Three News Items from the Natural World around Us. 

Communing with Nature is a passion for many people. Just getting out of doors and observing the plants and animals that inhabit the wild areas of our world can be an endlessly fascinating pastime. Those people who are lucky enough to study nature as their profession are obviously called naturalists and they have many interesting stories to tell, here are three of them. I’ll start with the biggest, creature that is, and work my way down in size.

Ah, enjoying nature. What could be better than having a career that allows us to observe and understand the world around us! (Credit: Westend61)

Everyone has heard the old saying that “an elephant never forgets”. For thousands of years or longer we humans have recognized that elephants are among the smartest of animals and over the last few decades evidence that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror or the ability of elephants to remember the directions to waterholes they haven’t been to for years has proven their mental abilities.

Good advice from one intelligent species to another. (Credit: Flickr)

Now a new study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution that suggests that elephants might have individual names for each other in the deep rumblings that they use to communicate. There are already a few other species that are recognized as having and using personal names for each other, Bottlenosed Dolphins and Orange Fronted Parakeets are two examples. Unlike humans however, who are given our names at birth, individual Dolphins and Parakeets create their own signature call that their friends and family then use to identify them. These animals pick their own name in other words.

Yes, it appears that Elephants have individual calls that they associate with certain individuals and use those calls when they want to get the attention of those individuals. They each have their own name! (Credit: Bored Panda)

In order to determine whether or not elephants also have personal names researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York recorded 469 calls from wild female African savanna elephants and their offspring. The team then used an AI to analyze the contents of the calls. After processing the calls the AI was able to identify which elephant was being spoken to in each call more than 25% of the time.

Some of the audio data accumulated by the researchers as they studied the calls of African Elephants. (Credit: Nature)

In order to demonstrate that their analysis was correct the researchers then replayed some of the recorded calls to a group of 17 elephants. When the ‘name’ of a particular animal was played that elephant was observed to become more vocal itself and moved toward the speaker that had sounded its name.

African Elephants now join a growing list of different species of animals that are known to have personal names from individuals. (Credit: The Atlantic)

The fact that elephants actually call each other by individual, personal names shouldn’t really surprise anyone. We’ve always known that elephants have complex social lives and of course good memories. The Cornell study is really just another example of how intelligent other species of animals can be.

The evolutionary linage of elephants. Right now some scientists are trying to bring the extinct Mammoths back to life. If they succeed it will be interesting to see if they are as intelligent as their African kin? (Credit: Britannica)

Another way that animals can demonstrate their intelligence is through tool use. Certainly one of the biggest moments in science during the 20th Century was when Jane Goodall saw a chimpanzee take a twig, licked it and then stuck it into a termite mound. When the chimp pulled the twig back out it was covered with termites that the animal then consumed. The chimpanzee was using a tool to obtain protein rich food to eat.

When Jane Goodall first observed Chimpanzees using twigs to ‘fish’ for termites it was proof that our closest relative used tools. (Credit: Britannica)

Since that time many other species have been observed to use tools. For example sea otters along the Pacific coast will bring up a clam or oyster from the sea floor to eat. Swimming on their backs with the shellfish on their stomach the otter will then bang a sharp rock on the clam in order to break the shell open so they can eat the mollusk inside.

A sea otter banging a mussel shell against a rock in order to open it! Another species of animal that uses tools. (Credit: Phys.org)

The advantages of using the rock as a tool are pretty obvious but a new study by Naturalists at the University of Texas at Austin and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California examined tool use among sea otters more closely to determine if there were any other benefits as well. What the researchers did was to observe the feeding techniques of 196 radio tagged sea otters off of the California coast. In an effort to gather as much data as possible the scientists also enlisted the aid of volunteer ‘otter spotters’ who were able to keep track of individual otters thanks to the radio tags.

Here’s someone who’s really into observing sea otters. Naturalists often make good use of volunteers like this to gather data about how animals in the wild live. (Credit: USGS.gov)

What the researchers found was that female otters tended to make use of rocks as tools more often than males did, perhaps to compensate for their smaller size and reduced biting strength. The tendency of females to make greater use of tools is also known from other tool using species such as dolphins and chimpanzees, and perhaps for the same reason. The naturalists also suggest that, since it is the females that raise the young in all those species, it may be that tool use is passed down though the generations by females.

Like humans, much of what a baby sea otters learns comes from its mother! (Credit: YouTube)

One other unexpected but not surprising outcome discovered by the study was a considerable reduction in tooth damage to those otters that used the rocks as tools. As you can imagine major tooth damage can be a death sentence to any animal so the fact that tool use reduces the chances of tooth damage is another great advantage to any species.

Trying to open clam shells with your teeth not only requires a lot more effort but also can result in damage to the otter’s teeth. That’s the advantage of tool use! (Credit: Futurity)

My last story from nature does not concern a single species of animal but rather a huge group of animals spread across several phyla. I’m talking about animals that fly, along with many that swim and how fast they all beat their wings / fins in order to fly / swim. A large scale analysis of hundreds of such species by researchers at the Department of Science and Environment at the University of Roskilde in Roskilde in Denmark has led to a simple equation that predicts the frequency that a flying animal has to beat its wings based only upon the animals mass and the area of its wings. This single equation was found to be accurate for hundreds of species of insect, birds and bats and also for the fins of penguins along with several species of whale.

We all know that bird’s flap their wings in order to fly but how often they flap depends on several factors. (Credit: Wired)

According to the study the frequency of wing beat is proportional to the square root of the animal’s mass divided by the area of the animal’s wings.

The basic equation for the frequency that birds, insects, bats and even whales have to flap their wings or flippers in order to fly or swim. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

After checking the accuracy of their equation against the wing beat frequency of several species that had not been used in deriving it the researchers then used it to predict the frequency of wing beats for the extinct pterosaur species Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest known flying animal ever. According to the equation Q northropi would have had to beat its ten square-meter wings seven times every ten seconds in order to be able to fly.

Some of the data collected to verify their equation for wing beat frequency. (Credit: Jensen, Dyer et al)

Whether they are studying a single species or discovering a general rule that helps to understand hundreds of different species naturalists are lucky in that they get to study the endlessly fascinating world of life on Planet Earth.

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