1 April 2022. Dolphins | Touch
Grooming, gossip, gangs and dolphins. The end of human touch.
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1: Gossip, gangs, and dolphins
It’s April 1st today, but we’re long past the era when spoof stories have any meaning. So I thought I’d share a couple of things that are strange enough to be spoof stories, but aren’t.
Obviously that doesn’t include Dyson’s ridiculous air purifier headphone things, because nothing says that we’re in the last stages of late capitalism and in denial of planetary boundaries and a looming resource crisis quite like the phrase “noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones with air purification technology built in.” So I’m assuming the PR people jumped the gun and announced the product a couple of days early.
Let’s talk about dolphins instead.
(Photo of an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin by Aude Steiner, via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 1.0)
Virgina Morell has a piece in Science about the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. These have intrigued scientists for several decades, because unrelated males form strong social bonds, and sometime exhibit gang-like behaviour, all of which is unusual in animals.
Now scientists have discovered a couple of intriguing things. The first is that the dolphins with the biggest social networks father the most offspring. The second is that the dolphins whistle to each other to maintain their friendships.
As they grow up, the male bottlenose dolphins form what scientists call ‘second order alliances’ in groups of up to 14.
In the new study, Livia Gerber, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and colleagues analyzed which factors influenced male dolphins’ reproductive success. Using 30 years of behavioral data collected during surveys from a motorboat, the scientists examined 10 second-order alliances consisting of 85 males. ... the scientists determined that males who had the strongest social bonds and were friends with all members of their alliance had the most offspring. Other factors, including a male’s age or the size of his home range, did not predict paternity success, the researchers report today in Current Biology.
Or as another researcher put it:
“It’s a great study,” says Frans de Waal, an emeritus primatologist at Emory University. “A lone male stands no chance in this system.”
A lot of this male bonding system is down to touch and hanging out (I’m paraphrasing lightly). The whistling matters because it maintains relationships at a distance.
Every dolphin has a signature contact whistle, a warbly, high-pitched “eeee,” they learn from their mother, and that they use to identify themselves. Mothers and calves and allied males use the whistles to stay in touch. To further investigate how adult males use them, Chereskin and her colleagues analyzed 92 whistle exchanges recorded by towing hydrophones from a boat... The caller emits his whistle (basically saying, “Quasi, here. Quasi, here.”), and the receiver replies with his own whistle (“Imp, here. Imp, here.”). Doing this “strengthens their bond,” says co-author Stephanie King, a behavioral biologist also at the University of Bristol. “It’s a low-cost way to maintain these relationships.”
The researchers think that the dolphins whistle to maintain links to members of their group that they are less strongly bonded with, and connect this to Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis about humans using calls to ‘groom at a distance’. (This may be the origin of language). But this is the first time that there’s been evidence of non-human species exhibiting such behaviour.
(N)umerous studies of nonhuman primates have never supported this idea—the animals exchange calls, but most often with those they’re most closely bonded to. “But no one had looked at this outside of primates,” Chereskin says.
“It’s an elegant test of Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis, using a sterling suite of data,” says Simon Townsend, a comparative psychologist at the University of Zürich. “They’ve supplied strong, surprising support from another species.”
As Morell notes at the end her article: humans spend a lot of time preening ourselves for our uniqueness. But we’re not so unique after all.
The article has a clip of dolphins whistling to each other, but I couldn’t find a way to link to it directly. There’s also a fantastic short (35”) clip of dolphins hanging out together, which you’ll also have to visit the site to watch.
2: The end of human touch
Some scanning by my colleague Finn Strivens for a client project that I’m involved in took me to the work of artist, film-maker and body architect Lucy McRae. From her website,
She is... exploring the cultural and emotional impacts science and cutting edge technology have on redesigning the body. Lucy uses art as a mechanism to signal and provoke our ideologies and ethics about who we are and where we are headed.
One of her works, from the 2019 Trienniale Milan, is called ‘Compression Cradle’. It
is a machine that affectionately squeezes the body with a sequence of aerated volumes that hold you tight—in an attempt to prepare the self for a future that assumes a lack of human touch.
She says in a film that the exhibit “can only be felt”, and it plays with ideas of touch, disconnection, and human relationships with technology. The timing, in the months before the pandemic started, with all that it meant for everyday gestures of touch and comfort, seems prescient, even prophetic.
Even without visiting it in an exhibition space the images on the website are quite discomfiting.
(Artwork by Lucy McRae. Photo by Daria Scagliola)
(Artwork by Lucy McRae. Photo by Scottie Cameron)
Lucy McRae explains more in this short (2’30”) video.
Notes from readers
Thanks to Nick Wray, who responded to my article on Wednesday about the sexism of classical orchestra repertoires by sending me research on the gender of orchestral players by instrument. This is a write-up of a big survey across 40 orchestras. A lot of the content is as dry as dust.
But: Tubas are the most ‘male’ instrument in the orchestra, harps the most ‘female’.
(Source: Desmond Charles Seargent and Evangelos Himonides)
Principals of orchestra sections are quite a lot more likely to be male than female, even though there are relatively small differences between the length of orchestra tenure. This might be a function of choice of instrument; it’s harder to become a Principal Violin (because there’s more competition) than in smaller brass or woodwind sections. There’s some evidence that blind auditions increase the number of women hired, but the sample is tiny.
They conclude:
Our data shows the disbalance of male and female musicians in orchestras to have two dimensions: (1) unequal overall representation of men and women and (2) skewed distribution of males and females across instrumental sections associated with the proclivity of women for smaller, lighter instruments of higher pitch, and men for larger, heavier, instruments of lower pitch.
The roots of this are historical:
“having their origins in a male-dominated labor force of post-Victorian society and its pervasive influence on attitudes to the respective social roles of men and women, especially those concerning child bearing and family responsibilities.”
And the schedules of orchestras—a lot of evening work and a lot of long-distance travel—don’t fit well with traditional patterns of family life. Probably it will take a social and gender revolution in childcare to get equality in the classical orchestra. But that’s no excuse for not playing more pieces by women in the repertoire—currently running at 5%.
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