Class is in session!

With the advent of September, children all across the country are gearing up for another year of backpacks, books, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That’s right, it’s time for school. In school, children develop new skills, learn new information, and establish patterns of thinking and behavior that will serve them their entire lives. And their teachers - people whose jobs it is to teach others what they do not already know – are one of the driving forces behind the process.

Teaching sounds so simple that you might be surprised to learn that it has always been believed to be exclusively human. You might think that there are many examples in nature of animals teaching each other. After all, don’t mother cats bring live mice to their kittens to show them how to kill and eat live prey, and don’t baby birds learn how to fly from their mothers? True – but that’s not the kind of teaching behavioral scientists like to study. There are, in fact, two kinds of teaching – social teaching and active teaching.

In social teaching, a youngster learns by watching and copying adults performing a task. In active teaching, an individual is a teacher if it changes its behavior in the presence of an uninformed observer at some initial cost to itself. This change in behavior sets an example so that the uninformed individual learns more quickly than it would on its own. In social teaching, knowledge is passed on passively, without deliberate initiation by the knowledgeable individual. In active teaching, the teacher initiates the instruction solely to pass knowledge along. Thus a young duck learning to migrate by flocking south with other ducks was not “taught” the process, since the experienced ducks would have flown south regardless.

Here is classic example of social learning. Dr. Michael Noonan is a professor of animal behavior at Canisius College. He has reported how orcas in a Canadian marine preserve set “water traps” to catch and eat seagulls. In one case, one orca (Alpha) set the trap with apparent success; some weeks later, the killer whale’s brother (Beta) began setting the same trap. After study, Dr. Noonan concluded that this was the result of Beta watching Alpha and then mimicking the technique, not due to an active teaching role of Alpha. Alpha was not a teacher. He was merely an example.

While there are many examples of social teaching in nature, scientists have only recently proved that active teaching takes place in non-humans. The results come from two surprising animal species – a tiny British ant (Temnothorax albipennis) and the plains-dwelling meerkat (Suricata suricatta).

In one study, Drs. Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson from Bristol University showed that ants use a technique called “tandem running” to teach each other about a source of food. This technique involves an ignorant ant (the student) closely following an experienced ant (the teacher). The student uses its antennae to periodically stop the teacher to determine its location relative to local landmarks. This process results in a slow initial journey to the food of interest (in fact, at least 4 times slower than the teacher would take on its own); however, the student learns the location of the food so well that it subsequently takes any number of paths to and from the food without the need for random foraging. The scientists concluded that all the requirements for active teaching are in place, thus proving this ant species as the first non-human species to teach each other.

Shortly thereafter, Drs. Alex Thornton and Katherine McAuliffe from the University of Cambridge demonstrated teaching in wild meerkats. Meerkats live in social groups of a dominant male and female (who produce the pups), a variable number of adult helpers (who rear the pups), and the pups themselves. The meerkat diet consists of insect and animal prey, some of which can be quite dangerous to an untrained pup. A scorpion sting, for example, can be crippling or even lethal for an animal the size of a meerkat. Thornton and McAuliffe showed how the helper meerkats teach pups to disable and then eat scorpions without being stung. This teaching takes more time and effort for the helpers than would merely providing the pups with a diet of dead scorpions. However, it results in a decreased scorpion sting rate and faster development of the hunting skills for the pups. Again, the data was clear. Meerkats, like humans and British ants, actively teach their young.

So this marks the first non-human species to be proved as engaging in active teaching. (Of course, I suspect they probably do not wait until September to start their lessons as humans do.) Admittedly, ants, being insects, do not have nearly the same appeal that meerkats do. So while ants are able to teach each other, I suspect it’ll be a while before we see any television shows featuring “The Ant Food Finding School.” But for all of you who enjoy watching “Meerkat Manor” on Animal Planet, I’d like to propose a possible sequel on the Learning Channel. It’s called “Meerkat Elementary School.”