Radiolab - How to Win Friends and Influence Baboons

Episode Date: October 31, 2020

Baboon troops. We all know they’re hierarchical. There’s the big brutish alpha male who rules with a hairy iron fist, and then there’s everybody else. Which is what Meg Crofoot thought too, before she used GPS collars to track the movements of a troop of baboons for a whole month. What she and her team learned from this data gave them a whole new understanding of baboon troop dynamics, and, moment to moment, who really has the power.  This episode was reported and produced by Annie McEwen. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.    

Hey, it's Chad. So an election is happening. I don't know if you heard. And today and in a few days from now we have two quick releases for you that sort of look at the big day from a variety of different angles. And as you might have heard, we also have two new co-hosts here at Radio Lab, Lulu Miller and Lotha Phenocter. And they're going to take these two on their own. I will see you...

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There we go. Hello. Aha. Hi. How you doing? Hi. Welcome back. Hey, I'm Lative Noster.

This is Radio Lab. And today we've got a story from our producer, Annie MacEwan. Okay. So, you just came back from a vacation. Yes. I just came back from a vacation. Yes. I just came back from paternity leave. And this is really like, I don't know anything about this story. I think you must have pitched this while it was gone.

And so this is great. Like this is literally the first thing I'm doing. So it's like, this is nice. I'm really coming at this. I don't know anything. Well, okay, so I guess when I pitched this, I was just, I don't know, it's just in this, like, I am ready to hear about someone other than humans. I'm just, I'm just a little overwhelmed with humanity right now.

And so this story I have for you today is an animal story. Okay. But, of course, except hello. Hi. Hi, Meg. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you, Annie? Hi. To talk about animals, I need a human to help me. I'm in my office. The door is closed.

There's a sign not to knock. So that human is Meg Krofoot. And I study the behavior of wild animals for a living. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute and a prof at the University of Constance. It is an awesome job. Loves her job. I do. And so the reason I was drawn to hers because her work with animals

tackles this really deep question. How groups reach consensus and achieve collective goals despite potentially conflicting interests of the individuals in the group. Okay, that's a little hold on really. It's a lot. Yeah, yeah.

So simply like, how does a group of animals, each of them with their own fears, their own needs, their own desires, how do they somehow, despite that, come together, make a decision and move forward? Right. Yeah, this doesn't sound relevant to humans at all. This sounds actually entirely disconnected from anything going on in the world or this country.

You know what I mean? Okay, this actually is an animal story. Okay. Because when Meg was like first starting to approach this, she was spending her time on a little island of the coast of Panama. Chasing Capuchin monkeys around the jungle. Watching the ways that we compete with each other. Chasing each other out of this tree, trying to stand a ground on that rock, which she

says was infuriating. You know, they're house cat-sized black things, just hidden behind leaves and ranches and they're moving fast and... And she'd be sitting there like, okay, I see the monkey. Oh, where'd it go? Wait. and ranches and they're moving fast and she'd be sitting there like okay I see the monkey oh where to go wait there's wait is that same monkey where did the first one go ah you can't keep track of what everybody's doing yeah that seems impossible right totally until one day Meg heard about this totally new way of approaching this problem. I was sitting in this lecture hall in Panama City at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

There was a weekly seminar this afternoon of science. She's sitting in this lecture hall and she's watching this Israeli scientist, named Ron Neton, give a talk on his work tracking bats. He'd put a tiny GPS backpack on a bat, set a free, and was able to track its movements really, really closely. One GPS point per second. And so you had this amazing detail of this bat. This little red dot on a map.

Waking up and leaving its roost and flying out across the Israeli desert. You could see going up in the air and down in the air, and following roads, and following lights, and then coming to this fruit tree in the middle of nowhere. And then eating in that fruit tree and then flying back. But just the detail of it. And I remember sitting there in in the seminar room, and just being like, wow, imagine what you could know if you could put these kinds of instruments on an entire group of primates. Not just follow one animal to a tree and back,

but actually be able to see how a bunch of animals move at the same time and interact with each other in space. It would give you a whole new way of seeing their world, seeing what they were doing, and understanding how they were influencing each other's behavior. It really felt like, sort of the same way I kind of imagined somebody staring for the first time through a microscope. I mean, rather than a microscope, a macroscope.

But having this whole new way of accessing the world, right, it was this moment that just felt so full of potential. That day, that lecture. Totally changed the course of what I was doing scientifically. So she spent time gathering funding and choosing the perfect primate for this project. The answer is the boonsate for this project. The answer is baboons. Huh. Okay. Well, how'd you work with baboons before it?

You know, I've never seen a baboon. I guess I had seen a baboon at a bar one time. Exactly. I had a drink. It was natural. The why? Why would then you pick this animal to study out of all the animals that you could have picked? Well, partly it was logistics. Forest canopy covered disrupts the GPS signals.

And baboons about in the open, there was a big enough to wear the heavy GPS callers the Meg was planning to use. But also, and I think maybe more significantly, baboons are a super well studied animal. Like we already know a lot about them. We already know a lot about how their troops work. And they are notorious for sticking together. Like every day, these groups of 30 to 50 baboons, big little male, female, lower ranking, higher ranking, they move through the landscape together. As a cohesive unit. And at some level, they must decide where to go together.

And Meg's question was how. Right. So she gets on a plane and heads to Kenya. You land in Nairobi and Nairobi is a big bustling city. She and her team head out to the Impala Research Center in this massive wildlife conservancy that's just filled with so many big animals. They're driving past giraffes and hyenas and zebras and elephants. Finally you're out in this plateau. It looks out at Mount Kenya.

It's a really beautiful, beautiful landscape. And it was here that she saw what she came for. The Boons. All of the baboons, troops of them, roaming the savanna. Sort of sandy, brown color. They have longish noses like a dog, a heavy brow. The males, they've got big, bushy, mains. All of the over the shoulders and back and head

and big canines. They're about the size of a German shepherd. The females are a lot smaller. And when they're in heat, they get these big pink glossy butts. It looks so uncomfortable. Anyway, troops of these olive baboons are roving the savanna and after a couple of weeks

of scoping them out, we eventually settled on a troop that slept pretty consistently in the set of trees along the river. So to make a long story short, Megan or team set some traps, beneath those trees, and started catching and collaring these baboons. It's like a dog collar or it's like a... Yeah, it's like a fancy computer dog collar.

Got it. So they do this until they get 25 baboons collared. Yeah, it's like a fancy computer dog collar. Got it. So they do this until they get 25 baboons collared. Yeah, and how, 25 out of how many? It's about 40 animals and about 25-ish were big enough to wear collars. So a few days later, all together, the collars flick on and start collecting data. One GPS point per second and then we were collecting continuous accelerometry readings. Each of their movements minutely tracked for one whole month when the callers pop off.

And how many like data points is that? 20 million GPS points and 30 times that many accelerometry points. Oh my god. Yeah, just this C of data. So all of these numbers just start popping up on a computer screen. And at this point, it's just numbers, but what she's hoping those numbers can tell her is, again, how do these baboons, and maybe they have differences of opinion or whatever,

how do they make decisions about what to do or where to go? And just from looking at the data, you could tell it was there. Everything I could have ever wanted to see. But we still haven't solved the problem. How do you understand who was influencing whom in all of this data? How do we understand how the movements of one baboon are impacting its group mates? Okay, how's that? Check, check.

And so that's where Damien and Ari came in. So I'm Damien Fried. Hi, I'm Ari, Strandberg, Cushkin. I'm a human. Damian is also a human. Yeah, 100%. Anyway, Ari and Damian are two biologists at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Luckily, Ari and I work very well together. We have very complimentary skills and we enjoy working together.

Because they spent the better part of two years trying to figure out how to read this data. Among the very first things we ever did was to actually just create some visualizations of the data. So we've just had little dots. All these dots moving around, representing the GPS coordinates of each animal, as if you were looking at it from above, and these were baboons walking through an empty landscape. They decided to color code them. We had these dark blue dots that were adult males. And the light blue was the sub-eduled males.

Red dots were adult females. And light red was the sub-eduled females. Sounds very pretty. Yeah. So now they could see a little better what the baboons are actually doing. In the morning, they're all kind of jumbles on top of each other. Pinks and reds and blues. They're in their sleeping tree and they're just waking up.

And the key thing to know about baboons, if you don't already, is that they're super hierarchical. Males rank above females. There's an alpha male, of course. The female ranking system is super complex. Top ranking match line, second ranking match line, third ranking match line, fourth ranking match line. Whoa. So in these dots, what Meg and Ari and Damian thought they were going to see

was a dark blue super alpha male dot after stretching and like rubbing his little dot face. And, you know, brushing his little dot T. Fushing his little dot T singelote was little dot neighbors. For him that dark blue alpha dot to come down from the tree. And then be followed by the rest of that cloud of multicolored dots down down down they come and then that dark blue dot has a thought we're gonna go this way for breakfast follow me everyone and the dark blue dot moves off and the rest of the little multicolored dots follow

Right and why not? That sounds like it would be efficient Yeah But No That's not what they saw at all our initial sets of hypotheses weren't supported in the data

What they saw was much more like a almost like an amoeba shape It was sort of like blue out and there'd be a couple different colored dots that would move out that way And then they would come back and then a few more dots would move over here and then come back before it finally then somehow moved off together. It just totally befuddled them. We're going to take a break, but when we come back, Meg and Damien and Ari are going to investigate this baboonie blob until they learn exactly how these baboons move forward despite the fact that they all want to go in different directions. Hello, this is Erin Scornia, currently located in Arlington, Texas, the radio lab that supported in part by the Alfred Peace Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world, or information about Sloan at www.s Sloan.brg. Science Reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Hey, it's LuttifNosser. This is RadioLab. We're back with Annie McEwan, who has got Meg and Ari and Damien sitting in front of a computer staring at a nonsensical blob of little baboonie dots. Baboonie dots. You were looking for who influences who, and the idea was like where to go, is that right? Right. Yeah, so every day this troop has to decide like how to navigate its landscape and has

to reach consensus, which means that somehow some individuals have to sort of move somewhere and others have to decide to follow. So for those dots, makes's dots actually answered this question. She and Ari and Damien had to figure out a way to analyze them. And they came up with this idea that kind of acted as this key that unlocked this hidden pattern. But maybe the easiest way to explain it is to actually tell you about the thing that Damien saw, not on the computer screen,

but right in front of him out in the field. One morning we watched the group sort of as it was leaving the sleeping site and one of the baboons was walking in our direction and probably walked about 100 meters from the rest of the group. And then it stopped. When we were standing there or sitting there on their haunches as baboons do, declaring its intention to go in this direction. So the group was still milling around in the sleeping

trees and the group was clearly not that interested in coming in this direction. It was not seeing any sort of further movements towards this. So what really struck me is what the baboon did next. They then went and climbed up a dead tree and sat on top of this dead tree in a way that was clearly intending for it to be more prominent in the vision, like more observable by the rest of the group. Wow. They see sitting on top of this dead tree for I think almost 10 minutes before eventually giving up

and then rejoining the group and the group went in a different direction. What gave you the sense that it wasn't just climbing the tree because it's an animal and animals do things that don't make sense? You could at the risk of maybe anthropomorphizing, but I mean you could see it had a degree of like impatience to it. So you know initially sort of sat there on the ground and then it got a bit restless and then it climbed the tree and it was very clearly facing the rest of the group coming up as observing. You know is it a little bit uphill as well, so it was really observing what the group was doing.

Well, just staring down the group. I know you can all see me here. Yep, exactly. Now, that baboon in that moment was actually demonstrating two key moves. Two different kinds of movement interactions. That Meg and Ari and Damien zeroed in on. What we called pulls, which was like, I move away and you follow me.

Which is what Damien's baboon tried to do. And then anchors, which is, I move away, you don't follow me, so I come back. Which is what the baboon ended up doing. Right. Another way to think about it is like. If you imagine two baboons at either end of a slinky, okay? One moves off. either end of a slinky okay one moves off

and that stretches slinky and then another one might follow it which would be a successful pull uh-huh right or one moves off this linky kind of stretches and then ultimately that one comes back and that's an anchor because the other one didn't want to follow or whatever digs its heels and And that's an anchor because the other one didn't want to follow or whatever. Diggs, it's heels in. Yeah, maybe. And so Ari and Damian wrote these scripts to basically go through these 20 million data points and pull out all of the pulls and anchors and that ended up being sort of base for us to understand the dynamics of this decision making process. You know the matrix when Neo finally realizes that he's the one. Yeah, and then like floor and the walls and even the bad guy in front of him just turn to these moving green numbers and just like seize in this way that he'd never could see before.

That's how I imagine it. Like they get all of a sudden see what was happening. It's like they could see the program, the social programming of the Babu. Totally. Because once you have that sort of base unit, pulls and anchors, you can start to ask questions like, well, what are the characteristics that make one baboon

more likely to follow another versus to not follow into anchor them? What makes a baboon a successful leader? And it turned out being the alpha guy didn't matter at all. The answer wasn't dominance. There was no impact of dominance. The answer wasn't age sex class. And so it took her like actually a moment to believe what she was seeing, which was like a red dot move away and a blue dot follow. You'd see a pink dot move away and a dark blue dot follow. Like it didn't matter.

You didn't, it didn't matter at all who you were. There was no correlation between rank and successfulness of being followed. The thing that really did seem to impact whether or not you were successful in influencing the behavior was how they moved. Really? Do you mean like how they walked? The boons that moved in this very directed, very straight way. The intermediate and very constant pace. So they weren't moving fast, they were moving slow.

We're much more likely to successfully pull followers, then individuals who either moved slower or with more curvy paths. So a young female, low ranking female, if you moved purposefully in a straight line, the alpha male could just follow her, there would be no... Yeah. Really? And you saw that? Yeah, we absolutely saw that. So what we found was that every member of the group was able to successfully pull. Huh.

Wow, cool. So it's like, anybody can be the leader at a given time. Right. But then what happens if like two baboons have different ideas and want to go in different directions? Great question. What we found is that if the direction between those two

initiators or those two individuals going out in different directions is if the angle between those directions is relatively small within 90 degrees of one another. Let's say one dot moving to the north and a different dot moving to the east. Then the follower will tend to average those directions. They just sort of compromise. They split the difference.

They'll move directly down the center. At 45 degrees. At 45 degrees. Yeah, they just move straight in the middle. Like they literally split the difference. But if two baboons were going, not 90 degrees different, but in totally opposite directions, like one dot goes north, one goes south,

there's no middle, there's no compromise. And Damien actually said he saw this happen. There were baboons waving in two different directions, almost 180 degree opposite. And both of these directions started to build up a bit of a consensus. So there were supporters for each direction, but about the same number of supporters in each direction. That created a bit of a stalemate.

The remaining baboons refused to follow, like they just won't budge. And eventually they have to all come back together to regroup and start again. Really? Yeah, they start over. Now, let's say this happens again. Two baboons, let's say one young female heads north and one adult male heads south, totally opposite directions.

The troop hangs out under the tree for a bit, watching. Then a couple of them start to follow one way or the other. But let's say the young female, maybe there's something about the way she moves with purpose, she gets just a couple more baboons to go her way. The rest of the tree, under the tree, they look north, they look south, and in the end, what we found was this really clear majority rule. Again and again, the team saw that in these cases, the rest of the baboons are coming it up and go north,

with a young female, but got those couple extra baboons to follow her. And the smaller group that headed south initially, they turned around, head north and rejoin the group. Go with whichever direction was preferred by more members of your group. Even if the smaller group was filled with the highest ranking males. Yeah, even then. Wow. Oh, even then. Wow.

Oh, that makes me like baboons, actually. That's really nice. It's nice, right? But actually for the baboons, doing it kind of sucks. I remember sort of realizing that it's to take in almost 45 minutes to decide for the group to get going in the morning. And this was, you know, like any other morning, there wasn't like a cold morning or raining or anything. It just

seemed to be that the group was completely struggling to come up with a solution to which direction to go. And this is like in the morning, they're wake up so basically they're deciding where to go eat breakfast. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it's quite striking that they would spend so long making this decision when all those individuals are probably quite hungry. They're not like there's food in the trees where they're sleeping. They really have to move somewhere to get food initially. And so they were paying the cost. They haven't had a sip of water. They haven't had anything to eat. And they're putting this discussion in front of any of their physical needs.

45 minutes? Yeah, that seems like stupidly inefficient. Like, it's like, let's start the day already. Like, let's go. Let's go. Wouldn't it be more efficient if the alpha male was like, let's go over here. We're going by, like, that would be one minute. Yeah.

And actually, makes us that there are conditions under which it can go that direction. Right. There's there's evidence from a different boboon species that high ranking individuals can tilt group decisions in their favor. Are you there? I hope so. Which brings us to Andrew King. Yay. Andrew is a biologist at Swansea University. And a few years before Meg, he also did a baboon study. This was with a different species, and it was over in Namibia. And the edge of the Namebe Desert. And in his study, he and his team left the baboon troop,

a little gift. Corn kernels. Bucketfuls of corn kernels. Rake into the sand, fairly close to the sleeping site. After several days, the baboon troops stumbled upon this present. And when they did, the alpha male kind of just went bananas. Run around, chase everybody else off, and eat as many of these corn that he could put into his mouth and shuffling around on his bum,

picking up one, two left, right, left, right, left, right, putting these corn in. Meanwhile, the rest of the troop, they just sit and wait. Sit patiently and wait for him to finish. He does that guy. I guess he does let if anyone is related to him, like if there are babies that are definitely his babies, he will let some of them eat a little bit of it. But very selfish. And then they put more corn out that night Next morning

Exactly thing happens again and they do this experiment again and again and again I think we did it for about 80 days. What every morning for 80 days the baboons wake up They race off follow the alpha to the patch They just watch him pig out and then finally they get to go on. He's getting almost all of the Yeah, and everybody else gets almost nothing. So we can say, if you incentivize the alpha male, he will choose to go there and he will be followed. So you can say that there's been what you would call

a despotic decision. One decides the rest follows with the alpha male having a big say in what they were doing. So maybe what's going on here is, like, you know, if the alpha knows that there's some corn right around the corner, he's gonna go for it and he's gonna pull everyone along with him. But most mornings, when he wakes up,

he doesn't really know what's out there. He doesn't know what the best choice is. And there's really good evidence that the accuracy of decisions improves with the number of voices that are contributing information into making them. Like sort of like, you know, guess the weight of the bowl, you know, like the crowd, guess. Wisdom of crowds. Yes, exactly.

Like, they're going to make a better decision because they're all going to have a say. Right. Anyway, the point is you've got these two studies that reach seemingly contradictory conclusions. But according to Meg, what's exciting about the intersection between the work that Andrew King has done and that we've done is that in some cases, baboons can show a despotic decision-making process, even if on a day-to-day moment-to-moment basis most of the group decision-making process is very egalitarian, is very shared. And so I think that one of the interesting things, like I think oftentimes we sort of get this myopic sense of a species being one way or another, that baboons are

despotic or they're democratic. Whereas in fact, like these are just strategies. Some decisions just have to be made now. For example, if you spotted a leopard and the leopard is running at you, you don't wanna sit there and have a long process about, do we wanna run left or do we wanna run right? You just wanna go. Right, right, right, right.

And so in cases like that, if the leopard's a real near threat, then you're going to go with the despot. But then, you know, if you want to decide, okay, are we more likely to find food over the river or up the hill? There isn't perhaps the same time pressure, so you're going to afford to reach consensus via a more shared process in the interests of reaching a better decision. So what you see is like, baboon society can be

both despotic and democratic. You could hold this multi-potentiality in your hands. To me, the interesting question isn't so much, are baboons egalitarian or are they despotic? question isn't so much our baboons egalitarian or are they despotic? But when? You know, in a way she did, she did sort of talk about that. Like it was like, if there's a leopard, then that's the time you want to be, you know, follow the leader, follow the despot. Right. But then if it's, you know, a lazy Sunday morning and you're going out to brunch with your friends,

maybe that's time to hear every voice. Maybe that's the time for democracy. Right, right. Yeah, and I think that's right. But if you're a baboon, most of the things that happen in your day-to-day life are not those two extremes. And I think the question is, and this is what Meg is focusing on moving forward, what's really going on in that middle space? And where's the tipping point?

Like, there's some threshold where a group of baboons will go from a situation where they're all just like blindly following the tough guy, even if it's against our own interests, to a moment where a baboon, maybe it's the smallest, runtiest baboon in the troupe, stands up and marches with confidence in the direction that they think is right. To the poles. Yeah. Alright, story was reported and produced by Annie McEwen and our fact-chicker was Diane Kelly. I'm Letha Vnossaster, this is Radio Lab.

Thank you for listening. Hi, this is Stefan, born in Crop Calgrail, Burda,,,, Canada. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abbanrod and is edited by Sorn Wheeler, Lou Miller and La Tifna Sur Arcohoz. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design and Susie Lechtemberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brestler, Rachel Kusak, David Gable, Tracy Hunt, Matt Keeltee, Tobin Low, Enny McEwen, Sarah Carrey, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Ouliai, Sarah Sandbach, and Johnny

Moen, our fact checker is Michelle Harris. you