Judging by some reader reactions to my posts, there are folks out there heavily invested in the clearly unsupportable belief that there are people and there are animals, two totally separate and completely unrelated categories of life. Worse, this cockeyed world view is often used to justify human’s abuse of what are perceived as those clearly lesser animals. Sad, weird, and wrong.
No, I am not saying that every guppy is to be valued and appreciated in the same way and to the same degree we value and appreciate others of our own species, nor am I suggesting that a cockroach could have written Hamlet or that a pigeon could have engineered the space shuttle. That we are an animal of extraordinary talents and abilities is not a question, at least not in my mind. However, that we are indeed an animal is also not a question worth asking. We are of course animals, related to and similar to and different from the rest of the world’s wonderful and diverse animals.
From my vantage point, it is equally interesting to see and celebrate how we are similar to other animals as it is to see and to celebrate the differences. Way back when I was in elementary school, teachers taught us that there were two big things that separated us from the rest of the animal kingdom: our ability to communicate by language, and our use of tools. Our understanding and knowledge of the world has progressed over these decades, and we now know that the truth is far more nuanced than so simply black and white.
Yes we use language differently than do whales but both whales and people communicate orally, telling others of their kind things both mundane and important. Yes we use tools differently than do chimpanzees and certainly we make far more complicated tools than do our close relatives, but we both make and we both use tools to help us live our lives. More startling, the recent first discovery of tool use by a species of invertebrate animals: the octopus.
Although a radical discovery, it is — like most discoveries — better thought of as a next step rather than a huge leap in our understanding of the world we share, since something very much like tool use has long been observed with other invertebrates: for example, how some types of ants use leaves like baskets to help collect and carry food. But although like tool use, scientists have distinguished this from tool use because the action only occurs in a very specific situation with a very specific set of conditions present. That is, the leaf was there and the food was there and the ant took advantage of those two facts rather than bringing the leaf along in hopes of finding food and then, as a second step, using the leaf for the purpose of carrying food back to the nest.
Over a period of almost ten years, a group of scientists spent more than 500 hours in the waters off the coasts of Bali and Sulawesi in Indonesia studying more than 20 individual Veined Octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus). These soft-bodied animals have learned to envelope themselves within coconut shells, manipulating two halves to create a solid whole with them ensconced safely in the center; the half shells, by the way, are garbage discarded into the waters by the inhabitants of coastal towns. When startled from the safety of this hard shell, an octopus would quickly return and reassemble the tough coconut ball around itself. Even more to the point, on several occasions octopuses were observed carrying stacked coconut halves below their bodies for considerable distances (up to 70 feet).
Octopuses were observed exiting the cover of their shells, stacking them neatly one inside the other, arranging them under their arms and then moving off with a stiff legged motion (what the scientists call “stilt walking”) with the shells embraced in a circle of octopus armpits. As the scientists explain in an article which appeared in Current Biology Magazine, “This unique and previously undescribed form of locomotion is ungainly and clearly less efficient than unencumbered locomotion (i.e., costly in terms of energy and increased predator risk compared with normal walking or the faster jet swimming escape). While ‘stilt walking’ the octopus gains no protective benefits from the shells(s) it is carrying as the head and body are fully exposed to potential predators. The only benefit is the potential future deployment of the shell(s) as a surface shelter or as a buried encapsulating lair.”
No, not quite the same thing as purchasing a drill from Sears, but this is an invertebrate’s intentional and creative use of objects for a unique purpose which enhances their lives. We are not octopuses and octopuses are not us, but this particular “shell game” is a whole lot like the behaviors we know early humans exhibited, behaviors which demonstrate thought and memory while manipulating things in the world; that range of behaviors which we once used — and really no longer can use — to think of us as completely unlike our neighbors here on Mother Earth.