The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Mammal contests

Daniel Everett – then a missionary, now a linguist -- had just come to live in a Pirahã village in the Brazilian Amazon, by the bank of the Maici River. In his book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, he writes, “I was startled by the sight of two small gray porpoises jumping in sync out of the river. I had no idea that there were freshwater porpoises.”

Not in the Amazon Basin, there aren't, so let's call them dolphins.

Things got even better. Two canoes came hurtling around a river bend, furiously paddled by local men who were chasing the dolphins, trying to tag them with the canoe paddles. The dolphins could easily evade the canoes, but kept popping up almost within reach so the men would chase them some more. People in the village gathered to watch, laughing uproariously.

The men chased the dolphins until it got too dark to continue. “In all my years watching this contest between mammals, no porpoise has ever been 'tagged,'” Everett writes.

Everett and his family lived among the Pirahã for years. He learned, and wrote a thesis on, their difficult language, and failed to convert a single person. He lost his religious belief and diverged from the teachings of famous linguist Noam Chomsky in making the controversial argument that the Pirahã language doesn't have features of Chomskian “universal grammar,” notably recursion. He also says it doesn't have names for colors or numbers, and that the Pirahã don't have “motherese” (baby talk). They don't have a creation story. My favorite part is the idea that the language has many suffixes indicating the source of information, so that one distinguishes instantly between, say, “Dan caught a fish (I saw him),” “Dan caught a fish (Keren says she saw it)” and “Dan caught a fish (I assume on circumstantial evidence).”

(A related problem with missionary efforts to the Pirahã seems to be a cultural impatience with extended hearsay. If you were Jesus Christ, they would be happy to talk to you. If you had seen Jesus Christ perform a miracle, they'd be willing to hear that. But if your pastor told you that he read in Bible that Timothy heard that Jesus Christ performed miracles, the Pirahã can't be bothered.)

Everett's claims have created great ongoing controversy, and more non-theological interest in studying the Pirahã language. He's been called a charlatan, or simply wrong about one point or another.

About the porpoises – the only freshwater porpoises were in the Yangtze (probably now extinct). I can't figure out if Everett was seeing the freshwater dolphin called Inia geoffrensis or boto, or the one called Sotalia fluviatilis or tucuxi. He had missionary training and linguistic training, not natural history training, so I don't think imprecise cetacean nomenclature reflects on Everett-as-observer.

Here's a picture of a boto in the Duisberg Zoo.


Here's a picture of what I take to be a tucuxi.


If only I were blogging in Pirahã! This entry would be much shorter, since with simple prefixes I could indicate things like “Everett said this,” “Everett said this, but I think he meant something else,” “Wikimedia Commons didn't exactly say this, but this is a picture the search term sent me to,” and “the boto caught a fish (unless that's Photoshop work).”

Dancing with Bubbles

For  a story on a pit bull rescue organization, I was visiting Kim Ramirez. Kim has two dogs, and she was fostering a third, Spyder, a worried young dog who had been confiscated from the Michael Vick dog-fighting operation. I was there to meet Spyder, since the Vick dogs were celebrities. I also met the other two, Nala and Ross. Ross is a 60-pound pit bull mix, white with brindle spots, with a classic Hello-I-love-you pit bull bonhomie. Kim adopted him after the organization rescued him from the shelter. (Shelters overflow with unwanted pit bulls.)

In order to have a place for three big dogs, Kim and her daughter live in a mostly industrial neighborhood, on the outskirts of town.

After we talked about Spyder (who had retired to her crate to avoid stressful media attention), Kim showed me Ross's favorite game. We were in the kitchen, late afternoon sun leaning through the window. She got out a bottle of bubble-blowing liquid and blew a plume of bubbles. “Touch!” she said.

Ross was delighted. He leapt into the air, catching bubbles. He flung himself clear off the floor. He twisted, trying to grab more than one bubble per leap. He jumped again and again, leaving no bubble unpopped. He looked at Kim hopefully – more bubbles? More bubbles?

She blew more bubbles and Ross jumped for them, even the tiny ones.

The pit bull rescue story was fascinating to research. There was a lot to learn, about dog fighting, dog breeding, dog rescue, and dog politics. Some of it was very sad. Some of it was encouraging. There was no space in the article for Ross.

But the image that keeps coming back to me from that story is of Kim, and a big pit bull in a sunny kitchen jumping like a trout to catch bubbles.

Vigorously Support the New Turtle Diet!

As far as we know there are fewer than half a dozen Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtles left in the world and only one is female.

The Yangtze giants (Rafetus swinhoei) are hard to overlook, since they get to be more than a yard long and can weigh a couple of hundred pounds. That means they've been easy to hunt -- and perfect for feeding a crowd.

When it was realized how endangered they were, a search was launched for survivors. A male was in the zoo in Suzhou, China. He's thought to be 100 years old. Two more males were found in Vietnam.

When keepers at the zoo in Changsha, China, got the mailing about the turtles, they said they had a turtle who looked a lot like the one in the picture.... She was thought to be 80 years old. The Changsha turtle, now named China Girl, is indeed a Yangtze giant soft-shell, and was shipped to Suzhou to meet the male there. Neither had seen another turtle of the opposite sex in decades.

China Girl and her new friend knew exactly what to do, and there was much rejoicing when China Girl laid eggs. (I am trying to tell this story tastefully, and avoid the “Ha ha, sexy oldsters!” tone found in much of the coverage. So please keep in mind that these turtles appear to be longer-lived than we are, and for us to snigger about them might be like nine-year-olds groaning and pretending to vomit when they see college students holding hands.)

Though many of the eggs were fertile, not one hatched. Turtle experts blamed years of a low-calcium diet. China Girl had been fed beef and pork. A more suitable and calcium-rich diet would be fish and crayfish. Xie Yan, who runs the Wildlife Conservation Society's China program, says China Girl's diet has already been changed. “Next time will be better.” Lie Jinde, director of the organization that manages the Suzhou Zoo, says “Wait until next year. We ought to succeed.”

At Suzhou, the turtles are protected. There's a guard, a surveillance camera, and bullet-proof glass. (Weirdly, there are people who would commit serious crimes in order to own the last female Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtle in the world. Some of them would try to breed her in the same way as the zoo, some would keep her as a trophy, and probably a few of them would make a point of eating the hardest to-get, most expensive, most selfish, and most evil turtle soup in the world.) So those things are needed.

And of course there's the new regimen.  I vigorously support the new turtle diet!

But I would also support making the turtles' lives better in other ways. A turtle can get bored.

Here's the story of Pigface (from Becoming a Tiger):

An unusual example of play in an adult comes from Pigface, a Nile soft-shelled turtle who arrived at the National Zoo in 1940. Six inches long, he was not really pig-faced, but he had the pointy nose and wide decurved mouth appropriate to his species. By the 1980s, Pigface was a yard long, and violently bored. Once a week he received a nutritious dead rat, and twice a week a dozen live goldfish.  The goldfish were the highlight of the week, and he pursued them “with speed and agility,” so zealously that until he caught them all he literally stopped only to breathe.  This filled 20 exciting minutes a week.

In the 1980s keepers noticed that Pigface had begun to bite his front legs and rake his neck with his front claws, hurting himself badly. Suddenly grasping that he might be bored, they gave Pigface toys—basketballs and a floating hoop. This reduced Pigface’s self-mutilation, and he spent hours nosing and biting at the basketballs, pushing them across the water. As for the hoop, he could not only nose it, bite at it, and push it, but also chew it, shake it, pull it, kick it, and swim back and forth through it. Best of all he liked the hose the keepers used when they refilled the tank, enjoying the sensation of the water streaming over his head at exactly the right angle, and playing tug-of-war with the keeper on cleaning day by grabbing the hose and swimming backward with it, pulling it into the tank. (There is no reason to suspect that Pigface was hoping to pull his keeper into the tank, steal his keys, and make a getaway.)

Nile soft-shelled turtles (Trionyx triunguis) are closely related to Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtles. I suspect that what's good for Pigface might be good for China Girl.

Do those safe, well-fed turtles in Suzhou get to chase goldfish? Could China Girl maybe have a hoop? A hoop and a ball? A hoop and a ball and a chance to fight with a hose?

Do happier turtles breed better? It's worth a try.

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 .)