The Well-Connected Animal, with Lee Alan Dugatkin

and pre order it. If not, grab it on Thursday. It's a delightful read. And this was a delightful chat. I really enjoyed talking with Lee. Let's go ahead and jump right into the interview.

And so early on a lot of my work was experimental work with animals. I looked at the evolution of cooperation and the evolution of aggression and so on for many many years in my laboratory. And then about fifteen years ago or so, after I had been doing this for a couple of decades, I started getting much more interested in the history of the subjects that I was

working on. So it turns out that all of the people early on who were studying the evolution of cooperation were really fascinating characters in and of themselves, how they came about it, the environment, and the kind of social atmosphere in which they developed their ideas. And I began to become much more interested in that aspect of the work.

other affect one another in a real way. And again that could happen either directly by your interaction with Steve, or it could happen indirectly because you interact with Steve, and Steve interacts with Nancy, and so Nancy is affected by what you have done to Steve. And so generally it's this information flow and effect on others in your network. That's that for me, is the key to social networks.

You know, humans are in all sorts of social networks, Facebook and that sort of thing, but we're also embedded in them in almost everything we do in life. Are our families or one kind of social network? Are the people we work with or another, our friends or another, and so on, and they all overlap. Now, in terms of the history of the subject, I mean, anthropologists and particularly sociologists have been interested in this in humans for

quite some time. It was, you know, in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties where people first began to get serious about trying to understand the details of what we now would refer to as social networks how they work

in humans. And that involved a lot of mathematics in terms of understanding what it means if I interact with you, and you interact with somebody else and that somebody else is affected by me, and who is Who are the key individuals in the social network, the ones that have the most impact, and are there cliques where certain individuals

tend to interact with each other more? And that really began to flourish, I would say, in the nineteen forties and fifties in anthropology and sociology what we now refer to as a social network. I think that language became much more common in the late nineteen hundreds and into

the early two thousands. Now when it comes to studying social networks and non humans, we can trace it back quite far in the sense that even in Darwindnesday and a little bit later, so the late eighteen hundreds, people were beginning to think that the same kind of social tools that can be used to study human behavior can be used to study animal behavior. And so there are people who were basically arguing that animal societies were structured

very much like human societies. And even though the word social network wasn't around, the idea idea that we could study non humans like we study humans was there. It really began to flourish more again around the same time as early work in humans did. That is, in this case maybe the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties when primatologists people who study monkeys and apes, began to think in

terms of social networks. They began to realize that information was flowing through these non human groups, again mostly primates, in a way that was similar to the way it flows through human groups. And it really mattered in a group of chimpanzees, if one chimpanzee groomed the other and got bugs and parasites off it back, it really mattered who they groomed and who that individual groomed, and how

that kind of grooming social network developed. So it first started with non human primates, which kind of makes sense because there are closest evolutionary relatives, and then it began to branch out in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties when people began to study it in all sorts of organisms. In fact, the two classic studies early on were done in dolphins and in birds. So it's been around in a serious way in the animal behavior literature for on

the order of twenty to thirty years. Now.

Everywhere you look. Now that we've started to actually explore it in depth, we're finding it. And this is sort of what happens in animal behavior a lot. We tend to think of things initially as strictly human, and then when we begin to probe deeper, we see similar sorts of things in non humans, and once we begin to look, we begin to see it everywhere.

was still some of that. I interviewed a bunch of people for this book, and I had stories of people telling me that in the early two thousands, when they would put in grant applications to study social networks and non humans, they would get this kind of pushback that was, you know, it can't be this complex. You're you're, you're, you're making it more complex than it needs to be, and we're not ready to kind of give you money

to do this. But the more that people were able to do it on their own, the more that it became part and parcel of what people were looking for, the less less the pushback. I mean, you're going to get pushback from outside the scientific community, from people who who just want to live in a world of human exceptionalism that tends to fall apart eventually. I mean, you know, we used to think that was true about tool use in in in in animals, that you know, only humans

could use tools. Then we find that animals can use tools only humans have culture. Well no, it turns out animals have culture, only humans have social networks. No, in fact, non humans have social networks. So the pushback is nowadays not as bad as it used to be.

And in dolphins the tool is actually another living organism. So basically what they do is they put a sponge on the end of their their rostrum, their their their face where where where their mouth is. They they put this sponge over that when they're looking for food. And the reason that they do that is that oftentimes they're probing the bottom of the bay that's very rocky and gravelly and it and it hurts to pound down on there. And what they're doing is they're trying to find fish

that are hiding under the gravel and sand. So if you stick soft sponge on top of your mouth, then probing down there allows you much more flexibility and a lot less pain. And it turns out that dolphins are very particular about the sponges that they use. Once they find one that works, they keep it for a long time. So they'll go around probing on the bottom for food and if they find a fish that's hidden, they drop the sponge and they go and they catch that fish.

Then they come back and they look for the sponge they had before it because if it worked once, it's likely to work again. They pick it up, they put it back well, they put it back onto their face, and then they go looking for more things at sort of hiding in the bottom of the sand. And they learn this. They learn how to sponge from their mothers. So if you watch calves, dolphin calves, they're basically learning the technique of how to find a good sponge, put

it on, and hunt with it. And so the actual learning is through mother child interaction. It's not genetic, but it's rather they learn from their parents. Now in terms of the networking. It's actually complex. So basically, when they have these sponges on, they're hunting alone, and so you wouldn't think that this sponging had anything to do with

social networks, but in fact it does. And the reason that it does is dolphins often carry these sponges around when they're not hunting because, as I say, if they find a good sponge, they like it. Dolphins know who else are spongers. Not everyone's a sponger, only a small

subset of them actually use these two tools. And so what the researchers did was they started trying to understand whether or not individuals who did use these sponge tools hung out with each other when they actually weren't going around looking for food, and it turns out they were. There are these cliques of dolphins that use the sponge tools that hang out with each other when they're not

actually down on the bottom looking for food. And the reason we think they do this is if you hang out with other spongers, you're likely to get information about where the good places to sponge are, and so you network with them so that you can take these sponges and use them in the best possible locations, and the sponges are really great tools. The ganet man who ran this study, she and her colleagues actually thought, you know, we should see if sponging really works. It kind of

looks like it works when you watch the dolphins. They put sponges on their hands, and they went around under the water using the sponges on their hands the way dolphins use them on their snouts. And it turns out you really do kick up a lot of prey items

things to eat when you use these sponges. And so networking allowed us to kind of understand this cultural tool use in a much more general way, not just this dolphin does it or that dolphin does it, but that they hang around together if they do it, and they get all sorts of information from each other when they do this.

or power dynamics. You know, we've seen enough documentaries or engage with enough animal content. But communication and health don't always instantly come to mind, I imagine, not with like the number of species that are covered in the book.

And it turns out that again, social network thinking allows us to probe really deep into these communication networks that

exist in chimpanzees. And so, for example, there's this population of chimpanzees called the sun so population that's been studied for a very long time, and it turns out that when you look at the kind of gestural communication it goes on in these chimpanzees, you see something very different when individuals are interacting with friends in their social networks rather than with others who they don't know quite as well.

So if you look at communication between chimpanzees who know each other well and who have done things like cooperative hunting together, they tend to use visual communication. And this kind of visual communication. Other people have found that this kind of really lowers their heart rates and reduces the amount of stress that the chimpanzee itself feels. The individual who's the recipient of the communication calms down, they have a lower heart rate. This is when communication goes on

between friends. But when communication is going on between individuals who don't know each other as well, maybe haven't interacted as much in the past, then you tend to see a different kind of communication. You tend to see it being very physical and tactile, with them touching each other. And the researchers who did this work, Anna and Sam Roberts have argued that visual communication works perfectly well between friends because you know each other and there's a large

level of trust that's already in place. But when you don't know each other very well, visual communication doesn't work as well because it's not as clear, it's.

as the waggle dance. So here the bees are trying to communicate to one another where a new food source is. And the way that they typically do this is, if you've a new food source and you go back to the honeybee hive, you do this particular kind of dance known as the waggle dance, and the waggle dance basically involves moving very very quickly and shaking your abdomen as you're moving through the hive. And we know from prior work that this gives various types of information to others

in the hive about where the food source is. For example, how long you dance gives information about how far away the hive is, and there's a really nice translation. Every tenth of a second of dancing translates into the food being this many feet away from the hive. They also dance at a certain angle, and the angle they dance at, believe it or not, is the angle between the sun, the hive and where the food is. So they're communicating

all of this information through the dance. Now, in terms of working, it turns out that there were other ways to communicate information about new food sources. They can communicate this information when they transfer food from themselves to another individual in the hive. They can also communicate information about the food when they basically take their antennas and connect to the antennas of another bee in the hive. This

also gives them information. So what has been done in terms of the networking is people have asked, well, they can get this information in all these different ways, how do they do it? When do they decide if they're going to transfer the information by dancing or moving food from one mouth to another or touching antenna. So what researchers did with they set up this experiment where they had these hives that were placed out in a field and they knew where the hives were, and they controlled

how much food was going into the hives. And what they found was and so I should say, they marked all of their bees, thousands of them, so they knew who these bees were. And it turns out when you look at communication networks and the bees, you find this wonderfully complex system in place. If the sun is out there, they use dancing to communicate because they can transfer information about food using the angle of the sun compared to

the hive and the food source. But in London there are many many days when it's not sunny, and when it's not sunny, the communication network focuses on the transfer of food or the touching of antenna. So they have these kind of multiple communication networks and if one of them is down because the sun isn't out, then they

move to a second kind of communication network. And so what this tells us is that you know, you can have a brain the size of a honeybee or the brain the size of a chimpanzee, and you can still get complex communication networks in non humans. You were also asking about disease. I think for me this was one of the more surprising components of social networks and animals,

the way that they relate to disease transmission. And here what's kind of cool is that in almost all of the other behaviors that we're talking about, feeding and communication and cooperation, really it's individuals, animals and the network that are the key. But when cut when it comes to disease, what's basically going on is the disease is hitchhiking on

the social networks that the animals have in place. So the animals don't want to transfer disease from one individual to another, but the social networks are in place in terms of, for example, aggression and power struggles. What that means is diseases can use those networks to move from one individual to another. And I think my favorite example of this is this bizarre disease that has been studied

in Tasmanian devils. And if you can't picture a Tasmanian devil in your head, think back to the Bugs Bunny cartoons, because there was this wonderful caricature of a Tasmanian devil in there. And in Tasmanian devils they have this thing called facial tumor disease. And this is one of the very rare instances that we know of in which cancer

is transmitted from one individual to another. The sort of worst case scenario when we think about human cancers would be if we could actually transmit cancer from one individual to another. It doesn't happen, but in certain species, like Tasmanian devils, it does. And what happens is if they are infected with this cancer and they bite somebody really hard, right, they can transmit that cancer to the other individual. So here's where social networks come into play. Tasmanian Devils fight,

and they fight a lot, particularly during mating season. Males will fight intensely to gain access to mates. Sometimes when they fight, if you have facial tumor disease and you bite somebody else, you can transfer that disease to that individual. Again, the tumor is actually hitchhiking on the power show network structure that's in place in the Tasmanian Devils. And so it's not surprising, for example, that males transmit this disease

much more often to one another than females. And that's because males fight a lot during mating season, and it's only through bites that this disease can be transmitted. It's more complex, and what we're discovering are strange things like even though males are more likely to transmit the disease, females also get facial tumor disease, and they tend to

get it from males who are defending them. But in the context of courtships, sometimes it gets a little too rough and you get some biting and females can get infected with this disease. Now, what's weird is if you look at female Tasmanian Devils. Usually it's individuals are in the weakest health state that are most susceptible to getting disease. But in the Tasmanian Devils, it's the healthiest females who end up getting this cancerous disease by being bitten by males.

Why well, if you do a social network analysis, what you find is the healthiest females are the ones that the males prefer as mates. That means they're the ones that are most likely to get bitten even unintentionally by males during courtship. And so they the healthiest ones, end up being most likely to get the cancer, which is something that we can possibly have really understood without a social network analysis.

it's a really expensive way of living for a mammal. Right, so bats are mammals, and most mammals don't fly, but if you fly, it's energetically extremely expensive. And what people have found is if a vampire bat doesn't get a blood meal about every two days, it can starve to death. Now, what the vampire bats do is they have this social network in place where they transfer blood from one back

to the other. So if you take a camera and you go inside a vampire bat roost, what you will find sometimes is that one bat will come up to another bat and it'll start licking its face in a very kind of stereotypical manner. What that bat is doing is it's trying to get the other bat to regurgitate some of the blood that it has in its gut so that the solicitor, the one that's licking the face, can actually survive long enough to go out and get

its own blood meal. So it's hungry, it's starving. It goes up to a bat that has a really distended big gut, which means it has lots of blood. It licks its face trying to get that bat to regurgitate some of the blood to it. They will do that for one another, but only when they know that it's

a trustworthy partner. So if one bat goes up to another and tries to get blood regurgitated, the only way it'll work is if in the past that blood that bat who's hungry who needs the blood, has helped and given blood to the bat that it's now asking for blood from. So they're basically keeping track of who gave them blood in the past when they were hungry, and if that bat now comes up and tries to get some blood you to recurgitate some blood, then you're much

more likely to do it. So that's the basic structure that's in place in these vampire bat roots. Networking comes into place because it turns out again that it really matters not just sort of who gave you blood when you were hungry, but also who you go at with and look for blood when there's an nice night out there to go out and fly and look for an unsuspecting cow. So what researchers have done is they have placed little what are known as pit tags on these bats.

And so basically all a pit tag is is this little, tiny, one ounce less than one ounce device if they put on a bat, and it allows them to track every bat in the roost when the bat goes out and

looks for food. And the way it works is they have all of these receivers that have been placed out in the fields with the cows, and so you can know where the bats are because the little things they have on their bat are transmit are transmitting information to these receivers that are in the field, so you know everything about what the bats are doing. What's more, these little pit tags that the bats have on their back

talk to each other. That is, if two vampire bats come close enough to one another, these little pit tags light up and you know that vampire Bat one and vampire Bat two are on the back of a cow together sucking blood. Now, these things are not easy to set up, but after you have this system in place, you can test all sorts of incredible things, like is it the case that this kind of network of blood sharing that goes on inside the roost translates into who's

hanging out with who? When they're actually going out and looking for blood. That's a really hard thing to do because you never know when bats are going to leave their roost and they fly and they're really hard to follow. But when you have these tags and these transmitters and responders in the field, you can do this and lo and behold. Basically, the network of blood sharing that goes on inside the roost is a very good predictor of who will be found on the back of the same

cow sucking blood when they go out. They go out, The bats go out and start flying independently, but they find their favorite partners one way or another, and they end up tending to be found on the back of some unsuspecting count in the field. And we can only know how complex all of this is when we realize that it's all embedded in these social networks that the bats have built around blood sharing.

gather wherever they are. That's one thing. Then basically in other studies, what they do, what individuals do, is they attach the equivalent of kind of a GPS device to the back of an animal and they can track it then over really long distances. And my favorite example here

is white stork behavior. So white storks are these beautiful animals, right, but they migrate thousands of miles in the winter, and we know almost nothing about the details of their migration because it's really hard to follow birds that are flying a thousand feet above the ground and traveling thousands of miles. But if you put GPS transponders on their back, then

you have the possibility of doing this. So people who have worked with these white storks, Andrea Flack is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute, So she put all of she put these GPS trackers on the backs of these white storks, and she basically would follow them as

they were making them migration. As I'm making them migration, they kind of come down every night to rest, and she would kind of try and track them for hundreds of miles if she could on her own, and so she was trying to follow them, but at the same time, she could know what the birds were doing when they were a thousand feet above the ground because the GPS devices were so sensitive that she could know where a bird was in the flock as they were flying these

thousands of miles. And it turns out that what that allowed her to do was built a social network of the flock as it was flying these south thousands of miles. And what she found was that in this network, this travel network, there were certain white storks that were the leaders. They were the ones that were determining when the flock

would move this way or that way. So if you look at a bird of flocks, a flock of birds like geese, you can tell there are certain leaders that are the ones that are determining the movement of the flock. But you can't do that with white storks when they're that far above the ground unless you have these GPS devices. So there are these leaders and followers in the white stalk travel networks, and it really matters. The leaders are

very very good at finding up drafts. So when you're flying as a bird, what you want is to expend as little energy as you can, and there are these updrafts, these winds that come that allow you to fly at

very low energy levels. The leaders are tremendously good at finding these, and in fact, what they were able to do with the researcher were able to do was demonstrate not just that there were leaders and followers in these flocks, but that the leaders were actually able to migrate further than the followers because they were so good at finding these updrafts. So it really mattered who was a leader and a follower in these networks. And this kind of

study would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. I mean, without the technology, you simply cannot do this sort of thing. You can move from flying one thousand meters above the ground to swimming many many feet below the water and find the same thing. And there's this wonderful study done on manta rays in the South Pacific where they've done exactly this. They've tagged them so they can study what

the manta rays are doing. And in addition to that, they fly these drones over groups of mantar rays that are swimming close to the water surface. The drones then videotape the interactions between the manta rays. And the manta rays have these sort of very unique color and patterns that allow the researchers to know who's who. So you can study them by the drones watching them from above, and the little pit tags and various other GPS like

devices under the water. They'll let you know where they are all the time, which means you can build social networks you can look at In the case of the manta rays, they look at who's a key hub in a social network. So a key hub is an individual through which a lot of information travels. So if you think about Facebook, for example, key hubs are like public figures where if you want to sort of track the

way that information flows, these individuals really matter. Well, it turns out in manta rays there are key hubs as well, individuals through which information travels. In this case, it turns out that juvenile manta rays are the hubs in social networks associated with feeding. They're the ones that are the key to understanding how individuals swim around looking for food underwater. Again, without the technology, these are just pipe dreams, but now

they are going on. All these kind of studies are going on all the time in non humens.

You know, obviously the book is primarily about what we're learning about these non human animals and their social networks. But do you think to any degree you were able to like turn some of these revelations around to better understand like what human social networks are? You have only just to remind us that we're not special.

do this sort of thing. But let me give you just one example that I think helps in terms of what we might learn. So there's this great study that was done on Reese's macaque monkeys and their social networks on this little island in Puerto Rico. And I won't get into the details of the social network study per se, but basically the thing about this study was that they had been studying these macaques on the island for a very long time. They knew a lot about their social networks.

Then Hurricane Maria came through and absolutely devastated the island where these mecacus lived. And obviously it also decimated Puerto Rico and had all sorts of impacts on our own species, but it basically destroyed the island that they lived on, the mecacs lived on, and what that allowed the researchers to do was study how social networks respond to disasters. This kind of study was also done in in mice, how they respond to catastrophic events, social networks respond to

catastrophic events. I think that the more information we get that on that from non humans, the more we might be able to understand ways that we might expect social networks to respond to natural disasters in our own species.

One thing that I think studies and animal behavior allow us to do is this, If really your primary interest, and it's perfectly reasonable, would be social networks and non humans, and you're not all that interested in social networks and non humans, here's a reason you might want to rethink that. If you think about this at the species level, we have a species count of one if we only focus

on humans. But if these social networks are as complex as they appear to be in non humans, that means that we have this treasure chest of information about how social networks work. How does a what does it mean to be a hub in a social network? How much does it matter what your friends do versus what your friends of friends do. It turns out friends of friends really matter not in non human social networks. How do

these things work? At a most general level, we're if we only think about humans, our sample sizes one species. But if we think about it in dolphins and humpback whales and and manter rays and honey bees and chimpanzees and so many other species, then all of a sudden, maybe we can pick up some patterns about social networks that we wouldn't have picked up otherwise, and so I think that that's potentially a very powerful implication of studying this in non humans.

idea called the degeneration hypothesis. And what this natural historian said was that all life in the New World, particularly in America, was degenerate compared to life other places, that all the animals in in the United States or even before that, the colonies were weak, feeble, and diminished compared to species in other places in the world, and Jefferson became obsessed in demonstrating to Count Buffon why he was wrong.

In fact, the longest chapter in the book, the only book that Jefferson ever wrote, The Notes on the State of Virginia, is all about proving how wrong this degeneracy hypothesis is. And one of the key pieces of information that he wanted Buffon to see was our moose, which was it's massive right. So Jefferson wanted to send Buffon a giant moose to show him how wrong he was about this theory of American degeneracy. And so he spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort getting this moose

and then shipping it over to Buffon. And so that's where the moose in the title comes from.

Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing this episode and if you would like to get in touch with Joe or myself, if you have suggestions for future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, If you have interview suggestions you'd like us to consider, write and we would love to hear from you. You can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.