David Barrie in the land of the bogong moth. Bogong moths fly a thousand or more kilometers in their annual nocturnal migration from their breeding grounds in southeastern Australia to high, mountain caves in the Australian Alps. Like migratory birds, these moths rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to guide their routes. New discoveries indicate that the moths also use the alignment of the Milky Way to navigate. Photo by Eric Warrant.
It has been said that the Sahara desert ant, Cataglyphis fortis, is a navigational miracle. These tiny insects live in the barren salt pans of North Africa, where ground temperatures soar to 145 F — too hot for almost any animal to survive. They live underground and leave their nests at the hottest time of day to avoid predators and to forage for food (typically other insects that have died of exposure). To avoid being burned to a crisp themselves, the ants must be as efficient as possible in returning to their nest. How does the desert ant find its way back, sometimes over distances of 100 meters, via the fastest route? The answer, our guest, award-winning author David Barrie writes, is astounding and flat-out humbling. So too is the ingenuity of the scientists who study them. Here, he writes, is “a small insect capable of performing navigational feats that we humans can only manage with the help of instruments.”
Barrie with a bogong moth on his right thumb in the snowy mountains of New South Wales. “Discoveries about animal navigation can help us recognize what is at risk…” he writes. “Even if our own lives did not depend on the health and vitality of the planet we inhabit, the preservation of the almost infinitely complex web of life from which such wonders emerge is surely an ethical imperative … We must plot a new course.” Photo by Eric Warrant.Continue reading Ep. 21 – David Barrie on the wonders of animal navigation
“When I see people standing on the faces of cetaceans, what is it that they’re doing? We’re mastering,” Cowperthwaite says. “We’re trying to be bigger than and better than them. What does that say about us?”
The filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, did not set out to make a film that would force a national moral reckoning over how we keep whales in captivity, slash the profits of SeaWorld, and make her an unexpected enemy of a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s what happened. Cowperthwaite wasn’t a marine mammal activist before she made the documentary Blackfish. She was a mom who had taken her kids to SeaWorld, and she was a talented filmmaker, with over a dozen years of experience creating TV documentaries. She set out to tell the truth, and the truth — told by Cowperthwaite — proved to be, like the orcas themselves, complicated and powerful.
Blackfish is the story of a single 12,000-pound protagonist, a performing orca bull named Tilikum, who killed three people while in captivity. In tracing Tilikum’s narrative, from his violent capture in the wild as a two-year-old orca to his life as a highly feeling and intelligent animal becoming psychotic while living in what one interviewee calls “a bathtub,” Cowperthwaite reveals the orcas’ extraordinary nature, the horror of how we have treated them in captivity for so long without understanding or acknowledging the consequences, and the profound regret of trainers who once cared for Tilikum. In doing so, Cowperthwaite illuminated for the American public the profound disconnect between Sea World’s public image and the reality of what it means for humans to treat orcas this way.
“As a little kid, the thing you do when you go to [zoos] is knock on the glass,” Cowperthwaite says. “It’s the first thing you do. Even as an adult you have to stop your impulse to tap on the glass. It’s not that you want to see [the animal], it’s that you want it to see you. The idea that we will be acknowledged by something ‘out there’ is electrifying to us.”
Shot on a budget of just $76,000 and released in 2010, Blackfish has been viewed by more than 60 million people and has become one of the most impactful and successful documentary films of all time. Sea World’s stock price plummeted 60 percent following the film’s theatrical premiere, the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to provide $1 million toward a study on the effects of captivity on orcas, and celebrities, airlines, fast food giants and musical tour groups spoke against and dropped associations with Sea World. Eventually, the company responded to public pressure by announcing changes at its theme parks, including officially ending its orca breeding program and phasing out orca shows all together by the end of 2019. Cowperthwaite’s David slayed SeaWorld’s Goliath not with a sword, but with a story.
In eastern Greenland, Macfarlane descends a moulin, a smooth ice shaft cut into a glacier by meltwater. “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.
In 1994, three French cavers came upon the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. In his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey,the writer Robert Macfarlane describes the December day in which the trio descended into the chamber, passing stalactites that reached from floor to ceiling. Suddenly, the flashlight of one caver illuminated a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a mane speckled with blood. It was soon revealed that the gallery of Chauvet Cave, also known as the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, houses hundreds of animals — mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, bison, owls, stags, panthers and bears — painted over 30,000 years old. Many of the creatures are now extinct or nearing extinction.
Macfarlane writes: “The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack — to our knowledge — of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement — a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions — muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry — pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema.” Macfarlane quotes John Berger: “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”
In Andoya, Norway, Macfarlane visited off-shore oil fields with a local fisherman and activist, Bjornar Nicolaisen, as his friend and guide. “What Bjornar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia,’ the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ …” Macfarlane writes. “Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes unhomely around its inhabitants.” Photo by Bjornar Nicolaisen. Continue reading Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time
“If you think that other animals are stupid and exploitable and basically just available to us, typically what that has meant is that we exploit them more and more,” Anthony West says. “What this produces is a totally non-adapted, genuinely stupid creature.”
In his paper “A New Cosmogony,” the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem asked how it can be possible that from the vast cosmos, most likely filled with intelligent beings other than ourselves, we have so far heard nothing. The problem is more commonly known as the Fermi Paradox: given the high probability that other intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, why does it seem that none of them has ever tried to contact us?
In his blazingly original paper, “Radio Astronomy as Epistemology,” our guest, philosopher Anthony Weston, formulates a response to the Fermi Paradox. What we take to be the silence of the universe, he suggests, may teach us more about ourselves–and the challenges of receptivity to nonhuman minds in general–than about the prevalence of other life. “Suppose,” he writes, for the sake of argument, “that some extra terrestrial intelligence briefly scans our portion of their sky in search of ‘messages.’ Could they recognize our TV transmissions–for them just one fluctuating electromagnetic impulse among billions of others…–as a product of intelligent beings? … A TV signal is certainly not constructed to be easily decoded by anyone else. We cannot assume,” he continues, “that the ETIs are so unlucky as to have thought of television.”
“Scientists have been studying dolphins for fifty years,” Schnöller says. “We know they’re communicating in a sophisticated way but we don’t know how. We knew the same thing is going on with sperm whale, but we didn’t know how because no one was going in the water.”
In 2007, our guest, Fabrice Schnöller, was sailing off the coast of Mauritius, in East Africa, when he had an encounter that would change his life and open a new frontier in marine biology. As his boat neared land, huge pillars of steam burst out of the water and began surrounding the boat. Schnöller, an experienced diver, grabbed his snorkeling gear and jumped in to investigate. No sooner had he slipped under the water than he was overwhelmed by a crashing, creaking sound. Glancing downwards, he discovered a set of what appeared to be huge, dark monoliths accelerating towards him.
“I asked myself, ‘are these clicks only used to see the world, as sonar?’ or are they also used to communicate? If they do that, it would [involve] a completely different way of communicating.” Pictured here, Schnöller dives with a sperm whale. (Photo courtesy of Fabrice Schnöller)
Dr. Thomas Seeley as a graduate student in 1976. “[When] I started graduate school in 1974 to earn a PhD in biology, and I had to choose a topic for my thesis research, I decided to investigate what honey bees seek when they (not a beekeeper) choose their living quarters,” Dr. Seeley writes. “In doing so, I figured that I could apply to honey bees the ‘know- thy-animal-in-its-world’ rule that I was learning from my thesis adviser at Harvard, the German ethologist Bert Hölldobler. I also hoped that I could foster a new approach to studying honey bees, one in which we view them as amazing wild creatures that live in hollow trees in forests, not just as the ‘angels of agriculture’ that live in white boxes in apiaries.” (Photos courtesy of Thomas Seeley)
In the spring of 1963, when our guest, Dr. Thomas Seeley, was not quite 11 years old, he lived — as he still does today — in a wooded stream valley called Ellis Hollow, which is just east of Ithaca, New York. Dr. Seeley writes: “It is here I first observed a magnificent pileated woodpecker chiseling into a tree for carpenter ants, first watched a steely-eyed snapping turtle laying eggs deep in moist soil, and first showed my pet raccoon how to hunt for crayfish under rocks in little streams… One day, back in early June 1963, I was walking along Ellis Hollow Road, when I heard a loud buzzing sound and saw a bread-truck-size cloud of honey bees circling the ancient black walnut tree that stands beside the road about 100 meters east of my family’s house.” From a distance, Dr. Seeley watched as the swarm of bees took up residence in a cavity in the tree. Why, he wondered, did the bees choose that particular tree cavity for their home?
“If you are a beekeeper, then I hope [this book about] the astonishing natural history of honey bees has inspired you to consider pursuing bee-keeping in a way that focuses less on treating a honey bee colony as a honey factory or a pollination unit and more on admiring it as an amazing form of life,” Dr. Seeley writes in his new book, The Lives of Bees.“More than any other insect, the honey bee has the power to capture our hearts and connect us emotionally with the wonders and mysteries of nature. We love these beautifully social bees, we want them in our back- yards, and many of us cannot bear the idea of living without them.”
Humans have lived with bees for our entire existence as a species, but the vast majority of our studies have focused on bees in managed colonies, whether the clay cylinders people used to keep bees in the Iron Age or the white boxes of modern apiaries. But here, in the black walnut tree, were wild bees — living without human supervision or human understanding. How wild bees lived presented great mystery. Dr. Seeley writes, “I visited [the bee tree] often that summer and gradually overcame my fear of the bees, eventually learning that I could watch them close up (while perched atop a stepladder) without being stung. It was a time of wonder…. Watching that swarm take up residence in that tree on that day is the spark that ignited my long-standing passion to understand how honey bees live in the wild.”
Dr. Thomas Seeley on a “bee hunt,” an outdoor pursuit that was once widely practiced in North America and Europe but is little known today. In his new book The Lives of Bees, Dr. Seeley explains how he uses the craft of “bee hunting” to find the wild bees he studies.
That eleven-year-old in Ithaca grew to become the world’s leading authority on honey bees and a magnificently gifted writer about their worlds. For over four decades, Dr. Thomas Seeley has led research on honey bees’ behavior, social life and ecology. He writes about the science, natural history and surprising stories behind how honey bees live in the wild in his new book: The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild. Dr. Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology at Cornell University and is the author of four other books on honey bees.
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Seeley about the long historical relationship between humans and honey bees (which is as old as humanity itself), how honey bees live in the wild, why wild honey bees are thriving while managed bee colonies are collapsing at alarming rates, and how applying lessons learned from wild bees can improve our beekeeping.
The red arrow in this photo points to the entrance to a wild bee colony’s nest in Cornell University’s 1,700-hectare Arnot Teaching and Research Forest, where Dr. Seeley has conducted many of his studies of wild honey bees for decades.
In her forthcoming book Talking with Bears (Rocky Mountain Press, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells the story of the naturalist Charlie Russell. “If the search for truth was the engine of Charlie’s life, then it was love that provided the fuel,” she writes. (Photo courtesy of Gay Bradshaw)
Bears, like other carnivores, are typically cast as unthinking, emotionless killers. But the late naturalist Charlie Russell believed this tragic misperception hides the truth about who bears really are. Charlie’s life story changed how humans perceive grizzly bears. While other scientists and naturalists were studying bears from a distance, tranquilizing them and tagging them with trackers, Charlie chose to live — intimately and without harm — among bears for decades in far east Russia and in North America. His objectives were as different as his methods. “Biologists know a lot — how many calories a bear needs every day, their numbers, and so on. This is good information, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about who a bear is,” he told our guest. “I’ve never wanted to know about bears, I’ve only wanted to understand them.”
In her much anticipated new book,Talking with Bears (Rocky Mountain Books, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells Russell’s story, built on a decade of conversations about, and two lifetimes devoted to, searching for the truth of who animals really are. An internationally renowned expert on animal trauma and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, Dr. Bradshaw has spent her life exploring the minds, emotions and lives of animals, and pushing and inspiring science and society to better understand them.
“Very conservative neuroscience does document and does demonstrate that non-humans have the same brains and processes in their brains that govern our consciousness and our emotions and thoughts,” Dr. Bradshaw says. But “our society, our relationships and everything reify and strengthen and reinforce [seeing them as ‘other’].”
Her expertise includes the effects of violence on and recovery of elephants, grizzly bears, chimpanzees, orcas, parrots, and other animals suffering from human violence, both in the wild and in captivity. Early in her career, she made the ground-breaking discovery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in free-living elephants — which is the topic of her Pulitzer-Prize-nominated book Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity. Her most recent book, Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Beings Really Are, is an equally magnificent call for correcting how we think about and co-exist with carnivores. She is also the author of The Elephant Letters: The Story of Billy and Kani, which tells the stories of two African elephants, one wild and one captive, born on the same day. Dr. Bradshaw holds doctorates in both ecology and psychology and has taught, lectured and written widely about these fields in the U.S. and around the globe for over three decades. She is the founder and director of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence in Jacksonville, Oregon, where she lives and runs The Tortoise and The Hare Sanctuary.
“None of us on our best days could have envisioned how far we would have come at this point by now,” David Wolfson says. “Ringling Brothers: gone, Seaworld: changing, vegan food: everywhere, veganism: not so crazy anymore. Ten years ago it would be impossible to believe any of that stuff.”
In the United States today, 10 billion land animals are raised and killed for food annually. That’s over 19,000 animals per minute. About 1.1 million animals during the length of this podcast. Yet as far as federal law is concerned, farmed animals do not exist. They are not counted as “animals” under the country’s primary federal animal protection law, the Animal Welfare Act. Their status is finally changing at the state level, thanks to the remarkable work of our guest, corporate lawyer and activist David Wolfson.
“‘Change happens funeral by funeral,'” Wolfson says. “The idea that we persuade people who disagree with us to change our minds is not really how change happens. What happens is that people who have not [yet] formed their opinion change their minds as they grow up.”
In addition to his work leading Milbank globally, David teaches animal law and policy at NYU. He has previously taught animal law at Columbia, Harvard, Cardozo and Yale. He is the author of a number of seminal articles and chapters on animal protection law and represents pro-bono many of the leading animal protection groups, including The Humane Society of the United States, Mercy for Animals, and Farm Sanctuary. With colleagues, he pioneered the first successful farm animal protection ballot initiative in Florida in 2002–a strategy that he has helped to replicate in many other states since then.
“When you go to these elephants and you study their networks and you study their behavior, you find in elephants the same, I would argue, type of friendship that you find in us,” Dr. Christakis says. “I find that incredibly moving. If we can share this property with elephants for God’s sake, we can certainly share it with each other.” (Photo: Via Yale Human Nature Lab)
For decades, researchers have debated whether or not animals make friends. “Friends” — the taboo “f word” — was generally put in quotes if it was used at all. But if you study the social networks of elephants, whales and other animals, it is clear that they have friends just like we do, according to the renowned sociologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis. Friendship, like other societal characteristics, evolved independently and convergently across species. Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, Dr. Christakis is a leading Yale sociologist and physician known for his research on human social networks and biosocial science. In this episode, he speaks with us about the ancient origins and modern implications of our common animality and his remarkable new book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
In his new book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Dr. Christakis investigates the biological foundations of our impulse toward the good. “For too long,” he writes, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness, and cruelty. [But] our good deeds are not just the products of Enlightenment values. They have a deeper and prehistoric origin …. we come to this sort of goodness just as naturally as we come to our bloodier inclinations.”
“We spent most of our evolutionary history surrounded by other beings, not having conquered the earth, and with a very limited material culture,” Stern says. “There are tremendous emotional costs to becoming the only act in town, costs that I think we feel in how we relate to one another and how we think about who we are. One way to look at these draconian, absurd experiments [on animals] going on all over the world is to see them as a symptom of that.”
In March of 2016, a group of scientists reported a discoveryfrom the forests of central Japan. Writing in Nature Communications, Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki and his team announced that compositional syntax, the property of speech that enables it to “express limitless meanings,” was not unique to human languages. It had been observed in the vocal system of a bird. The paper sparked a flurry of tweets. It was also picked up the popular press, and for good reason. Given the putative role of syntax in expressing higher order thought in humans, its presence in an avian vocal system suggested that when a bird sings it is not simply naming a stimulus in its immediate environment but, rather, expressing a thought.
“It’s amazing, the parts of yourself you can reach [writing fiction],” Stern says. “It’s an endless surprise, and that’s part of what makes it frightening.”
