Aarati Asundi (00:12)
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Smart Tea Podcast where we talk about the lives of scientists and innovators who shaped the world. I'm Aarati.

Jyoti Asundi (00:20)
And I'm her mom Jyoti.

Aarati Asundi (00:22)
You know, Mom, normally a day or two before we sit and record, you start asking me for hints about what the episode is about.

Jyoti Asundi (00:31)
Yes, you know I detest surprises, you know this. And yet you insist on surprising me with the story.

Aarati Asundi (00:39)
Yes, but I love your genuine reactions. So I always do my very best not to tell you much about the episode is going to be about.

Jyoti Asundi (00:47)
Yes, you are very close-lipped when you decide to be. I know this about you.

Aarati Asundi (00:53)
So today because of that you are flying blind as it were.

Jyoti Asundi (00:57)
I am, I a rough feeling. If I were a drinker, I would drink some couple of shots to smooth this ride.

Aarati Asundi (01:05)
It's fitting though because we're so close to Halloween and I wanted to do somewhat of a spooky themed episode.

Jyoti Asundi (01:15)
I'm already spooked man. You want to make it more spooky with your story? 

Aarati Asundi (01:20)
Yes! 

Jyoti Asundi (01:21)
I'm already spooked that I have no clue what you're going to talk about.

Aarati Asundi (01:24)
Anxiety? On the edge of your seat, yes? Okay.

Jyoti Asundi (01:27)
Edge of the seat, the low levelbanxiety, curdling in my tummy.

Aarati Asundi (01:32)
No, you're gonna like it. You're really gonna like it. So today's episode, we are gonna be talking about a scientist named Dr. Donald Griffin, and he is one of the most famous bat scientists.

Jyoti Asundi (01:46)
Bat? 

Aarati Asundi (01:47)
Yes.

Jyoti Asundi (01:47)
Yes, okay.

Aarati Asundi (01:49)
He's the scientist who basically figured out how bats are able to navigate around using echolocation.

Jyoti Asundi (01:56)
Yes!

Aarati Asundi (01:58)
But he also did a lot of animal behavior studies in general. He studied a lot of different animals. So bats...

Jyoti Asundi (02:04)
Nice.

Aarati Asundi (02:05)
...is what he's most famous for, but he has done a lot. So...

Jyoti Asundi (02:10)
Wonderful. Sounds like a fun guy. Let's listen.

Aarati Asundi (02:14)
So starting off with his childhood, he was born in 1915 in Southampton, New York. His family moved around New York for the first nine years of his life until ultimately setting down in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Donald Griffin went by Don. His parents actually had a son before Don was born named Gerald, but he died as an infant. So when Don was born, his parents were sometimes maybe a bit overprotective of him. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (02:46)
Naturally, yeah, that kind of trauma doesn't go away that easy.

Aarati Asundi (02:51)
Yeah, and other than that, Don was an only child, so he was brought up as an only child.

Jyoti Asundi (02:55)
Hmm... That also leads to a bit of overprotectiveness even without the past trauma of a lost child.

Aarati Asundi (03:02)
Yeah. His father, Henry Ferrand Griffin, was educated at Yale and became a reporter who covered notable events like Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. Have you heard about that? 

Jyoti Asundi (03:15)
No I don't know about this. What is this bull moose campaign?

Aarati Asundi (03:18)
Yeah, I was like, I'm so sure I've learned about this in high school history at some point and then totally forgot. So, a little bit off topic, but his Bull Moose Campaign was basically Theodore Roosevelt created at one point a third party that was more progressive than either Democrat or the Republican party. 

Jyoti Asundi (03:38)
Got it, okay.

Aarati Asundi (03:38)
And so for a brief time in America, we had three parties.

Jyoti Asundi (03:41)
Traction, he had traction.

Aarati Asundi (03:43)
Yes. So Don's father covered that campaign. And he also covered the sinking of the Titanic. So he's covering some big...

Jyoti Asundi (03:51)
Oh big things, he has really looked at some big issues. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (03:56)
Yeah, huge. When Don was born, Henry turned to advertising, but he had to retire early due to health reasons. 

Jyoti Asundi (04:05)
Oh no, okay.

Aarati Asundi (04:06)
yeah, just some blood pressure things and he had to reduce his stress, I think. So after retirement, he became somewhat of an amateur historian, reading translated Greek and Roman texts and writing historical novels and essays. So he was really big into literature and writing.
Don's mother, Mary Whitney Redfield Griffin, was also very highly educated for a woman at that time. When Don was little, she would read to him so much that his father was afraid that Don wouldn't learn to read for himself. 

Jyoti Asundi (04:39)
Oh nice.

Aarati Asundi (04:40)
But also to his father's dismay, Don's favorite pieces of quote unquote literature were wildlife and hunting magazines. 

Jyoti Asundi (04:51)
He should not be dismayed by that. 

Aarati Asundi (04:54)
No, he was like, why aren't you... like at least listen to Shakespeare or something? Some Greek novel.

Jyoti Asundi (04:59)
Look at the history of, yeah, he was more of a historian.

Aarati Asundi (05:03)
Yeah, and not just that, it's like these are not great pieces of literature. Read something worth it. Read something good. Read a good story, classic story, you know?

Jyoti Asundi (05:11)
Got it. Got it. But you know it's like everyday practical life. So I feel, very legit.

Aarati Asundi (05:19)
Yes, I think he just liked looking at the animals to be honest at that age. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (05:22)
Of course! Yeah!

Aarati Asundi (05:24)
Don's uncles and extended family were also very impressive. Most notably though, his mom's brother, Uncle Alfred Redfield, was a biology professor at Harvard, an avid bird watcher, and one of the founders of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Jyoti Asundi (05:41)
Oh goodness, oceanographic on one side and the birds on the other. Maybe he was more interested in water birds or something. You never know. but,

Aarati Asundi (05:49)
Could be, And we're going to be talking about water birds actually in this episode. So it's totally possible.

Jyoti Asundi (05:53)
So it is possible that's where... okay, he has some very strong, good defining influences in his life. Wonderful.

Aarati Asundi (06:03)
Yes, very, very strong background. Everyone is encouraging him to learn everything from literature to biology. They're all very encouraging and helping him.

Jyoti Asundi (06:14)
What a fantastic environment to be brought up in.

Aarati Asundi (06:18)
But interestingly about his education, from kindergarten to fourth grade, Don attended private school. But after that, his education became, in his own words, extraordinarily irregular, quote unquote.

Jyoti Asundi (06:32)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (06:34)
For a short time after the move to Boston, he attended public school. But after about a year there, his parents were convinced that Don wasn't learning anything except how to gamble from other kids. So, like, what is this?

Jyoti Asundi (06:47)
Well He's probably far ahead of his age group at this point.

Aarati Asundi (06:52)
Possibly, but I also think very alarming thing to them was that it turned out that the principle was staunchly against teaching evolution. So, yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (07:02)
Oh see, see that makes a lot of sense that they wouldn't like that.

Aarati Asundi (07:08)
Yeah I think there was some anecdote where little Don was like, don't we have a similar ancestors as monkeys? And the principal just like blew up and was like, are you calling us monkeys? And you know, that's not how God created us and that kind of thing. So

Jyoti Asundi (07:23)
The school was very much into creationism.

Aarati Asundi (07:25)
Yes, exactly.

Jyoti Asundi (07:27)
So this is actually now happening around 1925 or something or 30 or something like...

Aarati Asundi (07:32)
Yeah, around there.

Jyoti Asundi (07:34)
And it's very funny to me that 100 years later, we are back to the same spot. 

Aarati Asundi (07:39)
We're still fighting it. 

Jyoti Asundi (07:41)
We are still fighting creationism. 

Aarati Asundi (07:44)
Yeah, I don't know. But I was I was very glad to hear that his parents were not happy about this. And they were like, you're not going to that school anymore. So they pulled him out.

Jyoti Asundi (07:54)
Yes. That's a very bold move and it takes a lot of courage actually to do that ⁓ because you're now going against the flow, you're going against the trend and there's going to be a lot of pressure from other people in society. You need to have the courage of your convictions in order to be able to make a move like that as a parent, mean, because you really do want the best for your child.

Aarati Asundi (08:19)
It is true, like the other kids and parents kind of viewed Don as a little bit of like an overprotected kind of part of an eccentric family that didn't mingle well with the rest of, you know, the town. So there was a little bit of that feeling that he's kind of an outsider.

Jyoti Asundi (08:38)
Mm-hmm.

Aarati Asundi (08:40)
So they pulled him out of that school, the public school, and they sent him to a boarding school. But at the boarding school, he just spent so much time reading about fur trapping and wildlife that, again, his dad pulled him out and was like, no, we're going to start homeschooling you now. And so he started teaching Don literature and the Greek classics and Roman classics. And then he started hiring home tutors to teach him math and science and all that other stuff that he didn't know.

Jyoti Asundi (09:09)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (09:11)
So his education then started consisting of a few hours of tutoring and a few hours of chores or practicing practical skills with his mom. And I thought this was interesting. His mom the one who taught him how to use tools like hammer and saw and a screwdriver to repair things because his father had zero interest in any of that and so never bothered to learn.

Jyoti Asundi (09:35)
They were a very out of norm family. The gender roles are reversed and they are going against the flow with public school. Very nice. Thinking for themselves.

Aarati Asundi (09:47)
Yeah. His mom also taught him how to type and how to sail and even helped him build his first flat-bottomed boat when he was around nine years old, which they named The Bathtub. 

Jyoti Asundi (10:00)
Oh! I bet you there's a very good reason for that. I can imagine this bathtub actually. 

Aarati Asundi (10:06)
A little bathtub boat. Yeah. I thought that was very cute.

Jyoti Asundi (10:10)
That is cute. Hey, his mom sounds like a fun lady. 

Aarati Asundi (10:15)
Yeah, really fun. And it really instilled this love for sailing in him. And so sailing and boating became a really big hobby of his throughout his life.
So after he did his tutoring and learning his practical skills, he had hours of free time, which he spent exploring outdoors. He was not a very athletic kid and was often sick with some mild flu or cold, but he just loved being out in the wild.

Jyoti Asundi (10:41)
And that itself is a great learning experience. Nice.

Aarati Asundi (10:45)
Yes, he loved looking at animals, like finding the animals where they lived. He started trying to trap animals like he had read about in his favorite quote-unquote books and magazines, but he wasn't too successful at first. He also started keeping journals to keep track of all the animals that he saw each day. So beginnings of scientific recording... 

Jyoti Asundi (11:11)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (11:11)
...and, you know, notekeeping. 

Jyoti Asundi (11:13)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (11:14)
He also spent a lot of time at the Boston Museum of Natural History where he met two curators, Francis Harper and Clinton McCoy, who redirected his interest in simply trapping and selling animal fur to collecting it and actually studying it.

Jyoti Asundi (11:31)
Oh fantastic! He has such strong, wonderful influences.

Aarati Asundi (11:36)
So by the time he was 15, Don had subscribed to the Journal of Mammalogy and was reading scientific papers on small animals that he found in his area. His traps for small animals also got better and soon he started collecting rabbits, skunks and muskrats.

Jyoti Asundi (11:54)
That must have been a fun experience, trapping a skunk. Okay.

Aarati Asundi (11:58)
Oh yes. There was a whole story about how he trapped a skunk and then had to put it in his car and hope that it didn't spray him. 

Jyoti Asundi (12:04)
no, ⁓ no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to know more.

Aarati Asundi (12:10)
There's a lot of stories about him actually. So there's a three volume biography by Carolyn A. Ristau, she goes into all of these little anecdotes about how he tried to trap a skunk and how he went digging for some muskrat holes and things like that. I'm just like... if you want to read her books or her biography about him, she's like the preeminent expert on Don Griffin. So yes.

Jyoti Asundi (12:36)
⁓ fantastic.

Aarati Asundi (12:38)
I'll link her book on the website so that people can see it. In 1932, when he was 17, he visited the Oliver Austin Bird Banding Station, where the owners taught him how to catch birds and attach a metal onto their leg.

Jyoti Asundi (12:55)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (12:56)
And this helps them study all sorts of questions like where did the birds go when they migrate how long can they survive and do males behave differently than females because now you can like track them.

Jyoti Asundi (13:08)
Yes. Do they come back every year to the same spaces? Yes.

Aarati Asundi (13:12)
Mm-hmm. So initially, Don wasn't very interested in birds. He was more interested in small mammals. But this is where he first really got interested in bats because bats are small mammals that fly.

Jyoti Asundi (13:26)
Both. Yes, they are bird-like mammals. It's a nice cross section in that Venn diagram between birds and mammals. Who is there? That's the bat.

Aarati Asundi (13:36)
That's the bat. So he starts attaching these little metal bands to small brown bats in his area in the caves where they hibernated. And this actually led to his first scientific publication in the Journal of Mammalogy entitled Marking Bats, in which he basically lays out that bird bands work great on bats too.

Jyoti Asundi (13:59)
He's opening up a new resource. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (14:02)
Yeah, they don't fall off and the bats tolerate them pretty well. Don't try to chew them off. However, this did lead to a bit of trouble with the authorities because it turns out that he was basically stealing bird bands from the Oliver Austin station.

Jyoti Asundi (14:19)
A minor protocol problem right there. That's hilarious that he did not think to get his own bird bands and just kind of took some without thinking it through. I don't think he thought it through. I don't think he thought of it as stealing.

Aarati Asundi (14:37)
I don't think he thought it was such a big deal, but it turns out that these bands are given to the station by the government specifically to study birds. 

Jyoti Asundi (14:45)
Oh no. So it's a federal offense now. 

Aarati Asundi (14:49)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (14:50)
Oh shoot. Oh no, poor guy.

Aarati Asundi (14:54)
So finally, after a lot of back and forth where he pleads his case to the US Bureau of Biological Services, which later becomes the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they reject him and they say, no, we're not giving you any bat bands, and he's like, come on, give them to me. Finally, he wins and they issue bat-specific bands for him to use.

Jyoti Asundi (15:17)
Okay so it's a happy ending. Okay. 

Aarati Asundi (15:20)
Yes. 

Jyoti Asundi (15:21)
Alright.

Aarati Asundi (15:22)
Soon he started to recruit his friends to help him band bats. He wrote, quote, I perfected what I've come to call the Tom Sawyer fence whitewashing method of recruiting college friends participate in studies of animal behavior under natural conditions by letting them in on the secret that it is great fun," end quote.

Jyoti Asundi (15:46)
He has a good sense of humor there. Tom Sawyer was a smart aleck and it's fun to see Griffin followed the same pattern. 

Aarati Asundi (15:56)
Yeah, yeah, it's like, come help me band these bats. 

Jyoti Asundi (15:57)
But for a good cause, for a very good cause. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (15:59)
Yeah, you're helping and it's so much fun. You get to band bats. Who wouldn't want to do that?

Jyoti Asundi (16:06)
And also only if you are good and then was true Tom Sawyer fashion, you would have even charged his friends for the privilege of banding bats.

Aarati Asundi (16:14)
Oh yes. I can totally see him turning it into a contest of like who can band the most bats.

Jyoti Asundi (16:20)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (16:21)
The summers between 1933 and 1938, Don and his friends managed to ban 16,000 bats.

Jyoti Asundi (16:29)
Oh! Wait, locally they found 16,000 bats and they banded them.

Aarati Asundi (16:35)
I think he traveled a little bit. He might have gone up to Vermont and found some bat caves and things like that. I think he did travel a little bit around the East Coast over the summers. But yeah this isn't worldwide. This is East Coast, a couple of states there in the northeast.

Jyoti Asundi (16:51)
That lays down the foundation for a very good study though.

Aarati Asundi (16:55)
Yeah, yeah, now you can identify all these bats that are flying around the east coast.

Jyoti Asundi (16:59)
Yes, so much information.

Aarati Asundi (17:01)
And around this time, he started making some pretty interesting preliminary observations, namely that if he captured a bat from one location and took it somewhere else to band it and released it in that other secondary location, the next day he would find the bat back at the same location he originally captured it at.

Jyoti Asundi (17:21)
Wow, what GPS!

Aarati Asundi (17:24)
Yeah! So he captured it again, and this time he took it somewhere completely different... 

Jyoti Asundi (17:28)
A third location.

Aarati Asundi (17:28)
...sometimes even farther away. Sometimes even out over the water, he got into his sailboat and went out over the water, and he released the bat. And the next day, the bat had found its way back to its original home again.

Jyoti Asundi (17:40)
Wow, this is great. And I'm almost jealous of the fantastic GPS that these bats seem to have. You remember your childhood where I took you on this shortcut? And I said...

Aarati Asundi (17:51)
Oh yes, I remember the infamous shortcut story.

Jyoti Asundi (17:55)
We were going to go for a walk and then I was convinced that there was a shortcut to take us back home and I made you little children walk like miles and miles and miles in my shortcut.

Aarati Asundi (18:05)
Yeah, this was like when I was like nine or ten or something?

Jyoti Asundi (18:08)
Yes, yes.

Aarati Asundi (18:08)
And my brother was what, like five or six?

Jyoti Asundi (18:12)
Five or six and I was completely convinced that I knew the shortcut.

Aarati Asundi (18:17)
And we believed you. We were like, she seems really sure of herself. We should follow her.

Jyoti Asundi (18:21)
Yes, I'm always very sure of my wrong directions actually. You've seen that about me in airports as well where I take off with great confidence in the wrong direction.

Aarati Asundi (18:28)
Yes, even today, although... Yeah. And sometimes I still follow you. I'm like, she seems sure of herself. And then I'm like, wait, no, it's "mom" and "directions". We need to double check what she's doing. 

Jyoti Asundi (18:43)
Yes, Oh my goodness.

Aarati Asundi (18:45)
Yeah but these bats, you could release them in random places and they would find their way home again. So this is right now still anecdotal. He's not actually studying this per se, but he's making this observation.
Despite his crazy schooling during his teens, he was able to get into Harvard in 1934, where he focused heavily on biology. He was a solid B student. His uncle Alfred convinced him to take physics and physical chemistry courses, which he struggled to earn Cs in. And he got Bs in organic chemistry and atomic chemistry.

Jyoti Asundi (19:22)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (19:23)
But he got straight A's in any courses related to animals and mammals and birds.

Jyoti Asundi (19:29)
He knows what he wants to do. He's found his life's passion.

Aarati Asundi (19:33)
Yeah. And again, I found it really relatable and nice to know that he wasn't a straight A student and he wasn't this like genius that was just, so smart at everything. He struggled with some science courses, you know, and it's okay.

Jyoti Asundi (19:46)
Yeah, he was good at what he was meant to be and then he struggled with assimilating the rest of the information.

Aarati Asundi (19:53)
But that's a normal person. I like that. 

Jyoti Asundi (19:56)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (19:56)
I like the stories where it's like, yeah, he struggled. He struggled with physics. And I'm like, relatable, yes.

Jyoti Asundi (20:01)
Yes, absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (20:04)
Outside of classes, he started working with a physiologist named Dr. John Welsh, who encouraged Don to pursue scientific research in bats, because he figured out his interest and was like, "Do it!" 

Jyoti Asundi (20:15)
Yeah.

Aarati Asundi (20:16)
Together, they started asking questions like, if bats live in a dark cave and they can't see the sun, how do they know what time it is? Because they're nocturnal, so they must have some sort of clock that tells them, hey, it's dark outside. It's time to go wake up and go hunting for insects. So in short, they were asking, does a bat circadian rhythm look like? 

Jyoti Asundi (20:39)
Correct.

Aarati Asundi (20:40)
So they captured small brown bats to keep in the lab and hook them up to a machine that had a pen. And every time the bat moved, the pen would move. So you would almost get like a sleep monitor readout. And they found that in addition to a bat having an innate circadian rhythm, bats could also adjust their rhythm. So for example, if scientists fed them at the same time every day, then every 24 hours just before feeding time, the bats would wake up and get more active regardless of what time of day it was.

Jyoti Asundi (21:11)
So you can manipulate their rhythm by giving them something they need. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (21:15)
Yeah. While he was an undergrad at Harvard, he also started some of the experiments that he's most famous for. So as he's studying the bats, he starts to wonder how are bats able to fly in the dark without banging into anything?

Jyoti Asundi (21:30)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (21:32)
In the 1760s, now we're going back like two centuries, there was an Italian professor named Lazzaro Spallanzani. And he had asked a similar question. He had found that some animals like owls need at least a tiny bit of light to be able to fly without bumping into obstacles. But if you blinded them, they couldn't fly at all. But bats could do it in total pitch blackness. Even when he blinded the bats, they were fine.

Jyoti Asundi (22:03)
Wow.

Aarati Asundi (22:04)
Not only that, but they could hunt and feed themselves just as well as before they had been blinded.

Jyoti Asundi (22:09)
So their sense of sight is not as crucial for their survival.

Aarati Asundi (22:15)
Exactly. So Spallanzani was like, "Okay, so if their sight's not important, what other sense they be using?" And so he started trying to mess with the bats other senses. He covered their ears, closed their mouths. He would like paint their wings so that they could, with some, I don't know, like some waxy film or something so they couldn't feel anything. He would close their nose. He would try all these things to mess other senses. And he found that when he covered their ears or closed their mouths, they failed to fly properly. 

Jyoti Asundi (22:51)
Got it.

Aarati Asundi (22:52)
But anything else, like sight, smell, touch, didn't matter. Those things, they didn't need to fly. He wrote, thus blinded bats are able to use their ears when they hunt insects. This discovery is incredible. But the question was what sounds were they even being able to hear to tell that there's an obstacle in the way? Because they're in a cave, these bats are avoiding the rocks. But rocks don't make sounds, so...

Jyoti Asundi (23:20)
Correct

Aarati Asundi (23:21)
...how are they able to hear a rock or how are they able to hear an insect? Like can they really truly hear the beat of an insect's wings or something? Like that seems really far-fetched. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (23:32)
Yeah. What exactly are they hearing in order to be able to navigate so accurately?

Aarati Asundi (23:37)
Yeah. Spallanzani was never able to take his research further than that. And so because of that, no one really believed him. They were like, "Yeah right". So Don had read Spallanzani's original works. But now he had a new idea because World War I had just finished, or like a decade ago. And during World War I, the big story was that physicists had figured out how to use SONAR or Sound Navigation And Ranging to see underwater.

Jyoti Asundi (24:08)
Right, right.

Aarati Asundi (24:10)
And the way that worked is the submarine would emit a sound wave and listen to the echoes that bounce back. 

Jyoti Asundi (24:16)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (24:17)
And so Don wondered if maybe the bats were doing the same thing, but at a much higher sound frequency than humans could hear.

Jyoti Asundi (24:25)
Ah! What a good theory!

Aarati Asundi (24:28)
And he thought this because a bat's ear is very unique. And he knew all about like this gigantic ear. It's so big compared to the rest of its body. And it's shaped like a funnel, which can focus even the smallest of sounds into the ear.
And if you think about it, humans can typically hear a range between 20 hertz, which is the lowest, the very lowest note or very lowest pitch that we can hear, up to 20,000 hertz, is the very highest. And by the way, you can go on YouTube. They have a human audio test where they play this range from 20 to 20,000 hertz. And you can listen to hear your hearing drops off. 

Jyoti Asundi (25:15)
Interesting.

Aarati Asundi (25:16)
Yeah. So I personally can hear between 25 hertz and 13 to 14,000 hertz, after which it gets too high pitched for me to hear.

Jyoti Asundi (25:24)
But humans have the capacity to hear higher or a bit lower.

Aarati Asundi (25:28)
Yes, I probably ruined some of my ears with all the music that I listen to and stuff like that constantly with my earphones in. I think also as you age, it also starts to drop

Jyoti Asundi (25:40)
I'd like to get a- I'd like to check mine. You should put that link over there.

Aarati Asundi (25:44)
Yeah, we'll do this afterwards. We'll see how low and high you can hear.

Jyoti Asundi (25:48)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (25:49)
So humans are up to 20,000 hertz. On the other hand, most bats can hear quote unquote ultrasonic sounds up to 120,000 hertz. And some can even hear past 200,000 hertz.

Jyoti Asundi (26:05)
Which means six to ten times higher

Aarati Asundi (26:09)
Yep.

Jyoti Asundi (26:09)
Wow! 

Aarati Asundi (26:10)
So, Don has this theory that, you know, maybe these bats are emitting sounds in that frequency that we can't hear, but the bats can hear. But how do you study that?
So some of his fellow students told him about a physics professor at Harvard named George Washington Pierce, who had invented something called a parabolic horn that could detect very high frequency sounds and translate them into a frequency that humans could hear.

Jyoti Asundi (26:38)
Got it.

Aarati Asundi (26:39)
So they urged Don to ask Professor Pierce if he could borrow this instrument to detect whether the bats were making ultrasonic sounds. And honestly, he was a bit scared at first because remember, he was a solid C+ student in physics and now he needs to go like knock on the door of a physics professor and be like, "Hey..." You know?

Jyoti Asundi (26:59)
Yes. But what a collaboration. I was about to say with all the SONAR technology for detecting sounds, et cetera. That's all coming under the realm of physics. So yeah, he's a solid C or a B, but is interdisciplinary collaboration the horizon.

Aarati Asundi (27:15)
He just wasn't...yeah, he knew that. He just wasn't sure if the professor would wanna work with him because he's such a poor student in physics. He was like, you know?

Jyoti Asundi (27:22)
No, I bet you the professor must have interested.

Aarati Asundi (27:27)
You are correct, he was thrilled. He was extremely excited to help Don study his bats. So sure enough, when they turned on the parabolic horn and held the bat near it, they found that even when the bats didn't seem to be making any sounds at all, that their ears could pick up, the parabolic horn was emitting signals to indicate that the bat was making ultrasonic sounds.

Jyoti Asundi (27:49)
Wow, nice. What a finding. 

Aarati Asundi (27:51)
And these sounds were extremely short, just barely a click. That's all that... They weren't making these like long, you know, notes or anything. So their next test was to let the bat loose and fly around the physics lab and see if the bats made the clicking noise when they came near obstacles.

Jyoti Asundi (28:11)
Give me a second to absorb this imagery here. This bat flying around a physics lab. Interesting. Because until you said that, I was still thinking that they had gone to the cave where the bat lived. But no, this makes more sense to just capture the bat and bring it in.

Aarati Asundi (28:27)
I think they had to use like some soundproofing and stuff to make sure the parabolic horn didn't pick up any other extra sounds that was only picking up the bat. So this is a controlled environment. 

Jyoti Asundi (28:35)
make sense they needed a controlled environment. They needed a controlled environment. This is so fascinating that they would a bat running around a physics lab.

Aarati Asundi (28:45)
They let the bats loose. The bats are flying around the physics lab. They turn on the parabolic horn and they hear nothing, absolutely nothing. So even though the bats are flying around the room perfectly and they're avoiding all obstacles, the parabolic horn wasn't picking up any sounds.

Jyoti Asundi (29:03)
Hmm.

Aarati Asundi (29:05)
This was a huge disappointment and very confusing to both Don and Professor Pierce. They had been so sure that they were on the right track.

Jyoti Asundi (29:12)
Yes, I was sure of it too while you're narrating the story that they're going to hear all sorts of things.

Aarati Asundi (29:19)
I was sure of it when I was researching the story. I was like, what do mean they heard nothing?

Jyoti Asundi (29:22)
Yeah, yeah, how can this be?

Aarati Asundi (29:26)
So they wrote up their findings in 1938 about the bats making ultrasonic sounds, and they still tentatively suggested that they could use the sounds to navigate, but they had no evidence that the bats were making sounds while flying.
So Don continued to struggle with this question and the following year he met another student named Robert Galambos who is basically the Robin to his Batman.

Jyoti Asundi (29:54)
Every Batman needs a Robin.

Aarati Asundi (29:57)
Now they're unstoppable. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (29:59)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (30:00)
So Robert Galambos was particularly interested in studying animal physiology and hearing. So he was very interested in the bat's ear and the way that the ear was shaped and how it functioned to help the bat hear. 

Jyoti Asundi (30:15)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (30:16)
So they struck up a partnership. 

Jyoti Asundi (30:18)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (30:19)
They repeated Spallanzani's tests again and found the same things that he had, that flying bats were able to navigate and fly perfectly well, but if you closed their ears or mouth, the bats refused to fly or they did so very awkwardly. So they were like, "Yeah, the sounds they're making must be important for navigation."

Jyoti Asundi (30:39)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (30:40)
Eventually, after all this testing, they came to realize that the problem had been that both the bats and the parabolic horn were extremely focused in a single direction. So if the bat was held next to the horn, it was basically clicking straight into the horn. But if the bat was flying around, its sound was extremely focused in only direction that its head was facing, and so the horn wasn't able to pick it up.

Jyoti Asundi (31:09)
Oh got it. Oh the bat was still emitting those sharp ultrasonic but the sound waves are going in a very limited direction and the instrument is not able to pick it up.

Aarati Asundi (31:23)
Yeah. And the instrument itself is also only able to pick up sounds in the direction that it's facing. 

Jyoti Asundi (31:30)
Correct.

Aarati Asundi (31:31)
So their theory had been right.

Jyoti Asundi (31:30)
I'm glad he didn't throw that theory out because it does make a lot of sense. 

Aarati Asundi (31:37)
Yes, it does.

Jyoti Asundi (31:38)
It's just the limitations of the experiment the instruments that they had at that time.

Aarati Asundi (31:43)
Exactly. Now things have gotten a lot better and we are a lot more sensitive and things like that. But yeah, at the time...

Jyoti Asundi (31:49)
Yes, goodness. Our cell phones seem to pick up everything from multiple rooms anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Aarati Asundi (31:54)
I know. Yes. They also experimented to see how small an object had to be for a bat to detect it and dodge around it. And they found that bats could dodge wires as thin as one millimeter, which is about as thick as a piece of paper.

Jyoti Asundi (32:11)
Nice.

Aarati Asundi (32:12)
And by the way, there's also videos of this on YouTube if you want to go see. 

Jyoti Asundi (32:18)
A bat dodging around a thin...

Aarati Asundi (32:20)
Yeah, like, you know, really old timey video from like the 1930s or 40s of these bat experiments where they're, bat is just flying around these wires. Yeah. 

Jyoti Asundi (32:27)
Wow, such exciting times. Yeah, yes.

Aarati Asundi (32:32)
I'll link that on the website too if anyone wants to go watch.

Jyoti Asundi (32:35)
Absolutely, this is absolutely fascinating.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Aarati Asundi (32:44)
Hi everyone, Aarati here. I hope you're enjoying the podcast. If so, and you wish someone would tell your science story, I founded a science communications company called Sykom, that's S-Y-K-O-M, that can help. Sykom blends creativity with scientific accuracy to create all types of science, communications, content, including explainer videos, slide presentations, science, writing, and more. We work with academic researchers, tech companies, nonprofits, or really any scientists. To help simplify your science, check us out at sykommer.com. That's S-Y-K-O-M-M-E r.com. Back to the story.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Aarati Asundi (33:31)
As his time as an undergraduate student came to an end, Don started thinking that maybe he should take from bats. 

Jyoti Asundi (33:38)
Oh!

Aarati Asundi (33:38)
Later on, he wasn't sure why he didn't just continue with bats, but he thinks in general there was a lot of negativity around simply continuing his bat navigation experiments. A lot of professors were like, "Yeah, that's cute, but you need to do something real and more important for your PhD." So they just didn't think that these bat navigation studies were on the same level as like studying physiology or biochemistry or something like that.

Jyoti Asundi (34:05)
Yes, the bat studies did not have the level of credibility needed for a doctorate. 

Aarati Asundi (34:10)
Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (34:12)
So sad.

Aarati Asundi (34:14)
So he found a professor at Harvard named Karl Lashley, who was both in the biology and the psychology departments. Professor Lashley had written a paper on homing terns. So these are birds that were able to find their way back home from long distances. And Don was like, "Hey!" 

Jyoti Asundi (34:32)
That he knows all about this. 

Aarati Asundi (34:34)
Yes, bats can do that too.

Jyoti Asundi (34:35)
He knows all about this. He knows all about that with his birds and his bats and the theft from the federal government of the bands.

Aarati Asundi (34:42)
Yes. So Don approached him about doing his PhD under him and further studying this homing ability to see if local birds could orient their way homewards even if they were in an unfamiliar place.

Jyoti Asundi (34:55)
Mm-hmm.

Aarati Asundi (34:56)
So he starts studying this and at first the weren't very impressive. He started studying petrels and then herring gulls, which are both seabirds, and he would take them far away to an unfamiliar place and release them. Eventually, most of them would only after a really long time, sometimes many days later, they would like take breaks and they would sit and eat and they would sleep. And he was just like, "What are these birds doing?" you know?

Jyoti Asundi (35:26)
Yes, yes.

Aarati Asundi (34:28)
Don couldn't tell whether the birds were just randomly flying around until they found something by chance that was familiar. And then they were like, "I know that". And then they figured out their way home. Or the other option is that they do actually have some system in place to figure out how to get home and they're doing something, but he couldn't figure out what it was.

Jyoti Asundi (35:50)
Or they're just smelling the roses along the way. You never know. They know exactly what they're doing, but it's like life is a journey. I don't have to be at the destination when you say so. I'll get there when I get there.

Aarati Asundi (36:01)
Yeah. I'm picking up new information here. 

Jyoti Asundi (36:06)
Absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (36:07)
I'm a worldly bird now. 

Jyoti Asundi (36:10)
That's right.

Aarati Asundi (36:11)
There's also no GPS tracking systems at the time. So he couldn't like, the way we would do today is just like attach this GPS to the bird and then sit in our lab and watch the bird fly around from the comfort of our own home, you know?

Jyoti Asundi (36:23)
Yeah, relax. Yes. Yeah. And the computer will make all the markings to tell you where the bird is, 

Aarati Asundi (36:29)
Yeah, map it out for us beautifully.

Jyoti Asundi (36:30)
Map it out. 

Aarati Asundi (36:32)
Yes. Give us all the statistics. How fast did they take?

Jyoti Asundi (36:32)
Find me. You could have it on your phone. You could be at dinner and you could see it on the phone where your bird is.

Aarati Asundi (36:40)
Yeah, you just have hundreds of birds on your Find Me app. It's like, there goes bird 188. 

Jyoti Asundi (36:43)
Yeah, that's right.

Aarati Asundi (36:47)
Because there's no GPS tracking system, really the only way he can track them is with his own eyes. And so he's using binoculars when he releases them to try and figure out where they're going. But he would lose sight of them pretty quickly.

Jyoti Asundi (36:59)
But I'm assuming he does have the banding on them. It's just that he's wanting to also see what they do in between.

Aarati Asundi (37:06)
Yeah. Yes, he has the banding on them. So once they pop back up in some place somebody is monitoring, then they can say, they can ring him and say, "Hey!"

Jyoti Asundi (37:16)
Yeah, they came from A to B or whatever.

Aarati Asundi (37:19)
Yeah but in between what happened between points in A and B, he has no idea what the bird was doing. 

Jyoti Asundi (37:24)
And that's what he's keen on figuring out.

Aarati Asundi (37:26)
Yeah. So in comes Uncle Alfred again. He introduced Don to another professor at Harvard named Alexander Forbes, who was a physiologist and also an aviator. So Professor Forbes was like, hop in my plane and we'll track your birds by air.

Jyoti Asundi (37:44)
Fantastic! Oh my God! What a fun life!

Aarati Asundi (37:47)
Really fun. It gets more fun. So he and Don went up in a small plane and Professor Forbes told Don that when they were about 2,000 feet up in the air, Don should open the plane door and throw the bird out. 

Jyoti Asundi (38:02)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (38:03)
Unfortunately, when Don did this, the open door of the plane started to act like a rudder and set the plane into a spin.

Jyoti Asundi (38:11)
⁓ no way!

Aarati Asundi (38:13)
Don wrote, quote, "This was exciting, and I had no idea whether it would be the end of us. I remember watching the Connecticut River rotating slowly beneath us."

Jyoti Asundi (38:23)
Whoa.

Aarati Asundi (38:24)
"Of course, recovering from spins at 2,000 feet is routine, and Forbes had no difficulty leveling off the plane in ample time."

Jyoti Asundi (38:31)
Oh my Lord!

Aarati Asundi (38:34)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (38:35)
It's like I don't know if I'll die but this is really fun!

Aarati Asundi (38:37)
This is really interesting. Yeah. And then he goes on to say, "But clearly this was not the ideal way to start following a herring gull from the air. He circled a few times looking for, but saw no trace of it." So in that plane spinning, they lost track of the bird. 

Jyoti Asundi (38:54)
They lost the bird. Poor fellows. I can imagine the frustration.

Aarati Asundi (39:05)
They're like, that wasn't a good idea. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (39:11)
Horrible. Truly horrible.

Aarati Asundi (39:14)
This really has Tom Sawyer shenanigans written all over it. 

Jyoti Asundi (39:17)
I tell you. These guys are fantastic.

Aarati Asundi (39:21)
So the next time they learned, they decided to keep the bird at the airport when they took off. And then once the plane was up high enough, they would signal to someone at the airport to release the bird. 

Jyoti Asundi (39:33)
Oh to release the bird! Okay.

Aarati Asundi (39:34)
And yeah, and then they would start to follow it. 

Jyoti Asundi (39:37)
Okay that makes a lot more sense.

Aarati Asundi (39:38)
So that worked much better. By 1941, Don had taken flying lessons to become a licensed pilot and even bought his own small plane. However, it was the beginning of World War II now, and it was becoming clear by 1941 that the US was likely going to join the war. So everyone was on really high alert. And so Don realized that if he goes around flying his plane randomly it starts to become a little bit dangerous in case the military mistook him for some spy or enemy or something.

Jyoti Asundi (40:13)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Aarati Asundi (40:15)
So he soon had to stop flying around.

Jyoti Asundi (40:18)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (40:18)
Throughout his PhD work though on birds, Don kept his eye on bats and he kept up with the research that his friend Robert Galambos had been doing to further understand how bats hear. In 1944, Don coined the term "echolocation" to describe the way bats navigate similarly to SONAR.
He also got married to a woman named Ruth Castle and had a child. This may have been kind of strategic as family men were less likely to be drafted into the war.

Jyoti Asundi (40:49)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (40:51)
But after Pearl Harbor, Don did start doing military related work to help the war effort. So he put his schooling on hold.
He started working at the SS Stevens Psychoacoustic Laboratory working on improving voice communication systems used by the military. One day while he's working there, he gets a call from a man named Lytle Adams, who was an inventor, kind of, and he was looking for a bat expert because he had an idea about creating bat bombs.

Jyoti Asundi (41:25)
Bat Bombs?

Aarati Asundi (41:26)
Yes. So basically, Lytle had this idea that in order to avenge Pearl Harbor, he wanted to attach little bombs to bats, which could be released in Tokyo.

Jyoti Asundi (41:41)
Oh my goodness.

Aarati Asundi (41:42)
And his idea was that the bats would fly into people's homes and then the bombs would explode. And there was this prevailing kind of racist theory that Japanese homes were all built of paper and wood. And so the home structures would just burn down completely. 

Jyoti Asundi (42:00)
I see, I see.

Aarati Asundi (42:01)
So this is his grand plan. Don was skeptical, but he did some preliminary experiments. And he was like, theoretically, it might work if they were able to develop bombs that were lighter than three grams. Otherwise, the bats wouldn't be able to fly with them.

Jyoti Asundi (42:20)
Got it. Mm-hmm.

Aarati Asundi (42:22)
So he sent that report to Lytle Adams, and then he heard nothing about the project again, and he assumed that it died. He was like, yeah, how are you going to create a bomb less than three grams? 

Jyoti Asundi (42:32)
which is less than three grams, yeah.

Aarati Asundi (42:34)
Yeah. And he was like, this is a stupid idea to begin with. Like, this is, But then two years later, an organic chemistry professor named Louis Fieser at Harvard called him and asked him what he thought about the Bat-Bomb project, which was now being called Project X-Ray for some reason.

Jyoti Asundi (42:52)
is this the same Pfizer who started the Pfizer laboratories?

Aarati Asundi (42:55)
No, it's not spelled... I'm not even sure if I'm saying it right. It's F-I-E-S-E-R.

Jyoti Asundi (43:01)
Oh Fieser.

Aarati Asundi (43:02)
Yeah. And Professor Fieser was being asked to develop an effective napalm that would be used in the Bat-Bomb devices. And he's asking Don, hey, what do you think about this project? Like, should I be going in and developing this? Should I be trying this? 

Jyoti Asundi (43:16)
Right.

Aarati Asundi (43:17)
So Don told him again that he was highly skeptical that this project would work at all. But Fieser was a bit more optimistic and said, OK, I'll work on it.

Jyoti Asundi (43:27)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (43:28)
And again, Don fell out of the loop.

Jyoti Asundi (43:31)
Okay.

Aarati Asundi (43:32)
Fieser did in fact end up successfully inventing a military-grade napalm, but before Project X-ray could be seen all the way through, the US dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending the war.

Jyoti Asundi (43:43)
Yeah, why would you bother with little, why would you bother with little bat bombs if you had the big bazooka? Yes.

Aarati Asundi (43:53)
But there were a few places where I saw the Manhattan Project and Project X-Ray kind of being pitted head to head and the US government is trying to determine which one is more worth funding and more viable.

Jyoti Asundi (44:07)
It some traction.

Aarati Asundi (44:09)
It did have some traction despite Don's skepticism that this would ever work.

Jyoti Asundi (44:14)
Yes, yes. And if you have studied an animal for that long, you develop a deep respect for it. And for a person with such deep respect for bats to be asked to basically create kamakazi bats...

Aarati Asundi (44:28)
Yes.

Jyoti Asundi (44:29)
...is not right. 

Aarati Asundi (44:31)
I couldn't imagine that. Yeah. 

Jyoti Asundi (44:33)
Yeah, how can you imagine.... That's terrible.

Aarati Asundi (44:35)
When he has such high respect for them and their intelligence and how they're able to navigate and their, like, superhuman abilities.

Jyoti Asundi (44:39)
Yes, yes, Absolutely. I'm glad that the project died then eventually.

Aarati Asundi (44:50)
Many years later, Don was upset to see, though, that there was a report from Lytle Adams about Project X-Ray, which insinuated that Don had strongly supported the project when actually the opposite was true. And yet, over time, the story has been twisted by many media outlets claiming that he encouraged this project and thought it was a great idea. So just wanted to set the record straight on that. That he did not.

Jyoti Asundi (45:16)
Insult...insult upon injury. How typical.

Aarati Asundi (45:20)
Yeah. Don worked in a few different labs to support the war effort, but once the war was over, he realized that he had been affiliated with Harvard for about 12 years and decided it was time to move on. He happened to know some biologists at Cornell University and wrote inquiring about becoming an assistant professor in comparative physiology there. He received strong support particularly from Professor Howard Adelman, who was building up a department of zoology at Cornell. And so he and his family, now with four children, moved to Ithaca, New York.

Jyoti Asundi (45:55)
Nice, that's where I came initially.

Aarati Asundi (45:58)
Yeah, very first home in the US.

Jyoti Asundi (46:01)
Very first home in the US was in Ithaca, New York. Beautiful place.

Aarati Asundi (46:06)
At Cornell, he continued to study both bats and birds and how they're able to navigate. In 1948, his mind basically exploded when he read a paper by Karl von Frisch, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1973. And he had showed that bees were able to communicate complex information about specific locations by doing a quote unquote waggle dance.
So the bees find a source of pollen or sugar or something. They come back to the hive. They do a little dance. And then all the bees in the hive get that information. And they all go over to that source of pollen.

Jyoti Asundi (46:48)
So many ways of communication. Fantastic.

Aarati Asundi (46:50)
And so Don was like, dude, if insects can understand each other and even communicate complex information like geographic locations to each other, then birds and bats have to be able to do it too because...

Jyoti Asundi (47:06)
Absolutely, they are a species of a higher order.

Aarati Asundi (47:09)
Yeah. So Don immediately set up his own beehive and started studying their interactions for himself. And he invited Von Frisch to Cornell to give a series of lectures. In 1951, Don takes his studies in echolocation even further, showing that bats actually use echolocation to hunt insects. This was a very surprising discovery because until that point, even Don had thought echolocation was just a way to avoid crashing into stationary obstacles.

Jyoti Asundi (47:38)
Whoa!

Aarati Asundi (47:38)
So the fact that they could use it to like hunt tiny mobile moving insects is crazy.

Jyoti Asundi (47:46)
It tells you that their echolocation system is highly sophisticated.

Aarati Asundi (47:50)
Yes, very highly developed. And the other thing that they noticed was as the bat got closer to its prey, its clicking noise would speed up as it honed in on its target.

Jyoti Asundi (48:02)
Because it's really now defining it more quickly. Further, further fine tuning that exact position of a moving object.

Aarati Asundi (48:11)
Yes. After this discovery, he also had the opportunity to travel to Panama to study tropical fruit bats, where he was able to learn that these bats that ate fruits used echolocation differently than bats that ate insects. 

Jyoti Asundi (48:28)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Aarati Asundi (48:29)
So that just opened up a whole new field of comparative echolocation for him and other scientists to study.
In 1953, he returned to Harvard's biology department teach zoology. Over time, he kept on studying how bats use echolocation, and as technology improved, his measurements got more and more precise. He was able to rule out the possibility that bats were listening to the sound of flying insect wings beating to locate them, that they really using the bounce back of the echolocation.

Jyoti Asundi (49:02)
Their own echoes.

Aarati Asundi (49:06)
Yes. And then the other kind of experiment or story I wanted to include in here, because it's funny, is that once there was a rare group of red bats that were sighted in Massachusetts at a golf course. So Don convinced a very reluctant golf course owner to let him study the bats by bringing a truck full of parabolic detectors and microphones onto the course. He just had to promise the owner not to tell any of the golfers what he was doing. But then, of course, that just led to wild speculation that he was studying radio waves coming from the ionosphere. So people are like, what is this guy doing running around pointing this thing at the sky? yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (49:51)
Yes. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (49:54)
He also did another interesting experiment where he studied whether bats could tell the difference between certain things that they were chasing. So to do this experiment, he and a colleague threw mealworms up in the air, which mealworms can't fly, you know, normally. So this is like a new thing for the bats that's in the air. And once the bat learned that, hey, that thing that's soaring through the air is food, actually,

Jyoti Asundi (50:19)
Yeah.

Aarati Asundi (50:20)
Don and his colleagues switched it up and they started tossing pebbles that were about the same size as the mealworms. And at first the bats also chased the pebbles, but then they realized the pebbles were inedible, of course. 

Jyoti Asundi (50:34)
Correct.

Aarati Asundi (50:35)
And so soon they stopped chasing the pebbles altogether and only chased the mealworms. 

Jyoti Asundi (50:41)
Oh they were able to distinguish between those two. What a sophisticated system.

Aarati Asundi (50:47)
Yes. He also teamed up neurophysiology experts to study how the bat's brain lights up when it hears different things. he's doing all these different experiments and I'm...

Jyoti Asundi (50:59)
Wow.

Aarati Asundi (50:59)
There's so many, like I'm just trying to get the most important ones or the most interesting ones, but there's just so many experiments that he's doing on bats and birds and bees and everything.

Jyoti Asundi (51:10)
Such novel such novel which we take for granted today.

Aarati Asundi (51:15)
Yeah, and unfortunately weren't super appreciated in his time either because lot of the at Harvard disagreed still with him being a professor and him even being chair of the department because they still thought animal behavior was not real science. It was just observational and it wasn't on the same level as, biology, physiology, those kinds of things.

Jyoti Asundi (51:41)
Got it.

Aarati Asundi (51:44)
And so think he faced a lot of criticism, a lot of people trying to undermine his position. Also, sometime in the early 1960s, he and Ruth got a divorce, not sure why.

Jyoti Asundi (51:56)
Oh no.

Aarati Asundi (51:58)
But in 1965, he got remarried to a woman named Jocelyn Crane, who was an expert on crustaceans and she had been an assistant to William Beebe. And if that name rings a bell for any of our listeners, it's because of our episode on Eugenie Clark, the shark lady, hero was William Beebe. He was the guy who went down in the bathyscape and everything. And she was like, I want to be like him. 

Jyoti Asundi (52:25)
Wow, beautiful connections.

Aarati Asundi (52:27)
In 1965, he was given the opportunity to organize and become director of an Institute for Research in Animal Behavior at Rockefeller University. And so, of course, he immediately jumped at chance. He was like, goodbye, Harvard people who don't believe in me. I'm going to Rockefeller to direct this institute.

Jyoti Asundi (52:45)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Fantastic.

Aarati Asundi (52:49)
At Rockefeller, he did a bunch more experiments on bats, bees, birds. I can't go into it. It's really fascinating, just we don't, we'd be here all day. But is one more concept that he's really famous for voicing.
In 1976, he writes a book called The Question of Animal Awareness, where he puts forward the argument that animals don't just react to stimuli, but they're actually conscious of what they're doing. They can think, they can plan and experience sensations in much the same way that humans can. 

Jyoti Asundi (53:28)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (53:29)
And he argues that if we don't study this side of animal behavior, then our understanding of cognition will always be incomplete. This was a radical idea at the time because many psychologists, and even today, some psychologists believe that consciousness is a uniquely human trait... 

Jyoti Asundi (53:47)
Oh I see.

Aarati Asundi (54:48)
...in that only people are aware of the fact that we are people and we are moving through this world as people and that there different experiences than ours. In contrast, they believe that all animal behaviors that we observe, everything from navigation to communication, or even tool use, are just instinctual and or due to training, we can train animals to do something or not do something. 

Jyoti Asundi (54:17)
Right, right, right.

Aarati Asundi (54:20)
But they don't think that animals are conscious of themselves being an animal, or they don't think there's any strategy behind it per se, there's no plan.

Jyoti Asundi (54:28)
Yes. So he was far ahead of his time actually. He was a genius who was not completely recognized in his own time.

Aarati Asundi (54:37)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think the biggest sticking point for scientists, like we mentioned in our previous episode about Alfred Binet, was this idea of positivism. Because if an animal has consciousness, there has to be a way to measure it. A lot of scientists have this, like if it's a pure science and if it's truly a fact...

Jyoti Asundi (55:01)
Yes.

Aarati Asundi (55:01)
...then there needs to be a tangible way to measure, quantitatively, this thing. And how do you measure consciousness? So you can't really ask a bat, like, "Hey, what's it like being a bat? Do you enjoy being able to fly around hunting insects?"

Jyoti Asundi (55:19)
That's right. Yes. Yeah. How are you going to determine? How are you quantify those things? How do you communicate with the bat to be able to quantify that correctly?

Aarati Asundi (55:29)
Yeah. And I think this was a question that Don himself was always endlessly fascinated by, like even when he was a little kid. And primarily what got him into animal research was this kind of question of like, I wonder what it's like to be a bat. If I were a bat, I wonder what it would be like to fly up in the air at night and go hunting insects. Or even if I was a muskrat, what would it be like to be go digging in the dirt and, you know.

Jyoti Asundi (55:56)
That's right.

Aarati Asundi (55:57)
So he was fascinated by this question and he did think that animals kind of were aware that, yes, I'm a muskrat digging in the dirt or I'm a bat flying in the air, which a lot of scientists strongly disagreed with him and actually thought he was going senile for putting this idea out.

Jyoti Asundi (56:15)
I can see that. I could, I can see the resistance to a concept like that.

Aarati Asundi (56:20)
Yes, and definitely also because I think a lot of scientists believed that consciousness  is what separates us humans from the animals.

Jyoti Asundi (56:30)
Yeah and minute you say that they have consciousness, now you're just taking advantage of a species not capable of defending itself as well as can. And so you are able to slaughter it for its meat and do whatever you want with it and destroy its home for building your own. All sorts of things you're doing without compunction because you're able to assign a lower level of consciousness to that animal. But the minute you...

Aarati Asundi (56:56)
There's a lot of like moral and ethical implications once you start doing...

Jyoti Asundi (57:00)
Absolutely. Once you go down that road, you have to start the level of ethical behavior that you're willing to assign to yourself.

Aarati Asundi (57:09)
Yeah. He faced a lot skepticism for saying this. But he did think that there were ways to prove it or would be ways maybe in the future to prove it. This is still like the 70s, 80s, time period. And he thought that there was the possibility of getting concrete evidence of animal consciousness by doing comparative neurology studies to see what parts of the brain lit up and if those parts of the brain correlated with human consciousness Also studying how different animals react to new challenges. So for example, back to the bee experiment if a bee comes to the hive and does its waggle dance informing all the bees that pollen in this direction, it's been observed that not all the bees fly off to find that. Some will stay back. 

Jyoti Asundi (57:59)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Aarati Asundi (58:01)
So is that a conscious decision? 

Jyoti Asundi (58:04)
Absolutely. 

Aarati Asundi (58:04)
Do they make a choice that I'm not going to go and I'm going to stay? 

Jyoti Asundi (58:06)
I bet you they do. Yes absolutely. I think there is a there is a plan there.

Aarati Asundi (58:12)
So if we study those kinds of behaviors more and the differences between like some of the bees go and some of the bees stay, why did the bees who stay, what happened in their brains that made them stay versus what happened in the bees brains that went? What's the difference? Maybe that would kind of probe at that consciousness question a little bit more.

Jyoti Asundi (58:31)
Yes. You see that behavior, that conscious decision between two choices in so many species, like even birds that fly in formation. How do they decide who is the leader bird? How do they decide that now it's another bird's turn to be the leader bird?
There's method there, it's not randomness. 

Aarati Asundi (58:50)
Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (58:51)
So that indicates a level of higher consciousness and the ability to strategize and think it out. And that's very hard for human beings to digest because then we human beings are partners in the ecosystem with these other species. Right now, we are more comfortable with looking at ourselves as the apex species and everybody else is around just to serve us. And that whole idea is torpedoed out completely.

Aarati Asundi (59:23)
Yeah. And so facing a lot of backlash. The other piece of evidence that he thought we could study a bit more was the ability of animals to learn new things. And he came up with the example of ravens. There was a study on ravens that could learn to select boxes with a certain number of spots on them, up to seven spots. So if you told the raven, get the box that has three spots on it versus get the box with five spots on it, it could tell the difference.

Jyoti Asundi (59:54)
In fact there is a study somewhere because crows have been studied and there are lots of stories, anecdotal stories and various things. We know the famous story where the crow drops stones into a small pot of water so that the water rises it can drink.

Aarati Asundi (1:00:12)
Or heard they like fly really high with snails and stuff and drop them so that the ground cracks the shell of whatever it is. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jyoti Asundi (1:00:19)
That's right, the ground cracks them. Yeah, and all this is evolved over time rather than... So there is documentation of that. So yeah, they do have the intelligence to learn, It's true of not just humans, it's true of all species.

Aarati Asundi (1:00:34)
And I think that was the big argument that was happening was Don was saying that these crows are strategizing and they're able to come up with a plan to keep dropping pebbles into the jar for the water to rise or to keep dropping the snail from higher heights so that its shell would crack. But his retractors or naysayers were saying, this is all purely instinct. They're just doing this because either they were trained to do it or they just instinctually know how to do this. It's not something that they are planning and strategizing. ⁓ But for Don, was like, it's really clear that it is a plan. It is a strategy. You know?

Jyoti Asundi (1:01:17)
Yes, yes, yes.

Aarati Asundi (1:01:20)
So Don writes two more books on animal consciousness, Animal Thinking in 1984, where he presents evidence from his navigation studies that animals don't just respond, but they actually plan out alternate routes to their destination.

And he also wrote Animal Minds in 1992, which focused on evidence from studies in elephants, dolphins, and primates and other animals, where he argues that these animals show self-awareness through things like the mirror self-recognition test, where if you hold a mirror up in front of them, they realize that that's a reflection of themselves. It's not another elephant or it's not another dolphin. And animals also show other emotions like empathy, which is also very much rooted in being self-aware, being conscious.

Jyoti Asundi (1:02:16)
There are so many stories now of these animals like dolphins or even sharks who come up and swimmers asking for nets or harpoons that have got they have got stuck in. So  it's unimaginable to me that people can of this thought process that animals have their own awareness and consciousness.

Aarati Asundi (1:02:40)
Yeah, I was like, you know, it's really weird even living with a dog, have a pet dog, Kyro, and the way he looks at you sometimes or the way he, interacts with us sometimes, I'm like, he's very self-aware. He knows his place in the house and he knows when he needs to ask for help, you know. He knows when he wants something or doesn't want does want something.

Jyoti Asundi (1:03:02)
He rolls his eyes when we take too long to actually get out the door for his walking time. 

Aarati Asundi (1:03:09)
Yeah, he heaves a big sigh. Yeah.

Jyoti Asundi (1:03:09)
I can literally, yes... big sigh, rolling his eyes like, oh my God, you guys get your act together.

Aarati Asundi (1:03:17)
I'm just thinking, like, none of you science retractors must have pets because I think anyone with a pet would have realized that animals have to be self-aware.

Jyoti Asundi (1:03:26)
Absolutely. Yes.

Aarati Asundi (1:03:29)
In 1986, Don retired from Rockefeller, but he continues to teach as a visiting lecturer at Princeton, and he teaches an undergrad course at Harvard. He also continues to work on gathering evidence for animal consciousness, and he continues to set up experiments on literally any animal he thinks has strong potential for proving his theories. example, in 1996 to 1998, he organized a study that put cameras and microphones in beaver dams to study their communication and teamwork.

Jyoti Asundi (1:04:01)
Yes, yes.

Aarati Asundi (1:04:03)
In 2000, he and another zoologist named Katie Boynton-Payne started planning to set up a series of studies on elephant behavior and communications.

Jyoti Asundi (1:04:13)
Oh they are a magnificent species.

Aarati Asundi (1:04:17)
Yes. And in 2001, he published one more book called Animal Minds Beyond Cognition and Consciousness. Don passed away on November 7th, 2003 at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, still in the middle of doing numerous field studies on beavers, bees, and elephants. He was 88 years old.

Jyoti Asundi (1:04:36)
He kept at it. 88. He kept it until the very end. Good for him.

Aarati Asundi (1:04:44)
In his obituary, the New York Times wrote, "Many scientists say the only reason that animal thinking was given any consideration at all was that Dr. Griffin suggested it." end quote.

Jyoti Asundi (1:04:56)
That's a beautiful legacy, beautiful legacy.

Aarati Asundi (1:05:00)
And today there is lot of evidence, as we were saying, proves that Don was correct. So science finally caught up with him. Most notably, on July 2012, leading experts in neuroscience and animal cognition at the University of Cambridge signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, affirming that many animals, including mammals, birds, and maybe even octopuses, possess the neurological ability to be conscious and share some of the same brain structures as humans that allow human consciousness.

Jyoti Asundi (1:05:36)
Wow.

Aarati Asundi (1:05:37)
there's still so much to explore in this whole realm, but he's the one who really kickstarted it. So yeah, that's the story of Don Griffin.

Jyoti Asundi (1:05:47)
Beautiful. This is a beautiful story. I enjoyed it so much. I didn't know anything about it, but it was fantastic. It was wonderful, wonderful story. I loved it.

Aarati Asundi (1:05:57)
Yeah, I highly recommend going and reading more about him. There's so much information that I had to leave out just due to time and due to like, I need to finish this story at some point, you know?

Jyoti Asundi (1:06:10)
No, all we can do is create a window into the lives of these wonderful people who really changed the landscape for humanity. And then hopefully they are inspiring enough for us to go chase further and find out more information.

Aarati Asundi (1:06:26)
And as I mentioned put all of my sources on the website. So if anyone wants to go and more, it's all there for you to read. And I'm sure there's stuff I've missed. So let me know if there's something exciting that I've missed. I would love to hear it. Cause it sounds like he had a very exciting life.

Jyoti Asundi (1:06:44)
Thank you so much, Aarati.

Aarati Asundi (1:06:45)
Yes. I'm glad you enjoyed it and happy Halloween.

Jyoti Asundi (1:06:48)
Loved it. Loved it.

Aarati Asundi (1:06:51)
Thanks for listening. If you have a suggestion for a story we should cover or thoughts you want to share about an episode, reach out to us at smartteapodcast.com. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Blue Sky at Smart Tea Podcast and listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a rating or comment. It helps us grow. New episodes are released every other Wednesday. See you next time.