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Do Animals Make Mistakes? (featuring Dr. Andy Sih) · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:07
Speaker 1: Howdy, extraordinaries! We often talk on this show about how
0:11
Speaker 1: natural selection has exquisitely shaped animals to help them thrive
0:14
Speaker 1: in their environments. And while that's still true, I'm sure
0:18
Speaker 1: we've all seen animals doing something truly stupid. So why
0:22
Speaker 1: do animals make mistakes? What kind of mistakes do they make?
0:26
Speaker 1: And does living in a world that is profoundly altered
0:29
Speaker 1: by humans cause animals to make more mistakes or even
0:32
Speaker 1: make new mistakes? We're getting answers to these questions today
0:37
Speaker 1: from the amazing Dr.
0:38
Speaker 2: Andy C. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Mistaken Universe.
0:56
Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to
0:58
Speaker 3: think about aliens. And in my house, there's an animal
1:01
Speaker 3: who never makes a mistake. Yeah.
1:04
Speaker 2: Who is that animal?
1:05
Speaker 3: He's a very good boy.
1:06
Speaker 2: Oh, is it Pepito?
1:07
Speaker 3: It is Pepito. Yeah, he's a good boy.
1:11
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space. And
1:14
Speaker 1: I have a lot of goats who, they're not making mistakes.
1:17
Speaker 1: They're just being stinkers, I guess. No, that's not true.
1:20
Speaker 1: They've gotten themselves stuck in lots of things and I've
1:23
Speaker 1: had to get them out of trouble.
1:24
Speaker 2: So that's a mistake.
1:25
Speaker 3: Are goats famous for making good life choices?
1:28
Speaker 2: No, no.
1:28
Speaker 1: But they're curious and they have a lot of fun.
1:31
Speaker 1: So there's some lesson there for the rest of us,
1:34
Speaker 1: I think.
1:36
Speaker 3: Always think to yourself, what would a goat do in
1:38
Speaker 3: this situation?
1:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, they would make a loud noise, look for snacks,
1:42
Speaker 1: and then follow whatever their heart is telling them to do.
1:45
Speaker 2: That's what I think.
1:48
Speaker 3: Awesome.
1:48
Speaker 1: Speaking of mistakes, we got a fantastic question from a listener.
1:54
Speaker 1: So let's go ahead and take a listen to what
1:56
Speaker 1: Duran wanted to know about.
1:58
Speaker 4: Hey, Danielle and Kelly. This is Duran in Dallas, Texas.
2:02
Speaker 5: I wanted to ask if there is a biological or
2:05
Speaker 5: scientific concept of a mistake.
2:07
Speaker 4: Sometimes Kelly would describe.
2:09
Speaker 5: A specific animal behavior that deviates from a known behavior
2:12
Speaker 5: with a known evolutionary benefit, and the suggestion is sometimes
2:16
Speaker 5: that maybe there's some alternative advantage. But my thought is,
2:21
Speaker 5: what if the organism just goofed up? And if so,
2:24
Speaker 5: how would we know that it was a mistake? Also,
2:27
Speaker 5: are there different types of mistakes? Me locking my keys
2:30
Speaker 5: in the car seems like it would be different than
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Speaker 5: a parasitic wasp misinterpreting sensory cues and infecting the wrong host.
2:37
Speaker 4: Thanks. I love the show.
2:39
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
2:40
Speaker 1: I got so excited when I got this question because
2:42
Speaker 1: it turns out that I got my PhD with like
2:45
Speaker 1: the mistakes guy, the guy who studies mistakes and, And
2:50
Speaker 1: studies how our like rapidly changing environment impacts how often
2:53
Speaker 1: animals are making mistakes and which animals are making the
2:56
Speaker 1: right decision as the environment is changing. And my PhD
3:00
Speaker 1: advisor is like the coolest guy around.
3:02
Speaker 2: And so I am stoked to have him on the show.
3:04
Speaker 3: But why does your advisor study mistakes? I mean, I
3:07
Speaker 3: thought you got your PhD on like fish guts or something.
3:10
Speaker 1: Andy C., over the course of his career, has come
3:13
Speaker 1: up with lots of new fields that have become like
3:16
Speaker 1: super hot topic that like thousands of people work on.
3:19
Speaker 1: He's just like this amazing idea guy. But when I
3:21
Speaker 1: went into his lab, I was studying animal personalities, which
3:24
Speaker 1: I think we'll get to today. And I particularly, I
3:27
Speaker 1: wasn't excited about fish guts, but I was interested in
3:30
Speaker 1: how parasites would impact the behaviors and the personalities of
3:35
Speaker 1: their hosts, either directly by infecting them and changing their
3:38
Speaker 1: behavior in some way, or indirectly because animals might change
3:42
Speaker 1: their behaviors to try to avoid getting infected. And so
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Speaker 1: I was interested in parasites and behavior. That was my thing.
3:48
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's amazing that you had such a
3:50
Speaker 3: good experience with your advisor, that you're still so positive
3:53
Speaker 3: and excited about him. And so then my question to
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Speaker 3: you is that you think he's so awesome. Is he
3:58
Speaker 3: the goat?
3:59
Speaker 2: He is the goat. He is the greatest of all
4:01
Speaker 2: time advisor. I'm leaning in.
4:04
Speaker 4: Yep.
4:05
Speaker 3: He is.
4:05
Speaker 2: I had a great time working with Andy.
4:06
Speaker 3: But he's the goat that makes good life choices.
4:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
4:10
Speaker 1: He doesn't make a lot of mistakes like my goats.
4:13
Speaker 1: He's the right kind of goat.
4:14
Speaker 6: Yeah.
4:15
Speaker 2: And you know what?
4:15
Speaker 1: Let's not wait any longer. Let's bring the goat advisor
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Speaker 1: onto the show right now.
4:21
Speaker 2: Dr.
4:22
Speaker 1: Andy See is a distinguished professor in the Department of
4:25
Speaker 1: Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.
4:28
Speaker 1: He's won the Animal Behavior Society's Exemplar Award for major
4:32
Speaker 1: long-term contributions in animal behavior, their Quest Award for seminal
4:36
Speaker 1: contributions in animal behavior, and their Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award
4:41
Speaker 1: for outstanding careers in animal behavior. Basically, if there is
4:44
Speaker 1: an animal behavior award out there, Andy has won it.
4:47
Speaker 1: And I could go on. I'm a huge fan because
4:49
Speaker 1: he was my PhD advisor, but it's way more fun
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Speaker 1: to hear him talk than to hear me talk. So
4:54
Speaker 1: let's bring Andy onto the show.
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Speaker 2: Great to see you, Andy.
4:57
Speaker 6: Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
5:00
Speaker 1: I'm excited to be seeing you again after many years.
5:03
Speaker 1: I don't think I've seen your face in a long time.
5:06
Speaker 6: Wow. Whereas I've seen your face many times in just,
5:09
Speaker 6: you know, various, various formats.
5:12
Speaker 2: I'm sorry about that.
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Speaker 3: It's always fun to meet other people's thesis advisors. And
5:19
Speaker 3: so since you're an expert, On behavior, I have to
5:22
Speaker 3: ask you, was Kelly a well-behaved grad student?
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Speaker 6: Oh, my God. No, Kelly was– She was one of
5:30
Speaker 6: these forces of nature who was just sort of making
5:34
Speaker 6: life better for everybody all the time. And she and
5:37
Speaker 6: Zach also just sort of endlessly amused us with her
5:41
Speaker 6: science and her gigantic cats.
5:46
Speaker 1: Oh, Hilbert has since passed on. I know exactly which
5:49
Speaker 1: gigantic cat you're referring to.
5:51
Speaker 2: He was.
5:53
Speaker 1: He was mammoth at one point, but he was a
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Speaker 1: lot of fun. You used to amuse me by having
6:00
Speaker 1: a whole wall in your house of mirrors and many
6:04
Speaker 1: parties centered around karaoke. And I remember having loads of
6:08
Speaker 1: fun singing in your house. So it was fun being
6:10
Speaker 1: in the C-Lab.
6:11
Speaker 6: Yeah, and we have a sort of a karaoke song
6:15
Speaker 6: event as part of the PhD party where everybody sings
6:18
Speaker 6: their song. And I probably have the recording of you
6:22
Speaker 6: singing your song somewhere back there. And I'm planning to
6:27
Speaker 6: put together an entire YouTube of all the songs over
6:30
Speaker 6: the years. Yes.
6:33
Speaker 2: I think mine was parasite themed.
6:35
Speaker 6: Absolutely.
6:35
Speaker 1: I think I changed the lyrics. Yeah, yeah.
6:38
Speaker 4: All right.
6:39
Speaker 3: Speaking of mistakes. Recording yourself doing karaoke. All right, but
6:45
Speaker 3: today we are here to talk about mistakes because we
6:47
Speaker 3: got this fantastic question from a listener about animal behavior
6:51
Speaker 3: and mistakes.
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Speaker 1: So I thought we could start with obvious mistakes. So,
6:56
Speaker 1: you know, the listener was asking, do animals ever make mistakes?
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Speaker 1: But there are some very clear instances where it's not
7:02
Speaker 1: black and white. The animal is making a mistake. So, Andy,
7:05
Speaker 1: tell us about animals who make obvious mistakes.
7:08
Speaker 6: Good question. So I think animals often do make mistakes,
7:13
Speaker 6: but some of the most spectacular ones are ones associated
7:18
Speaker 6: with what are called evolutionary traps, where they almost certainly
7:23
Speaker 6: did something like really stupid because they did evolve a
7:28
Speaker 6: system of thinking about the world that used to work
7:33
Speaker 6: in the old world, but now often humans have added
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Speaker 6: something that ends up causing things to backfire from their
7:40
Speaker 6: simple system. And the one that has gotten a lot
7:42
Speaker 6: of attention and you can see the pictures online is
7:45
Speaker 6: the Beatles and beer bottles example. You guys have heard
7:50
Speaker 6: about that one? No.
7:52
Speaker 3: Do Beatles drink beer bottles in the wrong way?
7:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
7:56
Speaker 6: So that is part of the jokes that come out
7:58
Speaker 6: of it because the whole thing happens in Australia. where
8:01
Speaker 6: the Aussies are known for their fondness of beer. But
8:05
Speaker 6: in this case, it's beetles that actually have been observed
8:12
Speaker 6: furiously attempting to mate with beer bottles. And so this
8:20
Speaker 6: is where these beetles, they're jewel beetles, they're brown, they're
8:23
Speaker 6: You know, beetles, they're kind of longish and cylindrical, and
8:28
Speaker 6: they have a sort of pebbly texture. And when males
8:30
Speaker 6: are looking for a female, they do need a cue,
8:33
Speaker 6: some sort of information that tells them this is a female. And,
8:37
Speaker 6: you know, the same with us, that when we look around,
8:40
Speaker 6: we have cues that identify this is a human, this
8:43
Speaker 6: is a human that is, in fact, the sex we're
8:46
Speaker 6: interested in, and this is one we really like. And
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Speaker 6: so the beetles use this simple cue of sort of hard, cylindrical,
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Speaker 6: kind of longish, brown, pebbly textured. And it turns out
9:00
Speaker 6: beer bottles fit the criterion. And what's more, for them,
9:03
Speaker 6: bigger is better. And a beer bottle turns out to
9:07
Speaker 6: be super sexy. And people observed, like, you can see
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Speaker 6: pictures online, you know, invite you to look it up,
9:15
Speaker 6: jewel beetles and beer bottles. They're just like a whole
9:19
Speaker 6: cluster of males on the bottle, With their little insect
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Speaker 6: genitalia extended, mating with the beer bottle.
9:28
Speaker 4: Wow.
9:29
Speaker 6: That seems like we can call that a mistake.
9:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a mistake.
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Speaker 1: And do they seem to figure it out eventually, or
9:37
Speaker 1: do they just keep furiously mating.
9:39
Speaker 2: With the bottle until they have completed their part of
9:41
Speaker 2: the process.
9:42
Speaker 4: Yeah.
9:42
Speaker 2: And that is the amazing thing.
9:43
Speaker 6: Is it was so bad and so persistent because those
9:46
Speaker 6: bottles are so sexy to them that actually the entire
9:49
Speaker 6: species was in decline because so many males were actually
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Speaker 6: just on the beer bottle until they die. Wow.
9:55
Speaker 4: Wow.
10:12
Speaker 6: And ecologists were actually became something was in the newspaper
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Speaker 6: and so on of our beer bottles are killing these beetles.
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Speaker 5: Wow.
10:19
Speaker 3: The decline of the species because of the failure of
10:22
Speaker 3: the male gaze. That's amazing.
10:25
Speaker 6: Yeah. And there are probably other examples of that. And
10:30
Speaker 6: one could even, you know, I don't even know if
10:32
Speaker 6: it actually is literally declined, but people have actually ended
10:35
Speaker 6: up saying that Internet porn has some resemblance of distracting
10:40
Speaker 6: to the point of, like loss of productivity or something.
10:45
Speaker 6: But they actually did manage to recover these beetles by
10:49
Speaker 6: having the beer manufacturers change their bottles.
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Speaker 5: Wow.
10:54
Speaker 2: Wow. What did they have to change?
10:56
Speaker 6: Yeah, so they actually apparently debated that one thing you
10:58
Speaker 6: could do is change to green bottles instead of brown.
11:02
Speaker 3: Okay.
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Speaker 6: But then it turns out that green bottles actually do
11:06
Speaker 6: not screen out UV very well, and it messes up
11:09
Speaker 6: the flavor of the beer. Which is interesting because some
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Speaker 6: beers are in green bottles, but apparently it's well known
11:16
Speaker 6: that it can mess up the flavor of the beer.
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Speaker 6: But they just had to remove the pebbly texture that
11:21
Speaker 6: they had on sort of the bottom of the bottles,
11:24
Speaker 6: on just part of the bottle. And that actually solved
11:27
Speaker 6: the problem. And the species has rebounded.
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Speaker 3: I'm just trying to imagine what it was like to
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Speaker 3: work at that beer manufacturer and to get that phone call.
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Speaker 3: It just sounds like a prank, you know?
11:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
11:39
Speaker 6: But I guess it was in the newspaper. It was
11:42
Speaker 6: something that was being talked about. And I think they
11:44
Speaker 6: were happy to get the good press from saving these
11:48
Speaker 6: incredible Beatles.
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Speaker 3: So we're calling it a mistake because... the creature was
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Speaker 3: evolved to suit a certain situation. And then it turns
11:57
Speaker 3: out that that same behavior doesn't really work anymore. Because
12:00
Speaker 3: as you say, the environment has changed because of what
12:03
Speaker 3: humans have done. So we're calling that a mistake. It's
12:05
Speaker 3: like a maladaptation.
12:06
Speaker 4: Yeah.
12:08
Speaker 6: And, you know, what is a mistake can be pretty subtle.
12:11
Speaker 6: But these examples of what actually ecologists call an evolutionary trap.
12:18
Speaker 6: You know, they were trapped into doing something really... Like
12:22
Speaker 6: our favorite examples are obviously this is the wrong thing
12:25
Speaker 6: to do. And those are, you know, we're just happy
12:28
Speaker 6: enough to call those mistakes. Like there are also loads
12:31
Speaker 6: of insects that are laying their eggs on windows.
12:35
Speaker 2: Why windows?
12:36
Speaker 6: And the reason appears to be that they also, these
12:40
Speaker 6: are these aquatic insects that, you know, have the larval
12:43
Speaker 6: stages in the water. But then the adults come out
12:46
Speaker 6: and fly around like dragonflies do that and mosquitoes, you know,
12:49
Speaker 6: lots of things do that. And they have to figure
12:51
Speaker 6: out when they're ready to lay their eggs back in water,
12:55
Speaker 6: what is water? And so when we look at a pond,
12:58
Speaker 6: we are actually using some set of cues that tells
13:01
Speaker 6: us this is a pond and it's water. And so
13:05
Speaker 6: they actually use a particular pattern of reflected light. off
13:09
Speaker 6: of the water to tell them it's water. And that's
13:12
Speaker 6: always worked well. This particular pattern that even involves polarized light,
13:17
Speaker 6: it's always worked well evolutionarily over time. But now glass
13:23
Speaker 6: in the right conditions can actually have the same reflected pattern.
13:26
Speaker 6: So they think glass is water, which, you know, that
13:29
Speaker 6: could happen to us in just the right conditions. But
13:32
Speaker 6: for them, it's so ingrained that that pattern means water.
13:36
Speaker 6: That they seem to not care that it's vertical.
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Speaker 3: Well, are these good insects, you know, like honeybees or
13:45
Speaker 3: bad insects like mosquitoes? So should I feel bad about
13:48
Speaker 3: this or not?
13:48
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah. So honeybees, luckily for them, they don't have
13:51
Speaker 6: larvae in the water. But this is happening to like bazillions.
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Speaker 6: That's like more than billions, I guess, is bazillions of mayflies.
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Speaker 6: And I think dragonflies do it some, but, you know,
14:03
Speaker 6: lots of insects are doing it. Mayflies maybe even do
14:06
Speaker 6: it more because they only, you know, have like a
14:08
Speaker 6: day or two to just mate. and lay their eggs
14:12
Speaker 6: in the water. So they're in a rush. And they've
14:14
Speaker 6: got this simple cue, that's water. And they're just, you know,
14:18
Speaker 6: photos of incredible numbers of mayflies clustered on windows and,
14:25
Speaker 6: you know, mismanaging the system, making an error.
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Speaker 1: Daniel, have you seen, slight tangent, have you seen mayflies before?
14:32
Speaker 1: Have you like been in an area when mayflies emerged?
14:34
Speaker 3: I don't even know what a mayfly is.
14:36
Speaker 1: Oh, man. Andy, do you want to go into a
14:38
Speaker 1: bit more detail about the amazingness that is mayflies?
14:40
Speaker 2: Tell us.
14:41
Speaker 4: Yeah.
14:42
Speaker 6: OK. I'm not an expert on that, though. I have
14:44
Speaker 6: seen other people's talks about it. But there are lakes
14:48
Speaker 6: where when they come out and they come out synchronously.
14:52
Speaker 6: which makes sense because if you're only going to be
14:54
Speaker 6: alive as an adult, they've been in an aquatic larva
14:58
Speaker 6: for like a year. Then they come out as adults
15:01
Speaker 6: and within a day or two, they're only built to
15:03
Speaker 6: live a short time. They have to mate, lay their eggs.
15:07
Speaker 6: And you don't want to do that like the day
15:10
Speaker 6: after everyone else does it. You know, you got to
15:12
Speaker 6: do it at the same time as everyone else if
15:14
Speaker 6: you're going to mate. And so they come out synchronously
15:17
Speaker 6: and In some of these lakes where it's so many
15:19
Speaker 6: of them that it's literally blinding, like you're walking through
15:23
Speaker 6: just a mass of insects. You've got to push them
15:27
Speaker 6: out of the way to just even walk around. Again,
15:30
Speaker 6: I don't know what the right word is. Bazillion seems
15:33
Speaker 6: like what I usually use. Mayflies. Again, that's something that
15:36
Speaker 6: I'm sure there are YouTubes online. You should check it out.
15:39
Speaker 6: It's amazing. I've never gone there, but to see it happen,
15:43
Speaker 6: because I guess you got to hit that day just right.
15:46
Speaker 6: You probably got to hang around for a little while,
15:48
Speaker 6: but I'd love to actually be there and experience it sometime.
15:54
Speaker 2: I hit that day.
15:55
Speaker 6: Oh my God.
15:56
Speaker 1: So I lived on the, along Lake Erie. And so
15:59
Speaker 1: I got my, you know, bachelor's and master's degree in Ohio.
16:02
Speaker 1: And I was on literally one of the worst dates
16:04
Speaker 1: of my life. I had just finished asking the guy, uh, Hey,
16:08
Speaker 1: why is it that you always talk about chemistry, but
16:10
Speaker 1: you've never mentioned your wife before? And his answer was
16:14
Speaker 1: because chemistry is more interesting.
16:16
Speaker 5: Okay.
16:17
Speaker 1: This was the last date. But right after he said that,
16:20
Speaker 1: I looked up and there was a cloud moving towards us.
16:24
Speaker 1: And I was like, that's like cloud is really low.
16:26
Speaker 1: What's going on? It was mayflies that like so many
16:30
Speaker 1: mayflies had emerged all at once. It was like a
16:32
Speaker 1: cloud moving towards us. And then the next day when
16:34
Speaker 1: I walked around the like, you know, the little city.
16:38
Speaker 2: You would slip.
16:39
Speaker 1: There were like so many of them that had died
16:42
Speaker 1: after like their big mating that the ground was like
16:45
Speaker 1: slippery and you had to like, you know, watch out
16:47
Speaker 1: because you'd fall over because there were all of these
16:49
Speaker 1: like dead mayflies that you would slip on that all
16:51
Speaker 1: died at once after they had finished mating. And anyway,
16:54
Speaker 1: maybe they laid all of their eggs on all of
16:55
Speaker 1: the windows and I had missed that because I was
16:58
Speaker 1: too focused on the bad date and trying not to trip.
17:01
Speaker 6: They also get fooled by somewhat wet asphalt. So they've
17:05
Speaker 6: also laid massive numbers of eggs on wet roads. So
17:10
Speaker 6: maybe that's what you were slipping on is.
17:12
Speaker 2: Is their eggs.
17:13
Speaker 6: Gross.
17:14
Speaker 2: And their bodies.
17:15
Speaker 4: Yeah.
17:15
Speaker 6: Apparently there are so many of them that they still
17:18
Speaker 6: are doing okay, I think, as opposed to the beetles
17:21
Speaker 6: even starting to decline as a species.
17:25
Speaker 2: Okay.
17:25
Speaker 3: So this concept of evolutionary traps is new to me,
17:28
Speaker 3: but it's fascinating. But I guess it means you can
17:30
Speaker 3: take advantage of... of a species and manipulate them into
17:33
Speaker 3: behavior you want. Like when we have like duck calls
17:37
Speaker 3: or like when I put a piece of cheese in
17:41
Speaker 3: a trap, is that like an evolutionary trap I'm taking
17:44
Speaker 3: advantage of?
17:45
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah. And it definitely is. I want to quickly
17:48
Speaker 6: note that there is a medium literature on humans falling
17:51
Speaker 6: into evolutionary traps where the You know, I kind of
17:55
Speaker 6: mentioned internet porn. People have actually sort of talked about that.
17:58
Speaker 6: But the main one that people talk about is people
18:02
Speaker 6: evolved likely often in places with relatively like not enough food.
18:09
Speaker 6: And so we've evolved a strong craving for, in fact,
18:14
Speaker 6: high calorie food, fatty, sugary foods. And obviously in the
18:19
Speaker 6: modern world, there's just a lot more of that available.
18:23
Speaker 6: And people have said we've become evolutionarily trapped into what
18:26
Speaker 6: at a species level is a global epidemic of overeating
18:30
Speaker 6: those foods with major health implications and so on. So
18:34
Speaker 6: if you want to talk about animals getting trapped and
18:37
Speaker 6: having major problems, it would be fair to say humans
18:41
Speaker 6: have fallen into that trap.
18:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.
18:43
Speaker 2: We're not as great as we think we are. We
18:45
Speaker 2: fall into traps too.
18:46
Speaker 4: Yeah.
18:47
Speaker 6: We make mistakes. Yes, we do.
18:49
Speaker 5: Yes.
18:49
Speaker 1: Daniel mentioned some ways that we can make use of
18:52
Speaker 1: these things, like we can do animal calls or whatever.
18:55
Speaker 1: Are there other really good examples of ways humans are
18:58
Speaker 1: purposefully setting evolutionary traps?
19:00
Speaker 6: Yeah, probably a real common one is literally using pheromone traps.
19:09
Speaker 6: Do you guys know about these pheromone traps?
19:11
Speaker 2: We use them for Japanese beetles.
19:13
Speaker 6: Exactly. And so there are many pest insects... that are
19:19
Speaker 6: crop pests and so on. And one way to catch
19:24
Speaker 6: them and get them out of the system is to
19:27
Speaker 6: take advantage of the fact that males, this is again,
19:30
Speaker 6: males desperate to mate with females thing. But for insects
19:36
Speaker 6: and for lots of species where the density of them
19:40
Speaker 6: is medium, but maybe not that high, one kind of
19:44
Speaker 6: what could be a problem is finding a mate. And
19:48
Speaker 6: then in some species, what males do is they go
19:50
Speaker 6: where they know the females are going to come to.
19:53
Speaker 6: Like if females are going to go to water to
19:56
Speaker 6: lay their eggs, then the males can just hang out
19:58
Speaker 6: at the water like dragonflies do that. But in other
20:02
Speaker 6: species like moths, it's not so clear cut where you should,
20:05
Speaker 6: you know, where are the females? You got to go
20:06
Speaker 6: find them. And so the system that has evolved is
20:10
Speaker 6: females release just a little bit, by our standards, a
20:13
Speaker 6: little bit of basically their perfume, a pheromone, a chemical
20:18
Speaker 6: that basically says, I'm a female and I'm ready to mate.
20:22
Speaker 6: And here I am. And so they release just, you know,
20:25
Speaker 6: I mean, how much? chemical could a moth release? And
20:28
Speaker 6: not a lot. It's a moth. And fruit flies do
20:31
Speaker 6: this also. So a little puff comes out. And the
20:35
Speaker 6: males find the females using that. And when you think
20:38
Speaker 6: of just how much puff of perfume could have come out,
20:41
Speaker 6: like we can't detect it. We don't detect it at all.
20:44
Speaker 6: But even if we could, it feels like maybe you
20:46
Speaker 6: could smell perfume from a potential mate from you know,
20:50
Speaker 6: maybe 20 yards away.
20:51
Speaker 4: Wow.
20:52
Speaker 6: But in fact, they can smell it from a typical
20:57
Speaker 6: thing for a moth apparently is hundreds of meters, and
21:00
Speaker 6: they actually have a world record of seven miles.
21:04
Speaker 4: What?
21:04
Speaker 3: What? That's insane.
21:06
Speaker 1: How did they figure that out? Did they release a
21:07
Speaker 1: moth seven miles away and it found the mate or?
21:10
Speaker 6: I think they do actually have marked males and they
21:14
Speaker 6: actually experimentally release, you know, an appropriate amount of the stuff.
21:18
Speaker 2: Okay.
21:19
Speaker 6: And, you know, so that's like if a female moth
21:21
Speaker 6: in Central Park in New York just put out a
21:23
Speaker 6: puff and now a male that's over in somewhere on
21:26
Speaker 6: Long Island, you know, in Brooklyn or Queens actually smelled it.
21:30
Speaker 6: And not only do they smell it, like I think
21:32
Speaker 6: there's no other system in nature that is as sensitive
21:36
Speaker 6: as their sensory organs for detecting that smell.
21:40
Speaker 2: Wow.
21:40
Speaker 6: One molecule and their brain's firing. Female. But then they
21:45
Speaker 6: actually have to follow a path to the female.
21:48
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
21:49
Speaker 6: So they have to actually do this sort of zigzagging
21:51
Speaker 6: and detecting and sort of recalibrating even what the wind
21:56
Speaker 6: is doing and so on and eventually find the female.
21:59
Speaker 6: So we take advantage of that by just putting out
22:02
Speaker 6: a little bit of the pheromone, probably even much more
22:05
Speaker 6: than one female moth would, and males come in. And
22:09
Speaker 6: you're doing that apparently to take care of Japanese beetle
22:12
Speaker 6: problem on your farm there.
22:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we accumulate them in this giant bag and
22:18
Speaker 1: then we kill them. But apparently you have to be
22:20
Speaker 1: sort of careful because you can make your yard a
22:23
Speaker 1: hotspot if you release a bunch of the pheromone Japanese
22:27
Speaker 1: beetles from many miles around will move.
22:30
Speaker 2: Towards your property.
22:31
Speaker 3: Party at Kelly's place.
22:33
Speaker 1: And now if your bag gets full, maybe you have
22:35
Speaker 1: more Japanese beetles than you would have had otherwise because
22:38
Speaker 1: they've all been attracted to your super hot pheromone spot.
22:42
Speaker 2: So you need to be a little careful.
22:44
Speaker 6: No, this is great. A mistake on top of a mistake.
22:47
Speaker 2: So many layers. Meta mistakes.
22:50
Speaker 1: One of the things I love about catching male moths
22:53
Speaker 1: on our property is that the females have... antenna that
22:57
Speaker 1: just kind of like you know they stick up they're
22:58
Speaker 1: like little sticks or whatever but the males have super
23:01
Speaker 1: feathery antennae because they have all this extra surface area
23:05
Speaker 1: so that they can catch those those pheromone molecules when
23:07
Speaker 1: they're in the air and uh it's an easy way
23:10
Speaker 1: to tell the difference between the males and the females
23:12
Speaker 1: no good point yeah okay so we are going to
23:16
Speaker 1: keep talking about mistakes when we get back from the
23:18
Speaker 1: break but we're going to transition to more subtle.
23:20
Speaker 2: Mistakes and so let's take a break.
23:23
Speaker 3: Captioned by Captionmax.
23:42
Speaker 2: And we are back.
23:43
Speaker 1: And having Andy on the show has definitely not been
23:46
Speaker 1: a mistake. And now we are moving to more subtle mistakes.
23:50
Speaker 1: And so, all right, let's take a sort of broader
23:52
Speaker 1: view of mistakes. Obviously, mating with a bottle when you
23:55
Speaker 1: meant to be mating with a, you know, real beetle
23:58
Speaker 1: partner is a mistake. But would something like getting eaten
24:02
Speaker 1: by a predator count as a mistake? And so, Andy,
24:04
Speaker 1: how do you think about the definition for mistakes?
24:08
Speaker 6: Yeah, that is a great question, because it seems obvious
24:11
Speaker 6: that Getting killed by a predator is not a good
24:14
Speaker 6: thing for you and should be viewed as a mistake.
24:18
Speaker 6: But the subtlety that behavioral ecologists use in thinking about
24:23
Speaker 6: it is it depends because there are just sort of
24:27
Speaker 6: layers of issues that could make it that this was
24:32
Speaker 6: still an outcome of you doing the best of. a
24:36
Speaker 6: complex situation that you live in. So a simple thing
24:38
Speaker 6: here would be just that you got to go out
24:40
Speaker 6: and find food. It might be for that matter, finding mates.
24:44
Speaker 6: And then often there is what we refer to as
24:46
Speaker 6: a risk reward trade-off where it's pretty common that where
24:51
Speaker 6: the food is, is also where there's danger and that
24:55
Speaker 6: you need to actually balance these as almost all animals
24:59
Speaker 6: are in that situation. And even the optimal balance is,
25:04
Speaker 6: does not mean that you don't take any risks. You
25:07
Speaker 6: have to go out and find food, and there are
25:09
Speaker 6: risks involved with that. And so it could even be
25:11
Speaker 6: that even when you do the optimal balancing of these
25:15
Speaker 6: risks and rewards, sometimes the risk does hit you, you
25:18
Speaker 6: get killed. But it was still the best you could do.
25:20
Speaker 6: But on the other hand, it is an error if
25:23
Speaker 6: you actually were too risk-taking. So what we try to
25:28
Speaker 6: do in the field is figure out what is the
25:30
Speaker 6: optimal level of balancing risk and rewards. And you could
25:36
Speaker 6: actually get killed even doing the best that you could
25:38
Speaker 6: possibly do, but you could also make a mistake and
25:41
Speaker 6: overdo it.
25:42
Speaker 3: So for example, if there are like lions at the waterhole,
25:45
Speaker 3: but you have to drink, then you have to take
25:48
Speaker 3: the risk and try to drink when there aren't lions
25:51
Speaker 3: or whatever, but sometimes you're going to get eaten. And
25:53
Speaker 3: you're saying that taking that risk is not a mistake,
25:56
Speaker 3: but taking it unnecessarily or being sloppy about it, that
26:00
Speaker 3: would be a mistake.
26:01
Speaker 6: Exactly. Cool. And I think a layer we put on
26:04
Speaker 6: top of that that also is part of how more
26:07
Speaker 6: sophisticated analyses of human behavior do, that economists do, is
26:11
Speaker 6: account for imperfect information. That to actually even optimally balance
26:18
Speaker 6: what you should do would imply that you kind of
26:20
Speaker 6: know everything you need to know about what's going on. Like,
26:23
Speaker 6: where is the predator? Where is the food? And is
26:26
Speaker 6: that good food? And so on. But there's a pretty
26:30
Speaker 6: good sense that we don't have perfect information. Animals don't
26:34
Speaker 6: have perfect information. And part of why you might make
26:37
Speaker 6: an error, but it's still an understandable error, is things
26:41
Speaker 6: are unpredictable. Often they're not totally unpredictable. They're partially unpredictable.
26:46
Speaker 6: And you're still doing the best you can in an
26:48
Speaker 6: unpredictable world. Like when you put an investment into whatever,
26:52
Speaker 6: which could be financial or or for that matter, a
26:55
Speaker 6: mate choice, or buying a used car, that you don't
27:01
Speaker 6: have perfect information, you're not predicting the future, because, you know,
27:05
Speaker 6: who can do that? And so you might make mistakes,
27:07
Speaker 6: and we still kind of call those mistakes, but they're
27:10
Speaker 6: still obviously understandable mistakes.
27:13
Speaker 1: So how much do we know about how much information
27:17
Speaker 1: animals are taking in. So like every once in a while,
27:20
Speaker 1: we'll get a question from a listener that will be like,
27:21
Speaker 1: you know, are animals like robots where they're just sort
27:24
Speaker 1: of responding to stimulus without thinking about it too much?
27:27
Speaker 1: Is a salamander that's living in an environment? And yes,
27:31
Speaker 1: I picked that in particular. Is a salamander that's living
27:34
Speaker 1: in an environment like taking in information about the risk
27:37
Speaker 1: and like how much information do animals take in and
27:40
Speaker 1: what are they doing with it?
27:41
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a fascinating field because it's almost like
27:44
Speaker 6: the Dr. Dolittle thing of trying to understand what an
27:48
Speaker 6: animal is thinking. What does it know? You know, people
27:51
Speaker 6: have also mentioned like, I don't actually know what you're thinking.
27:54
Speaker 6: And what do you know? Even the thing of, am
27:57
Speaker 6: I sure that you're an actual conscious thinking organism? But
28:02
Speaker 6: for animals... It's going to be a lot harder. We
28:04
Speaker 6: are not them. We don't understand them that well. But
28:06
Speaker 6: we can do various experiments where we often train them
28:11
Speaker 6: by having a certain set of information that we give them.
28:14
Speaker 6: And then we often trick them by then changing the
28:16
Speaker 6: world in some way. So it used to be red
28:19
Speaker 6: means where the food is. and see how long is
28:22
Speaker 6: it taking to figure that out. But then we change
28:23
Speaker 6: it to blue. And various experiments of that sort can
28:27
Speaker 6: give us a sense of how do they think about
28:30
Speaker 6: the world. And, you know, sometimes we figure out they
28:33
Speaker 6: don't know as much as you would think they might know.
28:36
Speaker 6: But sometimes they're unbelievably smarter than we would think.
28:40
Speaker 1: Can you give an example of a moment where you
28:41
Speaker 1: were like, wow, I didn't expect this animal to be
28:44
Speaker 1: as smart as it ended up being?
28:46
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think some of the classic stuff on that
28:48
Speaker 6: is even honeybees and their ability to find food. And
28:54
Speaker 6: this is actually outside of my expertise, so I won't
28:56
Speaker 6: know the example in any detail. But their ability to
28:59
Speaker 6: find food using some combination of memory and navigation skills,
29:05
Speaker 6: even when there are barriers, like there's a building in between.
29:10
Speaker 6: is actually apparently much better than humans. Oh, wow. And
29:14
Speaker 6: the general idea there is that, you know, animals have
29:16
Speaker 6: evolved to do what they need to do. And that
29:20
Speaker 6: it's still usually thought of as using relatively simple sensory
29:25
Speaker 6: and cognitive mechanisms. But there are things that we are
29:29
Speaker 6: not evolved to do so well, that other animals can
29:32
Speaker 6: do better than us. And actually, even like pigeons feeding
29:37
Speaker 6: on just little bits of food on the ground. I
29:39
Speaker 6: don't know if you've ever watched that or actually thrown
29:41
Speaker 6: out some bread for them, but they can actually spot
29:44
Speaker 6: the food that's just kind of out there, little tiny
29:48
Speaker 6: bits of crumbs better than we can.
29:51
Speaker 1: So was there like an experiment where they threw out
29:53
Speaker 1: breadcrumbs and they had people crawling around trying to get
29:56
Speaker 1: the crumbs and pigeons and the pigeons won?
29:58
Speaker 6: Well, the cute thing is that scientists like to be
30:01
Speaker 6: more tech than that. And so we actually trained pigeons
30:06
Speaker 6: to feed. And we've done this with various animals on
30:09
Speaker 6: little bits of things on a video screen. And they
30:13
Speaker 6: got to peck on that. And if they peck correctly,
30:15
Speaker 6: they get real food. And so what they do is
30:17
Speaker 6: they put little dots of things on backgrounds that actually
30:20
Speaker 6: are not that easy to see what's what. But I'm
30:23
Speaker 6: pretty sure pigeons are better than humans at detecting stuff
30:28
Speaker 6: on a screen.
30:29
Speaker 2: Cool.
30:29
Speaker 6: That's a reasonable simulation of food on the ground.
30:32
Speaker 3: And anybody who's had a cat knows that cats are
30:34
Speaker 3: very good at understanding patterns. I was hearing a story
30:38
Speaker 3: recently about a guy who used to feed his cat
30:40
Speaker 3: dinner at the end of the day when he closes
30:43
Speaker 3: his laptop. And the cat figured this out and just
30:45
Speaker 3: started closing the guy's laptop and expecting dinner.
30:51
Speaker 1: I'm lucky my gigantic cat didn't figure that out. He
30:54
Speaker 1: wasn't super smart. But anyway, so say you are out
30:59
Speaker 1: in nature and you see an animal get eaten. How
31:03
Speaker 1: do you start thinking about whether or not that was
31:06
Speaker 1: a mistake and what caused the mistake?
31:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, what do you do?
31:09
Speaker 1: So one of the questions from the listener was, how
31:11
Speaker 1: do you even know an animal has made a mistake
31:13
Speaker 1: when you see a behavior happening?
31:16
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, one interesting thing is,
31:20
Speaker 6: despite loads of work on predator-prey interactions, you know, lions
31:25
Speaker 6: and whatever, and pumas feeding on deer, actually seeing the
31:31
Speaker 6: actual predation events, even though out in the Serengeti, out
31:34
Speaker 6: in the open, we can see it more easily. But
31:38
Speaker 6: for lots of other animals, we don't actually even see
31:40
Speaker 6: the predation event much at all. Like we know hawks
31:43
Speaker 6: are catching little birds and catching mice, but there's actually
31:47
Speaker 6: apparently not much information on the actual event occurring. So
31:51
Speaker 6: we don't know as much about that as you would think.
31:54
Speaker 6: And even these days, we've got more and more animals
31:57
Speaker 6: wearing little devices that are kind of like our cell phone,
32:00
Speaker 6: you know, little GPS units and accelerometers. So we're getting
32:04
Speaker 6: a better picture of the more detailed elements of what's
32:06
Speaker 6: really going on when there is a predation event. But yeah,
32:09
Speaker 6: when I see an animal get killed in one of
32:12
Speaker 6: my experiments, I guess the first step we usually do
32:16
Speaker 6: is actually think about and get enough data on these
32:20
Speaker 6: risk-reward trade-offs. But then there are other cases where what
32:24
Speaker 6: we realize, even as biologists, is they have limited sensory systems.
32:29
Speaker 6: that if the animal can't see very well at all,
32:33
Speaker 6: and a predator that is fast and doesn't have much smell,
32:37
Speaker 6: isn't making any noise, comes out of nowhere and kills them,
32:40
Speaker 6: then we figure that animal didn't really make a mistake
32:43
Speaker 6: because it doesn't see very well, couldn't see that thing
32:46
Speaker 6: coming even though we could. Though it could have made
32:49
Speaker 6: a mistake in that it shouldn't have been out of
32:52
Speaker 6: its hiding place at that time of the day. So
32:55
Speaker 6: we think more about this sort of, There was this
32:58
Speaker 6: risk-reward trade-off. It came out to feed and it overdid
33:01
Speaker 6: that maybe. But part of the thing of where it
33:04
Speaker 6: just didn't have good sensory abilities is certainly part of
33:08
Speaker 6: what we think about. And more detailed analyses of insects
33:11
Speaker 6: have found that their eyes are often much smaller than
33:14
Speaker 6: our eyes. And they're totally different. They've got bazillions of
33:17
Speaker 6: little bits of eyes that all put together the image.
33:21
Speaker 6: But I guess analyses have found that their vision is
33:24
Speaker 6: much worse than you would think. What they see is
33:26
Speaker 6: a much blurrier picture, and that even seeing something from
33:30
Speaker 6: a few feet away is not something that many of
33:33
Speaker 6: them can do very well, the ones with little eyes,
33:35
Speaker 6: little insects. But they can see a shadow coming, so
33:38
Speaker 6: they can see your hand coming to try to slap them.
33:42
Speaker 6: But otherwise, their vision's not very good, so you wouldn't
33:44
Speaker 6: expect them to see stuff that a perfect animal would see.
33:49
Speaker 3: Can I ask a kind of a basic question? which
33:51
Speaker 3: is it seems to me like the categorization of like,
33:54
Speaker 3: this is a mistake, this is not a mistake, is
33:57
Speaker 3: a little bit subjective. People argue about it, whatever. Is
34:00
Speaker 3: it important that we get that boundary correct? Or is
34:04
Speaker 3: this just like what humans are curious about, that you're
34:07
Speaker 3: excited about these kinds of behavior because they personally tickle you?
34:11
Speaker 3: Or is it like actually an important scientific decision? What's
34:14
Speaker 3: a mistake and what isn't?
34:15
Speaker 6: Okay, yeah. No, I would say that actually there is
34:19
Speaker 6: no absolute consensus on is that a mistake. And it's
34:24
Speaker 6: not actually even a topic that these animal behaviors are
34:28
Speaker 6: talking about a lot, perhaps because it'd be hard to
34:32
Speaker 6: nail down. And have me say, no, you're wrong. This
34:37
Speaker 6: is a mistake and that's not a mistake.
34:38
Speaker 3: You're mistaken about mistakes.
34:40
Speaker 4: Right.
34:40
Speaker 6: Exactly, yeah. But what we do have is just that
34:44
Speaker 6: clearly animals do get killed. Animals do end up, you know,
34:48
Speaker 6: just going in directions and going to places where they
34:51
Speaker 6: really probably shouldn't have done that. And that it's actually
34:55
Speaker 6: a major source of thinking and insight into what the
35:00
Speaker 6: animals are really doing or plants for that matter.
35:02
Speaker 4: Right.
35:03
Speaker 6: That we build like simple models that say if they
35:05
Speaker 6: knew everything and they were perfect at balancing all that information,
35:09
Speaker 6: this is what they would do. But when we run
35:11
Speaker 6: the experiments, that's actually what they do. And the difference
35:16
Speaker 6: often gives us a hint as to what are the mistakes.
35:20
Speaker 6: But then we try to understand why did they do that?
35:23
Speaker 6: And that often lets us figure out part of the
35:26
Speaker 6: story on, oh, well, they didn't even have the sensory
35:29
Speaker 6: ability or no, they had this other risk reward tradeoff.
35:33
Speaker 6: Or a speed accuracy trade-off.
35:34
Speaker 3: I was just wondering if this could help understand like
35:37
Speaker 3: teenagers and why they make the decisions they do.
35:41
Speaker 6: Whoa. Yeah. Let's see. I guess that's a pretty big one.
35:45
Speaker 6: I don't know if I had the answer for that.
35:48
Speaker 6: My teenager, when he was still a teenager, did do
35:51
Speaker 6: stuff like didn't bother to go to school because he
35:56
Speaker 6: thought it would be more fun to go just sit
35:57
Speaker 6: and read a book. And at one point he, well,
36:02
Speaker 6: let me not go on and on about my teenager.
36:04
Speaker 3: Let's take another hypothetical teenager. You know, I see them,
36:07
Speaker 3: for example, riding bikes and they wear their helmet, but
36:11
Speaker 3: they don't clip the helmet because apparently that's cool to
36:14
Speaker 3: ride a bike with a helmet unclipped. And I just
36:17
Speaker 3: think like, that feels like a mistake to me.
36:20
Speaker 6: Yeah.
36:21
Speaker 3: But there must be some way in which their minds
36:23
Speaker 3: are like, this is the optimal teenage behavior, right? Their
36:26
Speaker 3: failure to base you and update something.
36:29
Speaker 6: Yeah. I don't think I have an immediate answer to why,
36:33
Speaker 6: but now it makes me think, oh my God, did
36:35
Speaker 6: I clip my helmet off this morning?
36:39
Speaker 1: I feel like something that has been hounded into me
36:43
Speaker 1: when I go to the middle school orientations is that
36:46
Speaker 1: at this age, their brains are not fully developed yet.
36:50
Speaker 2: And they don't fully.
36:51
Speaker 1: Develop until they're, what is it, 21, 24 is when
36:54
Speaker 1: the frontal lobe fully develops. It's some age that seems
36:57
Speaker 1: way too late to me. It should have happened sooner.
37:00
Speaker 1: So I wonder if limited cognitive ability explains some of that.
37:06
Speaker 1: I would like to at least blame some of my
37:08
Speaker 1: youthful indiscretions.
37:11
Speaker 2: On a brain that had not finished developing yet, personally.
37:15
Speaker 6: You know, that's this interesting thing that, of course, all
37:17
Speaker 6: animals have got limitations on their cognitive, you know, just
37:21
Speaker 6: how much brain power do they have.
37:23
Speaker 1: But.
37:25
Speaker 6: You know, the thing where we didn't develop enough brain
37:28
Speaker 6: power is not quite saying that that explains– you know,
37:32
Speaker 6: I think the fact that teenagers now do stuff that
37:35
Speaker 6: we think, what the hell, might have even been a
37:38
Speaker 6: clue to, are their brains not even developed enough yet?
37:42
Speaker 6: But the fact that parts of their brain are still developing–
37:46
Speaker 6: I wonder whether or not they actually were still smarter
37:49
Speaker 6: when it actually made a difference. Like hundreds of years ago,
37:54
Speaker 6: when if you made a mistake, you got killed, or
37:58
Speaker 6: the family didn't get enough food because you didn't do
38:00
Speaker 6: what you were supposed to do, that actually, even though
38:02
Speaker 6: their brains were not as developed as they will be
38:04
Speaker 6: when they're 25, which many years ago was way past
38:09
Speaker 6: the point when it mattered what you do. But maybe
38:12
Speaker 6: as a teenager nowadays, it doesn't matter as much all
38:15
Speaker 6: around in some sort of fitness terms. And that's a
38:19
Speaker 6: key part of this story.
38:21
Speaker 1: So like the age that development finishes is slipping because
38:25
Speaker 1: they're less likely to die one way or another?
38:27
Speaker 2: Is that what you're arguing?
38:29
Speaker 6: I think it's possible you don't actually need to have
38:31
Speaker 6: your brain develop fully to make good decisions. That that's
38:38
Speaker 6: a connection we have seen. We sort of blame it
38:41
Speaker 6: on that. But I think a lot of decisions that
38:43
Speaker 6: matter probably used to be done well, even before their
38:47
Speaker 6: brains were developed, that a two-year-old might not be able
38:50
Speaker 6: to figure out what to do yet, but... Actually, and
38:52
Speaker 6: this is totally out of my field of expertise, so
38:54
Speaker 6: now I'm really intrigued to go look this up, whether
38:57
Speaker 6: or not we have evidence that 12-year-olds used to be
39:00
Speaker 6: pretty smart.
39:01
Speaker 3: It sounds to me like you're saying that teenagers are
39:05
Speaker 3: kind of goofy at decision-making because they don't have real
39:08
Speaker 3: consequences and we protect them. And so basically, it's our
39:12
Speaker 3: fault if teenagers are being idiots.
39:16
Speaker 6: Yeah.
39:17
Speaker 3: Okay.
39:17
Speaker 6: Right. And, you know, we shape the ways they are idiots,
39:21
Speaker 6: but we basically do kind of let them get it.
39:23
Speaker 6: Or maybe it's not we, but just sort of nature and,
39:26
Speaker 6: problems and actual things with major consequences.
39:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
39:31
Speaker 2: Well, that lands.
39:33
Speaker 1: I think my kids don't experience probably nearly as many
39:36
Speaker 1: consequences as they ought to. So I'm contributing to that problem.
39:39
Speaker 1: But let's go ahead and take a break. And when
39:42
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to talk about how different
39:44
Speaker 1: personality types tend to make different kinds of mistakes.
39:47
Speaker 2: Thank you. OK, and we're back.
40:08
Speaker 1: And I ended up going to Andy's lab because I
40:11
Speaker 1: was interested in this concept of animal personalities. And that,
40:15
Speaker 1: you know, sort of set me on my life path.
40:17
Speaker 1: And so we'd have to talk about animal personalities today,
40:19
Speaker 1: of course. And so, Andy, what is what do we
40:22
Speaker 1: mean when we say animal personalities and like do fish
40:26
Speaker 1: have personalities?
40:28
Speaker 6: Aha. Okay. Turns out to be something that, yeah, my
40:32
Speaker 6: lab has studied quite a bit and Kelly was studying
40:35
Speaker 6: fish personalities and how they were possibly being manipulated by parasites.
40:42
Speaker 6: And so that's Kelly's entry point into an entire fascinating career.
40:47
Speaker 6: The idea of what is a personality for most of
40:50
Speaker 6: us comes out of thinking about human personalities and And
40:54
Speaker 6: for human personalities, there's a whole sense of sort of
40:56
Speaker 6: emotions and feelings and things that we think might be
41:00
Speaker 6: not what other animals are feeling and thinking emotionally. But
41:05
Speaker 6: the core idea there that the field of animal personalities
41:08
Speaker 6: is picked up on is just the idea that humans
41:11
Speaker 6: are each individual has some sort of consistency in who
41:15
Speaker 6: they are, that each one of us could do things
41:19
Speaker 6: that our friends would think that's unexpected. this is not
41:22
Speaker 6: who they are, that they have a sort of a
41:24
Speaker 6: type and that different individuals have different types. And so
41:28
Speaker 6: we apply that to other animals where the behaviors we
41:32
Speaker 6: look at in other animals is often not exactly what
41:35
Speaker 6: we look at in humans, but it's sort of like,
41:36
Speaker 6: you know, how bold are they or how aggressive are they?
41:39
Speaker 6: And that when we test any given individual animal and
41:43
Speaker 6: just see what it's up to, we find that indeed
41:47
Speaker 6: some cats are You know, more curious than others or
41:51
Speaker 6: more aggressive than others and dogs. And it's gone to
41:54
Speaker 6: fish and insects and spiders. And people have even speculated
41:58
Speaker 6: on whether or not plants have different personalities and how
42:01
Speaker 6: aggressively they kind of grow and even put out chemicals
42:06
Speaker 6: that try to harm other plants and so on.
42:08
Speaker 1: I love the idea of a plant that's like consistently
42:10
Speaker 1: kind of a jerk and is like releasing lots of
42:13
Speaker 1: chemicals all the time.
42:14
Speaker 6: Yeah.
42:15
Speaker 1: And so why, what is the current like framework for
42:18
Speaker 1: thinking about why personalities exist at all? Like, is it
42:21
Speaker 1: better to be consistent so people could be like, well,
42:24
Speaker 1: that's kind of weird that you did that? Or would
42:26
Speaker 1: it be better to like be able to adjust to
42:28
Speaker 1: every situation and respond perfectly?
42:31
Speaker 6: Yeah, that actually has not been nailed down yet. as
42:37
Speaker 6: to why be consistent. So something to clarify is it's
42:44
Speaker 6: not just why are some bold and some are fearful,
42:48
Speaker 6: let's say. We kind of have a sense that that's
42:50
Speaker 6: partially genetic, partially shaped by earlier experiences, and that it
42:55
Speaker 6: is connected to something about your hormones and your brain
42:58
Speaker 6: and actually even some evidence that it's connected to your microbiome.
43:03
Speaker 6: But this is the question of why even be consistent
43:06
Speaker 6: at all, right? And for that one, quite a lot
43:09
Speaker 6: of literature says, even though behavior in principle could go,
43:13
Speaker 6: you know, you could be more bold, less bold, you could,
43:15
Speaker 6: you know, nothing in physics stops you from being totally
43:18
Speaker 6: different tomorrow from, or even 10 seconds from now from
43:21
Speaker 6: what you were 10 seconds ago. But if your behavior
43:25
Speaker 6: is connected, often for sensible reasons, to something else that
43:30
Speaker 6: is more stable, maybe even somewhat permanent, but more stable anyway,
43:34
Speaker 6: that that kind of grounds your personality. And the things
43:39
Speaker 6: that are more stable have lots of possibilities. It could
43:42
Speaker 6: be just, you know, what condition are you, you know,
43:44
Speaker 6: how strong and vigorous and coordinated you are, but it
43:47
Speaker 6: could be your information state, you know, what skills do
43:50
Speaker 6: you have? That could be mental skills, like you're a
43:54
Speaker 6: bold type because you've learned over time how to be
43:57
Speaker 6: bold well. And so it makes sense for you to
44:00
Speaker 6: be bold. So you continue to be bold. So you
44:02
Speaker 6: get more practice of being bold. You are bold and
44:05
Speaker 6: you stay bold versus you are the fearful type. And
44:08
Speaker 6: being bold would be you'd be really bad at it.
44:11
Speaker 6: So your skill set kind of locks you into a personality.
44:17
Speaker 6: Another idea is being consistent is part of the social world.
44:23
Speaker 6: where it helps that when other individuals know who you are,
44:28
Speaker 6: they could manipulate you by realizing you're nice, so I'm
44:32
Speaker 6: going to take advantage of that. And that's a problem
44:34
Speaker 6: with being consistent, but it could be an advantage where
44:38
Speaker 6: they know you are nice, so they will be nice
44:40
Speaker 6: to you because they know you will be nice in
44:43
Speaker 6: return and a nice friendship develops that they can count on.
44:47
Speaker 6: But that probably doesn't apply for lots of other animals
44:49
Speaker 6: that still do have these consistencies.
44:52
Speaker 3: I mean, are we suggesting here that there is like
44:55
Speaker 3: an ideal personality, that having a range of personalities isn't
44:59
Speaker 3: sometimes better than having a single personality? I mean, clearly
45:03
Speaker 3: like diversity in thought and diversity in background is a
45:06
Speaker 3: benefit in many communities, right?
45:08
Speaker 6: Yeah.
45:08
Speaker 3: It's not like. There is one perfect personality. We should
45:11
Speaker 3: all be that person.
45:13
Speaker 6: Yeah. So there's a fair bit of ongoing study. There's
45:17
Speaker 6: a lot in humans. So the human personality world of
45:21
Speaker 6: study is quite large.
45:23
Speaker 5: Yeah.
45:24
Speaker 6: And there is a lot of work on how the
45:26
Speaker 6: mix of personalities in a group can have various benefits,
45:30
Speaker 6: though there are also studies on bad personalities. They literally
45:36
Speaker 6: sometimes use the term bad apples sometimes. in your social
45:39
Speaker 6: group that can mess up the social dynamics. So it's
45:43
Speaker 6: not like all personality variation is a good idea to
45:46
Speaker 6: have in your group. And, you know, we all know that.
45:49
Speaker 6: And so people are also studying this with animals where
45:51
Speaker 6: we put together collections of more bold and less bold
45:54
Speaker 6: and see if the more bold are helpful in kind
45:57
Speaker 6: of exploring and the group can follow the leaders that
46:01
Speaker 6: there wouldn't be any leaders if everyone was fearful. But
46:03
Speaker 6: the fearful ones are good at actually being more vigilant
46:06
Speaker 6: and ready. So for predator attacks, they're the first to
46:09
Speaker 6: respond and the group benefits both ways. And so people
46:12
Speaker 6: have been studying those sorts of things. In humans, there's
46:17
Speaker 6: a lot of personality study and it does turn out
46:20
Speaker 6: that different personalities have different strengths. And I think that's
46:23
Speaker 6: probably obvious. There is enough of a literature to suggest
46:27
Speaker 6: that one of the personality axes in what's called the
46:31
Speaker 6: big five in humans, is more closely related to successful
46:37
Speaker 6: careers and successful long-term happy marriages than other personality axes.
46:45
Speaker 6: So I'm going to ask you, after I tell you
46:47
Speaker 6: what the axes are, what you think is the key
46:50
Speaker 6: to happiness and success in life.
46:53
Speaker 3: Avoiding chemistry, that's the key.
46:55
Speaker 2: All right, what are the five axes?
46:58
Speaker 6: Okay, the five axes are acronymed as OCEAN. So the
47:03
Speaker 6: O is openness for sort of curious and exploratory. And
47:09
Speaker 6: the C is conscientiousness, being responsible and like on time.
47:15
Speaker 6: And the E is extroversion versus introversion. The A is agreeableness,
47:20
Speaker 6: sort of being nice. And for that matter, trusting. And
47:24
Speaker 6: the N is neuroticism, where you are actually relatively easily stressed.
47:30
Speaker 4: And.
47:31
Speaker 6: you know, maybe worry too much and so on. So
47:34
Speaker 6: what do you think is the key axis?
47:36
Speaker 1: I want it to be neuroticism because that would be
47:38
Speaker 1: good for me, but I'm sure it's not.
47:42
Speaker 2: You want to go first, Daniel?
47:43
Speaker 3: I guess I'm going to guess openness. That seems to
47:46
Speaker 3: me to be a crucial thing in marriages and friendships
47:49
Speaker 3: and maybe in professional relationships.
47:51
Speaker 1: I don't know.
47:52
Speaker 2: I was going to go with the O too.
47:54
Speaker 6: Yeah. So openness is not actually– it's more sort of
47:57
Speaker 6: a curiosity and maybe not so much willingness to accept
48:02
Speaker 6: what your partner is saying as willingness to try out
48:05
Speaker 6: new things and stuff like that. So openness– I'm pretty
48:08
Speaker 6: sure there's a literature on how that is often associated
48:12
Speaker 6: with creative, highly successful creative people in the arts or
48:16
Speaker 6: in the sciences. But actually the axis that boringly seems
48:21
Speaker 6: to be the best correlate is conscientiousness.
48:24
Speaker 3: Oh, wow.
48:25
Speaker 6: Conscientious people kind of get things done. In jobs and
48:29
Speaker 6: careers and actually, you know, none of this is like
48:33
Speaker 6: an absolute predictor.
48:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.
48:35
Speaker 6: And you don't even need both people to be conscientious, actually.
48:38
Speaker 6: If your partner is conscientious, it helps apparently keep you
48:42
Speaker 6: happier that they actually are on time and responsible and
48:45
Speaker 6: do the dishes and so on.
48:47
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's correlated with stress. Like one of
48:49
Speaker 1: you needs to remember that the taxes are due once
48:51
Speaker 1: a year. And if neither one of you remembers that,
48:55
Speaker 1: then you're.
48:55
Speaker 2: Both just going to be miserable all the time.
48:57
Speaker 1: And so I had conscientiousness third on my list. I
49:01
Speaker 1: thought maybe agreeable after like openness, but anyway, that, that
49:06
Speaker 1: makes sense.
49:06
Speaker 5: Yeah.
49:08
Speaker 6: And so in animals, our main things are how bold
49:12
Speaker 6: are they at basically in this risk-reward trade-off, kind of
49:15
Speaker 6: willing to go out there and take risks to get
49:18
Speaker 6: the food or to get the mate, but aggressiveness. And
49:23
Speaker 6: we also study exploratory tendencies, sort of willingness to just
49:27
Speaker 6: go out into places that we, as far as our
49:29
Speaker 6: experiment goes, we know they've never been there before, but
49:32
Speaker 6: also sociability. which is tendency to actually prefer to kind
49:38
Speaker 6: of hang out with other members of your species. That's
49:42
Speaker 6: just sort of the opening line on it. And there
49:45
Speaker 6: is a medium literature that each of these, if you're
49:48
Speaker 6: too much on that scale, it can be associated with
49:52
Speaker 6: making some even really bad mistakes.
49:55
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some of those. Can you give us
49:57
Speaker 1: some famous examples?
49:59
Speaker 6: You know, the boldness is almost obvious that if you're
50:01
Speaker 6: too bold... that this can get you killed and make
50:06
Speaker 6: it more likely that you get killed than otherwise. And
50:09
Speaker 6: that mainly comes up as something we can actually get
50:12
Speaker 6: the data on if, in fact, there are lots of danger.
50:15
Speaker 6: Being really bold in a safe world ends up being
50:19
Speaker 6: often a pretty good idea. Being too aggressive has been
50:23
Speaker 6: associated with picking fights with bigger opponents and starting fights unnecessarily.
50:29
Speaker 6: But also associated with– actually with sexual coercion in other species.
50:35
Speaker 6: Like beating up the female when it just wasn't necessary
50:39
Speaker 6: and even drove her away.
50:40
Speaker 3: When is it necessary? Sorry.
50:44
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess in some species, actually–
50:49
Speaker 6: You know, suppressing the female physically is just part of
50:52
Speaker 6: how things work.
50:53
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've seen ducks mating at a
50:55
Speaker 1: duck pond, Daniel. It can be unpleasant to watch. But yes,
50:59
Speaker 1: nature's rough.
51:00
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it turns out one of the species that
51:03
Speaker 6: I was studying, water striders, these bugs that skate over
51:06
Speaker 6: the surface of the water, there were males that were
51:09
Speaker 6: so geared up and aggressive about mating, but about everything,
51:13
Speaker 6: that they were busy attacking everything and trying to mate
51:16
Speaker 6: with it. You know, and that was actually quantifiably too
51:19
Speaker 6: aggressive because during the mating season, they drove everybody else away.
51:23
Speaker 6: So after a while, nobody was even in their general
51:27
Speaker 6: area anymore. They'd driven everyone away and they didn't get
51:30
Speaker 6: to mate because they were just too aggressive about it.
51:32
Speaker 1: Were these water striders that had been like collected from
51:35
Speaker 1: the wild? Or is this like the kind of thing
51:36
Speaker 1: you only see in the lab?
51:39
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah. No, these were wild animals.
51:42
Speaker 1: Wow.
51:42
Speaker 6: Too wild, apparently.
51:43
Speaker 4: Yeah.
51:44
Speaker 6: Or, you know, the example that I don't remember if
51:48
Speaker 6: you even overlap with this study, but the example of
51:51
Speaker 6: excess sexual cannibalism.
51:54
Speaker 2: I remember hearing a lot about this.
51:55
Speaker 4: Yep.
51:56
Speaker 6: Yeah. So when I've mentioned that in, you know, in
51:59
Speaker 6: talks to even like the public, people love those words,
52:03
Speaker 6: excess sexual cannibalism.
52:07
Speaker 3: It's a terrifying combination.
52:11
Speaker 6: Sexual cannibalism.
52:13
Speaker 1: How much sexual cannibalism is the right amount of sexual cannibalism?
52:17
Speaker 6: That is actually what the study was looking at is spiders.
52:22
Speaker 6: So we popularly known that black widow females will kill
52:27
Speaker 6: the male sometimes and eat it. This was a study
52:31
Speaker 6: in fishing spiders that are pretty big and kind of
52:35
Speaker 6: scary because they can run fast over land. They can
52:38
Speaker 6: run over water. They can go underwater and catch little
52:41
Speaker 6: fish underwater. And they actually do that by actually erecting
52:46
Speaker 6: like little hairs that are waterproof on their body that
52:49
Speaker 6: ends up coating them with a layer of oxygen. So
52:52
Speaker 6: when they go underwater, they can breathe out of this
52:54
Speaker 6: little bubble they've created around themselves.
52:56
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
52:56
Speaker 6: And stay underwater for like half an.
52:58
Speaker 4: Hour or more.
52:58
Speaker 6: Wow. But the females actually, during the mating season, will
53:03
Speaker 6: sit at the edge of some water, like a little pool,
53:06
Speaker 6: a pond. And males come in court. And males will
53:10
Speaker 6: sort of poke at the water and kind of signal
53:12
Speaker 6: by sending little waves over there that I'm a male
53:15
Speaker 6: and please don't attack me. But in fact, females basically
53:19
Speaker 6: have the choice that if they think this male is
53:21
Speaker 6: good enough, they might let him mate. And if he's
53:24
Speaker 6: below the bar, then might as well kill him and
53:27
Speaker 6: eat him and get a good meal out of it.
53:29
Speaker 1: Sure.
53:30
Speaker 6: And males are very careful in their courtship. But in fact, sometimes, obviously,
53:34
Speaker 6: sometimes they just get driven away. The female attacks and
53:37
Speaker 6: the male runs away. But other times he gets caught
53:39
Speaker 6: and eaten. And what the study documented, so it's not
53:43
Speaker 6: all bad doing it. It's you saying, here's my mate choice.
53:46
Speaker 6: You're not good enough. So I'm going to kill you
53:48
Speaker 6: and eat you instead. But in this species, the study
53:53
Speaker 6: found that a measurable proportion of the females were so
53:57
Speaker 6: geared up and set the bar so high, apparently, that
54:00
Speaker 6: They didn't mate with anybody, and so they didn't actually
54:03
Speaker 6: fertilize their eggs, and they ended up with zero fitness.
54:07
Speaker 6: And that was reasonable to call that excess sexual cannibalism. Instead,
54:12
Speaker 6: they drove away or killed and ate every male that
54:14
Speaker 6: they met.
54:15
Speaker 1: That's, yeah, I do remember hearing about that was Chadwick Johnson, right?
54:18
Speaker 1: I think he was right before me. Yeah, I remember
54:20
Speaker 1: thinking that was a crazy study. And we end up,
54:23
Speaker 1: we get a lot of questions about evolution and why
54:26
Speaker 1: we see certain behaviors. And so why, why, why can,
54:31
Speaker 1: why does that show up? Why is that a thing
54:33
Speaker 1: that exists when clearly it's a bad choice for the
54:35
Speaker 1: females to eat every partner who they come across?
54:38
Speaker 6: Yeah, what studies found was the same females that are
54:41
Speaker 6: too geared up to sexually cannibalize, set the bar too high,
54:46
Speaker 6: are also females that are just generally more aggressive. So
54:51
Speaker 6: they actually did get more food, grew bigger, made more eggs,
54:56
Speaker 6: and had all these benefits of being the aggressive type.
54:59
Speaker 6: They were also relatively bold, that after we scare them
55:02
Speaker 6: into hiding, they came out more quickly. So they were
55:04
Speaker 6: generally that type, and there were many advantages of being
55:07
Speaker 6: that type. as a spider. But they made this mistake.
55:13
Speaker 6: By the other hand, probably most of the very aggressive
55:17
Speaker 6: female fishing spiders did fine because they did meet somebody
55:21
Speaker 6: who was above the bar. And these didn't know that
55:26
Speaker 6: It turns out all the males that I meet are
55:28
Speaker 6: not good enough. And I probably should have made it
55:31
Speaker 6: with the last one, but I didn't know that was
55:33
Speaker 6: the last one I'll ever see. And, you know, the
55:36
Speaker 6: way I often put it is there are plenty of
55:38
Speaker 6: people who have set a high bar and are not
55:41
Speaker 6: currently paired up with anybody and maybe even kind of lonely.
55:46
Speaker 6: And they set the bar too high. And the main
55:49
Speaker 6: difference between them and the spiders is they probably didn't
55:51
Speaker 6: tend to actually kill and eat the partners that they rejected.
55:56
Speaker 4: Yeah.
55:57
Speaker 1: Well, there's also probably a lot of people out there
55:59
Speaker 1: who have rejected all their partners and they're.
56:01
Speaker 2: Super happy being on their own.
56:03
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, that's fair.
56:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, just a different environment.
56:06
Speaker 6: Yeah, I guess we didn't check whether or not any
56:08
Speaker 6: of those spiders were actually kind of happy after they
56:11
Speaker 6: had sat there with us.
56:12
Speaker 1: They had absolutely no regrets afterwards. They were like, this
56:15
Speaker 1: was all the right choice for me.
56:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
56:18
Speaker 6: The question of what can we tell if an animal
56:20
Speaker 6: is happy is actually a pretty interesting question that I
56:23
Speaker 6: don't have clear expertise on. But that's the animal welfare
56:27
Speaker 6: world is trying to figure out, are animals, you know, unhappy?
56:32
Speaker 6: Are they, you know, just not even like in health
56:36
Speaker 6: terms unhealthy? They're just are they just kind of like
56:39
Speaker 6: bored for that matter?
56:40
Speaker 4: Yeah.
56:41
Speaker 2: Pacing back and forth and not enjoying their lives.
56:43
Speaker 1: And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so we also had this
56:46
Speaker 1: question of do animals have free will? And, you know,
56:49
Speaker 1: I think Daniel and I will philosophically argue even if
56:52
Speaker 1: humans have free will and if physics has anything to
56:54
Speaker 1: say about that. And so I don't think there is
56:57
Speaker 1: an answer. But at the end of the day, you know, philosophically,
57:00
Speaker 1: what do you think? Do non-human animals have free will?
57:05
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll probably put it as a.
57:09
Speaker 6: It's as complicated... We might think it's less complicated. They're
57:14
Speaker 6: just little automatons. You poke them in this way and
57:17
Speaker 6: they'll do that. And the simplest animals... We've probably done
57:22
Speaker 6: enough work on their normal biology that it might be
57:24
Speaker 6: as simple as you poke them in this way and
57:26
Speaker 6: they do that. But lots of other animals have enough
57:31
Speaker 6: complexity in their overall system that they are quite flexible
57:37
Speaker 6: in what they're doing and much more just sort of
57:41
Speaker 6: flexible and context dependent on, I'm going to do this
57:44
Speaker 6: when you poke me, but it depends on this, this, that,
57:47
Speaker 6: and like a bazillion other things.
57:48
Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.
57:49
Speaker 6: That even some of these insects are actually pretty far
57:53
Speaker 6: along in that way. And so if we think that
57:57
Speaker 6: the fact that we are so context dependent, that there
58:00
Speaker 6: are many things that seem to affect how we do
58:04
Speaker 6: things to the point where it's so complicated that somewhere
58:07
Speaker 6: in there, maybe we're not at all like, poke me
58:11
Speaker 6: and I'll do this, that we actually have some Actually, philosophically,
58:16
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm backing myself into a corner of saying that,
58:19
Speaker 6: you know, when we are that complicated enough in context
58:23
Speaker 6: dependencies that we can't even figure out what the real
58:26
Speaker 6: context dependency is. Like there's too many interacting factors that
58:29
Speaker 6: somewhere in there emerges the possibility that we even have
58:32
Speaker 6: free will and that other animals do have quite a
58:35
Speaker 6: lot of that already. And that it's not out of
58:39
Speaker 6: the range that they also have something in there that's
58:42
Speaker 6: free will. They certainly do a lot of stuff that
58:43
Speaker 6: seems to be just kind of hanging around. not focused on.
58:48
Speaker 6: I am looking for food, get out of my way,
58:50
Speaker 6: that they do a lot of other wandering around.
58:53
Speaker 4: All right.
58:54
Speaker 1: We have had an hour of amazing conversation about mistakes.
58:58
Speaker 1: And so that is the end of the show for us.
59:01
Speaker 1: And Andy, it was so great having you on the show.
59:03
Speaker 2: Thank you.
59:04
Speaker 1: I hopefully will be able to have you come back
59:06
Speaker 1: on the show again. I gotta say it was really
59:08
Speaker 1: fun asking you why animals have animal personality and then
59:12
Speaker 1: remembering that you asked me that at my master's defense
59:15
Speaker 1: and I totally blew it and it was fun to
59:17
Speaker 1: get to ask you but you got the answer right
59:20
Speaker 1: and so I guess I guess it was a different
59:22
Speaker 1: experience for you than it was for me.
59:24
Speaker 3: Yeah Andy it's been a pleasure thank you very much thanks.
59:26
Speaker 5: For being on the show okay thanks much hey everyone
59:30
Speaker 5: Thanks for the thorough answer to my question. The idea
59:32
Speaker 5: of evolutionary traps is an interesting concept, though I am
59:35
Speaker 5: familiar with the idea of how humans are not really
59:38
Speaker 5: prepared for the modern food environment, so I really enjoyed
59:40
Speaker 5: that aspect. I also liked the segment on how even
59:44
Speaker 5: animals can be doing a risk-reward assessment, and sometimes the
59:47
Speaker 5: error is just taking on too much risk.
59:49
Speaker 4: It was a great episode, and I enjoyed listening. Thanks again.
59:58
Speaker 3: Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a
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