The Casual Blog

Tag: Lars Chittka

January 7, 2023

Big white birds, intelligent bees, Ultra, and the tree lady

Last week I drove to eastern North Carolina to check on the visiting wild birds.  Some hundreds of tundra swans were there.  These big white birds nest on the Arctic tundra and migrate long distances to winter at places like Pungo Lake.  They really are majestic, swimming calmly or climbing the air.  I watched them for quite a while, flying, landing, feeding, preening, and having minor disputes.

Shortly after sunrise I also saw thousands of snow geese in a riotous murmuration, circling around a farm field, landing, then taking off again.  It was thrilling.  What were they up to?  They vocalize as they fly, and perhaps they’re debating how to group themselves and where to go for the day.  Or perhaps that’s just their ritual, their way to greet the sunrise.  

We have a lot to learn about the minds of other animals.  A new book I’m reading, The Mind of a Bee, by Lars Chittka, shows that most of what I was taught about bees back in the day was ridiculously wrong.  Chittka, a professor, discusses the special qualities of bee perception, communication, and behavior.  He makes a convincing case that individual bees have memories and solve complex problems of navigation, flower biology, and structural engineering.  It’s hard not to conclude that they have a kind of intelligence.  

On the drive out east, I listened to Rachel Maddow’s new podcast, Ultra.  The subject is American Nazis in WWII, including a couple of dozen members of Congress who collaborated with Hitler’s government.  One group, inspired by the rabidly antisemitic Father Coughlin (the most popular radio personality of his time), stockpiled arms and planned to overthrow the U.S. government. 

 I enjoy learning about American history, and like to think my knowledge is above average.  But the Ultra story was a chapter I’d never heard anything about.  I’d had the impression that in WWII, there was hardly any disagreement among Americans on the proposition that Nazism was wrong and needed to be opposed with all our strength.  But thanks to Rachel and her team, I now get that it wasn’t that simple.  

The January 6 insurrection, election denialism, QAnon conspiracy thinking, and the MAGA penchant for violence and repression now make more sense.  As disturbing as these ideas are, it’s clear that they aren’t random or isolated.  

Fascist fears and longings have been part of our story for a long time. For some, there’s real appeal in the idea of finding unity behind an inspired dictator to beat down a supposedly grave threat.  It’s easy to condemn this kind of extremism.  But it’s better to understand it as part of a long-standing culture that adherents did not consciously choose.  It might make us less judgmental and angry, and able to help the extremists calm down and perhaps find a measure of sanity and peace.    

On a happier note, I was glad to see the Washington Post featured a good piece by Sarah Kaplan on Suzanne Simard. Simard is a pioneering plant biologist who made key discoveries relating to how trees in forests behave.  (She was the model for a character in Richard Powers’ excellent 2018 eco-novel, The Overstory.)  She discovered that mycorrhizal fungi connected to tree roots facilitate living forest communities.  

Kaplan wrote, “Through decades of study, Simard and other ecologists have revealed how fungi and trees are linked in vast, subterranean networks through which organisms send messages and swap resources. The findings have helped revolutionize the way the world sees forests, turning static stands of trees into complex societies of interdependent species, where scenes of both fierce competition and startling cooperation play out on a grand scale.”  

Simard’s current big experiment is called the Mother Tree Project.  She’s designed different environments to see how trees and their associated fungi networks fare.  It seems pretty clear that the logging methods generally used today are not sustainable, and she’s looking for a better way. 

August 13, 2022

Our safari in Tanzania

Cheetah

We returned last week from a 10-day safari in Tanzania, where we visited Tarangire National Park and Serengeti National Park.  It was a long hard trip there and back, but completely worth it.  We met some interesting people, but the highlights were the non-human animals living their lives on the savannah.  

We saw many elephants, gazelles, giraffes, buffalo, zebras, baboons, monkeys, ostriches, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, and many, many wildebeests, as well as a few jackals, hyenas, lions, leopards, and cheetahs.  There were also many colorful birds, small mammals, unusual speedy antelopes, and reptiles.  

Some of the oldest known human fossils come from east Africa, and our species spent a lot of its pathbreaking years there.  It’s a big but underappreciated part of our story.  Looking out over vast grasslands, I found myself thinking of the tall grass differently:  vital food for many creatures, and hiding places and ambush spots for some. 

The Serengeti was the setting for the Lion King, which I thought was a sweet and touching movie, though I had assumed it had a large dose of romantic fantasy in depicting the animals and landscape.  It seemed unlikely that different species of animals would live close together cooperatively and mostly peacefully.  

Wildebeests crossing the Mara River

But in fact, we saw a lot of different species sharing territories, some warily but others relaxed.  In most if not all herds, there were animals of different ages, including young ones.  The young animals played while their mothers kept a watchful eye.

We saw large groups of animals organize themselves quite efficiently for travel, rest, and eating, though how they do it is still largely unknown.  One of the most amazing spectacles was the wildebeests crossing the Mara River as part of their annual migration.  We saw nine or ten of these crossings in which thousands of the creatures plunged down steep embankment, swam the river, and climbed the bank on the other side near us.  Most were successful, though we saw crocodiles get a few. 

A leopard in the Serengeti near sunset

According to Seni, our guide, who knew a lot about animal biology and behavior, wildebeests aren’t particularly smart or athletic by Serengeti standards, and some people consider them ugly.  Apart from their dramatic migration, their lives seem to be mostly about eating grass, avoiding predators, and reproducing.  We know little about how they communicate and organize to get things done.  But their huge numbers show that they do so, and their strategy appears to be successful.

The animals of Tanzania have some of the same problems we do, like rising temperatures, droughts, storms, and fires caused by global warming.  They get diseases or get caught by powerful predators, not to mention human poachers.  But I was struck and moved by how well so many of these creatures do when we just leave them alone.  In Tanzania’s huge national parks, they have territories and healthy habitats, and seem to be living mostly peacefully and doing as they like.  

When I was a schoolboy, we were taught that animals operate mostly on raw instinct, and don’t have anything similar to our mental processes for memory and planning, or even feeling.  There’s more and more evidence that this is far from true, and that many animals have strong memories, the ability to plan ahead, and emotions.  

The Washington Post had a fascinating piece this week by Lars Chittka on the consciousness of bees.  Chittka’s researchers found that individual bees could remember human faces, count, and use tools, and that they experienced positive and negative emotions.  It makes one wonder, how much more is there yet to learn about animals’ abilities and consciousness?    

We’ve been thoroughly socialized to avoid thinking about animals as agents having coherent lives worthy of respect.  Most of our education on animals just ignores the complexity and successes of their social systems (their families, herds, alliances), political systems (territories, cooperatives, group decision making, conflict resolution), and creative achievements (communication, nourishment, transportation, sports, shelter).  

We’ve long assumed that humans and their systems are separate from and superior to all non-humans and their systems.  This is, of course, self-serving, and also less and less persuasive in light of modern research.  The massive destruction wrought by humans on the rest of the earth over the last few centuries calls such thinking into question:  our species has been the main driver of our grave crises.  Yet even in the face of the human onslaught, many animals carry on with their cultures.  We can learn from them, and should.       

Lion mom and cub

For the trip, I brought along my new Nikon mirrorless camera and three lenses, one of which (the long one, 150-600 mm) malfunctioned on the first day.  Still, I took a lot of pictures, and I’m still not finished with the first pass through them.  But I wanted to go ahead and share a few that I thought reflected some of the beauty of Tanzanian animals’ lives.  I’m hoping to write more next week on the experience and share more images.