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The Many Surprising Ways That Animals Play
Monkeys, of course, but also bees, ravens, rats, and more.
Posted March 29, 2023 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- Animal play is difficult to study scientifically because it's dynamic, unpredictable, and related to the "internal state" of the players.
- Researchers have observed play behaviors in other primates, but also in birds, elephants, octopus, rats, and even insects.
- As humans do, other species may acquire important developmental skills from play including cooperation and innovation.
Have you ever watched a bird fly high into the air, then plummet down toward the earth before swooping back up high, only to repeat again and again? Or perhaps you’ve smiled as you’ve watched two squirrels somersaulting together across a path, only to break apart for a moment before bouncing back into action? Or maybe you’ve chuckled as you’ve watched a monkey splash around in a puddle, a crow slide down a snowy bank, or a lamb spring across a field?
Perhaps, like me, you experience the same joy watching these animals frolic around as you do when you see humans play. But is animal play really the same thing?
Play is tricky to study scientifically, largely because it’s hard to identify. It is unpredictable, dynamic, and related to the internal state of the "players."
In general, researchers of animal play use five criteria to figure out if a behaviour really is play. First, does the behaviour serve no purpose? Second, is it intrinsically rewarding (i.e., does it happen even without external rewards such as food)? Third, is it different to other behaviours that are done for a specific reason (e.g. foraging for food or searching for mates)? Fourth, is it repeated and not just a one-off? And finally, is it initiated when the individual is relaxed? If all these conditions are met, a behaviour is considered to be play.
Humans tend not to be surprised when species that look similar to and are evolutionarily close to us engage in the same sorts of behaviours that we do. Perhaps, then, it’s not so shocking to learn that we have lots of evidence that monkeys play. Monkeys love to wrestle, playfight, and chase each other, but they also enjoy playing with objects, such as sticks, stones, and food items.
One of my favourite personal experiences of monkey play was watching young rhesus macaques queueing up on a branch overhanging a lake. One at a time, they’d dive-bomb into the water below. After splashing about in the water, they’d bounce straight back up to join the queue again. I could have watched them for hours.
Another common conception we humans have is that only the "cleverest" animals play. We do know that as well as primates, species of crow, parrot, elephant, dolphin, octopus, and other animals with big brains engage in play.
However, play isn’t only the domain of the big-brained. For example, researchers recently found that rats absolutely love hide and seek, and become strategic masters at the game. When seeking, rats systematically check good hiding spots, and often check the spots they have previously found others hiding in. When hiding, they choose spots that are opaque rather than transparent, and stay completely silent while they hide.
Perhaps most surprisingly, recent research has revealed that even insects engage in behaviour that meets all the criteria of play. When given coloured balls, bees will voluntarily roll the ball, and prefer to spend time in areas where they'd previously had access to ball-rolling versus areas without balls. This suggests that bees find ball rolling to be intrinsically rewarding.
You might wonder, though, whether play is really the same in animals as it is in humans. Does it bring the same sense of joy that humans experience, and how could we ever tell? After all, surely we can never really understand an animal’s subjective experience of the world.
In some ways, this is true: We can never fully understand what is going on inside the mind of an animal. That, in my opinion, is what makes it so wonderful, exciting, and beautiful to study: All we can do is inch ever closer to understanding what the world is like from the point of view of an animal, but in some sense, it will always be a mystery.
We can, however, use behaviour and neuroscience to begin to unravel the emotional state of animals. First, we can ask whether animals engage in any of the hallmark behaviours humans do when we’re happy. For example, do they laugh? Indeed, evidence for calls similar to human laughter have been found in many species; apes, monkeys, dolphins, elephants, mongooses, cows, magpies, parrots, and rats all have specific play vocalisations. Adorably, rats "giggle" uncontrollably when they are tickled by human caregivers.
As well as behavioural cues of emotion, we can also look at what’s going on in the brain when animals play, and compare this to what happens in human brains. Not many species have been studied in this manner; most of the research is on primates and rats. What we see is that, in both groups, the same areas of the brain are used for play. This offers some (very tentative) clues that our subjective experiences of play might be similar.
An intriguing question is how we might begin to understand play in animals with very different brains and behaviours to our own. For example, what would we expect to be happening in the brain tissue of invertebrates—from bees to octopuses—during play behaviour, when their brains are nothing like our own? Should we still expect their subjective experiences of play to be similar to ours? Who knows—maybe an octopus's experience of play is something we cannot even imagine.
Play is often assumed to be the domain of humans, especially by those who think animals only ever engage in directly "functional" behaviours. But the fact that play is so widespread across the animal kingdom shouldn’t be a shock.
For a long time, we’ve known that play is important for human development. It helps us learn things like how to cooperate with others, the physical rules of the world, and how to innovate. Other species need these skills, too, so it’s no surprise that play behaviour has evolved across the tree of life. If play behaviour is helpful for our survival, then it’s also no surprise that evolution has sculpted it to be joyful. If we love it, we’ll do it more, and our chances of survival will improve.
There is something beautiful about the knowledge that playfulness and its associated joy are likely to be a shared experience across humans and many non-human species. Nature isn’t always red in tooth and claw. Sometimes it’s all just a bit silly.
ANIMA means "of breath." This blog explores the similarities between humans and non-human animals, as well as what makes us unique. I’ll be covering topics from the evolution of friendship, to whether animals feel empathy, to the ethical implications of our understanding of animal minds.
Facebook/LinkedIn image: Rita_Kochmarjova/Shutterstock
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