by Matthew Cobb
Here’s a great video of an elk calf playing in a puddle. I noticed it on someone’s FB wall this morning, but it appears to have been on Youtube for around 18 months. I couldn’t trace the original posting of it, so don’t know who to credit The most frequently viewed version has a soundtrack with a Brandenburg Concerto on it, which was rather odd. I prefer this silent version.
If the number of similar Youtube videos are anything to go by, this is not an unusual behaviour. Here’s Picnic, a tame deer:
And here are some fawns doing similar silly things:
Apart from going “ahhh, how cute!” we have to ask ourselves the question: what is the advantage (if any) of this behaviour> Is it simply play? Presumably so, as animal “play” is generally performed by young individuals and is thought to be a form of learning to behave in particular ways. and on this (extremely small!) sample, it would appear to be an immature behaviour. Is it related to puddles? That is, do baby deer do the same thing on dry patches of earth? If not, what is it about water that they are learning? Estimating depth? I’m afraid I don’t buy the “they’re just having fun” argument, no matter how much it looks like that. Even when they play with a sprinkler, like in this scene from an Alaskan’s back yard (we don’t get things like this in Manchester!):
“…animal ‘play’ is generally seen by young individuals…”
Guess I’d better not watch then. Don’t want to skew the statistics.
On a more serious note, maybe the lesson is that water is nothing to be afraid of, so that if they find themselves in a situation where they need to ford a stream, they can do so without panicking.
As to why they seem to be having fun doing it, my guess is the Baldwin Effect: if there’s an advantage to learning this behavior, then those individuals with an innate predispostion to learn it will be at an even greater selective advantage.
Very good! Fixed it.
Couldn’t it just be a byproduct of a useful but more general behavior? Caution in the face of a novel Something in the environment for instance? First a slight fear—>caution, followed by relief and playfulness?
Elephants, including adults (in captivity, at least), get playful in water, and mud is useful to them, to prevent sunburn and block insects. Maybe that too is relevant.
ISTR that as adults, moose prefer wetlands as a habitat, so an attraction to water would make sense. But that wouldn’t explain the deer.
What are young humans learning when they stomp around in puddles?
OTOH, what more reason would you need than, say, developing large motor skills and becoming accustomed to novel sounds and sensations? That would apply equally to the young of both hominids and cervids.
Give me a pair of wellies & I’ll stomp puddles all day
Bath time ? Where’s my battleships dear ?
Hmmmm–water is such weird stuff. This puts me in mind of sitting in the shower with my kids when they were infants (Japanese-style bath, so adult has to be in there, too). I so distinctly remember Teddy sitting on my lap trying to grab the shower water. “I can *see* it, and *hear* it, and *feel* it…but I can’t hold it! Whoa! What *is* this stuff??!” Possibly baby animals have a similar reaction/need-to-learn-nature-of-water thing going on. “I can *see* it, I can *smell* it, but what *is* this stuff??! When I put my foot on it, it goes right down! Weird!”
My 6 year old son exhibits this same behaviour in the presence of mud puddles. I believe the evolutionary advantage is that playing in the mud results in his mother calling him inside for a bath, thus reducing the amount of time he is outside where he could be devoured by wolves.
“No, as long as I can slap at you from dry land, I am not going to get
my fur wet” :- Here
I can’t comment about the Alaskan elk (seems to be just thirst), but the baby deer frolicking in the mud puddles first agitate the water, then drink a bit. At the end of that clip, it looks like the fawn is peeing in the puddle! Maybe they’re stirring up some little snails or other organisms to eat?
Gotta get that seratonin from the soil!
I wonder if they are responding to their own reflections, and playing a game of “run away from the imaginary predator” – good practice for when they are older, but also fun.
Presumably there is evolutionary selection for practical play being fun. If practicing for the real thing is fun, you are more likely to practice and therefore be prepared for the real thing when it does come along?!?!?
Enjoyment of water as juvenile -> Conditioning to spend more time around water as adult -> more efficient consumption of water -> more time to mate.
Enjoyment of water as juveniles -> conditioning to spend more time around water as an adult & conditioning to be in a good mood around water -> large groups of reproducing adults all conditioned to spend time around water & be in a good mood while doing so -> git yer freak on!
Water is an essential property for pretty much all mammals. We all drink it.
It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re wired to like water.
More interesting to me would be mammals that are wired to not like water.
Not all mammals drink water. There are species of desert dwelling critters that drink no water: the kangaroo rats of North America, the jerboas of Asia and Africa, and the hopping mice of Australia.
Their water is produced by carbohydrate metabolism.
Horses will paw, dig, splash, snort and drink in any decent-sized puddle. (Well, most horses. Some seem to get a heartattack at the thought of even getting near one).
Sometimes I think it’s a game to assess how deep this thing is … other times I just think they’re trying to get as muddy as possible as fast as possible.
Definitely just trying to get muddy. Especially if their coat is white and you just cleaned it with expensive blueing solution.
Oh … cervids …
Why not? Because of the ‘just’?
Like sex, the feel-goodness of play in general could be an evolved means to an end. It doesn’t have to be specifically about water–a general tendency to ‘enjoy’ messing around in various ways with new objects and situations seems like a plausible-enough adaptation to me. You’re bound to learn something if you fart around with it long enough, whatever it is.
The first one looks kind of purposeful to me. Could it be trying to splash muddy water on its belly for some reason?
No moose is good moose. Moose are Elk! Elk are Cervus canadensis or Wapiti, Moose are Alces alces. I just looked up the origins – Moose comes from Eastern Abenaki – ‘mos’, while Wapiti comes from Cree ‘wapitik’. As the elk was extinct in Britain & western Europe (outside Scandinavian)when Europeans first saw Moose, they used the local name of course. But you knowledgeable folk all knew this! I learnt only now that DNA has shown the Wapiti to be separate as a species from Eurasian Red Deer, but that there is a subspecies of Wapiti in Mongolia, from before Beringia was covered by rising seas. Thanks – really interesting! Fascinating how play translates into adult behaviour.
While watching a bald eagle nest cam at Sidney BC the last couple of years, I often wondered what the internal, mental life of a bald eagle is like. Since the most recent common ancestor of us and them is a l-o-n-g way back, bald eagle thinking may be, were we in a position to eavesdrop, utterly incomprehensible.
Other mammals, not so. Mammals are surprisingly similar, and I think that comments pointing out that the young of many mammals indulge in “play for the fun of it” are on point. Yes, my cats aren’t as smart as I am, but when Little Girl goes nuts and starts racing around the house like a demented thing, I can only think “gee, she’s having a lot of fun.”
William of Ockham long ago devised his famous razor: to paraphrase, keep your explanations as simple as is consistent with the evidence. And since the simplest explanation of play in young mammals is “fun”, I think we should get off our high horses and just accept that.
Nobody’s arguing that it isn’t fun. The question is, what’s the adaptive value (if any) of having fun in this way? Why did natural selection attach the “fun” motivator to this behavior?
I’ve seen deer in my back yard kick up their heels like that, with no puddle in sight. They also like to run sprints back and forth across the field.
Fun phenomenon, fun post!
I would imagine that what they’re learning is how to run in water. Both Picnic and the elk calf follow the same cycle – enter the water, pretend to start, run away, repeat. It seems like they’re practicing the scenario “okay, I’m standing in water and some predator startles me – what now?”
As anyone who’s ever tried to walk in a swimming pool will tell you, moving in water is significantly different from moving in the air. Thus, it makes sense that animals would be evolutionarily encouraged to practice that skill; if you’re standing in the water taking a drink and suddenly you smell a mountain lion, you wouldn’t want that to be the first time you’ve had to go from standing still to full sprint in water; you’re liable to get your legs mixed up and fall.
I agree with Sven.
If you don’t buy the “just having fun” argument, then you first need to offer a plausible difference between an elk’s thought limitations and a humans that excludes fun from the former.
If we watch human children at play, they imitate adult behavior or explore new situations and textures. It’s impossible to watch a human child “play” without seeing clear learning strategies at work, from kinesthetic to mathematic to linguistic ability.
Given the brain size of elk, deer, moose, etc., I would suspect they learn less, but not that they should enjoy the process less, because the frontal lobe is an enjoyment inhibitor, not enhancer.
From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are easier ways to ensure the organism acts in the best interest of the genes than sophisticated neural wiring.
An example: an elk fawn comes upon a puddle.
a) The neurons recognize the puddle as absent from experiences and tell other neurons to move the organism closer for a systematic test of this new texture.
b) The elk fawn steps into a new texture causing a change in synapses. The genes survive better the more the elk learns, so new synapses release “happy” chemicals, such as dopamine, as they are formed. The more the fawn learns about this new or rare situation, the more its brain gets flooded with “happy.” In other words, the fawn is playing for fun.
Now, which seems more likely? I do recognize option a) is poorly supported. I do not mean to straw man the option, but I really do not know how it would work.
Growing up on a small farm in northern Minnesota, we saw this behavior in all animals, mostly in the spring. More in the young but especially in the spring, the adults would kick up their heels and dance around. We even had a phrase for it because it happened so often. We said, ‘they are going crackers’. Because it happened more often in spring, we thought it might have something to do with hormones but I have no science schooling.
Learning to keep your footing in puddles and streams seems pretty adaptive to me. You don’t want to be running from a wolf when you first experiment with that one.