Not enough fish in the sea

The scientist who found a way to tally up global catches is an ocean advocate and a vocal critic of industrial fisheries. Now we have a treaty for the high seas — but does it go far enough?

By Nicola Jones

3.22.2023

Daniel Pauly is one of the world’s most cited fisheries researchers — and someone who’s used to making waves. He has called for a ban of subsidies that promote overfishing, such as ones that make shipping fuel cheaper or keep market prices artificially high. And he has compared the global fishery industry to an unsustainable Ponzi scheme: Just as fraudsters subsist only by finding new investors to scam, he says, fisheries survive only by finding previously unexploited stocks to fish.

This February, Pauly and colleague Rashid Sumaila won the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement from the University of Southern California for their efforts championing ocean sustainability. The pair, for example, penned a petition to the United Nations this February in advance of an international meeting to hammer out a new high seas treaty, calling for those waters to be declared a massive UN Protected Area that bans commercial fishing. That treaty was finally forged on March 4 to broad acclaim; it includes a way to designate marine protected areas in the high seas, but it does not go nearly as far as the duo had asked in terms of marine wildlife protections.

Pauly is no stranger to conflict and hard times. In the wake of World War II, he recounts, his mother sent him from France to live with a Swiss couple for a few months, but they never sent him back. At the age of 16, he ran away to Germany, where he finished his studies and became a fisheries biologist. He worked in Ghana, Tanzania and then the Philippines for 15 years, and wound up in Canada where, in 1999, he founded the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. That project, described in the 2023 issue of the Annual Review of Marine Science, aims to quantify humanity’s impact on fisheries and seek the best ways forward.

Knowable Magazine spoke with Pauly about his work. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the Sea Around Us project start?

In 1997, I was invited by the Pew Charitable Trusts (at the time, it was a foundation) to participate in a meeting along the lines of: What would you do if you had lots of money to answer the questions “How is the ocean doing?” and “How can we improve what we do to the ocean?” There were five or six heavyweights in oceanography, and me. They all said: We need more data (most scientists always say we need more data) and then in 20 years you can say something. I was the last to speak, and I said: This is nonsense. The fisheries are sampling the ocean for us. All we need to do is to document fisheries properly, and then we can extract information about the state of the ocean.

I got about $1.2 million a year, for 15 years, from Pew to do this. And that was the basis of all of our success. We documented the world fisheries, and we made this available to the world.

Today it’s more difficult, because we don’t have this kind of support. We have about one-third of the money, assembled from various sources.

How did you get the data to document fisheries?

Basically, every year, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) publishes the data that they get from their member countries about their fisheries. But the catch data is incomplete.

For example, Canada doesn’t send the FAO the catch of their recreational fisheries, or the catch made by foreign fleets in its own waters, or discarded catch, or bycatch — fish caught by accident alongside the target species. In the US, only the catch made in their federal waters, further than three miles from the coast, is sent.

Many Pacific Island nations will not report the catch made by local fishers, including women on reefs, which often feeds their population. That’s up to 80 percent of their catch, which goes into cooking pots but is never reported. How do we know about it? We know because the World Health Organization publishes, for example, fish consumption. Many countries don’t import fish, so they must get it from their own waters.

There are a few countries where officials can get political mileage by saying their fisheries are doing well. For example, Myanmar has for years sent to FAO not their catch, but the projection for what they expect to catch next year. That was smoothly increasing: In 2008, they had a major hurricane that destroyed half their fishing fleet, but it didn’t show up in their FAO reports.

The Chinese statistics are bad as can be.

We have to fix all this, fill in the gaps. We find data sometimes in anthropological papers, in gender studies, in health studies, anywhere that documents what people are eating and doing.

So, you're trawling all kinds of datasets to get this information.

Yes. We made an atlas — that effort involved 400 people, friends and colleagues throughout the world who helped us on a voluntary basis to reconstruct country-by-country data going back to 1950.

Some of our country estimates are going to be too high or too low. But we are confident that the total that we get by adding all these up is not far from the truth.

What is that total? What’s the total global catch?

We think it peaked around 1996 at 130 million metric tons. In the 1990s, there were still new stocks that we could exploit that had never been exploited. Then there came a time where the expansion hit a limit. It could not expand further, even though the fishing effort, the number of boats that we have and the time they spend at sea, is more today than in the 1990s.

That 130 million metric tons of fish provide about 5 percent of the calories needed for the world. And it is perhaps 20 percent of the global fish biomass at any time. In a sustainable, well-managed fishery, you can typically catch about 10 percent per year of the biomass that is there. So the global catch is excessive.

How much have the oceans suffered as a result?

There isn’t one single way to quantify this that everybody will agree on. But if you take the abundance of big fish, like sharks, they have been reduced by 70 percent. The biomass of exploited fish populations is going down virtually everywhere. People are shifting the population of the oceans to smaller fish.

There are very few indicators that are positive. One might be money. The decline in cod, for example, has allowed shrimp and crabs and lobsters to blossom. And you can make lots of money exploiting that; some people make more money than ever before. But fisheries money is distributed differently today than in the past. It’s now more in the hands of a few industrial boats, as opposed to widespread over the landscape.

Are there bright spots or exceptions?

The Alaska pollock fishery in the northeast Pacific is an anomalous fishery in that it is very well managed. This is one of the smartest fisheries, because they have managed to keep the biomass extremely high, and it’s stable. They don’t allow too many boats, so each boat makes a huge amount of money. It’s the most profitable fishery in the world.

I should mention that US fisheries, as a whole, are better managed than ones in most other countries.

What role does fish farming have to play in a sustainable ocean?

Fish farming sounds good. But right now, only Asia gets a net benefit from fish farming. About 60 percent of the world aquaculture is in China. The overwhelming majority of their seafood production is mollusks, such as clams, oysters and so on. These are invertebrates that you don’t need to feed; they feed themselves. That’s good aquaculture.

When we talk about aquaculture in the West, we usually mean salmon and other carnivorous fish that have to be fed with fish meal. You need about 3 to 4 kilos of small fish to produce 1 kilo of salmon. This kind of aquaculture consumes fish, it doesn’t produce them. In West Africa, for example, the sardines that people used to eat are now ground up for export as fish meal.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) — spots where fishing is legally restricted or banned entirely — are often promoted by conservationists but contested by the fishing industry. Do they work?

Yes. Basically, if you fish in a certain area, the population is reduced. If you overfish, the population is reduced even more. If you don’t fish, then the population bounces back. That’s what happens. There is no conceptual blockage to the notion that they should work, and every time somebody does a study of MPAs, they do work.

When you have a large MPA, you can see from space all the boats that are fishing right at the edge: It’s called fishing the line. The fishing industry will go to the edge of an MPA and catch lots of fish, and then they will go and complain about MPAs. It’s illogical.

In December 2022, more than 190 nations pledged to protect 30 percent of the land and 30 percent of the ocean by 2030 (the 30x30 campaign). How is that going?

I don’t know. It’s not only me who doesn’t know, because often people declare an MPA but they don’t actually protect anything there. It’s just a “paper park.”

For example, there is a system of marine protected areas in Europe called Natura 2000. Somebody has investigated them and found these marine protected areas in Europe are killing zones where the fishing pressure is stronger inside than outside. I’m not making that up. The French concept of a marine protected area is an area where you can fish really without restriction, including trawling. We have developed a “paper park” index, and found the worst 11 MPAs in the world.

The 30 percent target is a worthy goal. But many countries will meet the 30 percent requirement by lying.

You have suggested banning commercial fishing on the high seas — the areas beyond “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs), which extend 200 miles off national coastlines. Wouldn’t that have a huge impact on our fish supply?

The high seas make up 60 percent of the world ocean, but less than 10 percent of the fish that is caught worldwide. So this is an immense area, producing very little fish. It gets lots of attention because that’s where we catch tuna and squid and so on. But altogether, the high seas are a sideshow.

Notably, almost every species that is caught in the high seas also moves into EEZs, where they could be fished. Right now, tuna are caught by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Spain, and two or three more countries, and that’s it. Whereas if you could fish only in the EEZs, then maybe 50 countries could access tuna. You would bring much more equity to the world.

If we close the high sea to fishing, we would still have the same catch, globally. We would produce much less greenhouse gas if fishing boats weren’t going so far out. We would have less slavery at sea because all of this would be done within national jurisdictions. And the fish populations would be much more sustainable, because there would be such a large area where they could recover.

Are there signs that this will happen?

It is an idea that will take 20 to 30 years. But it’s like the idea of exclusive economic zones. That started with a few South American countries in the 1940s to 1960s, and it was laughed about at the time: The idea that a fleet could not fish in coastal waters without authorization and without paying a fee seemed completely absurd. And yet in 1982, the Convention on the Law of the Sea was ratified and EEZs became the norm of Planet Earth. And so one cannot expect this to be to be happening right away, but it is an idea whose time has come.

Delegates to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) just agreed this month, after years of discussion, on a treaty for the high seas. It establishes a way to set up MPAs in the high seas, but doesn’t go as far as you asked in your letter.

We did not at all expect our idea of banning all fishing in the high sea to be picked up in this round — the idea is far too new. What’s important is that we have a high seas treaty, which can and will be amended later.

If we were to do all the good things — ban all fishing in the high seas, protect 30 percent of the ocean in MPAs, ban harmful subsidies, enforce stricter fishing regulations and quotas — how long would it take fish stocks to bounce back?

The sea recovers very fast. Stocks recover very fast — faster than land: They can be rebuilt within 10 years.

But we also have climate change to face.

Yes. The fish will move, toward the poles. But the ocean is getting more and more problematic for fish because the oceans are being slowly deoxygenated. As waters warm, fish require more oxygen, but the water is capable of  holding less oxygen. It will be a mess if we don’t solve the problem of greenhouse gas emission: The ocean will be inimical to higher life forms — that is clear. There will be smaller fish in a few areas that will survive.

But it will not be the fishery that brings down our civilization. Our agricultural system will collapse: That is much more fragile. Russia’s war on Ukraine has illustrated how the failure of a few countries to export wheat can trigger famines.

So right now, overfishing is the biggest problem for fish. But even if we do all the right things about that…

If we don’t lick the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, that will all be in vain. Yeah.

That’s depressing.

It’s not depressing. We have agency, we can do things. We’re not prisoners. We can get out of this hole.

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Nicola Jones is a contributing editor and writer for Knowable Magazine and lives in Pemberton, British Columbia. Read more about her and her work on her  blog.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Why Britain’s new CPTPP trade deal will not make up for Brexit

UNIKYLUCKK/Shutterstock

Terence Huw Edwards, Loughborough University and Mustapha Douch, The University of Edinburgh

The UK recently announced that it will join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), giving British businesses access to the 11 other members of the Indo-Pacific trade bloc and bringing its combined GDP to £11 trillion.

Some commentators have suggested the deal could make up for Brexit. It’s been called “a momentous economic and strategic moment” that “kills off any likelihood that it [the UK] will ever rejoin the EU customs union or single market”. Shanker Singham of think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs has even said: “it’s no exaggeration to say that CPTPP+UK is an equivalent economic power to the EU-28-UK”, comparing it to a trade deal between the UK and EU members.

UK business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch echoed such sentiments, telling Times Radio:

We’ve left the EU so we need to look at what to do in order to grow the UK economy and not keep talking about a vote from seven years ago.

The problem with this fanfare is that the government’s own economic analysis of the benefits of joining this bloc is underwhelming. There is an estimated gain to the UK of 0.08% of GDP – this is just a 50th of the OBR’s estimate of what Brexit has cost the UK economy to date. Even for those that are sceptical about models and forecasts, that is an enormous difference in magnitude.

Of course, the CPTPP is expected to offer the UK some real gains. It certainly provides significant potential opportunities for some individual exporters. But the estimated gains for Britain overall are very small.

The main reason for this is that, apart from Japan, the major players of the global economy are not in the CPTPP. The US withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership (the CPTPP is what the remaining members formed without it). And China started negotiations to join in 2022, but current geopolitics now make its entry highly improbable. India was never involved.

In addition, the UK already has free trade agreements with nine out of the 11 members. The remaining two, Malaysia and Brunei, are controversial due to environmental threats from palm oil production to rainforests and orangutans.

Britain’s existing trade agreements with CPTPP members

Author provided using GDP data from the World Bank and trade data from UN Comtrade.

And despite the widespread public perception of the Asia-Pacific area as a hub of future growth, the performance and prospects of the CPTPP members are a mixed bag. The largest member, Japan, is arguably in long-term decline, as is Brunei, while just three members (Vietnam, Singapore and New Zealand had average growth in the last decade above 3% annually.

Finally, distance really does matter in trade. All the CPTPP members are thousands of miles from the UK, which explains their relatively small shares in UK trade at present.

Some benefits of CPTPP

While all of these points pour cold water on the suggested gains, there are some potential benefits from the CPTPP agreement, which allows for mutual recognition of certain standards. This includes patents and some relaxation of sanitary and phytosanitary rules on food items.

However, agreements over standards will involve the UK submitting to international CPTPP courts on these issues. This sits uncomfortably with many of the “sovereignty” objections to the European Court of Justice in relation to Brexit (largely from many of those who have extolled the CPTPP). It’s also notable that out of the nine agreements with CPTPP members that existed before the UK signed this deal, all but two are rollovers of previous EU deals.

But a trade deal with the CPTPP is worth more to the UK than separate deals with each member due to requirements around “rules of origin”, which determine the national source of a product. When a product contains inputs from more than one country, a series of separate free trade agreements may not eliminate tariffs. But if all the relevant countries are members of a single free trade agreement, then rules of origin on inputs from other members cease to be a problem (although there might be some issues if some members do not police the requirements properly).

Not the ideal agreement

While these benefits should be recognised, we should also acknowledge that the CPTPP is not the ideal agreement for Britain. As stated above, distance really does matter in trade – this is overwhelmingly accepted by modern trade economists.

Research shows that the rate at which trade declines with distance has barely changed over more than a century. This might seem strange because transport costs have fallen over time. But, as transport and communications have improved, firms have outsourced much of their production to complex supply chains that often cross national borders many times, with “just-in-time” supply schedules to keep down the costs of holding large stocks.

This means that, while trade everywhere has grown, there is still a big premium for trading (many times) across borders between contiguous countries. It is exactly this type of trade which benefits most from big comprehensive trade agreements that simplify rules of origin and regulatory paperwork.

This suggests that, while some elements of the the CPTPP offer benefits to the UK, it is unlikely to boost its trade in the way it does between countries around the Pacific Rim. For this sort of boost, the UK really needs to look towards its own neighbours. Of course, this is just the sort of agreement that Badenoch seems reluctant to discuss.

Terence Huw Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Loughborough University and Mustapha Douch, Assistant Professor in Economics, The University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What the image of the Milky Way’s black hole really shows

The massive object at the galaxy’s center is invisible. But this year’s picture of the swirling plasma around its edges will help to reveal more about the galaxy’s history and evolution.

By Katie McCormick

11.8.2022

Black holes keep their secrets close. They imprison forever anything that enters. Light itself can’t escape a black hole’s hungry pull.

It would seem, then, that a black hole should be invisible — and taking its picture impossible. So great fanfare accompanied the release in 2019 of the first image of a black hole. Then, in spring 2022, astronomers unveiled another black hole photo — this time of the one at the center of our own Milky Way.

The image shows an orange, donut-shaped blob that looks remarkably similar to the earlier picture of the black hole in the center of galaxy Messier 87. But the Milky Way’s black hole, Sagittarius A*, is actually much smaller than the first and was more difficult to see, since it required peering through the hazy disk of our galaxy. So even though the observations of our own black hole were conducted at the same time as M87’s, it took three additional years to create the picture. Doing so required an international collaboration of hundreds of astronomers, engineers and computer scientists, and the development of sophisticated computer algorithms to piece together the image from the raw data.

These “photos” do not, of course, directly show a black hole, defined as the region of space inside a point-of-no-return barrier known as an event horizon. They actually record portions of the flat pancake of hot plasma swirling around the black hole at high speeds in what’s known as the accretion disk. The plasma is composed of high-energy charged particles. As plasma spirals around the black hole, its accelerating particles emit radio waves. The blurry orange ring seen in the images are an elaborate reconstruction of these radio waves captured by eight telescopes scattered around the Earth, collectively known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

The latest image tells the tale of the epic journey of radio waves from the center of the Milky Way, providing unprecedented detail about Sagittarius A*. The image also constitutes “one of the most important visual proofs of general relativity,” our current best theory of gravity, says Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam and member of the EHT collaboration.

Studying supermassive black holes such as Sagittarius A* will help scientists learn more about how galaxies evolve over time and how they congregate in vast clusters across the universe.

From the galactic core

Sagittarius A* is 1,600 times smaller than Messier 87’s black hole that was imaged in 2019, and is also about 2,100 times closer to Earth. That means the two black holes appear to be about the same size on the sky. Geoffrey Bower, an EHT project scientist at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, says that the resolution required to see Sagittarius A* from Earth is the same as would be required to take a picture of an orange on the surface of the Moon.

The center of our galaxy is 26,000 light-years away from us, so the radio waves collected to create this image were emitted around the time that one of the earliest-known permanent human settlements was constructed. The radio waves’ voyage began when they were first emitted from particles in the black hole’s accretion disk. With a wavelength of about 1 mm, the radiation traveled toward Earth relatively undisturbed by the intervening galactic gas and dust. If the wavelength were much shorter, like visible light, the radio waves would have been scattered by the dust. If the wavelength were much longer, the waves would have been bent by charged clouds of plasma, distorting the image.

Finally, after the 26,000-year trek, the radio waves were picked up and recorded at the radio observatories distributed across our planet. The large geographic separation between the observatories was essential — it allowed the consortium of researchers to detect extremely subtle differences in the radio waves collected at each site through a process called interferometry. These small differences are used to deduce the minuscule differences in the distance each radio wave traveled from its source. Using computer algorithms, the scientists managed to decode the path-length differences of the radio waves to reconstruct the shape of the object that emitted them.

Researchers put all this into a false-color image, where orange represents high-intensity radio waves and black represents low-intensity. “But each telescope only picks up a tiny fraction of the radio signal,” explains Fulvio Melia, an astrophysicist at University of Arizona who has written about our galaxy’s supermassive black hole. Because we’re missing much of the signal, “instead of seeing a crystal clear photo, you see something that’s a little foggy … a little blurred.”

The image helps reveal more about the black hole’s event horizon — the closest point to which anything can approach the black hole without being sucked in. Beyond the event horizon, not even light can escape.

From the image, scientists have been able to better estimate the size of the event horizon and deduce that the accretion disk is tilted by more than 40 degrees from the Milky Way’s disk, so that we’re seeing the round face of the flat accretion disk, rather than the thin sliver of its edge.

But even if the black hole’s accretion disk were oriented edge-on relative to Earth, the gravity around the black hole warps the space around it so much that light emitted from the backside of the black hole would be bent around to come toward us, making a ringlike image regardless of its orientation. So, how do scientists know its orientation? Because the ring is mostly round; if we were viewing the accretion disk edge-on, then the ring would be more squished and oblong.

Markoff thinks that this new ability to look into the heart of our galaxy will help to fill in gaps in our understanding of the evolution of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe. A dense, massive object such as a black hole at the center of a galaxy influences the movements of the stars and dust near it, and that influences how the galaxy changes over time. Properties of the black hole, such as in which direction it spins, depend on the history of its collisions — with stars or other black holes, perhaps. “A lot of people … look at the sky and think of it all as static, right? But it’s not. It’s a big ecosystem of stuff that’s evolving,” Markoff says.

So far, the fact that the image matches the scientists’ expectations so precisely makes it an important confirmation of current theories of physics. “This has been a prediction that we’ve had for two decades,” Bower says, “that we would see a ring of this scale. But, you know, seeing is believing.”

Lea en español

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Katie McCormick is a quantum physicist-turned-science writer based in Sacramento, California. Read more of her work at www.katiemccormickphd.com.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

The secrets of cooperation

Most people care what others think of them. In many situations, that can be leveraged for the common good.

By Bob Holmes

People stop their cars simply because a little light turns from green to red. They crowd onto buses, trains and planes with complete strangers, yet fights seldom break out. Large, strong men routinely walk right past smaller, weaker ones without demanding their valuables. People pay their taxes and donate to food banks and other charities.

Most of us give little thought to these everyday examples of cooperation. But to biologists, they’re remarkable — most animals don’t behave that way.

“Even the least cooperative human groups are more cooperative than our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos,” says Michael Muthukrishna, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics. Chimps don’t tolerate strangers, Muthukrishna says, and even young children are a lot more generous than a chimp.

Human cooperation takes some explaining — after all, people who act cooperatively should be vulnerable to exploitation by others. Yet in societies around the world, people cooperate to their mutual benefit. Scientists are making headway in understanding the conditions that foster cooperation, research that seems essential as an interconnected world grapples with climate change, partisan politics and more — problems that can be addressed only through large-scale cooperation.

Behavioral scientists’ formal definition of cooperation involves paying a personal cost (for example, contributing to charity) to gain a collective benefit (a social safety net). But freeloaders enjoy the same benefit without paying the cost, so all else being equal, freeloading should be an individual’s best choice — and, therefore, we should all be freeloaders eventually.

Many millennia of evolution acting on both our genes and our cultural practices have equipped people with ways of getting past that obstacle, says Muthukrishna, who coauthored a look at the evolution of cooperation in the 2021  Annual Review of Psychology. This cultural-genetic coevolution stacked the deck in human society so that cooperation became the smart move rather than a sucker’s choice. Over thousands of years, that has allowed us to live in villages, towns and cities; work together to build farms, railroads and other communal projects; and develop educational systems and governments.

Evolution has enabled all this by shaping us to value the unwritten rules of society, to feel outrage when someone else breaks those rules and, crucially, to care what others think about us.

“Over the long haul, human psychology has been modified so that we’re able to feel emotions that make us identify with the goals of social groups,” says Rob Boyd, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University.

For a demonstration of this, one need look no further than a simple lab experiment that psychologists call the dictator game. In this game, researchers give a sum of money to one person (the dictator) and tell them they can split the money however they’d like with an unknown other person whom they will never meet. Even though no overt rule prohibits them from keeping all the money themselves, many people’s innate sense of fairness leads them to split the money 50-50. Cultures differ in how often this happens, but even societies where the sense of fairness is weakest still choose a fair split fairly often.

Lab experiments such as this, together with field studies, are giving psychologists a better understanding of the psychological factors that underpin when, and why, people cooperate. Here are some of the essential takeaways:

We cooperate for different reasons at different social scales

For very small groups, family bonds and direct reciprocity — I’ll help you today, on the expectation that you will help me tomorrow — may provide enough impetus for cooperation. But that works only if everyone knows one another and interacts frequently, says Muthukrishna. When a group gets big enough that people often interact with someone they’ve never dealt with before, reputation can substitute for direct experience. In these conditions, individuals are more likely to risk cooperating with others who have a reputation for doing their share.

Once a group gets so large that people can no longer count on knowing someone’s reputation, though, cooperation depends on a less personal force: the informal rules of behavior known as norms. Norms represent a culture’s expectations about how one should behave, how one should and shouldn’t act. Breaking a norm — whether by littering, jumping a subway turnstile or expressing overt racism — exposes violators to social disapproval that may range from a gentle “tut-tut” to social ostracism. People also tend to internalize their culture’s norms and generally adhere to them even when there is no prospect of punishment — as seen, for example, in the dictator game.

But there may be a limit to the power of norms, says Erez Yoeli, a behavioral scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The enforcement of norms depends on social disapproval of violators, so they work only within social groups. Since nations are the largest groups that most people identify strongly with, that may make norms relatively toothless in developing international cooperation for issues such as climate change.

“The problem isn’t owned by a single group, so it’s kind of a race to the bottom,” says Yoeli. Social skills that go beyond cooperation, and psychological tools other than norms, may be more important in working through global problems, he speculates. “These are the ones we struggle a bit to solve.”

Reputation is more powerful than financial incentives in encouraging cooperation

Almost a decade ago, Yoeli and his colleagues trawled through the published literature to see what worked and what didn’t at encouraging prosocial behavior. Financial incentives such as contribution-matching or cash, or rewards for participating, such as offering T-shirts for blood donors, sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, they found. In contrast, reputational rewards — making individuals’ cooperative behavior public — consistently boosted participation. The result has held up in the years since. “If anything, the results are stronger,” says Yoeli.

Financial rewards will work if you pay people enough, Yoeli notes — but the cost of such incentives could be prohibitive. One study of 782 German residents, for example, surveyed whether paying people to receive a Covid vaccine would increase vaccine uptake. It did, but researchers found that boosting vaccination rates significantly would have required a payment of at least 3,250 euros — a dauntingly steep price.

And payoffs can actually diminish the reputational rewards people could otherwise gain for cooperative behavior, because others may be unsure whether the person was acting out of altruism or just doing it for the money. “Financial rewards kind of muddy the water about people’s motivations,” says Yoeli. “That undermines any reputational benefit from doing the deed.”

Gossip plays a lead role in enforcing norms

When people see someone breaking a norm — for example, by freeloading when cooperation was expected — they have three ways to punish the violation, says Catherine Molho, a psychologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: They can confront the offender directly about their transgression; they can shun that person in the future; or they can tell others about the offender’s bad behavior. The latter response — gossip, or the sharing of information about a third party when they are not present — may have unique strengths, says Molho.

The clearest example of this comes from an online experiment led by Molho’s colleague Paul Van Lange, a behavioral scientist also at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The study used a standard lab procedure called a public goods game, in which each participant receives a sum of money and can choose to contribute none, some or all of it to a shared pool. The experimenters then double the money in the shared pool and divide it equally among all participants, whether they contributed or not. The group as a whole maximizes their earnings if everyone puts all their money in the pool — but a freeloader could do even better, by keeping their own cash and reaping a share of what others put in the pool.

Crucially, people played the game not just once but four times, with different partners each time. Between rounds, some participants had an opportunity to punish freeloaders from their most recent group by paying some of their own money to the experimenters, who would fine the freeloader three times the amount of that payment. Others were given the chance to gossip — that is, to tell members of the freeloaders’ new group that they had failed to cooperate. Sure enough, the gossip led to higher levels of cooperation — but, surprisingly, direct punishment did not, the researchers found.

People use the power of gossip in the real world, too. In one recent study, Molho and her colleagues texted 309 volunteers at four random times each day for 10 days to ask if they had shared information with others in their social network, or received information from them, about someone else. If so, a follow-up questionnaire gathered more information.

The 309 participants reported more than 5,000 total instances of gossip over that time, and about 15 percent were about norm violations such as tossing trash in the street or making racist or sexist comments. People tended to gossip more with closer friends, and about more distant acquaintances. Gossip recipients reported that this negative information made them less likely to help the untrustworthy and more likely to avoid them.

“One reason gossip is such a powerful tool is you can accomplish many social functions,” says Molho. “You feel closer to the person who shared information with you. But we also find it provides useful information for social interaction — I learn who to cooperate with and who to avoid.”

And gossip serves another function, too, says Van Lange: Gossipers can sort through their feelings about whether a norm violation is important, whether there were mitigating circumstances and what response is appropriate. This helps reinforce the social norms and can help people coordinate their response to offenders, he says.

We like being on trend — and on the cutting edge

Some well-meaning ways of encouraging cooperation don’t work — and may even backfire. In particular, telling people what others actually do (“Most people are trying to reduce how often they fly”) is more effective than telling them what they should do (“You should fly less — it’s bad for the climate”). In fact, the “should” message sometimes backfires. “People may read something behind the message,” says Cristina Bicchieri, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania: Telling someone they should do something may signal that people don’t, in fact, do it.

Bicchieri and her colleague Erte Xiao tested this in a dictator game where some participants were told that other people shared equally, while others were told that people thought everyone should share equally. Only the first message increased the likelihood of an equal share, they found.

That result makes sense, says Yoeli. “It sends a very clear message about social expectations: If everybody else is doing this, it sends a very credible signal about what they expect me to do.”

This poses a problem, of course, if most people don’t actually choose a socially desirable behavior, such as installing solar panels. “If you just say that 15 percent do that, you normalize the fact that 85 percent don’t,” says Bicchieri. But there’s a work-around: It turns out that even a minority can nudge people toward a desired behavior if the number is increasing, thus providing a trendy bandwagon to hop on. In one experiment, for example, researchers measured the amount of water volunteers used while brushing their teeth. People who had been told that a small but increasing proportion of people were conserving water used less water than those who heard only that a small proportion conserved.

Much remains unknown

Behavioral scientists are just beginning to crack the problem of cooperation, and many questions remain. In particular, very little is known yet about why cultures hold the norms that they do, or how norms change over time. “There’s a lot of ideas about the within-group processes that cause norms to be replaced, but there’s not much consensus,” says Boyd, who is working on the problem now.

Everyone does agree that, eventually, natural selection will determine the outcome, as cultures whose norms do not enhance survival die out and are replaced by those with norms that do. But that’s not a test most of us would be willing to take.

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Bob Holmes is a science writer based in Edmonton, Canada.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Can playing video games make you smarter?

OPINION: Research highlights six key principles for better learning

By Richard E. Mayer

If you spend more than an hour a day playing video games, that’s 5 percent of your life. Will this time investment do anything good for your brain?

This is a question that my colleagues and I at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been studying for the past two decades. We want to know whether playing video games can increase cognitive skills: In other words, can game playing make you smarter? We have performed experiments, conducted meta-analyses of research literature and even produced a couple of books: Computer Games for Learning and Handbook of Game-Based Learning.

The results have been surprising — with some bad news, good news, even better news, and some prospects for the future based on rigorous scientific research.

My team focuses on what I call cognitive consequences experiments. Our researchers take a group of people and give them a test that assesses some cognitive skill, like attention, perception, mental flexibility, spatial processing, reasoning or memory. Then we split the group in half. One half plays a video game targeting that skill for two or more hours over many sessions; the other half engages in some other activity, like playing a word-search game. Then we give them all the same test again.

First, the bad news. A careful review of published scientific research shows that most off-the-shelf video games do not improve cognitive skills. This holds true for strategy games, adventure games, puzzle games and many brain-training games.

Next, the good news. There appears to be one genre of commercial games that can improve cognitive skills — and it might surprise you. Playing action video games, including first-person shooter games, can continually exercise your perceptual attention with immediate feedback, under a variety of ever-changing contexts, and with increasing levels of challenge.

Finally, even better news. Some research groups are having success making nonviolent learning games that work. Our lab, for example, has partnered with the CREATE Lab at New York University to develop games using evidence-based theories. In one, All You Can ET, space creatures fall from the sky and you must shoot up food or drinks depending on ever-changing rules. This trains “task switching” or what some people call multitasking — an executive function skill associated with academic success.

We have found that playing All You Can ET  for as little as two hours improved task-switching skills more than playing a word-search game for the same amount of time. All You Can ET  is available for free on Google Play Store for Android and on the Apple App Store (we do not receive any income from the game).

A few other labs have seen similar successes. Neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and his team at the University of California, San Francisco, for example, created NeuroRacer: a car-driving multitasking game that has been shown to train attention control skills in older adults. That technology was used by a company to develop EndeavorRx, targeted to help kids with attention deficits. In 2020, that became the first-ever video game approved for medical marketing by the FDA, available by prescription.

Why do these games work while others do not? Our games are designed with six principles: focus on a well-specified target skill, provide repeated practice, give immediate feedback, maintain increasing levels of challenge, provide varying contexts for exercising the skill and make sure the game is enjoyable.

With studies like these in hand, we can look forward to a future when researchers and developers collaborate to construct fun games that train specific cognitive skills. Then that hour a day of play really will make you smarter.

Produced by  Knowable Magazine , this piece first appeared in the Mercury News .

Lea en español

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Richard E. Mayer is an educational psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. 

Amyloidosis: Beyond Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

Amyloid plaque can build up in body organs other than the brain. The resulting diseases — AL amyloidosis, ATTR amyloidosis and more — cause much suffering.

By Amber Dance

Isabelle Lousada was in her early 30s when she collapsed at her Philadelphia wedding in 1995. A London architect, she had suffered a decade of mysterious symptoms: tingling fingers, swollen ankles, a belly distended by her enlarged liver. The doctors she first consulted suggested she had chronic fatigue syndrome or that she’d been partying and drinking too hard.

But her new brother-in-law, a cardiologist, felt that something else must be going on. A fresh series of doctor’s visits led, finally, to the proper diagnosis: Malformed proteins had glommed together inside Lousada’s bloodstream and organs. Those giant protein globs are called amyloid, and the diagnosis was amyloidosis.

Amyloid diseases that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, receive the lion’s share of attention from medical professionals and the press. In contrast, amyloid diseases that affect other body parts are less familiar and rarely diagnosed conditions, says Gareth Morgan, a biochemist at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Physicians may struggle to recognize and distinguish them, especially in early stages.

Treatment options have also been limited — Lousada, now CEO of the nonprofit Amyloidosis Research Consortium in Newton, Massachusetts, was fortunate to survive thanks to a stem cell transplant that is too grueling or unsuitable for many with amyloidosis.

Several new medications have come out in the last five years — and these, Lousada says, “have been real game-changers.” But although these therapies can block the formation of new, damaging amyloid, they can’t dissolve the amyloid that’s already built up. The body has natural processes to do so, but these are often too slow to clear years’ worth of built-up amyloid, especially in older individuals. And so patients still deal with amyloid clogging their organs, and people still die of amyloidosis, even if they survive longer than they once did.

Scientists are working on newer treatments, including ones that may help a patient’s own immune cells swoop in and destroy residual amyloid.

When folding goes awry

Amyloid structures are natural body proteins gone horribly wrong. When protein formation proceeds normally, the amino acid chains curve and fold just so, like precise origami, to create their final, functional shapes. But sometimes, due to genetic errors or aging, a protein adopts an alternative, inappropriate shape that exposes sticky bits. Misfolded proteins start to clump together into small aggregates, then bigger chains called fibrils, and finally into huge, rectangular structures called amyloid. Amyloid can gum up the workings of cells by just generally getting in the way, but it may also interact with certain other molecules to produce directly toxic effects.

There are a few dozen human proteins that have a propensity to form amyloid, and scientists regularly add more to the list, says Fabrizio Chiti, a biochemist at the University of Florence, Italy, who coauthored a paper on misfolded proteins in disease for the Annual Review of Biochemistry. The body does have ways to identify and dispose of these misfolded proteins, but with age, these defenses tend to falter, so amyloid diseases often strike older people.

One of the more common non-brain amyloid diseases is transthyretin amyloidosis, or ATTR for short; it occurs when a protein called transthyretin misfolds. The normal job of transthyretin is to carry a thyroid hormone and vitamin A in the blood to different parts of the body. When it forms amyloid, the result is different depending on where the malformed proteins land. In the peripheral nerves, the amyloid causes symptoms such as tingling and numbness in extremities. More commonly, amyloid forms in the heart, where it causes symptoms of cardiomyopathy such as abnormal heart rhythm and shortness of breath.

Up to 7,000 new cases of ATTR-cardiomyopathy are diagnosed every year in the United States; more people may have some of this amyloid in the heart without manifesting symptoms, says Morgan. ATTR-cardiomyopathy may account for many more cases of heart disease than physicians currently realize.

Amyloid can form from entirely normal transthyretin. But another, inherited form of the disease occurs when a genetic mutation makes the transthyretin protein particularly likely to misfold. It’s this form that doctors initially suspected after Lousada’s wedding. Hereditary ATTR can occur in people of Portuguese descent, and a physician noticed that Lousada’s last name is Portuguese.

Doctors performed a liver biopsy and used a special stain to identify amyloid, but further studies indicated that ATTR wasn’t the answer. It turned out that Lousada’s kidneys, liver, spleen and heart were chock full of another kind of amyloid, built from a portion of antibody protein.

Our bodies make a huge diversity of antibodies to help defend us against countless foreign threats. But sometimes, one immune cell starts copying itself like crazy, pumping out tons of just one kind of antibody. Perhaps 1 percent of people over the age of 50 have this condition without a problem, says Morgan. But if those immune cells accumulate additional defects they can take over the bone marrow, becoming a type of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. Or if the overproduced antibodies include misfolding segments in a part of the antibody called the light chain, the result is light chain amyloidosis, or AL.

AL amyloidosis causes a variety of symptoms, including, commonly, kidney or heart damage. In later stages, the tongue may swell up with amyloid and blood vessels around the eyes may become damaged. “It’s almost like having black eyes all the time,” says Morgan. Though AL is the other most common form of non-brain amyloidosis, it is only diagnosed up to 3,200 times every year in the United States.

Lousada’s AL diagnosis was made decades back, and she was lucky: Eventually, a therapy worked — but not immediately. Physicians first tried chemotherapy, but her disease continued to worsen, and doctors in London discharged her to hospice care, estimating that she had months to live.

Her brother-in-law came to the rescue again, connecting her with a hospital in Boston that was doing stem cell transplants — a multiple myeloma treatment — for patients with AL. The idea was to wipe out the bone marrow from which immune cells arise, then replace it with new marrow from a donor. This should eliminate the cells that were spewing out the problem light chain protein.

Lousada underwent the treatment, which required months in the hospital, and it took years to fully recover.

Like AL, treatment options for ATTR also were limited and difficult in the past. Most transthyretin is made in the liver, so a liver transplant can help some people with the inherited form. But that leaves patients taking immunosuppressants for life, lest they reject the new liver.

More options were desperately needed, and years back, well before Lousada got sick, researchers were at work on the problem.

A variety of drug approaches

Since 1989, chemical neurobiologist Jeffery Kelly had aimed to develop medication for ATTR. Kelly, now at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, knew that normal transthyretin consists of four individual proteins joined together, and that, in this form, it cannot misfold or form amyloid. He reasoned that if he could use a small molecule to lock the four transthyretin molecules together in the proper shape, he could stop the protein from taking on a new, damaging one.

Over several studies and more than a decade, Kelly’s team tested about a thousand potential molecules in test tubes for the ability to stabilize transthyretin. When amyloid forms, it makes solutions cloudy or opaque in violet light and near-ultraviolet light, so the scientists could measure when drugs inhibited creation of amyloid. After chemical tweaking of these candidate drugs, they settled on a molecule called tafamidis.

Kelly cofounded a company, FoldRx, to develop the drug; Pfizer took over FoldRx in 2010. In an international trial, researchers studied 128 people who had polyneuropathy due to the transthyretin mutation doctors once suspected in Lousada. The drug slowed the rate at which their symptoms worsened. This study, which focused on people who had neuropathy and was published in 2012, led to approval of tafamidis in several nations. A second trial of 441 patients who had heart disease caused by ATTR showed the drug reduced cardiovascular-related hospitalizations and deaths and slowed decline in quality of life, leading to US Food and Drug Administration approval for ATTR-cardiomyopathy in 2019.

Today, Kelly says, there are about 30,000 people taking tafamidis worldwide. But he thinks many more could benefit if it were easier to diagnose ATTR.

Other researchers are developing drugs using different approaches. For example, while tafamidis stabilizes transthyretin, other scientists have decided to eliminate the protein itself. That’s possible because there are other proteins that can do transthyretin’s transport job, says physician David Lebwohl, chief medical officer for Intellia Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company is using a form of gene therapy to deactivate the transthyretin gene in the livers of ATTR patients.

In an early trial of 15 people with inherited ATTR-polyneuropathy, the treatment was safe and cut the amount of transthyretin present in their blood by an average of 93 percent at the highest dose. Intellia hopes to start a larger trial looking at the drug in ATTR-cardiomyopathy patients by the end of 2023. If successful, Intellia’s treatment would join three other anti-transthyretin gene treatments that have come out in the last five years, inotersen, patisiran and vutrisiran. These medications use small snippets of nucleic acid that block transthyretin from being made, without deactivating the gene itself as Intellia’s strategy does.

Things are also looking up for treatment of AL amyloidosis. In 2021, the FDA approved a treatment containing daratumumab, another medication borrowed from multiple myeloma, specifically for AL. Like the molecule behind the disease, this treatment is an antibody, but an entirely different one. The daratumumab antibody sticks to the problem immune cells that are churning out light chain. It acts as a label that calls in other parts of the immune system to destroy the problem cells. Once they’re gone, they can’t spew out the problematic AL antibody anymore.

And Kelly, inspired by his earlier protein-stabilizing success, hopes to apply the tafamidis strategy to AL. He and Morgan, who used to work in his lab, are on the hunt for small molecules that would lock the antibody light chain in its proper form so it can’t misfold. This is more challenging than for transthyretin, says Morgan, because every person with AL has a different light chain behind their disease. They need a molecule that will stabilize any and all of them.

After screening more than 650,000 small molecules, Morgan and Kelly found several candidates. Based on biochemical tests and studies of the molecular structures, they think these potential drugs slide into the space between any pair of light chains and keep them in their proper shape. The team has done further chemistry to make molecules that do this even better. The next step will be to test these drug candidates on patient blood samples in Morgan’s lab, to see if it can stabilize light chain proteins sampled from people known to have AL. Kelly cofounded another company, Protego, to bring this medication to market. (Kelly also sits on the scientific advisory board of the Amyloidosis Research Consortium.)

Attacking amyloid itself

Although these new drugs stop amyloid from forming, it’s hard to say how much they help with amyloid that’s already present in patients, which can cause ongoing symptoms.

Patients still deal with amyloid clogging their organs, and people still die of amyloidosis, even if they survive longer than they once did.

Scientists suspect that with time, the immune system — at least in younger people — can identify and clear up this residual protein garbage. But some researchers are working on ways to facilitate elimination of amyloid directly, such as by developing antibodies that would lure immune cells to a specific form of amyloid, or even to any form of amyloid. Such pan-amyloid antibodies would, theoretically, benefit not just patients with ATTR or AL, but also those with other amyloid diseases. There already is a new antibody drug for Alzheimer’s, lecanemab, that identifies the amyloid associated with that disease and appears to reduce its amounts.

And Kelly, who co-wrote about diseases of protein maintenance in the Annual Review of Biochemistry, is interested in revving up a natural process called autophagy. This process is used by body cells when they contain something that’s dangerous, damaged or just no longer useful. They shunt the garbage into an acidic bag called the lysosome, where it’s destroyed.

Immune cells, for example, use autophagy to destroy the garbage they take up, which is probably how young people with feisty immune systems can get rid of residual amyloid. But Kelly suspects that some of these autophagy mechanisms go dormant in elderly people, and defects in autophagy have been linked to neurological amyloid diseases.

Augmenting autophagy in older individuals with amyloidosis, Kelly hopes, will allow their aged immune cells to take out the trash properly. Presumably, this would work on any form of amyloid, in the brain or in the body.

To find molecules that would promote autophagy, the team started by testing 940,000 small molecules to identify ones that would promote a destruction of fat droplets, which are natural targets of autophagy, as well as other degradation methods, in cells growing in lab dishes. Then they tested the winners more specifically for autophagy activation, using the disappearance of a green-glowing piece of protein as it was digested to measure successful autophagy. As reported in a preprint, one promising candidate reduced the amount of amyloid in cultured cells that made either one of two well-known amyloids: tau protein amyloid, linked to Alzheimer’s disease, or an amyloid protein associated with what’s known as “mad cow” disease. The researchers still need to figure out the mechanism of the drug, called CCT020312 for now, before starting clinical trials.

The amyloidosis field has come a long way in the last three-plus decades. “It’s a really amazing time to be in this space, because there’s a lot that has happened,” Morgan says. He envisions a day when treatments will combine several approaches: Stop the production of the problem protein, as daratumumab and gene therapy do; stabilize the protein that’s still made, like tafamidis does; and mop up residual amyloid, like the immune system approaches aim to do.

With time, perhaps, more people with amyloidosis will have stunning results like Lousada did, but with far less onerous treatments than a transplant. Twenty-seven years after her diagnosis, she is fully recovered, though she still has regular blood tests to check if the light chain is building up in her body again. She and her husband are raising three children and have moved to the United States, and she’s become an activist for amyloidosis research.

“I really felt, when I came out of this experience, that I could do something that would have more meaning and impact than architecture,” she says. “In every way, it changed the trajectory of my life.”

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Amber Dance is a Knowable Magazine contributor based in Los Angeles.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Three AI experts on how access to ChatGPT-style tech is about to change our world – podcast

ChatGPT has the fastest-growing user base of any technology in history. Dmytro Varavin/iStock via Getty Images

Daniel Merino, The Conversation and Nehal El-Hadi, The Conversation

ChatGPT burst onto the technology world, gaining 100 million users by the end of January 2023, just two months after its launch and bringing with it a looming sense of change.

The technology itself is fascinating, but part of what makes ChatGPT uniquely interesting is the fact that essentially overnight, most of the world gained access to a powerful generative artificial intelligence that they could use for their own purposes. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we speak with researchers who study computer science, technology and economics to explore how the rapid adoption of technologies has, for the most part, failed to change social and economic systems in the past – but why AI might be different, despite its weaknesses.

Spending just a few minutes playing with new, generative AI algorithms can show you just how powerful they are. You can open up Dall-E, type in a phrase like “dinosaur riding motorcycle across a bridge,” and seconds later, the algorithm will produce multiple images more or less depicting what you asked for. ChatGPT does much the same, just with text as its output.

Open AI’s Dall-E generated this image from a prompt reading ‘dinosaur riding a motorcycle over a bridge.’ The Conversation/OpenAI, CC BY-ND

These models are trained on huge amounts of data taken from the internet, and as Daniel Acuña, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the U.S. explains, that can be a problem. “If we are feeding these models data from the past and data from today, they will learn some biases,” Acuña says. “They will relate words – let’s say about occupations – and find relationships between words and how they are used with certain genders or certain races.”

The problem of bias in AI is not new, but with increased access, more people are now using it, and as Acuña says, “I hope that whoever is using those models is aware of these issues.”

With any new technology there is always a risk of misuse, but these concerns are usually accompanied by hope that as people gain access to better tools, their lives will improve. That theory is exactly what Kentaro Toyama, a professor of community information at the University of Michigan, has studied for nearly two decades.

“What I ultimately discovered was that it is quite possible to get research results that were positive, where some kind of technology would enhance a situation in a government or school, or in a clinic,” explains Toyama. “But it was nearly impossible to take that technological idea and then have it have impact at wider scales.”

Ultimately, Toyama came to believe that “technology amplifies underlying human forces. And in our current world, those human forces are aligned in a way that the rich get richer and inequality keeps growing.” But he was open to the idea that if AI could be inserted into a system that was trying to improve equality, then it would be an excellent tool for that.

Technologies can change social and economic systems when access increases, according to Thierry Rayna, an economist who studies innovation and entrepreneurship. He has studied how widespread access to digital music, 3D printing, block chain and other technologies fundamentally change the relationship between producers and consumers. In each of these cases, “increasingly people have become prosumers, meaning they are actively involved in the production process.” Rayna predicts the same will be true with generative AI.

Rayna says that “In a situation where everybody’s producing stuff and people are consuming from other people, the main issue is that choice becomes absolutely overwhelming.” Once an economic system reaches this point, according to Rayna, platforms and influences become the wielders of power. But Rayna thinks that once people can not only use AI algorithms, but train their own, “It will probably be the first time in a long time that the platforms will actually be in danger.”

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This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood and hosted by Dan Merino. The interim executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe The Conversation’s free daily email here. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Listen to “The Conversation Weekly” via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

Daniel Merino, Associate Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation and Nehal El-Hadi, Science + Technology Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Macaque monkeys shrink their social networks as they age – new research suggests evolutionary roots of a pattern seen in elderly people, too

Older monkeys still hang out, just with a smaller circle of intimates. Lauren Brent, CC BY-ND

Erin Siracusa, University of Exeter and Noah Snyder-Mackler, Arizona State University

There are many changes that can come with old age – hair turns gray, eyesight isn’t quite what it used to be, mobility often becomes limited. But beyond these physiological changes, people also experience changes to their social world. As we age, our social circles tend to get smaller.

Such declines in social networks have raised concern among scientists who are aware of just how important social relationships are to health and well-being. Being socially isolated can harm health as much as obesity, alcoholism or sedentary living.

In the past decade, however, scientists have started to think that the shrinking of social networks with age might not be all bad.

Rather than social declines being driven exclusively by the death of friends or deteriorating health, people might become more selective in their social interactions as they age. After all, many older adults tend to focus their social effort on family and close friends. This change in social focus might result from older adults’ being aware of the limited time they have left and prioritizing their most important relationships.

As a behavioral ecologist and a molecular ecologist, we were interested in understanding the evolutionary roots of these age-based changes in social focus.

An older female macaque sits alone on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Noah Snyder-Mackler, CC BY-ND

To investigate whether other animals share these patterns of social selectivity with age, we turned to a free-roaming population of over 200 macaques on the island of Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico. In collaboration with our colleagues, we collected eight years of data about how these monkeys interacted with one another as they got older.

We found striking parallels to the patterns of social aging seen in humans, and our study sheds light on the causes and potential consequences of shrinking social networks with age.

Picky partner choice

We focused specifically on female macaques, because they have the most stable long-term relationships in this population. With the help of several dedicated research technicians, we followed these females for up to seven hours a day over the course of eight years.

Daniel Phillips, a research technician, collects data on macaque social relationships on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Erin Siracusa, CC BY-ND

First, we found that female macaques did indeed spend time with fewer social partners as they got older. Aging macaques sat near fewer partners and also groomed fewer partners. Grooming is an important bonding behavior in macaques that females do only with their besties.

Importantly, this reduction in females’ social circles was not precipitated by their partners dying or by older monkeys being seen as somehow undesirable and therefore to be avoided. We observed that how often other monkeys sought out older females as social partners did not change with age.

Instead, there seemed to be clear evidence that females were actively reducing the size of their social networks over time. Specifically, as females got older, they initiated interactions with fewer group mates. We observed these declines beginning in females who were in their prime years (around 10 years old) all the way through those who were near the end of their lives (around 28 years old).

A family matter

Of course, an important piece of this puzzle is who these female macaques did choose to interact with as they got older.

We found that, similar to humans, aging female macaques focused their time and effort on family members and “friends” with whom they shared a particularly strong and stable bond.

While this narrowing of networks and focus on kith and kin does not necessarily result from macaques’ being aware they are nearing death – scientists aren’t sure if nonhuman animals have an awareness of their own mortality – it does suggest that there may be a shared evolutionary reason for social selectivity in humans and other primates.

A female macaque grooms her offspring on Cayo Santiagio, Puerto Rico. Lauren Brent, CC BY-ND

Why might this be?

One possibility stems from the fact that as humans and other mammals get older they experience declines in their immune system. We get sick more easily and have a harder time recovering when we do come down with something.

Reducing one’s social circle with age may be an important way to avoid acquiring a disease or other illness. Such a decrease need not be a deliberate strategy, but could be an unconscious tendency that was selected for over evolutionary time because it enhanced biological fitness in our primate ancestors. As a result, this pattern might persist today, even in humans well beyond their reproductive years.

A hopeful outlook

So, what does this all mean? Understanding how people can live longer and healthier lives is a central priority for health organizations worldwide. Figuring out how to maintain valuable social relationships into old age is likely to play a key role in that endeavor.

An older female macaque spends time with her family on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Lauren Brent, CC BY-ND

The results from this study indicate that the shrinking of networks across the life span is an aging pattern that is not unique to humans but may be present in other primates.

While loneliness in the elderly is a health concern that should not be ignored, there may be important distinctions between those who are unwillingly isolated as they get older and those who choose to stick to a smaller social circle. In the latter cases, shrinking networks with age may not be all bad.

Instead, there may be important benefits to be gained from being selective in our socializing as we get older, which has allowed this pattern to persist for millennia.

Erin Siracusa, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Animal Behaviour, University of Exeter and Noah Snyder-Mackler, Assistant Professor of Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.