I find social dynamics, in humans and in other animals, to be very interesting. More than that, I find the way that humans study and think about social dynamics to also be interesting. I started writing this post because I mis-read the headline of a study (we’ll get to that later), and became invested in making my pre-emptive tangent about video games relevant.

One of my favorite fantasy “races” is a species called Skritt, from the game Guild Wars 2. They’re generally introduced to the player as a nuisance – small, rat-like humanoids who seem to have a compulsion to steal from others, but while they can speak, they’re… not very bright.

Until you get a few of them in a room together, at which point, their speech becomes clearer, and their thoughts more direct.

It turns out that the reason Skritt are everywhere, since the rise of the dragon Primordius drove them out of the depths, is that while they have individual identity, they also have a collective intelligence. They communicate with each other, constantly and almost subconsciously, using hyper-sonic squeaks, and if you get enough of them together, they all become genius-level smart. In many ways, a Skritt alone is no Skritt at all.

This feels like a fantasy application of the concept of a hive-mind, the fictional trope inspired by eusociality – the kind of super-organism arrangement most commonly associated with bees and ants. The concept largely focuses on an in-born caste system, with “queens” doing all the work of giving birth, non-reproductive workers, and a few males who exist to fertilize the queens and not much more. These organisms also tend to build themselves homes – and colonies, termite mounds, bee hives, and so on.

The prime example of a non-controversially eusocial mammal is the naked mole-rat, which lives and works collectively, and has one “queen” doing all the reproductive work. It actually has counterpart in Guild Wars, called the Dredge. They don’t have the “hive mind” setup that the Skritt do, but they are very explicitly designed after an American view of the USSR. Having been previously enslaved to the Dwarves, they are now mostly governed by a “dictatorship of the moletariat”, and they have cities like Molensk and Molengrad. They are a collective, but have a more human approach to things.

I find this a little amusing, as well, because in developing their social rodent groups, they made the actually eusocial one less so, and more like humans.

Humans (and Dredge) seem to exist at the edge of the word’s definition, since we’re very clearly a social species that divides labor, works collectively, and so on, but we don’t really have the kind of reproductive arrangement that you find in bees and mole-rats. From that perspective, I suppose the Skritt would likewise not be eusocial, because their hierarchies and divisions are societal – formed through voluntary or coincidental association, not physiological. The hive-mind is just an additional aspect of what they are.

E.O. Wilson proposed the idea of human eusociality, based on our collectivity and our divisions of labor, but to me that seems like a rather superficial conflation, born of a lifetime obsession with ants. I have the utmost respect for Wilson and his work in ecology, biogeography, and science communication, but I have to disagree on this subject. I think there’s a way in which it makes intuitive sense – after all, termites and ants build cities just like we do – but the complexities of our social interactions – and those of most other social species – are different from the complexities of truly eusocial organisms.

Our social landscape is fascinating and complex, and I think there’s plenty of reason to see us as having a form of collective intelligence, but like the Skritt and the Dredge, we’re more akin to most other social mammals.

There’s one comparison that I think should be made more often. Wolves obviously come up, because of our long historical relationship with them, and apes because of our visual and evolutionary similarity. What I would like to see more of, especially in fantasy settings, is bats.

We’ve known that most bats are social for a long time. All it takes is to see a few of them roosting in a barn, a tree, or a cave, and it’s clear that, while they don’t seem to build anything together, or to hunt as a group, they are nonetheless social creatures. The biggest bat colony in the world has an estimated 20 million individuals, putting it ahead of the entire New York City metro area in terms of population. I would posit that when you have that many individual creatures living together, social dynamics will evolve, and will be complex and varied. Based on what I understand about evolution, it would be impossible for things to go any other way. That being the case, what are bat societies like?

There’s plenty of information out there from observing bat behavior, but that gives us limited insight into how the bats themselves see the world. It may seem a bit silly (especially coupled with a discussion of fantasy games), but if we’re considering whether social animals have societies, then wouldn’t it be important to get the bats’ perspective in some way?

The problem is, how do you study this sort of thing? Bats are rather famous for their ability to fly, and interacting with animals (including humans) tends to change their behavior, making it difficult to study their “natural” activities. Not only that, but bats are on the long list of animals with whom we cannot verbally communicate. How could we possibly know how they see things?

Well, we depart from the realm of fantasy, and enter the realm of what was very recently science fiction. Modern technology has gotten to the point where scientists are able to read bats’ minds, to a limited degree, and it turns out that they don’t just maintain a geographical map of their roosting sites, they also maintain a social map:

In the new study, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used wireless neural recording and imaging devices to “listen in” on the hippocampal brain activity of groups of Egyptian fruit bats as they flew freely within a large flight room — often moving among tightly clustered social groups — while tracking technology recorded the bats’ movements.

The researchers were surprised to find that, in this social setting, the bat’s place neurons encoded far more information than simply the animal’s location. As a bat flew toward a landing spot, the firing of place neurons also contained information about the presence or absence of another bat at that spot. And when another bat was present, the activity of these neurons indicated the identity of the bat they were flying toward.

“This is one of the first papers to show identity representation in a non-primate brain,” said study senior author Michael Yartsev, an associate professor of bioengineering and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “And surprisingly, we found it in the hub of what was supposed to be the brain’s GPS. We found that it still acts as a GPS, but one that is also tuned to the social dynamic in the environment.”

This is the headline I mis-read, by the way. I thought, for a moment, that this was about learning about bat communication and neurons, rather than bat navigation. Back to the actual study, this makes sense, right? We form internal social maps of the world, associated places with people, with feelings, and with activities and experiences. It stands to reason that other creatures – especially other mammals – would do something similar, and that it would be detectable in the brain.

Due to the complexity of the experiment, Forli initially had doubts about whether allowing groups of bats to fly and interact freely would yield results about the neural basis of collective behavior. He was concerned that the movements of the bats and their social interactions might be too random to uncover robust relationships between their neural activity and their behavior.

So he was pleasantly surprised when the bats spontaneously established a handful of specific resting spots within the flight room and followed very similar trajectories when traveling among them. The bats also showed strong preferences for flying toward specific “friend” bats, often landing very close to or even on top of each other.

“We found that if you put together a small group of bats in a room, they would not actually behave randomly, but would show precise patterns of behavior,” Forli said. “They would spend time with specific individuals and show specific and stable places where they liked to go.”

These precise patterns of behavior allowed Forli to identify not only the neural activity associated with different flight trajectories, but also how the neural activity changed depending on the identity of the bat present at the target location and the movements of other bats.

“By recording just a handful of those neurons from this brain structure, we can really know what the bats were doing in their social space,” Yartsev said. “We could find out if they were going to an empty location or to a location where there were other individuals, which is really surprising.”

Later in the article, Yartzev points out that most research into animal neuronal activity has been done on immobile creatures, which may tell us which bits of their brains relate to certain stimuli, but clearly can’t tell us much about the animal’s experience of the world. This study faces similar problems – it’s still captive bats in an alien environment – but it clearly gives us a much better insight into insight into how bats see and think about the world.

The world is filled with fantasy races derived from some form of “what if this animal, but more human” thought process. While it would require magic to get rat-people like the Skritt, the more we learn about the real world, the clearer it becomes that we’re not actually that different from the animals around us. They also form relationships, and opinions about each other. They also choose where to go and what to do, based on who they think they’re likely to encounter. They’re not just like us, but…

They’re just like us – for real.