The Infinite Monkey Cage - Clever Creatures

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Those Clever CreaturesBrian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian and author Danny Wallace, ornithologist Professor Tim Birkhead and marine biologist Helen Scales to look at animal intelligence. We have all heard about clever chimps that can count, and about how we can compare the intelligence of humans and the great apes - but have we underestimated many of the other animal species? It would seem so, with remarkable examples of cunning, smart behaviour from animals as diverse as birds, octopuses and even fish. So how do you test a guppies IQ and can a crow really outsmart a gorilla, or even a human...prepare to be amazed. Producer Alexandra Feachem

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Hello, welcome to the Infinite. I did a very special hello, by the way. That was what we call the podcast hello, which means that because slightly younger people often listen to BBC Sounds for their podcasts, I go, hello. Can I just explain who that is? That's Robin Ince. I'm Brian Cox. And you are listening to the BBC Infinite Monkey Cage podcast on BBC Sounds, which you know, because presumably you've downloaded it. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Today's programme is about intelligence, not human intelligence,

as its existence has become far more debatable in recent years. Due to our ability to use a Black & Decker jigsaw and invent Nutella, we've always believed ourselves to have an intelligence way beyond that of any other creatures on the Earth. That of course in our ability to first of all invent language and then relegate it to a series of emoticons lol. But have we been looking at intelligence wrongly? In today's show we'll look at the cutting edge research into animal intelligence in particular the octopus and birds. Is brain size really a good marker of intelligence and how do we define what intelligence actually is? Actually the real reason, I can tell you the real reason we're doing

this is because Brian is one of those omnivores who eats pretty much anything, this is true, except the only thing he stopped eating is he now won't eat octopus because he did some scuba diving, met an octopus, had a very kind of flirtatious tentacly conversation with the octopus, and then decided it was too intelligent for him ever to consider eating. So if you ever wonder, basically, Brian will only eat things that he respects the intelligence of, which places me in a consistent sense of jeopardy. To discuss the intelligence of animals, we are perhaps sadly joined by an entirely hominin panel due to the inability to fit the dolphin tank in here and and the fact that also the raven we had on last time

is now asking for more money because it has celebrity status so uh enjoy that when you see in panto with bobby davro uh so today's hominin panel are i'm tim burkhead i'm professor of behavior and evolution at the university of sheffield. And my favourite example of animal intelligence is an experiment with a rook that was presented with the Aesop's Fable of... Well, this was a perspex column filled with water halfway up with a floating grub and a pile of stones. And a rook that had never seen this set up before came along and sussed it out and started dropping pebbles in

until the water level rose up and then they ate the grub and walked away. The fact that it could do that with no previous experience is just utterly mind-blowing. I'm Dr Helen Scales. I'm a marine biologist and writer. Among my books are Spirals in Time, Eye of the Shoal, and most recently a ladybird book about octopuses. Eye of the Shoal, and most recently a Ladybird book about octopuses. And I think the most wonderful example of animal intelligence is the coconut-carrying octopus. So it was about ten years ago, a researcher in Australia called Julian Finn noticed an octopus at the bottom of the sea that had picked up two halves, two empty halves of a coconut, and was carrying them around

and trotting across the seabed using its legs as arms and then it got a bit scared and it climbed inside one half of the coconut and then took the other one and sealed itself inside making a nice shelter now it tells us a couple of really cool things about octopuses and their intelligence one and that they use tools and that's one really important sign of intelligence is the ability to use tools and this is quite a complex tool it's in two bits they have to put it together and two the octopus has a sense of foresight it it knew that it maybe didn't need this coconut right now but at some point in the future it might need somewhere to hide so the this coconut carrying creature is an

octopus with a plan. That's like the best version of a kinder coconut you can imagine, isn't it? That is such a treat. My name is Danny Wallace. I'm a writer and a presenter, and I have been researching lying for a project recently, and I found out about a gorilla called Coco. And Coco was quite emotional sometimes, and one day she got a bit angry,

and she wrenched this giant metal sink off the wall and tossed it aside, and everyone heard it, and the keepers ran, and they went, Coco, what's going on? And now Coco looked, and she realized that she might be in a bit of trouble here, and so she did what a lot of us would do, and she decided to lie, and she had a great idea, and she looked through the glass, and she saw her, you know, constant companion, All Ball, and pointed at All Ball. And that was a great plan except All Ball was a very tiny kitten.

So it didn't work out. And this is our panel. I love that gorilla story. I don't know if I've told this on the show before, there was a friend of mine, Andrea, who's a zookeeper, when they had a male gorilla at her zoo. It was a new male gorilla, and she was quite worried about the kind of grumpiness of the gorilla,

and we were talking about it, and I said, is that a big problem? She said, it is a big problem, but it's not the biggest problem. I said, what's the biggest problem? She said, every time we clean out his bedding, we find new nuts and bolts, and we don't know where they're coming from. What? Just the idea of it. Nothing to see here. Beautiful.

Tim, let's start off first. Let's start with the definition. When we say intelligence, what do we mean by intelligence? Yeah, it's a difficult one. Intelligence is really difficult to define. I think probably the best definition is an animal having some kind of foresight, some kind of logics, being able to work something out like the rook and the octopus that we've just talked about. But it's really hard to come up with a hard and fast definition. The problem is that we always set ourselves up as the standard against which to compare everything else.

When you say ourselves, I mean, you know, there are various people you can pick, aren't there? Yes, I'm generalising. It's an interesting point, Danny, actually, isn't it? Because if you think about the range of intelligence in humans, it is large, very large. So when you select an animal, let's say a rook, then presumably there's a vast range of abilities.

There's a fantastic example of that. From ancient Roman times, people kept goldfinches as pets. And one of the popular tricks was to train a goldfinch to pull up a little silver chain with a little bucket of water, and the goldfinch would hold it in one foot and then drink the water and then let the chain go down again and people just loved that trick and that was used as a model for animal intelligence in the 1940s and 50s and then in the 1970s a couple of German scientists did a really cool experiment they they took some nestling goldfinches that had never seen this tree before and hand

raised them all in isolation. And then they presented them with the apparatus that would allow them to pull the chain and the bucket up. And a quarter of them just did it like the rook. First thing, just no problem. A quarter of them learned to do it by watching the first set of goldfinches. And the other half never mastered it, whatever you did to them, however many times they saw it. So that's a really striking example of the variation that exists

in kind of cognitive ability in animals. And do you think the range is in some sense the same by some measure as it is in humans? Are there genius goldfinches or rooks or octopuses? Okay, the bucket and chain example with goldfinches doesn't really allow your genius to shine through. But the most striking example of genius in birds is Alex the parrot, who died 10 or 15 years ago.

Irene Pepperberg had that parrot, and it became very famous. You probably all saw it on television at various times. And it could do all sorts of tests. It could discriminate objects of different shapes, different textures, different colours. And she subsequently had lots of other African grey parrots, and they were all duffers by comparison. Helen, when we talk about animal intelligence,

do we mean the same thing as when we talk about human intelligence in terms of the ways of testing it? Well, no, because I we mostly we couldn't sort of sit down most other animals and give them a um you know an iq test oh sorry i didn't mean it doing sats but i meant you know as as in what we would consider to be again challenges of of intelligence we might change the yeah no i think and i think that's one of the reasons why i think some groups of animals are kind of lagging in our understanding of and our appreciation of their intelligence, cognitive abilities, whatever you want to call it. Because you do have to come up with specific tests that are relevant to that animal or to that species, so ecologically relevant.

So, you know, you can't necessarily expect an octopus to do the same experiment or test as a bird or a gorilla or a goby. same experiment or test as a bird or a gorilla or a goby um because they've got different um well first of all you know different abilities to manipulate objects like it's uh you can get an octopus to sort of look for things down a maze by giving it objects that it can reach with its arms because it's got very flexible body but the same thing wouldn't be the case for um a sea cucumber for example maybe that's a bit extreme but um so yeah so you do have to think about what an animal experiences naturally in the wild and and use that to sort of think of clever ways even to test that intelligence in a meaningful way so does that mean that marine animals so so dolphins for example or the octopus um require a different set of tests or a different approach to try and assess their

intelligence well yeah i mean i guess and sometimes we try and apply the same tests and it's always a little tricky so one of the um a classic test to try and figure out if an animal has a sense of self-awareness is the mirror test no and it's a facet of perhaps towards something a bit bigger like consciousness which is does an animal have a sense of its own individual identity and you put a blob on its face and if it's a gorilla or if it's an elephant it actually has a limb that it can look in the mirror and go oh what's that i don't usually have that but a dolphin doesn't uh but you can put a spot on the front of a dolphin and it will swim around in front of the mirror and you think well maybe it does is it checking itself out going oh that's a bit different and weird? Same with fish.

And they've just done this with fish, actually. And it's little, these little things called cleaner wrasse, which, you know, have tiny, tiny brains. And you wouldn't necessarily think have the capacity for this level of intelligence. But there's lots of signs that they do, partly because of the lives that they lead when they have to, they're cleaning parasites off other fish. And they have to be quite clever about it so they don't get eaten um so they have evolved intelligence and they seem to have possibly passed the mirror test you put a dot on its head and at first um basically most fish if you put a mirror

in front of them they attack it because they think it's another fish but um these ones eventually kind of realize that maybe that's them in the mirror and start checking themselves out and actually rubbing their heads against the bottom of the tank as if it's like a parasite they've got on their face. So maybe they... So you can see how the mirror test could translate but lots of other things you do have to be a bit more specific. Doesn't that illustrate a really important point that in the past, in the Victorian era for example,

people exaggerated their idea of what intelligence was. You know, they'd see something and they'd read into it but now we've kind of rejected that and more scientific approaches allow us to understand that the cleaner rat is actually much cleverer than we ever thought it was before so there's this business of over-exaggerating intelligence and underestimating it as well until you do the exactly the right kind of test that's appropriate for that animal in that environment but is that what they do as well i mean you mentioned the birds that learn from each other and we mentioned dolphins there and gorillas

and and these things that are part of bigger kind of social groups who you imagine would learn from each other but octopus you know an octopus is quite a lonely, weird figure. How would an octopus become more intelligent? Why have you made the octopus? You've turned it into a kind of goth octopus there. Lonely, weird octopus there. Never trust an octopus, Robin. Never trust an octopus. Oh, don't.

And they eat each other. That's the main thing. Most of the octopus, if you put them together in a tank, you'll only have one after a while. You've just burst the octopus bubble. We liked them up until now. I mean, they just don't like each other, which is fine. I'm going to start eating them again.

I'm going to eat each other. They mate at arm's length as well, because the males are like, OK, here you go, see ya, and they just stretch out with their long arm and just... They're a dangerous animal, dangerous animal to each other yeah but i mean they do live there is a there's now two places we know of in the world where they have been found living together and this is really rare and we think it's just a sort of weird sort of occurrence that there are a couple of places in australia one's called octopolis and one's called octolantis where um there are like these big groups of

octopus that live and socialise together. And they are kind of fairly rough with each other. They have fights. There's like a boss one who always is mean to the other octopuses. Is this a sitcom? You are thinking, if it was in Scotland, the fact that Octonocty would just be this wonderful... So they can be social, if they have to be. And we think they're in this place because there's lots of food and they all just kind of want to eat this enormous pile of scallops. So they can be social if they have to be and we think they're in this place because there's lots

of food and they all just kind of want to eat this enormous pile of scallops um so they can be social but generally they're anti-social and that actually i mean is in terms of like octopus intelligence it is kind of funny to think about this sort of smart little octopus just sitting on its own not really interacting with its own kind apart from mating and eating and playing with coconut shells and And playing with coconut shells. And in a way, like, I love that we've discovered this place where they live together. I mean, I want to play this forwards by thousands, millions of years

and see, like, what's going to happen to these guys? Because it's almost like this is setting the scene for more stuff in the octopus world to evolve, maybe, because they're interacting and they're, like, you know, they have maybe language with each other and stuff. So maybe this is the whole beginning of a new branch of the octopus world to evolve, maybe, because they're interacting and they're like, you know, they have maybe language with each other and stuff. So maybe this is the whole beginning of a new branch of the octopus evolution. I love this kind of solipsistic octopus Morrissey

that you've created. I think it's a beautiful vision. Tim, I think it's interesting that talk of socialisation because all of those, you know, different ideas of intelligence and it keeps changing, you know, but that has for a long time been one of those ideas ideas of intelligence, and it keeps changing, but that has for a long time been one of those ideas, hasn't it, that creatures that are able to socialise, it must immediately mean that they must have some kind of superior intelligence, and yet here we're talking about what we believe to be

a very highly intelligent creature, which has made quite the opposite. Exactly. The octopus has probably evolved in a completely independent way, but for the rest of the animal kingdom, being social means you have to be smart as well. Simply being monogamous, being paired up for a long time, you have to be pretty smart. You probably have to have a big brain to anticipate what your partner's doing so that you can coordinate incubating the eggs, feeding the chicks and so on. Whereas if you're a promiscuous so-and-so, you just swan around and do your own thing.

And you don't have to be particularly smart to do that. There's no human parallels there, of course. And so being highly social like a primate is an extension of being married, basically, and having a single partner. You've got a whole bunch of individuals that you have to recognise, you have to remember where they are in the hierarchy, you have to remember all sorts of experiences that you've had with them.

So it's generally recognised that parrots and members of the crow family, magpies, ravens and so on, they're all social, and their smartness is deeply tied up with their complex social life. They also live quite a long time. Parrots can live 50 years. Ravens can probably live 50 years. So you've got to remember a lot of stuff. Whereas if you're a guillemot, which is what I study the rest of the time, they have a limited repertoire.

And there's more going on in guillemot's brain than you would probably imagine, but they don't come close to parrots and corvids so people i mean quite a few people have a have a lone african grey parrot for instance and so it would be better for to actually have them on their own is not good those poor parrots on their own i mean they are imprinted on their owner and we looked after one for a friend and he brought it back from africa when he was in the army many years ago and he went on holiday and this parrot went I'm so pissed off and just pulled all its feathers out and they never grew back and that was that was a stress response so you're absolutely right because those birds are traditionally part of a pair if you lose your partner it's terrible

so you're right I think so parrots that are kept on their own, unless their owner spends a lot of time with them, probably have a desperate life. Exactly the same thing is true of the bullfinch, which has a very big brain for its body size, is intensely monogamous, and they also pine for their partners. If you watch them in your garden,

they're often going round as pairs. One of the really interesting things about bullfinch intelligence is that in the past, people trained them to whistle two or three different German folk tunes, and I think what was happening is they were co-opting those bits of its brain that would normally be used for keeping the pair bond intact and anticipating what its partner was going to do

to enable them to do all this amazing mimicry i think also i i think there's a law in switzerland that makes it illegal for you to own one guinea pig you you have to own two because they see it as cruelty otherwise but they wouldn't learn german folk they'd learn yodeling i think yeah but it is but that's genuinely a thing i think um danny you did a lot of research into chimpanzees it's your area of expertise and i wanted to ask you because when you made the documentary for horizon part of what brian was talking about you know when he met this octopus this sense of communication this sense that another creature is under understanding you to someone did you have that experience with

the chimpanzees that you you? I had one magical moment. I mean, growing up, you know, we always want to feel like we have this sense of communication, don't we, that this other little thing kind of understands us. I grew up in a house where my mum's greatest wish was that our cat could speak. And it was really... And the problem is, my mum is deaf in one ear, and so sometimes she finds it hard to play sound.

And once, getting back from the shops when I was a kid, she went, hello, Sammy. And I went, hello, Mrs. Wallace. And rather than sort of come to the normal conclusion, she span around and looked me in the eye and just went, did you hear that? And that is our hope. So making this documentary,

I was hoping that something like that would happen. And I went to Des Moines, Iowa, and I met a bonobo called Kansi and Kansi was behind the glass and they sort of warned me he was a bit of a tricky character and to my left was a big screen and on it were all the words that Kansi had learned and I could press the word and then the voice would come out and Kansi hopefully might respond. So, you know, if you wanted to say food, Kansi would know. But as I sort of played with it, I thought,

well, I'm going to try and actually have a chat with Kansi or, like, agree on something in some little way. And I'd seen Kansi running around, so I wrote, Kansi like Chase? And there was a moment there where Kansi was like, oh, hang on, I got that, and nodded.

And so I stood up, and the camera didn't quite know what to do, because we didn't know this was going to happen, and I asked the keeper, should I go? And they went, yeah, and so I went round the back, and we chased each other.

And it was the most amazing thing. It was like looking into the eye. It was like making a phone call to an ancestor and agreeing on plans and then doing those plans. And I was quite affected by it. But that understanding of languages... Tim, you were talking about this beforehand. There's a lovely Gary Larson cartoon

where you have an owner telling a dog off, and he's going, Fido, you have been very naughty. I cannot believe that you've done this, Fido. And then you see what the dog hears, which is just blah, blah, blah, Fido, blah, blah, blah. Now, you were actually telling me beforehand that, for instance, language, the understanding in dogs, you were telling me of an example which goes far deeper than that. Well, there's that famous Border Collie. You've probably seen it on television well the tv camera's in the owner's front room and there's a pile of i think

it's a thousand soft toys and the owner's sitting there in his chair he goes go and get go and get yellow monkey the dog just runs into this pile of toys scurries around brings out the yellow monkey go and bring uh red lion and the dog does the same and it could remember a thousand different items and recognize them and find them it's just that is extraordinary and i suspect that that's an einstein sheepdog as well because that is i mean beforehand one of my favorite things that's happened in this room before is big academic arguments between the scientists we had we had pretty much a stand-up row as whether life was going to first be found on Mars or on Enceladus and had to be calmed down.

Now, beforehand, the nearest we got to that in the green room was talking about marine animals, and you then said, Tim, that, well, a dolphin's only as clever as a dog, really. And there was a nice little... So, Helen, what's your... Because dolphins are the pin-ups, aren't they? Dolphins really are, in terms of animal intelligence,

especially in the 60s and 70s, John C. Lilly's work, etc. So do you think it's fair to say, you know, dolphins and Dachshunds? See, I think I don't know enough about what wild dogs get up to. I think with dolphins there's two things, and with all the cetaceans that have these big brains and that seem to have remarkable, social lives we've touched on that already but that the idea that that these are groups of animals that live in groups they have to remember stuff they have to interact with each other so there's a good reason for for signs of intelligence

in in that way um and so we we have captive studies of dolphins and those are the ones that go back and we you know we get them to mimic our body movements, perhaps even our language. I don't know that they've really got the same understanding as a bonobo. But actually, I think what's more interesting is what they get up to in the wild and some of the stuff that they do when they're out there swimming around in their pods and so on.

You know, that there's signature whistles that they have names for themselves. But sure, dogs have names, right? They recognise their names. So maybe there actually are more parallels and maybe saying that dolphins are as intelligent as dogs isn't such a bad thing they're both pretty smart yeah they're both smart my point of saying that was really to illustrate how difficult it is to judge so you know dogs do do an amazing array of things and we tend to think of dolphins and other cetaceans as being super smart,

partly because they're mysterious, they're underwater, we can't really see them very easily. And there is this whole mythology has grown up around them. And if your starting point is, okay, they're no different from dogs, then the challenge to the academic is to prove otherwise. By spending time with animals, that's what gives you the greatest insight. And that's what Conrad Lorenz did in the 1940s. Nico Tinbergen, Lorenz and Tinbergen, together with somebody else, won the Nobel Prize for starting the study of animal behaviour.

And Tinbergen was a field man. He was outside watching birds through binoculars, rather distant. Lorenz kept his animals in captivity and developed this really close affinity with them and much, much greater insight. So Tinbergen saw things in a very broad species kind of way whereas Lorenz just knew them as individuals. And both approaches are completely valid,

but I think that close proximity gives you that extra insight into what makes animals tick. Is it partly so that proximity, you spend time with them, as Danny spoke about, and you get to know the capabilities of the animal. But as you said, Helen, there's also an element of perhaps the mimicking our behaviour. So is there a sense in which it's easier to ascribe intelligence to something like a chimpanzee or a dog than something that's rather alien?

And we really find it more difficult to make a connection. It's like an octopus. We find it more difficult to make a connection because we don't really recognise its behaviour. It can't mimic us in the way that something with a face like a chimpanzee or a dog can. Yeah I think there's two I think there's a few things going on there like you say that if it can if we can sort of reach across that divide between our species and another in some recognisable way then we're much more likely to to sort of find a a quicker way of of gauging its intelligence and i i think another thing is i think and we're still suffering from this which is is the assumption that there isn't that intelligence there and i think um the the creatures of the

ocean are particularly prone to this especially things like fish and and octopus too i mean they're silent they don't make, they haven't got facial expressions. So how can we even sort of assume that they don't do things, that they don't have emotions, they don't have this sort of intelligence? Because it is that much more of a divide between them and us. And so we do need to break through that barrier of just assumption. And I think it still lingers a lot. By devising clever tests, and it's much more difficult to devise those tests with something like an octopus. Just coming back to your point about your bonobos,

I was once in Africa, and a troop of baboons came into the campsite, and the tent next to us, it was an oldest chap with his secretary, probably his wife, I don't know, and they'd gone for a drive and left their tent unzipped, so to speak. And these baboons had gone in and just kind of ripped open these metal containers and were sitting there eating cashew nuts and drinking whiskey.

And my brother was in the vehicle with me and he pushed me out. He said, you go and chase them off and I'll go back and make sure they're not in our tent. And I went up to these baboons and I chased and chase them off, and I'll go back and make sure they're not in our tent. And I went up to these baboons, and I chased the little ones off, but these male baboons just stood there and looked at me, and I thought, this is it, I'm going to die. And it was that looking in their eyes when you realise they are so close to us. I mean, this was like meeting a group of thugs on the corner of the road. I don't know if you've ever been to a Wetherspoons.

on the corner of the road. I don't know if you've ever been to a Wetherspoons. Just to bring these threads together, so the octopus and the intelligence in mammals and birds and so on, these are very different evolutionary lines, aren't they? The common ancestor between us and an octopus is 600 million years ago or something like that. Yeah, I mean, that's what we can assume. That thing wasn't intelligent whenever whatever that common ancestor was.

We can carefully assume that, yeah. Is that important that we've got two pretty separate lines of evolution of what we might call intelligence? It's crucial, I think. And I think it's what makes the octopus and, you know, some of their friends and the other cephalopods in the same group of mollusks you know cuttlefish and squid are also pretty pretty brainy um that was what makes it so fascinating that's what makes it so important beyond the kind of how wonderful

octopuses are and i've had moments with octopus and i can't eat them either beyond that is this idea that they are out there on their own 600 million years more likely all on their own and they've done it themselves again in a way that we can sort of relate to but sort of not it's a bit strange and different the way they even just arrange their the nerves in their bodies is different to ours we've basically got a massive brain and some nerves that kind of control the rest of our bodies but over half if not two-thirds of an octopus's nerve cells neurons are in its arms so they are doing things very differently to us it's almost like they've got more of this dispersed network of sensors and responses and and processing power so completely different to

ours and that is showing us something incredibly powerful i mean as often people sort of say things like oh you know octopuses are aliens, they're here on Earth, and there's even a fairly sensible scientific paper that came out recently, more of a thought experiment, saying, well, could they be aliens? Maybe they did come down as eggs on an icy comet or a virus from squid that live on another planet. Most of the people who know anything about squid and octopuses

kind of just ruled that all out. All of the people who know anything about it and octopus has kind of just ruled that all out all of the people who know but it is an alien intelligence in the sense isn't it because it's separate it is separate so i think in that sense it is it's it's as if we found them on another planet we may as well have and i think as well the other thing it raises is the possibility that we could find intelligent life on another planet it's happened here twice at least we know and possibly more i mean it could be that you know intelligence has evolved more within the mammals and within the vertebrates for example so but we know for sure definitely twice here so why not elsewhere too but you would talk about like you know um community and socialising and stuff, I was wondering about humour, because there is sort of evidence for apes finding stuff funny,

and you like to think that maybe a dog will find something funny. Could an octopus ever find anything funny? And if so, what? I think they do, and I think they actually... What is it, like puns, or...? Slapstick, mostly. Yeah, no. Slapstick's great. I mean mean the fact you've got eight choices for the slap it's pretty impressive well there is the lovely story of maybe it's not a sense of humor but a sense of mind possibly this story which um i love particularly with octopuses is

so there's a lady who keeps a whole bunch of them in captivity she's doing various studies and she's doing the kind of daily feed um there's a bunch of keeps a whole bunch of them in captivity. She's doing various studies. And she's doing the kind of daily feed. And there's a bunch of different octopuses, all in their glass cases. And octopuses actually prefer live crab to eat if they get the choice. That's their food of preference. But they can be weaned onto frozen shrimp. And so they'll take that if they have to. But there's this one particular octopus.

And she went down. She gave all the octopuses their squid and she walked back down the line and this one had stopped and it was holding its bit of shrimp. And as she walked past, it swam at the same speed looking at her, eye to eye, holding this piece of shrimp. And without the gaze still engaged,

it shoves that shrimp down the kind of outflow pipe of its tank. It's like, I'm not eating this like this no i've seen brian like that in restaurants it's quite common yeah so what was the most intelligent behavior or some of the most intelligent behavior you've seen in birds you've described a couple of examples gosh okay so years ago we did an experiment with with chickens and this most of my research has been on a topic called sperm competition which is females making channel five yeah females mating with more than one male and we were interested in how much sperm males had to spare so we did this experiment where we presented hens to a cockerel and if you do that and you put the hen in front of the cockerel

and he mates with her, and then you put her behind your back and then put her back, he'll mate with her again and he'll do that all afternoon. But we devised a system where we could... LAUGHTER So human. Anyway, we devised a system where we could count the number of sperm that were being transferred from the male to the female. I won't go into details. And if you did that, the number of sperm in successive matings

goes down and down and down. So we did this trick on these cockerels. And instead of bringing the same female out, we brought a different female out. And the sperm numbers shot up, so to speak. And what we realized was going on before every mating the cockerel would just oh it's you and then the sperm numbers would go down but if it was somebody new it's called the coolage effect he would put in a whole new bunch of sperm so his intelligence was in terms of recognizing the female having some kind of strategy in his head about how many sperm he's going to transfer, and realising that the male almost unbeknown to us

was kind of sussing out who the female was just to check, I just thought that was a remarkable bit of behaviour, because chickens aren't renowned for being super smart It's not the kind of intelligence you described earlier, the problem solving in a problem you've never been presented with before

i don't think they'd been presented with this particular experiment before they were thrilled danny i mentioned we the idea of uh again if testing animal intelligence i wonder sometimes whether it also comes from the fact that we're still seeking to make sure that we're superior. Because the idea, for instance, humans were defined as being, oh, we use tools. Not like, oh, so does that bird over there, and so does that ape over there. And so then we change it, and then it becomes something about social. And then it goes, oh, it turns out so did they. Or maybe it's because we grieve.

Is there something about also the desire for human superiority that maybe within these tests we're going, we've got to find something that just makes us different to everything else, and actually we're having a problem with that. Well, maybe. I don't know how we'd feel if we found out that a chaffinch was three times smarter than we were. I think we might have trouble with that. I now want to bring out a bucket and some water

and see if you can do that test. Or some hens. Infinite monkey cage, late and blue. Let me at them. No, I do, you know, maybe, I think I quite like it if an animal

gets one over on me. You know, it's quite a great thing if you get outsmarted by a cat. I think that's something good. I remember having to, actually for that chimp documentary, I remember having to we had a little publicity photo taken and they brought this, well I met this lovely chimp and we got on. One thing led

to another. And the chimp sat behind me and put its hand over my mouth. And it was quite a sort of a weird moment. Obviously, they could rip your head off, but it chose not to. And it was just like this. So we had the picture taken, and it was like I was being silenced by the chimp.

And I thought that was great, and I loved the photo. And then I found out what the chimp normally used its left hand for. And that's when I thought, I think that chimp's cleverer than I am. And this idea of kind of a sense of mind, of others' minds, and their knowledge of what you're doing and their knowledge of what they think and what they can perceive. And if there's going to be a tick list of signs of intelligence, I'm sure that sort of thing is one of the important things.

One of the problems with really getting to grips with what octopuses are doing with this huge, weird brain of theirs is getting them to actually do the experiments you want them to do because they're really unruly, they won't do what they're told, they'll just muck about. So it's really actually quite a limitation in terms of getting these sorts of studies done because some of them will...

Something simple like training them to recognise a target and you feed them and they learn to do that and that's great and some of them will do that you know there'll be like a box of food with a lever and if they learn how to push the lever they get some food fantastic maybe even some nice live crab um not not frozen shrimp um and then there was another octopus will just come along and break the lever off because it's just like, no, don't want to do that. I don't really want the food or whatever. Just, they're quite inconsistent and they're quite tricky as animals.

I mean, I think that maybe it's also telling us partly what's going on in their minds, but they're quite hard to work with. But you mentioned you'd had a moment with one. I had an experience with one diving in Florida, actually, we were filming. And so I was diving, it was very shallow water. Here he is.

It was very shallow water, so it was quite difficult to sort of dive in it you know quite tidal and so i was a bit wobbly and all over the place and this octopus came out and started mimicking my movements and so i noticed it was standing with two arms so i'm standing on it six legs with two up like that and so so i i'd put an arm forward and it would put an arm forward and I took it back and it took it back. And so we had this quite a long interaction where I would do something

and it would mimic it and I would do something else and it would mimic it, which is absolutely a fascinating interaction. You know, that was my point where I thought, that was actually John Corkshaw

in a cagoule. Yeah, absolutely. I've only managed to frighten octopuses, actually. I'd love to, the mimicking sounds amazing. That is another thing I've done is I've managed to frighten one and they go white when they're frightened

and I saw an octopus in the reef and I kind of ducked down to it and every time I did that it would just go and turn white and then as long as I backed off it went back to being red again and I did that kind of five times That is harassment I love the fact Brian most of your stories are very kind of

exotic, I was you know the Great Barrier Reef diving but you did also tell me because i love the fact brown most of your your uh stories are very kind of exotic i was you know the great barrier reef diving but you did also tell me one involving a sewage farm i think in uxbridge and a crow yeah so yeah i don't yeah you might comment on this too we were filming um instead of royal society and it was a some educational films for gcse signed about um sewage tree water treatment actually and it was near Heathrow. And they had these big sort of treatment ponds with a scraper on it that would move around on like a railway and they'd scrape off the fat that rose to the surface. So that was the idea.

So the fat would rise up and they'd scrape it off. And they found that it kept breaking. And the reason was that the crows had noticed that if they got rocks and piled them up on the little railway line, they could break the sweeper and then all the fat would build up and they could eat it. So they calculated or understood how to break the apparatus so they could eat. Well, that's an extension of the Aesop's Brook, isn't it? I mean, that's a fabulous example. We might all be doing that after October. So, cut that out, it's fine. brook isn't it i mean that's a fabulous example we might all be doing that after october so um cut that out it's fine uh the

the other the one other animal that i found remarkable which perhaps goes to the evolution of intelligence was um uh on christmas island which is just off indonesia the the top predator is a crab so the the they call it the robber crab or the coconut crab and they're tremendously intelligent they'll live to a long 70 80 years and they told us that they will they call they call them robber crabs i think locally because they steal things they come into people's houses and steal things like a magpie right they build things and they said don't leave your camera equipment or bags open because they'll come they're huge things these things they're big as big as a dog but a crab uh island giganticism it's called isn't it and so it's literally my worst nightmare and so it i'd left a bag there and and it went to the bag and we watched it went to the bag and opened it and it. It went to the bag and opened it, and I had some money in it, and it took the money out of the bag

and wandered off and climbed a tree with the money. So it was really a remarkable behaviour. But these things are the top predator on the island. It would be amazing if it turns out that Brian Cox is, like, Britain's biggest fantasist. The universe is tiny, it turns out. It's rubbish. I was so hoping when he said the top predator in Christmas Island is elves. I feel really disappointed.

We asked the audience a question today as well, and we asked them if one animal was going to take over the world, which should it be and why? Let's find out. Brian, what have you got? Hedgehog. So we get half the year off while they hibernate. Spiders, because they could replace the World Wide Web. Danny, you've got some there this is yeah sloths because then we'd have a good excuse to be lazy

that is true we'd just copy them it'd be like you know just copying our leaders and the dung beetle which is finally fed up dealing with peoples and then a word it says Robin here I suppose you are an animal but then I think it's

robin the bird i think no it must be me it says because they all seem to be intelligent it must be me let it be me um vampire cows because fangs can only get butter well done neil very nice thank you very much to our panel, Tim Birkhead, Helen Scales and Danny Wallace. And, well, next week, next week, I had a premonition about next week's show. No, you didn't, you didn't, did you? Why didn't I have a premonition about next week's show? Because of the geometry of space-time.

Ah, my premonitions included my premonition that you wouldn't believe I had a premonition. But also, while I was asleep, so therefore I couldn't obey the laws of physics um i i had this dream and i saw brian riding into the studio on a space hopper shaped like max plank and sidman freud was riding on a banana after him screaming stop this stop this it doesn't mean anything at all and then herman rorschach was behind him leaving inky footprints all of which look like my mother so my premonition was correct,

because next week we're looking at the science of dreams. So that's our next week's show. Thank you very much for listening, and bye-bye. Bye. In the infinite monkey cage Without you traveling In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again.

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