 Hello and welcome to the OIST podcast, bringing you the latest in science and tech from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University. My name is Danny Ellenby and joining me today is Dr. Tamar Gutnick, a researcher from the Biology and Physics Unit here at OIST. Dr. Gutnick studies animal behaviour, learning and cognition, and the underlying neural mechanisms and strange and unusual creatures. During her masters and PhD at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she started studying octopus, tortoise and stingray cognition, adding the mysterious cuttlefish and its display patterns to her research repertoire during her postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. Here at OIST, she studies a range of different cephalopods, including octopus, cuttlefish and squid, and has recently concluded an almost decade-long research study into the ultra-long-term memory of tortoises. I sat down with Dr. Gutnick and had a chat about her research. So before we get into your research, please could you introduce yourself to us and give us a general overview of your research area? Well, that's an actually hard question. You start with a hard question. So I'm currently a postdoc at OIST and my general topic of research is cephalopods. Normally, but I have an interest in comparative cognition, really, in learning and brain in basically a wide variety of animals. So what first inspired you to study cognition in animals and what was it that particularly interested you about this research area? I just found out I was good at training animals to do things. When I started working, I actually started on a more classical training and classical work on rodents, on rats. And I discovered I have an act of working with animals. And the animals got weirder. As my career developed, the animals got weirder and weirder. The rodents turned into octopuses. The octopuses turned into anything I could get my hands on, really. What would you say is the weirdest animal that you've ever worked with? Weirdest animal I've ever worked with. I mean, octopuses are pretty weird. They live in an alien world and the way their body is organized and their brain is organized. It's all so different from our vertebrates, from us for sure. But so it really is an alien. Probably the turtles are one of my favorites. So the giant tortoises are probably one of my favorites because they're kind of like a really slow dog. Not mentally slow, just movement-wise. It's nice that you touched on the tortoises and the turtles because you recently published a paper on animal cognition and tortoises, which attracted a lot of widespread attention all around the globe. So first of all, could you explain to us what you did with the turtles and what you saw and why it's so cool? So the turtles, we started the work, I think, over 10 years ago, maybe 11 years ago. Really, from the moment I sort of got to know them, it was clear that these animals are intelligent and they're very curious and they want to do something. So they were always trying to get your attention. They wanted you to interact. And as most things turned into an experiment very quickly, it turned into an experiment. And what we did is we did a very common method of training, which is basically associative learning, where you pair a reward with an object that has no value. So what we did is associative learning and that's a target training. Basically, we paired a rubber ball, dog toy, to a reward. And for the turtles, reward was a certain kind of food that they preferred. It was dependent on the turtle, which food that was. But that is, it's a kind of training that is very common also in zoos as well. But we just did it in a very methodical way and recorded the process of the animals learning. And when we started doing this, we did this in the Vienna Zoo. So what we did is we trained each turtle alone. So the turtles would almost actually line up to work. And they would go into an area that was visually closed. And we would train the turtle for 10 trials a day. And then he would go out and the next one would come in. And when this worked so fast, we decided to do a color discrimination experiment. Where basically we took the same kind of rubber ball, except that each tortoise was assigned his own color. So George, who is our hundred, now he's over a hundred years old, over 200 kilo adabra tortoise. His color was brown, he had a brown ball was the correct color. And then you have another color that's a distractor. And you present them both at the same time and the animal basically has to go to the correct color every time. And that was the experiment. And they learned very fast before that I had worked with training octopuses to do tricky mazes and turtles were so much fast. Really? Oh God. Well, the mazes were very, but that worked very fast. And we had seven turtles in the Vienna zoo. And we decided that we want to go bigger, not physically 200 kilo. It's about as big as they get. So we contacted through the Vienna zoo, we contacted the zoo and we did the same training in the zoo, except in the zoo. We had a situation in which we couldn't visually separate the animals. So when we started the training, the animals weren't actually made to look at each other on purpose, but they could and they did. So we did the same training, these two stages, one is the target training, here's a ball, ball means food. And come walk to this ball and then the second stage with color discrimination. And we were surprised that when these animals were trained with invisible range of each other, this first go to your target task, go to a target task. So the first association task was a lot of tasks. And the color discrimination was at the same speed. So we think there's an effect of social learning. Basically the one animal doing the task alerts the other animal that something interesting is going on here. We don't know if the animal is can tell, oh, you know, that ball means food or it just sees a ball and says, oh. He's paying attention to that. Maybe that's interesting. So we can't, because the way the experiment was built, we can't say which type of social learning is involved, but it is a form of social learning. So that's really interesting that turtles and horses, which evolved so long ago from us or they exhibit these kinds of social learning. I think a lot of what we don't know is limited by what we haven't had the chance to test yet. So the other thing that we did with these turtles specifically within the Vienna zoo turtles is we came back to the Vienna zoo turtles. We came back three months after we had trained them to do the color discrimination. We came back and then we trained them again. What do you guys remember? And they all remembered the first task immediately and the long term memory. They didn't remember immediately, but they did relearn it faster. So three months is nice and long for a long term memory study. Then last year we had the chance to go back and test the turtles nine years after their long term memory. And what we found was that a blue rubber ball still means carrot to them. And in the zoo, the animals basically lived there. So we were very lucky to be able to come in nine years later and see, wow, these animals still remember this. The reason we thought this is a possibility is because there's lots of anecdotal evidence that the animals remember their keepers. They react to specific keepers more than they react to other keepers. So there is a whole life going on there in the life of one of these giant tortoises that we're just, you know, we're not in on. It's an interesting point you mentioned the kind of access to these kind of more weird and unusual animals that aren't usually studied. So a lot of the research you've done, both with the turtles and then also stingrays, they were carried out in zoos. Now recently, these have become very controversial. So what is your opinion on zoos? Why are they so important to the science? Well, I think what we see is, like I said, our understanding of the cognitive abilities of animals is really limited by how many animals we've tested. And the zoos give you the access that you don't have in any other situation and you wouldn't have in any other situation. And I think for research, that is very important. And we've found them very willing to participate and to collaborate because part of keeping the animals means that a lot of them are very curious and very interested in what their animals can do. And I think they have an important educational value. I think one of the things that is very important is the understanding that keeping an animal is not just keeping an animal, but you have to keep a healthy happy. And understanding what the cognitive abilities and how the brains of different animals work is something that is very important for us being able to keep healthy, happy animals. And even in lab settings, that is a huge importance for good animals mean good research, basically. And I think being able to look at, so looking at the stingray, cartilaginous fish, not many people have access to those animals to work on them. At the moment, these animals are probably over a meter by now, each one of them is like a giant huge frying pan of an animal. How big are your frying pans? Maybe if you're cooking for an entire tribe. So being able to work with an animal like that is something that you can't do in the lab. There are some labs that work with sharks, but it's very few and far between. And even with cephalopods, the moment the animal gets more difficult to take care of, more difficult to raise, then you have a problem of how and where to do. And I mean, we are very happy to have collaborations with Zeus because that gives us access to animals that just are not possible to work with otherwise. So you've mentioned a whole range of animals that you mentioned cephalopods, the octopus is stingrays, the cartilaginous fish, and then turtles. So out of them, which is the favorite species that you've worked with and why? Oh, wow. Difficult question. I mean, saying this, I think I've said before that I have trained all these animals and I still haven't managed to train my dog. But I can manage to train other animals. Oh, favorite animal. I don't know. They're also different, right? Yeah, it's so different. I mean, you can't, well, you can pet a stingray, but it's not as easy as petting a giant tortoise. And octopuses are not particularly fond of being pet. Yeah, I think at the moment, George is kind of high on my list because I, in our last vacation, I got to see him and snuggle. So George is the over 100 year old, 200 kilogram tortoise in Vienna Zoo. Yeah. So can you tell us about some of your escapades with George? Oh, George. He's a character. He has a, he has a sense of right and wrong. And I don't know, that's it. That's, that's putting a little bit of my human point of view into a turtle, which is exactly what we try not to do in our research, but it's really hard not to do when you talk about them. But one of my favorite George stories is that if you've ever had an animal, a turtle that has a beak and you give him a piece of carrot and he snaps it in half and half falls on the ground. The half hour of watching him try and pick up the other half of carrot is very, very, very exciting. He's like, I'm on a schedule here. Come on. So I figured you got half a reward. So I'm just going to take the other half and use it for, you know, next trial. I picked it up. George looked at me, shouted, and then walked straight through me. He just, and there is, he walked straight through me. He didn't, you know, walk around just figured you're the one who's going to move. And that was it. He was not willing to play for the rest of the day. And yeah, but I mean, this was in the stage where we were sort of trying to figure out what they like eating and, and stuff like that. So, but, but he had the sense of I should not have picked up that carrot. That was his. Yeah, you did him wrong there. So would you say all the tortoises have like different personalities then? Yeah, they do. Personality is a very difficult thing to describe because we always use sort of a human based point of view. But there is also a scientific way of describing personalities in animals. But in a human point of view of, you know, describing the turtle as I would my dog. Yeah, George is the one who figures he should be the most important for me to pet at the moment, but he'll push someone else out of the way. Some of the younger turtles that we worked with, they were always trying to get you to bite you in the ankles or bite you behind your knee to get your attention. You have to always watch out for your hands. Because they always, you know, that's the human version of a personalities. But yeah, you can't argue with an animal that comes and puts his head on you and says, scratch me now. You kind of have to do what they want. Look at the stingrays, for instance, which is for me was a lot less of a sort of personal experience in a way that you don't get into the water with them and sort of have them interact with you that way. But you see a lot of not only dominance, but also a group in which this one goes with that one more often and you see how they sort of organize to approach a novel object. So, for instance, in dominance and stingrays, the dominance is the one on the bottom. So they sort of overlap their discs a little bit and the one who's dominant is the one on the bottom, because that's where your mouth is and that's where the food is. But if they're going up to explore something, then they're going to sort of inch towards it, while staying in contact with another one, they're not going to go out there alone on your own to explore so they'll inch over there. With octopuses, which I've trained to do very different kinds of tasks much more. My work with octopuses has been much more about the interplay between their peripheral nervous system and their central nervous system and how they can use their arms what they can do with them and what kind of information they can get from them. And with them you also you always see that some animals will be much harder to convince to approach your apparatus. It won't make them learn slower necessarily, but to get them to get over that initial phase of neophobia is different between different animals. So for our listeners out there, could you like briefly describe exactly what you mean by the kind of interplay between the central nervous system and the peripherals and the brains and the arms. Why is this such a challenge for octopuses? Well, if you look at an octopus, the relative would be a snail. So basically a brain of an octopus is a brain while as a snail has ganglia, which is groups of nerves. So octopuses have centralized brains, cephalopods have centralized brains. But what the octopus has that is unique is these eight arms. And each one of those arms has about 200 suckers. Each one of those suckers can actually move on its own little stem. And it has thousands of primary sense of cells. So tactile, they taste with their hands and there is a lot of local reflexes in controlling this. But the question is how much does the brain know what the octopus arms are doing? And how much can it get the octopus arms to do? Do the octopus arms normally kind of they move by themselves without input from the brain? Well, they can. So one of the reasons that we know that there is a huge amount of autonomy is because even if the arm is not connected to the body, it's just going to come and continue to move around in a quite coordinated way. So there's a lot of local reflex arches going in between suckers and, you know, close suckers suckers a little bit farther away and between each of the arms. But at the end of the day, the octopus has to solve all kinds of tasks and they has to control these arms to do these things. So that doesn't make any sense that there is no central control. And that is where my research comes in, trying to figure out how much information is really coming from out there. And what can he do? So in your paper on octopuses, what did you do? What did you find? So in that paper, basically, what we wanted to show is that what we know is that an octopus can send out his arm in a very sort of simple way towards a direction. Otherwise, he can't get anything done, right? You need something. You have to get your hand to get there. Earlier research from the Hochner lab in the Hebrew University where I did my degree, they showed that there is a way for an animal to simplify the motion. Several simple motions can be done by reducing the degrees of freedom of this arm, because this arm can, it's, it can move in any direction. It's wibbly wobbly. But what we wanted to show or what we wanted to find is whether the animal can control that arm also when in a more complex movement, in a more complex movement. So basically not reducing it to just reaching to a target. We built a maze where the animal had to put his arm through this maze and out of the water and into where he sees the food. So this visually marked location and he couldn't do the regular reaching movement, so the simplified movement. And what we saw is that the animals could do it and they used movements that took more time and they clearly needed to use their vision to locate the food. And when they didn't, when they weren't looking at it, they couldn't do it. So you were able to show that information from the central nervous system that they were seeing in their brains was able to be used to control. They could control an arm in a movement that is not in a complex movement. So it could be used to control an arm in a complex movement rather than just unrolling a bend in your arm. It's very hard to describe how octopuses move without visuals. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard. Yeah, I'm just picturing that kind of like wibbly wobbly legs. So I mean, that's the point of it is if you want to move your arm to a certain location, you have very specific limitations. You have joints in a certain location and they're at a very specific distance from your, you know, each point is a very specific distance from the other point. And you have your hand at the end, because if you want to reach something, that's the part that has to grab it. When you look at an octopus arm, it doesn't have any joints, it doesn't have any bones, and he can grab with whichever part of the hand hits first. So all of these sort of limitations, they don't exist. So the idea of controlling that is much more complex, even when you want to go do something very simple and just aim towards a certain location. It sounds like you've had some like great experiences working with octopus, stingrays and turtles. Is there any animal in particular that you would love to work with in the future? Well, I mean, I've had the joy of working here. We worked also with squid, and we worked with cuttlefish, and we've done a little bit of work with fish as well. Komodo dragons, off the top of my head, monitor lizards. They would be an interesting and slightly dangerous species. I mean, I have to meet one personally to know what my fear level is, but off the top of my head, it's monitor lizards. If you had to pick an animal to describe yourself, what animal would you pick? And why? I know, toughest question of them all. Yeah. Today, three toads lost. I can sympathize with that. I kind of feel like hanging upside down, but I don't know if slots drink coffee. Thanks for listening to the podcast. It was recorded by me, Danny Ellenby, and edited by Andrew Scott. Special thanks to Dr. Tamar Goetnik for providing us with such an enjoyable conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe to get more as soon as we release them. And we always love to read your reviews, so why not let the world know what you think of the show? You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter, or send us an email to media at always.jp.