Do animals hold funerals?

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1:34So I put them out here. The chicken's definitely gone. There is no chicken.

1:40Caroline Steel:Welcome to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that answers your science questions. Do you want to see what's on the camera? Yeah, let's see what's on the camera. I'm Caroline Steele, and you're joining me rummaging around in some bushes on a strange city adventure. So, this has been triggered by something. OK, so you're opening up the camera. Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. I'm being shown videos from wildlife cameras, camouflaged little devices that record when they detect movement, like the twitch of a tail or the flap of a wing. Oh, what's that? Oh, we've definitely got some night-time activity.

2:22Caroline Steel:I'm hoping for a clue to help answer this week's question, or at least part of it, because this one comes in two parts from two people. I'm Molly and this is Dougie. Hiya. And we live in South East London in the UK. Perfect, thank you. You happy, Dougie? Yeah. OK, so what's your question for CrowdScience? We thought of it because we were walking along the seafront in Wales and the... How come the flag was ripped off? Yeah, the town flag had been what we thought, like, ripped off in the wind. There was just a shred left. And you were wondering where it had gone. And I said probably, sadly, it's ended up in the sea with all the plastic rubbish and maybe a fish ate it.

3:12And then what did you say? The fish couldn't have the headstone. Yeah, you said a fish would have an RIP, which is rest in peace, that is often on a headstone.

3:23Caroline Steel:Dougie has seen R.I.P., Rest in Peace, written on headstones which mark graves. But it's a human practice, not something we've yet seen in fish. I sort of said, oh, well, it would die, but fish don't have headstones with R.I.P. written on it. And then we started thinking, do any animals have anything like a funeral or any kind of way of marking it? Maybe something similar to us, like a chimp. Chimpy! Because they have more family and friends relationships, don't they? So I wonder if they might mark it. What do you think, Dougie? Do you think some animals might have funerals, like humans do? Maybe.

4:06Caroline Steel:Maybe? Like an elephant. Maybe an elephant. That was what I was going to guess. Yes. So you sort of want to know, do any animals mark the death of other animals in their species? So do they have funerals or headstones or things like that? Yeah. Yeah. And sort of is there anyone that does something a bit ceremonial? And then we started talking about even if they don't do a ceremony, does anything happen? Because where we live in London, there's actually quite a lot of birds and other wildlife. and we hardly ever see dead ones. And you think just naturally they must be coming to the end of their life all the time.

4:50And we've only seen one dead bird. Okay, well, we're going to have to try and work this out.

4:58Caroline Steel:Do you think we're going to find the answer, Dougie? It's on the radio, mate. You can't nod. I saw your nod. I appreciate it. Thanks for your vote of confidence. All over the world, end-of-life ceremonies are a big part of human culture. From solemn Christian burials to families dancing with their ancestors, like Madagascar's Van Marihana. But are funerals uniquely human? Or do animals mark death with some sort of ritual too? And then there's Dougie and Molly's other question. What happens to the bodies of animals when they die? There are presumably no burials or cremations, yet somehow we rarely come across dead animals in the wild.

5:48Caroline Steel:Which brings us back to those camera traps. So last night I might have looked a little bit unusual because I had a tray of chicken and I put cameras around the edge of this environment. And more than one person asked me what I was up to. This raw chicken waitress unnerving the people of Cardiff in the UK is Dr Sarah Perkins. I'm a wildlife biologist at Cardiff University and I've been running a citizen science programme called RoadLab for about the last 13 years. RoadLab is all about counting the numbers of roadkill, animals that die from being hit by vehicles. But it's not an easy task. So some of these animals might disappear really, really quickly and if people are missing roadkill, the estimates we're getting is a massive underestimate.

6:37They're missing it because it's been scavenged. So we wanted to know how quickly does it disappear. But actually it was quite challenging to put the camera traps on actual roadkill. So we replicated the study using fakie roadkill. What's fakie roadkill? So the fakie roadkill in this instance was a chicken head donated by the local butcher.

6:58Caroline Steel:To help her catch the scavengers in the act, Sarah hid pieces of chicken and filmed them using hidden cameras. Which I also think will help us work out the answer to Dougie and Molly's question. Why don't we see more dead animals in our parks and green spaces? So Dougie and Molly's question, I approach from a slightly different way. We know that there are species that are scavengers that will feed on these. So we thought we need to put some camera traps on these animals. so you've come at this question thinking what happens to animals that die on roads Dougie and Molly are interested as to what happens when animals die in general but I guess we're going to have a similar answer right because the behavior of other animals in the environment or humans or the dying animals is going to be similar whether they die on a road or anywhere else really absolutely so inadvertently I think we may have answered some of that question so last night you walked around this bit of green outside the university you put down bits of chicken and then you put a camera sort of what focused on the bit of chicken to see does it last the night and if it doesn't what's happened to it exactly if something goes in front of the camera it triggers it and it records about 20 seconds of video so we get a little snippet of what's come in and had a look or taken the bait or foraged on it a little bit okay where's the first camera hidden If you follow me into the undergrowth, we'll see how close we can get.

8:29Caroline Steel:OK. I don't see any chicken on the ground, so it looks like all the chicken has gone. I think so. There's a camera. Oh, I've got it. So we could look at this one first. Yeah, OK, cool. Let's have a look. Sarah and I are excitedly peering at the camera's tiny display screen, hoping a scavenger might appear for a snack. Oh, we've definitely got some night-time activity. Who have we got there? Look, it's a little bum. I'd say it's quite a big bum. Okay. So that tail there is quite long. That's a rat. That's a rat. That is a rat. Oh, my gosh. Oh, look at eating it. Oh, lovely. It's eating it then and there.

9:04And off he goes.

9:04Caroline Steel:Oh, it's really cute. Isn't that great? So we know that rats attended the overnight chicken buffet. Who else? So that looks like we've got a crow come in. So they're really common scavenger species. So the corvids, the magpies, the crows. Can we see the chicken? Has the crow taken the chicken or is it already? There's the chicken, there's the crow. That is looking guilty. Looking guilty. Looking guilty, guilty, guilty. Gone. Crow gone, chicken gone. Oh, night time. Oh, here we go. We've got some mice here. There's a whole zoo's worth of animals that will take a free meal if they come across it.

9:45The crows and the magpies hang out in the parks. The gulls hang out in the streets. And the foxes are all about the night time. We've also got some domestic dogs and the domestic cats. So they're coming in and taking food that perhaps we're leaving or, you know, animals that have died and scavenging on that so we don't get a big pile of bodies in the park or in the urban area. So they're like the invisible clean-up crew. Yeah, they're doing us a favour. Exactly. We don't really realise it.

10:16Caroline Steel:So, Dougie, Molly, we have an answer to your question. If an animal is killed by a vehicle or dies of sickness or old age in the wild, you're unlikely to see the body because usually a scavenger gets there first. Fresh bodies are more likely to disappear quickly, especially because there's kind of a return on investment for a scavenger. You know, decomposing body only has value to a scavenger up until a certain point. And that's kind of the juice isn't worth the squeeze. This is Dr Kaylee Swift. She's an ecologist at the University of Washington in the USA. She studies how birds respond to death, which has given her an eye for spotting what happens to dead animals.

11:01For animals that have died from injury or disease, often they're falling into shrubbage and stuff that would conceal their body. and then their final resting place is there. It might get taken pretty quickly, but if that doesn't happen, it might be around for a long time. It might be around until it turns to feathers and bones. I see that here in the city of Seattle, not uncommonly. Obviously, over time, the organisms on kind of the smallest end of the food chain have munched it up. So the small ones are on cleanup duty at that point, basically. Exactly, exactly.

11:37Caroline Steel:Organisms like insects and bacteria will eventually break down any carcasses that haven't already been eaten by scavengers. But generally, there's very little for them left to do. There's one assumption, which is when we think about the volume of individuals and death, we are thinking about how people are dying all the time, they're dying in hospitals. But most wildlife does not die of old age. There's billions of birds flying around in the sky. Presumably they're dying. But the mechanism of that death is not that they have reached old age and fall off a branch. It's that they're getting killed by predators.

12:18Maybe they're dying from an underlying factor like injury or disease. But again, most often in those cases, what's actually going to kill them is direct predation. So part of the answer to why don't we see more dead animals is because the cause of death for most things is getting eaten. That is bleak. It depends. If you're the one doing the eating, then that's life sustaining.

12:48Caroline Steel:The reality is, unlike us lucky humans, most animals don't make it to old age. Instead, they become dinner. unless they're towards the top of the food chain. In Seattle, where Kaylee lives, crows don't have many predators, so they often die from disease, starvation or accidents, which means they are sometimes found dead in the wild. And when another crow spots the body, a fascinating scene unfolds. The first bird to observe the dead individual will produce an alarm call and that results in the recruitment of other crows to the surrounding area. The birds gather and make a whole lot of noise around the dead crow.

13:36They'll get together in a collective flock, often calling during this period, perching in trees and there'll be kind of these periods where they're very silent and then they'll get really loud again and then eventually they'll start to disperse. To me, that response sounds quite ceremonial. I like to use the term funeral because I like for people to understand what I'm talking about when I say that I study dead birds. But the sort of jargony way that we often describe it in the literature is a cacophonous aggregation.

14:11Caroline Steel:Cacophonous aggregation. I mean, yes, funeral sounds much easier to wrap your head around. And do you know why they're doing this? Yeah, so I know one reason, or at least I have very good evidence for part of the reason. So one of the things that we tested was whether or not crows use these opportunities where they discover a dead crow to learn about things in the environment that represent new threats, danger learning and avoidance. And two of the things that we looked at is predators. And in this case, we used people because in a crow's world, we exist on a spectrum of danger. Sometimes we're completely neutral.

14:55Sometimes we're very dangerous. Sometimes we take shotguns and we kill them. But then on the other end of the spectrum are the people who love crows, who feed them. So crows are really good at recognizing people, particularly if we're people that they see in their environment often.

15:15Caroline Steel:How do you know this? Because you can't ask a crow, hey, do you recognize me? Yeah. So before I started my graduate studies, there was this now very famous study that came out of the University of Washington where they looked at facial recognition among crows by wearing masks when they captured crows. And the function of capturing them is that we could individually mark them, put colored bands on them, and then they would let the crows go and come back later wearing that same mask. And what they found is that the banded crows, the ones they had interacted directly with, when they would see that mask, they would alarm call.

15:57They would act the way that they act towards a predator. And more importantly, they found that that spread through the local crow community to crows that they hadn't originally interacted with. So they're actually sharing that information through the flock. And also they found that they share it generationally.

16:16Caroline Steel:That's such complex communication. So from the alarm call, another crow who wasn't there to witness someone capturing a crow basically manages to get from the alarm call of a crow who was there that this person is dangerous. Keep away. From the alarm call and the body language.

16:43Caroline Steel:Are there any other examples of animals that sort of behave similarly in death? Yeah, we can kind of think of death responses on a spectrum. And the social insects, termites, bees, these are animals that have very systematic like, oh, we found a corpse and we know exactly what we're going to do with it. And they do the same thing every time. And then on the other end is the animals that have the really variable responses. They might gently groom or attend to their dead. They might be really violent towards it. They might ignore it completely. And on that spectrum, socially intelligent animals might be responding to their dead for a number of reasons.

17:27And some of them are going to be immediate survival reasons of something dangerous has happened. I want to assess so that I can avoid it, too. But on the other hand, we know that for social animals, long term bonds are also a really important social strategy. And that would suggest that there may actually be some adaptive benefit to maintaining deep emotional bonds and having some type of emotive response to their dead.

18:00Caroline Steel:Crows aren't alone in attending to their dead. Socially intelligent animals respond in a range of ways, from gathering round and squawking to gentle grooming. Which makes sense if you frame the behaviour as learning about the death to protect themselves from meeting the same end. But could animals also be responding to the loss of a friend, even grieving? That's what we're going to be looking at next. This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market Summer Fruit Fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic and bursting with flavour. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt.

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19:33Caroline Steel:You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that answers your science questions. In this episode, we're answering a question from Molly and eight-year-old Dougie. They emailed crowdscience at bbc.co.uk to ask if animals have a funeral or sort of end-of-life ceremony when one of their kin dies. Dougie was curious about one animal in particular. They can cry and they're famous for their magnificent memories. The African savannah elephant is the world's largest land animal. It's also the favourite animal of this Botswanan safari guide. My name is Matali Musheti, well known as metal in the tourism industry.

20:23Caroline Steel:Metal has spent 18 years with these giants in Chobe National Safari Park. Elephants have an excellent sense of smell and when another elephant dies, they detect it from miles away They are walking along the trail and suddenly the wind comes to them and then they pick the scent of the remains The elephants walk towards the dead elephant and begin to explore They will just touch the bones with the end of the trunk He touches the bones, he touches the roof of the palate and then he stimulates the sensitive organ inside their mouth to analyse who is this. So they use their trunk to kind of sniff around the body and then they have an organ on the top of their mouth that gives them information.

21:15Caroline Steel:What kind of thing is this organ detecting using the scent? What's going on? Yeah, it's an organ that is meant to analyze who is this. And then if it's somebody whom they don't know, he will say, okay, I thought I know him, I don't know him. If he analyze and he say, oh, is this one? Then the reaction will be Trumpety calling everybody like, come and we investigate this. And then another one there is doing the same thing. And as the other one say, let me confirm, is it he? Of course, this is him. That's when you will see the emotional and the aggression. You will hear them living that stress and even sometimes kicking the logs.

22:04Caroline Steel:OK, so they investigate the body of a dead elephant with their trunks. They might kick a log or something with their feet. Do they do anything else that might suggest that they're sort of acknowledging or holding a vigil for the dead? Yeah, you will see them gather just like people. When they are morning, they will get into that moment of silence. You will see them crowding around those bones, motionless, silently. And then from there, sometimes you see them like scooping the sand, throwing on the bones. and then after they feel like it's done, it's settled, then they start to lead in the walk and say, OK, done, we are done, let's go.

22:45Caroline Steel:Do you think that behaviour is sort of funeral-like or ritual-like? It seems that you think they're mourning like humans do at a funeral. Yeah, truly, it really shows that they feel what we feel. Lashing out in anger and standing in silence around the dead sounds awfully familiar and very human. Metal is convinced that elephants are mourning. Scientifically, it's very hard to prove which, if any, emotions an animal is experiencing. But seeing how certain social species react when a companion dies has led many people to come to a similar conclusion. Animals can grieve. I've spent the last dozen or so years studying animals' responses to death, and we do see a whole range of responses.

23:42To my mind, there's no question that there is a component of emotion in terms of viewing and spending time at the body by some elephants.