Inside the Animal Mind (2014–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Secrets of the Social World - full transcript
I've spent most of my life
out watching animals.
Ever since I was a child,
I've been fascinated by
their lives and behaviour.
But in truth,
it's never seemed quite enough.
I would give anything to be another
animal for just five minutes -
to be able to experience the world
the way they perceive it,
to know what they're thinking,
to be inside the animal mind.
And what I find most intriguing are
the minds of the cleverest animals.
These most intelligent of animals
all live in groups.
And it's made me wonder.
Could there be a direct relationship
between needing to navigate
the hurly-burly of a complex social
life and actually being clever?
In short, could being a
social animal actually make you
a more intelligent animal?
I'm going to explore the minds
of the most social animals.
And in particular,
the one that many people believe
to be exceptional -
dolphins.
I'm going to be swimming with them
to find out what goes on
in dolphin society.
Get signal? Roger that.
Using cutting-edge technology to
listen in on their conversations...
..and discovering their ability
to recognise themselves.
Wow, look at that.
And that's not all.
Because, as we look into the minds
of other social animals,
we'll also find out more about
a species much closer to home -
we humans.
So, could it be that by
delving into their minds,
we actually begin to learn something
more about our own?
I've come here to the
sub-tropical island of Bimini,
just 40 miles east of Florida,
and the reason I've come is that
these crystal-clear shallow waters
are home to a highly social animal
that's always fascinated me
but it's not an animal
that I've ever met face-to-face
in the wild, not an animal
that I've encountered in its world.
Kathleen Dudzinski
and Kel Sweeting are experts
on the Atlantic spotted dolphin.
They've been studying
the social lives of a group
of about 100 dolphins in the
Bimini waters for over a decade
and they're optimistic
I might be able to see some
really revealing behaviour.
The researchers identify individuals
using their distinctive spot
patterns and they now know the age
and sex of many of them.
Do you think that any of these
animals that you've been
working with for some time now,
how long have you been here?
This is my 11th research season.
OK, 11 seasons in the sea,
do you think that they might
recognise you as much
as you recognise them?
Am I wearing my science hat
or my I'm-having-fun hat?
You can be subjective here.
I think that they do.
And I would hope that after this much
time and earning their trust perhaps,
that they know it's me.
Dolphins are easy to romanticise
and for that reason,
I've always been a bit sceptical
about just how intelligent they are.
Is their social life
really as intricate,
really as sophisticated
as people claim?
Well, today, I might find out
because this is the first time that
I've swum with wild dolphins.
Look at the conditions,
the sun shining, the sea is blue,
and these stunning animals are just
about ten metres behind me.
I'm itching to get in, itching.
OK, Al, we're ready when you are.
We're lucky and are quickly
surrounded by a pod of 16 dolphins
from the Bimini group.
Kathleen is filming everything
so if we see any interesting
social behaviour,
we can study it in
more detail later.
And the dolphins swarm around,
creating bubbles with their tails.
But then they do something strange.
They start to use their beaks to
push each other through the water.
That was awesome. That was amazing.
Very cool. Very cool.
That has rocketed into the charts
as one of my greatest
animal encounters.
Just to lay there on the surface,
albeit being buffeted by quite
a bit of surf,
but looking down and seeing all
of it, I can't wait to see it again,
it was too much to take in on
the first occasion.
The behaviour we just saw
is unusual -
Kathleen and Kel have only seen it
a few times before.
So, firstly, which were
the animals that were there?
What ages and did you know
any individuals?
We definitely saw
Split-jaw, Billy, Tim and Speedy
who are four males that often
associate with each other.
Split-jaw is
the oldest of the group,
Billy and Tim are similar in age,
and Speedy's a little bit younger.
So they're friends? It certainly
looks like that way. Yeah.
When you look at their behaviour
from different angles,
a surprising story of complex
social relationships emerges.
What appeared to be a random
ball of eight dolphins actually
contains the three friends...
Dolphins cement the
strong bond between them
by touching each other's
pectoral fins.
Billy and Tim's association -
they're both 13 years old -
has lasted many years and they're
core members of this Bimini group.
Dolphins are very complex social
animals. They use a variety
of signals to share information,
so they use sounds,
they use posture,
they use behaviours,
they use interaction
between individuals.
And their society is complex.
Here again is that strange
pushing behaviour.
A juvenile male presents his belly
to five others.
We know that one of these is the
seven-year-old male "Number 95".
Together, they use their beaks
to push the other dolphin
through the water.
Here Speedy's involved
in the pushing too.
Why the dolphins do this
is a mystery.
The scientists are sure
that it's not sexual behaviour
and obviously the dolphins
are not fighting.
Kathleen and Kel think
it might be a form of play -
a sort of initiation rite
allowing juveniles to learn
the rules of social life.
It certainly seems the case when you
have a group of young individuals
that they're sort of testing
the waters if you will,
trying to see who
gets along with whom,
will this animal tolerate me
being this close,
or are they just somebody I don't
really want to be that close to,
and so they're sort of setting
those relationships as youngsters.
It's been an absolute privilege
to observe these wild dolphins
first-hand.
Their bustling social world
is far more complex
than I could have ever imagined.
But the power of the dolphin mind
is even more apparent
when they band together to hunt.
In these shallow waters
further down the coast of Florida,
individual dolphins find it hard
to catch the fast-moving fish.
But watch what happens
when they act as a group.
One dolphin swims in a circle.
It whips up a wall of muddy water
that corrals any fish inside.
Three wait, anticipating
what the other is doing.
The fish are driven
right into their mouths.
Here, one comes around again
to create another corral.
They've cleverly worked out
an efficient way to catch fish.
This is extraordinary
group behaviour
and it tells us much about the
ingenuity of the dolphin mind.
You see, if they're co-operating,
it means the dolphins can
communicate with each other -
they must possess some kind
of language.
So, is the language of
social animals
something that we could ever
understand?
The Amboseli National Park in Kenya,
home to some of the most social
animals on the planet -
elephants.
Not only are elephants
extremely intelligent,
they're also highly vocal,
using over a dozen different
types of call in their
intricate social lives.
One Saturday afternoon,
my parents took me to see
a film called Dr Doolittle.
It was about a man who actually
spoke to the animals.
As a kid, it was my dream come true
and I'm not the only one
that's obsessed about this.
There've been plenty of scientists
studying animal communication that
have really wanted to unravel just
how animals speak to each other,
in fact, to be able to
converse with them too.
So, will it ever happen?
Karen McCoomb is professor
of animal behaviour
from the University of Sussex.
The elephants here are the
most studied anywhere in the world.
The thing about this park
that's outstanding
is the visibility of the elephants,
a population of more than 1,000
elephants which we know individually.
Karen studies a specific
part of elephant language -
their contact calls.
These allow elephants to keep
in touch with one another
over long distances,
even when they're out of sight.
We're going to use this
gargantuan speaker which pumps out
sound at more than 100 decibels,
which is clearly very loud,
to test these animals
that are behind us.
Karen wants to find out if
elephants can recognise each other
solely by the sound
of their contact call.
She's made a library of these calls.
Some of the recordings are of
elephants familiar to the group
but some are of strangers.
So, Karen, exactly which call are
we going to play to these animals?
Here we're playing a call
of a genuine stranger
so an individual that
they won't have encountered.
So, they've never heard this
call before? No, not in this case.
And we're expecting them
therefore to respond
with a mixture of curiosity and
alarm, I take it? Yep. For sure.
The reaction of the herd
to the call can be very subtle...
..and Karen thinks our best chance
is to observe the matriarch,
the female leader of the herd.
Right, you give me the shout
and I'll hit the play button, then.
It's all set up, isn't it?
Yup.
So, go.
Listening.
What do you think?
Well, the matriarch is listening,
you can see she's holding her
ears out a little bit from the head.
She turned around, didn't she?
She definitely stopped what
she was doing and turned round
so she heard it,
there's no question about that. Yep.
Those on the left-hand side
are walking away, aren't they?
There is a bit of defensiveness here,
there was bunching up
within the group.
The reaction to a stranger's call
is even stronger with this
larger herd that Karen's
also filmed in Amboseli.
Again, they bunch up defensively,
something they wouldn't do
if they'd heard a call made by
an elephant that they knew well.
Karen has discovered that
the matriarchs are the best ones
when it comes to identifying
the calls of different elephants.
This allows them to quickly
distinguish between friend and foe.
In order to pass these sorts
of discrimination tasks that
we're giving them, they would need
to be familiar with at least
100 other adult females
in the population.
I imagine myself
standing in a stadium
and there's 1,000 people in the
stadium and scattered amongst them
are 100 people that I know and
they all have to shout out "Chris!"
I wouldn't recognise the voices
of 100 people in a stadium of 1,000.
No, I agree,
it's not a trivial task
and the very fact that it's only the
families with the older matriarchs
that consistently get it right
points to it being a complex task
that you've got to build up a memory
during your lifetime
in order to really be
sure about getting it right.
Karen's work has confirmed that
contact calls play a key role
in elephants' social lives.
And the discovery that elephants
can recognise each other
and communicate in this way reveals
the complexity of their mind.
You see, what the elephants are
doing
is something far more sophisticated
than what many species of animals
do when it comes to using
their voice.
Birds respond when the sun comes up,
it gets them singing,
sometimes they can recognise
their immediate neighbours,
but not 100 other individuals,
that is profoundly different.
However impressive elephant
communication is,
scientists have long suspected
that dolphin language
must be even more so.
And if only they listened closely
enough, they'd be able to crack it.
Dolphin research really didn't
begin in earnest until the 1960s
when one of the most
extreme experiments took place.
I think it has to be a contender
to be one of the most bizarre
ever in the history
of animal behaviour.
Meet California neuroscientist
John Lilly -
self-styled science guru
of the 1960s.
He believed he could teach
dolphins to speak English.
"And I just want to talk
to such ancient characters
"and find out, you know,
if they have any wisdom for us."
He thought the best way to do
this was to have a person
share their life with a dolphin.
So, Lilly flooded the
ground floor of this house
with 40cm of sea water for
a male dolphin called Peter.
He then persuaded 22-year-old
Margaret Howe to live with
the dolphin full-time
for two and a half months.
Of course, no-one knew
what was going to happen.
Margaret lived, ate and slept here.
This photograph shows her on the
phone whilst Peter is listening in.
But much time was spent
teaching Peter English.
In fact, two and a half hours a day.
This is a sound recording of Peter
attempting to repeat numbers
spoken by Margaret.
One, two, three, four, five.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
It was slow progress and keeping
Peter focused was really tricky.
From early on in the experiment,
he started to make sexual advances
towards his human companion.
Highly aroused,
he would rub against her legs.
Margaret had to "calm him down"
before he could proceed
with the lessons.
Controversial enough,
but in another test,
Lilly injected dolphins with
the hallucinogenic drug LSD
to see if it helped
with their learning.
This was the 1960s, you remember?
It's safe to say that the
dolphin-house-experiment,
to teach Peter to speak English,
was neither ethical nor a success.
The pioneering work that John Lilly
did certainly helped inspire
both researchers and the public
with a fascination for dolphins
and crucially, it taught
those researchers that any ideas
of teaching dolphins human language
was complete fantasy.
That's why today, scientists like
Vincent Janik, here in Florida,
prefer to study dolphins
in the wild.
He's researching the sounds that
dolphins make to communicate.
And he's using a pioneering
method of recording them.
We're going out today to try to find
wild dolphins and attach tags to them
which are little recording
tags that can give us information
about their sounds that they're
making and also give us information
about their behaviour as they're in
the bay, their own wild environment.
A dolphin's been
captured in shallow water
and the team works rapidly to
minimise any distress to the animal.
Until now, it's been almost
impossible to gather useful
sound recordings of wild dolphins
for the simple reason that
when they're in a group,
you can't tell which one
is making which sound.
Vincent's neat solution is to
attach a recording device -
it has suckers -
to the animal's head.
Nicholas, Nicholas, get signal?
'Roger that.' OK.
It will now record all the sounds
and calls made by
this individual dolphin
whilst also keeping a record
of its movements.
In addition, the device transmits
a signal so the team can track
the animal and recover
the unique data at the end.
Five, four, three, two, one.
The dolphin's released.
This is all part of
a bigger programme -
several dolphins are tagged.
At the same time, the scientists
are constantly observing them
so later, they can match
their behaviour
to the sounds they're making.
The device here measures
the distance between the dolphins.
What's going on over there?
There's lots of splashing,
I think that's a dorsal fin.
Yeah, they're two dolphins.
There's a variety of data that
we're collecting here from the boat.
What we can look at is
what the animal's doing,
whether it's travelling,
whether it's foraging,
whether it's socialising with others,
those, those kinds of things
we can observe from the surface.
They've now been tracking
the dolphins for six hours.
The recorder then
automatically detaches itself
from the animal captured earlier
and the team retrieve it.
Back at base,
the sounds can then be analysed.
At first listen,
it's an absolute cacophony -
a whole range of dolphin clicks,
whistles and pulses.
Half of these sounds are not
relevant to the study,
they're used by dolphins to find
their way around -
the echolocation clicks.
But Vincent's interested
in these other ones,
the communication calls,
and one of them in particular.
There's one very fascinating
sound which is the signature whistle
and the signature whistle is
a call that, in a way,
labels the identity of an animal,
it's, it's broadcasting who you are,
so here's an example of a signature
whistle from just one animal.
Every whistle is unique to
each dolphin, just like a name.
And these are the only mammals
apart from humans to have this
type of personalised call.
And yet the whistle is not fixed.
If male dolphins
change their alliances,
they can alter their
signature whistle.
The sounds that they do produce,
they can always bring in
new modifications, new improvisations
if you want and so therefore,
they're always able to somehow
change the sounds that
they already have.
So the range of sounds they're
making and the repertoire is
very, very large, and also very
adaptable to new situations.
Vincent now believes we might be
mistaken to think of this
as a human type of language at all.
We see language really as the
human communication system,
and it's very specific to what we,
what our needs are.
There's other very complex
communication systems out there.
One other example is music.
We can use music to communicate
about feelings for example,
and actually one can use music
to encode very specific messages
as well.
"Jaws Theme" by John Williams
We all know what these
sinister notes mean.
And we also know what
this is telling us.
"Bridal Chorus" by Wagner
But critically, we don't need
language to understand them.
And Vincent believes the calls
of dolphins could be a completely
different type of communication,
as different from language
as music is.
How dolphins communicate may be yet
a third way of complex communication
that is again different
from music and from language.
And it's very important in the study
of this, to keep an open mind
and be broad because if we were
to look for language, we would
actually already, in a way, blinker
ourselves to other possibilities.
In truth, I reckon it might
be many years, if ever,
before scientists can
fully crack the dolphin code.
But what's clear is that dolphins
have developed a unique ability
to communicate with each other.
So how did they get this ability?
To find out the answer,
I've come here to the Smithsonian
Institute in Washington DC
to meet one of the world's leading
experts on dolphin evolution.
Lori Marino came to this subject
through her research
as a neuroscientist
measuring the brains of dolphins.
Modern dolphins have
especially large brains
and she and her colleague wanted
to discover how this came about.
Lori and Mark Uhen are the first
scientists to study the fossil
skulls of ancient dolphin ancestors
using CAT scanners.
So what have we got here then?
Well, this animal lived
about 36 million years ago.
And we're going to stick it in
the scan, what do we hope to find?
Well, the scanner will let us
see inside the skull
and we'll be able to see all
the spaces in here
and the one we're really interested
in is the brain case back here,
so we'll be able to see how
large the brain case was
and actually calculate the volume
of the brain of this ancient animal.
And that's the part that changed
over time in evolution
and it looks very different than
what you'd see in a modern specimen.
This is a recreation
of basilosauraus,
an ancestor of modern dolphins
from 36 million years ago.
It was a solitary hunter.
Ferocious enough to take on sharks.
But it's the brain size
of these massive predators
that Lori is interested in.
And the results from the scan
are very surprising.
If we scroll though from
the front towards the back,
we can see the size of the brain
and the shape of the brain,
and we can see that, you know,
the brain does get bigger
as we move towards the back
but it's still a relatively
small cranial capacity
for the size of the animal.
This animal had a very big body
and a very small brain.
But when Lori studied the skulls
of more recent ancestors,
she noticed something extraordinary.
Two million years later,
drastic changes took place.
This is another dolphin ancestor,
dori-don.
Taking into account its far
smaller body size, the brain
of dori-don was almost twice
as big as that of basilosaurus.
Around the same time, it's thought
that these ancient sea mammals
stopped living alone
and began instead to live in groups.
Relative brain size shot up,
and along with that are signs
that their social ecology
changed as well.
So they became social but when they
did so, their brain size increased.
Is that the theory? That's right.
Smaller dolphin ancestors
like dori-don were forced to group
together for defence.
When you reduce your body size
and your dentition becomes
less formidable,
you need to band together
to protect yourself.
OK, so the development of social
behaviour in this species was
driving evolution. That's right.
The driver of the large relative
brain size was social complexity.
And what a driver it was.
Remarkably, for over
30 million years,
until early humans
came on the scene,
these dolphin ancestors had the
most powerful brains on the planet.
Lori's work here at the Smithsonian
strongly suggests that
there's a link between social living
and having a larger brain.
It's a theory at least that
needing to understand, to relate to
other individuals in that social
group is actually driving
the evolution of a more powerful,
more complex brain.
But is that an inevitable
consequence of living in a group?
Well, there's a question...
Let's take a group of animals
with one of the most extraordinary
social lives
anywhere in the animal kingdom -
the termites.
They build these
wonderful mounds here
to hold their complex societies.
And to discover just how complex,
you have to peer inside.
What I'm hoping to find, of course,
is some termites
and they occur in a number
of different castes.
The most populous are the workers.
Look at that, there's a whole
number of these animals here.
They're tiny, white animals
about a millimetre or two long.
And then there are the soldiers.
Yeah, there's a soldier.
You can see their much
larger heads and powerful jaws.
And in a nest like this, we'd
expect there to be several queens.
And here's a figure for you - these
queens can live for up to 45 years.
Most remarkable of all is
what the society can build.
Take the architecture of the mound.
The workers create vents
that draw in fresh air.
They build ducting so that warm air
and waste carbon dioxide can rise up
and be pumped out at the top.
A very impressive
air-conditioning system.
It's incredible what such small
animals can design and construct
and especially surprising given
that each individual termite
has a tiny brain.
They lack flexible thinking
and they have to carry out
their tasks by rote.
But what they lack in brain power,
they make up for in numbers
because inside this mound, there
could be several million termites.
Each of those individuals
goes about its simple duties
but when you add them all together,
when you collectivise them,
we get what we call
group intelligence
and, quite clearly, it works,
it works very, very well.
But within a pod of dolphins,
something else is going on.
You see, each dolphin is clever
and they have a
sophisticated understanding
of what the other individuals
in the group are doing.
What is it then about the dolphin
mind that allows them to do this?
To try and answer this question,
I've come to the
National Aquarium in Baltimore.
Keeping dolphins
in captivity is controversial,
and since 1988, aquariums
in the United States don't take
any dolphins from the wild,
except for the occasional stranding.
So, any new dolphins
are captive-born.
The head trainer, Alison Ginsburg,
is introducing me to Nonnie.
Each of the animals may know up to
65, 70 different hand gestures that
correlate to different behaviours
that we would like them to perform.
So you offer them the gesture and
they produce the behaviour? Correct.
So take your fingers like this and
you're just going to wiggle them.
Nice.
Now you're just going to take a fist
and you're going to throw it out.
We'll do one more.
Take your hands like this and you're
going to wave them at her. OK.
What about that?
And she knows up to 70 gestures?
Amazing. Amazing. Absolutely.
Animal psychologist Diana Reiss
believes it's
only in the controlled environment
of aquariums that you can
unlock some of the secrets
of the dolphin mind.
I often wonder when they see this,
if they know the mirror is going up.
Here, she can carry out experiments
that simply wouldn't be possible
in the wild.
This is the observation chamber
here at the aquarium.
It's cramped but you can get some
fantastic views of what's going on.
Now, he's going down to the bottom,
the other one turns around
and comes right back.
It's a beautiful bubble ring. Wow.
These dolphins have learnt to
make their own bubble rings.
It's a clever-enough trick,
but Diana wants to investigate
something far more fundamental.
Do dolphins recognise
themselves as individuals?
It was long assumed that only
the human mind was capable of this
but now we know a tiny handful
of other animals can do it too.
Diana places a one-way mirror
inside the observation window to
test the dolphins.
So now we're looking through a window
and they'll be seeing the mirror.
They're not looking at us,
that's the key thing,
they're looking at themselves.
They're looking at themselves.
Dolphins don't behave like this
if they simply meet another dolphin.
This suggests that they understand
that what they're seeing
isn't another animal,
but a reflection of themselves.
One action never normally seen if
they meet another is fin wiggling.
Is it true that dolphins have been
fascinated by watching themselves in
the mirror whilst
they're copulating?
I've seen that and
we've recorded that,
that was the first
study that we did.
This remarkable footage of dolphins
having sex was also filmed
through a one-way mirror.
They came to the mirror, and
they looked head-on into the mirror
and would copulate while they both
looked into the mirror and watched.
This is something
they can't see without a mirror
so this is very sophisticated.
This is understanding it's you
and understanding this mirror
is a tool to view yourself.
All this supports the idea
that dolphins must be aware that
they're looking at themselves.
Dolphins share this ability to
recognise themselves as individuals
with very few other animals.
Elephants can do it.
Chimpanzees can do it.
But the vast majority, including
dogs and monkeys, simply can't.
And, interestingly,
nor can young humans.
Before they're 18 months old,
most children fail to point out
a red dot painted on their cheek.
This boy simply assumes that
he's looking at another child.
Only when they're about two,
do children first realise
that the mark is on their own cheek.
They now know the reflection
is of themselves.
Diana has explored the age at which
dolphins first pass the mirror test.
And what's truly remarkable is that,
just like human toddlers,
dolphins don't learn to
recognise themselves until
they're two-years-old!
I've just had an extraordinary hour
in a damp pit in a dolphinarium
and these moments are
the real highlights of my life,
I can't tell you how excited
I am at the moment.
I've just witnessed dolphin
behaviour that I've not seen before
that was being interpreted by
a scientist that had analysed it,
had quantified it and qualified it
and it's changed my life probably
because I've seen these animals,
without doubt recognising
themselves as individuals.
And I felt -
maybe I'm getting old and soft...
..maybe I'm not as pragmatic
as I used to be,
but I felt a connection with them
based upon that self-awareness.
Social animals haven't evolved
an ability to recognise themselves,
merely to preen in mirrors.
Understanding yourself
as an individual
means you know
others are individuals too.
To find out why this
is so important,
I'm on my way to the
Yerkes Primate Centre, near Atlanta.
When an animal like a chimpanzee
is aware that another in their group
might have a different perspective
on the world,
it gives them an advantage.
It allows the chimp to lie
and manipulate others.
Primatologist Frans de Waal coined
the phrase "chimpanzee politics".
He and his team have set up
an ingenious experiment to reveal
how a low-ranking animal can deceive
a more dominant member of the group.
What we do here, is we hide food.
One individual knows where
food is hidden,
the other one doesn't know where
the food if hidden
and then we see
how they manipulate the relationship
in order to get the food.
So how do you do that?
You show an animal food and hide it
in the enclosure, I take it?
We show a low-ranking female
where food is hidden,
then we release her together
with the high-ranking female
who doesn't know anything
and then the low-ranking one,
she can wait till the other one
is gone, or distracted,
she can also mislead the other one
and lead her in the wrong direction
in order to get to the food in time.
We are testing Missy and Rita.
Rita, the dominant chimp,
comes out first.
If she knew where the banana was
she would simply help herself.
But only Missy,
the subordinate chimp,
saw the banana being hidden
under the red tube.
Missy is also aware that Rita
has no idea where the banana is.
In other words she realises
that Rita has a different
perspective on the same situation.
Missy notices Rita
close to the food
and so tries to appear nonchalant.
Rita now wanders off.
And when she's far enough away,
Missy goes for the banana.
She has successfully deceived Rita.
She's found her banana.
Frans has observed
this behaviour in chimps,
but it's very rare in other animals.
That kind of deception
is not so typical.
I think probably dolphins are
capable of it,
and maybe elephants.
But you need a large brain, I think,
to do this kind of thing.
Pre-meditated deception reveals
much about the minds of animals.
They must be able to plan.
And they have to anticipate
that their own actions
will influence events.
It's all high-level stuff.
And I've always been convinced
that the most successful animals
are natural-born-liars.
And the best liars of all?
There's no contest I'm afraid,
that's you and me, that's us humans.
And just think about it,
be honest with yourselves,
think of all the lies that you
tell to your social group
every single day
to manipulate and control.
Well, not only to
manipulate and control
but also to smooth over
those relationships
to make sure that your social group
is a functional one.
But social living is not
just about lies and deceit.
Frans also wanted to test if
animals had a sense of justice.
Would they realise if
they were being treated fairly?
Normally you would think the only
thing an animal should care about
is what do I get for my task -
I work I get rewards -
but, no, they're comparing with
what the other one is getting.
Frans began the fairness test
with the capuchin monkey.
These small, clever animals
are kept in large enclosures,
but, for the short duration of the
test, they're brought into a lab.
Each monkey
carries out a simple task.
And when both get a reward of
cucumber, everyone's happy.
But watch what happens when
the one on the right receives
a grape instead.
Grapes are so much better
than cucumber,
and the one who gets cucumber
gets really emotionally upset
by the fact that the other one
is getting grapes.
In chimpanzees things go actually
a little bit further,
and gets very close to
the human sense of fairness,
in that the one who gets grapes
also gets upset sometimes
and the one who gets grapes
sometimes waits till the other one
gets a grape, so it gets very close
to the human sense of fairness.
So the one that's getting
the better reward,
refuses to take the reward until the
other animal is being similarly
rewarded with the good stuff? Yeah.
Yeah, that's in chimpanzees,
that has never been found
in another animal,
but the chimpanzee goes
much further in that
they care about reward division
even if they're on
the better end of the scale.
The ability to forge
a friendship...
..to communicate with others
in the group...
..to have a sense of fairness...
..to know yourself
as an individual...
..and, occasionally,
to deceive and lie.
These skills don't require strength
so much as a prodigious amount
of brain power.
And the brainier you are, the more
likely it is you'll succeed
within that group and pass your
intelligence on to
your own offspring.
This is why social living has driven
the evolution of high intelligence.
But it's not just cleverness that
differentiates social animals.
Animals with minds like this
often show behaviours
which are very human.
They seem to be able to
put themselves in the shoes
of another individual.
And if they can do that,
they are just a short step away
from demonstrating something
that we call empathy -
and that's a trait that we always
consider to be uniquely human.
This is now a serious
scientific question
and researchers have been exploring
whether there's any evidence of
social animals displaying behaviours
which are akin to empathy.
It's what I want to witness
back here at Amboseli.
The elephants here display
a rare behaviour
that's nearly impossible to believe.
It's as moving
as it is extraordinary.
But to capture it,
Karen McComb and I are going to
have to do something almost macabre.
We put the skull down
in between the two jaw bones.
'We've created a miniature
elephant graveyard
'in the path of
an approaching herd.'
If you circle around...
'Now all we do is observe.'
That's good. OK,
stop there a minute.
It looks like they might be
interested, Karen.
Yeah, I think we've definitely got
the beginnings of a reaction here.
The male is swinging his trunk
towards the skulls and the jawbones.
Some of the younger females
starting to respond as well.
They've picked up
a whiff of the skulls.
Is this a skull of an animal
that they know?
Coincidently there are bones...
there's a jawbone there of a female
who they would definitely,
some of this family would definitely
have come across in real life.
They're going towards it now,
look. Yeah, wow.
'A few animals,
including chimpanzees,
'will be curious towards
the corpse of a companion,
'touching and investigating
the body.'
But only elephants take
an interest in the skulls and bones
of their own kind,
long after death.
Now we're really
starting to get a reaction.
We've got the females clustering
in around the skull
and the touching the jawbones, all
the trunks are coming in at once.
Stretching in
all at the same time, yeah.
You see the way the ends
of the trunks are moist there?
That's enhancing the scent
that they're getting.
It's a very intensely social thing
this approaching the skulls.
They're not just going up
as single individuals,
they're coming around as a group.
The matriarch's right there
in the core of the group
and everyone is together,
reaching in their trunks
and really feeling these skulls.
Just to qualify, you have tried
this with inanimate objects
and other skulls, I mean in the
sense that they're not responding
to any object that we
put in their path,
and they're not responding
to our scent either. No, no way.
They are specifically giving
these responses to elephant skulls
and ivory.
They pick out the long dead remains
of their own species
and show this intense interest.
You wouldn't see that in any other
species, except for humans.
It would be amazing to know
what was going on in their heads
when they do that.
I mean we can only guess.
Penny for your thoughts, penny?
I'd offer millions!
Reluctantly the young male
turns away and goes off to follow
the rest of the family.
Watching that group of elephants
was a moving experience.
It's really difficult not to
anthropomorphise here
and see them as mourning
because they arrange themselves
in such a reverential way,
in a way that we would
around a dead relative.
I suppose we may never know exactly
what's going on in their mind
but you can't help but speculate
that they have a concept of death.
And if they have a concept of death
does that mean that they
understand that that animal
has died and gone?
Does that mean that they understand
that one day they will die too?
Because that parallel would be,
not only similar,
but exactly the same as ours.
If social animals can experience
such a deep emotional connection
with one another, how far
could these feelings extend?
Well, in early 2013 a remarkable
incident was filmed off Hawaii
that may provide some answers.
A male dolphin had got fishing line
and a hook caught on its body.
Without anything being done,
he might well have died.
But the dolphin swims in to
a group of divers.
Now, think about it -
this animal must know that
he's in danger.
Might he also realise
that the humans,
instead of harming him,
could actually help him?
In other words, could this dolphin
be taking a calculated risk
that these people will show
pity for his plight?
It's a very difficult
question to answer.
But the good news is that
the dolphin survived -
perhaps an extraordinary example
of empathy crossing
the species barrier.
Personally, I think I'd always
underestimated the complexity
of the dolphin mind.
We couldn't be more different
than these animals.
We've evolved to live on land,
they in the sea.
But the way that we both use
our brains to deal with others,
there are clear similarities.
Maybe, mentally we're a lot
closer to these animals
than I initially thought.
Over the course of this series
I've had many memorable experiences.
I've come close to feeling what
it's really like to be a wolf.
I've witnessed
the incredible problem-solving
skills of the crow family.
Now, finally, exploring the world
of the most social of animals
has completed my journey.
And by looking into other animals'
minds, I've changed my own.
And that has to be a good thing.
And it's made me happy.
out watching animals.
Ever since I was a child,
I've been fascinated by
their lives and behaviour.
But in truth,
it's never seemed quite enough.
I would give anything to be another
animal for just five minutes -
to be able to experience the world
the way they perceive it,
to know what they're thinking,
to be inside the animal mind.
And what I find most intriguing are
the minds of the cleverest animals.
These most intelligent of animals
all live in groups.
And it's made me wonder.
Could there be a direct relationship
between needing to navigate
the hurly-burly of a complex social
life and actually being clever?
In short, could being a
social animal actually make you
a more intelligent animal?
I'm going to explore the minds
of the most social animals.
And in particular,
the one that many people believe
to be exceptional -
dolphins.
I'm going to be swimming with them
to find out what goes on
in dolphin society.
Get signal? Roger that.
Using cutting-edge technology to
listen in on their conversations...
..and discovering their ability
to recognise themselves.
Wow, look at that.
And that's not all.
Because, as we look into the minds
of other social animals,
we'll also find out more about
a species much closer to home -
we humans.
So, could it be that by
delving into their minds,
we actually begin to learn something
more about our own?
I've come here to the
sub-tropical island of Bimini,
just 40 miles east of Florida,
and the reason I've come is that
these crystal-clear shallow waters
are home to a highly social animal
that's always fascinated me
but it's not an animal
that I've ever met face-to-face
in the wild, not an animal
that I've encountered in its world.
Kathleen Dudzinski
and Kel Sweeting are experts
on the Atlantic spotted dolphin.
They've been studying
the social lives of a group
of about 100 dolphins in the
Bimini waters for over a decade
and they're optimistic
I might be able to see some
really revealing behaviour.
The researchers identify individuals
using their distinctive spot
patterns and they now know the age
and sex of many of them.
Do you think that any of these
animals that you've been
working with for some time now,
how long have you been here?
This is my 11th research season.
OK, 11 seasons in the sea,
do you think that they might
recognise you as much
as you recognise them?
Am I wearing my science hat
or my I'm-having-fun hat?
You can be subjective here.
I think that they do.
And I would hope that after this much
time and earning their trust perhaps,
that they know it's me.
Dolphins are easy to romanticise
and for that reason,
I've always been a bit sceptical
about just how intelligent they are.
Is their social life
really as intricate,
really as sophisticated
as people claim?
Well, today, I might find out
because this is the first time that
I've swum with wild dolphins.
Look at the conditions,
the sun shining, the sea is blue,
and these stunning animals are just
about ten metres behind me.
I'm itching to get in, itching.
OK, Al, we're ready when you are.
We're lucky and are quickly
surrounded by a pod of 16 dolphins
from the Bimini group.
Kathleen is filming everything
so if we see any interesting
social behaviour,
we can study it in
more detail later.
And the dolphins swarm around,
creating bubbles with their tails.
But then they do something strange.
They start to use their beaks to
push each other through the water.
That was awesome. That was amazing.
Very cool. Very cool.
That has rocketed into the charts
as one of my greatest
animal encounters.
Just to lay there on the surface,
albeit being buffeted by quite
a bit of surf,
but looking down and seeing all
of it, I can't wait to see it again,
it was too much to take in on
the first occasion.
The behaviour we just saw
is unusual -
Kathleen and Kel have only seen it
a few times before.
So, firstly, which were
the animals that were there?
What ages and did you know
any individuals?
We definitely saw
Split-jaw, Billy, Tim and Speedy
who are four males that often
associate with each other.
Split-jaw is
the oldest of the group,
Billy and Tim are similar in age,
and Speedy's a little bit younger.
So they're friends? It certainly
looks like that way. Yeah.
When you look at their behaviour
from different angles,
a surprising story of complex
social relationships emerges.
What appeared to be a random
ball of eight dolphins actually
contains the three friends...
Dolphins cement the
strong bond between them
by touching each other's
pectoral fins.
Billy and Tim's association -
they're both 13 years old -
has lasted many years and they're
core members of this Bimini group.
Dolphins are very complex social
animals. They use a variety
of signals to share information,
so they use sounds,
they use posture,
they use behaviours,
they use interaction
between individuals.
And their society is complex.
Here again is that strange
pushing behaviour.
A juvenile male presents his belly
to five others.
We know that one of these is the
seven-year-old male "Number 95".
Together, they use their beaks
to push the other dolphin
through the water.
Here Speedy's involved
in the pushing too.
Why the dolphins do this
is a mystery.
The scientists are sure
that it's not sexual behaviour
and obviously the dolphins
are not fighting.
Kathleen and Kel think
it might be a form of play -
a sort of initiation rite
allowing juveniles to learn
the rules of social life.
It certainly seems the case when you
have a group of young individuals
that they're sort of testing
the waters if you will,
trying to see who
gets along with whom,
will this animal tolerate me
being this close,
or are they just somebody I don't
really want to be that close to,
and so they're sort of setting
those relationships as youngsters.
It's been an absolute privilege
to observe these wild dolphins
first-hand.
Their bustling social world
is far more complex
than I could have ever imagined.
But the power of the dolphin mind
is even more apparent
when they band together to hunt.
In these shallow waters
further down the coast of Florida,
individual dolphins find it hard
to catch the fast-moving fish.
But watch what happens
when they act as a group.
One dolphin swims in a circle.
It whips up a wall of muddy water
that corrals any fish inside.
Three wait, anticipating
what the other is doing.
The fish are driven
right into their mouths.
Here, one comes around again
to create another corral.
They've cleverly worked out
an efficient way to catch fish.
This is extraordinary
group behaviour
and it tells us much about the
ingenuity of the dolphin mind.
You see, if they're co-operating,
it means the dolphins can
communicate with each other -
they must possess some kind
of language.
So, is the language of
social animals
something that we could ever
understand?
The Amboseli National Park in Kenya,
home to some of the most social
animals on the planet -
elephants.
Not only are elephants
extremely intelligent,
they're also highly vocal,
using over a dozen different
types of call in their
intricate social lives.
One Saturday afternoon,
my parents took me to see
a film called Dr Doolittle.
It was about a man who actually
spoke to the animals.
As a kid, it was my dream come true
and I'm not the only one
that's obsessed about this.
There've been plenty of scientists
studying animal communication that
have really wanted to unravel just
how animals speak to each other,
in fact, to be able to
converse with them too.
So, will it ever happen?
Karen McCoomb is professor
of animal behaviour
from the University of Sussex.
The elephants here are the
most studied anywhere in the world.
The thing about this park
that's outstanding
is the visibility of the elephants,
a population of more than 1,000
elephants which we know individually.
Karen studies a specific
part of elephant language -
their contact calls.
These allow elephants to keep
in touch with one another
over long distances,
even when they're out of sight.
We're going to use this
gargantuan speaker which pumps out
sound at more than 100 decibels,
which is clearly very loud,
to test these animals
that are behind us.
Karen wants to find out if
elephants can recognise each other
solely by the sound
of their contact call.
She's made a library of these calls.
Some of the recordings are of
elephants familiar to the group
but some are of strangers.
So, Karen, exactly which call are
we going to play to these animals?
Here we're playing a call
of a genuine stranger
so an individual that
they won't have encountered.
So, they've never heard this
call before? No, not in this case.
And we're expecting them
therefore to respond
with a mixture of curiosity and
alarm, I take it? Yep. For sure.
The reaction of the herd
to the call can be very subtle...
..and Karen thinks our best chance
is to observe the matriarch,
the female leader of the herd.
Right, you give me the shout
and I'll hit the play button, then.
It's all set up, isn't it?
Yup.
So, go.
Listening.
What do you think?
Well, the matriarch is listening,
you can see she's holding her
ears out a little bit from the head.
She turned around, didn't she?
She definitely stopped what
she was doing and turned round
so she heard it,
there's no question about that. Yep.
Those on the left-hand side
are walking away, aren't they?
There is a bit of defensiveness here,
there was bunching up
within the group.
The reaction to a stranger's call
is even stronger with this
larger herd that Karen's
also filmed in Amboseli.
Again, they bunch up defensively,
something they wouldn't do
if they'd heard a call made by
an elephant that they knew well.
Karen has discovered that
the matriarchs are the best ones
when it comes to identifying
the calls of different elephants.
This allows them to quickly
distinguish between friend and foe.
In order to pass these sorts
of discrimination tasks that
we're giving them, they would need
to be familiar with at least
100 other adult females
in the population.
I imagine myself
standing in a stadium
and there's 1,000 people in the
stadium and scattered amongst them
are 100 people that I know and
they all have to shout out "Chris!"
I wouldn't recognise the voices
of 100 people in a stadium of 1,000.
No, I agree,
it's not a trivial task
and the very fact that it's only the
families with the older matriarchs
that consistently get it right
points to it being a complex task
that you've got to build up a memory
during your lifetime
in order to really be
sure about getting it right.
Karen's work has confirmed that
contact calls play a key role
in elephants' social lives.
And the discovery that elephants
can recognise each other
and communicate in this way reveals
the complexity of their mind.
You see, what the elephants are
doing
is something far more sophisticated
than what many species of animals
do when it comes to using
their voice.
Birds respond when the sun comes up,
it gets them singing,
sometimes they can recognise
their immediate neighbours,
but not 100 other individuals,
that is profoundly different.
However impressive elephant
communication is,
scientists have long suspected
that dolphin language
must be even more so.
And if only they listened closely
enough, they'd be able to crack it.
Dolphin research really didn't
begin in earnest until the 1960s
when one of the most
extreme experiments took place.
I think it has to be a contender
to be one of the most bizarre
ever in the history
of animal behaviour.
Meet California neuroscientist
John Lilly -
self-styled science guru
of the 1960s.
He believed he could teach
dolphins to speak English.
"And I just want to talk
to such ancient characters
"and find out, you know,
if they have any wisdom for us."
He thought the best way to do
this was to have a person
share their life with a dolphin.
So, Lilly flooded the
ground floor of this house
with 40cm of sea water for
a male dolphin called Peter.
He then persuaded 22-year-old
Margaret Howe to live with
the dolphin full-time
for two and a half months.
Of course, no-one knew
what was going to happen.
Margaret lived, ate and slept here.
This photograph shows her on the
phone whilst Peter is listening in.
But much time was spent
teaching Peter English.
In fact, two and a half hours a day.
This is a sound recording of Peter
attempting to repeat numbers
spoken by Margaret.
One, two, three, four, five.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
It was slow progress and keeping
Peter focused was really tricky.
From early on in the experiment,
he started to make sexual advances
towards his human companion.
Highly aroused,
he would rub against her legs.
Margaret had to "calm him down"
before he could proceed
with the lessons.
Controversial enough,
but in another test,
Lilly injected dolphins with
the hallucinogenic drug LSD
to see if it helped
with their learning.
This was the 1960s, you remember?
It's safe to say that the
dolphin-house-experiment,
to teach Peter to speak English,
was neither ethical nor a success.
The pioneering work that John Lilly
did certainly helped inspire
both researchers and the public
with a fascination for dolphins
and crucially, it taught
those researchers that any ideas
of teaching dolphins human language
was complete fantasy.
That's why today, scientists like
Vincent Janik, here in Florida,
prefer to study dolphins
in the wild.
He's researching the sounds that
dolphins make to communicate.
And he's using a pioneering
method of recording them.
We're going out today to try to find
wild dolphins and attach tags to them
which are little recording
tags that can give us information
about their sounds that they're
making and also give us information
about their behaviour as they're in
the bay, their own wild environment.
A dolphin's been
captured in shallow water
and the team works rapidly to
minimise any distress to the animal.
Until now, it's been almost
impossible to gather useful
sound recordings of wild dolphins
for the simple reason that
when they're in a group,
you can't tell which one
is making which sound.
Vincent's neat solution is to
attach a recording device -
it has suckers -
to the animal's head.
Nicholas, Nicholas, get signal?
'Roger that.' OK.
It will now record all the sounds
and calls made by
this individual dolphin
whilst also keeping a record
of its movements.
In addition, the device transmits
a signal so the team can track
the animal and recover
the unique data at the end.
Five, four, three, two, one.
The dolphin's released.
This is all part of
a bigger programme -
several dolphins are tagged.
At the same time, the scientists
are constantly observing them
so later, they can match
their behaviour
to the sounds they're making.
The device here measures
the distance between the dolphins.
What's going on over there?
There's lots of splashing,
I think that's a dorsal fin.
Yeah, they're two dolphins.
There's a variety of data that
we're collecting here from the boat.
What we can look at is
what the animal's doing,
whether it's travelling,
whether it's foraging,
whether it's socialising with others,
those, those kinds of things
we can observe from the surface.
They've now been tracking
the dolphins for six hours.
The recorder then
automatically detaches itself
from the animal captured earlier
and the team retrieve it.
Back at base,
the sounds can then be analysed.
At first listen,
it's an absolute cacophony -
a whole range of dolphin clicks,
whistles and pulses.
Half of these sounds are not
relevant to the study,
they're used by dolphins to find
their way around -
the echolocation clicks.
But Vincent's interested
in these other ones,
the communication calls,
and one of them in particular.
There's one very fascinating
sound which is the signature whistle
and the signature whistle is
a call that, in a way,
labels the identity of an animal,
it's, it's broadcasting who you are,
so here's an example of a signature
whistle from just one animal.
Every whistle is unique to
each dolphin, just like a name.
And these are the only mammals
apart from humans to have this
type of personalised call.
And yet the whistle is not fixed.
If male dolphins
change their alliances,
they can alter their
signature whistle.
The sounds that they do produce,
they can always bring in
new modifications, new improvisations
if you want and so therefore,
they're always able to somehow
change the sounds that
they already have.
So the range of sounds they're
making and the repertoire is
very, very large, and also very
adaptable to new situations.
Vincent now believes we might be
mistaken to think of this
as a human type of language at all.
We see language really as the
human communication system,
and it's very specific to what we,
what our needs are.
There's other very complex
communication systems out there.
One other example is music.
We can use music to communicate
about feelings for example,
and actually one can use music
to encode very specific messages
as well.
"Jaws Theme" by John Williams
We all know what these
sinister notes mean.
And we also know what
this is telling us.
"Bridal Chorus" by Wagner
But critically, we don't need
language to understand them.
And Vincent believes the calls
of dolphins could be a completely
different type of communication,
as different from language
as music is.
How dolphins communicate may be yet
a third way of complex communication
that is again different
from music and from language.
And it's very important in the study
of this, to keep an open mind
and be broad because if we were
to look for language, we would
actually already, in a way, blinker
ourselves to other possibilities.
In truth, I reckon it might
be many years, if ever,
before scientists can
fully crack the dolphin code.
But what's clear is that dolphins
have developed a unique ability
to communicate with each other.
So how did they get this ability?
To find out the answer,
I've come here to the Smithsonian
Institute in Washington DC
to meet one of the world's leading
experts on dolphin evolution.
Lori Marino came to this subject
through her research
as a neuroscientist
measuring the brains of dolphins.
Modern dolphins have
especially large brains
and she and her colleague wanted
to discover how this came about.
Lori and Mark Uhen are the first
scientists to study the fossil
skulls of ancient dolphin ancestors
using CAT scanners.
So what have we got here then?
Well, this animal lived
about 36 million years ago.
And we're going to stick it in
the scan, what do we hope to find?
Well, the scanner will let us
see inside the skull
and we'll be able to see all
the spaces in here
and the one we're really interested
in is the brain case back here,
so we'll be able to see how
large the brain case was
and actually calculate the volume
of the brain of this ancient animal.
And that's the part that changed
over time in evolution
and it looks very different than
what you'd see in a modern specimen.
This is a recreation
of basilosauraus,
an ancestor of modern dolphins
from 36 million years ago.
It was a solitary hunter.
Ferocious enough to take on sharks.
But it's the brain size
of these massive predators
that Lori is interested in.
And the results from the scan
are very surprising.
If we scroll though from
the front towards the back,
we can see the size of the brain
and the shape of the brain,
and we can see that, you know,
the brain does get bigger
as we move towards the back
but it's still a relatively
small cranial capacity
for the size of the animal.
This animal had a very big body
and a very small brain.
But when Lori studied the skulls
of more recent ancestors,
she noticed something extraordinary.
Two million years later,
drastic changes took place.
This is another dolphin ancestor,
dori-don.
Taking into account its far
smaller body size, the brain
of dori-don was almost twice
as big as that of basilosaurus.
Around the same time, it's thought
that these ancient sea mammals
stopped living alone
and began instead to live in groups.
Relative brain size shot up,
and along with that are signs
that their social ecology
changed as well.
So they became social but when they
did so, their brain size increased.
Is that the theory? That's right.
Smaller dolphin ancestors
like dori-don were forced to group
together for defence.
When you reduce your body size
and your dentition becomes
less formidable,
you need to band together
to protect yourself.
OK, so the development of social
behaviour in this species was
driving evolution. That's right.
The driver of the large relative
brain size was social complexity.
And what a driver it was.
Remarkably, for over
30 million years,
until early humans
came on the scene,
these dolphin ancestors had the
most powerful brains on the planet.
Lori's work here at the Smithsonian
strongly suggests that
there's a link between social living
and having a larger brain.
It's a theory at least that
needing to understand, to relate to
other individuals in that social
group is actually driving
the evolution of a more powerful,
more complex brain.
But is that an inevitable
consequence of living in a group?
Well, there's a question...
Let's take a group of animals
with one of the most extraordinary
social lives
anywhere in the animal kingdom -
the termites.
They build these
wonderful mounds here
to hold their complex societies.
And to discover just how complex,
you have to peer inside.
What I'm hoping to find, of course,
is some termites
and they occur in a number
of different castes.
The most populous are the workers.
Look at that, there's a whole
number of these animals here.
They're tiny, white animals
about a millimetre or two long.
And then there are the soldiers.
Yeah, there's a soldier.
You can see their much
larger heads and powerful jaws.
And in a nest like this, we'd
expect there to be several queens.
And here's a figure for you - these
queens can live for up to 45 years.
Most remarkable of all is
what the society can build.
Take the architecture of the mound.
The workers create vents
that draw in fresh air.
They build ducting so that warm air
and waste carbon dioxide can rise up
and be pumped out at the top.
A very impressive
air-conditioning system.
It's incredible what such small
animals can design and construct
and especially surprising given
that each individual termite
has a tiny brain.
They lack flexible thinking
and they have to carry out
their tasks by rote.
But what they lack in brain power,
they make up for in numbers
because inside this mound, there
could be several million termites.
Each of those individuals
goes about its simple duties
but when you add them all together,
when you collectivise them,
we get what we call
group intelligence
and, quite clearly, it works,
it works very, very well.
But within a pod of dolphins,
something else is going on.
You see, each dolphin is clever
and they have a
sophisticated understanding
of what the other individuals
in the group are doing.
What is it then about the dolphin
mind that allows them to do this?
To try and answer this question,
I've come to the
National Aquarium in Baltimore.
Keeping dolphins
in captivity is controversial,
and since 1988, aquariums
in the United States don't take
any dolphins from the wild,
except for the occasional stranding.
So, any new dolphins
are captive-born.
The head trainer, Alison Ginsburg,
is introducing me to Nonnie.
Each of the animals may know up to
65, 70 different hand gestures that
correlate to different behaviours
that we would like them to perform.
So you offer them the gesture and
they produce the behaviour? Correct.
So take your fingers like this and
you're just going to wiggle them.
Nice.
Now you're just going to take a fist
and you're going to throw it out.
We'll do one more.
Take your hands like this and you're
going to wave them at her. OK.
What about that?
And she knows up to 70 gestures?
Amazing. Amazing. Absolutely.
Animal psychologist Diana Reiss
believes it's
only in the controlled environment
of aquariums that you can
unlock some of the secrets
of the dolphin mind.
I often wonder when they see this,
if they know the mirror is going up.
Here, she can carry out experiments
that simply wouldn't be possible
in the wild.
This is the observation chamber
here at the aquarium.
It's cramped but you can get some
fantastic views of what's going on.
Now, he's going down to the bottom,
the other one turns around
and comes right back.
It's a beautiful bubble ring. Wow.
These dolphins have learnt to
make their own bubble rings.
It's a clever-enough trick,
but Diana wants to investigate
something far more fundamental.
Do dolphins recognise
themselves as individuals?
It was long assumed that only
the human mind was capable of this
but now we know a tiny handful
of other animals can do it too.
Diana places a one-way mirror
inside the observation window to
test the dolphins.
So now we're looking through a window
and they'll be seeing the mirror.
They're not looking at us,
that's the key thing,
they're looking at themselves.
They're looking at themselves.
Dolphins don't behave like this
if they simply meet another dolphin.
This suggests that they understand
that what they're seeing
isn't another animal,
but a reflection of themselves.
One action never normally seen if
they meet another is fin wiggling.
Is it true that dolphins have been
fascinated by watching themselves in
the mirror whilst
they're copulating?
I've seen that and
we've recorded that,
that was the first
study that we did.
This remarkable footage of dolphins
having sex was also filmed
through a one-way mirror.
They came to the mirror, and
they looked head-on into the mirror
and would copulate while they both
looked into the mirror and watched.
This is something
they can't see without a mirror
so this is very sophisticated.
This is understanding it's you
and understanding this mirror
is a tool to view yourself.
All this supports the idea
that dolphins must be aware that
they're looking at themselves.
Dolphins share this ability to
recognise themselves as individuals
with very few other animals.
Elephants can do it.
Chimpanzees can do it.
But the vast majority, including
dogs and monkeys, simply can't.
And, interestingly,
nor can young humans.
Before they're 18 months old,
most children fail to point out
a red dot painted on their cheek.
This boy simply assumes that
he's looking at another child.
Only when they're about two,
do children first realise
that the mark is on their own cheek.
They now know the reflection
is of themselves.
Diana has explored the age at which
dolphins first pass the mirror test.
And what's truly remarkable is that,
just like human toddlers,
dolphins don't learn to
recognise themselves until
they're two-years-old!
I've just had an extraordinary hour
in a damp pit in a dolphinarium
and these moments are
the real highlights of my life,
I can't tell you how excited
I am at the moment.
I've just witnessed dolphin
behaviour that I've not seen before
that was being interpreted by
a scientist that had analysed it,
had quantified it and qualified it
and it's changed my life probably
because I've seen these animals,
without doubt recognising
themselves as individuals.
And I felt -
maybe I'm getting old and soft...
..maybe I'm not as pragmatic
as I used to be,
but I felt a connection with them
based upon that self-awareness.
Social animals haven't evolved
an ability to recognise themselves,
merely to preen in mirrors.
Understanding yourself
as an individual
means you know
others are individuals too.
To find out why this
is so important,
I'm on my way to the
Yerkes Primate Centre, near Atlanta.
When an animal like a chimpanzee
is aware that another in their group
might have a different perspective
on the world,
it gives them an advantage.
It allows the chimp to lie
and manipulate others.
Primatologist Frans de Waal coined
the phrase "chimpanzee politics".
He and his team have set up
an ingenious experiment to reveal
how a low-ranking animal can deceive
a more dominant member of the group.
What we do here, is we hide food.
One individual knows where
food is hidden,
the other one doesn't know where
the food if hidden
and then we see
how they manipulate the relationship
in order to get the food.
So how do you do that?
You show an animal food and hide it
in the enclosure, I take it?
We show a low-ranking female
where food is hidden,
then we release her together
with the high-ranking female
who doesn't know anything
and then the low-ranking one,
she can wait till the other one
is gone, or distracted,
she can also mislead the other one
and lead her in the wrong direction
in order to get to the food in time.
We are testing Missy and Rita.
Rita, the dominant chimp,
comes out first.
If she knew where the banana was
she would simply help herself.
But only Missy,
the subordinate chimp,
saw the banana being hidden
under the red tube.
Missy is also aware that Rita
has no idea where the banana is.
In other words she realises
that Rita has a different
perspective on the same situation.
Missy notices Rita
close to the food
and so tries to appear nonchalant.
Rita now wanders off.
And when she's far enough away,
Missy goes for the banana.
She has successfully deceived Rita.
She's found her banana.
Frans has observed
this behaviour in chimps,
but it's very rare in other animals.
That kind of deception
is not so typical.
I think probably dolphins are
capable of it,
and maybe elephants.
But you need a large brain, I think,
to do this kind of thing.
Pre-meditated deception reveals
much about the minds of animals.
They must be able to plan.
And they have to anticipate
that their own actions
will influence events.
It's all high-level stuff.
And I've always been convinced
that the most successful animals
are natural-born-liars.
And the best liars of all?
There's no contest I'm afraid,
that's you and me, that's us humans.
And just think about it,
be honest with yourselves,
think of all the lies that you
tell to your social group
every single day
to manipulate and control.
Well, not only to
manipulate and control
but also to smooth over
those relationships
to make sure that your social group
is a functional one.
But social living is not
just about lies and deceit.
Frans also wanted to test if
animals had a sense of justice.
Would they realise if
they were being treated fairly?
Normally you would think the only
thing an animal should care about
is what do I get for my task -
I work I get rewards -
but, no, they're comparing with
what the other one is getting.
Frans began the fairness test
with the capuchin monkey.
These small, clever animals
are kept in large enclosures,
but, for the short duration of the
test, they're brought into a lab.
Each monkey
carries out a simple task.
And when both get a reward of
cucumber, everyone's happy.
But watch what happens when
the one on the right receives
a grape instead.
Grapes are so much better
than cucumber,
and the one who gets cucumber
gets really emotionally upset
by the fact that the other one
is getting grapes.
In chimpanzees things go actually
a little bit further,
and gets very close to
the human sense of fairness,
in that the one who gets grapes
also gets upset sometimes
and the one who gets grapes
sometimes waits till the other one
gets a grape, so it gets very close
to the human sense of fairness.
So the one that's getting
the better reward,
refuses to take the reward until the
other animal is being similarly
rewarded with the good stuff? Yeah.
Yeah, that's in chimpanzees,
that has never been found
in another animal,
but the chimpanzee goes
much further in that
they care about reward division
even if they're on
the better end of the scale.
The ability to forge
a friendship...
..to communicate with others
in the group...
..to have a sense of fairness...
..to know yourself
as an individual...
..and, occasionally,
to deceive and lie.
These skills don't require strength
so much as a prodigious amount
of brain power.
And the brainier you are, the more
likely it is you'll succeed
within that group and pass your
intelligence on to
your own offspring.
This is why social living has driven
the evolution of high intelligence.
But it's not just cleverness that
differentiates social animals.
Animals with minds like this
often show behaviours
which are very human.
They seem to be able to
put themselves in the shoes
of another individual.
And if they can do that,
they are just a short step away
from demonstrating something
that we call empathy -
and that's a trait that we always
consider to be uniquely human.
This is now a serious
scientific question
and researchers have been exploring
whether there's any evidence of
social animals displaying behaviours
which are akin to empathy.
It's what I want to witness
back here at Amboseli.
The elephants here display
a rare behaviour
that's nearly impossible to believe.
It's as moving
as it is extraordinary.
But to capture it,
Karen McComb and I are going to
have to do something almost macabre.
We put the skull down
in between the two jaw bones.
'We've created a miniature
elephant graveyard
'in the path of
an approaching herd.'
If you circle around...
'Now all we do is observe.'
That's good. OK,
stop there a minute.
It looks like they might be
interested, Karen.
Yeah, I think we've definitely got
the beginnings of a reaction here.
The male is swinging his trunk
towards the skulls and the jawbones.
Some of the younger females
starting to respond as well.
They've picked up
a whiff of the skulls.
Is this a skull of an animal
that they know?
Coincidently there are bones...
there's a jawbone there of a female
who they would definitely,
some of this family would definitely
have come across in real life.
They're going towards it now,
look. Yeah, wow.
'A few animals,
including chimpanzees,
'will be curious towards
the corpse of a companion,
'touching and investigating
the body.'
But only elephants take
an interest in the skulls and bones
of their own kind,
long after death.
Now we're really
starting to get a reaction.
We've got the females clustering
in around the skull
and the touching the jawbones, all
the trunks are coming in at once.
Stretching in
all at the same time, yeah.
You see the way the ends
of the trunks are moist there?
That's enhancing the scent
that they're getting.
It's a very intensely social thing
this approaching the skulls.
They're not just going up
as single individuals,
they're coming around as a group.
The matriarch's right there
in the core of the group
and everyone is together,
reaching in their trunks
and really feeling these skulls.
Just to qualify, you have tried
this with inanimate objects
and other skulls, I mean in the
sense that they're not responding
to any object that we
put in their path,
and they're not responding
to our scent either. No, no way.
They are specifically giving
these responses to elephant skulls
and ivory.
They pick out the long dead remains
of their own species
and show this intense interest.
You wouldn't see that in any other
species, except for humans.
It would be amazing to know
what was going on in their heads
when they do that.
I mean we can only guess.
Penny for your thoughts, penny?
I'd offer millions!
Reluctantly the young male
turns away and goes off to follow
the rest of the family.
Watching that group of elephants
was a moving experience.
It's really difficult not to
anthropomorphise here
and see them as mourning
because they arrange themselves
in such a reverential way,
in a way that we would
around a dead relative.
I suppose we may never know exactly
what's going on in their mind
but you can't help but speculate
that they have a concept of death.
And if they have a concept of death
does that mean that they
understand that that animal
has died and gone?
Does that mean that they understand
that one day they will die too?
Because that parallel would be,
not only similar,
but exactly the same as ours.
If social animals can experience
such a deep emotional connection
with one another, how far
could these feelings extend?
Well, in early 2013 a remarkable
incident was filmed off Hawaii
that may provide some answers.
A male dolphin had got fishing line
and a hook caught on its body.
Without anything being done,
he might well have died.
But the dolphin swims in to
a group of divers.
Now, think about it -
this animal must know that
he's in danger.
Might he also realise
that the humans,
instead of harming him,
could actually help him?
In other words, could this dolphin
be taking a calculated risk
that these people will show
pity for his plight?
It's a very difficult
question to answer.
But the good news is that
the dolphin survived -
perhaps an extraordinary example
of empathy crossing
the species barrier.
Personally, I think I'd always
underestimated the complexity
of the dolphin mind.
We couldn't be more different
than these animals.
We've evolved to live on land,
they in the sea.
But the way that we both use
our brains to deal with others,
there are clear similarities.
Maybe, mentally we're a lot
closer to these animals
than I initially thought.
Over the course of this series
I've had many memorable experiences.
I've come close to feeling what
it's really like to be a wolf.
I've witnessed
the incredible problem-solving
skills of the crow family.
Now, finally, exploring the world
of the most social of animals
has completed my journey.
And by looking into other animals'
minds, I've changed my own.
And that has to be a good thing.
And it's made me happy.