Elephant Moms Carry the Wisdom of Generations | IN OUR NATURE (2)
That's the cutest thing I've ever seen.
Keep it together grass.
I can't.
I have so many feelings.
Well, not as cute as my kids, but like just my kids and there's that [inaudible 00:12:50]
that's close.
I haven't seen your kids, so I don't know.
They're pretty cute.
Here is maybe the most important thing when it comes to animal culture.
Culture doesn't just tell an animal how to live in this place.
It tells them how to survive.
The culture influences survival.
Up in Kenya, in Amboseli National Park in 2009, there was this epic drought.
We're telling you one of the worst droughts in decades and hundreds of elephants died,
but survival was higher in family groups that had matriarchs that were old enough to remember
the last time that there was a drought this bad.
They held some cultural memory that reminded them where the last sources of water might
be.
This researcher named Cynthia Moss.
She puts it really great.
She says, "these elephant families are old enough for wisdom."
I just love that.
So when these older elephants aren't around to pass on knowledge to the younger ones,
they might not survive.
Exactly.
And that is one reason why it's so important to protect these elephants.
They are the keepers of knowledge and that's culture.
And if they die, then the knowledge of how to live and survive in this place might die
with them.
Well, if we keep talking about this, we'll start seeing really ridiculous things.
About the wonder of cosmos.
Let me just, sorry.
How you can see the entire universe reflected and then elephants eye, if you stare long
enough at it.
It's culture.
So I think we can all get behind the fact that elephants are amazing.
They can pass culture to each other, but it's not just us and them.
Other animals also share knowledge and they pass on culture.
We mentioned chimpanzees earlier.
That's a really obvious one, but there's also dolphins.
They share tool use in foraging behavior.
Humpback whales share songs that actually can spread like pop music across the ocean.
And in fact, the more we look for culture in animals, the more animals we find to have
culture, which is why I went to San Francisco to the researcher studying White-crowned Sparrows.
He'll probably pop up on one of these bushes first.
Sounds angry.
Oh yeah.
Here he comes.
Got him.
Hey little guy.
Wow.
Yeah.
Mike makes this part look very easy, but I promise that it's not.
Those are just little birds.
I see them all over the city.
That's not where I thought we were going.
They are way smarter than you think.
And it has a really easy-to-study culture because of their Birdsong.
That sounds like a spring morning.
I love that bird.
Yeah, they're super cute.
They make this very distinctive sound and just like a baby learning to walk or eat or
watch the iPad.
These birds learn how to thrive in their environment when they're young.
They actually learn these songs and their songs function as a territorial marker, but
also show off the fitness of the bird, right?
Better songs mean the bird is strong and ready for a mate.
But the birds, they're not born knowing how to sing.
They have to practice to get good at it.
They probably can't learn to sing queen, but they're capable within their biological abilities
of singing different variations on this song.
And the teenage birds have this limited window to learn it.
They learn fast.
They learn to sing from their father or the birds in the area.
And they practice to sing like them.
They practice a lot, like all the time.
And they listened to their song and they tweak it and they find what works for them.
It's like learning any new skill.
It's like babies babble before they talk.
They're like "I'm a baby [inaudible 00:16:33].
Yeah, and it's the same with these birds.
That's why we were so excited to accompany Ruth and Mike out into the Marin Headlands
to listen to these White-crowned sparrows, because we saw this cultural practice in practice.
I can hear, but I'm not necessarily sure what I'm listening for.
It's like, [inaudible 00:16:52].
Yeah.
It's cute, right?
This song is one of the most studied sounds in all of animal behavior.
Can you believe that?
There's so much more to the song than our ears can actually hear because we're not birds.
The birds are looking for amplitude and pitch and speed, but to us, it all sort of sounds
the same.
Ruth actually carries around this little Bluetooth speaker and she plays what's called a conspecific
Sparrow call, sort of like the standard call that we know will activate the other birds.
And I have to say they, they get a little sassy.
They hear the playback and they get really mad and they zoom into the net.
The bird thinks, "who's that singing on my territory?"
He runs to see who it is and gets netted.
In order to understand the bird culture, they have to catch and band them to give them a
unique code.
So when we come back to map his territory or record his song, we know who we're recording
And you can spot them from afar based on his color.
Exactly.
So in the future, Ruth and Mike or other researchers can look up that code without having to catch
the bird again.
And once they'd heard, I'd never actually touched a bird.
They let me release a couple, which was really cool.
Wait, you've never touched a bird before?
I wasn't allowed to touch them as a kid, Joe.
Don't, let's not talk about it.
It's probably good advice.
So once they've been banded, they know who is singing and where they're moving.
So we caught up with Ruth and her advisor, Jenny, a bit later at the golden gate bridge
to do that bit.
So we're here to find some researchers who've been listening to these sparrows dating back
decades.
It's going to be pretty cool.
We got Ruth and Jenny, let me put on my mask.
Hi Hi!
How's the Sparrow hunt?
It's going good.
We've got a angry little male.
So he has a territory down here right below the Golden Gate Bridge.
Not a bad spot.
Yeah.
Ocean front view.
Yeah.
I think this is pretty good territory other than the noise, right?
But as it's gotten noisier, songs have gotten higher pitched in general and they've gotten
narrower in their pitch range or bandwidth and they've gotten faster.
And that leads to lower vocal performance.
And vocal performance is one way females can assess that male.
The research on these White-crowneds, it started decades ago back in the 1950s and 60s.
And there were lots of different song variations across different populations.
Lots of different ways for White-crowneds to sing.
But as the world got louder, the bird songs started to change.
And over time, the culture of this high-pitched song spread to all of the birds in this area.
Wait, so our culture got louder and we made theirs more boring in the process?
Yeah, because they couldn't be heard.
These little variations and personal touches that the birds added during their practicing,
they've mostly disappeared in favor of this one loud high pitched warble that mostly just
says, "I'm here" but it doesn't give a lot of nuanced information about the bird.
And the thing is we, the humans, we kept running into this problem while trying to record their
songs too.
The highway noise is a lot.
It's pretty loud.
Human noise.
It just kept getting in the way.
More and more, and we weren't slowing down and then something happened.
The COVID-19 pandemic.
It changed the world and all at once, everything got quiet again.
And that's why Jenny and Ruth are out here right now.
Young birds learn their song in 2020 during the pandemic and there was hardly any traffic
at all.
So they had a quiet soundscape, so they could actually hear themselves practice.
They could hear their fathers and their neighbors singing.
What did they sound like?
Could you tell a difference?
Okay, let's play a couple for you.
Here's the noisy environment.
And here's the quiet environment.
I can't tell a difference.
Okay, I'm glad you said that because I can't either, actually.
It's tough without bird ears, because we're really only talking about like a few hundred
hertz, which is why the scientists use these things called spectrograms.
They're basically sound fingerprints.
And when you look at these, you can really tell the difference.
And the birds, they can, of course, hear the difference.
So we went all over the place.
We're listening to these Sparrow calls and this is wild.
We actually heard a bird dialect.
Thinking about culture trace.
This male, you'll notice has a stutter note in his complex note, and that's one little
cultural trait that we tend to see here a little bit.
Students only.
So listen for it after the whistle.
Oh Yeah.
He's got kind of a little jump in the middle of that first long note.
So we call those buzzes and most of them just do kind of a long buzz.
But he does stutter buzz.
That's what I call it at least.
Amazing.
And that only happens here?
Yeah.
So let me get this straight.
Is you saying birds have different accents depending on where, what neighborhoods they're
from?
Joe.
Stop.
So bad.
I mean, I'm not saying it like that.
But yes, that is what I'm saying.
They do have different dialects and some of them haven't been completely wiped out by
human noise, yet.
So this whole thing started with a guy named Luis Baptista.
He actually originated this whole arm of research and discovered that these birds have culture
at all.
He was working as an ornithologist.
And while outside having lunch one day, he listened to the birds and he realized that
these sparrows had slightly different calls than the birds in another part of the city.
And he documented all these different calls.
During that time, old dialects were getting shoved aside for these higher pitch modern
songs, thanks to human noise pollution.
And he watched the bird culture change in real time.
Yeah.
I mean, when the pandemic happened and the noise levels dropped so dramatically in the
city, we could say, that's the quietest it's been in 50 years because of Baptista's recording.
Okay.
So do you know, were the birds returning to their old song?
The less noisy version?
So Jenny and Ruth are still trying to figure this out.
We know that the birds have culture and we know that the culture is shifting, but we
don't actually know what's going to happen.
Once a cultural shift kind of commits, it's difficult to reverse it.
And now these newer White-crowned Sparrow songs they're established in the population
and it might be too late to bring back the old variety that was there a half century
ago.
And in fact, studies with the young birds, they don't want to listen to the oldies.
Okay.
So this makes me think of how humans share cultural experiences and build on it.
Just like the elephants, the sparrows are able to communicate something to their kids
and it gets passed on and passed on from there.
It's sort of like how science evolves over time, where you take a new information and
tweak your hypothesis.
Totally.
100%.
Centuries ago, a few people realized that willow bark contains something that would
cure headaches.
And today people everywhere know it as Aspirin.
That is culture.
And all that sharing doesn't just affect our choices, but it can also affect our objective
reality.
