Maddalena Bearzi & Craig B. Stanford
Harvard University Press
I found this short and delightful book by chance in a bookshop of Doetinchem (The Netherlands) while I was looking for a present to carry back after the exchange trip some students of my highschool, a working mate and me made on October 2008. Doetinchem is small town in the eastern province of Gelderland and even so it is easy to find books in english in any of its bookshops (like in Spain, LOL).
This is a quick reading book with a very attractive topic. Maybe it is even too easy to read for anyone who has previously read something else on these intelligent creatures, not my case, so I did appreciate its light writting style and content. The book is written by two wellknown scholars, the cetacean researcher Maddalena Bearzi and the primatologist Craig B. Stanford, and here lies its worst flaw: sometimes I have the feeling of being reading two different books in one, with only few transition paragrahs among both stories.
The subtitle of the book took my attention from the begining: what could have in commmon these two types of mammals, apes and dolphins? It is wellknown that both of them have great brains, but the enviroments they live in are completely different: one live in deep rain forests and the other one in the open seas. The adaptation to such an opposite sourrinding creates big changes in brain structure because both of them use it for different purposes: apes are visual animals, while cetaceans main sense is hearing: they use echolocalitation as bats to find preys, to recognize each other, etc. However both authors show us the intriguing similarities these smart animals share: both use tools (some chimpanzees use small branches to get out termites and there have been seen some dolphins females wearing a sponge to protect their beak while they are pursuing preys on the sea floor), the usage of those tools is not an inborn behaviour, they have to learn it and this knowledge is a cultural item: it is not share among all the members of the same species, but only by the gropus that live in the same region; both of them have sophisticated means of communication, are able to imitate each other and are shelfaware. But why are both of them so close? What do they use their great brains for? It is still not well understood, but most researchers think that the main evolutionary benefit of intelligence is to be able to cope with complex social relations. In large social groups, each individual must remember the network of alliances, rivalries, debts and credits that exist among group members. Both, great apes and cetaceans, males bond in tight cooperative alliances to harass females, to hunt or, in the case of chimpanzees, to get political support. In the ape's world, as in ours, size does not matter as much as smarts, and male chimpanzees do not rise in rank by beeing physically big or brutish, but crrying favor with the right group members. A male chimpanzee will flip-flop his allegiance from day to day, depending on how the situation of the moment fits his agenda in life.
Both, apes and cetaceans, are capable of deception and manipulation and they use to lie as a means to get benefits in their complex social groups:
- one vervet monkey gave a predator alarm call as the group fed in a desired fruit tree; as other group members fled from the "predator", the call-giver could feed aggresively in their absence.
- a low-raking chimpanzee male wanted to mated with a desired female, so he made a charging display in front of the alpha male; this was taken as an act of insubordination and the alpha male launched into his own display while the low-ranking one furtively made his way back to a forest clearing and mate the female.
- a dolphin female was trained to bring objects to her trainer in exchange for a reward; in one session, at the trainer's request, she arrived at the surface with a small pice of paper ready to claim her reward; shortly thereafter, she brought another piece to exchange for a second fish; then a third, and a fourth, and so on; always small pieces and always one at a time; after a while the trainer made a close inspection of the pool and discovered a large paper bag stuck in one of the underwater grates, he gave the dolphin the command to retrieve it and she did in its entirety.
At the end of the book both authors survey the factor making dolphins and apes endangered species, and they make a plea for conservating the ecosystems in which they live because the beautiful minds of these creatures are a terrible thing to waste.
This is a quick reading book with a very attractive topic. Maybe it is even too easy to read for anyone who has previously read something else on these intelligent creatures, not my case, so I did appreciate its light writting style and content. The book is written by two wellknown scholars, the cetacean researcher Maddalena Bearzi and the primatologist Craig B. Stanford, and here lies its worst flaw: sometimes I have the feeling of being reading two different books in one, with only few transition paragrahs among both stories.
The subtitle of the book took my attention from the begining: what could have in commmon these two types of mammals, apes and dolphins? It is wellknown that both of them have great brains, but the enviroments they live in are completely different: one live in deep rain forests and the other one in the open seas. The adaptation to such an opposite sourrinding creates big changes in brain structure because both of them use it for different purposes: apes are visual animals, while cetaceans main sense is hearing: they use echolocalitation as bats to find preys, to recognize each other, etc. However both authors show us the intriguing similarities these smart animals share: both use tools (some chimpanzees use small branches to get out termites and there have been seen some dolphins females wearing a sponge to protect their beak while they are pursuing preys on the sea floor), the usage of those tools is not an inborn behaviour, they have to learn it and this knowledge is a cultural item: it is not share among all the members of the same species, but only by the gropus that live in the same region; both of them have sophisticated means of communication, are able to imitate each other and are shelfaware. But why are both of them so close? What do they use their great brains for? It is still not well understood, but most researchers think that the main evolutionary benefit of intelligence is to be able to cope with complex social relations. In large social groups, each individual must remember the network of alliances, rivalries, debts and credits that exist among group members. Both, great apes and cetaceans, males bond in tight cooperative alliances to harass females, to hunt or, in the case of chimpanzees, to get political support. In the ape's world, as in ours, size does not matter as much as smarts, and male chimpanzees do not rise in rank by beeing physically big or brutish, but crrying favor with the right group members. A male chimpanzee will flip-flop his allegiance from day to day, depending on how the situation of the moment fits his agenda in life.
Both, apes and cetaceans, are capable of deception and manipulation and they use to lie as a means to get benefits in their complex social groups:
- one vervet monkey gave a predator alarm call as the group fed in a desired fruit tree; as other group members fled from the "predator", the call-giver could feed aggresively in their absence.
- a low-raking chimpanzee male wanted to mated with a desired female, so he made a charging display in front of the alpha male; this was taken as an act of insubordination and the alpha male launched into his own display while the low-ranking one furtively made his way back to a forest clearing and mate the female.
- a dolphin female was trained to bring objects to her trainer in exchange for a reward; in one session, at the trainer's request, she arrived at the surface with a small pice of paper ready to claim her reward; shortly thereafter, she brought another piece to exchange for a second fish; then a third, and a fourth, and so on; always small pieces and always one at a time; after a while the trainer made a close inspection of the pool and discovered a large paper bag stuck in one of the underwater grates, he gave the dolphin the command to retrieve it and she did in its entirety.
At the end of the book both authors survey the factor making dolphins and apes endangered species, and they make a plea for conservating the ecosystems in which they live because the beautiful minds of these creatures are a terrible thing to waste.
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