Zoobiquity (37 page)

For California condors, mentors have played a key role in reeling this endangered species back from the brink of extinction. In 1982, with just twenty-two of these enormous birds left in the world, biologists took emergency action with an accelerated breeding program. By carefully removing eggs from nests as soon as they were laid, the scientists were able to begin building a captive breeding population. By 1992, wildlife conservation teams were ready to reintroduce the condors to their natural habitats in California’s redwood and mountain regions.

But they ran into an unexpected problem. They had modeled the release plan on the successful North American reintroduction of the peregrine falcon several years earlier. In that program, biologists had flooded the landscape with fledglings—young birds that were strong enough to fly but still sexually immature and in transition between needing parental care and being able to fend for themselves. The transitioning adolescent falcons had no trouble moving out into the surrounding territory and before long began breeding with one another, reviving the population of the species.

But the condors were different.

As Michael Clark, the head of the Los Angeles Zoo’s California Condor Propagation Program, explained to me, unlike peregrine falcons, which are more solitary and don’t need mentors, California condors are extremely social. They go through a long preadult phase, during which, by imitation and example, they learn complicated condor conventions for everything from foraging and feeding to resting and nesting. Key to their learning process is living in multiage groups where younger birds can observe older mentors. Hatched in incubators and raised by humans in condor orphanages, the early groups of chicks did not have this experience. Releasing the socially inept preadults created what Clark called a “
Lord of the Flies
situation.” The inexperienced birds didn’t know what to do when they were out on their own. Some ate garbage and got sick from malnutrition and poisoning. Not knowing better, some landed on telephone poles and electrocuted themselves. Many hung around the release sites before eventually, slowly, moving out into new territory. But perhaps most poignant of all, in the absence of competent adult leaders, some birds followed anything that soared—from eagles to hang gliders. One young bird flew from the Grand Canyon to Wyoming in a single day, dutifully following a
false mentor and winding up miles away from home at the end of the day.
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Group life provides animals with many long-term benefits. But sometimes what pulls individual adolescents into groups are short-term brain-based rewards.
As Alan Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale and the director of its Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic told me, research has shown that simply being physically next to same-aged peers and engaging in activities with them activates pathways for dopamine and other reward neurochemicals.

“
Having peers around is a reward and not having them around is felt as the opposite, which begins to explain your 14-year-old’s sullen, moody, heedless demeanor around the house,” he noted wryly in
Slate
magazine.

Although bachelor groups are seen in many species, adolescent animal groups are not always single sex. Transitioning albatrosses form coed groups called “gams” for several months between fledging and starting their own families. Although they mingle with the opposite sex, they don’t mate.
Zebra finches, too, congregate in mixed-sex peer groups. Males fine-tune their courtship songs for females and practice outsinging other males. Boy and girl finches preen together; every once in a while the young birds’ groups break apart so the kids can fly back to their parents’ nests and beg for food—a tendency that may sound familiar to many human moms and dads.

Ancient adolescents also formed groups. One fossil band of dinosaurs was found in a ninety-million-year-old lakebed in Mongolia. They were all between the ages of one and seven—still a few years away from their species’ sexual maturity, typically seen at ten years of age. Paleontologists suggested that these two-legged plant eaters may have roamed together in social herds without adult supervision.

Pink salmon, too, grow up entirely without the watchful eyes of parents. A few days after hatching, they emerge from their gravel nests and, under cover of darkness, begin to migrate downstream to the
open ocean. Before diving into the wide water of the northern Pacific, however, the young fish stop for a week or two in the shallow, calm waters of coastal estuaries. It’s here, in this safe environment, that the preadults start figuring out how to swim in a school. First, they group in twos and threes. A few days later, larger groups of five and six eventually combine into a much larger formation. Their daily schedule is much like a human adolescent’s. Mornings and afternoons are spent in the school. At nightfall, the groups break up, and the young fish drift individually around the surface of the water before coming together again in the morning. As the salmon learn the choreography and conventions of their fish life, they are also figuring out where they fit into the salmon social hierarchy. With no adult fish to model ideal behavior, the adolescents rely on innate instincts and trial and error to figure out how to get the best feeding spots and secure dominance as adults. It had never occurred to me that fish need to learn the iconic synchronized swim patterns we call schooling. Or that some would be better at it than others.

Schooling, herding, or flocking—moving within and belonging to a group—gives protection to an individual exiting infancy. A group means more lookouts, more eyeballs, more voices to raise danger alarms. But it comes with a price. Individuals coming together to form a group must learn to be inconspicuous. One fin sticking out in an odd direction, a zig when the rest of the group zags, flashing white fur or feathers when all its peers are wearing gray—anything odd or conspicuous makes an animal more obvious to a predator. Adolescent lessons in blending in may serve an animal well for the rest of its life.

We humans don’t literally flock or herd or school. But perhaps, if we listen carefully enough to our own adolescents’ cries to fit in, we can hear faint echoes of an evolutionary past in which conspicuousness attracted danger. Perhaps this suggests that before parents condemn a child’s desperate plea for the “right” Nikes or jeans as materialistic—or dismiss it as overly conforming—they consider a different perspective: the powerful adolescent drive to fit in may represent a precious and ancient protective evolutionary legacy.

Whether it’s the Moss Landing otters erupting into a rough-and-tumble wrestling session, Tanzanian gorillas walloping each other in a game of tag, or pink salmon learning to school, peer groups give adolescent animals
the chance to practice social behaviors and assess their place in the group. Like high school students figuring out whether they will be jocks and cheerleaders or drama geeks and mathletes, animals go through a similar sorting process. They get a sense of their competition and their community—what it takes to fit in and what it takes to win.

But groups have a troubling flip side. Although they can be safe, pleasant, and necessary, peer groups are not passive sanctuaries that simply shelter young humans and animals until they’re ready to burst into the adult world. Groups are elaborate social laboratories, places for young animals to practice adult behaviors. And for social animals, and perhaps especially long-lived social mammals, one of the most important things they’re sorting out is social status.

Sometimes the biggest risk for animal adolescents comes not from outside predators but from members of their own species.
Susan Perry notes in
Manipulative Monkeys
, her entertaining book about her decades studying capuchin monkeys in the forests of Costa Rica that “the main cause of mortality in capuchins is conflicts with other capuchins.” Rival gangs vying for territory, mates, and resources account for much of this violence. But peer groups pose other unique dangers. They tempt, cajole, and shame individuals into doing things that, on their own, they would never do. She told me about monkeys she’d observed that had “
extremely high social intelligence” and “great interpersonal skills” whose behavior deteriorated into violent mayhem when they became part of a bachelor group of other adolescents.

She followed one monkey in particular—a youth named Gizmo, who fell in with a gang of seven other males her research team called the Lost Boys. As a young monkey, Gizmo had been appropriately socially deferential and seemed to be headed for a stable, if exactly not illustrious, life in a capuchin troop. But as he emerged from childhood, Gizmo started getting drawn into dangerous situations. Egged on by his socially impulsive brother, Gizmo would end up in brawls with larger, older males. He invariably got soundly thrashed.

As Gizmo accumulated scars and broken bones, his gang also began attracting new members. Soon they totaled eight, each boy more battle scarred and unsuccessful in love than the next. It spiraled out of control.
They kept roving and terrorizing the neighborhood, never able to settle down into a coed, mixed-age stable family group. When Perry told me about the Lost Boys, she spoke with the resignation of a high school teacher who can only watch sadly as some of her students inevitably slide into delinquency.

“Their problem,” Perry said, “was that their group was just too big. The other troops of capuchins seriously resisted their immigration attempts when they saw eight adolescent male monkeys coming.” Perry emphasized that migration by all-male groups is a normal and necessary life stage—there’s no safe way to do it, yet they all have to go through it. What was striking about the Lost Boys was that, because their group was so big, they got stuck in the transition stage. Shunned from capuchin society, Gizmo ended up dying a pariah, never having achieved useful social status within the larger group.

And so it goes for human teens, too. “
Delinquency and criminal behavior … are more likely to occur in groups during adolescence than they are during adulthood,” writes Laurence Steinberg, an adolescence expert at Temple University. Drinking, risky driving, sexual risk taking—all are more prevalent, more dangerous, and more likely to occur in groups of adolescents.

For animals and humans alike, falling in with—or afoul of—the wrong crowd can have deadly consequences.

In September 2010, six teens—Raymond Chase, Cody J. Barker, William Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi, and Asher Brown—all died of the same cause. Although they ranged in age from thirteen to nineteen and lived in different states, their deaths were linked by one sad commonality: all six had killed themselves after being bullied.

Their deaths were added to the rolls of the several thousand other teen suicides in the United States in 2010. Suicide is a major adolescent human health threat—among eight- to twenty-four-year-olds nationwide, it’s the third most common cause of death.

Like adults who commit suicide, teens who kill themselves usually have an underlying mental illness—in particular, depression or depressed mood. However, one familiar aspect of the adolescent emotional profile may make this age group especially vulnerable to suicide:
their increased impulsivity. With access to physical and pharmacological weapons of self-destruction, an impulsive teen can tip a difficult situation into a deadly one.

Psychological “autopsies,” the extensive interviews and investigations conducted by psychiatrists after suicides, have shown that the triggers for teen suicide are remarkably similar across cases. Loss—such as the death of a close friend or family member. Or a best friend’s moving out of town, especially for teens who have few friends. Rejection—by a girl- or boyfriend. Deep embarrassment—being kicked off a team, failing an important exam, enduring a humiliating public reprimand by a teacher.

Loss, rejection, embarrassment. The kinds of experiences that are triggers for human suicide also occur within animal groups. But animal behaviorists give them different names: isolation, exclusion, submission, and appeasement. Along with loss, rejection, and embarrassment, these terms describe the complex mixture of reactions and behaviors that contribute to the dynamics of social status within animal groups.

Determining and maintaining status occupies much of the activity within groups of social animals. Aggression by dominants against subordinate members of the group is seen commonly, in animals including sea otters, sea birds, wolves, and chimpanzees. And social hierarchies are in constant flux. A position at the top is never secure. As many animal behaviorists have pointed out, picking on subordinates is a useful, public way for dominant animals to display and preserve their top-dog positions. Although not every animal can be an alpha, top-tier rank carries important benefits, often including exclusive control of mates, food territories, and shelter.

In humans, we see dominants aggressing against subordinates all the time, but we use a more colloquial term: bullying. For years the rap on bullies was that they were insecure, the kids who “feel bad” about themselves. Picking on others, it was believed, momentarily raised their self-esteem.
But recent research suggests that bullies feel, on the whole, pretty good about themselves. Their self-esteem is just fine. In fact, bullies often sit comfortably at the top of the social food chain, surrounded by hangers-on, wannabes, and silent bystanders who are more than happy just to be out of the bullies’ line of fire.

If animal and human bullying share some common purpose, it may
be exactly that: a demonstration of strength and dominance, and a cautionary lesson to anyone who might challenge the status quo. This cross-species perspective on bullying offers insights into why bullies often emerge from the top, not the bottom, of human social hierarchies.

Animals can also help us understand how human bullies choose their victims. In some animal groups, being different can increase an animal’s vulnerability.

Not unlike animal predators, human bullies are constantly on the lookout for something that makes their victims stand out a little from the crowd. In North America, a common target of bullies is boys who are—or are perceived to be—gay. In fact, the six September suicides of 2010 had another thing in common besides month and year. All six teens killed themselves after being harassed for appearing to be gay.