Have any animals been observed to spontaneously create external symbols?

December 13, 2015 11:40 AM

Have any kinds of animals been observed to spontaneously— ie, in the wild, without the coaching of humans— create any kind of enduring external symbols, such as number markings, pictograms, ideograms, etc (visual-based or based in any other sense, such as sound, etc)? — Doubt it, but would be curious to know of any leading or controversial research on this subject
posted by cotesdurhone to Science & Nature (21 answers total)

Wombats have very poor eyesight and so have evolved to poop in cube shapes so their poop will stay stacked on rocks to mark their territory and attract mates.

They're like trail signs for wombats.

Made out of poop.
posted by phunniemee at 11:52 AM on December 13, 2015 [11 favorites]

I suppose any kind of decoration to attract the opposite sex could be construed as "external symbols." Just watched the BBC series again with that bird that cleaned up a whole area and put little gleaming beetles in place and prevented them from running off, until a mate showed up...
posted by Namlit at 12:01 PM on December 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

Check out these Pufferfish sand patterns.
posted by jamjam at 12:04 PM on December 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

Dogs (and cougars) scratch the ground to mark territory. They're not very long-lived symbols of course.
posted by anadem at 12:04 PM on December 13, 2015

Bower birds and their ilk. Their whole nest is a symbolic creation.
posted by Thella at 12:05 PM on December 13, 2015 [5 favorites]

Best answer: There are researchers studying "chimpanzee archaeology" in the Tai Forest in Cote d'Ivoire - they've found 4,000 year old stone tools (link to the damn paper) chimps were using to crack open hard nuts 4000 years ago. This is a cultural behavior chimpanzees still exhibit today in Tai.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:11 PM on December 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

There's the honeybee waggle dance, though probably doesn't fit your criteria as it doesn't involve enduring physical symbols.
posted by smcameron at 12:12 PM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think you're going to need to define what counts as a symbol a little more narrowly. Basically all animals communicate, whether through sight, sound, smell, taste, or other chemical reception. Most are ephemeral, but some persist. Many birds, for example, rely on the quality of a constructed nest as a signal of mate quality. In dry environments, those nests can persist for many years. Poop is a nearly universal symbol for territorial mammals.
posted by one_bean at 12:26 PM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

How long doe sit have to last? Wouldn't all those scent markings count? Cat spray, for instance, can persist quite a while (see all the AskMe questions about getting cat pee and cat spray out), and dogs mark pretty regularly, too, and obviously find other dog's marks informative.
posted by dilettante at 12:29 PM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: You guys are awesome... Keep the ideas coming! :)
posted by cotesdurhone at 12:48 PM on December 13, 2015

Do beaver dams count? How about coral reefs?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:09 PM on December 13, 2015

Best answer: It seems like you're asking if any animals ever use objects as signals to communicate some meaning or message. I would echo the people who have mentioned bowerbirds, where the bower supposedly signals the maker's cognitive capacity and health. Some cichlids (a kind of fish) make craters in the sand and wheateaters (a kind of bird) construct small stone piles, presumably also to signal to potential mates that they have time and energy.

What do you mean "enduring external symbols" that can be based in sound? I think signals that are sound-based are, by the nature of the medium, usually transitory, right? Animals have a ton of auditory signals, most of which are produced with vocal organs, but some are produced with external objects. Chimpanzees commonly drum on the buttresses of trees, and this violates your "contact with humans" thing, but especially interesting at the moment is this recording of a chimpanzee drumming rhythmically on a bucket in captivity.

This is maybe a bit more distantly related to your motivating question, but some final points: A bunch of animals (e.g., capuchins, crows, chimps, orangutans, dolphins, macaques) have material cultures of tool use, where individuals seem to observe others and learn that they can use tools, most often for foraging. Some animals (e.g., macaques, orcas, dolphins, probably/arguably chimps, sperm whales) also seem to have cultural social norms and culturally-variables forms of communication. These can include "dialects"/proto-languages or meaningful gestures.

This review on whales is really cool and has a bunch of stuff on the dialects and other forms of culture in cetaceans. [Edit: I would just look at table 3 of this paper, unless you really want to dig into it. But Table 3 shows a bunch of examples of culture in cetaceans, including songs, dialects, foraging techniques, etc.]
posted by mrmanvir at 1:16 PM on December 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm going to guess from ChuraChura's answer that this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but to take it in just a "preserved record of animal behavior" there's an entire branch of geology called ichnology, the study of trace fossils, which uses the records of behavior left behind in the rock record like tracks, burrowing, fossilized feces, and other traces. And not only are there records behind in the rock record, you can use what's found on fossils themselves (teeth marks! boring) There's even bioerosion, like the parrotfish which eats coral reefs and leaves evidence of that gnawing behind. There's even huge preserved, corkscrew beaver burrows from the extinct beaver called Palaeocaster.

My very favorites are stromatolites, which are a kind of bacterial mat that have existed for 3.5 billion years and still exist today; trilobite trace fossils, and starfish resting traces which are essential stars imprinted in the sand.
posted by barchan at 1:33 PM on December 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

You mentioned sound — so, my cat knocks stuff off the bathroom counter (usually the same plastic drinking cup) when she wants us to turn on the water in the sink to a trickle to she can drink and groom. She came up with this on her own, without any coaching from us, and she does not knock stuff off any other surfaces just for fun, as some cats do. It's just to tell us to turn on the water, because we're a couple of rooms away and don't hear her mewing in there, so she needs to make more noise.

Of course, this is not animal-to-animal communication. Our other cat is too dumb to follow her example or to understand what it means. But, it's a symbolic action that has a specific communicative meaning.
posted by beagle at 1:37 PM on December 13, 2015

There are quite a few different bird mating rituals. Most of them involve dances, songs, or other bodily displays, but some of them involve the kind of external physical signs I think you are looking for. For example, have a look at the bowerbird's architectural creations here. These are constructed by the male to attract a female to mate with, and include a variety of improvised decorative elements the male scrounges in the environment. Once the female arrives and mating occurs, the "bower" is NOT used as the nest — the female builds her own nest and raises the offspring on her own.
posted by beagle at 1:48 PM on December 13, 2015

I'm not sure whether this counts, but elephants apparently have rituals related to the death (of their species and I guess even humans) that can include burying the dead, so would an elephant grave count as an enduring symbol? Here's a wiki link as a starting point.

If auditory signals count, there's all sorts of orcas having particular dialects, interfamilial communication signals, etc. They can also apparently learn to mimic the speech of dolphins, which is pretty neat, although maybe not exactly what you're going for, either.

such as number markings, pictograms, ideograms, etc

I remember coming across something about a study showing that dolphins might be able to understand the concept of numbers/counting, but I'm pretty sure that was in the context of human intervention, so I guess that wouldn't count.

Scientists have found evidence that spiders create webs that are tuned to specific frequencies to communicate with other spiders. I guess this only qualifies depending on what you count as "enduring."

This wiki page on tool use by animals might also be a good source of further reading and investigation.
posted by litera scripta manet at 3:08 PM on December 13, 2015

Beavers establish scent posts near their ponds. These are composed of a mound of mud, grass and sticks piled up into a dome-shaped mass. The beaver rubs castoreum on the mound. Some of these mounds can be huge, measuring a foot tall and three feet across.
posted by mannequito at 3:22 PM on December 13, 2015

Wasn't the speculation that crows can count based on an observation of something that might have been a kind of notation (Sorry, the stupids are inhibiting my backtracking...we talk about crows a LOT here)?
posted by cookie-k at 10:03 PM on December 13, 2015

Yeah, whale song is enduring enough to travel huge distances through the ocean and convey all sorts of meaning between many individuals.

As a side point, you might want to ask yourself why you started from a position of doubt that more than one species out of millions on the planet can create "enduring external symbols." That's an assumption that should be examined, and then tossed in the trash.
posted by mediareport at 5:03 AM on December 14, 2015

Response by poster: Think I actually meant rather complex, abstract external symbols, equivalent to the complexity of an ideogram or logogram, that are not ephemeral per generation, or instinctual, but can be transmitted on a more conscious cultural level over generations. While reading these responses, the notion solidified that Tools are such a symbol- animals must understand what a tool's purpose(s) are, and be able to communicate the use of the tool and these purposes to others and offspring. When a more cognitively advanced animal regards a tool, then, they interpret it more or less as we would an ideogram... Also, proto-linguistic calls, gestures, etc, which some animals can innovate and combine, are essentially non-alphabetic logograms... All of these answers are great; I'd like to mark them all 'best answer,' but alas, there can only be a few. Thanks again
posted by cotesdurhone at 2:55 PM on December 14, 2015

Best answer: In that case, both black-capped chickadees and prairie dogs have been shown to have developed complex language that includes the notion of counting and the combination of different "words" to form primitive sentences.
posted by one_bean at 8:55 PM on December 14, 2015