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“Fooled Again: Why the Animal Kingdom Is Full of Con Artists” By Elizabeth Kolbert
Some crows “cry wolf” to snatch food from their neighbors; some caterpillars trick ants into treating them like queens. What can we learn from beasts that bluff? Published by The New Yorker on March 27, 2023 On April 20, 1848, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates set off for the Amazon on a boat named Mischief. The two young men—Bates was twenty-three, Wallace twenty-five—had met a few years earlier, probably at a library in Leicester, in England’s East Midlands. Both were passionate naturalists, and both were strapped for cash. (Neither had been able to afford university.) To finance their adventures, they planned to ship specimens back to London, where they could be sold to wealthy collectors. For reasons that no one has ever been able to explain—but that many have speculated about—Wallace and Bates separated soon after they reached Brazil. In the decade that followed, Wallace amassed an
immense trove of new species; lost most of them in a ship fire; set off again, for Southeast Asia; and, with Charles Darwin, discovered natural selection. Bates, meanwhile, remained in Brazil. He sailed up the Tapajós, an Amazon tributary, and then up the Cupari, a tributary of the Tapajós. Travel in the region was often agonizingly slow; to get from the town of Óbidos to Manaus, a journey of less than four hundred miles, took him nine weeks. (At some point during the trip, he was robbed of most of the money he was carrying.) Bates would find a congenial town and spend months, even years, there, making daily forays into the surrounding rain forest. He tromped around in a checked shirt and denim pants, an outfit considered outré by the British merchants he encountered in Brazil, who wore their top hats rain or shine. As a collector, Bates was primarily interested in insects, of which there seemed to be a nearly limitless variety. Just in the area around Tefé, a town a few hundred miles upriver of Manaus, he discovered three thousand species of beetle. Bates would rise with the sun, spend five or six hours in the field, and then work until dark preparing and labelling what he had caught. He kept meticulous records—notebooks filled with descriptions of the animals’ body type, preferred habitat, and behavior, often accompanied by delicate watercolor drawings. Assessing his specimens, Bates came to notice something curious. Some of the butterflies he had netted, which had appeared more or less identical while flitting through the forest, turned out, when pinned and examined closely, to belong to entirely different families. This was the case not just with one pair of lookalikes but with several. Careful study of the doppelgängers revealed an intriguing pattern. Members of one species in the pair usually gave off a strange odor; Bates surmised that these butterflies were probably unpalatable. By the time Bates returned to England, in the summer of 1859, both Wallace and Darwin had published their earliest papers on evolution. Bates was an instant convert. The new theory allowed him to explain what he had seen. The impostor species, he decided, had, under the pressure of natural selection, evolved to look like the noxious ones. In this way, the nontoxic butterflies gained protection from predators. Bates laid out his ideas in a paper that he delivered to the Linnean Society, in London. Though the officers of the society weren’t especially interested in the phenomenon he described, Darwin immediately recognized its significance. “I cordially congratulate you on your first great work,” he wrote to Bates in
- The imitation of a harmful species by a harmless one has since become known as Batesian mimicry.
The bluestriped fangblenny is a color-shifting fish that lives in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Fangblennies hang out around so-called cleaner fish; the latter make their living eating parasites and other types of gunk that build up on the scales of larger fish. The relationship between cleaners and their “clients” is mutually beneficial: the smaller fish get a meal; the larger get rid of a nuisance. Young fangblennies assume the coloration of a cleaner fish; then, once a client draws near, the fangblennies remove not gunk but a chunk of the fish’s flesh. As Martin Stevens, an ecologist at the University of Exeter and the author of “Cheats and Deceits” (2016), points out, “Fangblennies are not only costly to the fish they attack, but also to the real cleaner fish.” Client fish naturally grow wary once they’ve been bitten. Sun compares fangblennies, not unadmiringly, it seems, to “gangsters running a racket.” Sun is given to punchy pronouncements. There are, he claims, two “laws” of cheating in the animal kingdom, by which he appears to mean two basic methods of deception. In one, an animal exploits another animal’s cognitive weaknesses. Batesian mimicry falls into this category: the strategy works because potential predators either can’t see well enough or lack the wherewithal to distinguish a poisonous butterfly from its double. Brood parasites, too, take advantage of their victims’ cognitive limitations. Birds, it turns out, have poor egg-recognition skills—in some cases, almost comically poor. In one of a series of famous experiments, the Dutch animal-behavior expert Niko Tinbergen showed that a greylag goose, when faced with a choice between rescuing its own egg and rescuing a volleyball, would pick the ball. “To exploit the cognitive loopholes of another species, you only need a good enough disguise to fool your target,” Sun observes. “Often a very crude mimic will suffice.” The other way that animals cheat, in Sun’s schema, is by issuing false information, or, more plainly, by lying. Many animals (and even plants) communicate with one another; this is often a critical survival skill. But the possibility of communication inevitably opens up the possibility of miscommunication. Crows, for example, issue alarm calls to alert other crows to potential danger. Conniving corvids, according to Sun, “cry wolf” to scare their neighbors from food. Formosan squirrels also issue alarm calls: during mating season, sneaky males squeak out alarms to distract competitors. Sex, Sun observes, is fertile ground for deception. Male fireflies from the genus Photinus flash to attract mates. If females are interested, they flash back. Females from the genus Photuris mimic Photinus females’ flashes; then, when males get close enough, they eat them. ( Photuris females have become known as the firefly “femmes fatales.”) Some male garter snakes emit faux female pheromones; by confusing their rivals, they increase their chances of scoring. Blister beetles belonging to the species Meloe franciscanus , in the American West, practice an elaborate, sex-dependent form of kleptoparasitism. Newly hatched Meloe franciscanus larvae hang out together in
clumps and collectively emit chemicals that attract male bees. When a male tries to mate with the clump, the larvae attach themselves to his back with special hooks on their feet. If the male is later lucky enough to find an actual mate, the larvae relocate to her back, hitch a ride to her nest, consume the pollen she has gathered, and, for good measure, eat her young. Frauds like those perpetrated by femme-fatale fireflies and kleptoparasitic beetles obviously take a heavy toll on their victims. This is precisely why, Sun contends, deception is such a powerful evolutionary force. The cheated are under heavy selective pressure to outwit the cheaters, who then come under heavy pressure to refine their techniques. The choice is innovate or die. Consider the case of the superb fairy wren, a small, sweet-looking bird native to Australia. Horsfield’s bronze cuckoos—also small and sweet-looking—frequently parasitize fairy wrens’ nests. Fairy-wren moms, it seems, have come up with a musical defense: they sing a special tune to their chicks while they’re still in their shells. The mother birds repeat the tune until their chicks are ready to hatch, which is around the time when the bronze cuckoos swoop down to deposit their eggs. Once the fairy-wren chicks emerge, they incorporate the notes their mother has taught them into their begging call. The cuckoo chicks, either ignorant of the melodic password or unable to mimic it, get fed less, or sometimes not at all. “Cheating schemes spark countermoves, which in turn beget counter-counter-cheating maneuvers, ad infinitum,” Sun writes. “In the process, a theoretically infinite number of tactics will be contrived.” When it comes to scheming, of course, one species far outstrips the rest. In the second half of “The Liars of Nature,” Sun turns his attention to dishonesty among Homo sapiens. As a case study, he draws on the life of Frank Abagnale, whose autobiography, “Catch Me If You Can,” served as the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name. By his own account, Abagnale’s career as a con artist began in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when, as a teen- ager, he ran away from home. Straightaway, he altered his driver’s license, to make himself ten years older, and started kiting checks. Soon he moved on to more elaborate scams. He got hold of a uniform and posed as a Pan Am pilot, a ruse that enabled to him to fly around the country free and to cash forged checks stamped with the airline’s logo. In what was perhaps his most imaginative exploit, he visited the University of Arizona and convinced some comely coeds that he was there to recruit stewardesses. He and his “recruits” then spent the summer swanning around Europe on bilked funds.
Abagnale’s marketing of his supposedly outrageous scams was far and away his most outrageously successful scam—not so much a cheat as a meta-cheat. (Not only did it yield a book and a hit movie; it also inspired a musical that enjoyed a brief Broadway run.) Yet Sun cites “Catch Me If You Can” as if it were a historical record. How to explain his apparent credulity? Was he actually duped by Abagnale? Or is he only pretending to be, to demonstrate his larger point about the power of deceit? Honestly, who can say? ♦
