Learning From the Octopus by Rafe Sagarin

Author:Rafe Sagarin [Sagarin, Rafe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465029815
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

chapter seven

CALLING YOUR BLUFF AND BLUFFING YOUR CALL

THROUGH MY NATURAL SECURITY PROJECT, I met Dan B., an expert in surveillance and threat assessment. He is a critically important contributor to the project, but he can be hard to track down sometimes. Sometimes he’ll be deployed in the field for months at a time in a remote outpost in the Rocky Mountains. Then I’ll learn that he’d been roaming about high altitude places in dangerous territories of Pakistan, including the town where Osama bin Laden was discovered to be hiding out. From what he is able to tell me about his work, I’ve learned that he spends his time there stealthily deploying remotely operated drones and running a network of observers who fastidiously watch how individuals in populations respond as these threats enter their community. He wants to know exactly how a population under stress responds to a threat, and how their response changes over time. Do individuals respond in a rational or even predictable way to threats? Do individuals eventually stop caring if something once perceived as a threat never unloads with its full arsenal? He meticulously notes the responses of each individual, categorizing and quantifying their reactions with the detached air of a scientist.

That’s because Dan is a scientist. Dr. Blumstein is a behavioral ecologist at UCLA, to be more precise. The remote drone he deploys isn’t a spy plane from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works but a stuffed badger pelt mounted on a customized remote-controlled truck chassis known as Robo Badger. His subjects aren’t Pakistanis caught in the crossfire of the war on terror, but their marmot compatriots. And his networks of observers are students who are learning to study animal behavior.

Marmots are small alpine mammals that resemble overstuffed squirrels with stubby tails. They live in small groups that forage in alpine meadows, ever watchful for predators. Dan is particularly enthralled by marmots, even hosting a website, “The Marmot Burrow,”1 dedicated to them, which includes, helpfully, that they make decent pets because they can be housebroken, and when you go on vacation they will just hibernate. Dan has spent countless hours quietly observing his subjects, getting to know each individual and discovering that they, like humans, have their own idiosyncrasies and their own tolerance for risk and uncertainty.

When Dan really wants to pinpoint how the threat of predation affects prey’s behavior, he uses an array of ingenious homemade gadgets and sensors, including the fearsome remotely operated Robo Badger. When he drives Robo Badger into the territory of a peaceable group of small marmots, all hell breaks loose, but Dan is prepared to note how each individual responds. Using this mix of keen observations of nature and clever experiments, Dan has been able to catalog general rules of how threatened populations respond to their adversaries.

For example, in keeping with our understanding that variation is the fundamental building block of nature, Dan finds that not all marmots are equally well-adapted for survival. In particular, Dan has seen that some individual marmots,

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