Care and Training of the Juvenile

Do cheetah mothers teach?

• Cheetah mothers school their cubs in what to eat and how to catch and kill it; when her cubs are ∼ 10 weeks old, a cheetah mom first introduces them to solid food by calling them to the carcass of an animal (usually a gazelle) she has just killed.

• Then lets the kids join her when she is hunting, although they do little more than play and disrupt her work

• Then she catches a newborn gazelle and does not kill it. Instead, she releases it in front of her cubs: the neonate gazelle cannot run fast, and the cubs swat at it, and try to knock it off balance; it gets up and runs, and the cubs knock it down again; after about 10 min, the mother cheetah comes back in and strangles it.

• Later, she will bring the cubs an adult to tackle: often lose this prey

• A cheetah mother clearly changes her normal predation behavior when hunting with her cubs, and she is surely hungry after she has hunted for a gazelle and brought it back only to watch as her inept cubs let dinner run away (a cost to the mother).

• Cheetah mothers show many of the hallmarks of being good teachers

do animals teach?

Teaching is a way of transmitting information by social learning, and it does involve costs: it can be years before the teacher benefits.

• So why would natural selection favor a behavior that makes the animals go out of their way to help others?

• Meerkats: cooperative breeders; groups of 2- 40 individuals, arid and challenging environment. Males and females of more than 3 months old help raise the infants (“helpers”), giving them food, often scorpions

do animals teach? → scorpions

a dangerous, toxic prey, so the helpers kill or disable a scorpion before giving it to a pup; as pups mature, helpers hand them more intact prey: with practice and supervision, pups learn how to pull out the scorpion’s stinger on their own

The pups make different begging calls as they age, and those sounds trigger the helper’s behavior

• Playing recordings of the pup calls:

• begging calls of older pups to foraging groups with younger pups: the tutors were fooled and brought intact, more dangerous prey to the young, inexperienced pups

• when the cries of younger pups were played to groups with older pups, the tutors brought more disabled, safer prey

• The helpers were not deciding what to feed the pups based on the youngsters’ capabilities, rather, the tutors were simply responding to the pups’ cries.

The faster the pups learn how to handle prey, the sooner they’ll become helpers

mimicry of parents

Mimicry of parents by their young is certainly a way to learn critical survival techniques

bonobos share with strangers before acquaintances

• Bonobos live in groups run by females and emphasize cooperation over competition.

• And like people, Bonobos use food to make new friends, not just to keep old ones

• Researchers give the salad bowl to a bonobo in a locked enclosure; the bonobo has two neighbors in adjacent enclosures who do not have food; one of the neighbors is a bonobo they know, and one is a stranger.

• Only the bonobo with the salad bowl can unlock the doors that would let a neighbor in; most of the time, the bonobo with the salad bowl did share, but not with the bonobo they already knew

• Besides, often the stranger who had just gotten access to the food would let the third bonobo in, and all three bonobos would eat together

• Bonobos are trying to extend their social network: they apparently value that more than maintaining the friendships they already have.

• But, if they are not going to see a social benefit (e.g., strangers), they will not share

The empathizing-systemizing theory

• It suggests that people may be classified on the basis of their scores along two dimensions: empathizing (E) and systemizing (S) (Simon Baron-Cohen)

• It measures a person's strength of interest in empathy (the ability to identify and understand the thoughts and feelings of others and to respond to these with appropriate emotions; Bonobos) and a person's strength of interest in systems (in terms of the drive to analyze or construct them; Chimpanzees)

orphans

• Hand-raised lambs tend not to graze with the flock

• Early experience had profound effects on the orphan lambs’ subsequent social behaviors

• Orphan lamb covered with skin of dead lamb coat to disguise scent and promote fostering by dead lambs' mother, New Zealand

• “Wet fostering”

• Hand-reared male domestic turkey

• As adult, courted most human males that walked through his park (sexual imprinting ?!)

• Attacked females

• The “tom” or “globbler” thought he was a person

• Maybe they did not like women, because their skirts resembled wattles and drooping wings...

play

• Play: a special form of social behavior

• Indulged in particularly by the young of primates and of the carnivorous mammals

• E.g., chimpanzees, dogs, cats, weasels, mongeese

• Noticeably absent in young of many of the large herbivores

• It may, however, be seen in lambs, foals, calves

• Does this have anything to do with domestication?

• Neoteny in animals?

• In many cases,“play” is active practice to perfect a needed technique

• Dog pups stalk and wrestle with each other: developing the techniques necessary for hunting; they generally play as though they were stalking and killing prey

self-handicapping // role reversal

• Self-handicapping: a dominant individual allowing him/herself to play a submissive role during a “playful” interaction, but only briefly and with re-establishment of dominance before end of play session

• Role reversal: essentially the same concept

play in young carnivores

• Young carnivores invest time and energy in practicing these techniques

• Such activities also teach the young:

– How to form social relationships

– How to relate to other individuals

– How to react to signals sent out by another individual which indicate social status and mood (bite inhibition)

play in dolphins

• Some animals (e.g., otters, dolphins) really do appear to play even as adults

• Dolphins are probably one of the most playful species on earth, but hey can also be quite savage

• Be careful no to confound play with aggressive behavior