Wildlife Intelligence Explorers with Dr. Ian Miller, Dr. Felicity Muth, Dr. Tiago Falótico & Dr. Mauricio Cantor
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, writer Tavia Gilbert. And along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.

In our last episode, we spent time with the extraordinary Dr. Jane Goodall, primatologist, writer, speaker, and conservationist. Dr. Goodall previewed today's episode, featuring the three recipients of the Wildlife Intelligence Project,

a $2.7 million joint initiative between National Geographic Society and Templeton World Charity Foundation designed to support three early career scientists whose passion for and discoveries in wildlife field research have the potential to illuminate unknown wonders of our world

Today, we'll meet each of those three scientists and hear about their groundbreaking work. But let's start with paleobotanist Dr. Ian Miller. He's the Chief Science and Innovation Officer at the National Geographic Society, and he shares what made each of the three recipients stand out from hundreds of other applicants.

He says there was something of Dr. Goodall's genius in each of them. Dr. Goodall was critical in our history here at the National Geographic Society. We really wanted to find people who might follow in her footsteps. We're always, first and foremost, looking for incredibly sound, groundbreaking science.

And then within that, the idea was to be able to find people that are working on really cutting edge animal cognition and behavior research. So the implication was from many luminaries in the field that these three individuals really changed the way we thought about animal cognition in areas that might not be typically aligned with what we might always think of as animal cognition.

cognition and behavior, right? So these three will hopefully come together to really help us deepen that understanding of what intelligence in the natural world means. And through that, we'll create a deeper connection to the organisms that we share the planet with.

Giving scientists time to study those deeper connections to the natural world has always been at the heart of National Geographic's mission. One of the beauties of this is that in emulating Jane, we're trying to give people real time on the ground to get the work done. So I don't always, I don't think I know exactly what those outcomes are other than the fact

that my deep hope is that each of them will find unique ways to inspire people to care deeply about the animals that they know and are working on so hard, and that they ultimately love them and will the rest of us fall in love with them too. We'll come back to Dr. Miller later in the episode, but let's meet the first wildlife intelligence explorer who will make us fall in love with bees.

Cognitive ecologist and bee researcher Dr. Felicity Muth runs a bee cognition lab located at the University of California, Davis. What questions is she asking in her research? Trying to understand how ecological variables lead to differences in cognitive traits. People have been studying

animal cognition across different animals for a long time, but I think we still have a long way to go because so much is focused on a few species and often in a captive environment. And so while there are many people studying cognition in the wild, I think that there are still so many species that we have no idea about their cognition. I think that

Animals' cognition or their intelligence is a reflection of the environments that they have evolved in. And you're going to see a massive diversity in how animals think, how they process the information in their worlds, how they learn, how they make decisions. But ultimately, it will have been selected for the environment in which they live.

In the context of talking about bees, most of the time what we're talking about is associative learning. So the animal is learning to associate a particular stimulus with a particular reward, and then they change their behavior as a result of that association. So in honeybees and bumblebees, people have shown that they form what are called abstract concepts.

So they can learn something in a particular context and then apply it to a different context.

Honeybees and bumblebees are really good at learning about floral features because they're generalists. And bees that are generalists visit so many different types of flower and they have to learn so much information. When a bee lands on a flower, it's learning all kinds of information about that flower, about the smell, about the color, features of that flower and how they are related to the rewards that they can get from that flower.

It makes sense that they should be able to learn which of these flowers have got the best rewards. So being able to quickly process that information and then also learn more general concepts that can help them visit the best flowers in a meadow, all of this we would expect to be selectively advantageous.

With one million neurons, says Dr. Muth, the bee brain is fairly simple and tractable, much more so than the human brain, which has tens of billions of neurons. That malleability makes bees the perfect subject for Dr. Muth's cognition research.

Bumblebees have been used as a model to study cognition for a really long time because they are incredibly good at learning and they're incredibly motivated to partake in the kinds of experiments we do with them. And because of that, bees have emerged as a model for studying learning and studying cognition. For example, if a bumblebee finds food out in its environment, it can come back to the colony and run around releasing a pheromone that essentially says to the other bumblebees,

I have found food out there. And so this is something that I want to test in bees, comparing generalist bees to specialist bees. I'm going to be testing the hypothesis that generalist bees will be better at learning associations with floral features than specialist bees. For example, let's say that we find that dietary generalists in bees are better at learning novel associations or better at

forming abstract concepts about flowers, then we might also expect that same thing could be true in other systems as well. So it helps us understand more general principles about how cognition might evolve.

While a bee colony may live for a year, an individual bee may live for only a few weeks to a few months. In order to navigate and survive in their environments, then, the bees learn and store data in their memory that likely lasts essentially their entire short lifetime. Dr. Muth can see evidence of that cognition when she observes bees in the lab.

So in the last experiment I did, we were training them to learn a color association. And so this is something that they would do as part of their natural foraging behavior. Normally, they'd be learning in a meadow, for example, this blue penstemon has got better nectar than this yellow aster. When we put them into a tube and we're training them to a color association, we'll use strips of colored paper containing a bit of sucrose, which acts as a proxy for nectar. And so it's something that...

seems a bit artificial, but it is close enough to what they do in their natural environment that they very rapidly learn.

It's when she gets out into the natural environment that Dr. Muth can see how capable the short-lived bees truly are and how much they're impacted by their ecology. Lab work allows us to get at what bees can do, but if we want to really understand what they actually do, then it's helpful to go out and work with wild animals.

When we're training a bee, we work with one individual bee and we tag that bee and we give it a particular experience. And so I might give them flowers where the blue flowers have got pollen, the yellow flowers don't have any pollen, they discover the pollen on the blue flowers, and then I give them a choice between blue or yellow. And if they go and search for pollen on the blue flowers, then that's an indication that they've learned that association between colour and the pollen reward.

And so it's not just that they're just looking for pollen, they're also paying attention to other features of the flower of where they found pollen in the past. And the way that we test that is when we test them, we give them flowers that don't have any pollen on them at all. And yet they'll still go to, say, the blue flower and search for

pollen there. It tells us that when you see a bee flying around a meadow, it's making us decisions of what flowers it's going to visit based not only on its memory of where it found nectar in the past, but also on where it found pollen in the past. And we found that they can remember these associations for quite a while. I tested them after a week. They still have this long term memory of having found it in the past.

And so it adds a new dimension to how we think about pollinator-plant interactions. Dr. Muth isn't just fascinated by bees. The more she observes and learns about them, the more she respects them. Recently I made a discovery that

Queen bumblebees are really good at learning. So I work on public land in Nevada and California. And so I'm often obsessively checking the weather, trying to work out when the snow has melted enough that we expect flowers to start coming out and bees to start coming out. And so the queens, they emerge in the spring and they don't yet have a colony. So they're basically functioning as a solitary individual.

So they can't rely on that colony structure. So I found that these queens are really good at learning and now I want to know why. Are they just giant genius bees or do they have more specialized cognition in particular ways?

Why is it important to look for answers to these questions and to explore diverse intelligences at all? We define the word intelligence based on human cognition, right? So we say the most intelligent animal are humans, but we have used human cognitive abilities to define that, right? We say things that we're really good at: language, tool use, metacognition.

But if we were a bee, then we might say that the most intelligent thing is learning about thousands of different flowers, right? And we're not very good at that as humans. I would say that the cognition an animal has reflects its requirements. And so there are going to be other animals that have totally different type of cognition than what humans have.

And sometimes we might not even recognize the different cognitive abilities if they're not ones that we have. Understanding cognition in any non-human animal helps us understand cognition better and because we're all related, ultimately our understanding will help us understand everything, including humans.

What does it mean to Dr. Muth to win an award that was inspired by the work of Dr. Jane Goodall? It makes me feel very humbled. It is definitely a challenge to follow in her footsteps, but one of the big things I take from Jane Goodall is just the power of observation.

And I think that's really important. And I tell my students that they should spend time just watching wild bumblebees do what they do, because I think so often as humans, we come in with our own preconceived ideas of what we expect to see, what we want to see, and I think it's really important just to step back and observe what the animal is doing.

Like Dr. Goodall, Dr. Muth's work is in part driven by the climate crisis. Focusing on bees allows her to bring a bigger planetary story into focus. Many native bees are in decline, and I think it's part of a much bigger picture, right, of wildlife on this planet.

For bees, some of the big drivers are pesticide use, habitat loss, right? If you turn meadows into parking lots, of course bees have nowhere to go. And conversion of land for agriculture. And I think this is a loss for everybody and not just for us. Humans are animals too. And so the more we can understand about the other animals on this planet, the more we will also learn about humans.

Preserving biodiversity is important for so many reasons, but is also important for the future of humanity. Like Dr. Muth, grant recipient and primatologist Dr. Thiago Falachico is humbled to build on the body of work first developed by Dr. Goodall. In fact, as a researcher at the Neotropical Primates Research Group in Brazil, Dr. Falachico stands on Dr. Goodall's shoulders.

No, it's big shoes to fill. The work of Jane Goodall was inspirational for primatologists in particular. So it's a very

It's nice to be able to follow the path that Jane Goodall opened for primatology and to look at the primates in a way more as individuals, like seeing each monkey as an individual and that you can learn from them. Dr. Falachico's field of expertise is not Dr. Goodall's beloved African chimpanzees, but rather Brazilian capuchin monkeys.

One of the breakthroughs Dr. Falachico admires of Dr. Goodall's was her discovery that chimpanzees in the wild use tools. And he's building on that body of work. And now we have capuchins, that's what are sometimes called the chimpanzee of the new world, also using tools. So they are separate lineage from the African primates. They are separated by 45 million years of evolutionary history.

So they are a really interesting model to understand how the tuyus evolved in this separate group of primates. Capuchin monkeys are primates from South and Central America,

They're small, between 4 and 8 pounds, and they live as long as 35 to 40 years old in groups of about 15 to 35 individuals. But it's their tool use that most intrigues Dr. Filacico. They're extremely intelligent and have a great behavior flexibility. And they are the only neotropical primates that use tools in the wild.

So they are of great interest to study and to understand the evolution of this behavior particularly. I think the big question is how this culture evolved in these populations. And to try to answer that, I need to see how the monkeys learn to use the tools. They have big brains and they have very complex social structures.

They're usually omnivores, so they are very generalistic in what they can eat. And therefore, they are also very used to being in touch with several kinds of food and try to process different kinds of food. So I think this is something that allows them to innovate this kind of object to use. What kind of tools do the capuchins use? Most often, they'll use stones like a hammer to crack open nuts, seeds, or fruits,

Or they'll dig in soil looking for roots, tubers, or trapdoor spiders that tunnel underground. They also use stick tools like probes. So they can use probes to flush out prey from hiding places like lizards, carpenter bees, scorpions, spiders. Or also to dip for honey or for water that are inside trunks or nests.

And this kind of tool, the probes, they can modify, so it's not something that they just choose in the environment. They also modify, they can trim the tips of the sticks, take out the lateral leaves, and modify to make them to the right size that they need. Dr. Filachico is focused on the two genus of capuchins, Sipagius and Sibus. What's the mission of his research?

The aim is to compare two of the populations that have the most diverse toolkit that we know for capuchin monkeys, compare them between them and also across the other populations to see what makes these two populations very different regarding the toolkit that they use.

So those are the only ones that we know that have some kinds of tool use, like the probe tool and digging tools. We want to understand what makes them use those kinds of tools and what is the difference of those two populations with the other populations that do not use those kinds of tools. How advanced are the capuchins' tools? Compared to other animals, it's really sophisticated, especially the probe tools, when they modify the probes to have a certain size to use.

So I think it's compared to other animals, of course, compared to humans, they are not so sophisticated, but they do have the beginning of sophistication. But even the stone tools, the stone tools, although they do not modify the stone, they do select the stones according to what they are needing. So they are going to use more bigger and flat stones for nut cracking or

any fruit cracking, and more flat or pointy stones when they are digging. So they are selecting different objects for different things. Dr. Falachiko's research follows the capuchins' ontogeny, or their development over a long period of time. That's allowed him to observe how adult capuchins teach their young about the culture of tool use. They play a lot.

Not only the infants play, but also the adults play between them and with the infants. That's something that's usually not happening in many primates. Usually apes do that, but the other primates don't do that much. We usually record the social network of the group to see who is spending more time with whom, to see if the flow of information also follows the social network.

And they usually spend a lot of time together, the adults, and they are very tolerant to infants being around, grabbing food, what also allows them to interact with the tools and other behaviors that they are doing. So for what we have for capuchins in particular is that they are attracted to the objects. When they saw the other using something, especially when it's food related, they are interested in that place and that objects.

So it's a socially biased learning. It's not an imitation. They are not imitating, but they are being brought to the motivation and attention to that places and objects where they can then learn by themselves. It's the Capuchin's social nature that has allowed tool use to become a defining part of their culture.

To become a culture, this has to be learned by the others. Because if you innovate something and nobody sees that innovation, that's going to die with you. But if you innovate and then you have the chance to the others to see this innovation, in this case of two U's, or be in touch with the elements of that behavior, then it allows this social learning to happen at some point.

and then allows the culture to be maintained in that group. We don't know yet if they have cumulative culture, if they're going to change something based on previous innovations. That's something that would be interesting to see. Dr. Falachico has discovered something surprising about how the Capuchins use some tools. We also have some stones that they use for communication, such as the females throwing stones at the males.

Capuchin females, when they are in estrus, they try to get the attention of the male. And when they are in estrus, they choose a male and going to try to convince that male to mate. And sometimes they took a while for him to start responding. One group of capuchins in Cerrada Capivara, the females also start to throw little pebbles to the males to try to get their attention. And that's a communication tool. So they are using a stone to communicate something. That's something that we were not expecting.

expecting when I saw the females throwing stones at the males. Or using stones to threaten. There's another kind of communication. They can use a big stone and just bang the stone to threaten the observer, like us.

It's completely different from the mammalian pattern that we have. So it's interesting that the females choose the male and go after them. There is some guarding that the male, when he can lead the female out of the group when she is in the peak of ovulation. There's some data showing that they do that. But it's completely different from other primates in general.

Over the next four years of his research, Dr. Falachico will collect data about the behavior of tool use in capuchins from infancy to adulthood. Will this research help us understand ourselves better as humans? We have very complex tools, so it's interesting to see another species that also use tools and see what

lead them to use those tools in the wild, what could have happened during our evolution, the ecological factors, the social factors that could be a starting point of our own complex tool use that we have now, first in the beginning of everything.

Like Dr. Falachico, the final Wildlife Intelligence Project grant recipient is equally interested in understanding culture. Meet behavioral ecologist and biologist Dr. Maurizio Cantor, an assistant professor at the Marine Mammal Institute and the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University.

Like Dr. Falachico, Dr. Kontor researches the evolution of animal cognition and how that informs human culture. Or, as he puts it, studying... How animals...

find solutions to the fundamental problems of life, to eat, not to be eaten, reproduce, survive. Dr. Kontour's focus is on the extraordinary cooperative relationship between fishers and dolphins in two locations: Laguna and Tramandaí Inlet in southern Brazil. For generations there, humans and their marine partners have teamed up to catch fish together,

A remarkable relationship that has offered long-term benefits to each. What's the history of this unique cooperative? I believe it started with some clever humans trying to increase their chances of catching fish by figuring out that if they cannot see the fish in those murky, estuarine waters,

but they can follow what the dolphins are doing. Dolphins are pretty smart creatures as well and quickly they have learned that they can also take advantage back from the humans, specifically from the tools that humans use to catch the fish, nets. In this interaction site where the dolphins and fishers cooperate, typically what happens is the fishers will be waiting at the beach for the dolphins to arrive. They know by now that it's

Usually a lost battle if they go try and fish without the dolphins. They wait at the beach as some of the dolphins arrive. They recognize individuals, the ones who they call the good cooperative dolphins, and they all run into the water in a line and wait for the dolphins to work out the fish's goal. The dolphins will cue the fishers with a head or tail slap or a sudden deep dive where the fishers should cast their nets.

The fishers are casting blindly into the murky estuary waters, but with the dolphins' guidance, the fishers tend to hit in exactly the right spot, and the dolphins get a reward for their help. What does Dr. Contour know about the history of this fishing strategy? These behaviors don't leave a fossil record, of course, but the earliest known record of cooperative fishing with dolphins is an account from the first century philosopher Pliny the Elder,

And in more recent history, there's a written report about the partnership in a local journal from the 1880s. What is it about dolphins' cognition that has long made cooperative fishing with humans possible?

I think dolphins, they're very smart, very intelligent, they're very good at memorizing and learning new things. And those are primarily two skills that you need or that helps to engage in more complex behavior, more elaborate forging tactics like this. And definitely to remember individuals who they interact with in the past, be it

other dolphins and normally other dolphins but in this case humans it definitely helps because repeated interactions is one of the drivers of cooperation too and the fishers they also can reap other non-material benefits such as a sense of cultural identity and strong social bonds with other fishers and a sense of pride from being a fisher who can cooperate with wild dolphins

So there are intangible benefits to it as well.

One of the benefits to the dolphins who support the fishers is that the specialist marine mammals spend most of their time in one place in a home range, which makes them more likely to survive to adulthood than dolphins who don't cooperate with artisanal human partners. Spending time in a location where traditional fishery takes place also protects the dolphins from risks such as getting entangled in nets from illegal fisheries.

Another benefit for both fishers and dolphins is the strong social bonds they form, bonds that may last an entire lifetime. They forge friendships among them. They're able to identify individual dolphins. And over time, by doing this, you know, across decades, that kind of provides a sense of community in the fishing community as well. And they can get really attached to specific dolphins. They can...

identify the ones with whom they had successful interactions in the past. So they name them, they know who the dolphins hang out with as well. And one of these more famous dolphins

end up dying, for example, is a big deal in the community. So we can see old men crying at the beach in front of that dolphin, for example. Now, just recently, the local community has put what I find something really interesting was an art installation that kind of mimics a cemetery with a cross and a name and a photo of each of the cooperative dolphins that have worked with them in the past. What is the main thing Dr. Kontour has learned from observing the Dolphin Fisher Partnership?

It's a unique example of how wild animals can help humans to flourish. This could be by learning with them how to solve the problem of catching fish, but also generating food and income that can sustain these local fishing communities

These are all humble fishing communities that still depend on subsistence activities like this. And it's becoming more and more difficult to make a living as an artisanal fishery in developing nations like Brazil, India and Myanmar. So I think this project can be in a prime position to show us that wild animals can help humans to flourish.

in this economic sense, but also beyond that. As I mentioned before, the ability to interact, to learn how to interact with a wild animal like dolphin, gives them a sense of purpose, gives them a sense of cultural identity and pride as well. This has been passed through generations, so they really identify as the fishes who can understand the dolphin. So I think that gives a lot of purpose.

Why does the partnership with dolphins and the dolphins' unique abilities matter so much to Dr. Kontour? I guess there's a lot of lessons to learn about the basics of how to navigate life and about all the diverse strategies, the ways that they find to achieve these goals. We as humans also have to solve the same problems, same challenges, and I think we can get sometimes some inspirations from very different creatures living in completely different environments.

The biggest lesson is wild animals and humans can still work together to their mutual benefits. This is a big counter example of all the other way too familiar harmful ways that we interact with nature. Usually nature pays the larger costs and humans will gain the largest benefits. You know, it doesn't have to be like this all the time. So there are still a few cases where both can mutually benefit.

Dr. Kontour also appreciates the benefit of the multidisciplinary approach to his research, and he doesn't just highlight the contributions of his scientific team, but of the fishers themselves.

The major lesson that I learned from dolphins and fishers is that big challenges like this require cooperation and one cannot do this by alone, right? To lead this project I do cooperate with many bright researchers and students and all of them are

are typically under-represented in coming from the Global South. This multidisciplinarity is a cornerstone of this project. We were working on the interface of many disciplines from biology, ecology, conservation, but also social sciences and cultural evolution and economics. So this project is also a unique opportunity to make a long-lasting impact on the

on the human side as well, on the researchers side as well. And it will also give us the ability to

as external observers of the system, as researchers and scientists, to interact directly with the artisanal fishers who have a completely different, can have a completely different perspective of the same phenomenon. So they have their cumulative traditional ecological knowledge that can inform and help us to shape, refine our scientific knowledge. Dr. Kontour is excited to have four years of funding to study the community of fishers and dolphins.

And he hopes that his research will play a part in sustaining the unique cooperative culture, which is at risk in the modern era, as the way the traditional fishing knowledge is passed down is no longer limited to family members teaching next generations of children, but now may be taught by unrelated professional colleagues or even via videos on the internet. There's more room for error. If you lose that traditional knowledge,

either on the dolphin side or on the fisher side, then that can break down their cooperation. It can take more than a decade to start to understand the changes in the system, to see if we can predict any tipping points that could lead to these long-standing partnerships to dissolve. Funding from the Wildlife Intelligence Project is invaluable, offering him the opportunity for long-term study that will spark others' empathy and understanding.

He's inspired by Dr. Goodall's legacy. First, it's a huge honor and a privilege to be able to have now these resources to work in all of these places. And I think, well, two major things come to mind. First is inspired by her work is that individuals matter. And in particular, the individuals matter in these small cooperative systems. The fishers recognize individual dolphins.

It's one of those 10, 12 dolphins that have been interacting with humans throughout their lives and learning and getting better at it. So the individual matters. But then to study individuals, be it dolphins, be it fishes, we need time. So long-term observation, long-term monitoring is really important.

Having great insights, similar to what Dr. Jane Goodall had, it took time. So we also feel very privileged to be able to study these interactions over the long run.

The Wildlife Intelligence Project funders from National Geographic and TWCF look forward to hearing the stories of where all three of these researchers take their work, to learning more about the minds of bees, monkeys, dolphins, and humans, to seeing how these researchers' findings make an impact in the world, says Dr. Ian Miller.

If you create new knowledge and illuminate the science behind certain topics or problems, that through storytelling and education can inspire people to care and then to act and to change things. That research would then, through essentially our theory of change here at the Society, lead to deepening empathy with the animal world. These three explorers working on bees, dolphins, and primates help us understand ourselves in the sense that we are part of a greater whole.

that we are not separate from the natural world and that we probably share more with the other organisms on this planet than we are different from them. And I think in this day and age, more than ever, we need to really fully understand and feel that we're part of a bigger system and we're not separate from that system.

We really feel here at National Geographic is that if we can create that empathy for the natural world, we'll all be inspired to care for it much more deeply and then motivated to protect it. And these three people will really help us do that, I think. If you enjoy the stories we share with you on the podcast, please follow us, give us a five-star rating, and share us with a friend. And be sure to sign up for the TWCF newsletter at templetonworldcharity.org.

You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org. This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with interviews by Richard Sergei. Written and produced by Tavia Gilbert for TalkBox Productions. Senior producer Katie Flood. Assistant producer Oscar Falk. Production support by Mandy Morish. Music by Alexander Felipiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michelle Cobb.

The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.