There was a time when it all seemed so simple, the behavior of we humans was based on reason and moral judgment while that of the animals was purely based on instinct, a rather egotistic point of view to be sure. In fact, ever since we humans began to actually look at the way animals do behave, we’ve been surprised at how often animal behavior resembles our own.
Many animals use tools! Many communicate with each other using a variety of methods! Teamwork among animals is more extensive and complex than we ever imagined! Animals also engage in bad behavior, like stealing from each other, committing murder, even going to war! In many ways the behavior of animals differs in degree, not in kind from human behavior.
Take intoxication for example, surely the drinking of alcoholic beverages is an activity that didn’t exist until we humans began fermenting grapes or grains or, let’s face it we’ll ferment any food with enough sugar in it. Well actually no, fermentation is a very natural process, a process that just happens to overripe fruits and grains as the yeast on their skins begins to convert sugar to alcohol.
And there have been numerous observations by naturalists of fruit eating animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and then acting inebriated. In fact many overripe fruits can have an alcohol content of 1-2% by volume and some, like the palm fruit in Panama, have been found to have an alcohol content as high as 10%. Also most fruit eating animals, like monkeys and bats are rather small so it takes less alcohol to get a spider monkey drunk than an adult human.
Still most naturalists assumed that drunkenness in animals was just an accident, not an actual behavior. That assumption is now being challenged by a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. While the paper accepts that drunkenness has its downside, it is certainly more difficult to avoid a predator’s attack if you are inebriated than if you are sober, there are still a lot of benefits to consuming alcoholic fruit.
For one thing it is packed with calories, the thing all living creatures need most, and the strong smell of alcohol may serve to lead the animals to the fruit. Alcohol can also have medicinal benefits, it kills many viruses and bacteria, that’s why we use alcohol wipes to disinfect. Finally the paper speculates that, as with we humans, the more social of fruit eating animals may actually use over ripe fruit, and its alcohol as a relaxant, an aid in socializing.
The paper concludes by stating that more research is needed before anything definite can be said. Alcohol occurs naturally in many ecosystems and if evolution has taught us anything it is that living creatures will find some way to make use of any resource.
Another way that we humans thought that we were unique was in our ability to organize and coordinate really large scale hunting efforts. O’k there are wolf packs and lion prides but organizing really big kills, like the cattle drives of the old wild west or even just the harvesting of tuna or some other schooling fish, well that takes human ingenuity and cooperation.
Or maybe not, in a recently observed episode off the coast of Norway researchers using the latest acoustic surveying techniques watched in awe as the largest predation event ever recorded took place. It began as a huge swarm of capelin; an anchovy sized fish that lives in cold artic waters, migrated southward to the Norwegian coast in order to lay their eggs. The oceanographers who witnessed the event estimated from the size of the swarm and its density that there were more than 20 million fish gathered in a school spread over tens of kilometers in area, that number is still only a small fraction of all the capelin in the Artic. Heading south the capelin ran straight into a large school of their most dangerous predator, cod.
Over the course of just a few hours of continuous feeding the cod consumed more than half of the capelin, over 10 million individual fish, making this the largest predation incident ever studied. It’s worth remembering however, that this slaughter was only completely observed because of the new technology and the resources necessary to cover the entire occurrence, so it probably won’t be long before even bigger battles are observed.
Just a few more of the ways that other the behavior of other creatures resembles actions that we thought were unique of our species.