This video and story have been making the rounds on the Internet in the last few days. I just saw it yesterday and it's fascinating! For the first time (allegedly), "tool-use" in a fish has been filmed and the behavior is available for all of us to see. The fish in question is a species of wrasse observed in Palau, Choerodon anchorago or orange-dotted tuskfish.
You can see the fish digging out a clam with its pectoral fin, then carrying it over to a rock or a coral head and cracking it with a characteristic sideways motion of the head. The fish was observed doing this three times in a row, the last of which was recorded. Each event lasted less than five minutes. Here are summaries of the story from Scientific American, Science Daily and AnimalWise.
This finding is being published as a short notice in the journal Coral Reefs and joins other findings from earlier this year, published in the same journal, presenting the first photographic evidence of the same behavior in another species of tuskfish, Choerodon schoenleinii. That story was summarized in Science Now and Wired Science. In fact, there have been a handful of reports of the same behavior from different species of wrasse indicating that this might be a shared ancestral behavior in the Labridae.
Whether this constitutes "real" tool use as seen in mammals and birds, or not, will depend entirely on the kind of definition you use. That question is boring to me. But I do think it would be a mistake to equate or compare this "tool use" in fish to, for example, tool use in chimpanzees. Instead I think the interesting perspective is to put this behavior within the already known complex feeding and food seeking behaviors in fish to see in which niches "tool use" might have been beneficial.
Bernardi, G. (2011). The use of tools by wrasses (Labridae) Coral Reefs (Online First™, 20 September 2011) DOI: 10.1007/s00338-011-0823-6
Jones, A., Brown, C., & Gardner, S. (2011). Tool use in the tuskfish Choerodon schoenleinii? Coral Reefs, 30 (3), 865-865 DOI: 10.1007/s00338-011-0790-y
Now someone just has to engineer them to shout WOOOOOOOOAAAAH!
Being able to predict recurring phenomena in the environment in order to adapt to them better offers an immense advantage to an organism. That's why pretty much all living things have an internal molecular clock that quite literally "ticks", it oscillates back and forth and allows the organism to tell what time it is. This probably arose in unicellular organisms to protect the delicate DNA molecule from the danger of UV light from the sun by timing DNA replication, when the molecule is exposed, to the nighttime hours. Having an internal clock would also allow this unicellular organism to separate different chemical reactions in time to prevent them from interacting with each other. Us multicellular organisms not only coordinate our cellular chemical reactions by time, we also adapt our behavior and our physiology. Sleep is the most dramatic example, but the release of most hormones for instance varies during the 24-hour cycle and it's also worth mentioning the many seasonal migrations that criss-cross the globe every year. In essence, time keeping is an elementary part of being alive.
The authors of the paper described in the video above have managed to connect this time keeping mechanism in E. coli with a mechanism that the bacteria use to communicate with other cells in the colony, called quorum sensing, thus making the whole colony oscillate in near synchrony. This is visualized by adding the gene for green fluorescent protein into the molecular clock, something the authors reported already in 2008. The result, as you can see in the video, is a propagating wave of flashing bacteria.
This is not only a beautiful demonstration of a fundamental function of all living cells, it's an elegant use of the available biotechnology and it advances the repertoire of molecular tools we have at our disposition for the creation of useful organisms in the future. Danino, T., Mondragón-Palomino, O., Tsimring, L., & Hasty, J. (2010). A synchronized quorum of genetic clocks Nature, 463 (7279), 326-330 DOI: 10.1038/nature08753
From the Richard Dawkins YouTube channel: Psychologist Andy Thomson talks about why we believe in gods at the American Atheists 2009 convention. He talks briefly about the brain imaging study I wrote about in a previous post.
Of course he's an atheist speaking to a (I would assume) largely atheist audience and it comes through, but I think the main point, at least to me, is general enough to be appreciated and understood by everyone. At the very least he provides a hypothesis for how belief is generated in our brains, although he does focus too much on adaptations, and at the very most he demonstrates how unlikely gods are. There's plenty there to discuss. Swedish blog tags: Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Religion, Ateism Technorati tags: Neuroscience, Brain, Religion, Atheism
Look at these videos below. They show sulphur-crested cockatoo Snowball apparently dancing along to a song, synchronizing his movements to the beat and adapting when the tempo changes, something that does not form part of these birds’ natural behaviors.
This is no small feat or mere circus trick. Beat perception and synchronization, as it's called, involves not only perceiving the pattern of the rhythm but also coordinating the movements in anticipation of every beat. These are really sophisticated cognitive processes; so sophisticated they were long considered to be exclusive to humans. Not even chimpanzees, our closest extant relatives, are able to keep the beat to an external auditory rhythm.
Snowball was brought to my attention by friend and musician Christopher who after reading this report ("At least birds can dance") on the science pages of leading Swedish morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter, declared bluntly that his view of the world had been shattered. To him it was clear that music had been demoted to an inferior position below linguistic abilities. The article declares that "the capacity of perceiving music - even in humans - is an evolutionary by-product that tagged along when we developed the ability to speak and communicate with each other". It’s a very sweeping statement, but it raises some interesting questions.
The report in Dagens Nyheter refers to two freshly published articles in the journal Current Biology. In two independent studies Snowball and African grey parrot celebrity Alex were tested to verify if they actually have the ability to move synchronously to an external auditory beat or if they simply appear to be synchronous by chance occurrence or maybe even just mimic the movements of their masters. Hilariously, the researchers were completely unaware that birds could have this ability until a YouTube video of Snowball dancing went viral and eventually came their way.
It turns out that yes; these birds are actually able to keep the rhythm. This is the first time it's been shown in a non-human animal. You can see the statistics represented on the figure below. 0° indicates perfect alignment to the beat and Snowball's average is indicated by the arrow.
Ref: A. Patel et. al. (see reference below)
So Snowball's head bobs did align with the beats pretty well, but not perfectly. As you can see in both videos his periods of synchronicity are interspersed with periods that are more or less off. The authors of the study argue that this could mirror how small children synchronize to music. As demonstrated in the second video, Snowball could also adapt his movements to changes in the tempo, another key feature of beat perception and synchronization.
Parrots, like us, are vocal learners; our speech is not innate but learned by mimicking other individuals, often parents or close relatives. The circuits in the brain that underlie vocal learning, which interconnect the auditory system with systems for initiation and execution of movements, overlap with those involved in beat perception and synchronization. So it’s likely that the ability to perceive and synchronize beats, an integral part of our ability to perceive and practice music, is a product of the same neural foundations that gave us language and speech abilities. It seems like some abilities, however important we may consider them, evolved as secondary effects or by-products to other more clearly beneficial cognitive abilities - as evidenced by the fact that parrots exhibit beat perception and synchronization even though they clearly have no use for this curious behavior in their natural environments.
However, it’s important to remember that musical ability is not just one thing; it’s grounded in several interacting phenomena with different neural bases. So claiming that our capacity of perceiving music as a whole is a by-product of our linguistic abilities would not be right. The ability to perceive rhythm and coordinate movements to an external beat is an integral part of our musical behaviors, but there are other components as well - the perception of pitch for instance, and the ability to cooperate and create music as a group.
So, is our pervasive musicality just a happy accident, or did evolution shape our minds to be musical? Well, until an aspect of musicality is discovered to be innate, with an obvious adaptive advantage of its own, the question remains open. The results generated from observing Snowball and his dancing conspecific highlight the likelihood that individual aspects of musicality could be by-products of other cognitive abilities. This is not surprising considering that this is how evolution works; it builds and expands upon already existing structures and features to generate new ones. We shouldn't give terms like "by-product" unnecessary attention. A more interesting question to ask is why we find musical expression so important and rewarding and why it’s so deeply embedded in the architecture of our minds. That’s when we start discussing the true evolutionary value of musicality.
Schachner, A., Brady, T., Pepperberg, I., & Hauser, M. (2009). Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.061
Patel, A. (2006). Musical Rhythm, Linguistic Rhythm, and Human Evolution Music Perception, 24 (1), 99-104
This finding is being published as a short notice in the journal Coral Reefs and joins other findings from earlier this year, published in the same journal, presenting the first photographic evidence of the same behavior in another species of tuskfish, Choerodon schoenleinii. That story was summarized in Science Now and Wired Science. In fact, there have been a handful of reports of the same behavior from different species of wrasse indicating that this might be a shared ancestral behavior in the Labridae.
