Zoobiquity (38 page)

How much actual “bullying” occurs among animals is hard to say exactly. If we define bullying as aggression by a dominant animal on a subordinate, then quite a lot. Wildlife biologists and veterinarians frequently characterize male-on-male roughhousing in which no serious injury occurs as “playing.” Indeed, when you watch groups of young animals in rough-and-tumble play, whether they’re sea otters, dolphins, horses, capuchins, condors, kittens, or puppies, the line between “play fighting” and “bullying” may be unclear. Just as bullying can be invisible to an adult parent, some of the “sparring” or “mock fighting” we see in animal groups may be more intense and purposeful than we have previously thought.

Among animals, peer oppression sometimes comes at the claws or beaks of siblings.
The Oxford zoologist T. H. Clutton-Brock described the formative impact of bullying in blue-footed boobies in his
Nature
article “Punishment in Animal Societies.” Blue-footed boobies are normally born two to a nest. The first egg to hatch is usually the dominant sibling, a power he or she lords over the second-born by fierce authority displays involving pecking and jostling. Even if the younger chick eventually grows larger than its tyrannical nest mate, their early, in-nest dominance relationship remains for life.

That a propensity to bully may be transmitted across generations was recently explored in another bird, the Nazca booby. When the parents of these Pacific seabirds leave to feed, older, unrelated boobies fly to the unprotected nests and abuse the chicks. Grabbing the youngsters’ necks
and heads in their orange-and-black beaks, the larger birds squeeze with nutcracker intensity as the small chicks pull away submissively, hiding their bills in their downy chests. Biologists have observed a particularly interesting pattern of abuse: the birds that were attacked the most frequently as chicks were later, as adults, the most likely to attack other youngsters. These Pacific seabirds may be nature’s example of “the victimized becoming the victimizer.”

The human depression linked to bullying may be uniquely dangerous for impulsive teens. Yet in animals, muted, submissive, perhaps even depressed responses to being picked on may actually make some animals
safer
. Following a violent conflict over hierarchy, the losing animal may be smart to withdraw and not push his luck with repeated challenges. Numerous animal studies have demonstrated that failing to cry uncle results in escalating attacks by the dominant.

While every movie and comic book involving bullies ends with the victim fighting back and often taking the bully down, such revenge fantasies don’t often get played out in the animal kingdom. Slinking off to lick your wounds and perhaps find another path often makes more sense than running back and fighting the same bully again and again.

Comparing animal and human behaviors will not bring us to a prescription for “solving” or “curing” complicated human social interactions like bullying. But a species-spanning approach might be able to show us where to start looking.

As far as we know, when an unprotected seabird is victimized, or an unpopular vervet ostracized, or a curious young otter killed during its first solo foraging trip, few adult tears are shed—except, perhaps, by an empathetic field biologist observing through binoculars. But parental care does occur across species. Whether it’s a hagfish excreting a protective coating of slime over a clutch of eggs and just swimming away or a Gombe chimp demonstrating a termite-fishing technique to a juvenile, animal parents of all kinds are invested in how their transitioning offspring fare.

Even when they’re old enough to live and breed on their own, some animals receive parental care long after they are capable of feeding themselves.
The parents of Kloss’s gibbons, for example, help defend a child’s
territory until that offspring can find a mate.
Three-toed sloth mothers, like arboreal, insect-eating helicopter parents, vacate a portion of their own territory to assist their offspring in starting its own mature life.

Of course, the parents of an adolescent narwhal, bowerbird, or otter will interact very differently with their transitioning offspring than a human parent will—whether a Japanese
ryosai kenbo
(good wife, wise mom), Russian
mat’ geroina
(hero mother), or North American tiger mother. Brains are different. Social structures are different. Development, genes, and environments are all different. Species are different. But a zoobiquitous consideration of parenthood uncovers an embedded reality for mothers and fathers of all species: a parent’s genetic legacy depends on its offspring’s survival and reproductive success.

For some incredibly unlucky human parents, adolescent risk taking and impulsivity will result in tragedy.
Early exposure to alcohol and drugs will put their children in the path of injury, accidental death, and addiction. And the social minefields their children must traverse may exact casualties in the form of severe depression—or even suicide.

If you’re a parent, this knowledge won’t shrink the lump in your throat while you try to suppress an angry outburst following a missed curfew. It may not stop your fingers from brushing eye-obscuring hanks of hair off your adolescent’s face. It’s doubtful it could quell the pounding in your chest when you open the e-mail containing your teen’s SAT scores. And it’s very unlikely to squelch the involuntary screams flying out of your mouth in the final seconds of your child’s sports tournament.

But when you find yourself emotionally activated by your teen’s behavior, appearance, or prospects, a species-spanning approach might save you a trip to a psychotherapist’s office. Instead of blaming “culture” or looking for the early childhood experiences in your own life that contributed to your overreaction, perhaps take a moment to peer much, much further “left” on the evolutionary timeline—and consider the ancient animal roots of your parenting.

And you might take heart from the story of Robert’s son, Charley. At sixteen, Charley seemed to be off on a bad course. Bored and unmotivated, he was on the verge of academic collapse. Teachers bemoaned his lack of focus; they said he made no effort unless the topic personally interested him. To make matters worse, Charley preferred riskier pursuits: joyriding and target shooting. When Charley finally enrolled
at a university, drinking and smoking became his trademark among his peers.

Robert was in despair. Time after time, he’d tried to get his son to buckle down, to focus on school and on life beyond age twenty. He put together an “emergency plan” to try to salvage his son’s future. In one weak but memorable moment, he told Charley, “
You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

But don’t worry about Charley. He didn’t suffer too badly from his risk taking, his rebelliousness, his refusal to accept the world as his elders taught and thought it should be. In fact, he parlayed his iconoclastic nature into one of the most storied careers in the history of science. The mature Charley—Charles Darwin—even later forgave his father’s tough parenting, saying, “
My father, who was the kindest man I ever knew and whose memory I love with all my heart, must have been angry … when he used such words.”

Modern parents can take comfort from the fact that most of our teenagers come through adolescence, too—perhaps a little bruised, maybe a little humiliated, but stronger for the journey.

After all, most capuchin monkeys don’t go off with a gang and die alone. Most salmon figure out how to school; most vervets get into a new group; most gazelles learn to flee lions and go on to raise young gazelles of their own. And most California sea otters survive, and eventually leave behind, the Triangle of Death.

When crows by the hundreds began hobbling around and dropping dead on the sidewalks of Queens, New York, in the summer of 1999, Tracey McNamara felt a stab of dread. Rarely does a single species get sick and suddenly die off without other nearby animals coming down with symptoms, too. A few weeks later, the exotic birds under her care at the Bronx Zoo started falling like flies. McNamara knew an avian killer was on the loose. If she didn’t identify it, and fast, it could wipe out her zoo’s entire bird population.

McNamara, a veterinarian and the zoo’s head pathologist, did two things right away. As a responsible employee, she called New York State wildlife officials to alert them to the alarming appearance of a deadly disease in the Bronx.

But McNamara, a no-nonsense Queens native with a doctorate from Cornell and years of experience analyzing tissues under a microscope, knew a thing or two about bird diseases. With a maverick streak and a love of a good medical mystery, she began her own investigation. Peering at magnified slides late into the night, surrounded by jars of preserved amphibians and exotic reptile fungi, McNamara searched for clues to
the mystery of what was killing her birds. One thing was obvious. The killer was swift and ruthless—frying the birds’ brains and ravaging other organs. They’d died of massive brain hemorrhages and heart damage. This pointed overwhelmingly to encephalitis—inflammation of the brain—caused by a virus. But which virus?

McNamara knew she had three prime suspects: the viruses that cause Newcastle disease, avian influenza, and eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), all of which notoriously attack birds. With the clock ticking, McNamara began a process of elimination. Newcastle disease and avian flu are highly contagious. Spreading from animal to animal, they can wipe out adjacent flocks in no time. But they couldn’t be the culprit: the zoo’s exotic flamingos and eagles were dying, yet the chickens and turkeys in the children’s petting zoo were fine. McNamara crossed Newcastle and avian flu off the list. That left EEE. But, McNamara realized, the zoo’s emus weren’t sick. Healthy emus would seem to rule out EEE; the large, ostrichlike birds are particularly vulnerable to this virus and would certainly be showing signs of illness. With three strokes, McNamara had reduced her lineup of suspects to zero.

It had to be a different pathogen, one that didn’t spread through bird-to-bird contact. That’s when McNamara thought:
mosquitoes
. The petting zoo closed before sundown and opened well after sunrise. The chickens and turkeys were housed safely indoors at dawn and dusk, the prime mosquito feeding times. However, the exotic birds that were dying—the flamingos and cormorants and owls—were housed outside around the clock. This was not a comforting realization. If mosquitoes were indeed spreading this contagion, whatever it was, the birds weren’t the only animals at risk. Any warm-blooded creature that provided mosquito meals—like the zoo’s rhinos, zebras, and giraffes—was in danger. So, too, McNamara realized grimly, were New York–area human beings.

This was late August. Just a week or so before, emergency room doctors around New York had started tracking a mysterious illness cropping up in elderly people. It appeared to be neurological: patients were presenting with high fevers, weakness, and confusion. Some had signs of swollen brains—encephalitis. When the cluster of sick people reached four, an infectious disease specialist at a Queens hospital raised the alarm, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta sent a team of epidemiologists to investigate. Because encephalitis
was present, the CDC, too, was thinking, “Mosquito vector.” As one of the researchers put it, “
If you see encephalitis in the later summer, you have to think about viruses spread by mosquitoes.” It had been a perfect year for the insect bloodsuckers. A long, dry spring followed by lots of rain and high humidity had created breeding conditions ideal for a population explosion.

After a few days and some tests on the spinal fluid of the sick people, CDC officials triumphantly announced that they had solved the mystery. It was St. Louis encephalitis (SLE). This brain-attacking disease leaves its victims, especially the elderly, with outcomes ranging from bad fever and neck stiffness to death. It has no vaccine, and while reasonably common throughout the South and the Midwest, it hadn’t been seen on the East Coast since the 1970s. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani quickly rolled out a $6 million mosquito-abatement plan that included free insect repellant, reams of informational brochures, and a helicopter that sprayed malathion, a potent insecticide, over the city and its alarmed inhabitants.