Tag: Two Stories from Nature

Two Stories from Nature that Illustrate just how similar the Behavior of Animals is to our Own. 

There was a time when it all seemed so simple, the behavior of we humans was based on reason and moral judgment while that of the animals was purely based on instinct, a rather egotistic point of view to be sure. In fact, ever since we humans began to actually look at the way animals do behave, we’ve been surprised at how often animal behavior resembles our own.

Like ourselves Chimpanzees are now known to use a variety of tools for different jobs. (Credit: AnimalWise)

Many animals use tools! Many communicate with each other using a variety of methods! Teamwork among animals is more extensive and complex than we ever imagined! Animals also engage in bad behavior, like stealing from each other, committing murder, even going to war! In many ways the behavior of animals differs in degree, not in kind from human behavior.

And again like ourselves Chimpanzees are now known to make war one group against another! (Credit: Shutterstock)

Take intoxication for example, surely the drinking of alcoholic beverages is an activity that didn’t exist until we humans began fermenting grapes or grains or, let’s face it we’ll ferment any food with enough sugar in it. Well actually no, fermentation is a very natural process, a process that just happens to overripe fruits and grains as the yeast on their skins begins to convert sugar to alcohol.

The classical Greeks and Romans so loved wine that they created the god Bacchus to honour it. (Credit: Crystalinks)

And there have been numerous observations by naturalists of fruit eating animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and then acting inebriated. In fact many overripe fruits can have an alcohol content of 1-2% by volume and some, like the palm fruit in Panama, have been found to have an alcohol content as high as 10%. Also most fruit eating animals, like monkeys and bats are rather small so it takes less alcohol to get a spider monkey drunk than an adult human.

The Palm fruit of Central and South America is well known for undergoing the process of fermentation when it becomes over ripe, a naturally occurring form of alcohol. (Credit: Specialty Produce)

Still most naturalists assumed that drunkenness in animals was just an accident, not an actual behavior. That assumption is now being challenged by a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.  While the paper accepts that drunkenness has its downside, it is certainly more difficult to avoid a predator’s attack if you are inebriated than if you are sober, there are still a lot of benefits to consuming alcoholic fruit.

Central American spider monkeys have now been observed to actually seek out over ripe fruit in order to get drunk! (Credit: Daily Mail)

For one thing it is packed with calories, the thing all living creatures need most, and the strong smell of alcohol may serve to lead the animals to the fruit. Alcohol can also have medicinal benefits, it kills many viruses and bacteria, that’s why we use alcohol wipes to disinfect. Finally the paper speculates that, as with we humans, the more social of fruit eating animals may actually use over ripe fruit, and its alcohol as a relaxant, an aid in socializing.

We humans use alcohol as a disinfectant, could some animals be doing the same thing? That would imply a considerable amount of intelligence on their part! (Credit: www.lazada.com.ph)

The paper concludes by stating that more research is needed before anything definite can be said. Alcohol occurs naturally in many ecosystems and if evolution has taught us anything it is that living creatures will find some way to make use of any resource.

Naturally occurring yeast on grapes just starts the process of fermentation. It doesn’t need any human effort to make alcohol. (Credit: Enobytes)

Another way that we humans thought that we were unique was in our ability to organize and coordinate really large scale hunting efforts. O’k there are wolf packs and lion prides but organizing really big kills, like the cattle drives of the old wild west or even just the harvesting of tuna or some other schooling fish, well that takes human ingenuity and cooperation.

Native American were known to drive large herds of Buffalo over cliffs as one method of hunting them. Surely only we humans are capable of such planning and organization. (Credit: Buffalo Bill Center of the West)

Or maybe not, in a recently observed episode off the coast of Norway researchers using the latest acoustic surveying techniques watched in awe as the largest predation event ever recorded took place. It began as a huge swarm of capelin; an anchovy sized fish that lives in cold artic waters, migrated southward to the Norwegian coast in order to lay their eggs. The oceanographers who witnessed the event estimated from the size of the swarm and its density that there were more than 20 million fish gathered in a school spread over tens of kilometers in area, that number is still only a small fraction of all the capelin in the Artic. Heading south the capelin ran straight into a large school of their most dangerous predator, cod.

During their mating season millions of Capelin, a small fish related to the anchovy, swim to the coast of Norway in order to breed. Such a huge amount of food naturally attracts many different types of predators. (Credit: Interesting Engineering)

Over the course of just a few hours of continuous feeding the cod consumed more than half of the capelin, over 10 million individual fish, making this the largest predation incident ever studied. It’s worth remembering however, that this slaughter was only completely observed because of the new technology and the resources necessary to cover the entire occurrence, so it probably won’t be long before even bigger battles are observed.

While the Capelin are eaten by cod the cod are then eaten by larger fish, or we humans! That’s the food chain. (Credit: Yale E360)
Some of data collected by the naturalists who observed the immense predation event. You can almost see the cod attacked and devouring their prey. (Credit: MIT News)

Just a few more of the ways that other the behavior of other creatures resembles actions that we thought were unique of our species.

Two stories from Nature about the primary ways animals interact with each other, communication and sex.

Every individual from nearly every species of animal must from time to time interact with other members of its own species. The most important reason for such contacts is surely procreation but there are countless others such as safety in numbers, hunting in packs or even just agreeing upon separate territories so as to minimize the number of interactions. In all of these contacts there must be some form of communication in order to facilitate the outcome of the meeting.

The annual Red Crab migration on Christmas Island. Even usually solitary animals like these still have to interact with their fellows on occasion. (Credit: Parks Australia)

We humans of course have the best, most versatile form of communication, language but we know that the howling of monkeys, the songs of birds and the barking of dogs are simpler, courser forms of language. At the same time we wonder if some of nature’s other most intelligent species, dolphins or chimpanzees for example, may have languages approaching ours in complexity. Over the past fifty years or so there have been numerous studies to try to ‘talk with the animals’ as Doctor Doolittle would say.

Rex Harrison as the original, and still the best Doctor Dolittle. He taught the parrot to speak English and the parrot taught him to speak animal. (Credit: DiscDish)

Recently an experiment in communicating with humpback whales has been carried out by a group of researchers from the University of California at Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation along with the SETI Institute. Humpbacks are well known to communicate with each other using long songs that seem to repeat themselves with slight variations and that can travel for thousands of kilometers in the ocean.

Researchers with UC Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation and SETI succeeded in carrying on a ‘conversation’ with a wild Humpback Whale for 20 minutes. We’re not quite certain what the conversation was about but the whale seemed to enjoy it. (Credit: YouTube)

What the team did was to take a boat out to an area of the ocean where humpbacks were known to be and played a recording of a humpback song that was well established as a form of greeting. The humans then waited for a response from one of the whales. They didn’t have to wait for long as a humpback who had been given the name of Twain not only replied to the call but approached the boat and began circling it.

No, we haven’t gotten there just yet, but it sounds like an interesting book! (Credit: Amazon.com)

The researchers then began playing other recorded whale calls and each time Twain replied with a different call of his own. Now the scientists had only the vaguest idea of what their calls actually meant in the humpback language, let alone what Twain’s replies meant but they still managed to continue the ‘conversation’ for about twenty minutes.

Considering all the problems we have communicating with other humans it’s gonna take a while before we’re really talking to animals. (Credit: English Tips)

While a twenty-minute exchange of only half understood messages can hardly be considered a ‘communications breakthrough’ it is nevertheless data that can be analyzed by the mathematical principles known as information theory. And with each additional such encounter scientists will learn a little bit more about how to communicate with the other intelligent creatures that share our world with us.

The gorilla Koko became famous for being able to speak in sign language. Just how well she understood language is still controversial but she certainly represented a major step forward in animal communication. (Credit: The Franklin Institute)

Another interesting point about the study is the inclusion of the SETI or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute, an organization dedicated to seeking out intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, not here on Earth. However the people at SETI recognize that learning how to communicate, or even just being able to recognize an attempt at communication with non-human life here on Earth will help them to better find and contact alien intelligences. Slowly we humans are coming to understand the other intelligences here on Earth and one day soon we’ll be having real conversations with them.

The SETI institute is usually concerned with communicating with Extra-Terrestrials but they are also interested in communicating with non-human life forms here on Earth. (Credit: The Indian Express)

However, as I said above the most important reason living creatures have for interacting with members of their own species is mating, producing offspring to keep the species going, sex! Now we all know that the many different species here on Earth have quite a variety of different ways to have sex. Some species of fish for example gather in large numbers of both genders and then just release both their eggs and sperm into the water knowing that most of the eggs will get fertilized by somebody’s sperm. Many plants actually use an intermediary like a bee to carry their pollen from one flower to another so that fertilization can occur. The only set rule of mating is that, if it works it works.

When coral spawn they simply release their eggs and sperm into the water. Some of the eggs get fertilized, many don’t. It works for them however, they’ve been here at least half a billion years. (Credit: CoralGardening)

It was thought that all mammals basically had sex the same way we humans do. The male’s penis penetrates the female’s vagina where it releases the male’s sperm in order to fertilize the female’s egg. Certainly dogs, horses, whales and even egg laying mammals like the platypus do it that way.

It was thought that all mammals, even dolphins and whales, mated pretty much the same way that we humans do. The male penetrates the female leaving his sperm inside her to fertilize her eggs. (Credit: YouTube)

Now however a new study from the journal Current Biology has called that assumption into question for one large group of mammals, the bats, based upon videos taken in a church steeple in the Netherlands. The species of bat in the study is known as serotine bats who are native to a wide area of both Europe and Asia. Since bats are nocturnal and often live in hard to access places not a great deal is known about their mating habits in general and the serotine bats in particular were considered mysterious. You see the penis of the male serotine bat was simply too large to fit inside the female’s vagina!

Unlike mammals, when most species of birds mate there is no penetration by the male. Instead he simply spits his sperm at her vagina and enough of it gets in to cause fertilization. (Credit: Shutterstock)

So researchers, led by Dr. Nicholas Fasel filmed hundreds of hours of the bats in the steeple of an Old Dutch church where they succeeded in catching several instances of the bats mating. What they found was that serotine bats mate by simply touching their genitals together in a manner similar to the way most species of birds mate, not mammals. This finding raises the question of whether other bats have sex the same way, quite a few species are known to have oddly shaped if not oversized penises.

In Serotine bats the male’s penis is fully seven times larger than the female’s vagina making what we consider normal copulation difficult if not impossible. The recent study has concluded that Serotine bats copulate in the same fashion as bird’s do. (Credit: Daily Mail)

So if serotine bats mate by just touching their genitals then why do the males have such large penises? Well, Dr. Fasel points out that the female serotine bat has evolved a flap of their leathery wing as a covering for their vagina in order to prevent an unwanted male from being able to mate with them. He theorizes that perhaps the male has evolved his large penis as a means of pushing that flap out of the way. In other words we may be witnessing a literal battle of the sexes in evolution.

The Battle of the sexes is even a standard problem in Game Theory. The best solution is to do something together. (Credit: Springer Link)

All of which shows that when it comes to interactions between members of the same species nature keeps coming up with odd and interesting ways of doing things.