2021 | The digital ether
Animal tool use podcast episodes
I listen to a lot of podcasts. It started when I regularly traveled for days at a time to reach remote field sites, but these days it’s more about passing the time in pandemic London. Still, it’s one of the best ways to hear directly from people at the cutting edge of research.
Podcast quality is rising fast—did you know Jane Goodall hosts one?—but so is the sheer information overload. To help cut through the clutter, I’ve picked out nine of my favourite episodes from the past year or two, each of which covers a different aspect of animal behaviour, concentrating on tool use or construction. From birds to beavers, via Neanderthals, monkeys and octopuses, there’s something for everyone.
Just hit the play button, and if you like what you hear, consider subscribing to the podcast to get more of the same. And if you’d rather watch videos, at the end I’ve included one covering the topic of each episode.
Anyway, let’s dive in—I guarantee you’ll learn something new!
1. Many Minds | DISI
Clever crows and cheeky keas (September 2020)
Alex Taylor talks to Kensey Cooperrider and the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute about his work on bird intelligence. He explains the various ways that New Caledonian crows and New Zealand keas show their smarts in tests of tool use and reasoning (for more on keas, see the Twig Technology post here).
2. Origin Stories | Leakey Foundation
Monkeys get creative (July 2021)
Claudio Monteza-Moreno works with wild capuchin monkeys in Coiba National Park, Panama. He and his colleagues—including Brendan Barrett and host Kevin McLean—used camera traps on uninhabited islands to find the first evidence of stone tool use in gracile capuchins of the genus Cebus.
[Full disclosure, I was a reviewer on the initial Leakey Foundation grant that supported Brendan Barrett’s fieldwork in Coiba National Park.]
3. The Jane Goodall Hopecast | JGI
Hope is all we can learn from animal teachers (April 2021)
In April, Craig Foster won an Academy Award for his documentary My Octopus Teacher. Jane Goodall talks to the filmmaker and founder of the Sea Change Project about underwater life and their shared respect for wild animals.
4. Enter the Psychosphere | Melanie Challenger
Neanderthal neurons (June 2021)
Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes takes host Melanie Challenger deep into what we know about Neanderthal minds. She discusses her own research into stone tools, and the growing pool of genetic and even artistic evidence for the mental processes of our closest hominin relatives.
5. 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter | BBC
Termite & ventilation system (May 2019)
The BBC World Service speaks with architect Mick Pearce about towering termite mounds, which have inspired him to design efficient ventilation for buildings in hot environments.
6. Overheard | National Geographic
March of the beaver (November 2019)
Ken Tape and others explore the effect of beavers on the Arctic tundra. They explain to National Geographic that, as our climate changes, beavers are expanding northwards. The problem is that new beaver dams and their ponds are raising water temperatures, thawing permafrost at an even faster rate.
7. The Dissenter | Ricardo Lopes
Primates, tool use & communication (October 2020)
Primatologist Thibaud Gruber and host Ricardo Lopes cover what we can learn from chimpanzee behaviour about their social lives and cognition. They discuss wild observations and captive experiments that attempt to tease out just when and why our primate relatives use tools.
8. Short Wave | NPR
Mirror, mirror, on the wall (December 2020)
There is an idea that the way animals react to their image in a mirror can tell us a lot about how they understand other animals’ minds. Pioneers Gordon Gallup, Daniel Povinelli and Diana Reiss take NPR through the latest evidence in the debate, including monkeys, elephants, dolphins and more.
9. Freakonomics | Stephen Dubner
The invisible paw (April 2018)
Economics is the epitome of rational decision making, which makes the study of non-human animal economic behaviour an odd topic. Stephen Dubner talks to experts in many different fields on whether or not animals understand and use economic principles, including captive monkeys that seem to use criteria of fairness in deciding whether to exchange tokens for food.
Related videos
More of a visual person? No problem. Here are a selection of videos that illustrate aspects of each of the above episodes.
1. Alex Taylor sets up a multi-step tool use problem for a New Caledonian crow (via Inside the Animal Mind, BBC):
2. Video from Brendan Barrett, Claudio Monteza-Moreno and colleagues’ work with the stone-tool-using capuchin monkeys of Coiba National Park, Panama:
3. Here’s the trailer for Craig Foster’s Academy Award winning documentary, My Octopus Teacher:
4. To help you understand Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ discussion of the balance of care and controlled violence that goes into making a Neanderthal stone tool, London’s Natural History Museum has this demonstration:
5. Architect Mick Pearce talks through his inspiration from termite mounds (via National Geographic):
6. An in-depth (40 min) online talk from Ken Tape on his work on how beavers are changing the Arctic tundra:
7. Wild chimpanzees invented and spread the use of moss for sponging up drinking water, shown here in videos from a publication co-authored by Thibaud Gruber:
8. Diana Reiss talks us through the use of mirrors to understand dolphin minds:
9. Finally, in this extract from a TED talk, Frans de Waal discusses how using tokens can help investigate the idea of fairness in captive capuchin monkeys: