Martina (greylag goose)

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Martina (* 1935 in Altenberg near Vienna ; date and place of death unknown) was the first gray goose ( Anser anser ) that was hatched and imprinted on him under the care of the Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz . In numerous scientific publications that Lorenz published between 1939 and 1988, he made reference to this animal. In 2014, Die Zeit wrote that a short story from 1949 about “The goose child Martina” was “Konrad Lorenz's defining essay on coinage”, and Der Standard had already noted in 2011 that Martina was “immortal” thanks to this short story, which was translated into numerous languages and world famous ”. In an article about the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Konrad Lorenz in 1973, Der Spiegel wrote under the heading Goose celebrated : "The story of Konrad Lorenz and his gray goose Martina is well known." In fact, Martina laid the foundation stone for the Nobel Prize ceremony, The reason given by the Nobel Committee stated that Lorenz received the award because he had shown in the 1930s “that birds that hatch in an incubator without their parents being present follow what they see first. For example, they can be fixed on a person. "

Martina's imprint on Lorenz

In their Lorenz biography, the two authors Klaus Taschwer and Benedikt Föger quote from an unpublished manuscript in which Konrad Lorenz mentioned in 1989, shortly before his death, that one of the first books that was read to him as a child, The wonderful journey of the little one Nils Holgersson was with the wild geese . In 1909, shortly before he started school, he raised two newly hatched domestic duck chicks, which is why - as he recalled 80 years later - his "intimate interaction as a surrogate mother" with "Pipsa and Pupsa" taught him

"That the young ducks who followed me as faithfully as they usually followed their birth mother were, from a human point of view, quite astonishingly stupid, for example that despite their attachment they were never able to know their own names."

In the introduction to his book Here I am - where are you? Lorenz wrote the ethology of the greylag goose in 1988,

"The love for the anatids [duck birds], which took possession of me back then and which still fills me today, is perhaps a good illustration of the fact that irreversible imprints can also occur in humans."

However, the ducks were only a substitute for the wild geese that were actually desired, as Lorenz's mother did not tolerate any geese in the garden out of concern for her lettuce crops. Lorenz '“permanent imprint on ducks” did not prevent his “great desire for gray geese from staying awake”. In 1935, when he had already put one of his main scientific works - The Kumpan in der Vogel Umwelt des Vogel - into print, he procured 20 gray goose eggs and hatched ten eggs each from a white domestic goose and a turkey . After 27 days he laid the turkey's eggs in an incubator and two days later - as he reported in 1949 - he observed the hatching of the first chick:

“So my first little gray goose was born, and I waited until she was so strong under the electric heating pad that had to replace the warming belly of my mother that she was able to carry her head upright and take a few steps . "

On the same day, wrote Lorenz in 1949, the goose child “received the name Martina in a solemn baptism”, whereby this chick “was by no means named after Saint Martin , but after our friend Martina.”

In 1935, Lorenz was aware of the phenomenon of follow-up imprinting both from his own experience as a pupil, but also from his knowledge of the writings of Oskar Heinroth , who had already described this behavior in 1911 and whom Lorenz referred to several times in his study The Kumpan in the Bird's Environment spiritual foster father relates. Nevertheless, Lorenz presented the imprint on him observed with Martina in 1988 as a coincidence and deviating from his description in 1949:

“I intended to have the domestic goose lead all 20 goslings , which would have been acceptable. But it turned out differently, one must say luckily! When the first goose had hatched and was dry, I could not resist the temptation to take the lovely creature out from under the wet nurse and examine it more closely. Meanwhile it looked at me and after a while let out the loud, monosyllabic 'whistle of abandonment', which I knew how to correctly interpret as crying after my training with domestic ducks. So I responded with some reassuring tones. […] Finally, I had enough of baby-sitting, tucked the gosling back under the wing of the brooding gray goose and wanted to leave. I should have known better. As soon as I had walked a few steps away, a quizzical, low whisper sounded from under the white person, to which the house goose responded with the voice-feel sound 'Gang gang gang' as programmed. But instead of calming down, as any goose child would have if it had not been exposed to the experiences of my little goose, she came resolutely crawling out from under her nurse's belly, looked up at her with one eye tilted, and ran away crying loudly her way. [...] Understandably, I was deeply moved by the way the poor child came behind me crying loudly, still stumbling and sometimes rolling over himself, but with astonishing speed and a determination, the meaning of which could not be misunderstood: Me, not the white domestic goose, considered it his mother. "

In the months that followed, Martina lived with Lorenz, slept in his bedroom, later flew around freely, and kept coming back to him for almost two years. As an adult gray goose she mated with a ganter named Martin, who was also hatched by a domestic goose in Altenberg near Vienna - and in 1937, shortly after sexual maturity, Martina and Martin flew away forever. Martina was first publicly mentioned in the same year, at the beginning of December 1937, in an entertaining essay in the Neue Wiener Tagblatt under the title “Silly Goose”.

Behavior as a result of tribal history

In her analysis of Konrad Lorenz's publications on Martina the goose, published in 2011, the Swiss science historian Tania Munz traced the various representations of Lorenz's approach to his wild geese and distinguished four phases. At the same time, she argues that Lorenz's vivid descriptions of Martina's behavior in particular contributed significantly to establishing “his science and his image in public”.

Munz dated the beginning of phase 1 in 1935, beginning with the publication of his publication Der Kumpan in der Vogel Umwelt des Vogel , which is considered one of his major scientific works. There, the behavior of the wild geese played a subordinate role, because Lorenz mentions that his observations are based only on the exact knowledge of two wild geese that he had already received as an adult from Schönbrunn Zoo and taken in, but probably under a. the handling of 15 egrets , 32 night Reihern , many Mallard and high breeding Flugenten , a dozen Goldfasanen and numerous other individuals of different species. In this early work, however, Lorenz does not yet emphasize the individuality of the gray geese, and with regard to the behavior of their newly hatched chicks, Lorenz avowedly falls back on a detailed description by Oskar Heinroth from 1911, who had observed:

“If you open the lid of a hatching oven in which young ducks have just left their eggs and have become dry, they push themselves motionless at first, and then, if you want to touch them, shoot away at lightning speed. They often jump to the ground and hurriedly hide under objects that are standing around, so that one often has a hard time getting hold of the little things. Young geese are very different. Without betraying fear, they look calmly at people, have no objection to being touched, and if you occupy yourself with them for even a very short time, you will not get rid of them that easily: they beep pathetically when you are away and very soon follow you faithfully. I have seen such a thing, a few hours after I removed it from the incubator, be satisfied when it could fall under the chair on which I was sitting! "

Konrad Lorenz followed Heinroth's description in 1935 and interpreted the process as follows:

“It would be wrong to claim that species which, like the greylag goose, know very few signs of their parent companion innate, have no innate pattern at all. Only with such forms the scheme is immensely wide because of the small number of signs. For the newborn gray goose, which does not yet have an object for its successor, it is not possible for any object to become a companion in the leadership; rather, this object must have certain properties that are necessary to trigger the successor. Above all, he has to move. He doesn't really need life, because cases have become known where very young gray geese tried to join boats. Even a certain size of the companion is obviously not a 'sign' contained in the innate scheme. "

Tania Munz points out that Lorenz does not describe the animals he observed as individuals with individual peculiarities elsewhere. According to Munz, “the focus of these early programmatic publications” is “behavior as the object of its emergence in the course of tribal history”.

"Ma" and "M" in the service of National Socialist thought

In phase 2, Lorenz combines his ornithological, comparative observations on wild animals and their domesticated relatives with observations on the lifestyle of humans. This happened after he had applied for membership in the NSDAP on June 28, 1938 - a few weeks after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich - and emphasized that his academic work was "in the service of National Socialist thought". At this point in time, this statement referred in particular to his research project on “Comparative and genetic studies of instinctual innate movements in birds, especially anatids”, which the German Research Foundation had promised him to finance in February 1938. At the beginning of July 1939, Lorenz gave a lecture at the 16th congress of the German Society for Psychology on "Deficiency symptoms in the instinctive behavior of pets and their socio-psychological significance". His biographers Benedikt Föger and Klaus Taschwer mention that the zoologist Lorenz tried to "emphasize the transferability of his animal psychological findings to human psychology and at the same time to prove the political relevance of his research" in front of a large number of important German psychologists. a. equated the behavior of allegedly over-civilized "city dwellers", through whom the "national body" was damaged, with abnormalities in the behavior of domesticated animals:

“If I were not to make a certain selection among my geese by continuously abolishing the superfluous house geese crossings, the purebloods would be completely pressed against the wall within a short time by the competition for space between the house-flowered geese. The same applies mutatis mutandis to people in the big city. It is statistically established that people with moral idiocy achieve a much higher reproductive rate on average than full-fledged ones. "

Lorenz contrasted these negative examples with the healthy “ wild type ” in both humans and animals , and as examples of “one of the most fully-fledged pairs of goose” he mentioned Martina and Martin, who in the printed version of his lecture were named “Ma” and “M “Have been abbreviated. In a similar way, the behavior of the wild geese was highlighted in Lorenz's article in 1940 in the specialist article Disturbances caused by domestication, as an example of species-specific behavior in the sense of the National Socialist race theory.

Martina and Martin as literary figures

After four years of captivity , Konrad Lorenz returned to Altenberg in Lower Austria in 1948. In 1949 he founded his "Institute for Comparative Behavioral Research", which belonged to the Austrian Academy of Sciences . In the same year, his book He talked to the cattle, the birds and the fish was published - a successful anthology with twelve essays, planned as a source of money to finance his research plans. This book - named King Solomon's Ring after one of the chapters it contains - narrowly missed the 2006 Royal Institution of Great Britain's choice of “best popular science book of all time” . a. also translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Hungarian, Serbian, Chinese, Japanese and Afrikaans . A new edition in German was last published in 2018, Chapter 7 is - as in the numerous previous editions - dedicated to the "goose child Martina".

In contrast to his descriptions of Martina's behavior in the time of National Socialism , Lorenz's greylag goose became known to a large readership beyond the behavioral and human psychological experts from 1949. In this essay, which was classified by Tania Munz in phase 3 of his portrayals of dealing with wild geese, decisive moments in the life of the goose - such as the imprint on Lorenz - are described for the first time with literary stylistic devices and anthropomorphisms , which are "strongly linked to interpersonal relationships" remember and not only let Martina appear as a quasi-acting person; Lorenz takes on the role of chronicler , but leaves - as in later publications - his already existing knowledge of the phenomenon of coinage unmentioned:

“When my chick was 'finished', three more had just hatched under the domestic goose. I carried my child into the garden, where the fat white woman was sitting in the doghouse from which she had ruthlessly driven the rightful owner, Wolfi the First. I tucked my goose child deep under the soft warm belly of the old woman and was convinced that I had done my part. But there was still a lot to learn. It took a few minutes, during which I sat in happy meditation in front of the goose nest, when a soft whisper rang out from under the white man, as if questioning: Wiwiwiwiwi? [...] It could have moved a stone as the poor child came crying behind me with a cracking voice. "

Lorenz brings the readers closer to the Ganter Martin thanks to a special characteristic as an individual, on the occasion of a walk "on a cloudy early spring day" along the Danube, when Lorenz discovers a small flock of wild geese in the sky, where he notices that the goose that flies second in the left part of the triangular phalanx , a large feather is missing on one wing:

“The second goose in the left wing of the triangle is the gander Martin. At times he got engaged to my tame house goose Martina and was therefore baptized after her (before it was just a number, because only the geese raised by myself were given names). When it comes to gray geese, the young fiancé literally accompanies his bride at every turn. But since Martina moved freely and fearlessly in all the rooms in our house without asking about the concerns of the groom, who grew up outdoors, he was forced to venture into the unfamiliar rooms. [...] Suddenly the door slams shut behind him. Even a goose hero could not be expected to stand firm now. It flew up and straight into the glass chandelier . It lost several appendages. Knight Martin but a hand swing . "

In 1949, Lorenz concluded his essay on his hand-reared gray goose with the optimistic words:

"How wonderful is the moment when the new harmony of the adult bird is reached, when the wings are strengthened and able to unfold for the first flight."

In 1988, however, in his last book Here I Am - Where Are You? Ethology of the greylag goose , the dark side of the rearing of birds, which has been shaped on humans, comes up for the first time. Tania Munz therefore assigns the book to phase 4. In the first chapter, which is solely dedicated to Martina and Martin, Lorenz reports again on how the ganter lost a hand swing. This time, however, inside the house he is not described as a “knight” but only as “trembling with fear”, and immediately after describing this anecdote , the chapter closes self-critically as follows:

“Unfortunately Martina and Martin disappeared a short time later. Either they had not found a suitable nesting place in our overly populated garden, or, what seems more likely to me today, they escaped the stress they were constantly exposed to. "

Lorenz's view of Martina is even more clearly changed in the first paragraph of the chapter, where, more than 50 years after the events described, he frankly admits:

"Based on our current level of knowledge, her life story does not at all correspond to that of a 'normal' gray goose, since it was not raised in a species-appropriate manner and under multiple stress from the start."

This openly expressed distancing from the scientific relevance of earlier papers on the behavior of his hand-reared birds has the consequence that Lorenz now - in 1988 - can only report about his best-known animal of "chance observations on Martina", that is, of observations that were are of little scientific significance. The historian Tania Munz suspects that Lorenz's self-criticism is a result of the fact that research methods in behavioral biology had changed between the 1930s and 1980s: Instead of exploring the innate instincts in animals kept individually, it has become common to conduct long-term behavioral studies to explore the interaction between undisturbed, free-living conspecifics and their environment: Lorenz 'earlier ethological method is therefore now considered "quaint and out-of-date".

See also

literature

  • Tania Munz: "My Goose Child Martina": The Multiple Uses of Geese in the Writings of Konrad Lorenz. In: Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. Volume 41, No. 4, 2011, pp. 405-446, ISSN  1939-1811 , doi: 10.1525 / hsns.2011.41.4.405 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Tania Munz refers in particular to: Konrad Lorenz: Comparative movement studies on anatids. In: Journal of Ornithology. Volume 89, 1941, pp. 194-293 (reprinted in: Konrad Lorenz: About animal and human behavior. Collected treatises, Volume II. Piper, Munich and Zurich 1965, pp. 15-113.)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Konrad Lorenz : About failure symptoms in the instinctive behavior of pets and their socio-psychological significance. In: Otto Klemm (Hrsg.): Character and education. Report on the 16th congress of the German Society for Psychology in Bayreuth from 2-4. July 1939. Leipzig 1939, pp. 139–147.
  2. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Here I am - where are you? Ethology of the greylag goose. Piper, Munich and Zurich 1988, ISBN 978-3-492-11358-8 .
  3. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: The goose child Martina. In: the other: He talked to the cattle, the birds and the fish. Paperback edition. dtv, Munich 1964, pp. 84-95.
  4. ↑ Volker Schmidt: Konrad Lorenz: wrong ways of a chick father. ( Memento from March 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Published on zeit.de on February 27, 2014.
  5. ↑ The many martinas of Konrad Lorenz. The behavioral scientist has repeatedly rewritten and adapted the story of his favorite wild goose. On: derstandard.at of November 8, 2011.
  6. ↑ Kurt-Jürgen Voigt: Nobel Prize for Konrad Lorenz: Big goose celebrated. On: spiegel.de of October 4, 2010.
  7. ^ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973: Konrad Lorenz - Facts. On: nobelprize.org , last viewed on June 15, 2020.
  8. ^ Klaus Taschwer and Benedikt Föger : Konrad Lorenz. Biography. Zsolnay, Vienna 2003, pp. 30–31, ISBN 978-3-552-05282-6 .
  9. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Ethology of Greylag Goose , p. 18.
  10. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Ethology of Greylag Goose , p. 29.
  11. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: The friend in the environment of the bird. The conspecific as the triggering moment of social behavior. In: Journal of Ornithology. Volume 83, No. 2 and 3, 1935, pp. 137-215 and pp. 289-413, doi: 10.1007 / BF01905355 .
    Reprint in: Konrad Lorenz: About animal and human behavior. From the development of the theory of behavior. Collected treatises from 1931–1963. Volume I. Piper, Munich and Zurich 1965, pp. 115–282, full text (PDF) .
  12. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: The Goose child Martina, p. 85
  13. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Das Gänsekind Martina, p. 87.
  14. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Ethology of Greylag Goose , p. 29.
  15. ^ Oskar Heinroth : Contributions to biology, namely ethology and psychology of the anatids. In: Negotiations of the 5th International Ornithological Congress in Berlin, May 30 to June 4, 1910 . German Ornithological Society, Berlin 1911, pp. 589–702, full text .
  16. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Greylag goose ethology , pp. 30–32.
  17. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Ethology of Greylag Goose , p. 41.
  18. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Stupid Goose. In: Neues Wiener Tagblatt from December 8, 1937.
  19. ^ Tania Munz: "My Goose Child Martina": The Multiple Uses of Geese in the Writings of Konrad Lorenz. In: Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. Volume 41, No. 4, 2011, pp. 405-446 [here: p. 405], doi: 10.1525 / hsns.2011.41.4.405 .
  20. ^ Konrad Lorenz, Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogel , p. 128.
  21. ↑ Oskar Heinroth, Contributions to Biology, namely Ethology and Psychology of the Anatids , p. 633.
  22. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogel , p. 151.
  23. ^ Tania Munz, "My Goose Child Martina" , p. 418.
  24. ^ Leopoldina: Curriculum Vitae Prof. Dr. Konrad Zacharias Lorenz. At: leopoldina.org , accessed June 19, 2020.
  25. ↑ Benedikt Föger and Klaus Taschwer: The other side of the mirror. Konrad Lorenz and National Socialism. Czernin, Vienna 2001, pp. 74 and 78, ISBN 978-3-7076-0124-4 .
  26. ↑ Benedikt Föger and Klaus Taschwer, The other side of the mirror , p. 100.
  27. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: About failure symptoms in the instinctive behavior of pets and their socio-psychological significance. In: Otto Klemm (Hrsg.): Character and education. Report on the 16th congress of the German Society for Psychology in Bayreuth from 2-4. July 1939. Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig 1939, pp. 139–147 [here: pp. 146–147.]
  28. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: Disturbances of species-specific behavior caused by domestication. In: Journal for Applied Psychology and Character Studies. Vol. 59, No. 1-2, 1940, pp. 2-81.
  29. ↑ The Guardian: Levi's memoir beats Darwin to win science book title.
  30. ^ Tania Munz, "My Goose Child Martina" , pp. 430-431.
  31. ↑ Konrad Lorenz: He talked to the cattle, the birds and the fish. dtv, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-423-28165-2 .
  32. ^ Tania Munz, "My Goose Child Martina" , p. 432.
  33. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Das Gänsekind Martina , p. 87.
  34. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Das Gänsekind Martina , p. 17.
  35. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Ethology of Greylag Goose , p. 41.
  36. ↑ Konrad Lorenz, Here I am - where are you? Ethology of Greylag Goose , p. 29.
  37. ^ Tania Munz, "My Goose Child Martina" , p. 444.