Are You My Mother?: How Animal Imprinting Works

was a scene. That's called animal imprinting. I'm sure we've talked about this before, but is it a scene or end scene? Really? Joe ran dazzo to weigh in on this one, but now we don't it's and scene. Um sure comment. I'm positive we have talked about this, and I know we have, but I don't remember the outcome. Well, it was me saying it's a scene for sure, and you're going, sure, that's why we're talking about it again. Okay, it's antsen. So animal imprinting, it's a thing. It is.

It's uh in the strictest definition, it is only for birds. Yeah, and specific type of birds called precocial birds. Yeah, they're very precocial exactly. That means that they hatch out the egg and look around and start waddling, and they're like, oh, look, this is water. I think I have this weird and they urge to get in there and swim, and oh, here's a little bit of duck food. I think I'll eat some of that because I have a drive to

do that. But what is that wonderful smell? Oh? I think this might be the duck that gave birth to me or laid me as an egg, and now I'm going to imprint myself on you. It's either that or it's a grown human man. Yeah, it can't be anything, especially with ducks, but especially specifically. Precocial birds have a process where they form an attachment to a parent, and it's been shown over time that that parent doesn't necessarily have to be a biological parent. It can not even

be in the same species. It doesn't even have to be a living thing. No, it can be a toy train, yes, it can be, or a pair of gum boot yeah. Um. And humans have known for a very long time about this process. It just wasn't until like the nineteen hundreds that we started to get a um a real grip

on it. But like apparently in UH, there's a Roman treatise around I guess, like the thirties, in the real thirties, I mean like thirty c E. Not no, like thirty not the swing in thirties, UM, and it's it basically says like, if you want to train some wild ducks, go get yourself some duck eggs, put them under a hen that you have domesticated, and that handle raised those ducks is their own and they'll be unwild in UH.

In rural China, back in the day, rice farmers would imprint new ducks with a stick so they could then use that stick to guide them out to their rice population where they would eat snails right the rice population. So they literally following this stick around like it's their parents. So they would lead them to UH to help to work for them basically, And the whole thing is is the stick was what they were introduced to at a very specific time in their life, usually within a couple

of hours, and they said, stick, you're my mom. I'm gonna follow you everywhere. When you're not around, we're gonna freak out. It's so weird. Yeah, it's and and ducks are a really great um. They're like a classic example of imprinting because they're very emotional creatures um, And they form very strong attachments, and they're very social creatures. So either they're all those things because they form very strong imprinted bonds, or they form very strong imprinted bonds because

of all those things. Yeah, well, I think it's a natural selection at work. So that's the that's the at the heart of this whole thing is you know, is it nature versus nurture? And imprinting is a really great natural experiment to investigate the whole thing. And what it seems like we found is that it's both that apparently, especially specifically precocial ducks are hardwired to go seek out and form an attachment, but depending on what they encounter

at the time e g. Their environment, also known as nurture. UM, they can form that attachment with a stick or a toy train or a Nazi. It's very cute actually when you think about it, you know, they're just like, love me whatever, hand puppet. What was that Dr. Seuss book? I think it was Love Me hand Puppet? I think it was Are you My Mother? Like Horton makes an appearance in it. It's like some animals walking around like are you my mother? Yeah, it is pretty said, but

it's it's basically a doctor who's book about imprinting. Oh cool, well you mentioned Nazis, so to me, that's my que Two segue into the life of Conrad with A. K. Lawrence, who was Austrian born at the turn of the century in h three and um. He was big into animals and he studied regular medicine and then decided this is great. Humans are fun, but I'm really into studying animals and their behaviors. That was his bag, so he became a zoologist.

He did. He got a PhD in nineteen thirty three and started work alongside Oscar Heinroff, who was a fellow scientist with what it was the Austrian or German. I'm

not sure, he's probably one of the two. Well, so Lawrence is working, he's already established himself as a scientist when the Nazis come marching into town and one of the things, yeah, one of the things he had to answer four years later when he won the nobe L Prize for his imprinting work was his um zeal And enthusiasm basically with which he welcomed the conquering Nazis yea, and took his ideas about domestication and applied them to

the lens of Nazi theory. Yeah. Race, like Conrad Lawrence was a racist in the purest and violist form of

the word. Yes, it's there's no escaping that. No. And he uh, he flat out denied even being a party member until it was proven, and then he was like, oh, I was forgot about that membership, and he very much tried to to wiggle his way out of that years later, um by saying, you know, I think what how it ends up is he's not the only academic that was on the wrong side of history, and he came out years later, so like, oh yeah, but I sort of got swept up. I didn't really mean it in this way.

And science has kind of divided. Some people forgave him and others did not. Yeah, and it's um, I think science as a whole has forgiven him largely, like science

of the capitals. But there are plenty of scientists out there who are like the guy was a Nazi and he used his theories to help the Nazi regime, Like He was a Nazi psychologist in Austria who um was paid to examine um German Polish uh people, Yes, and and basically determined that like the the um mating of a German person and a Polish person produces undesirable offspring. Well you throw that out into the Nazi void and see what they do with that info. Yeah, they're not

gonna be mating with Polish people. So this guy is is he was a an evolutionary theorist of a very brilliant magnitude great zoologist, but also Nazi and a lot of people calling a question like the work that he produced um, but again, as a whole, science seems to have forgiven him for the most part. Yeah, that's a that's a great sort of a c o A. It's more like the more you know type of thing you

got to make the star exactly. So uh that aside, Let's get back to his work with Oscar Heinroth Um they were contemporaries and heind Roth he was actually the first dude, even though he didn't call it imprinting at the time. He's the German word, Uh progun is that how you say it? Yeah, like an a of the newmout sort of you that's good, that's sounded Swedish chef. Though, yeah, I'll probably get taken a task. But from my memory

of German and college, that's right on the money. So uh, Like I said, he didn't call it imprinting at the time, but he did study the gray lag geese and found out that right out of the egg that they um can attach to humans. And it was a big you know, although they did in Rome and ancient China, Germans probably thought they made it that up discovered it first. UM. And another thing that Lawrence is criticized for, aside from

the Nazi affiliation, was that he was um. He very readily made an anthrop what's called an anthropic shift, where he took his findings about animals and was very eager to extrapolate them onto humans as well, which some people are like, whoa budd you haven't you haven't shown that connection yet? You can't. That hadn't always work, No, but there there has we'll see, like come to there's a there's an understanding that yeah, there's something similar in humans

and other mammals too, as we'll talk about. Uh. So, there was one experiment early on where he took some goose eggs and separated them out into the control and the experimental experimental group, and of course the experimental he raised separate from the mother completely. All this sounds gonna mean too, by the way. Yeah, so all imprinting experience

experiments are about as immoral as they get. Yeah, it's like ripping the baby right out of the egg or womb away from its mother, right and in saying like to see what happens right like here, this gum boot is your mother. Try growing up normal and socialized with a gum boot for a mom. No, agreed, You know, almost across the board, these animals, these are immoral, unethical experiments, agreed. So the experimental geese only met with him, uh, not

the goose mom at all. And then eventually, to test this out, what he did was he put them, uh, he put the groups together, marked them, put him under a box, and then basically sort of like the old experience like Brady Bunch thing, to see who calls the dog, which when the dog will come to He had someone lift the box. He's on one side of the room, the gooses on the other, and the ones who he had raised came straight to him. Yeah, which all bet when they lifted that box. It was adorable. A bunch

of confused duckling sticking around like what was that? Right? You're my mommy Nazi man, right, the bearded nazis my mom. Uh. So he finally named it filial filial imprinting. I think filial filial imprinting. Yeah, And it's basically exactly what it sounds like. It's that if you if you imprint, if you introduced something or yourself to precocial bird at a certain stage of development, it will say you're my parents. Yeah. And he initially called that the critical period, right, is

the amount of time you had to do that? Yeah? So he um his studies weren't quite as um like well designed his later studies, but he basically said, like he assumed, probably first ten minutes maybe an hour after hatching is this critical period. And then he also took it a step farther by saying it's irreversible. So once once this duckling thinks the gum boot as its mom, it's always going to be stuck with that duck until

you eat it. So Lawrence like really put a lot out there, and he really moved evolutionary biology ahead to a degree. Ethology is the field that he helped found. Um. But we'll talk about some follow up studies that supported

and overturned some of his findings. Right after this, so chuck Um, Lawrence comes up with filial imprinting right then later studies in like the fifties and sixties, especially by a guy named Eckhard Hess and Ao Ramsey who a lab in Maryland specifically dedicated to studying animal imprinting, and they had really great control conditions and they they really

refined Lawrence's findings. Yeah, and they studied Mallard ducklings again with the ducks and um, they found that the most sensitive period was thirteen to sixteen hours after hatching, which was higher more hours than I think Lorenz had found. Correct. Yeah, he he headed down to it like three or four hours, right tops. Yeah, and this was I guess the ducklings likes to have a little time to swim around and get some food, maybe take a rest, and then they'll

start getting down to imprinting. Yeah, and he Um, I thought this was super interesting. They also found that the ducklings that had to go like jump through more hurdles and go through more to find the parent formed a stronger attachment. Just kind of makes sense, like you worked harder for it. All right. I guess it's like that Morrissey song. The more you ignore me, the closer I get. Man, he's the best, the best, ye also the worst as far as like canceling shows and like, I mean, dude,

cannot like I don't ever completed a full tour. There's no way. It's like every Morrisey tour. Eventually, if you're on the end of that tour, you might as well not even have tickets because you're not gonna be seeing Morrisey. Alright, that's my little soapbox about morris Finish your tour. That's right, you mean I had that happened to us. You had Morrisey tickets and see, ah was it recently? It was

in the last like two years. He should call every tour like the Morrissey potential to potential tour or first half tour. Uh So back to the ducklings. They also found that, um, they would imprint onto little paper machee that they made, which is very sweet colored balls, uh colored more than the white ones, which is interesting. I guess I don't know. They must react to color more. Even though the vision wasn't really a part. I thought it was just sound. It depends smell and touch. So

there's a um. There's a PBS Nature special called um My Life as a Turkey, and it's about a researcher who is studying animal imprinting and specifically with turkeys. Turkeys have astounding vision, yeah, just amazing vision. Like they can spot, like, um, a screw head from a football field away. That's small. How do you know did they say screw head? Right? Well, yeah, they're known for going and rooting out screw heads at far long distances. They just stop point like a pig

within the truffles, right exactly, That's what turkeys are used for. Um. But so turkey has very great vision, so I could see color being an environmental cue. Smell, movement, touch. Yeah, it's a big one al right. So another thing they tried that did not work, which I thought was interesting is going back even before they hatched and using auditory cues in the egg and they found that didn't make any difference. But it's a good thing to test. The

guy on the Nature thing though, found the opposite. Really yeah, he um, he would talk turkey to the eggs. Oh I thought he talked turkey once they were born. No, he's while they were eggs. He talked turkey to get them used to it, right, Yeah, and then that's pretty good turkey. And then um, after that, uh, when they were when they were hatched, they he talked turkey again to them and apparently they came right over. But smells also a big one too. The inside of the egg

probably smells a lot like the mom. Yeah, you know that makes sense. So all these environmental cues add up to what the what this little hatchling is basically mindlessly following because again, all of this imprinting stuff has found that animals at least are hardwired to go seek out and form these these attachments. Yes, and they also found that there that critical period was even longer when they

kept them isolated from birth. So they kept them completely socially isolated, they would have up to twenty hours to imprint. And this caused researcher name, oh boy, uh well, dav Slukan, great name. He said, it's actually not a critical period. Let's call it a sensitive period, right semantics if you ask me. Yeah, but it makes a pretty good point. It's basically saying like, this thing is not Yes, it appears to be hardwired, but it's also malleable in the

face of nurture, in the face of the environment. It can be postponed, it can be m altered. Uh, it's not sure versus nurture. It's nature and nurture in conjunction with one another. And so all of this filial imprinting that Lawrence first identified and really started systematically studying, and that was later carried on in birds um also led to the discovery that birds also um imprint sexually as well as fill, and depending on what they attached to

filially they will um. Their sexual attachments or sexual preferences will also be altered later on in life. So, in other words, a bird that is raised by a human will eventually try and mate with humans, even in the presence of other birds of that species. Crazy. Yes, And the reason why they think is because um, the bird is basically identifying with what it's taking as its own species. Right, So it will say a, well, my parent is a human, ergo I must be a human, and therefore I want

to get with a human. It's a very confused bird, right, But there's something that they've also found that refines this whole thing even further, and that is that sexual imprinting is basically blocked. They're sexually blind, is what they call it, to the person that raised them. So while they might be attracted to humans, they're not going to be attracted their human parent. And there's actually something which, um, we

should do an incest episode. I should, Um, that sounds like it's you just pulled that out of thin air, but it's remarkably similar. Yeah, there's something that's been noted in humans called the Westmark effect, which we'll have to do an incest episode. But super interesting, especially coming from like, um, it's like a clinical standpoint of viewpoint. Yeah sure, and not just like let's do a show on incests gross the end, you know, look at it sociologically. That sounds

like a stuff. Uh. Back to the birds. Another interesting finding here when they were when they studied the sexual imprinting. Initially it was with jackdaws, which are sort of like crows, and they found that there were different types of imprinting occurring as they mature. So, in other words, one of those jackdaws eight with humans flew with crows, but made it with Jackdaws. Right, So that suggests that they were partying. Dude,

there are these um so well rounded jackdaws. But it suggests that there are the the different sensitive periods rather than just one right, fourteen to sixteen hours after hatch hats right? Right? Um and it you maybe you have a filial imprinting like pretty early on. That's the first one, and then sexual imprinting comes after that. Who knows? Who knows? Um, Well, we'll talk more about Remember I said Lawrence was accused of making the anthropics shift a little too soon. Sure, well,

he was vindicated to a large extent. Because a lot of this does apply to mammals as well. We'll talk about that right after this. Before we talk about mammals. Those this quote that I'm meant to read before the last break, he talked about the guy who talked turkey, Joe Hutto, and he has quote he said, um, when the when the first pulse emerged, he made his turkey sound, and as Joe recounts, the pulse turned his head, its eyes met Joe's and quote, something very unambiguous happened in

that moment. Quote true love and the cute. It is cute, but a little creepy. You know, he's like, you know, we met, our eyes met, and it was and it was unambiguous. Yeah, so anyway, sorry about it. I just had to throw that in there. Nice Joe hutto turkey lover. Yeah, go watch my life as a turkey pbs. Uh, let's say turkey lover and jest he was a scientist. Oh yeah, he's not a creep. No, creeps don't use boards like

unambiguous to describe connection. They say get in my van. Right. Alright, So mammals UM, this is not exactly, strictly speaking imprinting, but they've sort of expanded over the years of definition to include, you know, like what happens if you rip a monkey away from its mom, which has been done yes by a guy named Harry Harlow in the fifties and sixties, the more despicable scientists involved in animal testing.

As a matter of fact, Harlowe's tests with UM filial imprinting among mammals and monkeys in particular UM led to the animal rights movement. It definitely gave its steam and a lot of public support after UM articles and news stories were released about Harlow and when he was vilified, he did not buckle under public opinion. He is very famously quoted as who could ever love a monkey? Um? Everybody but you. That's what he said in response to

being criticized, who could ever love a monkey? Like, what's your problem? Idiots? It's a monkey? Yeah, that's yeah. I don't get that. They shouldn't be in charge of running tests about filial imprinting with monkeys. They can just sit there on the sidelines and hate animals. Yeah, watch TV or something. Yeah, I agreed. Um, watch what was the broader movie about monkey desk Project X? Yeah that one, just watch that on a loop. But the working title

was monkey see Monkey do Oh. You're probably right? Um, all right, So back to mammals, right. Um. They did some studies in the ninete nineties a researcher named Keith Kendrick where they and this one doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, they switched sheep and goats at birth, and um, they were allowed contact social contact with their own species, but they were raised by their adoptive parents, like the baby sheep was raised by the goat, but

they were still allowed to commingle with other sheep. And it still worked. It turned out that they preferred to mate with the species of the adopted parent adopted mother. But they also found very um remarkably or notably, that it's reversible as well. Yes, they wanted to see how it would hold upright, So once a year they would bring them all back together, be like, mingo, have some there's some cheese plate over there. They play a little music.

This is after right after they had removed them from the opposite species, put them back with their own species, and once a year they said, hey, remember those goats that you like so much? Oh, it was like that up okay. So, and what they found was that among females we could say females because we're talking about a different species um the females showed a preference. They reverted

to their intra species preference. So like they showed like a sexual preference for their own species after about one to three years after being returned. Yes, right, yes, but males, even after three years of being um ming commingled again, they still showed a preference for the species that they did imprinted on. Yeah, they like the goats are still like, oh man, I remember those sheep. And the sheep said the same thing about the goats exactly where we can

go party sheep. Oh. I thought that was really interesting though, how I mean, there's no explanation, I guess, but how the females and the males reacted. You know, years later males are stubborn. Yeah, I think maybe that's all. It is not not quite as agile. There's another way to put it. So that's cheapen goats. The experiments called the

old switchero um. Harry Harlowe did some experiments and he actually um as mean as his experiments were, he actually managed to basically disprove an ongoing debate that had been ongoing up until that point, um whether or not you form an attachment or animals form an attachment based on classical conditioning or based on some sort of evolutionary mechanism. And so the classical conditioning people said, no, no, all, it's it's all about food. So the animal goes up

and imprints on whatever is giving it food. And what it's doing is it's making an imprint an attachment with the person that gives it food. So you're you're looking for the food and you insert the person who gives you the food, and then you can remove the food and you still have the attachment to the person that gave you the food. Classical conditioning just standard Freud stuff, Right, I punched that button. Food cocaine comes out exactly lots

more skinnery, but yeah, conditioning. Um. So with Harlow's experiments, he took monkeys, stripped them from their mothers in some cases, let them get nice and attached to their mothers, and then stripped them from their mothers. Had all sorts of different designs, but basically the upshot was he introduced them to two different mothers. They're both in animate objects. One was a monkey mother made of like wire with like spikes. They well, they referred to it as the iron Maiden.

But this one I had food. The other one was a inanimate monkey mother who was made of terry cloth. It was soft, a little bit like a teddy bear monkey teddy bear, so to a monkey. All of these monkeys showed a preference for the terry cloth monkey mother. Of course, they would go to this wire monkey mother when they were hungry and would eat and then would immediately go back to the monkey mother. When Harry Harlow came in, I was like, whoa who would scare them all.

They would all go over to the terry cloth mother. So he basically showed that it's not food. By extension, it's not classical conditioning. It's it's comfort. It's contact. It may be physical protection, but apparently it is um. It's

it's contact. And to make an anthropic shift, you can extrapolate that on humans too, because there's a drug called oxytocin that is released UM, especially on skin to skin contact, which is why touching and raising UM an infant and holding an infant is extraordinarily important, not just for its development, but also for establishing bonds and contact with with that kid. Yeah, and especially uh for adoptive parents. They say a lot of skin on skin contact as soon as possible is

key to establishing that bond. But that's really neat because it means, like the the imprinting is all about. It basically proves family is what you make of it, or family is whatever you find is your family. It does it's not this pre defined structure, it's from a from infancy.

It's whatever you make of Yeah, that's true. Uh, And then you know Harlowe was like him less and less the more you talk about him, But on the other side of the spectrum, what we've learned through all this research is if you work in wildlife conservation, UM, they're not just willy nilly and how they handle animals anymore. They go through great pains and efforts to uh. Like

we mentioned the hand puppet. You know, they have Operation Condor where they will raise these baby condors who are abandoned, and they would dress their their hand puppet up to look like a mama condor to feed it and basically to do everything they can do to make sure that they can live a regular life in the wild. And they're not looking for that iron spiked iron maiden in

the jungle. Uh. And even down to like migratory patterns, they'll use like the ultra light planes to later teach these birds and they will dress up the plane to look like a condor or whatever, a duck and you know fly uh, you know, the the migratory pattern that they should that they should use the route and there's one of the researchers is inside the glider and that's

a condor on the p a going phone. And the cutest thing ever, UM they found out that in uh, I think it was in Japan that pandas um didn't do so well when they were handled by humans too young, so now they were panda suits not adorable, Like you go to work, you punch in, you put on your panda suit and you cuddle with baby pandas well. That and it's not just human contact that can screw up,

like say a panda um. What they found is one of the things that Harlow found was that UM imprinting has a lot to do with socialization, so that even if you just stick a baby with the wire spiky iron maiden monkey mother, but you give that monkey twenty minutes a day to socialize with other monkeys, it should

turn out okay. But even if it has the terry cloth mother and it's kept in isolation from other monkeys, they in turn tend to make um inadequate mothers is what they call them, where they just like neglect their children or smack them around, or just do all sorts of stuff because as their mother was inanimate object, unethical stuff. Yeah, I feel like we owe the band Iron made in a big apology. Yeah, they're like the bad name. Yeah, Like this is just supposed to be a torture device,

not for animals for you, I do. There's a cute salon slide show called twenty Heartwarming Stories of Inner Species Adoptions. That's literally the best thing on the Internet in this suite is when you find like a horse cuddling with a puppy or raising it as its own. There's apparently a lioness who's well known in a preserve somewhere for um stealing antelope calves and not eating them, but raising them as her own because she wants a kid. It's

it's unbelievable. Animals teaching us the way right. You know, who could ever love a monkey? Like? Who cares what you look like? Who cares what what? Who cares if I'm meant to eat you? You know I'm gonna raise you as my own? Yeah? Well they I think they often display like true nurturing love more than a lot

of humans do. Uh. If you guys want to know more about this kind of thing, you can type animal imprinting in the search bar how stuff first dot com and also go check out our classic episode animal domestication. Good one, pretty good um, and you can find that on stuff you Should Do dot com. And I said search bar in there somewhere, so it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this gang article recommendation. Hi guys, my name is Ciarra. I just finished listening to How Street

Gangs Work. I thought it would offer a piece of literature as a suggestion to people interested in reading more about the subject. It's called Gang Leader for a Day by stood here Vin Kates. It's a sociological approach to street gangs in Chicago. Started out as a Harvard dissertation with then to Cash, asking what's it like to be poor and black, and turned into seven years of befriending

a crack dealing gang leader in the projects. It's a really great read, very interesting to see a first person account of gang life from someone who was not raised in the community which gangs prevailed, especially when you learn that gangs started to protect black people at its base level. So even when you see the gang violence brought forth in the book pages, you also get to see the gang members doing everything they can to protect their community members.

Uh the name. There's a New York Times article if you're interested about the book, called if you want to Observe Them, Join Them. I think it was like two thousand eight is but I read it's awesome, So thanks for all the work you guys put into the episodes. I love constantly learning something new, except for when it's about space. I don't want to learn anything about space. Okay, it'll make me lose my mind. We thank you, Sira,

Thank you. CIA's appreciate it. Go listen to our episode on the Sun or the make most people lose their minds elevator to the Moon or Mars or the Moon. Got a lot of them about the space. She's like, yep, I've avoided them all. Um. We want to know what will make you lose your mind topic wise or actually in general. Yeah, or if you've ever imprinted on the something non human? There you go. You can send us all that info via Twitter at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff

you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com