What ants and orcas can teach us about death

In the summer of 2018, off the coast of British Columbia, an orca named Tahlequah gave birth. When the calf died after 30 minutes, Tahlequah refused to let go. For more than two weeks, she carried her calf’s body around, often balancing it on her nose as she swam.

The story went viral, which was no surprise to Susana Monsó, a philosopher of animal minds at the National Distance Education University in Madrid.

Despite the vast chasm that seems to separate humans and killer whales, this orca mother was behaving in a way that was profoundly relatable.

“This idea of a mother clinging on to the corpse of her baby for 17 days seems like something we can understand, something we can relate to, for those of us who have experienced loss,” Monsó said.

Projecting our own human experiences onto other species can be a tricky business, and scientists often warn about the mistakes we can make when we engage in this sort of anthropomorphism.

But we can also be misled by our tendency to assume that many cognitive and emotional traits are unique to humans, Monsó said. And in her new book, Playing Possum, she argues that a variety of animal species have at least a rudimentary concept of death.

Monsó spoke with The New York Times about her work. This conversation has been condensed and edited.

Q: How did you get interested in this aspect of animal minds?

A: I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality or rationality. Death was a natural topic to pick up.

There had been a growing number of reports of animals reacting in different ways to corpses. This seemed to be the birth of a new discipline, which is called comparative thanatology: the study of animals’ relationship with death.

Q: You note that an animal does not need to have a “concept” of death in order to respond to it. Can you give an example?

A: Corpses can be very important objects, either because they entail an opportunity for an animal who is a scavenger or because they entail a threat for animals who might be infected by pathogens carried by a corpse.

So, some animals are equipped with adaptations that allow them to detect corpses.

Ants will do things like take dead ants out of the colony and into the refuse pile. This behavior seems to be dependent on the detection of certain chemical cues, such as oleic acid, which arises from the decomposing process.

If we take oleic acid and we put it on a live ant, the other ants will treat it like a dead ant and take it out to the refuse pile.

So they’re not really understanding death. What they’re doing is just reacting, more or less automatically, to a certain stimulus.

Q: But you argue that many animals do understand death.

A: The concept of death has often been understood in very cognitively demanding ways — as somehow requiring an understanding of infinity or absence. I’m thinking of what I call a “minimal concept of death,” which is the idea that dead individuals don’t do the sorts of things that living beings typically do and that this is a permanent, irreversible state.

One of the most interesting cases was when a chimpanzee was born with albinism. It’s an extremely rare condition in this species, and the other members of the group reacted in a way that suggested that they found the baby to be extremely scary. They started alarm calling, making these calls that they use to signal predators. Their fur was standing on end. And after a few moments of panic, the alpha male grabbed the baby and killed him.

Once the baby was dead, the attitude of the chimpanzees radically changed. They suddenly all became so curious about this corpse. They were sniffing it, touching it, pulling on its hair. They didn’t show indications of fear. They understood that the baby could no longer hurt them, that its nonfunctionality was irreversible.

Q: Is it going too far to say that animals grieve?

A: Deceased-infant carrying, what we saw in the case of Tahlequah, is very common in mammalian mothers who lose their babies. I don’t think it’s outlandish at all to suppose that this is an example of grief. Grief is an emotional process of coming to terms with the demise of another individual. And this seems to be what these mothers are doing.

Q: What can we learn by thinking about how animals respond to death?

A: Thinking about death in animals, how they cope with it, how they live with this reality, can help us to understand that death is not something unfair that happens to us. It’s a deal that any animal that is alive must step into. We are these bodies that work until a certain point but then eventually break down irreparably — the same as happens to any other animal in the world.