was an old bear, with worn-down teeth, who wouldn't be able to support himself in the wild.

Fish & Game has views on the unwisdom of people feeding formidable wild animals. (F&G would get the blame if Samson gummed a Chihuahua.) They have experience with relocating garbage-eating bears (who return to favored garbage dumps with lightning speed). They also know that zoos are full up with black bears. They announced that they would euthanize Samson. Horrified, the Potters took their videos of Samson bathing to the television news. The public was appalled, as anyone would be who can identify with an innocent woodland creature lolling in a hot tub after a satisfying meal of garbage. The governor issued a stay of execution.

The Orange County Zoo, with a sharper eye to public relations than F&G, announced that it would take Samson in. They built him a big enclosure with a waterfall and a pool. (But no hot tub, and I am betting no salty snacks.) He lived there for years, until he got so sick he really did have to be euthanized.

So if we already have wildlife trying to sign up for the spa treatment without encouragement, think of the business we could do if we were trying. Spas where they didn't have to dodge wardens, where the salty snacks were laid out on buffets, where dogs wouldn't bark at them.

We'd need to be clever. We'd need to be sure that a rabbit coming out of the massage room (blissfully relaxed), didn't encounter a coyote (invigorated by a back-scratching session), back into a bobcat exiting a meditation class, jump sideways and bump into a moose heading for the jacuzzi, and startle a bear into swallowing a loofah. Since none of these animals really want to meet humans either, we'd do it by monitoring video cameras and not opening gates that would let predator and prey or any kind of enemies into the same space.

(It wouldn't be right to use spas to attract animals for hunting purposes. What if the custom spread? What if manicurists and masseurs went Sweeney Todd on their clientele? Think about it.)

Why on earth would we do this? It's not like animals can pay. We would do it because it would be cool, because we like animals, because it would be interesting to see what happened, and mostly, as the story of Samson shows, because we would get Such. Cool. Video.

What Shall I Do with These Opposable Thumbs?

A few years ago, Terri Nelson and I went to the San Francisco Zoo, and came upon the Nocturnal Gallery. This is closed now, but it was a little building with glass-fronted cages with small primates. It was dark inside, with double doors so people entering  wouldn't let in daylight. There were dim red lights. If you waited long enough, your eyes would adjust and you could dimly see small nocturnal animals hustling along tree branches, sorting leaf litter, and grooming each other. Most people didn't take the time, and went out again. We were alone with tiny primates.

Terri and I were spellbound. Bushbabies! Then we saw the mouse lemurs, infinitesimal primates you could hold in the palm of your hand, if it were allowed. We felt compelled to peer at them in case there was a still smaller baby mouse lemur clinging to its mother.

Then we spotted the aye-ayes, and were stunned with delight. Aye-ayes are rare and endangered, five and a half pounds of nocturnal weirdness from Madagascar. Few zoos have them. Aye-ayes eat grubs that burrow in decayed wood, so they fill the ecological niche of a woodpecker. (A big woodpecker. Given their size and rarity, let's say an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.) They have opposable thumbs and skinny witchy fingers, especially their middle fingers, which are ridiculously long, Edward Scissorhands long. In the Malagasy night, they tap on trees, listening with big bat ears for hollow sounds, and for a grub squirming. Then they bite a hole in the wood and pull the nutritious and no doubt tasty grub out with that long middle finger.*

In the dimness of the nocturnal house we could see the aye-ayes parading along horizontal branches, making daring leaps from one branch to branch, and pausing so we could drink in the spectacle of their crazy staring eyes, their disheveled fur, and those bizarre hands. They popped in and out of a wooden nestbox.

We had been looking silently for a long time, bewitched, when we saw a quick flash in the enclosure. It was a red bar of light that appeared for a second and then was gone. It came again. “Did you see that?” “Yes -- what was it?” We stared. Nothing. Then, again, from a different spot. We couldn't figure it out. Were there lights in the enclosure with the aye-ayes? Some kind of motion detectors? It flashed from a different spot. Then, gone.

It flashed twice, in the same spot. We peered and suddenly saw an aye-aye sitting on a branch. Facing us. Brandishing a large wrench.

“Do you see that?!” one of us asked in disbelief, and the other one hissed, “Yes.”

When the wrench was tilted toward a red light, it reflected a red bar of light from the handle. The flashes from different places must have come as the aye-aye paraded around with the wrench. The aye-aye manipulated the wrench thoughtfully, then jumped up and disappeared into the nestbox. When it came out, it had no wrench.

We tried to figure it out. When one of the cages was being repaired, someone had left a wrench lying around. The aye-ayes had stolen it. They were hiding it in the nestbox. Clearly they planned a break-out. “They plan to use it to unbolt something and escape,” I hazarded. Terri showed a better understanding of basic primate thinking. “They plan to hit the zookeeper on the head with it and escape,” she said.

##

*There are no woodpeckers in Madagascar. Feel free to use this remark the next time conversation falters.

Everybody Just Wants to Have Fun

I've been thinking recently about ways to use technology to improve the lives of animals, and to communicate with them. I was lucky enough to get to talk about this at the Science Buzz Cafe  at Maker Faire , and I hope to write on the subject from time to time.

It would be a mistake to be too serious. We shouldn't think only in terms of animal needs, feeding them, protecting them, providing them with affordable health care. People love to use technology to play and animals are likely to feel the same. My brother Tim remarks that since pigeons are better than people at spatial thinking, maybe we could use that to create a pigeon video game.

To quote from Becoming a Tiger:

At the task of looking at two shapes and figuring out which is the mirror image of a third shape, pigeons and college students were equally accurate. But pigeons were faster. The researchers suggest that pigeons use some different, automatic process, and that they need it more than we do, because they fly around and look down on things that are oriented arbitrarily, whereas the things we look at are more consistently oriented. ...navigating in three dimensions must be harder than navigating in two. So we shouldn't feel bad about being inferior to pigeons at mental rotation. But we should avoid going on game shows where we would face teams of pigeons at mental rotation tasks, because that really would be embarrassing.

(The more I think about this, the more I am grieved by this vision of our species swarming spiderlike across the plane of Flatland. Memo to self: remember to look up.)

The experiments showing that pigeons are spatial thinking virtuosos take place in labs. Pigeons peck at keys to indicate which of several images is the same as another one, but rotated in three dimensions. If they're right, they get a snack. That's practically a game already. A boring one.

So maybe you could design a video game that involved lots of three-D navigation, maybe through virtual forests. Players would have to swoop through without touching anything. Pigeons might play that, because, like people, animals enjoy doing things they're good at. (Germans call this Funktionslust.) I think a pigeon would have to play by pecking keys, since a joystick could be a problem.

Maybe pigeons can whip us when it comes to rotating 3-D objects, but I'm sure there are lots of areas besides joystick technique where we would totally whip pigeons. For one thing, I'm not sure a pigeon could identify with an avatar.  It might have to be a first-person shooter type game.

This brings us to frigatebirds, also called Man of War birds. They're huge glamorous seabirds, mostly black, with long long pointed wings, and long forked tails. Brilliant flyers, they can stay in the air for a week at a time. They're one of several species that get a lot of their food by robbing other birds. They spot another bird with a fish, say a gull, and they chase that gull, they outfly that gull, they invade its airspace, they pull on its feathers, they harass it until the gull drops the fish or coughs it up, and then the frigatebird grabs it on the fly.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you? That's right. Grand Theft Frigatebird.

Would a sweet, peaceful pigeon get a kick out of role-playing piracy? There's only one way to find out. In fact, if you proposed to shed light on whether violent video games make people violent, you could even get grant money.

We could try adding a magnetic steering component to the game. New research on how birds use the earth's magnetic field to orient themselves indicates that they may use fancy molecules that link a carotenoid, a porphyrin, and a spherical fullerene. In the test tube, these molecules react to very weak magnetic fields. These molecules resemble molecules in birds' eyes called cryptochromes. (Wait a minute. A spherical fullerene? You mean... a buckyball? Yes! If birds had them first, I wonder if they took out patents?)

I think it would be a good practice for us to design systems geared to sensory systems we don't have ourselves. Echolocation videogames for bats and dolphins. Sophisticated olfactory videogames for dogs and wolves. UV videogames for bumblebees.

It would be good intellectual exercise. It would be good moral exercise. And it would give us valuable experience, which would help us get cool jobs if people suddenly need to communicate through new and unusual channels when our civilization encounters aliens.

**

(Pigeon: Photograph taken by Dori. . Frigatebird: Photograph from putneymark .)

From Evil, Turtles

I came across the story of the most endangered turtle in the world while researching the question of whether “worm stomping” in Wood Turtles is a cultural behavior. (Alas, no.) In Ronald Orenstein's Turtles, Tortoises and Terrapins: Survivors in Armor ">Turtles, Tortoises and Terrapins: Survivors in Armor (2001), I read of Aspideretes nigricans (formerly Trionyx nigricans), the Black Softshell turtle, or Bastami Softshell, which “survives for religious reasons. The entire population of some 400 animals is held in semi-captivity in an enclosed pond, or tank, about five miles from Chittagong, Bangladesh, where visitors and pilgrims feed them bread, bananas, and offal. The tank is attached to an Islamic shrine...” Other sources confirmed that it was “critically endangered,” “extinct in the wild,” and “the 'holy' turtle of Bangladesh.”

The shrine is of a ninth century Sufi mystic, Bayazid Bastami, of whom I had not previously heard. It is said, apparently, that Bastami encountered evil spirits, and turned them into turtles. What a nice man. He didn't bind them in eternal chains, cast them into flame, or even drive them out. He just turned them into turtles. From evil he brought good. Or if not from evil, good, at least from evil, turtles.

The former evil spirits are protected. Orenstein quotes an early report that “the turtles are so tame that they come to feed when called, placing their forefeet on the edge of the platform or even climbing upon it and stretching their necks out of the water. Some even allowed us to touch them, and ate pieces of chicken from wooden skewers held in our hands.”

The species was taxonomically described by J. Anderson in 1875. The general assumption was that the rest of the species had gone extinct in the wild and only these few captives hung on (like the Pere David's deer, a herd of which survived on the estate of the Emperor of China, while all the rest were exterminated). A few herpetologists suggested that the Bastami turtles were just a bunch of inbred descendants of A. hurum, the Peacock Softshell, or A. gangeticus, the Ganges Softshell. How insulting.

But now Peter Praschag and colleagues have done the mitochondrial DNA work and even some field work, and have illuminated the matter in a paper in Zoologica Scripta, complete with cladograms and excellent drawings of baby turtles. It is not true that the Bastami Softshells are merely inbred, aberrant, Peacock Softshells or inbred, aberrant, Ganges Softshells. They are a distinct species in their own right. (Praschag et al. advise changing their name to Nilssonia nigricans).

However, the DNA work indicates that they are the same species as some turtles in a pond next to the Kamakhya Tantra Temple in Assam. (Note to self: if build temple: install turtles. Query: charge pilgrims for turtle chow?) They are even the same species as a turtle that was caught swimming wild in the Jia Bhoroli River, also in Assam. Praschag et al. don't know how many Bastami Softshells are out there, but they figure it's a lot more than just the ones that hang around the shrine.

What a revelation! As a fan of plot and anecdote I would much prefer that the temple have the only Bastami Softshells in the world, saved from extinction by the pious – but as a crazed fan of fauna I am very glad there are more Bastami Softshells  in the world – saved from extinction by their own efforts.

A Worrisome Precedent

A black bear is being sought by New Jersey police on suspicion of stealing a minivan. Officer Dave Dehard came across the stolen minivan abandoned by the side of the road with dented door panels and a broken passenger window. Looking for clues..., Dehard found the front seat covered with drool, candy wrappers, and coarse black hair... Police theorize that the bear smelled candy..., smashed the window, then “accidentally released the emergency brake” while foraging inside, causing the vehicle to roll down a hill. ---The Week

“Mom, Dad, I theorize that a black bear smelled brownies, entered our home through the dog door, was attracted to your purse by the smell of gum, inadvertently swallowed a twenty dollar bill, lurched against the computer, accidentally linking to that porn site, which automatically linked to a couple other porn sites, and then exited through the mud room, probably picking up a six-pack of the Moosehead as he went. I knew you'd be upset about the mess, and I was trying to clean up, but I only got as far as vacuuming up a whole bunch of coarse black hair.”

“Sweetheart, I just came home a minute ago and found the place like this. I theorize that a black bear smelled that shaving cream you got on the rug the other day, entered our home via the chimney, found itself in our bedroom, spritzed itself with your aftershave, and then exuberantly rolled on the bed, dislodging that pair of somebody's boxer shorts which must have somehow gotten accidentally included with our dry cleaning. What a mess! I got what must be bear drool on my clothes when I came in, so I took them off right away. Ugh! Bear drool! So gross! Hold me!”

“Captain, my theory: looks like the perp was a black bear. Bear smells something in the evidence room, sneaks into the station house. Maybe hid in the back of a squad car, lay low in the garage until the day shift went home. Then made unsuccessful attempt to break and enter the evidence room. Grabbed and consumed snacks from the detective bureau desks. Then detected candy scent in that piñata of the commissioner the detectives have. While attempting to access the candy the suspect climbed onto a computer that was logged on, through the use of a back paw got into the discretionary fund, accidentally clicked with its claw to bet it all on European stock indexes, then, hearing a noise, exited out the side. Doesn't it seem to you like there's more coarse black hair than usual lying around? Too bad about the money. You wouldn't really expect good investments from a bear. Though of course if the indexes had gone the other way, he'd be a total hero.”

Editors—I hypothesize that a bear, attracted by the lure of publication, which the animal took for the scent of fame and for the deep primordial call of self-expression, made its way into a small office in the downtown area of a Western city, where it raked its long curved claws across a keyboard with a grace surprising in such a large creature--one typically thought of as ungainly, and one which does not invariably feed only upon the canonical “roots and berries,” but on rare occasions reveals itself as a formidable predator--creating a short work of apparently lighthearted prose. Accidentally releasing its own innate sense of literary restraint, the bear, or if not a bear, a person strongly identifying with bears, composed a brief fantasia addressing the human penchant for relentlessly deterministic explanations of animal behavior, and the equally marked human penchant to employ these explanations in self-justification. The innocent animal—and I knowingly use the term “innocent” for its several meanings such as “not cognizant of current normal literary channels,” and “free of the imputation of original sin,” and “hasn't killed anyone yet, or even hurt anyone, and knocking over dumpsters is hardly a felony”--then flicked a claw rapidly across the metallic device which it simultaneously found disquietingly natural and so familiar as to be almost invisible, sending the odd missive on its electronic way, exhaled a bitter gust that seemed to speak of the high mountain ranges, spun once in the office chair, and lumbered away, leaving the workspace littered with drool, candy wrappers, and coarse black hair.