Feature Article
A. KRISHNA MURTHY
Intelligence is not the
special privilege of
humans alone. The socalled ‘lower’ animals are
equally skilled and, hence,
are not really lower.
Incredible
Brainy Animals
sites were found located 74 km from the equatorial epicenter.
The number of paired toads dropped to zero three days before.
The shift in the toads’ behavior coincided with the disruption in the
ionosphere, the uppermost layer of earth’s atmosphere, which is
detected using very low frequency (VLF) radio sounding.
A
RE humans the only intelligent species? We often assume
that because we are at the acme of the high pyramid of
evolution. But contemporary studies are revealing
unbelievable facts about the intelligence of various animals. Let’s
take a look at some of these findings.
Toads and Earthquakes
Toads (Bufo bufo) can detect impending seismic activity and
alter their behavior from breeding to evacuation mode, suggests
a new study in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of
Zoology. The findings suggest that toads are capable of detecting
preseismic cues such as release of radon gas and charged
particles and use them as form of earthquake early warning
system.
According to the lead
author Dr. Rachel Grant from
the Open University, London,
the study has disclosed that
96% of the male toads
abandoned their breeding
sites five days before the
earthquake that stuck L’aquita
in Italy in 2009. The breeding
Meticulous Honeybees
The tiny seed-sized brain of a honeybee is such an evolutionary
marvel that it can estimate
exact energy expenditure while
foraging for pollen. The bee
estimates the distance visually.
Andrew Barron of Macquarie
University, New South Wales,
Australia set out to determine
whether bees also use visual
information to estimate the
flight costs. According to him,
to make honey, bees must
gather more nectar from
flowers than the energy spent
collecting it. Hence in order to
search efficiently they need to
know how much energy each
foregoing trip costs them.
The bee brain is incredibly
simple and yet it appears to possess an onboard calorimeter or
stop watch (Proceedings of Royal Society of London). Barron
discloses, “Our study has shown that bees can separately
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SCIENCE REPORTER, JANUARY 2011
Feature Article
Elephants in random groups separated by several
miles manage to move in perfect coordination
towards the same destination.
Engineers are still many years away from creating
instruments as sensitive and as flexible as dog’s nose.
calculate distance traveled and foraging efficiencies. Bees can
communicate with one another about their trips for flowers through
different elements of dance languages. For example, when a
source of nectar is close to the hive, they dance in the form of 8
(wriggle dance). The dance is longer and vigorous when the
amount of nectar is rich. Bees gradually slow down the dancing
movements when the substance in the source is exhausted.
German biologist, Karl von Frisch who studied the dances
very closely and established the honeybee’s communication with
one another using the dancing languages was awarded the
Nobel Prize for biology in 1966. Such mental abilities explain the
bees’ proficiency as nectar harvesters. The tiny bee brain solves
complex math problems. Foraging bees visit flowers at multiple
locations and, because bees use a lot of energy to fly, they find
a route that keeps flying to a minimum, solving what is called ‘the
traveling salesman problem’.
Bird Brain?
Although hummingbirds
have brains the size of a rice
grain, they have super
memories when it comes
to food. They visit nearly
2000 flowers a day to
consume nectar. These tiny
birds weighing 20g or less
remember not only their
food source but also can
plan with precision. This is
the first demonstration that
animals in the wild can remember both location of food source
and when they visited them.
Scientists studying Rofous hummingbirds in the Canadian
rocks found that the birds recollected where specific flowers
were located and when they visited last, two aspects of episodic
memory that was thought to be exclusive to humans. The
researchers tracked how often the birds visited artificial flowers
filled with sugar solution in the bird feeding grounds.
They refilled half the flowers at ten-minute intervals and the
other after 20 m gaps after they had been emptied. Their visits
matched exactly with the refill schedules. Flowers refilled after 10
m intervals were visited sooner. “We were surprised that their
timing abilities are so good that they managed to cope up
efficiently with as many as eight different timings,” the scientists
commented.
Intelligent Elephants
Elephants in random groups separated by several miles manage
to move in perfect coordination towards the same destination.
In 1985 Katharine Payne, a scientist at the Cornell University, New
York was watching a group of elephants in a zoo. She could feel
a spasmodic throbbing in the air similar to one created by distinct
SCIENCE REPORTER, JANUARY 2011
thunder. This coincided perfectly with fluttering on one of the
elephant’s forehead between its eyes.
Payne and her colleagues started investigating and found
that the throbbing was created by sounds below the ranges of
human hearing. The audible noise made by elephants like
trumpeting, rowling and growling would not travel far as the sound
would be absorbed by the trees, grass and shrubs. But the low
frequency sound can travel longer distances. Elephants are
credited with a keen sense of hearing. An elephant can also
recognize subtle musical vibrations.
Clever Chimps
Chimpanzees not only use tools to
snare termites but are also able to
modify as well, something that
requires conceptual and cultural
skills. A group of biologists headed
by Josep Call of Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology, who
studied the chimps’ activity, found
that the chimps manufactured a
special ‘brush stick’ in the knowledge
that more termites would stick on to
this form of probe. The apes use their
teeth to split the end of stick and fray
the fibres, forming tips that look like
an artist’s paintbrush.
More than 80% of the tools recovered from the termite nests
in six chimpanzee communities in the Goualougo Triangle of
Nouable Ndoke National park, Republic of Congo have been
engineered to give a brush tip, according to the study. According
to the scientists, chimps like humans are able to conceptualize
what they want to do and the tool making is the actual
achievement. “Our results indicate that chimps have a mental
template of the tool form, which is employed in crafting the tool
prior to use and refining.”
Electrical Communication
Just as we plug in our computers and smart phones to
communicate, electrical fish too communicate by quickly
plugging special channels into their cells to penetrate electrical
impulses. The fish generate electrical fields to navigate, fight and
to attract mates in murky streams and rivers throughout Central
and South America. They do so at night, while trying to avoid
predators like catfish that sense electric fields.
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Feature Article
The fish use a dimmer to save energy by turning their
electrical signals up and down, says Harold Zakon, Professor of
Microbiology, University of Texas, Austin. The scientist has found
that the dimmer switch comes in the form of a sodium channel
the fish insert and remove from the membrane of special cells.
When the sodium channels are in the cell membrane, the
electrical impulse emitted by the organism is greater. The process
is under the control of hormones.
Leech Touch
When a leech is touched it contracts at the diametrically opposite
point using Rene Descartes’s (the French mathematician) exact
formula to analyse which way to bend, according to a finding
published in Nature which provides insights into our own sense of
touch.
Dr. John Leuis and
William Kristan of the
University of California at
San Diego, La Jolla say
that four nerve cells in
each body segment
enable the leech to
encode exactly when it
has been touched. Each
nerve cell covers a sector
of 900, such as up, down,
left and right, similar to a
Cartesian system of the
kind
published
by
Descartes in 1637. By
comparing all the signal
outputs of all the four nerves, the leech can pinpoint the precise
direction of touch in two dimensions. “Leech performs
calculations as elegantly as Descartes would,” says Lorry Abbott
of Bandies University Massachusetts.
Disciplined Ants
“They march in columns of several tens of meters long. They are
like disciplined legions resembling heavy traffic on an inter city
freeway as seen from a low flying airplane.” This is the admiration
of a Harvard Biologist E.O. Wilson
for the minis. It appears that unlike
us, they are able to avoid traffic
jams in the marching columns even
at high density. No congestion at
all.
Professor
Debashish
Choudary, Indian Institute of
Technology, Kanpur describes an
experiment devised by Dussutour
and his colleagues. They created
a bottleneck in the ants’ trail. (J. Exp.
Biol. 208, 2903, 2005)”. Ants arriving
at the entrance at the bottleneck
gave way to those coming from the
opposite direction, and queued
up. The queue of the waiters
became longer in time, at the
point. The ants in the opposite
direction stopped and lined up for
the earlier queue to clear. In
other words alternate clusters
of inbound and outbound are
crossing the bottleneck. The
incoming cargo laden ants
always have the right of the
way.
Professor Conzin and
Franks (Royal Acad. Sci.
London B270, 139, 2003) have
observed that the outer lane
ants protect the food brought
by the inbound returnees.
Astonishing is the word used by
the researchers.
Doggy Smell
Engineers are still many years
away
from
creating
instruments as sensitive and as
flexible as dog’s nose. Until
then mother nature remains the master engineer. “You can train
a dog for anything that has unique or mostly smell,” said Lawrence
J. Mayor, Prof. Of Veterinary Science, Auburn University.
In the case of DVD’s, Lucky and Flo successfully employed at
London’s Heathrow airport have been trained to detect
polycarbonate plastic. In the case of cancer, scientists believe
that dogs may be picking up organic/biological compounds,
like alkanes, benzene and its derivatives that are not found in the
healthy tissue. Dog’s sniffing power, well known for ages lends
itself to any number of needs.
“Cocaine or peanut butter; whatever you want to find, we
can train a dog to find it,” said Bill Whitstine, founder of the Florida
Canine Academy, Florida.
Intelligent Damselfish
Wrlike E. Siebeck of University of
Queensland, Australia has studied
the
fish
Pamacentrus
amboinensis and P. moleccensis,
two species of damselfish
capable of seeing at the
ultraviolet end of the spectrum.
These fish can discriminate
practically identical reef fish and
can differentiate the tiny scales
around the eyes in the presence
of UV light. “These are really fine
and intricate patterns that we
humans can’t see at all,” Siebeck said.
The question for her and her colleagues was whether
patterns, and ability to see them apart, had an effect on the
behavior. In a series of experiments in which among other things,
they placed a fish inside a glass chamber equipped with a UV
filter, the researchers showed that P. amboinensus used the
patterns to discriminate the two species (Current Biology).
Dr. A. Krishna Murthy is a Retired Professor of Chemistry. Address: 2-7-592
Excise Colony, Hanamkonda, Warangal-506001; Email: avv122@yahoo.com
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