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Beast buddies: do animals have friends?

Science News, Nov 1, 2003 by Susan Milius

Meredith Bashaw says she started looking for social attachments among giraffes because they weren't supposed to have any. She needed a group to contrast with the more sociable animals she was examining as a beginning graduate student several years ago. Big field studies of wild giraffes in the 1970s hadn't found signs that the adults cared much one way or the other about which giraffe was munching on a neighboring tree. "Giraffes just seemed to move about the plains of Africa like random molecules in your coffee cup, says Bashaw.

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For the past year and a half, though, Bashaw has been putting that notion to a harder test. Each morning, she has driven around the 90 acres of the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park, keeping track of six of those long-necked molecules. She's searched for a pattern in her data on who hangs around with whom.

That issue of preferred associates comes close to the human notion of friendship, and it can prove just as important in understanding animal goings-on as it does in people watching. Baboons, bats, and dozens of other animals have been studied from this perspective. Biologists may start, like Bashaw, by asking whether individuals prefer to hang out with particular buddies. But other questions soon pop up. Does the sex or kinship of a companion matter? Are there benefits to the association? The answers to these questions may have implications for the evolution of human camaraderie.

GIRAFFE SPOTTING Bashaw began her quest to reexamine giraffes at Zoo Atlanta when she heard that the park was going to ship away its male giraffe. Two females had lived for 9 years in the same enclosure with the male without pregnancies. So, Bashaw predicted that the male's disappearance wouldn't elicit much reaction in the two remaining animals.

"Unfortunately, we got a huge reaction, Bashaw says. Both females dramatically increased the time that they spent repetitively licking the fence of their enclosure and pacing. Zookeepers take tics such as these as a sign that something's wrong. Ten days after the male's disappearance, one female had tapered off in pacing, but the other persisted in licking until the keepers introduced challenging containers for the animals' food supply, which seemed to divert the giraffes from the fence.

The giraffes' distress following the removal of the male startled Bashaw into wondering whether the animals were truly indifferent to their associates.

She couldn't make a fair job of looking for preferences in Atlanta, where there were so few giraffes. But then she moved to San Diego to continue her graduate work, where the Wild Animal Park has 12 Baringo giraffes, making up one of the largest herds in North America. Also called Rothschfld's giraffes, Baringos carry a distinctive spot pattern of polygons blurring into leafier shapes.

Bashaw became a connoisseur of spots as she learned to recognize individual adult female giraffes. The zoo photographs baby giraffes' necks and chests, noting spots with unusual shapes that will distinguish the animals throughout their lives. At first, Bashaw had to take the zoo's giraffe baby album into the field with her to tell the animals apart. "Shani has a heart-shaped spot on her neck, and Chinde has an asterisk," she says.

Each morning, Bashaw set out in a truck to follow the giraffes, noting each female's nearest neighbor and any encounters between the animals. Earlier field studies had reported occasional sightings of moms palling with moms when they had youngsters of a common age. But only one mother had a youngster in San Diego.

Mostly, each giraffe there browsed in one spot all morning. "A couple of times a week, something would startle an animal into running away, and Bashaw would roar off after it while simultaneously strategizing to keep the chase on the park roads, continuing to jot data on her record sheets, and watching for rhinos and other moving obstacles. Fortunately, she says, "the speed limit is 5 mph, so you're roaring rather slowly."

The giraffes arrayed themselves in patterns that varied considerably from one day to the next, says Bashaw. During 18 months, however, she found that a giraffe would end up with a particular animal as her nearest neighbor some 15 percent of the time. That's hardly intimate by standards of human friendship, but Bashaw points out that, in contrast, the same giraffe fed near some other individuals only 5 percent of the time.

Kinship makes a difference in the San Diego giraffe associations, she says. The adult group she watched had two mother-daughter pairs, and each member of a pair associated with her relative more often than with the other giraffes.

That pattern makes sense to ecologist Julian Fennessy of the University of Sydney in Australia. He's working with the Namibian Elephant and Giraffe Trust, based in Outjo, on the first detailed study of the Angolan subspecies of giraffe. They feed on the tough shrubbery that borders dried-up riverbeds in the Namib Desert.

Fennessy says he, too, now questions the older view of giraffes as having only loose, casual bonds. "Maybe it was like that in Kenya," where the old studies were done, he says. But in one of the desert-giraffe populations he monitors, he finds that certain females show up around other females perhaps a third to half the time he sees them. In another population he watches, which for some reason has predominantly males, he finds particular giraffes together more of the time. Fennessy says he's coming around to the view that the Namibian giraffes move around as "a group of close-knit friends, so to speak, plus some other giraffes that come along for a while and then move on.'

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Beast buddies: do animals have friends?

Science News, Nov 1, 2003 by Susan Milius

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