The Well-Connected Animal

Although our common use of the term "social network" to cover things like Facebook puts these interactions in too small a box, this survey of the current state of social communication in groups of animals is full of surprises. It's an excellently written popular account.

I read this book thanks to the publisher and NetGalley. As usual, the offer didn't disappoint me.

This book delighted the never materialized little scientist in me, because I was always passionate about animals, animal welfare and research, but rarely did those books manage to make me feel that passion behind the scenes of the research projects those scientists were conducting.

Every being (humans included) connects over food, reproduction, power, safety, travel, communication, culture and health, no matter how diminutive these networks may seem to our eyes. Networks are not present only between individuals, but also between groups and different species, not to mention even peculiar specimens inside one single individual.

After discussing the very idea of the network itself, every type is dissected in their own chapter. Each chapter painstakingly covers three or more dissertations made by author's fellow scientists, including their fascinating stories behind the scenes of each.
I was surprised to discover there are so many animals being analyzed that I did not pay very much attention to - from guppies to manta rays, sifakas and macaques, to hyraxes and tasmanian devils, to bats, cockatoos, bees and... microbes.

Personally I found the most interesting aspect of those projects were sometimes cataclysmic events that were in no way created by scientists, but happened quite accidentally. Those disasters such as hurricanes, droughts, unexpected apocalyptic-like predator attacks threatened to completely derail the experiments, but eventually proved to be oddly beneficial to the projects, because they unwittingly showcased what scientists also needed: how networks function under - mildly put - adverse conditions and how dynamics changed afterwards for the survival and the betterment of the whole group and the individuals.

I do envy those scientists. I would have loved to work with a massive amount of data and to try to make sense of it all. However, I would have had a very difficult time not to get attached to the subjects of those experiments, as many of them did. Good thing though was that after such a sorrow, they felt a bit of relief that in many cases life did find a way, and with those experiments they showed just how. Some might say the conclusions were obvious - humans are also beings who rely on networking in any sense mentioned above. However, it took a generation or two of scientists, and a book or two just like this one I've just read, to accept that such assumptions may be applied to animals of lower ranking than humans, and that we all are not so fundamentally different as we like to think.