One On One, Part II; No. 2; Will Bees Prove That Animals Think, Featuring Dr. Donald Griffin

This program is made possible by a grant from Sigma Xi, a scientific research society. I'm Faith Middleton, and this is one-on-one. It's a familiar scene in many homes. You tell the dog to get her ball, and she remembers where she left it several hours ago. And that happens most of us believe that animals think. But there's still a big debate about it in the scientific community. Well my guest is trying to prove that animals do think. He's Donald Griffin, a professor at Rockefeller University in New York. He discovered the natural sonar system in bats that guides them at night, and he wrote a book about it called Listening in the Dark. Soon after publication, Dr. Griffin won the Elliott Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. And now he's turning his attention to bees. Donald Griffin is trying to understand the sounds that bees make so that he can communicate with them one day in their language.

The bees have fascinated us since Karl von Frisch made the stunning discovery 40 years ago that bees use a symbolic dance to give directions to each other. As Donald Griffin will explain, it's called the Waggle Dance. What happens is that honey bees sometimes not always inside the hive go through a little maneuver which Frisch called a dance in which they waggle their abdomens from side to side very vigorously while crawling in a straight line over the honeycomb. Normally this is done in the dark on a vertical surface of honeycomb. They circle alternately clockwise and then after the next one counterclockwise back and do it all over again. This had been observed for many, many years, but no one until Frisch had figured out what it was all about. And what he discovered was that this is the way in which a bee that has found something important, usually food, not always food, communicates to her sisters and they are all

sisters or half sisters, the worker honey bees. Here this food is and they do it by indicating direction and distance and they indicate the direction by the direction of this waggle run relative to straight up. But straight up is the direction relative to toward the sun outside in the real world. So if the food or whatever it is, his straight towards the sun, this waggle run is straight up if it is away from the sun straight down and if it is 45 degrees to the right of the sun, that is roughly that angle too, straight up. So the bees use the sun as a kind of compass? So they use it as a reference point. Though when they are dancing in the hive, they can't see it, it is pitch dark in there. So they have to remember where the sun was or where the food was relative to the sun that the food was toward the sun or away from the sun or left of the sun or no.

Does this have to be close by or can it be of far distance? No, it can be far away. In fact, the waggle dance isn't used unless the, what they are dancing about is more than say, oh, 100 feet it varies a bit with the strain of bees, but it is used for relatively distant things and it can be as much as 10 kilometers, 6 miles. Do you want me to use English units or should I say miles and feeder or better or up to 5 miles away? They are accurate within perhaps 20 or 30 degrees in direction and within maybe something like 5 or 10 percent in distance. So the dancer can get her colleagues to the general area. If she can get her to get them to the general area, not perfectly, it is not pinpoint, but still it is enormously better than chance. So there is a lot more to the communication than the dancing, but the dancing is the symbolic part that conveys information about something that is not present where the communicating is going on, see, that is the thing that makes it so interesting.

When Frish made this discovery, was the scientific world shocked? Yes, I was personally shocked as part of the scientific world and I think everybody was startled and shocked and incredulous and well because we have not expected that insects could do anything this complicated or could communicate about things that weren't here and now to the insects. And there was a great deal of skepticism, but Frish says in one of his books, no good scientist ought to believe this the first time he hears it. It was such a departure from everything we thought we understood about insect behavior. I thought it was very rigid and all instinctive genetically programmed, although I did know they did some learning that the idea that bees or other insects could do anything this complicated was very, very surprising. I was absolutely, I heard about it first, sort of an indirect way I didn't know it was

von Frish and I hope this is the most ridiculous claim I ever heard of. And many other scientists went through the same experience and several of us just had to go and see it and be colonies with observation hives, a kind of specialized hive where you have a glass window and can see what's going on. We hadn't just had to see it but it is all there and it works beautifully. Nobody with the right situation can see this and you can set out test food sources if you can get the bees interested in them which is not always easy and see that the properties of the dance do correlate with the distance and direction of the food. Okay, so he was the pioneer. He was the pioneer, absolutely. And you are interested now in sound. Yes, now. What's that about? Well, I'll tell you about that, after he made this discovery in the 40s, naturally there was a great deal of further work on the honeybees and the dances.

Some of his own students, mostly for many years it was his own students who studied it and learned many other things. One of them named Ash, E-S-C-H and at almost the same time an American student would be his name Adrienne Wenner W-E-N-N-E-R observed something that everyone fresh hadn't initially noticed and that is that there is some faint sounds that you can hear during these waggled answers. They are pretty faint. You have to have a microphone or I think issues, a drinking straw that he stuck in his ear and put the ended straw near the bee to hear them. And of course there is a fair amount of noise of other bees in the hive and you have to take off the glass cover. You can't hear it through the glass, that may be why fresh didn't notice it initially. You have to get direct access to the bees while they are dancing. But there is this faint sound.

It's not absolutely constant and it does seem to vary with the enthusiasm of the dance and that's something I didn't mention that the dances have a third property of vigor or intensity. It's a little hard to describe but if you watch them sometimes the bee is just frantically doing it and other times sort of like a daisically, the obvious difference is that an enthusiastic bee will keep on dancing over and over again repeating it. If the dances are quite unenthusiastic then there are no sounds. The sounds seem to come only with reasonably enthusiastic dances. This was observed by Ash and I think by winter also, around 1960, the early 1960s. And well this suggests another aspect to the dance that see there is always problem how in the dark are these bees going to get the information about the direction and the distance.

The followers seem to come very close and some of the time at least they are touching the dance here. Maybe they sort of feel her direction and distance but perhaps these sounds might be important too. Let me see if I've got this now. Are you interested in the sound because you're wondering if there's a language that also goes with the dance? Yes, that's right. Although it wouldn't have to be an acoustic language but I'm interested in the whole communication because it is something like human language, very different many ways but it does seem to enable the bees to communicate fairly complex information and do it symbolically and do it, communicate about things that aren't present here and now to the bee. That is they're communicating that the food outside the hive is so far away in such and such direction and that it's very good or it's not so good and that to me and I shouldn't perhaps said this earlier is one indication that they might really be thinking about food and wanting their sisters to go get it.

Now you can't prove that but I find it suggested at least so that's why I'm so interested. A long-range dream that many people who studied this dance communication of bees have had and tried to bring the reality is to construct some kind of a model by which they could enter into this communication system. If you could get a model bee that you could make to dance and put in test messages and make the other bees go where your model said you could then do all kinds of experiments. You could vary the properties of the dance and see what mattered you could in a very limited sense really talk to the bees. You could put in test messages you could observe closely what they did. You might find that there was more to it than that so a long and ambitious hope is to find out how to make a model that the bees would accept and respond to as though it were communicating bee.

Now several people have tried this and it hasn't worked. It's sort of looked encouraging bees have come up to the model. They have treated it in some respects like a dancer but they haven't really followed it consistently and in particular they haven't shown any sign of really being stimulated to go out in the direction and distance that it says. One of the most nearly successful efforts was by a Gould about 10 years ago in which he added a few features that other people hadn't such as a little plastic tube to actually give out some sugar solution the way a real dancer regurgitates and he and other people too have tried adding sound to imitate these dance sounds in case that was important but it hasn't worked. And so the question is why hasn't it worked? What's missing? Well it may be that the odors are wrong and that's more difficult to duplicate but it might also be that the sounds are wrong in a particular technical sense.

That is by all ordinary evidence bees are deaf and so why should these sounds be important in the communication system if they're deaf? Well they are deaf in the sense that they don't seem to respond to what we ordinarily think of as sounds which are waves of pressure change in the air that travel at the speed of sound and that usually come from fairly distant sources. But in the situation in the hive where these dances are occurring, the other bee is very, very close within a few millimeters and bees do have the bright kind of sense organs to respond to the movement of air. So that's what they're reacting to. So they may, we don't know that chap town is studying this but we should say this is still an unsolved problem. So you're looking at the sound to try and figure out if there are adjustments that can be made there to make the model be affected. That's one reason, yes.

If you've just joined us, we were talking with Dr. Donald Griffin at Rockefeller University about animal thinking. Well, didn't you bring along a cassette of something to be? Yes, I have a cassette of some of these dance sounds. This was recorded with an ordinary pressure microphone but recently town William Town who is an associate of ghouls just finished his PhD work there at Princeton and this is something we are actively studying. We don't really know what the answers are going to be or whether we can get any answers but we're trying different kinds of microphones or different instruments that will detect different aspects of the near-field acoustics. So what are we going to hear? And what we're going to hear is just what you would hear if you were close enough to the bees and this may or may not be what stimulates the other bees but it's something pretty close and so shall I play it? Now if I think that again with it's going to be some voice but.

I will have channel one which was filtered for the dance sounds coming out of the loudspeaker of the 89-15 recorder and simply record acoustically. Okay this is probably not for the input. That's it. So it sounds like an electrical charge. And it's these little bursts that are sort of thing.

There are a few other noises and clanks and bangs and actually I was having to move the microphone around to follow the bee and I had a few voice comments but it's that little bur bur bur which goes on during the waggle runs. That was recorded with a very small microphone very close to the bee. That's interesting because that's not of course what you hear when you hear the bees. You hear what it sounds like to us. It's just that the regular the buzzing of bees is something different. This is a special sound that accompanies the waggling run. It's rather different from the flight sounds though it is made by small scale movements of the wings. It's about 250 hertz, 250 cycles per second. So you're trying to figure all this out to find out. Well one reason. Now trying to understand this communication system better and one sort of remote hope and distant objective would be to see if we can improve the model bee perhaps by making it do a better imitation of the near field acoustics that then it might work.

It may not. We might understand the near field acoustics perfectly and make a perfect replica and the bee is still might not communicate except the model but it does seem worth trying. Are you positive at this point that animals think? No. Certainly not. I think it's an open scientific question that we just don't know enough to know. They certainly manipulate information in their nervous systems. They certainly make choices they respond in certain ways under certain conditions. To some people that would be sufficient to call it thinking. I was in my quick response I thought you were asking me do they think consciously and we don't know that. But I think it's a possibility and an interesting one to investigate further and that's what I'd like to do. What's your hunch about it? My hunch is that they do but as a scientist one has to be careful and try to evaluate one's hunch is and check them out.

Well from reading some of the scientific journals and articles I gather that there is a lot of controversy about this subject. Yes many of my colleagues think it's a foolish subject for a scientist who get involved with and they think it's not an appropriate subject for a scientific investigation. They think that it is a kind of question to which there is no possible answer. In other words if I say maybe the bees are thinking consciously about distance and direction or smell of food the very common answer is there is no possible way in which you could ever answer that question convincingly yes or no that no conceivable evidence one might gather would distinguish between the bees reacting in a certain way doing certain things but not thinking consciously about what they're doing. So I don't find these arguments persuasive and I think my colleagues are just reluctant

to get into this area they feel it's messy and difficult and whatever data one gathers will be controversial and can be interpreted in a number of ways and be very difficult if not impossible they would say impossible I would agree difficult to decide how to interpret it. You know what I'm curious about why does this all matter so much to you the thinking question? Well it matters to me because I'd like to understand other species animals of other species I'd like to know what it's like to be a honey bee or a bat or a herringale. I think that's a very interesting question about other animals and I am primarily a zoologist scientifically interested in animals. It's been a question that I certainly was persuaded for a long time was unanswerable and impossible to answer and only the last few years has occurred to me that maybe it is possible at least to get some partial and limited answers but the reason it's important

to me is just that I'd like to know what animals are like and this is an important aspect if they are all little computers that don't have any conscious thoughts that's one thing they might be like if they do have some conscious thoughts that would be something else about them that I would like to know. We know about bats now thanks to you finding their way in the dark. We know that birds will when you approach the nest in some cases it would seemingly consciously lead you away from the nest and... This is predatory distraction displays. Yeah plovers do that. We know that the bees can communicate in their odd way about where food is and what not. When I read the articles in the journal, suddenly I imagine many lay people out there saying why is all of this considered so radical? We've known for a long time.

Yes, that's perfectly true and it's a special disagreement within the scientific community. I think it is really only scientists who feel very strongly about this. Most people feel that their pets have some simple thoughts and feelings. The cat wants to be let out the door. The dog is glad. His master is home and brings the stick and hopes his master will throw it for him. This seems self-evident to most people and it isn't how it is. Only on hand scientists are not totally crazy when they say whoops, let's be careful about this. It's very easy to infer thoughts and feelings in animals just because they behave in a way that seems to us to imply this. The whole history of studying animal behavior is full of discoveries of mistakes that

people had made in inferring from simple casual observations what animals do, what they must be thinking. There's some classic examples of that I could go into if you want. Should I? Well, one of the most extreme and frequently cited ones is the so-called clever Hans ever named for a particular horse named clever Hans, who's in Germany in the first decade of the 20th century, who's trained or thought that horses were very smart and they could learn many things that people did if only they were taught and he set out to show that he could teach his horses arithmetic and so he would train the horse to tap with its foot. He thought horses can understand arithmetic, they just can't talk so they can't tell us about this, but he trained them to tap a certain number of times with one foot in response to a certain number and he would present the number by drawing it on a little blackboard

and if he wrote the number four the horse would tap his foot four times, then he went on from there to present problems of arithmetic, he would write two plus three and the horse would tap five times and I think eventually he even got a long division in square roots and this looked very impressive, the horse really did this, other people could come and watch and sure enough the horse gave the right answer and there were other horses and other people who were playing this and it similar things have been claimed for other animals too. Well when it was studied in closely by psychologist named Fungst, P-F-U-N-G-S-T, he observed that there were some puzzles about it, first of all the horse got the right answer only if there was a person present, if you just held the blackboard, presented the blackboard in some way when there was no person around, the horse couldn't do any of these things. If the person couldn't solve the problem the horse couldn't solve it either and while

other strange people that weren't familiar to the horse couldn't be there, there had to be a person who was watching and who knew the right answer and it turned out that what was happening was that the people in order to keep track of the horse's county, they had to count and they made little motions, they would nod their head or move their feet or their hands while they were counting or the horse supposed to count 16 times, I've got to keep track and know whether he counted tap 16 or 18 and what the horse had learned to do was to watch these county movements and to stop tapping when the person expected it. So it was a visual and inadvertent case of inadvertent queuing, that's a technical term and there's a lot of possibility for that kind of error. No one had yet accused the bees of doing these dances by inadvertent queuing and they can be photographed with nobody there and bees and people are so different that it's pretty unlikely that the bees are doing it because somebody is giving them queued.

But that's an example of the sort of error that is very easy to make and the scientists who are skeptical and who say it's an inappropriate subject for scientific study have a point that it's very easy to make mistakes. So it's not a completely crazy sort of objection but I think it's overdone I think that scientists have been excessively cautious. Professor Donald Griffin at Rockefeller University in New York, one-on-one is a production of Connecticut Public Radio. The series is made possible by a grant from Sigma Zide, a scientific research society. For a cassette copy of the conversation you just heard, call 203-527-0905 or this member station of the Public Radio Network. The engineer of one-on-one is J. McDermott, Michelle Press and I co-produced the show. I'm Faith Middleton, thanks for listening.

Thank you for watching.

Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Thank you for watching.

Thank you for watching.