The Social Lives of Animals

Contributors

By Ashley Ward

Formats and Prices

Price

$30.00

Price

$38.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $30.00 $38.00 CAD
  2. ebook $17.99 $22.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 1, 2022. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A rat will go out of its way to help a stranger in need. Lions have adopted the calves of their prey. Ants farm fungus in cooperatives. Why do we continue to believe that life in the animal kingdom is ruled by competition? 
 
In The Social Lives of Animals, biologist Ashley Ward takes us on a wild tour across the globe as he searches for a more accurate picture of how animals build societies. Ward drops in on a termite mating ritual (while his guides snack on the subjects), visits freelance baboon goatherds, and swims with a mixed family of whales and dolphins. Along the way, Ward shows that the social impulses we’ve long thought separated humans from other animals might actually be our strongest connection to them.  

Insightful, engaging, and often hilarious, The Social Lives of Animals demonstrates that you can learn more about animals by studying how they work together than by how they compete.  

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

—Aristotle

In the rainforest of northern Trinidad, an abandoned house is gradually being reclaimed by nature. Lianas wrap themselves about its walls, while saplings venture through broken windows and push their roots through crumbling masonry. Animals, too, have seized the opportunity and have moved in. At the heart of the house, beneath a sagging staircase, a musty space provides refuge for an animal with a chilling reputation: the vampire bat. During the heat of the tropical day, the bats huddle in the cool seclusion of their lair, resting and gathering strength for the coming hunt. As night falls, they stir into wakefulness. Their hunger sharpened by the daytime fast, they take wing to scour the forest in search of blood. They’re seeking sleeping mammals, those that have dropped their guard. Any mammal might be targeted, from forest deer or peccaries to domestic livestock or even an unwary person.

In a forest clearing, a vampire circles cautiously above a tethered goat. The goat is unaware of the bat’s presence, the faint noise of fluttering wings lost amid the many sounds of the Trinidadian night. Stealthily, the bat alights on the ground and scurries in its ungainly fashion toward its victim. It makes an incision in the goat’s flank, cutting through the skin into flesh with scalpel-like teeth. As the blood begins to flow, the vampire drinks greedily, consuming as much as a third of its own weight before the meal is finished. Once satiated, it leaves as silently as it arrived—and with its prey none the wiser, despite a wound that continues to flow because of the anticoagulants in the bat’s saliva.

Back in the safety of their dilapidated shelter, the bats who have had a fruitful night can begin to digest their meal. But not all the returning hunters have been successful. The large mammals they seek as prey are few and far between, and many of those that can be found are alert to the threat posed by the bats. For these hungry individuals, time is running short: failure to feed on just three consecutive nights can mean starvation and death. Yet this is where the vampire bat’s behavior belies its sinister reputation. Should one of its roostmates go without a meal, a well-fed bat will step in. Almost like a parent bird tending its chicks at a nest, the successful hunter provides for its less fortunate companions by regurgitating some of its blood bounty. And the next time tonight’s lucky bat goes without, it can count on its companions to return the favor. In their struggle for survival, the bats have each other’s backs, a strategy that works well for all in uncertain times.

Cooperation such as this is a hallmark of social animals. Though the extent to which vampire bats engage in each other’s welfare is by no means universal, almost all animals that live in groups provide some degree of support to one another. At the most basic level, this might manifest in the form of what’s known as social buffering. Essentially, this means that social animals, from tiny krill to humans, gain a clear and measurable benefit simply from being near their own kind and being able to interact with them. They are buoyed by the presence of others, supported by the collective. For our own species, this has never been more important. The recent experience of lockdowns and social distancing prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted our connections and enforced solitude upon many. Little wonder, then, that a mental health crisis has emerged in the wake of the pandemic. Alongside this, the march of technology is gradually disposing of many of the day-to-day interactions that were once part of normal life. Self-service checkouts, automated tellers, metro ticket machines: all of them replace face-to-face encounters, while headphones lock us out of everyday discourse and the web replaces real-time connections with virtual ones.

The question is: Does this matter? I argue that it does. We humans are intensely social organisms. Our lives are interconnected with networks of friends and loved ones, and each of us plays a role in broader societies that define and shape our patterns of behavior. This social tendency has enabled us to achieve far more than could ever have been possible if we were solitary creatures. Moreover, the far-reaching effects of living alongside one another include everything from the development of spoken language to the ways that we interact with one another in daily life. It even provided the basis for the evolution of the intelligence that is the hallmark of our species. Ultimately, our instinct for cooperation has provided the foundation for human civilization. But this instinct didn’t begin with the first people; rather, it was something intrinsic to us, a legacy inherited through our shared ancestry with the animals that we live among.

Countless other animals have adopted sociality to solve the problems that life poses. Living in groups provides the platform for the success of species throughout the animal kingdom. What’s more, we can trace direct and important parallels between our own societies and those of the animals with whom we share the planet. These parallels, echoes of our own evolutionary journey, help us to appreciate how sociality shapes our lives so fundamentally. By understanding animals on their own terms, we can understand ourselves, and our societies, so much the better.

Watching animals and studying their behavior has always been my greatest passion. I’ve spent countless hours at it. Once, as a child, I lay on my front and peered into a tiny stream for so long that a stoat mistook me for a log and decided to come for a drink on the opposite bank, within just inches of my prone figure. When I looked up and came face to face with it, the astonished stoat leapt so high in the air that even its fleas applauded.

But being enraptured by creatures is one thing. Turning it into my life’s work seemed impossible. Lacking the confidence to pursue my animal ambitions, and leaving school with a motley assortment of underwhelming qualifications, I drifted into an underwhelming office job. There I stayed for five years, stuck in a rut of my own making. I might have continued much in that vein were it not for the intervention of my manager. It took him a long while to realize the extent of my ineptitude, but once he did, he sacked me.

Forced to find a new direction in life, I pondered what to do next. Could I put my meager skills to use looking after the exhibits at Scarborough Sea Life Centre? It wasn’t my dream job, perhaps, but the idea of working with animals, in whatever way, conjured happy memories of afternoons mucking about in rock pools or turning over logs to look for bugs. The Sea Life Centre needed someone to tend to assorted urchins, prawns, and starfish. I reached out to them (the management, not the animals). They reached right back to flick my ears. “You need a biology degree to scrub algae off an old lobster” was the gist of their reply.

At least now I knew what was needed. I enrolled at University of Leeds, where I tried to find meaning in rote learning amino-acid structures. Two years in, just when I was reaching a crisis point in my quest for the degree, I met a kindred spirit in the shape of Jens Krause, one of the academics at Leeds. Here was someone whose curiosity for the living world was as great as my own. Not only that, he was making a wonderful career of studying the behavior of animals. All of a sudden there was a point to it all. I saw for the first time what I wanted to do. Everything was laid out before me, even if the path wasn’t always easy. I like to think that the animals of Scarborough’s fourth-busiest attraction wished me well, and have found it in their tiny hearts to forgive me for abandoning them.

The point of these reminiscences isn’t just to show you, dear reader, how daunting I found it to be to admit to myself that I wanted to be a scientist. The point is how the purpose of my life became clearer just by virtue of coming into contact with another human being who shared my interests. The realization that you need other people in order to help you understand your own mind and what you want from life is a common experience for many. Unfortunately, what is also common is the human tendency to undervalue this very need, and not to appreciate that community and collaboration are frequently the bedrock of progress and a meaningful existence.

The one aspect of human behavior that has contributed more than anything else to our remarkable success story has been sociability—the ability to live and work alongside one another in groups, to cooperate. It has allowed us to find solutions to problems from prehistory to the modern day, to safeguard ourselves from predators and to hunt our own prey, to share information and learn from one another, to explore the globe and overcome a multitude of challenges. Since the first modern humans appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago, society has changed and evolved with us. For perhaps the first 290,000 of these years, we lived as hunter-gatherers in small, nomadic bands. Then, as the world emerged from the most recent ice age, the warming climate and human ingenuity ushered in the Neolithic Revolution, and we began to live for the first time in small settlements as agriculturalists. From there, human civilization developed apace, and as it did so, we had other species accompanying us, such as cattle, goats, and dogs, that were all social animals like ourselves.

Modern human society is a mix of culture and relationships, of law and conflict, and is composed of families, communities, cities, and nations. We might imagine that in this regard we stand distinct from other animals. Yet while our society is certainly different in character from theirs, in many ways it is not unique. Many social animals organize themselves in similar ways. Moreover, they were doing so for millions of years before we appeared. Our social instinct, our society, has an ancient lineage, and we have much in common with other social animals. In a world seemingly full of individuals navigating cityscapes and isolation, we arguably need to understand these parallels now more than ever. Why? Because they are a reminder of the fundamentals that shape behavior. Studying the social behavior of animals not only provides insights that are valuable in their own right, but also sheds light on the evolutionary basis of human sociality.

Take language, for example. Communication is an essential facet of living in groups and interacting within a social milieu. The more complex the web of relationships, the more important language becomes. It allows us to navigate our communities, to negotiate, to foster and develop relationships, to teach and instruct. In addition, it has enabled us to assemble into coherent, cooperative teams, from the hunting parties of our ancestors to the organizations and institutions of the modern day. Our cultures, our social behavior and social norms, the rules by which we interact, and the moral frameworks in which we operate developed alongside language. And while human language and culture may not look exactly like any language or culture found among other group-living animals, many animals do communicate with each other, whether it’s bees with pheromones or whales with clicks and whistles. By learning something about how other animals live together and communicate, we can understand ourselves a little better.

In another example, think of how we feel about our closest personal friendships. These feelings not only operate at the level of consciousness, but also permeate our physiology, via hormones that cushion us from the worst effects of stress. Those who engage in an active social life and feel close to friends and family members tend to live longer than those who do not. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that the same may be said for other gregarious creatures. While the assistance that vampire bats offer to their roostmates provides a compelling example, it is the intangible, enduring support garnered simply through interacting with a community that provides the most powerful aid to social animals. Here again, we can appreciate the common links between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

This appreciation has been slow in coming, but scientific research over the past half century has forced a reappraisal of our understanding of animal sociality and cooperation. In recent years, technology has afforded us remarkable insights into the behavior of animals in swarms, schools, flocks, herds, and even our own crowds. These insights have shown us that there are often striking similarities between ourselves and our animal cousins. Simultaneously, they have allowed us to better appreciate the complexity of animals while recasting our own sociality as a fundamental animal impulse. Some balk at such notions, believing humans to be separate and exceptional from other animals. Yet the differences between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is, as Charles Darwin said, of a degree rather than of a kind.

Almost a quarter of a century on from my first fumbling attempts to work out my course in life, I can look back on a dream fulfilled and at a series of adventures. It’s been an incredible privilege to study at close hand some of the world’s amazing creatures and to grapple with the hows and whys of their social behavior. In the following chapters, I consider a succession of animals, beginning with Antarctic krill and working through to our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. What all these animals have in common is that they are social.

The word social means many different things to many different people, but for the purposes of this book, I define a social animal as one that is drawn to its own kind, that lives and interacts in groups. It’s been my life’s work to study these interactions between animals: how they relate to one another; how they connive and compete, on the one hand, and unite and cooperate, on the other. In this book I’ve attempted to distill the wonder that I still feel in the company of animals.




CHAPTER 1

BROWN ALE AND CANNIBALISM

Krill and locusts form Earth’s greatest aggregations, though their motivations differ…

THE FROZEN SOUTH

I’m in Hobart, the beautiful capital city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. In front of me in the harbor is a ship, the Aurora Australis, Australia’s Antarctic flagship. It is a vivid geranium orange, though patches of brown rust show through the paint. You’d struggle to call this an attractive ship, but it is sturdy. It’s made countless trips south—to Macquarie Island, situated about halfway between Tasmania and the South Pole, and to Mawson, Casey, and Davis Stations on the Antarctic mainland. The journey to and from Antarctica is not for the fainthearted: traversing the Southern Ocean means entering some of the most inhospitable waters on Earth, a place of terrifying storms and deadly climatic conditions. In this part of the ocean, far from land and shelter, the winds can reach almost 100 miles an hour, well in excess of what feeble landlubbers would categorize as a hurricane. At such times, there’s no clear distinction between sea and sky: the furious wind drives the surface waters into a maelstrom of spray, whipping the tops off mountainous waves that can fling a ship around like a toy. Blizzards strike to produce whiteout conditions, and icebergs lurk to claim the unwary.

Happily for me, I can put thoughts of nautical terrors aside. I’m here to visit the Australian Antarctic Division, situated safely on dry land. It’s an impressive complex of buildings, decorated with breathtaking images of the frozen south, a part of our planet that few are lucky enough to see firsthand. Outside the entrance there’s a triptych of sculpted penguins, arranged as though they were having a chat at the back end of a huge recumbent metal seal, while in the foyer huge pictures capture the ethereal beauty of the Antarctic. Even the food in the cafeteria is themed—you can get burgers that are named for polar scientists. Doubtless, the giants of groundbreaking early expeditions would be thrilled by their commemoration as a snack.

Splendid as all this is, it’s nothing compared to the work taking place within. My particular interest is in finger-length crustaceans called Antarctic krill—I want to work out how and why they swarm. It’s an important question, because swarming is crucial to krill, and, in turn, krill swarms are crucial to the survival of the entire Southern Ocean ecosystem. Here at the Antarctic Division live one of the only populations of krill outside their natural habitat far to the south.

I’m met at reception by Rob King and So Kawaguchi, two people who’ve done more than just about anyone else alive to unpick the krill’s mysteries. Getting the krill here to Hobart in the first place is no easy matter. They have to be collected at sea and then mollycoddled for weeks on board before the Aurora returns to port with its precious cargo. Rob, a genial yet imposing man, described his first, eventful trip to the Antarctic. As he headed south, the weather progressively worsened, until the ship was facing 40-foot waves and vicious winds: a succession of giddying climbs up huge ocean rollers, each followed by a stomach-clenching lurch as the ship surfed down the wave’s back. Each time the ship reached the trough, the bow crashed into ocean, and tons of icy seawater flooded the decks and then streamed from the gunwales as the ship staggered into the next climb. Making little progress into the teeth of a storm, the ship was like a boxer pinned on the ropes, taking blow after punishing blow.

Concerned at the damage that was being done, the master was forced into the decision to turn about—a perilous prospect in such seas, because going side-on to barn-sized waves can easily roll a ship and sink it. All aboard knew that, if the worst happened, the prospect of rescue in a storm like this was slim. Even when you’re wearing an immersion suit to protect against hypothermia, the sea temperatures here can be deadly. Nevertheless, with the entire crew holding its collective breath, the ship began to edge around. At the mercy of the Southern Ocean, three enormous waves struck in succession, canting it right over to its beams. But the Aurora is made of stern stuff, and each time it heaved itself up from the canvas. Once the stern had turned to the waves, the crew, now running with the seas rather than against them, could ride out the storm in safety. Rob described this experience as “highly engaging.”

Finally, after weeks at sea, the ship reached the relative calm of Casey Station, an Australian base on the Antarctic mainland, to be welcomed by a small contingent of highly skilled engineers, support staff, and polar scientists, who were awaiting supplies—and, perhaps just as importantly, new people to talk to.

Having arrived at Casey, Rob was itching to get to grips with the creature he has devoted his life to understanding—the Antarctic krill. It was summer, and now that the storm had blown itself out, the conditions were relatively pleasant, with sunshine and temperatures edging above freezing. In front of the station, the bay was more or less free of ice. Rob decided to take to the waters in a small inflatable boat, to see what he could collect in his net. Sitting at the stern, he was happily dipping for specimens when he felt what he later described as “a presence.” Turning around, he found himself face to face with a leopard seal that had risen silently from the water and was now looking him right in the eye. Not many animals—people included—are tall enough to look Rob in the eye, even sitting down. But leopard seals can be 10 feet long and weigh half a ton. These are fierce predators, hunters of penguins and seals; they’ve claimed at least one human life. Who knows what the leopard seal had in mind. But a moment later, it seemed to give Rob a clue, as it opened its huge jaws to give him a view of its formidable, dagger-like teeth, set into a skull the size of a lion’s. And then, as if content that the message had been received, the seal slipped back into the water and disappeared. Rob doesn’t tend to take the boat out often when he’s at Casey now, but when he does, he makes sure not to sit on the side.

After all of that, there was still the return journey to consider, which involved collecting the live krill that sustain the research program back in Hobart. Another journey through capricious seas, interspersed with the exacting task of capturing delicate animals from the frigid waters they call home. And once they were installed in aquaria on board, Rob and So would have to be babysitters—krill are nothing if not demanding. You might wonder why people go to so much trouble for a load of measly shrimp-like creatures. To understand why, you need to see the bigger picture.

MAKING A KRILLING

The leopard seal and a whole host of other large marine predators are drawn to the Southern Ocean to hunt. Whether directly or indirectly, what supports these animals is krill, small but superabundant crustaceans related to prawns. In fact, there are something like eighty-five different species of krill spread across all the world’s oceans. But the one that most people think of when they hear the word is the Antarctic krill. For every person alive today, there might be ten thousand of these creatures in the near-freezing southern seas. Even though each one is only about the size of your little finger, collectively they outweigh us.

Krill are a “keystone species” in the Southern Ocean. This ecological term derives from the crucial role of the keystone at the apex of a stone arch. Take the keystone out, and the arch collapses. So it is for krill in relation to the animals with whom they share their habitat. From fish to squid, from penguins to albatross, and from seals to the great whales, krill are at the top of the menu. Many of these predators have diets that are more than 90 percent krill at certain times of the year. If krill disappeared, they’d take the bulk of Antarctica’s most charismatic and important species with them. For the predators, switching their diet to a different prey species is simply not an option; without krill, there would be no Antarctic ecosystem as we know it—no baleen whales, no seals, no penguins, no albatross, and none of the animals that feed on those that eat krill.

Numerous though they are, Antarctic krill are not invulnerable. Twenty years ago, on the other side of the planet, a change in oceanic conditions in the Bering Sea drove the development of a massive algal bloom. Good news for these algae-eating crustaceans? Not at all. It was the wrong kind of algae for the resident Pacific krill, the sister species of the Antarctic krill: they couldn’t eat it. Their population crashed, and with them went enormous numbers of seabirds. Salmon failed to show in the rivers, and the emaciated carcasses of whales washed up on shores. The devastating knock-on effects of the slump in Pacific krill foreshadowed what could happen if Antarctic krill were to go the same way.

For now, they are thriving. Drawn together into great aggregations, Antarctic krill can be seen from space when they gather together. A single superswarm might cover more than 100 square miles of ocean, staining vast swaths of the surface waters orangey pink as they cluster in their trillions. Congregating provides krill with some protection from predators and may even help keep them afloat. Since they are heavier than the surrounding water, they start to sink the moment they stop swimming. Yet, by gathering together, they are buoyed by the upwelling currents that result from the countless pulsing limbs of their fellows pushing water downward. The swarm is essentially krill’s life-support system.

Although we often think of invertebrates as instinctive creatures, devoid of any but the most basic responses and reactions, krill exhibit a fundamental trait shared by all social animals, including us—they hate to be alone. If they’re isolated, they react badly. It’s hard to know what panic might look like in an animal that doesn’t have a face, as such, but we can measure something akin to it by looking at what is going on inside their bodies. And since krill are largely transparent, it is possible to do this without too much difficulty: we can see their tiny hearts beating. Separated from the multitudes in the swarm, a krill’s heartbeat quickens. Krill show a similar response if they detect that whales are around. A raised pulse is a basic sign of stress. Clearly, they prefer company.

Nature documentaries rarely feature krill, but when they do it is as fall guys. We might get only a fleeting glimpse of these small crustaceans, usually portrayed as obliging little floating morsels as they’re swallowed by a leviathan. Krill, in other words, are little more than whale food to TV producers. But there’s much more to them than this. For one thing, they are far from sanguine about disappearing down a whale’s gullet. Despite the numbingly cold waters in which they live, they have surprisingly fast reactions when danger threatens. It takes only around 50 milliseconds for an alarming event in the krill environment to trigger an escape response in them. To put that into context, that’s about twice as fast as the reaction of an Olympic sprinter to a starting pistol. The escape response itself is dramatic—in the crucial first second following the detection of a threat, the krill may travel over a meter. Again, compared to a human sprinter, and scaling the krill to human size, that means that the krill would finish the 100-meter race in under two seconds. With a little warning, krill can even elude the cavernous maw of a feeding whale.

In short, catching them isn’t as easy as you might think, even for the largest mouths on the planet. Challenging the common notion of whales simply turning up and harvesting the krill, a recent study of humpbacks in the endless days of the Antarctic summer showed the effort they have to put into feeding. The whales lunged at the swarming crustaceans every fifteen seconds or so, minute after minute, hour after hour. With every mouthful, many krill are captured, but still more dart out of the way, leaving the feeding whales shortchanged. It’s exhausting work for the whales to satisfy their enormous appetites.

But while krill are first-class escapologists, it is their swarming that encourages the whales to focus their attention on them. So why do they collect in such vast numbers? The answer is that the krill are pursued by many different predators and swarming provides an excellent defense against most of them. Any predator that relies—as most do—on picking out their victims one by one faces a kind of sensory overload when confronted by myriad swirling krill.

Genre:

  • “Exhilarating…Ward has an irrepressible and infectious interest in virtually everything that creeps, crawls, climbs, swims, jumps, runs or flies, from bumblebees to baboons to African elephants…Reading Mr. Ward’s book is like entering a maze, too, with surprises awaiting the reader at every turn. What holds it all together is the author’s natural gift for storytelling and penchant for punchy, provocative one-liners.”—Wall Street Journal
  • “Extraordinary stories in this fascinating book…Any writer who can evoke the existential sadness of a lonely cockroach, or make krill thrilling, or describe a snorkelling colleague being engulfed in a ‘gargantuan cetacean bum detonation’ is a real gift to science communication.” -—The Guardian
  • “Very striking… Ward has a good eye for details...he writes vividly.”—The Sunday Times (UK)
  • “Ward’s lively and oftentimes surprising observations and quirky and wry writing will appeal to readers. The juxtaposition of animal and human behavior will linger long after readers have turned the last page.”—Booklist
  • “Ward’s enthusiasm keeps things moving… This is catnip for animal enthusiasts.”—Publishers Weekly
  • “Engaging and entertaining; of interest to anyone who wants to better understand the behavior of social animals, including humans.”—Library Journal
  • “The Social Lives of Animals offers a great antidote to the dog-eat-dog view of nature that we grew up with. Ashley Ward takes the reader on a personal journey of discovery to make clear that animals often depend on cooperation for survival.”
     —Frans de Waal, author of Mama’s Last Hug
  • "Ashley Ward is the perfect guide for this global tour of animal sociability: knowledgeable, enthusiastic and, at times, very amusing. Whether it’s shoals of fish or herds of elephants, Ward provides privileged access to the inner workings of animal societies, drawing tantalizing parallels with our own. You’ll discover how herrings die of loneliness and why chimps cheat, and meet pessimistic bees and philanthropic vampire bats. Ward deftly illustrates how our shared sociable nature shapes language, intelligence, culture and emotions across the animal kingdom. This is a delectable read that leaves you with a sense of kinship for social creatures big and small, from giant sperm whales to tiny Antarctic krill. Highly recommended for animal fans and students of human nature alike."—Lucy Cooke, author of The Truth About Animals
  • “A thoughtful exploration of the complex minds that share the planet with us. Ashley Ward will give you a new appreciation for the bonds, emotions, and connections that we thought set us apart, but in reality, just bring us closer to the animal world.”
     —Vanessa Woods, New York Times bestselling author of Bonobo Handshake
  • "On the face of it, Ashley Ward’s book is a lighthearted tour of animal social lives, a compendium of surprising revelations about a wide assortment of creatures, from krill to pinyon jays to sperm whales. Who knew, for instance, that keeping tabs on relationships is so vital to a sheep that it can recognize the faces of at least 50 members of its flock, or that a cockroach raised in isolation will never form normal bonds with others of its kind, and will remain forever at the margins of cockroach society? (Who knew, for that matter, that there even is such a thing as cockroach society?) A big part of the book’s appeal is just the strangeness and sophistication of this world of animal interactions, a nexus of cooperation and conflict that is all around us and yet mostly remains hidden from our view. Ward’s stories compel us to see social animals, not just as marvels, but as kindred spirits. He wants us to empathize with them as fellow navigators of the unpredictable landscape of relationships. And, with a light hand, he succeeds."—Alan de Queiroz, author of The Monkey's Voyage
  • "From swarming krill and flocking birds to cattle herds and tribal chimpanzees, Ashley Ward reveals animals to be much more social than often thought. Part deep dive into the latest science and part personal storytelling, Ward’s book shatters the old stereotype. This is not nature red in tooth and claw, but nature awash in cooperation and collaboration."

    Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh

On Sale
Mar 1, 2022
Page Count
384 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9781541600836

Ashley Ward

About the Author

Ashley Ward is a professor and director of the Animal Behaviour Lab at the University of Sydney, where he researches social behavior, learning, and communication in animals. His work has been published in top journals including PNAS, Biological Reviews, and Current Biology. The author of The Social Lives of Animals, he lives in Sydney. 

Learn more about this author