You hear from time to time that the law of nature make the strongest a winner, the one that survives. “Survival of the fittest” It is not from Darwin as many believe, but from Herbert Spencer. Spencer's original idea was what constitutes survival was the ability to adapt to prevailing conditions. So: The one who is best adapted survives. Darwin adopted the formulation; people misunderstood and made it “Survival of the strongest”.
The view of nature is a subjective idea, and ideas can be changed. Adaptation is a dynamic process, conditions change often. The dynamics of existence create evolution. This has been going on throughout Earth's history.
In recent years, many discoveries about cooperation and friendship are made. We see relations we didn't think was possible, between predators, between predators and game, between man and wild animal, all sorts of odd combinations.
During a dive on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, Redouan Bshary, a researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel, witnessed something unexpected. A large grouper swam up to a moray eel. A meeting between two of the reef's top predators could reasonably only end in a real confrontation?
The grouper swims towards the moray until only a few centimetres remains between them. Then the grouper makes a few quick nods with its body, whereupon the moray floats out of its crotch. They swim away, side by side. It turns out to be a joint hunt.
Groupers hunt during the day, near the bottom in open water, moray eels at night, and access nooks and crannies – they complement each other; one's weakness is another's strength. A prey has little chance of escaping. How and when did they come up with the idea to team up?
Others have documented the same thing. (For example, search ‘moray eel and grouper)’ on Youtube. Systematic studies of a larger number of encounters have shown more of the interaction between groupers and moray eels.1
Sometimes the grouper needs help with a practical problem: a prey has taken refuge in a crevasse, which is a specialty of the moray eel. The perch gets help and points with the body to where the prey hides. Either the moray gets the target or the prey slips away, but there the grouper is waiting. Example of anticipatory planning, something long thought to be beyond the capabilities of animals.
It is not difficult to find examples of animals trained to serve man. It is harder to find examples of wild animals voluntarily teaming up with humans for mutual benefit. But they exist.
In Tanzania, southeast of the Serengeti National Park, in the Ngorongoro Nature Reserve, some tribes live who take assistance from a bird to find the desirable wild honey. Without being in any way tame or trained, the ’Honeyguide’ (Indicator indicator) leads way to the honey. It can sometimes be a long walk, but the bird is ahead and leads.
Honeyguides is a species in a family of woodpecker birds and, like the cuckoo, is a brood parasite, that is, it lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and and abandon the nestlings to be raised by foster parents.
The honeyguide flies from tree to tree and the humans follow until they arrive at the bee colony in a tree, a rock crevice or a termite mound. The people break free the honey, the honeyguide gets the beehive opened and can take care of wax and larvae.
The following film clip is from Moçambique where the Yao people call for guidance with a special cry ‘brrrr-eh!’ which is inherited through the generations. Communication is two-way. The bird responds and leads the honey hunt with a particularly bright, chattering call.2
It is not only the people who seek the help of the bird. It goes in the other direction as well; the bird can initiate the hunt.
The Hadza people use whistle signals to communicate with the honeyguide.
For the bird, it does not seem to matter much which signals people use, communication works with the lure calls of the various traditions, be it drills, words, voice sounds, whistles, click sounds or a combination, often inherited since generations. It seems to be the communication focus that makes it.3
Human interaction with the honeyguide is strange because it is a wild animal that cooperates with humans, without being trained. Otherwise, it is not rare for two species to cooperate. The grouper and the moray eel are just one of many examples
The fact that a mammal and a bird cooperate can provide clues for those who think about the role of consciousness in evolution.
The research I have found on the honeyeater is mainly about the interaction between humans and birds and the communication between them. It would be interesting to know how the bird itself plans and lays out the work. Does the honeyguide look for people immediately when it has found a bee colony or wait until it gets hungry? Does it routinely scan the forest and lay out a layer of premises on an internal map that can be picked up when needed? 4
The cooperation between honeyguides and humans has been known for a long time. The cooperation between grouper became widely known in the 2000s. Also, crows' ability to solve problems and make tools is something that has only recently been noticed.
Crows sometimes really seem to thank humans for the food. It is told of a man who one day noticed plastic objects, toys, caps and miscellaneous everything strewn on the driveway to the garage. It turned out to be the work of crows. The man interpreted it as thanks for the food he gave them. One day he found a present in the form of a pipe coupling of about the same type as in the pipe installations he was working with. If it was a conscious gesture, one must admit that it was an attentive bird.
It would have been easy to dismiss such a story as a worthless anecdote, but with the Internet, and the video services that allow people to document in moving images what they have been through, it becomes clear that we are dealing with more than an occasional event.
Gifts strengthen relationships. There are many videos documenting ’gift giving crows’.
Invited for dinner and bring a bottle of wine? Do we have good manners from the same source as the crows?
Speaking of crows, I cannot help but include the following playground on a rooftop:
Mutualism, the cooperation of two species that benefits both, is common: flowers are pollinated by insects that receive nectar in return, the bacterial flora of the intestines share a body with us, trees and herbs live in symbiosis with fungi, bacteria unite pea plants with nitrogen, ants protect aphids which in turn give the ants carbohydrates 6 ... and of course the moray eel and the grouper. And honeyguide and human. And the crows and their presents. Just a few examples of cooperation in nature.
In Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park, there is an example of cooperation between two non-primate mammals, zebra mongooses and warthogs. The warthog, in need of a round of fur cleaning, seeks a family of mongooses who take it upon themselves to remove ticks and other parasites. Food for them, relief for the warthog. How did who come up with the idea and when? There are still those who claim that animals cannot create cultures.8
It is not only polishing on land. Cleaner fish and cleaning facilities are available in both fresh and salt water. Having parasites on the body removed is vital for many fish.
There are many types of cleaner fish. The ‘blue cleaner fish’ (Labroides dimidiatus) is fairly well described. (It was during a dive to study them that Redouan Bshary discovered the interaction between the grouper and the moray eel.)
At the polishing stations, customary market forces prevail and many craftsmen compete for customers. There are places with many establishments and critical customers; there are places where customer pressure exceeds the capacity of the cleaner fish. Supply and demand act as balancing forces. Bshary found that long-distance guests were prioritized over members of the local population; the latter are stationary and have no one else to turn to.9
The cleaner fish have many customers and keeping track of them requires a fishy version of facial recognition. It turns out they can really tell the difference between a familiar face and a newcomer. Then it is an open question how many they can keep track of.10 Presumably they at least recognize the customers they have sinned against and thus require special treatment.
Misdemeanours can consist of succumbing to the temptation to take a bite of the customer's protective slime, which may feel tastier than munching on parasites. On the other hand, it can lead to the loss of a customer; you can be hunted, in the worst case eaten. At the same time, the customer must think about his reputation. Not many people want to take on a customer who eats one. Often a rebuke is enough for the sinner to pull himself together.11
The customers on the other hand can swim around, study the range of cleaners and try to find reliable and skilled cleaners. How they behave can be seen in the reactions of the customer they treat. The cleaners, on the other hand, know they are watched, which helps them to shut up and behave.12
To calm an upset customer and perhaps to appear positive, the cleaner fish may stroke the customer's back with its pectoral and pelvic fins. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does nopt.
A customer who wants to be groomed signals this by gaping wide or adopting unusual postures. The cleaner fish can even work inside the mouth of large predatory fish without risking their lives. Predators know that being blacklisted from their services is a health risk.
The next clip highlights that fraudulent behaviour; not even the smallest piece of a customer is allowed.
Moray eel and grouper have an effective hunting partnership. The honey guide sees man as a tool to get wax and honey. To lubricate generous contacts, crows come with gifts. Warthogs ask zebra mongooses for help in getting rid of parasites. In the sea there are cleaner fish and cleaner shrimp—a collaboration where both parties win. These are hallmarks of life.
The corporate village of blue cleaners demonstrates basic market forces: competition, PR, evaluation, complaints, excuses, greed, cheating, fraud, sanctions, successes and failures, trusts and suspicions and unwritten rules and all found also in human conduct. Except that nature doesn't give way to unbridled greed.
It is not humans who humanize animals, it is animals that remind us where we belong.
Therefore, we can imagine how the moray eel and the perch think, not in words and concepts, but as a conscious act of cooperation. We can understand the honey guide asks for help, because we do the same when we need help. We probably choose craftsmen as carefully as the customers of the blue cleaner fish. Why be surprised that there is social interaction in the nature?
Humans share many of their characteristics with other animals. What is unique to humans is the span. Man is extreme: extremely cruel to extremely loving; extremely stingy to extremely generous; extremely suspicious to extremely gullible; extremely industrious to extremely lazy; extremely law abiding to extremely criminal; extremely radical to extremely conservative and all shades in between.
Human language with fixed concepts is a strength, but also a weakness. Concepts can wear down and disarm. Who would think that ribs at x pound per kilo are chest parts from a sentient being that had its throat cut after a poor life that ended in fear and horror?
Note that companies are legal subjects, living animals just possessions like cars and vacuum cleaners.
Objectification of nature is a natural approach for a civilization that mines ore, devastates forests, drains water reservoirs, treats animals as raw materials, paves, plans, blows up and demolishes with only its gigantic civilizational ego as a legal subject.
There is no correlation between intelligence and stupidity; stupidity appears in the most sophisticated administrations, in highly specialized science, in world-leading politicians, in economics and not least in people in general. A stupid person is a person that hurts itself by hurting others.
Micro plastics are found in people's blood15, a couple of million Swedes have high levels of PFAS in their drinking water16, worldwide seven million people die annually from air pollution17 — annually!—but without causing the same attention as covid-19.
The fact that fish, birds, turtles die from plastic waste that floats in incredible quantities in the world's oceans does not prevent new plastic from being added all the time. Nothing seems able to stop the destruction of air, sea and land; it reaches right into the cells of living organisms.
A seemingly all-mighty power creates an incessant flow of new technologies and untested substances that are released without anyone knowing what consequences they bring. Fossil society is supposed to be winding down, but the arrows point in a different direction. The Anthropocene is not the age of man, it is the age of helplessness.