How to Report Anecdotal Observations? A New Approach Based on a Lesson From “Puffin Tool Use”

Abstract

BACKGROUNDThere has been a long history of anecdotal reports in the field of natural history and comparative (evolutionary) animal behavior. Although, at the time of writing there is an open call for researchers of animal behavior by one of the oldest journal of the field "BEHAVIOR" to report "anecdotal evidence of unique behavior" (Kret and Roth, 2020), nowadays we see a decreasing trend of reporting anecdotes in scientific journals (Ramsay and Teichroeb, 2019). We do not dispute the relevance of publishing rare and novel behaviors or events, as they can be important drivers for future research, but we would like to draw attention to the fact that these reports should follow some standards and authors should be careful in avoiding over-interpretations.An example of possible over-interpretation is a recently published article (Fayet et al., 2020a) that also received a lot of media hype (e.g., 79 news outlets at the time of writing; for more details see Altmetric, 2020). The authors reported on two separate occasions (one accidental field observation and one recorded on an 11 s long video) when two individuals of the Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) were seen picking up or holding a stick in their beak, which then touched their body. These two cases were reported as an "Evidence of tool use in a seabird" (Fayet et al., 2020a).This publication was followed by at least three commentaries [Auersperg et al., 2020;Farrar, 2020;von Bayern et al., 2020; and for further discussion see also Recommendation of the Farrar (2020) commentary by Dechaume-Moncharmont (2020)] that provided partly supportive or alternative views on the original report. The present authors share some of the doubts presented earlier but in this contribution we use the above case as an example to point out the problems with such anecdotal observations in general, and suggest ways to improve the information exchange among researchers.

Zoo-housed female chimpanzee adopts local female-specific tradition upon immigrating into a new group

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“…The reported observations and inferences warrant differential scrutiny (Sándor & Miklósi, 2020). Moni's adoption of the crossed-arm walk provides an objective account of chimpanzees' capacity to copy behavioural sequences (Hobaiter & Byrne, 2010;van Leeuwen et al, 2014), yet proponents of the "zone of latent solutions" approach (Tennie et al, 2020) would challenge this notion by arguing that the crossed-arm walk was merely individually reinvented by Moni.…”

Self-care tooling innovation in a disabled kea (Nestor notabilis)

“…This claim has garnered significant attention from the scientific community, which has been skeptical that the study provides sufficient evidence of tool use 31 – 35 . Not only is the single recorded incident short in duration, lasting approximately one second, but the touching of the stick to the puffin’s chest may have been an accidental combination of two other behaviours, namely holding a stick and attempting to scratch itself 31 , 34 . Critics of this study 31 – 35 have argued for a hypothesis-testing approach to anecdotal reports such as these, suggesting that convincing evidence for tool use in puffins should include: (i) comparisons between the number of instances where sticks are picked up and used for scratching, and instances where they are picked up but not used for scratching; (ii) evidence of subjects’ intention to scratch with a stick, for example by showing that they exhibit preferences for sticks with favorable characteristics, value previously useful tools, or perform the same behaviour repeatedly over multiple days; and (iii) comparisons between tool-using and non-tool-using individuals, where the latter should be more likely to pick up sticks without performing scratching actions than the former.…”

Parental reactions to a dying marmoset infant: conditional investment by the mother, but not the father

“…We additionally quantify the time spent in proximity with the dying infant to compare between the parents, controlling for whether they were at the same time carrying the healthy infants of the triplet, as well as the specific behaviours directed towards the dying infant. Similar to Thompson et al 2020, we have access to video recordings and photographs of the event and can quantitatively analyse the reactions of both parents (following Watson & Matsuzawa, 2018;Sándor & Miklósi, 2020).…”