In humans it happens where individuals will snap and attack other members of their social tribe
Does this happen on social insects like wasps or bees, or on other social mammal species where one individual does the equivalent of a. Shooting spree (maybe a wasp goes nuts and stings all the other wasps before being killed)
Elephant in musth?
Birds have been known to attack and either maim or kill others in their flock. Sometimes they’ll kill their own mates.
Mice do, when the population density gets too high, but plenty of food.
Mothers eat their babies too. all sorts of weird things.
Chimpanzees famously.
Although I think there’s an issue with the “shooting spree” framing. A chimp might go rogue and kill infant(s). Or two former “friends” might violently fight over status. But how can one chimp, even a particularly strong one, subdue multiple adult chimps?
And this is going to be true for basically all animals.
Tomcats often kill kittens.
This is why we need to make guns accessible to chimps…for Science.
Here’s a video of a male elephant who has the hots for another female elephant, so before he tries to get it on with her, he decides to try and kill her baby first.
Some of the comments are a hoot, regardless of the video’s content.
I guess for my purposes I’m not counting violence that is inter-tribal, or that is done to monopolize valuable resources, or to gain status/mates, or to kill the children of potential mates. Those are all violent behaviors you’d expect with evolution.
I’m more wondering if animals just go nuts and try to cause as much destruction within their own social group as possible in a suicide attack. Do chimps wake up one day and go just berzerk, trying to kill all their fellow chimps within their tribe before being beaten to death.
Wasps going nuts and stabbing animals isn’t uncommon. Male animals killing the children of females they want to mate with fits in with evolutionary theory.
Is there a bee version of michael douglas in falling down?
I’m not sure what motivates murder/suicide spree killers in humans. I assume its due to feeling tired of life and feeling like a failure based on societies expectations. But I don’t know if social animals have that issue too for example.
True.
I was thinking more a chimp wakes up one day and tries to kill as many people in the tribe before being beaten to death. Or a wasp wakes up and tries to kill all the other wasps before being stung to death by their former living mates.
Like I say, it can happen with infanticide; where an adult can kill several infants, sometimes for no discernible reason (though there are hypotheses).
But an adult trying to kill as many adults as possible is going to be lucky to succeed in even killing one. As soon as he or she is attacking more than one individual, it’s advantage everyone else.
Even if the attacker is somehow able to engage each adult one by one, the attacker is going to get tired, and the potential victims are all fresh.
It would be a pointless suicidal move for an animal to make.
That said, it probably happens, exceeding rarely, as an unusual symptom of a disease or infection like rabies.
I’d argue that spree killing or murder suicide in humans are examples of insanity. Or at least mental dis-health, recognizing that 21st Century understanding of mental health & thinking in general is pretty darn sketchy. Let’s just call it “insanity” as a we-know-it-when-we-see-it kind of term.
In order to be “insane” you have to have a consciousness to begin with. It’s deliberate skilled purposeful behavior in pursuit of truly bizarre aims arrived at by a fundamentally defective set of motivations and/or cause-effect reasoning.
If your brain (e.g. a wasp) isn’t powerful enough to have “reasoning” or “motivations” you can’t have that particular defect occur. At that level it’s all instinct all the time.
As we go up the cognition chain from social insects to herd herbivores (whatever a buffalo is, smart ain’t it) to pack hunters (canines) to apes somewhere along the way my argument gets weaker. But I don’t know where in that chain, if ever, it fails completely. Like consciousness, insanity may be a uniquely human trait. At least uniquely human on this planet in this era.
Another thought:
Adult chimps are said to be about the mental equivalent of 3-5 year old humans depending on which expert you ask. Can a 3-5 year old human be insane enough to try these sorts of acts, or don’t they (yet) have a mind formed enough to go that far off the rails?
Heck if I know, but I believe the answers the OP wants are somewhere down this line of reasoning.