Planning for the future

Take a look around you one day and you will see a pattern in human thinking. Each Friday, grocery shoppers take lists to the store to buy food for their families to eat the next week. Each month, paychecks in America are taxed by the Social Security Administration for the money to be returned to those who are retired. Each year, Christmas decorations are put into storage for millions of households to be reused the following holiday season.

Every day of our lives, we plan for the future in some way or another. We save food, money, or supplies. We plan careers, houses and vacations. Do we eat dinner early to watch our favorite TV show, do we hire a babysitter this weekend to go see a movie, or do we really want to go for a jog to reap health benefits years from now? Planning is so common in our lives that it might surprise you to realize that knowing how to plan for the future has always been believed to be an ability exclusive to humans. Animals can exhibit saving behavior. Any city dweller sees how squirrels hide acorns every fall, and dog owners know how their pets bury their bones to be dug up later. However, these behaviors fall short of the true scientific definition of “planning ahead.”

Let’s talk about what qualifies a behavior as “planning ahead.” To non-scientists, planning ahead is a state of mind where you think beyond the present, anticipating a need and doing something ahead of time to fill it. To biologists, however, the definition of planning ahead is more rigorous and based in the animal’s behavior, not their state of mind. After all, we can’t ask squirrels why they bury acorns in the forest.

Two things determine whether an animal is really planning ahead. First, the behavior must be a novel action or actions, something new that the animal has not done before. Second, it must be appropriate to a motivational state, rather than a current condition. In other words, it has to be something the animal will anticipate needing, rather than something it currently needs. Thus a bear fattening up for hibernation cannot be said to be planning ahead for the winter, since it fails both criteria. The bear does it every year after learning from watching their mothers, so it is not a novel action. Moreover, metabolic changes in the bear’s body result in the addition of layers of fat to its anatomy. Biologically speaking, then, it is not a planned response to future hunger but to a current condition of hunger.

Proving whether an animal can plan ahead is very tricky, so it has never been done before. Until recently, that is. Early this year, researchers working with Dr. Nicholas Clayton at the University of Cambridge found a way to test the planning skills of a small, unassuming bird.

Western scrub jays are native to western north America. These birds, which live in oak woodlands in the wild, are well adapted to suburban environments. They are omnivores, and will eat just about anything, including a variety of seed. Importantly for Dr. Clayton, they are known to store their seed. But does that mean that they are planning ahead? Or are they acting on instinct?

Dr. Clayton tested the jays in a variety of caged environments with differing availability of food. In one experiment, the birds were allowed access to three cages. The first evening, the middle cage contained a supply of powdered pine nuts. Jays can’t carry this, thus they can’t save it. The next morning, they were contained for two hours into one of the other two cages, one that contained breakfast and one that did not. After several days of this, the birds were given whole pine nuts for dinner instead of ground pine nuts. The next morning, the scientists discovered a supply of whole pine nuts in the “no breakfast” room, but not the “breakfast” room. The jays knew which cage would not have food in the morning, so at their first chance, they stored food there. All the data for this experiment came from one test, so the birds could not have learned over time how their actions would determine whether or not they would have whole pine nuts to eat the next morning. The conclusion: the jays were planning ahead for their next breakfast.

A second experiment expanded the results. This time, the birds were confined to one of the two side cages for breakfast, where they were given one of two kinds of food. In one room they were fed whole pine nuts, and in the other, they were fed dog kibble. After several mornings of this, they were given both kinds of food in the central room. At this one and only opportunity, the birds stored the type of food that each room was lacking for the next morning (dog kibble in the pine nuts cage and vice versa). Again, the conclusion was clear: this behavior fit the definition of planning ahead.

This story, published earlier this year in the journal Nature, was the first generally accepted scientific proof of a non-human animal planning ahead. And I hope that you get a few things out of this story. First, I think the results are fascinating. Who would have thought that blue jays could think abstractly about the future? But in addition, it really shows how complex living systems are. We can observe a behavior in an animal, but that does not mean we know why they do it. That’s extremely difficult to test. But along with that difficulty comes one of the fun things about being a scientist. We have to be extremely creative sometimes to find a solution to an incredibly complex problem!