Vultures and artificial intelligence(s) as death detectors: GAIA develops a high-tech approach for wildlife research and conservation

Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW)

 

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AI data scientists and wildlife biologists analyse and interpret data from vulture tags and develop an Artificial Intelligence for behaviour recognition. The GAIA I³ Lab at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin brings together state of art expertise in Wildlife Biology and Artificial Intelligence development.

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Credit: Photo by Jon A. Juarez

In order to use remote locations to record and assess the behaviour of wildlife and environmental conditions, the GAIA Initiative developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that reliably and automatically classifies behaviours of white-backed vultures using animal tag data. As scavengers, vultures always look for the next carcass. With the help of tagged animals and a second AI algorithm, the scientists can now automatically locate carcasses across vast landscapes. The algorithms described in a recently published article in the “Journal of Applied Ecology” are therefore key components of an early warning system that can be used to quickly and reliably recognise critical changes or incidents in the environment such as droughts, disease outbreaks or the illegal killing of wildlife.

The GAIA Initiative is an alliance of research institutes, conservation organisations and enterprises with the aim of creating a high-tech early warning system for environmental changes and critical ecological incidents. The new AI algorithms were developed by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and the Tierpark Berlin.

The death of wildlife is an important process in ecosystems – regardless whether this is a regular case, such as the successful hunt of a predator, or an exceptional case caused by the outbreak of a wildlife disease, the contamination of the landscape with environmental toxins or illegal killing by people. For the investigation of mammalian species communities and ecosystems it is therefore important to systematically record and analyse these regular and exceptional cases of mortality. In order to achieve this, the GAIA Initiative makes use of the natural abilities of white-backed vultures (Gyps africanus) in combination with highly developed biologging technologies and artificial intelligence. “This combination of three forms of intelligence ­– animal, human and artificial – is the core of our new I³ approach with which we aim to make use of the impressive knowledge that wildlife has about ecosystems”, says Dr Jörg Melzheimer, GAIA project head and scientist at the Leibniz-IZW.

Vultures are perfectly adapted by millions of years of evolution to detect carcasses across vast landscapes quickly and reliably. They have outstanding eye-vision and sophisticated communication that allows them to monitor very large areas of land when many individuals work together. Vultures thus fulfil an important ecological role by cleaning landscapes of carrion and containing the spread of wildlife diseases. “For us as wildlife conservation scientists, the knowledge and skills of vultures as sentinels are very helpful to be able to quickly recognise problematic exceptional cases of mortality and initiate appropriate responses”, says Dr Ortwin Aschenborn, GAIA project head alongside Melzheimer at the Leibniz-IZW. “In order to use vulture knowledge, we need an interface – and at GAIA, this interface is created by combining animal tags with artificial intelligence.”

The animal tags with which GAIA equipped white-backed vultures in Namibia record two groups of data. The GPS sensor provides the exact location of the tagged individual at a specific point in time. The so-called ACC sensor (ACC is short for acceleration) stores detailed movement profiles of the tag – and thus of the animal – along the three spatial axes at the exact same time. Both groups of data are used by the artificial intelligence algorithms developed at the Leibniz-IZW. “Every behaviour is represented by specific acceleration patterns and thus creates specific signatures in the ACC data of the sensors”, explains wildlife biologist and AI specialist Wanja Rast from the Leibniz-IZW. “In order to recognise these signatures and reliably assign them to specific behaviours, we trained an AI using reference data. These reference data come from two white-backed vultures that we fitted with tags at Tierpark Berlin and from 27 wild vultures fitted with tags in Namibia.” In addition to the ACC data from the tags, the scientists recorded data on the behaviour of the animals – in the zoo through video recordings and in the field by observing the animals after they had been tagged. “In this way, we obtained around 15,000 data points of ACC signatures ascribed to a verified, specific vulture behaviour. These included active flight, gliding, lying, feeding and standing. This data set enabled us to train a so-called support vector machine, an AI algorithm that assigns ACC data to specific behaviours with a high degree of reliability”, explains Rast.

In a second step, the scientists combined the behaviour thus classified with the GPS data from the tags. Using algorithms for spatial clustering, they identified locations where certain behaviours occurred more frequently. In this way, they obtained spatially and temporally finely resolved locations where vultures fed. “The GAIA field scientists and their partners in the field were able to verify more than 500 of suspected carcass locations derived from the sensor data, as well as more than 1300 clusters of other non-carcass behaviours”, says Aschenborn. The field-verified carcass locations ultimately served to establish vulture feeding site signatures in the scientists’ final AI training dataset – this algorithm indicates with high precision locations where an animal has most likely died and a carcass is on the ground. “We could predict carcass locations with an impressive 92 percent probability and so demonstrated that a system which combines vulture behaviour, animal tags and AI is very useful for large-scale monitoring of animal mortality”, says Aschenborn.

This AI-based behaviour classification, carcass detection and carcass localisation are key components of the GAIA early warning system for critical changes or incidents in the environment. “Until now, this methodological step has been carried out in the GAIA I³ data lab at the Leibniz-IZW in Berlin”, says Melzheimer. “But with the new generation of animal tags developed by our consortium, AI analyses are implemented directly on the tag. This will provide reliable information on whether and where an animal carcass is located without prior data transfer in real time without any loss of time.” The transfer of all GPS and ACC raw data is no longer necessary, allowing data communication with a significantly lower bandwidth to transmit the relevant information. This makes it possible to use a satellite connection instead of terrestrial GSM networks, which guarantees coverage even in remote wilderness regions completely independent of local infrastructure. Even at the most remote locations, critical changes or incidents in the environment – such as disease outbreaks, droughts or illegal killing of wildlife – could then be recognised without delay.

In recent decades, the populations of many vulture species declined sharply and are now acutely threatened with extinction. The main causes are the loss of habitat and food in landscapes shaped by humans as well as a high number of direct or indirect incidences of poisoning. The population of the white-backed vulture, for example, declined by around 90 percent in just three generations – equivalent to an average decline of 4 percent per year. “Owing to their ecological importance and rapid decline, it is essential to significantly improve our knowledge and understanding of vultures in order to protect them”, says Aschenborn. “Our research using AI-based analysis methods will not only provide us with insights into ecosystems. It will also increase our knowledge of how vultures communicate, interact and cooperate, forage for food, breed, rear their young and pass on knowledge from one generation to the next.” GAIA has so far fitted more than 130 vultures in different parts of Africa with tags, most of them in Namibia. Until today, the scientists analysed more than 95 million GPS data points and 13 billion ACC records.

White-backed vultures and a jackal at a carcass 

Vultures are perfectly adapted by millions of years of evolution to detect carcasses across vast landscapes quickly and reliably. They have outstanding eye-vision and sophisticated communication that allows them to monitor very large areas of land when many individuals work together. Vultures thus fulfil an important ecological role by cleaning landscapes of carrion and containing the spread of wildlife diseases.

Credit

Photo by Jan Zwilling

The development of the AI algorithms require a distinct multi-step process that includes data acquisition in the wild and from vultures under human care, data annotation and AI training. The new AI algorithms were developed by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and the Tierpark Berlin.

Credit

IIllustration by Clara C. Anders

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Journal

Journal of Applied Ecology

DOI

10.1111/1365-2664.14810 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Death detector: Using vultures as sentinels to detect carcasses by combining bio-logging and machine learning

Article Publication Date

18-Nov-2024

 

More than one third of Vietnam’s mammal species are at risk of extinction

Pensoft Publishers

 

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VIETNAMAZING logo

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A recent study highlights that over one-third of Vietnam’s 329 mammal species are threatened with extinction. Conducted by German scientist Hanna Höffner of the University of Cologne and Cologne Zoo, alongside an international team, the research underscores Vietnam's vital but fragile position as a biodiversity hub within the Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspot.

Published in the open-access journal Nature Conservation, the study reveals that 112 mammal species in Vietnam face extinction, despite most being found in at least one protected area. Some micro-endemic species, such as Murina harpioloides, are particularly vulnerable as they are not present in any protected sites. 

Around 40% of the threatened species lack ex situ conservation (zoo conservation breeding) programs, increasing their risk of extinction. Iconic species like the saola (Pseudoryx vuquangensis), the silver-backed chevrotain (Tragulus versicolor), and the large-antlered muntjac (Muntiacus vuquangensis) are among the Critically Endangered taxa at risk.

The study advocates for the IUCN's "One Plan Approach" to species conservation, which calls for combining different expertise and integrated in situ and ex situ management strategies. Establishing assurance colonies in zoos and increasing connectivity between isolated protected areas are critical recommendations for safeguarding Vietnam’s unique mammal diversity.

By building up ex situ populations for threatened taxa, zoos can help to literally “buy time” and act as modern arks that can contribute with later releases according to the IUCN’s “Reverse the Red” conservation campaign. Ex situ species holding data by Species360 are now also integrated in the IUCN Red List species’ chapters (a “One Plan” approach to species data).

Vietnam is home to a rich array of mammals, including 36 endemic species and nine micro-endemic taxa. Its primate fauna is particularly noteworthy, with 28 species, the highest number in mainland Southeast Asia. This includes the endemic tonkin snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus avunculus) and Delacour’s langur (Trachypithecus delacouri). 

Northern Vietnam and the Annamite Mountain Range are biodiversity hotspots, hosting species such as the Critically Endangered Cao-vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus), the southern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus siki) and the red-shanked douc (Pygathrix nemaeus).

The study calls for prioritising the "One Plan Approach" to conservation of highly threatened species, reassessing Data Deficient species, and enhancing habitat connectivity. The conservation campaign VIETNAMAZING by EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria) currently highlights Vietnam’s biodiversity treasure and advocates for improved conservation of threatened mammal species.

Original study

Höffner H, Nguyen ST, Dang PH, Motokawa M, Oshida T, Rödder D, Nguyen TQ, Le MD, Bui HT, Ziegler T (2024) Conservation priorities for threatened mammals of Vietnam: Implementation of the IUCN´s One Plan Approach. Nature Conservation 56: 161-180. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.56.128129 

Ex situ preservation of threatened Vietnamese mammals worldwide.

Credit

Höffner et al.

Hipposideros alongensis.

Credit

Son Truong Nguyen

Red shanked douc.

Credit

Đặng Huy Phương

Murina harpioloides.

Credit

Son Truong Nguyen

Gaur.

Credit

Đặng Huy Phương

Journal

Nature Conservation

DOI

10.3897/natureconservation.56.128129 

Article Title

Conservation priorities for threatened mammals of Vietnam: Implementation of the IUCN´s One Plan Approach

Article Publication Date

7-Nov-2024

The monkeys that science has experimented on for over a century

Daniel Bellamy
Sun, November 10, 2024 

EURONEWS 


The rhesus macaque monkeys that managed to escape lab this week are among the most studied animals on the planet.

So far just one of the 43 that were bred for medical research - and that escaped from the lab - has been recovered unharmed, officials said on Saturday.

Many of the others are still located a few yards from away, jumping back and forth over the facility’s fence, police said in a statement.

An employee at the Alpha Genesis facility in Yemassee hadn't fully locked a door as she fed and checked on them, officials said.

For more than a century, they have held a mirror to humanity, revealing our strengths and weaknesses through their own clever behaviours, organ systems and genetic code.

The bare-faced primates with expressive eyes have been launched on rockets into space. Their genome has been mapped. They have even been stars of a reality TV show.

Animal rights groups point out that the species has been subjected to studies on vaccines, organ transplants and the impact of separating infants from mothers. At the same time, many in the scientific community will tell you just how vital their research is to fighting AIDS, polio and COVID-19.

FILE - In this May 13, 2019, photo, a mirror is held up to Izzle, a rhesus macaque, at Primates Inc., in Westfield, Wis. - Carrie Antlfinger/Copyright 2019 The AP. All rights reserved

In 2003, a nationwide shortage of rhesus macaques threatened to slow down studies and scientists were paying up to 9,000 euros per animal to continue their work.

“Every large research university in the United States probably has some rhesus macaques hidden somewhere in the basement of its medical school,” according to the 2007 book, “Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World."

“The U.S. Army and NASA have rhesus macaques too,” wrote the book's author, Dario Maestripieri, a behavioural scientist at the University of Chicago, “and for years they trained them to play computer video games to see whether the monkeys could learn to pilot planes and launch missiles.”

Research begins in the 1890s

Humans have been using the rhesus macaque for scientific research since the late 1800s when the theory of evolution gained more acceptance, according to a 2022 research paper by the journal eLife.

The first study on the species was published in 1893 and described the “anatomy of advanced pregnancy," according to the eLife paper. By 1925, the Carnegie Science Institute had set up a breeding population of the monkeys to study embryology and fertility in a species that was similar to humans.

One reason for the animal's popularity was its abundance. These monkeys have the largest natural range of any non-human primate, stretching from Afghanistan and India to Vietnam and China.

“The other reason is because rhesus macaques, as primates go, are a pretty hardy species,” said Eve Cooper, the eLife research paper's lead author and a biology professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “They can live under conditions and they can be bred under conditions that are relatively easy to maintain.”
NASA rockets and the Salk polio vaccine

In the 1950s, the monkey's kidneys were used to make the Salk polio vaccine. NASA also used the animals during the space race, according to a brief history of animals in space on the agency's website.

For example, a rhesus monkey named “Miss Sam” was launched in 1960 in a Mercury capsule that attained a velocity of 1,900 kph and an altitude of 14.5 kilometres . She was retrieved in overall good condition.

“She was also returned to her training colony until her death on an unknown date,” NASA wrote.

Mapping the human genome

In 2007, scientists unravelled the DNA of the rhesus macaque. The species shared about 93% of its DNA with humans, even though macaques branched off from the ape family about 25 million years ago.

In comparison, humans and chimpanzees have evolved separately since splitting from a common ancestor about six million years ago, but still have almost 99% of their gene sequences in common.

The mapping of the human genome in 2001 sparked an explosion of work to similarly decipher the DNA of other animals. The rhesus macaque was the third primate genome to be completed,

‘They’re very political'

For those who have studied the behaviour of rhesus macaques, the research is just as interesting.

“They share some striking similarities to ourselves in terms of their social intelligence,” said Maestripieri, the University of Chicago professor who wrote a book on the species.

For example, the animals are very family oriented, siding with relatives when fights break out, he told The Associated Press on Friday. But they also recruit allies when they're attacked.

“They're very political,” Maestripieri said. “Most of their daily lives are spent building political alliances with each other. Does that sound familiar?"

Maestripieri was a consultant for a reality show about some rhesus macaques in India called “Monkey Thieves.”

“They basically started following large groups of these rhesus macaques and naming them,” the professor said. “It was beautifully done because these monkeys essentially act like people occasionally. So it’s fascinating to follow their stories.”

43 lab monkeys escaped in South Carolina. They have a legal claim to freedom.

Who owns the escaped monkeys now? It’s more complicated than you might think.


by Angela Fernandez and Justin Marceau

Nov 11, 2024

VOX

Monkeys at the Alpha Genesis research facility in Yemassee, South Carolina. Anadolu via Getty Images

Last week, 43 monkeys, all of them young female rhesus macaques, escaped from the Alpha Genesis research laboratory in Yemassee, South Carolina, when an employee failed to properly secure the door to their enclosure.


It wasn’t the first time something like this happened at Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds and uses thousands of monkeys for biomedical testing and supplies nonhuman primate products and bio-research services to researchers worldwide. In 2018, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) fined the facility $12,600 in part for other incidents in which monkeys had escaped. “We’re not strangers to seeing monkeys randomly,” a nearby resident and member of the Yemassee town council told the New York Times.


Alpha Genesis is now working to recapture the macaques, who are each about the size of a cat; over the weekend, 25 of them were recovered. Meanwhile, the animal protection group Stop Animal Exploitation Now, which for years has filed federal complaints against the facility, has called on the USDA to prosecute Alpha Genesis as a repeat violator of its duty to keep the animals secure.


“The recovery process is slow, but the team is committed to taking as much time as necessary to safely recover all remaining animals,” a Facebook post from the Yemassee Police Department said, attributing the comment to Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard.


In one way, this is a story about what looks like a corporate failure. But there is another way to understand this situation, both legally and morally. What if these intrepid macaques, who the lab has said pose no threat to the public and carry no infectious diseases, have a legal claim to freedom?


The legal status of wild animals is more contested and malleable than ever, evident in the recent court case arguing that Happy, an elephant living at the Bronx Zoo, was a legal person entitled to freedom, the phasing out of animal use at entertainment venues like circuses, and the end of US lab experimentation on chimpanzees. While Alpha Genesis may have a strong financial incentive to recapture the escaped monkeys, longstanding legal doctrines suggest that the 18 monkeys still at large may not belong to the company as long as they remain free and outside of its custody. State officials, or perhaps even members of the public, might even be legally protected in rescuing these monkeys from a fate of cage confinement and invasive experimentation and bringing them to a sanctuary. Such an outcome would matter not just for these monkeys but also for the rights of captive animals more broadly.

When a captive animal becomes free


For many people, the idea of a lost animal becoming the property of another person might seem absurd. Certainly, no one would imagine forfeiting the companionship of a beloved dog or cat because the animal got out of the yard and was found by someone else. Neither law nor morality treats the escape of a domesticated animal as tantamount to a forfeiture of all claims to the animal.


But when it comes to wild animals, the law is different.


When a captive wild animal escapes, their captor generally remains liable for any damage the escaped animal creates to persons or property, but they may lose ownership of the animal, especially if the creature integrates into an existing wild population (sometimes called “reverting to the common stock”). That might sound unlikely for rhesus macaques in the US — the species is native to South and Southeast Asia and has been exported around the world for lab testing. But it turns out that it’s perfectly possible to live as a free-roaming rhesus macaque in South Carolina, where a more than four-decade-old population of the monkeys resides on the state’s Morgan Island, also known as “Monkey Island.”


Originally relocated from Puerto Rico between 1979 and 1980, the Morgan Island macaques now serve as a kind of reservoir of lab monkeys for the US government. Last year, Alpha Genesis won a federal contract to oversee the monkey colony there — in fact, the 43 escaped macaques had originally lived as “free-range” monkeys on the island before they were taken to be used for testing and research purposes, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CBS News in a statement. While these monkeys may not be able to rejoin the Morgan Island colony on their own, the fact that they came from a wild population strengthens the view of them as animals who not only can live in the wild but who deserve to be free.

Rhesus macaques on Morgan Island. The State/Getty Images

A macaque sits in a cage in a University of Muenster laboratory in Muenster, Germany, on November 24, 2017. Friso Gentsch/picture alliance via Getty Images


Our modern understanding of animals’ legal status derives from 19th-century American common law cases, which adopted the classical Roman legal approach to wild animals, or ferae naturae. Under that system, wild animals were a special type of property known as “fugitive” property because they could move freely and weren’t owned by anyone before being captured by a human. This created unique legal challenges — for example, conflicts between two hunters claiming the same animal — that can help us understand the case of the escaped monkeys.


The 1805 New York Supreme Court case Pierson v. Post, sometimes considered the most famous property case in American law (and about which one of us has written a book), is the starting point for understanding who legally owns a wild animal. In a dispute between two hunters, one who had been in hot pursuit of a fox and one who swooped in to kill the animal, the case held that the property interest of the latter was stronger. The court made clear that a definitive capture, and not pursuit alone, was necessary to establish and retain ownership of a wild animal.


In 1898, another New York case, Mullett v. Bradley, went further by recognizing that capture alone is not sufficient to claim ownership of a wild animal if the animal is able to escape and regain their liberty. The court found that a sea lion who had been brought by rail from the Pacific Ocean to the East Coast and later escaped from an enclosure in Long Island Sound was legally free until he was captured by a different person two weeks later. Cases like these gave rise to a doctrine that legal scholars now call “the law of capture,” which holds that if a captive wild animal escapes and control over them is lost, they no longer necessarily belong to the party who had previously captured them.


This line of legal reasoning generally works to the detriment of animals, ensuring that each generation of law students learns that animals are ours to possess and use for our own ends. But in the case of the escaped South Carolina monkeys, the law of capture raises doubt about whether the lab retains ownership of the animals unless and until it recaptures them.


A more recent Canadian case suggests that the law of capture may indeed offer a path to rescue for escaped animals like the South Carolina lab monkeys. In 2012, Darwin, a Japanese snow macaque, became a worldwide media sensation when he was found roaming through an Ontario Ikea store wearing a shearling coat and a diaper. While Darwin had been kept as a pet, a Canadian court ruled that he was a wild animal, and his owner lost her rights to him after he escaped from her car. Toronto Animal Services captured Darwin inside the store and transferred him to a primate sanctuary, where he could live among other macaques.


Still, one could argue that the escaped lab monkeys in South Carolina are effectively domestic animals who belong to their owner. Alpha Genesis has put resources into housing and raising them, including managing the monkey population on Morgan Island. But unlike pets who have been domesticated over many generations to live safely among humans, these rhesus macaques retain their wild instincts — they’ve been described as skittish, and food is being used to lure them into traps.


If the monkeys were to return on their own, like a house cat coming home after a day of adventure, the legal case for viewing them as domestic animals would be stronger because wild animals, once they stray, must have no animus revertendi, or intention to return. So long as these monkeys express their desire to remain free by evading capture, they should be considered wild animals. A 1917 Ontario court case, Campbell v. Hedley, involving a fox who had escaped a fur farm, established a similar principle, finding that the animal remained wild and thereby became free after fleeing the farm because they belonged to a species that “require[d] the exercise of art, force, or skill to keep them in subjection.”


There are, to be sure, cases in which common law courts have found losing control of an animal does not result in a loss of ownership. A 1927 Colorado case, Stephens v. Albers, held that a semi-domesticated silver fox who escaped from a fur farm still remained the property of that owner. And questions about the ownership of wild animals are infinitely debatable, as any good student of Pierson v. Post will tell you.


While these past cases offer important insight into the treatment of wild animals under common law, none of them took place in South Carolina, so courts in that state could consider them for guidance but wouldn’t be required to follow them when deciding who owns the escaped Alpha Genesis monkeys (and nothing in this piece should be construed as legal advice).

The moral meaning of animal escapes


Yet the law of capture aside, the plight of these monkeys is also interesting to us as legal scholars because it highlights one of many disconnects between the law and our moral intuitions about animals who have escaped and who are seeking or being afforded sanctuary. As journalist Tove Danovich has written, there is often great public sympathy and compassion for animals who escape painful confinement or slaughter at zoos, factory farms, or research labs — even among people who might otherwise tolerate the very systems that normalize those animals’ suffering. The public’s outrage when a single cow who escapes slaughter is gunned down by authorities is palpable and crosses ideological lines.


There is something enchanting and powerful, even romantic, about the idea of an animal escape, especially if it results in the animal’s rescue from confinement. Yet the law generally fails to recognize the moral tug that these escapes place on our collective conscience.


In a recent high-profile case in upstate New York, two cows wandered onto an animal sanctuary after escaping from a neighboring ranch. Unlike the South Carolina monkeys, these were straightforwardly domesticated animals, and the response from local law enforcement was harsh.


The sanctuary owner, Tracy Murphy, was arrested, shackled, and faced criminal liability for taking the cows in and refusing to immediately turn them over for slaughter (one of us, Justin, was defense counsel for Murphy, whose case was dismissed last month after a two-year legal battle). Her aid to two escaped cows was widely vilified by her neighbors and by local law enforcement because our legal system continues to treat many animals as property without any recognized rights or interests of their own.


The law is unlikely to swiftly abandon the archaic notion of human ownership over nonhuman animals. But we believe the law does implicitly recognize a right to rescue escaped animals, at least those who are lucky enough to make it on their own steam. We hope that the case of the escaped South Carolina monkeys will inspire conversations about the right of at least some animals to liberate themselves from exploitation and harm at human hands. Escapes are rare, but when they happen against all odds, we might ask ourselves, on both legal and moral grounds, whether the animals have a claim to freedom.

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Watch this elephant turn a hose into a sophisticated showering tool

Cell Press

 

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This is a video abstract for the 2024 Current Biology paper on elephant water hose tool use.

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Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology

Tool use isn’t unique to humans. Chimpanzees use sticks as tools. Dolphins, crows, and elephants are known for their tool-use abilities, too. Now a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 8, 2024, highlights elephants’ remarkable skill in using a hose as a flexible shower head. As an unexpected bonus, researchers say they also have evidence that a fellow elephant knows how to turn the water off, perhaps as a kind of “prank.”

“Elephants are amazing with hoses,” says Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin, one of the senior authors. “As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.”

The researchers made the discovery after the paper’s other senior author Lena Kaufmann (@lena_v_kaufmann), also of Humbolt University of Berlin, witnessed the Asian elephant Mary at the Berlin Zoo showering one day and captured it on film. She took it back to her colleagues who were immediately impressed. First study author Lea Urban decided to analyze the behavior in more detail.

“I had not thought about hoses as tools much before, but what came out from Lea's work is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools,” Brecht says.

The researchers found that Mary systematically showers her body, coordinating the water hose with her limbs. She usually grasps the hose behind its tip to use it as a stiff shower head. To reach her back, she switches to a lasso strategy, grasping the hose farther up and swinging it over her body. When presented with a larger and heavier hose, Mary used her trunk to wash instead of the bulkier and less useful hose.

The researchers say that the findings offer a new example of goal-directed tool use. But what surprised them most was the way fellow Asian elephant Anchali reacted during Mary’s showering.

The two elephants showed aggressive interactions around showering time, the researchers say. At one point, Anchali started pulling the hose toward herself and away from Mary, lifting and kinking it to disrupt water flow. While they can’t be sure of Anchali’s intentions, it looked a lot like the elephant was displaying a kind of second order tool use behavior, disabling a tool in more conventional use by a fellow elephant, perhaps as an act of sabotage.

“The surprise was certainly Anchali's kink-and-clamp behavior,” Brecht says. “Nobody had thought that she'd be smart enough to pull off such a trick.”

In fact, he reports plenty of debate in the lab about Anchali’s behavior and what it meant. Then, they saw Anchali find another way to disrupt Mary’s shower. In this case, Anchali did what the researchers refer to as a trunkstand to stop the water flow. For this feat, Anchali places her trunk on the hose and then lowers her massive body onto it.

Brecht explains that the elephants are well trained not to step on hoses, lest the keepers scold them. As a result, he says, they almost never do that. The researchers suspect that’s why Anchali has come up with more challenging workarounds to stop the water from flowing during Mary’s showers.

“When Anchali came up with a second behavior that disrupted water flow to Mary, I became pretty convinced that she is trying to sabotage Mary,” Brecht said.

The findings come as a reminder of elephants’ extraordinary manipulative skill and tool use, made possible by the grasping ability of their trunks. The researchers say they now wonder what the findings in zoo elephants mean for elephants in their natural environments.

“Do elephants play tricks on each other in the wild?” Brecht asked. “When I saw Anchali's kink and clamp for the first time, I broke out in laughter. So, I wonder, does Anchali also think this is funny, or is she just being mean?”

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This research was funded by the European Research Council.

Current Biology, Urban et al.: “Water-hose tool use and showering behavior by Asian elephants.” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)01371-X 

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

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Journal

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.017 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Water-hose tool use and showering behavior by Asian elephants

Article Publication Date

8-Nov-2024

Chimpanzees perform better on challenging computer tasks when they have an audience

Cell Press

 

image: 

Chimpanzee Pal doing task type 3

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Credit: Akiho Muramatsu

When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience on November 8 have found that chimpanzees’ performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them. The findings suggest that this “audience effect” predates the development of reputation-based human societies, the researchers say.

“It was very surprising to find that chimpanzees are affected in their task performance by audience members, and by human audience members nonetheless!” says Christen Lin of Kyoto University in Japan. “One might not expect a chimp to particularly care if another species is watching them perform a task, but the fact that they seem to be affected by human audiences even depending on the difficulty of the task suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have initially expected.”

The researchers, including Shinya Yamamoto and Akiho Muramatsu, wanted to find out if the audience effect, often attributed in humans to reputation management, might also exist in a non-human primate. People, they knew, pay attention to who is watching them, sometimes even subconsciously, in ways that affect their performance. While chimps live in hierarchical societies, it wasn’t clear to what extent they, too, might be influenced by those watching them.

“Our study site is special in that chimpanzees frequently interact with and even enjoy the company of humans here, participating almost daily in various touch screen experiments for food rewards,” Muramatsu says. “As such, we saw the opportunity to not only explore potential similarities in audience-related effects but also to do so in the context of chimps that share unique bonds with humans.”

The researchers made the discovery after analyzing thousands of sessions in which chimpanzees completed a touch screen task over six years. They found in three different number-based tasks that chimpanzees performed better on the most difficult task as the number of experimenters watching them increased. In contrast, they also found that, for the easiest task, chimpanzees performed worse when being watched by more experimenters or other familiar people.

The researchers note that it remains unclear what specific mechanisms underlie these audience-related effects, even for humans. They suggest that further study in non-human apes may offer more insight into how this trait evolved and why it developed.

“Our findings suggest that how much humans care about witnesses and audience members may not be quite so specific to our species,” Yamamoto says. “These characteristics are a core part of how our societies are largely based on reputation, and if chimpanzees also pay special attention towards audience members while they perform their tasks, it stands to reason that these audience-based characteristics could have evolved before reputation-based societies emerged in our great ape lineage.”

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iScience, Lin et al. “Audience presence influences cognitive task performance in chimpanzees” https://cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)02416-7

iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit https://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com. 

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Journal

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2024.111191 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Audience Presence Influences Cognitive Task Performance in Chimpanzees

Article Publication Date

8-Nov-2024