Ancient Alien Friend

Here's another adaptation from Diode's Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World, a work in progress. Enjoy!
 

Milwaukee River, detail.
C. Douglas Babcock; my collection


On the river--hard on the river--I could see the painted turtle's beak pushing so hard on the glass I was glad we'd had the watercolor framed. His pointer beak pressed on the far shore of the riverscape my father-in-law had painted from the bridge down the street. Curious, I thought, but then this wild turtle pushed a foot against my hand, pivoting, and I followed his canoeing to the porch window, which looked over the bluff toward the water, still visible through the leafless trees of the year's early spring. He looked down at the real river, then angled upstream a bit, and banged his beak on the window. Now I knew exactly what he meant.
     The night before, in the midst of a wretched week of tornadoes and worry and exhausting hours of searching, Michael and I, on the way home for sustenance, had seen our screen door angled out. Trudging steps began to fly, and we ran the last leg home. As we approached we saw a boot box, and it seemed to be scratching. We tore off the string and the box top, then, seeing what was not there, broke off in silence.
     The full-grown midland painted turtle, Chrysemys picta marginata, filled the space. We knew why he was there. We had posted fliers high and low picturing a flat tortoise: lost, heartwrenchingly lost. On a supervised walk in the wilds of an unkempt park between a railroad track and the raging Milwaukee River, she had, as John Updike put it, melted into grass: Willow, a rare African pancake tortoise, part of the family and part of our mutual explorations into symbolic communication. We were desperate to find her.
     I suppose it wasn't surprising that some of the turtles purporting to be the pancake-slender Willow were water turtles. Their aquatic lifestyle has made them flatter than the typical arch of terrestrial species. True, "flat" was the defining characteristic we sought, but not a hydrodynamically sleek--but only rather flat--swimmer.
     A note in the turtle's box expressed the hope that the turtle was Willow and asked that, if it was not, we return it to the given location. I didn't recognize the west-side address, and we decided to return him to his neighborhood the next day.
     When I lifted him from the shoebox, he pulled inside his shield of a shell, ornately decorated with the red marks around the edges that give the species its name; but I held him patiently, and, as usual with turtles, curiosity won. He poked his head out surreptitiously, looking at the unfamiliar surroundings of a house. Gaining more confidence, he extended his limbs and started to struggle for freedom, but I responded by turning in the direction of his struggling and walking that way. Within seconds he relaxed and simply pushed on my hands in the way the other turtles of the study group steered us to show their needs and interests.
     Michael stood in a doorway holding two of our turtles, who, seeing the uninvited stranger in my hands looking at them, stared back with no hint of a friendly overture. The painted turtle turned away, rubbernecking like any tourist to examine details all over the house, marking the human strangeness of the way we lived: the enclosing squareness of it, the calm aerial turtles, the oddity of television.
     It was the next morning when the turtle discovered the painting and tapped the window facing the river. This time I looked more carefully at the address on the note and looked it up on a map. It was where the turtle had pointed.
     We drove over the bridge to the address, a block or so from the river, and parked on the quiet lane. I was holding the turtle, and he steered down the lane under the Gothic arches of the elms in the direction of the river, his back legs alternating strokes against my hands, so he swayed back and forth as I walked.
     Michael, still exhausted, lagged behind, and from time to time the turtle would pivot me around and stop, looking at Michael for a moment before resuming his journey toward the river.


A midland painted turtle. James H. Harding in
 CalPhotos; under Creative Commons license

      At the flat bank by the edge of the water I stopped while the turtle, now motionless, surveyed the river and Michael caught up. I leaned down and set the turtle gently on the mud. He waited there a moment before swimming off in slow, relaxed strokes, his carapace and head still visible. From time to time he hesitated and pulled his head around to look back at us. Finally, he dipped under and disappeared.
     It seemed as if we had met and befriended another member of an alien order just arrived on Earth, just as he had learned to trust us members of our soft and gangly species. But, of course, we were the new kids on the planet, not the turtles.
     Different as we were, we were learning to understand each other. But we couldn't interpret his slow return to the river and his ambiguous hesitations precisely enough to know what he was thinking. Was he thanking us for an adventurous vacation with our species, alien to him--and returning him to his home? Was he amazed that his gestures had told us his place on the river? Or did he want to stay in our world? I'll never know.

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PANCAKE TORTOISES AT OMSI and ANGEL REVEALS SECRETS OF MIND

Our Lecture-Demonstration at the OMSI Reptile and Amphibian Show

A pancake tortoise meets one of many visitors. OMSI, 2009
Photo by Sharon Appleman

Saturday, September 3, 2011, we present our fourth annual lecture-demonstration at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Reptile and Amphibian Show, always on Labor Day Weekend. Other years the show has tallied around 3,000 visitors a day. Our special event is all about the unusual adaptations and accomplishments of the “amazing” East African pancake tortoises in our lab. We (including seven pancake tortoises from the lab) will be in a room near the main exhibit hall between 9:30 and 1:30—Saturday only.
      The computer slide show comes to life when a pancake tortoise meets you, perhaps examining your T-shirt design or jewelry and greets you bolder ones with a turtle-to-turtle greeting: a nose-to-nose push. They will demonstrate their balloon play, mirror play, and procedure in drawing pictures. Some of the better turtle art will be on display.     

      It’s always fun, though tiring, for all of us—the reason we’re limiting our time this year. Come get acquainted while we’re there! There’s more information and a link back to our blog on the OMSI site:  http://www.omsi.edu/reptileshow

Revealing Secrets: Angel Finds a Way

Until I got irritated at reading a whole book at my desktop computer, I was reading a galley version of dolphin researcher Diana Reiss’s forthcoming book, The Dolphin in the Mirror, a very interesting narrative. Her dolphin book, scheduled to appear in stores September 20, is one of a handful for the general reader on long-term studies of captive animals’ cognition that are written by the principal investigator. Thus, like books about Alex the parrot, Koko the gorilla, Kanzi the bonobo, and first signing animal Washoe the chimpanzee, it is a cousin to our Diode’s Experiment. (Funding for behavioral research is tenuous, and a rare study is able to continue for a whole career, so even Diana was not able to study the same dolphins throughout her thirty years of research.) Diana is also featured in the December 2011 issue of Discover magazine.
      Back in the mid eighties, Diana introduced me to her research dolphins (including Circes), John Lilley’s dolphins in adjacent pools, and the set-up for her research, at that time recording and studying dolphin contact calls. Both of us have studied our animals’ vocalizations and mirror self-recognition since the eighties—both with success—but more about the turtles’ sounds and mirror responses another time.
      In her book Reiss notes—and I agree—that if you pay attention to the animals’ interactions, both among themselves and with you, they “often reveal their secrets.” One way they begin this revelation is to show their behavioral flexibility and planning as they try to communicate with a human with whom they’re bonded (and, uh, from whom they want services.) If a lab turtle finds a water dish is, shall we say, “used,” I often see the turtle balanced on the edge of the dish, head bent straight down, staring into the water until I come to change it.

Angel in the Secret Garden

      Here’s a recent example from our lab. Angel, one of Diode’s daughters, found a way to request audio services from the floor. More often, a turtle will steer in hand to the audio equipment or a CD and give it a tap with the beak: the direct approach. This time Angel was walking on the lab floor.

      When I had reorganized books and speakers into a newly-purchased bookcase, I had placed the speakers at either end of the bottom shelf, only three inches above the floor. Angel walked back and forth in front of the long bookcase and stared up at the speaker nearer me each time she passed it, then glanced to my face. After a while I got the idea and put on the next CD.

“unwritten language / unnamed places": SLEUTHING THE TURTLE MIND

I can name most of the geographic places where this decades-long adventure of communication with other species spun out from its beginnings near Lake Lemon in southern Indiana: Indiana University, Chicago, Milwaukee, the San Francisco Bay Area, western Oregon.

In Oregon our wild foot-on-the-grass place on a hill with its slice of view looking out toward the Coast Range is named, yes, by a street address on Val Street and a number on a tax map, but for us it’s the home-cum-lab where—with the fifteen turtles—I continue learning ways to understand that unnamed "place" or nonplace rooted somehow in the turtles’ petite bodily brains. It’s called by the amorphous word “mind.”

            By today’s techniques in neuroscience our understandings of the workings of the human brain are pulling out of their infancy; in nonhuman animals, without language, most of the brain’s workings and relations to behavior and thought are still stuck in black-box mode. We do know some relevant things, though. Neuroscientists know that, in rodents at least, exercise and behavioral enrichment increase the weight of neurons and the number of their connections. That makes sense. The socialized turtles of the lab have as many experiences in and out of the lab as possible; and, speaking most generally, their responses and learning suggest plasticity in the brain, even for older animals. (We have to remember that not long ago our species was still thinking that “old dogs can’t learn new tricks”—we older folks can!—and that birds lost their neural plasticity after a defined early time to learn songs.)



The turtles slide their beaks on a vertical surface to make the
drawings they demonstrate at the Oregon Museum of
Science and Industry.



            Our Chelonian Connection lab has looked at turtle cognition from the other—no sacrifice, no cutting—side: communicative behavior and learning.

            For me learning to communicate with a turtle started back in 1969 near that Indiana lake, braking hard for a box turtle crossing in front of my then-husband and me. This is how I’ve put it in book-in-progress Diode’s Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World.

Now, forty years older and wiser in the ways of animals and the pressures of our civilization on their very existence, I would have seen him to safety and let wild be wild. But there I was, bending over the fleeing turtle with a cardboard box in my hand. Wanting that gorgeous box turtle felt like raw instinct, not a rational decision. I leaned down and picked him up.

. . . . .

His eyes, a vivid male red, seemed to be sparking with rage, his whole body now a self-contained vessel of wildness seeking a just freedom. He strained toward the other side of the road and the woods beyond, the strength of his muscles signaling his desperation to escape. With his long neck stretched taut toward the trees, he struggled on—so bold, so strong—as he tried to evade my grasp by pushing his feet against my hands. I would not be deterred; he was strong, but I was stronger. I held tight. What I didn’t know then was that his willful shoving against my hand and paddling in the air toward the woods would be the key to our learning to understand each other.

            What we noticed right away was that this turtle was curious; his curiosity calmed him and pushed his body to control us humans in his intent to examine everything.

. . . . .

            As days went by, Terry quickly lost his fury, but not his determination to go where he wanted to go whenever I picked him up. By himself, with four feet to the floor, he could hardly see the most interesting things: our strange possessions—books, instruments, pictures, clothes—and what was going on outside the window: all scaled to human height. His strong visual and kinesthetic cues gave me instructions for his flight of hand, and I, becoming curious about his aerial explorations, followed them.

            He led with his head, neck stretched out like the lead goose in flight, straight on till morning or veering to the side for the flock behind him—in this case, just me. Sometimes he would look up or down, which he emphasized by stretching his front or back legs tall, tilting his body one way or the other; and I would move my hand for the change in elevation.

 

This pancake tortoise steers down.



            His feet worked the kinesthetic engine. He pushed his back feet against my hand—right foot to go left, left foot to go right, like paddling a canoe. I was the canoe, and the strength of his strokes moved my feet to his bidding.

While he pushed with his back feet, his front feet echoed the motion as he paddled in the air. The pattern was the same: right foot to go left, left foot to go right. To go straight ahead he pushed and paddled with pairs of front feet or back feet or all limbs at once. Sometimes, to feel his actions more precisely, I held my free hand in front of him so he could grasp it with his front legs, making his pivoting unmistakable. 



Straight ahead!



            With practice it became easier for me to interpret his movements. As I caught on, like a horse in training learning to respond to a bit of pressure here, a bit of pressure there, his steering became more subtle. With my human hubris dropping away, I was the horse, the elephant, the Hogwarts broomstick. He was the rider, the mahout, the boy wizard.

            That was only the beginning: a turtle’s natural response refined to communicate his wishes to me and my learning to interpret it. How frustrating it must be to captive turtles to be held tight when they are struggling to go somewhere of their own choosing!

            Years later, we continue to learn from each other, for we have built a variety of more precise means of communication on top of that foundation. Yielding power leads to an interspecies bond stronger than food to the mouth, and other researchers in interspecies communication say too what I have learned: that building a bond is essential to true communication and motivation to learn.