Science: Beastly Behavior

Most animals are color blind. The matador’s cape is bright red only for the human actors and audience; the bull would be even more enraged by a pure white one. Even among animals which can distinguish color, notably fish and birds, brilliant markings do not influence the female’s choice of a mate. They serve primarily to intimidate other males. The barnyard turkey’s puffing and strutting are intended to advertise his dominance, maintain his social position, defend his territory. The female turkey responds to bluff, not beauty.

These are some of the conclusions about animal behavior reached by the late G. Kingsley Noble, onetime curator of experimental biology at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, and now published by his widow and longtime coworker, Ruth Crosby Noble, in The Nature of the Beast (Doubleday Doran, $2.75). A few of the book’s assertions were established by experiment. Readers are asked to accept the rest on faith in the Nobles’ long observation and deductive powers. Some other Noble findings:

¶ A mackerel cannot see or touch itself, thus has no idea what sort of creature it is.

¶ The greatest problem for many animals is to encounter and recognize a possible mate. A male lamprey eel apparently recognizes sex only by attaching himself with his suctorial mouth to another eel that clings to a rock. If the second eel lets go, it is a male and the two separate. If the second eel holds onto the rock, it is a female.

¶ To a dog, a room looks entirely different from the way it looks to people. The dog’s perspective is more foreshortened, so that the walls at the back of the room seem to converge toward the floor. In the same way, the shape of the furniture is changed. As dogs have no sense of color, the room is colorless; even stripes on furniture are indistinguishable.

¶ Among social animals like baboons there is complete dictatorship by an overlord who has first choice of food, mates, sleeping place. He demands subservience and gets it but, says Mrs. Noble: dominance, often as not, is based on bluff.

¶ A dog fits naturally into human society and instinctively subordinates himself to his master because of his primitive urge to join a pack and to be submissive to a leader. He transfers to the human family his loyalty to the dog pack.