animal behaviour
edyong | January 14, 2010
I've just flown from London to North Carolina, a trip of around 6,200km. As flights go, it's a pathetic one, a mere jaunt in the park compared to the epic voyage of the Arctic tern. Every year, this greatest of animal travellers makes a 70,000 km round-trip, in a relentless, globe-trotting pursuit of daylight. In summer, it spends its time in the sun-soaked Arctic and in winter, it heads for the equally bright climes of Antarctica. In its 30 years of life, this champion aeronaut flies more than 2.4 million kilometres - the equivalent of three return journeys to the Moon.
The Arctic tern'…
edyong | January 10, 2010
Weaver birds are the artisans extraordinaire of the bird world. As their name suggests, they fashion intricate nests out of plant material, carefully threaded and woven into a solid structure. All of it is done, quite literally, without lifting a finger.
These birds were all building nests in a tree outside a delightful winery called Delheim, which does an exceptional line of dessert wines. While my wife was inside sampling them, I was outside snapping away at this colony.
The males are the ones who do the weaving, and their efforts advertise their skill and quality to potential mates. By…
edyong | January 7, 2010
If someone at âyour workplace offends a client or a customer, they'd probably get an earful from their colleagues or boss. If someone annoys a friend of yours, you'd probably have a go at them. This capacity to punish those who behave badly, even if they haven't wronged us personally, pervades all aspects of human society. And we're not the only ones - fish punish bad behaviour too.
The bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) operates an underwater health spa for larger fish. It advertises its services with bright colours and distinctive dances. When customers arrive, the cleaner…
edyong | January 5, 2010
If you looked at the penis of a Drosophila fly under a microscope (for reasons best known only to yourself), you'd see an array of wince-inducing hooks and spines. These spines are present in all Drosophila and they're so varied that a trained biologist could use them to identify the species of the owner.
What's the purpose of these spines? Are they intended to actually wound the female during mating? Do they help the male fly to scrape out the sperm of his rivals? Do they actually pierce the walls of the female's genital tract, allowing the male to bypass any barriers to his sperm, as…
edyong | December 22, 2009Patricia Brennan from Yale University is trying to encourage male Muscovy ducks to launch their ballistic penises into test tubes.
Normally, the duck keeps its penis inside-out within a sac in its body. When the time for mating arrives, the penis explodes outwards to a fully-erect 20cm, around a quarter of the animal's total body length. The whole process takes just a third of a second and Brennan captures it all on high-speed camera. This isn't just bizarre voyeurism. Duck penises are a wonderful example of the strange things that happen when sexual conflict shapes the evolution of animal…
edyong | December 21, 2009It's a dinosaur tooth, and clearly one that belonged to a predator - sharp and backwards-pointing. But this particularly tooth, belonging to a small raptor called Sinornithosaurus, has a special feature that's courting a lot controversy. It has a thin groove running down its length, from the root to the very tip. According to a new paper from Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it was a channel for venom.
Thanks to a certain film that shall remain nameless, a lot of people probably think that we already know that some dinosaurs are venomous. But the idea that Dilophosaurus was…
edyong | December 20, 2009Safaris are all about the big game. But even though elephants, leopards and rhinos (oh my!) fill your lens and retinas on a daily basis, it's still just as wonderful to watch a squirrel scamper through a tree. This species is known in South Africa simply as a tree squirrel, or Smith's bush squirrel more broadly. Its golden coat with tinges of rust and green make it a far more handsome creature than the common grey squirrels that run through London's parks. It lacks none of their characteristic agility either, as the video below will demonstrate. I spent a good half-hour watching this…
edyong | December 14, 2009
Octopuses are masters of camouflage that can change their shape, colour and texture to perfectly blend into their environment. But the soft bodies that make them such excellent con artists also make them incredibly vulnerable, should they be spotted. Some species have solved that problem with their fierce intellect, which allows them to make use of other materials that are much harder. The veined octopus, for example, dons a suit of armour made of coconut shells.
The veined octopus (Amphioctus marginatus) lives in sandy, exposed habitats that have little in the way of cover. To protect…
edyong | December 13, 2009There's a great octopus story coming your way tomorrow. For that reason, I thought it was about time to republish this - the first ever post I wrote for Not Exactly Rocket Science, about the ever-amazing mimic octopus. This article was a game-changer for me. I submitted it to the Daily Telegraph's Young Science Writer competition in 2004, while still struggling with a failing attempt at research. It was awarded a runner-up prize - not a win, but enough to convince me that I could actually write and that I enjoyed it. Looking back on it now, it's decent but a bit rough. It also took forever to…
edyong | December 8, 2009On Nicobar Island, in the Indian Ocean, a most unusual hunting party is searching for food. Through the branches of the forest, the tiny Nicobar treeshrew scuttles about searching for insects. They're followed by the racket-tailed drongo, a small bird that picks off juicy morsels flushed out by the foraging treeshrews. So far, this isn't unusual - many distantly related animals forage together, either because they net more food or because they can watch out for predators.
But this alliance has a third an altogether more surprising member - a sparrowhawk. This bird of prey is five times…
edyong | December 7, 2009Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies.
By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…
edyong | December 5, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Two years ago, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center found that brown capuchin monkeys also react badly to receiving raw deals. Forget bananas - capuchins love the taste of grapes and far prefer them over cucumber. If monkeys were rewarded for completing a task with cucumber while their peers were given succulent grapes, they were more likely to shun both task and reward.
That suggested that the human ability to compare own efforts and rewards with those of our…
edyong | December 4, 2009We're less than a month away from the end of the year (the decade, even). In past years, I've done a review of the year, where I select my favourite posts. But those were more innocent and less productive times. This year, I have written 245 posts and counting and it's now easy to narrow these down to a manageable number.
So I thought I could get you to do it, and we could have some in the process
Throughout December, I will be getting you lovely readers to vote for the top stories covered on this blog over the last year. I've selected the ones that have interested me the most and divided…
edyong | December 3, 2009In the forests of Germany live large numbers of blackcaps, a small species of songbird. They all look very similar, but they actually belong to two genetically distinct groups that are becoming more disparate with time. For the moment, the best way to tell them apart is to wait for winter. As the cold sets in, one group of blackcaps flies southwest to Spain, while a smaller group heads northwest towards Britain.
If the prospect of spending winter in Britain rather than Spain seems odd to you, you're not alone. Indeed, blackcaps were hardly ever ventured across these shores before the 1950s.…
edyong | November 27, 2009
The hammerhead shark's head is one of the strangest in the animal world. The flattened hammer, known as a 'cephalofoil', looks plain bizarre on the face of an otherwise streamlined fish, and its purpose is still the subject of debate. Is it an organic metal detector that allows the shark to sweep large swathes of ocean floor with its electricity-detecting ability? Is it a spoiler that provides the shark with extra lift as it swims? All of these theories hypotheses might be true , but Michelle McComb from Florida Atlantic University has confirmed at least one other -the hammer gives the shark…
edyong | November 25, 2009
The role of Velociraptor's infamous claw has received much attention from scientists ever since they clicked their way across a movie kitchen. In comparison, the formidable claws of living raptors (birds of prey) have received little attention. Eagles, hawks, falcons and owls are some of the most widespread and well-liked of all birds. They are superb hunters and even though it's always been suspected that they use their talons to kill, we know amazingly little about their techniques.
Denver Fowler (great name for an ornithologist) and colleagues from Montana State University have changed…
edyong | November 24, 2009For the pipefish (and their relatives, seahorses and sea dragons), it's the males who get pregnant. After a male fertilises the female's eggs, he takes them up into a special brood pouch and shelters them until the babies hatch from his pot-bellied stomach several weeks later. He may seem like a shoe-in for the Dad-of-the-year award but this fatherly commitment has a sinister side to it. Not all of the babies he cares for make it out of his stomach alive.
Gry Sagebakken from the University of Gothenburg has proved that pregnant male pipefishes absorb some of the eggs and embryos within…
edyong | November 21, 2009
Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants. So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are incredibly successful because of their skill as gardeners.
As their name suggests, the 41 species of leafcutter ants slice up leaves and carry them back to their nests in long columns of red and green. They don't eat the leaves - they use them to grow a fungus, and it's this crop that they feed on. It's an old…
edyong | November 16, 2009At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly).
But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need…
edyong | November 10, 2009The question of whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded is one of the most enduring in palaeontology. Did they generate their own body heat like today's mammals; was their temperature more influenced by their environment like today's reptiles; or did they use a mixture of both strategies? Scientists have put forward a slew of arguments for all of these alternatives, but Herman Pontzer from Washington University has a new take on things which suggests that many dinosaurs were indeed warm-blooded.
Based on our knowledge of living animals, Pontzer worked out the energy that 14…