Great Ape Trust scientist coauthors new book, Animal Tool Behavior

Des Moines, Iowa – June 9, 2011 – The director of conservation at Great Ape Trust, Dr. Benjamin Beck, has collaborated with two former Trust researchers on an important new book about animal tool manufacture and use.  Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of Tools By Animals was written by Beck and former Great Ape Trust scientists, Dr. Robert Shumaker and Dr. Kristina Walkup.  Shumaker is the vice president of life sciences at the Indianapolis Zoo and Walkup is an adjunct assistant professor at Drake University. Animal Tool Behavior was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

“Tools have played a critical role in making us the species that we are, but animals from snails to apes also use and make complex and highly functional tools, which often play an indispensable role in the users’ survival,” said Beck. “Humans are unique however in powering tools not only with metabolic energy and gravity, like all other animals, but also with wind and fossil fuels. These additional fuels took us from tools to technology. It’s true that tools made us, but many feel that technology may be our unmaking, given its negative impacts on our environment.”

Animal Tool Behavior is a revised and updated edition from the seminal book Beck wrote three decades ago. In the book’s acknowledgements, The Johns Hopkins University Press wrote: “When published in 1980, Benjamin Beck’s Animal Tool Behavior was the first volume to catalog and analyze the complete literature on tool use and manufacture in non-human animals.  Beck showed that animals – from insects to primates – employed different types of tools to solve numerous problems. His work inspired and energized legions of researchers to study the use of tools by a wide variety of species.

In this revised and updated edition of the landmark publication, Robert Shumaker and Kristina Walkup join Beck to reveal the current state of knowledge regarding animal tool behavior.  Through a comprehensive synthesis of the studies produced through 2010, the authors provide an update and exact definition of tool use, identify new modes of use that have emerged in literature, examine all forms of tool manufacture, and address common myths about non-human tool use. Specific examples involving invertebrates, birds, fish, and mammals describe the differing levels of sophistication of tool use exhibited by animals.”

For Beck, the new Animal Tool Behavior is rewarding for two reasons – it’s a product of three generation of scholars and it is a significant revision to his landmark first edition.

“I included about 600 references in the first edition and we have 1,700 in the new edition. We’d like to think that the first edition triggered a massive growth of scientific interest in animal tool use, but the growth is more probably the result of the work of hundreds of talented scholars drawn to a topic that has interested scientists for more than a century,” said Beck. “It’s unlikely that any individual could have summarized all of this work, and I’m so fortunate to have collaborated on this new edition with Rob, who is my student, and Kristina, who is his. I am very grateful to Great Ape Trust for providing the intellectual environment to work on the book.”