Our family and other animals: do we deliberately downplay other species' intelligence?

I recently heard about a project investigating canine intelligence, the results being that man's best friend can distinguish similar-sounding words, even if spoken by strangers. Yet again, it appears there is a less and less that makes our species unique: from the problem-solving skills of birds to social insects' use of farming techniques we find ourselves part of a continuum of life rather than standing alone at the apex.

Reading the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom's thought-provoking book Superintelligence, I was struck by his description of the variation of human intellect (from as he put it, Einstein to the village idiot) as being startling narrow when compared to the potential range of possible intelligences, both biological and artificial.

The complexity of animal brains has been analysed by both quantitive and qualititive methods, the former dealing with such measurements as the number of neurons while the latter looks at behaviour of members of a species, both in the wild and under laboratory conditions. However, a comparison of these two doesn't necessarily provide any neat correlation.

For example, although mammals are generally - and totally incorrectly - often described as the pinnacle of creation due to their complex behaviour and birth-to-adult learning curve, the quantitive differences in neural architecture within mammals are far greater than those between amphibians and some mammalian families. In addition, there are many birds, mostly in the Psittacidae (parrot) and Corvidae (crow) families, that are both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to most mammals with the exception of some primates.

I think it was the essays of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould that introduced me to the concept of EQ or encephalisation quotient, which is a label for the brain-mass to body-mass ratio. On these terms, the human brain is far larger than nearly all other species with a similar sized body, the exception (perhaps not surprisingly) being dolphins.

However, it's difficult to draw accurate conclusions just from examination of this general trend: both the absolute size of the brain and neuron density play a fundamental role in cognitive powers. For example, gorillas have a lower EQ that some monkeys, but being a large ape have a far greater brain mass. It could be said then, that perhaps beyond a certain mass the absolute brain size renders the EQ scale of little use. A 2009 study found that different rules for scaling come into play, with humans also having a highly optimal use of the volume available with the cranium, in addition to the economical architecture common among primates.

As historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, the development of farming, at least in Eurasia, went hand in hand with the evolution of sophisticated religious beliefs. This led to a change in human attitudes towards the other animals, with a downplay of the latter's emotional needs and their categorisation as inferior, vassal species in a pre-ordained (read: divinely-given) chain of being.

By directly connecting intelligence - or a lack thereof - to empathy and emotions, it is easy to claim that domesticated animal species don't mind their ruthless treatment. It isn't just industrial agriculture that makes the most of this lack of empathy today; I've seen small sharks kept in a Far Eastern jewellery store (i.e. as decoration, not as future food) in tanks barely longer than the creature's own body length.

Although the problem-solving antics of birds such as crows are starting to redress this, most people still consider animal intelligence strictly ordered by vertebrate classes, which leads to such inaccuracies as the 'three second goldfish memory'. I first noticed how incorrect this was when keeping freshwater invertebrates, namely shield shrimp A.K.A. triops, almost a decade ago. Even these tiny creatures appear to have a range of personalities, or perhaps I should say - in an effort to avoid blatant anthropomorphizing - a wide variety of behaviour.

Now on the verge of setting up a tropical aquarium for one of my children, I've been researching what is required to keep fish in fairly small tanks. I've spoken to various aquarium store owners and consulted numerous online resources, learning in the process that the tank environment needs to fulfill certain criteria. There's nothing in usual in this you might think, except that the psychological requirements need to be considered alongside the physical ones.

For example, tank keepers use words such as 'unhappy' and 'depression' to describe what happens when schooling fish are kept in too small a group, active swimmers in too little space and timid species housed in an aquarium without hiding places. We do not consider this fish infraclass - i.e. teleosts - to be Einsteins (there's that label again) of the animal kingdom, but it would appear we just haven't been observing them with enough rigour. They may have minute brains, but there is a complexity that suggests a certain level of emotional intelligence in response to their environment.

So where does all this leave us Homo sapiens, masters of all we survey? Neanderthal research is increasingly espousing the notion that in many ways these extinct cousins/partial ancestors could give us modern humans a run for our money. Perhaps our success is down to one particular component of uniqueness, namely our story-telling ability, a product of our vivid imagination.

Simply because other species lack this skill doesn't mean that they don't have any form of intellectual ability; they may indeed have a far richer sense of their universe than we would like to believe. If our greatest gift is our intelligence, don't we owe it to all other creatures we raise and hold captive to make their lives as pleasant as possible? Whether it's battery farming or keeping goldfish in a bowl, there's plenty we could do to improve things if we consider just what might be going on in the heads of our companion critters.

Ocean acidification: climate change at the sour end

A few weeks ago, I overheard a 58 year old man telling a 12 year old boy that the most dire of scientists' warnings concerning global warming over the past 30 years had failed to materialise - and that what the boy needed to learn was to be able to separate facts from propaganda.

Although it is no doubt next to impossible to be able to change such entrenched mindsets as those of this particular baby boomer, there is still extremely limited public understanding of the insidious changes currently taking place in our oceans. In addition to the rise in both sea temperature and sea level (approaching a centimetre every two-to-three years) a rapid increase in ocean acidity is now on course to profoundly disrupt marine life.

With the USA pulling out of the Paris Agreement, will the rest of world manage to pull together in order to prevent another tipping point? After all, increasing ocean acidification isn't something us non-marine scientists can directly observe. One key point that is immediately obvious is that it isn't a localised issue: as a third of atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed into the oceans, all the planet's seas will be affected. The decrease of 0.1pH unit in the past few centuries equates to an astonishing 26-29% increase in acidity. What's more, this change is predicted to have doubled by the end of this century. Clearly, the effect on marine life is set to be substantial.

So what is being done to assess the probable issues? Various projects around the world are using mesocosms - transparent cylinders up to ten metres long - to understand the effects of current and predicted near-future acidity levels on marine life. Coral bleaching is possibly the one condition people will have heard of (although there appear to be an astonishing number of people who think that coral is a plant rather than invertebrate animal) but sea temperature changes are as much a cause as increased acidity. Apart from causing stress to some marine organisms, leading to such conditions as lowered immune systems and so the spread of disease, acidification reduces the material available for shell and carapace formation, especially for juveniles and nauplii.

The problem isn't so much the change itself as the rate of change, which is far faster than normal geophysical processes. Indeed, one report states that over the past 20 million years, changes in oceanic acidification have been barely one percent of the current rate. Obviously, there is minimal chance of the non-directed mechanism of natural selection keeping pace with adaptations to the new conditions.

While many organisms will suffer, some such as jellyfish and toxic algae may benefit, with the latter leading to the poisoning of key fishing industry species. This in turn could lead to toxins entering the human food chain, on top of the economic issues from the decline in fish and shellfish stocks. Indeed, the US Pacific coast aquaculture industry is already experiencing a reduction in the shellfish populations. This will be in addition to the pollution of fresh waterways already explored in a post last year.

Of the various experiments aiming to understand the impact of the rapid increase, the largest project is the pan-European Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification (BIOACID) scheme. Giant mesocosms sunk in a Swedish fjord have been sealed with local ocean water (and associated organisms) and half of them modified with the projected pH level.

Similar but small projects are underway in New Zealand and the Canary Islands, with preservation of edible stocks a key priority. Another problem with a decline in shellfish species destined for human consumption would be the loss of the raw material for chitosan, which may prove to be an ecologically-friendly replacement for plastic packaging.

Clearly, there could be numerous - and some as yet unknown - knock-on effects from the ocean acidification. Unlike the rise in atmospheric temperature, it is much more difficult to see the results of this fundamental change and for the public to understand the consequences. Yet again, the life forms affected are far from the cute poster species usually paraded to jump-start the public's environmental consciousness. Unfortunately, these may prove to be far more critical to the future of humanity and the wider world than say, giant pandas or Amur leopards. It's time for some serious sci-comm to spread the warning message!