Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Do Animals Make Mistakes? (featuring Dr. Andy Sih)

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Andy Sih about the kinds of mistakes wild animals make, and why they make them.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Hart podcast. Guaranteed Human. How many, Extraordinaries? We often talk on this show about how natural selection has exquisitely shaped animals to help them thrive in their environments. And while that's still true, I'm sure we've all seen animals doing something truly stupid. So why do animals make mistakes? What kind of mistakes do they make? And does living in a world that is profoundly altered by humans cause animals to make more mistakes or even make

new mistakes? We're getting answers to these questions today from the amazing Dr. Andy C. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's mistaken universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens. And in my house, there's an animal who never makes a mistake. Who is that animal? Is it? He's a very good boy. Oh, is it Pepito? It is Pepito. Yeah, he's a good boy. Hi, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space. And I have a lot of of goats who, they're not making mistakes. They're just being stinkers, I guess. No, that's not true. They've gotten themselves stuck in lots of things, and I've had to get them out of trouble.

So that's a mistake. Are goats famous for making good life choices? No, no. But they're curious and they have a lot of fun. So there's some lesson there for the rest of us, I think. Always think to yourself, what would a goat do in this situation? Yeah, they would make a loud noise, look for snacks, and then follow whatever their heart is telling them to do. That's what I think. Awesome. Speaking of mistakes, we got a fantastic question from a listener. So let's go ahead and take a listen to what Duren wanted to know about. Hey, Daniel and Kelly. This is Duran in Dallas, Texas. I wanted to ask if there is a biological or scientific concept of a mistake. Sometimes Kelly would describe a specific animal behavior that deviates from a known behavior with a known evolutionary benefit,

and the suggestion is sometimes that maybe there's some alternative advantage. But my thought is, what if the organism just goofed up? And if so, how do we know that it was a mistake? Also, are there different types of mistakes? Me locking my keys in the car seems like it would be different than a parasitic wasque, misinterpreting sensory cues, and infecting the wrong coat. Thanks and love the show. Oh my gosh, I got so excited when I got this question because it turns out that I got my Ph.D.

with like the mistakes guy, the guy who studies mistakes and studies how our like rapidly changing environment impacts, how often animals are making mistakes in which animals are making the right decision as the environment is changing. And my PhD advisor is like the coolest guy around. And so I am stoked to have him on the show. But why does your advisor study mistakes? I mean, I thought you got your PhD on like fish guts or something. Andy C. over the course of his career has come up with lots of new fields that have become like super hot topic that like thousands of people work on.

He's just like this amazing idea guy. But when I went into his lab, I was studying animal personalities, which I think we'll get to today. And I particularly, I wasn't excited about fish guts, but I was interested in how parasites would impact the behaviors and the personalities of their hosts, either directly by, infecting them and changing their behavior in some way, or indirectly because animals might change their behaviors to try to avoid getting infected. And so I was interested in parasites and behavior. That was my thing. Well, I think it's amazing that you had such a good experience with your advisor, that you're still so positive and excited about him. And so that my question to you is that you think he's so awesome. Is he the goat? He is the greatest of all-time

advisor. I'm leaning in. Yep, he is. I had a great time working with Andy. he's the goat that makes good life choices. Yeah, right. He doesn't make a lot of mistakes like my goats. He's the right kind of goat. Yeah. And you know what, let's not wait any longer. Let's bring the goat advisor onto the show right now.

Dr. Andy C. is a distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California Davis. He's won the Animal Behavior Society's Exemplar Award for major long-term contributions in animal behavior. Their Quest Award for Seminole Contributions. in animal behavior, and their distinguished animal behaviorist award for outstanding careers in animal behavior. Basically, if there is an animal behavior award out there, Andy has won it.

And I could go on. I'm a huge fan because he was my PhD advisor, but it's way more fun to hear him talk than to hear me talk. So let's bring Andy onto the show. Great to see you, Andy. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be seeing you again after many years.

I don't think I've seen your face in a long time. Wow. Whereas I've seen your face many times in just, you know, various, various formats. I'm sorry about that. It's always fun to meet other people's thesis advisors. And so since you're an expert on behavior, I have to ask you, was Kelly a well-behaved grad student? Oh, my God. No, Kelly was, she was one of these forces of nature who was just sort of making life better for everybody all the time.

And she and Zach also just sort of endlessly amused us with her science and her gigantic cats. Oh, Hilbert has since passed on. I know exactly which gigantic cat you're referred to. He was mammoth at one point. But he was a lot of fun. Well, you used to amuse me by having a whole wall in your house of mirrors and many parties centered around karaoke. and I remember having loads of fun singing in your house. So it was fun being in the C-Lab. Yeah, and we have a sort of a karaoke song event as part of the PhD party where everybody sings their song. And I probably have the recording of you singing your song somewhere back there. And I'm planning to put together an entire YouTube of all the songs over the years.

Yes. I think mine was parasite-themed. Absolutely. I think I changed the lyrics. Yeah, yeah. All right. Speaking of mistakes. Recording yourself doing karaoke.

All right, but today we are here to talk about mistakes because we got this fantastic question from a listener about animal behavior and mistakes. So I thought we could start with obvious mistakes. So, you know, the listener was asking, do animals ever make mistakes? But there are some very clear instances where it's not black and white. The animal is making a mistake. So, Andy, tell us about animals who make obvious mistakes. Good question. So I think animals often do make mistakes, but some of the most spectacular ones are ones associated with what are called evolutionary traps, where they almost certainly did something like really stupid because they did evolve a system of thinking about the world that used to work in the old world.

but now often humans have added something that ends up causing things to backfire from their simple system. And the one that has gotten a lot of attention and you can see the pictures online is the Beatles and Beer Bottles example. You guys have heard about that one? No. Do Beatles drink beer bottles in the wrong way? Yeah. So that is part of the jokes that come out of it because the whole thing happens in Australia, where the Aussies are known for their, you know, fondness of beer.

But in this case, it's beetles that actually have been observed furiously attempting to mate with beer bottles. And so this is where these beetles, they're jewel beetles, they're brown, they're beetles, they're kind of longish and cylindrical, and they have a sort of pebbly texture. And when males are looking for a female, they do need a cue, some sort of information. that tells them this is a female. And, you know, the same with us, that when we look at, look around, we have cues that identify this is a human, this is a human that is, in fact, the sex we're interested in, and this is one we really like. And so the Beatles use this simple cue of sort of hard, cylindrical, kind of longish, brown, pebbly textured,

and it turns out beer bottles fit the criterion. And what's more for them? bigger is better. And a beer bottle turns out to be super sexy and people observed, like you can see pictures online, you know, invite you to look it up. Jewel Beatles and beer bottles,

they're just like a whole cluster of males on the bottle with their little insect genitalia extended mating with the beer bottle. Wow. That seems like we can call that a mistake. I think that's a mistake. And do they seem to figure it out eventually,

or do they just keep furiously mating with the bottle until they have completed their part of the process? Yeah, and that is the amazing thing is it was so bad and so persistent because those bottles are so sexy to them that actually the entire species was in decline because so many males were actually just on the beer bottle until they die.

Wow! They were actually getting exhaustive. Fosted, sitting out in the Aussie hot sun, getting dehydrated, or finally ants came and just got him and killed them, that the whole species was actually in decline. And ecologists were actually became something that was in the newspaper and so on of our beer bottles or killing these beetles. Wow. The decline of the species because of the failure of the male gaze. That's amazing. Yeah. And there are probably other examples of that. And one could even, you know, I don't even know if it actually is literally declined, but people have actually ended up saying that internet porn has some resemblance of distracting to the point of like loss of productivity or something. But they actually did manage to recover these Beatles by having the beer manufacturers change their bottles.

Wow. Wow. What did they have to change? Yeah. So they actually apparently debated that one thing you could do is change to green bottles. instead of brown. Okay. But then it turns out that green bottles

actually do not screen out UV very well and it messes up the flavor of the beer. Huh. Which is interesting because some beers are in green bottles but apparently it's well known that it can mess up the flavor of the beer. But they just had to remove the pebbly texture that they had on sort of the bottom of the bottles

on just part of the bottle. And that actually solved the problem. And the species has rebounded. I'm just trying to imagine. imagine what was like to work at that beer manufacturer and to get that phone call. And it just sounds like a prank, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I guess it was in the newspaper.

It was something that was being talked about. And I think they were happy to get the good press from saving these incredible Beatles. So we're calling it a mistake because the creature was evolved to suit a certain situation. And then it turns out that that same behavior doesn't really work anymore. Because, as you say, the environment has changed because of what humans have done. So we're calling that a mistake. It's like a maladaptation. Yeah.

And, you know, what is a mistake can be pretty subtle. But these examples of what actually ecologists call an evolutionary trap. You know, they were trapped into doing something really like our favorite examples are obviously this is the wrong thing to do. And those are, you know, we're just happy enough to call those. mistakes. Like, there are also loads of insects that are laying their eggs on windows. Why windows? And the reason appears to be that they also, these are these aquatic insects that, you know, have the larval stages in the water. But then the adults come out and fly around, like dragonflies do that and mosquitoes, you know, lots of things do that. And they have to figure out when they're ready to lay their eggs back in water, what is water?

And so when we look at a pond, we are actually using some set of cues that tells us this is a pond and it's water, you know. And so they actually use a particular pattern of reflected light off of the water to tell them it's water. And that's always worked well. This particular pattern that even involves polarized light, it's always worked well evolutionarily over time. But now glass in the right conditions can actually have the same. reflected patterns so they think glass is water, which, you know, that could happen to us in just the right conditions. But for them, it's so ingrained that that pattern means water that they seem to not care that it's vertical. Well, are these good insects, you know, like honeybees or

bad insects like mosquitoes? So should I feel bad about this or not? Yeah, yeah. So honeybees, luckily for them, they don't have larvae in the water. But this is happening to like be zilisel. billions, that's like more than billions, I guess, is bazillions of mayflies. And I think dragonflies do it some, but, you know, lots of insects are doing it. Mayflies might maybe even do it more because they only, you know, have like a day or two to just mate and lay their eggs in the water. So they're in a rush. And they've got this simple cue that's water. And they're just, you know, photos of incredible numbers of mayflies clustered on windows and, you know, mismanaging. the system making an error. Daniel, have you seen slight tangent? Have you seen Mayflies before? Have you like been in an area when Mayflies emerged? I don't even know what a mayfly is.

Oh man. Andy, do you want to go into a bit more detail about the amazingness that is Mayflies? Tell us. Yeah. Okay. I'm not an expert on that, though. I have seen other people's talks about it. But there are lakes where when they come out and they come out synchronously,

which makes sense because if you're only going to be alive as an adult, They've been an aquatic larva for like a year. Then they come out as adults, and within a day or two, they're only built to live a short time. They have to mate, lay their eggs. And you don't want to do that like the day after everyone else does it. You know, you've got to do it at the same time as everyone else if you're going to mate. And so they come out synchronously in some of these lakes where it's so many of them that it's literally blinding, like you're walking through just a mass of insects. They're just, you can't even, you've got to push their out of the way to just even walk around.

They're just, again, I don't know what the right word is. Bezillion seems like what I usually use, Mayflies. Again, that's something that I'm sure there are YouTube's online. You should check it out. It's, like, I've never gone there, but to see it happen, because I guess you've got to hit that day just right. You've probably got to hang around for a little while. But I'd love to actually be there and experience it sometime. I hit that day.

Oh my God. So I lived on the Long Lake Erie. And so I got my, you know, bachelor's and master's degree in Ohio. And I was on literally one of the worst dates of my life. I had just finished asking the guy, hey, why is it that you always talk about chemistry? But you've never mentioned your wife before. And his answer was because chemistry is more interesting. This was the last date.

But right after he said that, I looked up and there was a cloud moving towards us. And I was like, that's like, like, cloud is really low, what's going on. It was mayflies that, like, so many mayflies had emerged all at once. It was, like, a cloud moving towards us. And then the next day when I walked around the, like, you know, the little city, you would slip. There were, like, so many of them that had died after, like, their big mating that the

ground was, like, slippery. And you had to, like, you know, watch out because you'd fall over because there were all of these, like, dead mayflies that you would slip on that all died at once after they had finished mating. Wow. And anyway, maybe they laid all of their eggs. on all of the windows and I had missed that because I was too focused on the bad date and trying not to trip.

They also get fooled by somewhat wet asphalt. Oh. So they've also laid massive numbers of eggs on wet roads. So maybe that's what, you know, you were slipping on is... Is their eggs? Gross. And their bodies. Yeah.

Apparently there are so many of them that they still are doing okay, I think, as opposed to the Beatles even starting to decline in as a species. Okay. So this concept of evolutionary traps is new to me, but it's fascinating. But I guess it means you can take advantage of a species and manipulate them into behavior you want. Like when we, you know, have like duck calls or like when I put a piece of cheese in a trap, is that like an evolutionary trap I'm taking advantage of? Yeah, yeah.

And it definitely is. I want to quickly note that there is a medium literature on humans falling into evolutionary traps where the, you know, I kind of mentioned internet porn. People have actually sort of talked about that. But the main one that people talk about is people evolved likely, often in places with relatively like not enough food. And so we've evolved a strong craving for, in fact, high calorie food, fatty, sugary foods. And obviously, in the modern world, there's just a lot more of that available.

and people have said we've become evolutionarily trapped into what at a species level is a global epidemic of overeating those foods with major health implications and so on. So if you want to talk about animals getting trapped and having major problems, it would be fair to say humans have fallen into that trap. Yeah, we're not as great as we think we are. We fall into traps too. Yeah. We make mistakes.

Yes, we do. Daniel mentioned some ways that we can make you. of these things, like we can, you know, do animal calls or whatever. Are there other, like, really good examples of ways humans are purposefully setting evolutionary traps? Yeah, probably the real common one is literally using pheromone traps. Do you guys know about these pheromone traps? We use them for Japanese beetles.

Exactly. And so there are many pest insects that are crop pests and so on. and one way to catch them and get them out of the system is to take advantage of the fact that males, this is again, males desperate to mate with females thing, but for insects and for lots of species where the density of them is medium but maybe not that high, one, you know, kind of a what could be a problem is finding a mate. And then in some species, what males do is they go where they know. the females are going to come too. Like if females are going to go to water to lay their eggs, then the males can just hang out at the water like dragonflies do that. But in other species like

moths, it's not so clear cut where you should, you know, where are the females? You got to go find them. And so the system that has evolved is females release just a little bit, by our standards, a little bit of basically their perfume, a pheromone, a chemical that basically says, I'm a female, and I'm ready to mate, and here I am. And so they release just, you know, I mean, how much chemical could a moth release? And not a lot, it's a moth. And fruit flies do this also. So a little puff comes out.

And the males find the females using that. And when you think of just how much puff of perfume could have come out, like we can't detect it. We don't detect it at all. But even if we could, it feels like maybe you could smell perfume from a potential mate from, you know, maybe 20 yards away. Wow. But in fact, they can smell it from a typical thing for a moth apparently is hundreds of

meters, and they actually have a world record of seven miles. What? That's insane. How did they figure that out? Did they release a moth seven miles away and it found the mate? I think they do actually have marked males, and they actually experimentally release, you know, an appropriate amount of the stuff. Okay.

And, you know, so that's like if a female moth in Central Park in New York just put out a puff and now a male that's over somewhere on Long Island, you know, in Brooklyn or Queens, actually smelled it. And not only do they smell it, like, I think there's no other system in nature that is as sensitive as their sensory organs for detecting that smell. Wow. One molecule and their brains firing female. Huh.

But then they actually have to follow a path to the female. So they have to actually do the sort of zigzagging and detecting and sort of recalibrating, even what the wind is doing and so on, and eventually find the female. So we take advantage of that by just putting out a little bit of the pheromone, probably even much more than one female moth would, and males come in. And you're doing that apparently to take care of Japanese beetle problem on your farm there. Yeah, and they, you know, we accumulate them in a bit, this giant bag, and then we kill them. But apparently you have to be sort of careful because you can make your yard a hot spot.

If you, like, release a bunch of the pheromone, Japanese beetles from, like, many miles around will move towards your property. Hardy and Kelly's place. And now, like, if your bag gets full, maybe you have more Japanese beetles than you would have had otherwise, because they've all been attracted to your, like, super hot pheromone spot. So you need to be a little careful. No, this is great. A mistake on top of a mistake. So many layers. Meta mistakes.

One of the things I love about catching male moths on our property is that like the, you know, the females have antenna that just kind of like, you know, they stick up. They're like little sticks or whatever. But the males have super feathery antennae because they have all this extra surface area so that they can catch those pheromone molecules when they're in the air. And it's an easy way to tell the difference between the males and the females. No, good point. Yeah.

Okay, so we are going to keep talking about mistakes when we get back from the break, but we're going to transition to more subtle mistakes. And so let's take a break. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts everyone's talking about. All in one place.

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Always free. Grab the free app. I heart radio. Everywhere you go. Always free. Download the free IHard Radio app today. And we are back, and having Andy on the show has definitely not been a mistake. And now we are moving to more subtle mistakes.

And so, all right, let's take a sort of broader view of mistakes. Obviously, mating with a bottle when you meant to be mating with a, you know, real beetle partner is a mistake. But would something like getting eaten by a predator count as a mistake? And so, Andy, how do you think about the definition for mistakes? Yeah, that is a great question because it seems obvious that getting killed by a predator is not a good thing for you and should be viewed as a mistake. But the subtlety that, you know, behavioral ecologists use and thinking about it is it depends because there are just sort of layers of issues that could make it that this was still an outcome of you doing the best of a complex situation that you live in. So a simple thing here would be just that you got to go out and find food. It might be, for that matter, finding mates.

and that often there is what we refer to as a risk-reward trade-off, where it's pretty common that where the food is is also where there's danger and that you need to actually balance these as almost all animals are in that situation. And even the optimal balance does not mean that you don't take any risks. You have to go out and find food, and there are risks involved with that. And so it could even be that even when you do the optimal balance, of these risks and rewards, sometimes the risk does hit you, you get killed. But it was still the best you could do.

But in the other hand, it is an error if you actually, you know, were too risk-taking. You know, so what we try to do in the field is figure out what is like the optimal level of balancing risk and rewards. And you could actually get killed, even doing the best that you could possibly do, but you could also make a mistake and overdo it. So, for example, if there are like lions at the waterhole, but you have to drink, then you have to take the risk and try to drink when there aren't lions or whatever, but sometimes you're going to get eaten. And you're saying that taking that risk is not a mistake, but taking it unnecessarily or being sloppy about it, that would be a mistake. Exactly.

Cool. And I think a layer we put on top of that that also is part of how more sophisticated analyses of human behavior do that economists do is account for. for imperfect information. That to actually even optimally balance what you should do would imply that you kind of know everything you need to know about what's going on. Like, where is the predator? Where is the food?

And is that good food? And, you know, and so on. But there's a pretty good sense that we don't have perfect information. Animals don't have perfect information. And part of why you might make an error, but it's still an understandable error, is things are unpredictable. Often they're not totally unpredictable.

They're partially unpredictable, and you're still doing the best you can in an unpredictable world. Like when you put an investment into whatever, which could be financial or, or for that matter, a mate choice, or buying a used car, that you don't have perfect information,

you're not predicting the future, because who can do that. And so you might make mistakes, and we still kind of call those mistakes, but there's still obviously understandable mistakes. So how much do we know about how much information animals are taking in? So like every once in a while we'll get a question from a listener that will be like, you know, are animals like robots where they're just sort of responding to stimulus

without thinking about it too much? Is a salamander that's living in an environment? And yes, I picked that in particular. Is a salamander that's living in an environment like taking in information about the risk and like how much information do animals take in and what? What are they doing with it? Yeah, this is a fascinating field because it's almost like the doctor do a little thing of trying to understand what an animal is thinking. What does it know?

You know, people have also mentioned, like, I don't actually know what you're thinking. And what do you know? Even the thing of, am I sure that you're an actual conscious thinking organism? But for animals, it's going to be a lot harder. We are not them. We don't understand them that well. But we can do various experiments where we often try. train them by having a certain set of information that we give them. And then we often trick them

by then changing the world in some way. So it used to be red means where the food is and see how long is it taking to figure that out. But then we change it to blue. And various experiments of that sort can give us a sense of how do they think about the world. And sometimes we figure out they don't know as much as you would think they might know. But sometimes they're unbelievably smarter than we would think. Can you give an example of a moment where you were like, wow, I didn't expect this animal to be as smart as it ended up being? Yeah, I think some of the classic stuff on that is even honeybees and their ability to find food. And this is actually outside of my expertise, so I won't know the example in any detail. But their ability to find food using some combination of memory

and navigation skills, even when they're barriers, like there's a building in between. is actually apparently much better than humans. Oh, wow. And the general idea there is that, you know, animals have evolved to do what they need to do and that it's still usually thought of as using relatively simple sensory and cognitive mechanisms, but there are things that we are not evolved to do so well

that other animals can do better than us. And actually, even like pigeons, feeding on just little bits of food on the ground. I don't know if you've ever watched that or actually thrown out some bread for them, but they can actually spot the food that's just kind of out there, little tiny bits of crumbs better than we can. Huh. So was there like an experiment where they threw out bread crumbs

and they had people crawling around trying to get the crumbs and pigeons, and the pigeons won? Well, the cute thing is that scientists like to be more tech than that. And so we actually trained pigeons to feed, and we've done this with various animals. on little bits of things on a video screen. Yeah. And they got a peck on that, and if they peck correctly, they get real food.

And so what they do is they put little dots of things on backgrounds that actually are not that easy to see what's what. But I'm pretty sure pigeons are better than humans at detecting stuff on a screen. Cool. That's a reasonable simulation of food on the ground. And anybody who's had a cat knows that cats are very good at understanding patterns. I was hearing a story recently about a guy who used to feed his cat dinner at the end of the day when he closes his laptop. And the cat figured this out and just started closing the guy's laptop and expecting dinner.

I'm lucky my gigantic cat didn't figure that out. He wasn't super smart. But anyway, so say you are out in nature and you see an animal get eaten. How do you start thinking about whether or not that was a mistake? and what caused the mistake? Yeah, what do you do? So one of the questions from the listener was, how do you even know an animal has made a mistake

when you see a behavior happening? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, one interesting thing is, despite loads of work on predator prey interactions, you know, lions and whatever, and pumo's feeding on deer, actually seeing the actual predation events, even though out in the Serengeti,

out in the open, we can see it more easily. But for lots of other animals, we don't actually even see the predation event much at all. Like we know hawks are catching little birds and catching mice, but there's actually apparently not much information on the actual event occurring. So we don't know as much about that as you would think. And even these days, we've got more and more animals wearing little devices that are kind of like our cell phone, you know, little GPS units and accelerometers.

So we're getting a better picture of the more dense. detailed elements of what's really going on when there is a predation event. But yeah, when I see an animal get killed in one of my experiments, I guess the first step we usually do is actually think about and get enough data on these risk-reward trade-offs. But then there are other cases of where what we realize, even as biologists, is they have limited sensory systems that if the animal can't see very well at all, and a predator that is fast and doesn't have much smell, isn't making any noise, comes out of nowhere and kills him, then we figure that animal didn't really make a mistake because it doesn't see very well, couldn't see that thing coming

even though we could, though it could have made a mistake in that it shouldn't have been out of its hiding place at that time of the day. Okay. So we think more about this sort of, there was this risk-reward trade-off. It came out to feed and it overdid that maybe. But part of the thing of where it just didn't have good sensory abilities is certainly part of what we think about. Yeah, and more detailed analyses of insects have found that their eyes are often much smaller than our eyes. And they're totally different.

They've got, you know, bezillions of little bits of eyes that all put together the image. But I guess analyses have found that their vision is much worse than you would think. What they see is a much blurrier picture. and that even seeing something from a few feet away is not something that many of them can do very well, the ones with little eyes, little insects, but they can see a shadow coming so they can see your hand coming to try to slap them.

But otherwise, their vision's not very good, so you wouldn't expect them to see stuff, you know, that a perfect animal would see. Can I ask a kind of a basic question, which is it seems to me like the categorization of like, this is a mistake, this is not a mistake, is a little bit subjective. people argue about it, whatever.

Is it important that we get that boundary correct? Or is this just like what humans are curious about, that you're excited about these kinds of behavior because they personally tickle you? Or is it like actually an important scientific decision? What's a mistake and what isn't? Okay, yeah. No, I would say that actually there is no absolute consensus on,

is that a mistake? And it's not actually even a topic that these animal, behaviors are talking about a lot, perhaps because it'd be hard to nail down and have me say, no, you're wrong. This is a mistake, and that's not a mistake. You're mistaken about mistakes. Exactly, yeah. But what we do have is just that clearly animals do get killed.

Animals do end up, you know, just going in directions and going to places where they really probably shouldn't have done that. and that it's actually a major source of thinking and insight into what the animals are really doing, or plants for that matter, that we build like simple models that say, if they knew everything and they were perfect at balancing all that information, this is what they would do. But when we run the experiments, that's actually what they do. And the difference often gives us a hint as to what are the mistakes.

But then we try to understand why did they do that? that, and that often lets us figure out part of the story on, oh, well, they didn't even have the sensory ability, or no, they had this other, you know, risk-award trade-off, or a speed-acuracy trade-off. I was just wondering if this could help understand, like, teenagers and why they make the decisions they do. Whoa, yeah, let's see. I guess that's a pretty big one.

I don't know if I had the answer for that. But my teenager, when he was still a teenager, did do stuff like didn't bother to go to school because he thought it would be more fun to go just sit and read a book. And at one point, he, well, let me not go on and on about my teenage. Let's take another hypothetical teenager. You know, I see them, for example, riding bikes and they wear their helmet, but they don't clip the helmet because apparently that's cool to ride a bike with a helmet unclipped. And I just think like, that feels like a mistake to me.

Yeah. But there must be some way in which their minds are like, this is the optimal teenage behavior, right? Their failure to Bayesian update something. Yeah. I don't think I have an immediate answer to why. But now it makes me think, oh, my God, did I clip my helmet all this morning when I wrote? I mean, I feel like something that has been hounded into me when I go to the middle school orientations is. is that at this age, their brains are not fully developed yet.

And, like, they don't fully develop until they're, I don't know, what is it, 21, 24 is when, like, the frontal lobe fully develops. It's some age that seems way too late to me. Like, it should have happened sooner. So I wonder if, like, limited cognitive ability explains, I don't know, some of that. I would like to at least blame some of my youthful indiscretions on a brain that had not finished developing yet, personally. You know, that's this interesting thing.

Of course, all animals have got limitations on their cognitive, you know, just how much brain power do they have. But, you know, the thing where we didn't develop enough brain power is not quite saying that that explains, you know, I think the fact that teenagers now do stuff that we think, what the hell, might have even been a clue to, are their brains not even developed enough yet? But the fact that parts of their brain are still developing, I wonder whether or not they actually were still smarter when it actually made a difference. Like hundreds of years ago when if you made a mistake, you got killed or the family didn't get enough food because you didn't do what you were supposed to do, that actually even though their brains were not as developed as they will be when they're 25, which, you know, many years ago was way past the point when it mattered what you do. but maybe as a teenager nowadays, it doesn't matter as much all around in some sort of fitness terms. And that's a key part of this story. So like the age that development finishes is slipping because they're less likely to die one way or another? Is that what you're arguing?

I think it's possible you don't actually need to have your brain develop fully to make good decisions. That that's a connection we have seen. we sort of blame it on that. But I think a lot of decisions that matter probably used to be done well, even before their brains were developed, that a two-year-old might not be able to figure out what to do yet. But actually, and this is totally out of my field of expertise. So now I'm really intrigued to go look this up,

whether or not we have evidence that, you know, 12-year-olds used to be pretty smart. It sounds to me like you're saying that teenagers are kind of goofy at decision-making because they don't have real consequences, and we protect them. And so basically, it's our fault if teenagers are being idiots. Yeah. Okay. Right.

And, you know, we shape the ways they are idiots, but we basically do kind of let them get it. Or maybe it's not we, but just sort of nature and, you know, problems and actual things with major consequences. Yeah. Well, that lands. I think my kids don't experience probably nearly as many consequences as they ought to. so I'm contributing to that problem. But let's go ahead and take a break. And when we come back,

we're going to talk about how different personality types tend to make different kinds of mistakes. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about. All in one place.

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Always free. Grab the free app. I heart radio. Everywhere you go. Always free. Download the free IHR radio app today. Okay, and we're back, and I ended up going to Andy's Lab because I was interested in this concept of animal personalities, and that sort of set me on my life path.

And so we'd have to talk about animal personalities today, of course. And so, Annie, what is, what do we mean when we say animal personalities? And, like, do fish have personalities? Aha. Okay. Turns out to be something that, yeah, my lab has studied quite a bit. And Kelly was studying fish personalities and how they were possibly being manipulated by parasites. And so that's Kelly's entry point into an entire fascinating career.

The idea of what is a personality, for most of us, comes out of thinking about human personalities. And for human personalities, there's a whole sense of sort of emotions and feelings and things that we think might be not what other animals are feeling and thinking emotionally. But the core idea there that the field of animal personalities is picked up on is just the idea that humans are, each individual, has some sort of consistency in who they are. that each one of us could do things that our friends would think, that's unexpected. This is not who they are, that they have a sort of a type and that different individuals have different types. And so we apply that to other animals, where the behaviors we look at in other animals is often not exactly what we look at in humans, but it's sort of like, you know, how bold are they or how aggressive are they? and that when we test any given individual animal and just see what it's up to, we find that indeed

some cats are more curious than others or more aggressive than others and dogs, and it's gone to fish and to insects and spiders. And people have even speculated on whether or not plants have different personalities and how aggressively they kind of grow and even put out chemicals that try to harm other plants and so on. I love the idea of a plant that's like consistently kind of a jerk and is like releasing lots of chemicals all the time. Yeah. And so why, what is the current like framework for thinking about why personalities exist at all?

Like is it better to be consistent so people could be like, well, that's kind of weird that you did that? Or would it be better to like be able to adjust to every situation and respond perfectly? Yeah. That actually has not been nailed down. as to why be consistent. So something to clarify is it's not just, you know, why are some bold and some are fearful, let's say. We kind of have a sense that that's partially genetic, partially shaped by earlier experiences,

and that it is connected to something about your hormones and your brain and actually even some evidence that it's connected to your microbiome. But this is the question of why even be consistent at all, right? And for that one, quite a lot of the literature says even though behavior in principle could go, you know, you could be more bold, less bold. You could, you know, nothing in physics stops you from being totally different tomorrow from or even 10 seconds from now from what you were 10 seconds ago. But if your behavior is connected, often for sensible reasons, to something else that is more stable, maybe even somewhat permanent. but more stable anyway, that that kind of grounds your personality. And that things that are more stable have lots of possibilities. It could be just, you know, what condition are you, you know, how strong and vigorous and coordinated you are, but it could be your information state, you know, what skills do you have?

That could be mental skills. Like you're a bold type because you've learned over time how to be bold well. And so it makes sense for you to be bold, so you continue to be bold. so you get more practice of being bold, you are bold, and you stay bold, versus you are the fearful type, and being bold would be, you'd be really bad at it. So your skill set kind of locks you into a personality. Another idea is being consistent is part of the social world, where it helps that when other individuals know who you are, they could manipulate you by realizing you're nice, So I'm going to take advantage of that, and that's a problem with being consistent.

But it could be an advantage where they know you are nice, so they will be nice to you because they know you will be nice in return and a nice friendship develops that they can count on. But that probably doesn't apply for lots of other animals that still do have these consistencies. I mean, are we suggesting here that there is like an ideal personality that having a range of personalities isn't sometimes better than having a single personality? I mean, clearly, like, diversity in thought and diversity and background is the benefit in many communities, right? Yeah. It's not like there is one perfect personality and we should all be that person. Yeah, so there's a fair bit of ongoing study. There's a lot in humans.

So the human personality world of study is quite large. Yeah. And there is a lot of work on how the mix of personalities in a group can have various benefits. though there are also studies on bad personalities. They literally sometimes use the term bad apples in your social group that can mess up the social dynamics. So it's not like all personality variations a good idea to have in your group. And we all know that. And so people are also studying this with animals where we put together collections of more bold and less bold

and see if the more bold are helpful in kind of exploring and the group can follow the lead. that there wouldn't be any leaders if everyone was fearful. But the fearful ones are good at actually being more vigilant and ready. So for predator attacks, they're the first to respond and the group benefits both ways. And so people have been studying those sorts of things. In humans, it's, you know, there's a lot of personality study, and it does turn out that different personalities have different strengths. And I think that's probably obvious.

There is enough of a literature to suggest that one of the personality axes, in what's called the big five in humans is more closely related to successful careers and successful long-term happy marriages than other personality axes. So I'm going to ask you, after I tell you what the axes are, what you think is the key to happiness and success in life? Avoiding chemistry. That's the key. All right, what are the five axes? Okay, the five axes are acronym as ocean. So the O is openness for sort of curious and exploratory.

And the C is conscientiousness being responsible and like on time. And the E is extroversion versus introversion. The A is agreeableness sort of being nice. And for that matter, trusting. And the N is neuroticism, where you are actually relatively easily stressed and, you know, maybe worry too much and so on. So what do you think is the key axis? I want it to be neuroticism because that would be good for me, but I'm sure it's not. You want to go first, Daniel? I guess I'm going to guess openness. That seems to me to be a crucial thing in marriages and friendships and maybe in professional relationships. I don't know. I was going to go with the O, too. Yeah. So, Openness is not actually, it's more sort of a curiosity and maybe not so much willingness to accept what your partner is saying as willingness to try out new things and stuff like that.

So openness, I'm pretty sure there's a literature on how that is often associated with creative, highly successful creative people in the arts or in the sciences. But actually, the axis that boringly seems to be the best correlate is conscientiousness. Oh, wow. Conscientious people kind of get things done in jobs and careers and actually, you know, none of this is like an absolute predictor. Yeah. And you don't even need both people to be conscientious, actually. If one person, if your partner is conscientious, it helps apparently keep you happier that they actually are on time and responsible and do the dishes and so on. I wonder if that's correlated with stress.

Like, one of you needs to remember that the taxes are due once a year. And if neither one of you remembers that, then you're both just going to be miserable all the time. And so I had conscientiousness third on my list. I thought maybe agreeable after like openness. But anyway, that makes sense. Yeah. And so in animals, our main things are how bold are they at basically in this risk-war trade-off, kind of willing to go out there and take risks to get the food or to get the mate.

but aggressiveness. And we also study exploratory tendencies, sort of willingness to just go out into places that we, as far as our experiment goes, we know they've never been there before, but also sociability, which is tendency to actually prefer to kind of hang out with other members of your species. That's just sort of the opening line on it.

And there is a medium literature that each of these, if you're too much on that scale, it can be associated with making some even really bad mistakes. Let's talk about some of those. Can you give us some famous examples? You know, the boldness is almost obvious that if you're too bold, that this can get you killed

and make it more likely that you get killed than otherwise. And that mainly comes up as something we can actually get the data on if, in fact, there are lots of danger. Being really bold in a safe world ends up being often a pretty good idea. Being too aggressive, it has been associated with picking fights with bigger opponents and starting fights unnecessarily, but also associated with actually with sexual coercion in other species, like beating up the female when it just wasn't necessary and even drove her away. When is it necessary? Sorry. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess in some species, actually, you know, suppressing the female physically is just part of how things work.

I don't know if you've seen ducks mating at a duck pond, Daniel. It can be unpleasant to watch. But yes, nature's rough. Yeah, and it turns out one of the species that I was studying, water striders, these bugs that skate over the surface of the water, there were males that were so geared up and aggressive about mating, but about everything. that they were busy attacking everything and trying to mate with it. And that was actually quantifiably too aggressive because during the mating season, they drove everybody else away. So after a while, nobody was even in their general area anymore.

They'd driven everyone away and they didn't get to mate because they were just too aggressive about it. Were these water striders that had been like collected from the wild or is this like the kind of thing you only see in the lab? Yeah, yeah. No, these were, yeah, these were wild animals. Wow. Too wild, apparently.

Yeah. Or, you know, the example that I don't remember if you even overlap with this study, but the example of excess sexual cannibalism. I remember hearing a lot about this. Yep. Yeah. So when I've mentioned that in, you know, in talks to even like the public, people love those words, excess sexual cannibalism.

It's a terrifying combination. Sexual cannibalism. How much sexual cannibalism is the right amount of sexual cannibalism? That is actually what the study was looking at is spiders. So we popularly known that Black Widow females will kill the male sometimes and eat it. This was a study in fishing spiders that are pretty big and kind of scary because they can run fast over land, they can run over water. They can go underwater and catch little fish underwater. And they actually do that by actually erecting little hairs that are waterproof on their body that ends up coating them with a layer of oxygen.

So when they go underwater, they can breathe out of this little bubble they've created around themselves. That's amazing. And stand in water for like half an hour or more. Wow. But the females actually during the mating season will sit at the edge of some water, like a little pool, a pond. and males come in court. And males will sort of poke at the water and signal by sending little waves over there that I'm a male and please don't attack me. But in fact, females basically have the choice that if they think this male is good enough, they might let him mate.

And if he's below the bar, then might as well kill him and eat him and get a good meal out of it. Sure. And males are very careful in their courtship. But in fact, sometimes obviously, sometimes they just get driven away. The female attacks in the male runs away, but other times he gets caught and eaten. And what the study documented, so it's not all bad doing it, it's you saying, here's my mate choice, you're not good enough. So I'm going to kill you and eat you instead. But in this species, the study found that a measurable proportion of the females were so geared up and set the bar so high, apparently.

They didn't mate with anybody. And so they didn't actually fertilize their eggs. and they ended up with zero fitness. And that was reasonable to call that excess sexual cannibals. Instead, they drove away or killed and ate every male that they met. That's, yeah, I do remember hearing about that. That was Chadwick Johnson, right? I think he was right before me.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember thinking that was a crazy study. And we end up, we get a lot of questions about evolution and why we see certain behaviors. And so why, why, why does that show up? Why is that a thing that exists when clearly it's a bad choice for the females to eat every partner who they come across? Yeah, what studies found was the same females that are too geared up to sexually cannibalized, set the bar too high, are also females that are just generally more aggressive. Okay. So they actually did get more food, grew bigger, made more eggs, and had all these benefits of being the aggressive type.

They were also relatively bold that after we scare them into high. they came out more quickly. So they were generally that type, and there were many advantages of being that type as a spider. But they made this mistake. By the other hand, probably most of the very aggressive female fishing spiders did fine because they did meet somebody who was above the bar. And these didn't know that it turns out all the males that I meet are not good enough. and I probably should have made it with the last one, but I didn't know. That was the last one I'll ever see. And, you know, the way I often put it is there are plenty of people who have set a high bar

and are not currently paired up with anybody and maybe even kind of lonely. And they set the bar too high. And the main difference between them and the spiders is they probably didn't tend to actually kill and eat, you know, the partners that they rejected. Yeah. Well, there's also probably a lot of people out there who, have rejected all their partners and they're super happy being on their own. Yeah, no, that's fair.

Yeah, just a different environment. Yeah, I guess we didn't check whether or not any of those spiders were actually kind of happy after they had sat there with a... They had absolutely no regrets afterwards. They were like, this was all the right choice for me. Yeah, yeah. The question of what can we tell if an animal is happy? It's actually a pretty interesting question that I don't have clear expertise on,

but that's the animal welfare world is trying to figure out. are animals, you know, unhappy? Are they, you know, just not even like in health terms unhealthy? They're just, are they just kind of like bored for that matter. Yeah, pacing back and forth and not enjoying their lives. And yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we also had this question of do animals have free will. And, you know, I think Daniel and I will philosophically argue even if humans have free will and if physics has anything to say about that. And so I don't think there is an answer. but at the end of the day, you know, philosophically, what do you think? Do, do non-human animals have free will?

Yeah, I'll probably put it as, as, it's as complicated. We might think it's less complicated. They're just little, you know, automaton, you poke them in this way and they'll do that. And the simplest animals, we've probably done enough work on their normal biology that it might be as almost as simple as you poke them in this way and they do that. But lots of other animals have enough complexity in their overall system that they are quite flexible in what they're doing and much more just sort of flexible and context dependent on, I'm going to do this when you poke me, but it depends on this, this, that, and like a bazillion other things, that even some of these insects are actually pretty, you know, pretty far along in that way. And so if we think that the fact that we are so context dependent, that there are many things that seem to affect how we do things to the point where it's so complicated that somewhere in there, maybe we're not at all, like, poke me and I'll do this, that we actually have some, actually philosophically, I mean, I'm backing myself into a corner of saying that, you know, when we are that complicated enough in context dependencies that we can't. even figure out what the real context dependency is. Like there's too many interacting factors

that somewhere in there emerges the possibility that we even have free will. And that other animals do have quite a lot of that already. And that it's not out of the range that they also have something in there that's free will. They certainly do a lot of stuff that seems to be just kind of hanging around not focused on. I am looking for food. Get out of my way. That they do a lot of wandering around. All right. We have had an hour of amazing conversation about mistakes. And so that is, that is the end of the show for us. And Andy, it was so great having you on the show. Thank you. I hopefully will be able to have you come back on the show again. I got to say it was really fun asking you why animals have animal personality and then remembering that you asked me

that at my master's defense. And I totally blew it. And it was fun to get to ask you. But you got the answer right. And so I guess, I guess it was a different experience for you than it was for me. Yeah. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thanks for being on the show. Okay, thanks much. Hey, everyone. Thanks for the thorough answer to my question. The idea of evolutionary traps is an interesting concept, though I am familiar with the idea of how humans are not really prepared for the modern food environment. So I really enjoyed that aspect. I also like the segment on how even animals can be doing a risk-reward assessment, and sometimes the error is just taking on too much risk. There's a great episode and I enjoyed listening. Thanks again. Thanks everybody for listening.

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