Studying Lizards Taught Me How to Trust

This is Our Animal Lives, a column by Ambika Kamath about how we see ourselves, or don't, in the animal world.

One of my favorite photographs of myself is from 2010. I’m on a small island in a lagoon off the east coast of Florida. My pale-blue thrift-store shirt is speckled generously with saltwater. Sunlight pouring into the camera lends the whole scene an air of dreaminess. I’m looking down at a little brown anole lizard perched on my hand—we’ve just finished measuring her, and I’m returning her to the exact palm shrub we had caught her on a day or two ago. The look on my face shows something like love.

This lizard was one of the last of hundreds that we’d watched, caught, measured, and released back into the wild that summer. I’d just spent two long months studying adaptation by natural selection in these animals. Not long after, I decided to continue this endeavor—my route to a PhD in behavioral ecology. I was fueled by a deep conviction I couldn’t fully put into words: that these lizards were something of a grail, leading somewhere important, though I wasn’t quite sure where. So I listed off reasons—they’re abundant! they’re easy to catch! they’ve been studied for decades!—that championed anoles as the perfect organism to work with if you’re interested in making a certain kind of scientific sense of the natural world. But in the six years that followed, these lizards led me somewhere better: They led me to a place where trust became possible.

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Do you remember the first time the world shattered your sense of trust? We’ve each had those moments; I know I have. When I cried for help and was met with none. When I leaned backward, expecting my gym teacher to catch my fall; instead, I landed on the ground, bone snapping within. When I closed my eyes in the schoolyard to let my friend guide me back to class and then suddenly dropped into a hedge—she’d pushed me. When I launched into the swimming pool before I could swim, trusting my father to keep an eye on me. But in those few seconds, he didn’t, and I breathed in more water than my airwats knew what to do with. I don’t know what any of these people—whom I trusted, and then didn’t—were thinking in those moments. They were probably thinking about themselves; they certainly weren’t thinking about me. The rest of my childhood, I didn’t venture into the deep end.

But in the six years that followed, these lizards led me somewhere better

What do you do when it no longer makes sense to trust others to look out for you? The opposite of trusting others is looking out for yourself. I had to operate as it seemed the world did—under the logic that everyone was only looking out for themselves. In response to my broken trust, I tried to discern the rules by which the world seemed to work, and then tried to maximize my odds of surviving, thriving even, in it.

The logic of looking out for myself meant hating myself when I asked for help. It meant never learning how to rest. It meant blaming myself for every failure and hoping shame would push me to perfection next time. It meant assuming that everyone was simply looking out for themselves, just like I was, which made every interaction a transaction—a zero-sum game that I did not want to lose. It meant acquiescing, agreeing, accepting what I shouldn’t have, hoping I’d get what I wanted in return. It meant an endless, exhausting accounting of what we owe one another, making sure I wasn’t being taken advantage of. It meant asking, when confronted with generosity, how is this actually selfishness? The mistrustful logic of looking out for oneself forms the seed of our alienation from the beings we share a world with. It leads us to believe that there is just one way to be—in tired competition against everyone and everything.

It was years before I tried to swim again. The very first summer I worked with anole lizards, on the Fourth of July, we took a day off from the grind of watching, catching, measuring, and releasing. We boated out into the lagoon, beers in tow, and a colleague said, “Today’s the day we teach you to swim.” Her instruction was impeccable; I was proud of my thirty minutes of progress. And then, a man, a vague acquaintance joining the festivities, offered to continue my lesson. I trusted, and agreed. There was distance from the group, from other men—I was in his territory. He wasn’t thinking about me, my hopes for that afternoon—he was simply thinking about himself. There were unwelcome words, there was unwelcome touch, and, later, there was shock. He saw my shock and said, in front of everyone, “You had quite the afternoon didn’t you? All tired out now, aren’t you?”

On the way back across the lagoon, his drunken antics sank our boat, with all of us in it; I was lucky the water was knee-deep.

*

Behavioral ecology tells me that when I watch animals interact with one another, I will see a very particular kind of order, one based in self-interest, in simply looking out for oneself. The field’s organizing principle—adaptation by natural selection—tells us to interpret every animal as self-interestedly seeking to maximize its own survival and reproduction. Which is not to say that a lizard basking on a fallen tree trunk is consciously plotting its every move according to a maximizing calculus. But the logic of self-interest lets us humans tell a clear story about what we see that lizards do. You’ve no doubt seen versions of this story in a classroom, or in the news—how a hummingbird’s path through a forest from flower to flower is perfectly optimized to yield the most nectar that lets it survive, or how every part of a male peacock spider’s flashy display is perfectly optimized to capture a female peacock spider’s attention and affection, which leads to reproduction.

This logic of looking out for yourself, of a single-minded self-interest, insists that there are winners at this game of life and so there must be losers too. It means that there are right and wrong ways to do things. It means that every interaction becomes not a connection but a transaction in service of one’s own optimization. As Richard Dawkins, trained behavioral ecologist turned spokesperson for this rational view of life, put it, “If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish.” I was familiar with this logic, the self-interest that came with the loss of trust. In this light, it’s no wonder that Dawkins described animals’ social interactions as “relationship[s] of mutual mistrust and mutual exploitation.”

When, in the course of my PhD, I set off to watch how anole lizards move through their environments and interact with one another, here’s what behavioral ecology told me I would see: I would see male lizards remaining within and defending a particular area—their territory. I would see males treat each other with suspicion and hostility, each simply looking to acquire as many female mates for himself as possible and preventing other males from acquiring these same females as mates. I would see smaller males sneak into the territories of larger males, to mate with females within and cheat the territory owners out of matings that were rightfully theirs.

Why might lizards behave in this way, a way we call “territorial”? Behavioral ecology tells us that territoriality is a straightforward, self-interested strategy. Males attempt to maximize the number of females they mate with, which presumably maximizes the number of offspring they sire, their reproductive output. Being territorial is simply how lizards must behave when they’re looking out for themselves.

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Five years later, another favorite photograph of myself. I’m sitting on the ground in a park in Gainesville, Florida, again looking down at a little brown lizard. This time, I’m holding the lizard firmly, attaching a small tag to his tail before I release him. My hands are in practiced motion, at work. This time I’m smiling because I know this is the start of my conversation with this lizard, not the end. After the lizard leaves my hands, I’ll know who he is. The next time I see him, I’ll write down exactly where we meet. In time, I’ll build a map of where he’s been and who he’s encountered along the way. I’ll be able to ask, of him and hundreds of other lizards—do the tenets of territoriality describe your life well? Does the maxim of self-interested survival rule your life too?

That summer in 2015, I watched these lizards go about their lives, sometimes staying put in a single place and sometimes restless, moving from tree to tree. I watched them interact with others of their kind—displaying their bright throat fans at one another, bobbing their heads and shoulders emphatically, tentatively approaching one another in slow escalations that sometimes progressed to physical contact. Behavioral ecology suggested I view many of these interactions as suspicious and hostile and all of them as self-serving. But the lizards told me a different story about themselves.

Lizard by lizard, I learned to welcome surprise, letting myself be delighted by their unexpected trajectories. There was U131, who meandered into our field site and then made his way to a fallen tree trunk that was home at various times to twenty-nine other males—yes, sometimes these males seemed to fight with one another, but far more often, they simply coexisted.There were U24 and U27, two males that, despite being about the same size and thus likely competitors for mates, never really strayed far from one another. There were two males, L11 and L61, whom I saw mating with one another. Almost any interaction I could imagine, these lizards served me an example of. Behavioral ecology’s fundamental rule—surviving and thriving by looking out for oneself—did so little to capture the complexity of these animals’ real lives.

Behavioral ecology’s fundamental rule—surviving and thriving by looking out for oneself—did so little to capture the complexity of these animals’ real lives. 

That summer, over a hundred days of watching lizards, I chose to let go of the self-interested logic of territoriality entirely. Instead, my team and I simply wrote down the five thousand locations at which we saw two hundred and fifty of these animals that we’d caught, measured, and individually marked. With the location data, I created a map of the probabilities that any two lizards would meet one another at a particular place and time. The picture of these lizards’ social lives that emerged from my calculations was fuzzier, harder to tell a single, selfish story about. But it was free of the constraints of self-interestedness. These lizards were no longer just competitors, playing a zero-sum game; they were beings in some kind of community.

At the end of this summer, I found myself filled with an openness I hadn’t really known before. If lizards could so flagrantly flout the rules of self-interest and persist for millennia nonetheless, anything seemed possible. In this joyous space, a small voice within me said, “If you can trust the lizards enough to let go of the logic of self-interest and replace it with genuine curiosity, maybe you could do the same for yourself too?”

*

I began therapy in the last year of my PhD. In my first appointment, I cried more than I had thought possible. I had no explanation for the sadness lurking just below my surface. In my second appointment, my therapist gently asked, “Can you listen to the part of you that was crying and ask what it’s holding?”

The logical voice in my head, hell-bent on looking out for me, resisted the notion that there was someone else inside me, some quiet, hidden part of me that was sad. The logical voice could make no sense of my sadness—I was successful, wasn’t I? I hadn’t just survived; I was thriving, wasn’t I? What reason did I have to be sad? From within the logic of a straightforward self-interest, it made no sense that I was sitting in that therapist’s office. But thanks to watching the lizards, I knew I had to move beyond this logic.

Session by session, I moved past stubborn, fearful logic and got curious about the chaotic swirl of feelings within me. I began to see, just like I’d seen in the lizards, so much more variation than I’d been led to expect. So many ways to live besides mistrustful of people and simply looking out for myself. So many voices inside me, each giving me a different kind of purpose.

Where once there had been a single voice of self-preservation, I found a whole cacophony. There was a fearful and gentle voice of deep feeling, a fiery and cruel voice that insisted on justice, a sometimes-loving sometimes-desperate voice seeking connection. And there were silences too, like the silent toiling of a part of me that simply got things done, and the sad, silent acceptance of what was so often unacceptable.

Some months into therapy, I thought about swimming, about what broke in me each time I tried to learn how to swim. There was a part of me, child-aged, flailing limbs and the breathed-in burn of chlorine in her nose, that still didn’t believe anyone would help me when I needed it. There was the part of me, young adult, convinced that reaching for the freedom of the water, something I wanted, would only bring me the worst kinds of attention. And there were other parts, each with hopes and dreams that stretched far beyond optimizing my survival.

Over the years, my therapists and I slowly listened to these parts of me, witnessing and releasing all of their burdens from the past and inviting them into the present. But the work didn’t end there—once in the present, these parts had to learn how to work with one another, beings in community that together make up, well, me. For the self-interested, logical part of me, this meant learning, by trying and failing and trying again, to truly trust voices and purposes other than its own, slowly easing out of its alienation and into alliance with all kinds of illogical. All of my parts learned that they do not have to make it on their own.

In the very last weeks of my PhD, my university’s athletics department offered free adult swimming lessons, and I signed up. I was given swim goggles that rendered the water rose-tinted. An athlete many years younger than me invited me into the pool, and tentatively, I stepped in. Her instructions on how to trust the water are a blur to me today, but I remember that brief moment when my world grew—I cannot tell you how, but suddenly I was floating.

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