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Augustus Brown
Why does a panda stand on its head and others amazing stories about animals
Dedicated to Gabriella, Thomas and Silena
Foreword
A few generations ago, even the most prominent thinkers treated animals as boring and uninteresting creatures - especially compared to people. Mark Twain, for example, considered man "the only animal capable of blushing, or having the need to do so."
D. H. Lawrence called humans “the only living things to be feared,” and G. K. Chesterton wrote that “no animal ever invented such an evil as drunkenness, or such a good as drinking.”
But Chesterton would certainly need a good sip of whiskey if he knew how wrong he himself and his two other famous contemporaries were. Father Brown's creator clearly had never encountered drunken Scandinavian elks eating overripe apples, or contemplating dozens of bird corpses lying on the ground, pecking at hallucinogenic berries and a whole flock crashing against a glass skyscraper. And Mr. Twain, of course, never had to see what a scarlet color flashes the long neck of a male ostrich, courting a female.
The author of the controversial Lady Chatterley, Sir Lawrence, was apparently never stung by the poisonous Australian jellyfish, colloquially called " sea wasp". If this happened, the writer would have to suffer for a week with a terrible headache, vomiting and the deepest depression that can turn any person ... let's say, into a trembling mass of jelly. After such an ordeal, Lawrence's fear of wild animals would certainly have remained for the rest of his life.
The zoological ignorance of all three writers justifies one circumstance: they lived in an era when there were no electron microscopes, films about life wildlife, TV channels like National Geographic, and computers that can decipher the DNA of cats and dogs.
Nowadays, it is impossible to look at the animal world without experiencing delight and amazement.
Almost every day in scientific journals, popular newspapers or TV reporters slip information about new amazing discoveries of zoologists. The variety, unpredictability and unusualness of these facts is truly fantastic. Cows increasing milk production to the music of Beethoven; male mice serenading their lovers; dolphins uniting in gangster gangs; elephants imitating the sounds of trucks rumbling along the roads ... Yes, you will not get bored with animals!
The book you are holding in your hands is a selection of some curious, unusual, and sometimes even incredible facts from animal life. Its purpose is not so much to inform you, dear reader, about the latest zoological discoveries, but to entertain and help brighten up your leisure time. That is why, having provided the book with a detailed list of references to primary sources and trying to present the facts gleaned there as accurately as possible, without sinning against scientific truth, I simultaneously tried to present them in a more amusing and entertaining form. Whether I coped with this task is up to you to judge.
To pedantically and scrupulously convey scientific information about animals means to completely discourage interest in them from the young generation of people. And I really didn't want to do that.
Augustus Brown,
London, Easter Sunday 2006
Part I
Communication in animals
About the fantastic ways animals can communicate
The main advantage of animals is their taciturnity.
Thornton Wilder, "On the Edge of Death"
If you think about it, the ability of people to communicate information to each other using words is a real miracle. But conversations play a huge role in the life of animals. They chat about food, sex, and babies, share hunting secrets, or gossip about strangers crawling or flying by. Animals choose a variety of - often extremely bizarre - ways to communicate. Some living creatures communicate news to each other by buzzing, drumming, singing and dancing. Others use color codes, smells, and touch to do this. To exchange information, animals do not neglect any means - even intestinal gases.
in body language
About what bizarre forms of communication exist in the world of living beings
Representatives of the fauna sometimes find amazing ways to communicate with their own kind. Here are some amazing examples.
Herrings talk to each other with the help of ... intestinal "exhausts": they make a series of high-frequency sounds, ejecting streams of gas with force from the anus, while forming chains of tiny bubbles that other members of the flock can see. Herring resort to this method of communication mainly in the dark, when, having huddled in a dense group, they swim close to each other. Under these conditions, fish are able to perceive the sounds made by relatives and with their help inform each other about their location. Scientists even gave the language of herring a special name - "rapidly repeating ticking."
Snakes, in order to scare away the enemy, make completely indecent sounds. Zoologists who have studied two species of snakes found in the southwestern United States - the Arizona asp and the pig-nosed snake - have heard with their own ears a rumble flying out of their anus. Further studies have shown that these pops result from the release of intestinal gases.
Cancers warn each other of danger in a very simple and effective way: noticing a predator, they simply empty their bladder.
Lobsters have developed this “liquid” language a bit: they expel urine in thin streams through tiny holes near the eyes and communicate with their relatives by spraying urine on their heads. The urine contains chemical substances, with which lobsters communicate information about their intentions to each other (for example, to start an affair or start a fight).
Important information is passed to each other with the help of urine and chipmunks. These animals mark with urine places abounding in food, and corners of the forest where food supplies have already been exhausted. Such odorous marks make it easier for other chipmunks to find food.
Odorous marks play an important role in the life of other rodents - voles. Unfortunately, this way of communicating often costs voles their lives. The fact is that their urine emits ultraviolet radiation, and this radiation is well seen by the main enemies of voles - the kestrel and other birds of prey. Flying from one ultraviolet mark to another, the feathered predator eventually discovers the animal that left them.
A few generations ago, even the most prominent thinkers treated animals as boring and uninteresting creatures - especially compared to people. Mark Twain, for example, considered man "the only animal capable of blushing, or having the need to do so."
D. H. Lawrence called humans “the only living things to be feared,” and G. K. Chesterton wrote that “no animal ever invented such an evil as drunkenness, or such a good as drinking.”
But Chesterton would certainly need a good sip of whiskey if he knew how wrong he himself and his two other famous contemporaries were. Father Brown's creator clearly had never encountered drunken Scandinavian elks eating overripe apples, or contemplating dozens of bird corpses lying on the ground, pecking at hallucinogenic berries and a whole flock crashing against a glass skyscraper. And Mr. Twain, of course, never had to see what a scarlet color flashes the long neck of a male ostrich, courting a female.
The author of the infamous Lady Chatterley, Sir Lawrence, has apparently never been stung by the poisonous Australian jellyfish, colloquially known as the "sea wasp." If this happened, the writer would have to suffer for a week with a terrible headache, vomiting and the deepest depression that can turn any person ... let's say, into a trembling mass of jelly. After such an ordeal, Lawrence's fear of wild animals would certainly have remained for the rest of his life.
The zoological ignorance of all three writers justifies one circumstance: they lived in an era when there were no electron microscopes, films about wildlife, television channels like National Geographic, and computers that could decipher the DNA of cats and dogs.
Nowadays, it is impossible to look at the animal world without experiencing delight and amazement.
Almost every day in scientific journals, popular newspapers or TV reporters slip information about new amazing discoveries of zoologists. The variety, unpredictability and unusualness of these facts is truly fantastic. Cows increasing milk production to the music of Beethoven; male mice serenading their lovers; dolphins uniting in gangster gangs; elephants imitating the sounds of trucks rumbling along the roads ... Yes, you will not get bored with animals!
The book you are holding in your hands is a collection of some of the curious, unusual, and sometimes unbelievable facts about animal life. Its purpose is not so much to inform you, dear reader, about the latest zoological discoveries, but to entertain and help brighten up your leisure time. That is why, having provided the book with a detailed list of references to primary sources and trying to present the facts gleaned there as accurately as possible, without sinning against scientific truth, I simultaneously tried to present them in a more amusing and entertaining way. Whether I coped with this task is up to you to judge.
To pedantically and scrupulously convey scientific information about animals means to completely discourage interest in them from the young generation of people. And I really didn't want to do that.
Augustus Brown,
London, Easter Sunday 2006
Communication in animals
About the fantastic ways animals can communicate
The main advantage of animals is their taciturnity.
Thornton Wilder,
play "On the verge of death"
If you think about it, the ability of people to communicate information to each other using words is a real miracle. But conversations play a huge role in the life of animals. They chat about food, sex, and babies, share hunting secrets, or gossip about strangers crawling or flying by. Animals choose a variety of - often extremely bizarre - ways to communicate. Some living creatures communicate news to each other by buzzing, drumming, singing and dancing. Others use color codes, smells, and touch to do this. To exchange information, animals do not neglect any means - even intestinal gases.
in body language
About what bizarre forms of communication exist in the world of living beings
Representatives of the fauna sometimes find amazing ways to communicate with their own kind. Here are some amazing examples.
Herrings talk to each other with the help of ... intestinal "exhausts": they make a series of high-frequency sounds, ejecting streams of gas with force from the anus, while forming chains of tiny bubbles that other members of the flock can see. Herring resort to this method of communication mainly in the dark, when, having huddled in a dense group, they swim close to each other. Under these conditions, fish are able to perceive the sounds made by relatives and with their help inform each other about their location. Scientists even gave the language of herring a special name - "rapidly repeating ticking."
Snakes, in order to scare away the enemy, make completely indecent sounds. Zoologists who have studied two species of snakes found in the southwestern United States - the Arizona asp and the pig-nosed snake - have heard with their own ears a rumble flying out of their anus. Further studies have shown that these pops result from the release of intestinal gases.
Crayfish warn each other of danger in a very simple and effective way: when they see a predator, they simply empty their bladders.
Lobsters have developed this “liquid” language a bit: they expel urine in thin streams through tiny holes near the eyes and communicate with their relatives by spraying urine on their heads. Urine contains chemicals that lobsters use to communicate information about their intentions (for example, to start an affair or start a fight) to each other.
Important information is passed to each other with the help of urine and chipmunks. These animals mark with urine places abounding in food, and corners of the forest where food supplies have already been exhausted. Such odorous marks make it easier for other chipmunks to find food.
Odorous marks play an important role in the life of other rodents - voles. Unfortunately, this way of communicating often costs voles their lives. The fact is that their urine emits ultraviolet radiation, and this radiation is well seen by the main enemies of voles - the kestrel and other birds of prey. Flying from one ultraviolet mark to another, the feathered predator eventually discovers the animal that left them.
According to many scientists, the vibrations of the soil help elephants communicate with each other. Treading water and shaking the ground with its powerful legs, the six-ton giant is able to send a message through the soil at a distance of 32 km - much further than the distance that a sound signal propagates in the air. Elephants-addressees perceive these messages with their feet. One day, scientists observed how a herd of elephants abruptly changed the route of their journey and rushed in the opposite direction. Zoologists suggested that the animals were warned about the danger by the trampling of the feet of dying relatives - the fact is that at the same time, at a distance of several kilometers, poachers attacked another herd of elephants.
African elephants are also able to perfectly copy sounds. Scientists, for example, have recorded on tape how they masterfully imitate the rumble of trucks speeding along a nearby freeway. One thing is not clear: why do animals do this?
As a child, I had a notebook in which I pasted various clippings from magazines and newspapers. What was pasted had to meet two conditions: A - I would like it, B - my parents looked to see if they needed this magazine / newspaper safe and sound. No more rules. Anecdotes, lyrics, recipes, pictures, beautiful aunties, funny poems coexisted peacefully in this vinaigrette.
This book reminded me of that notebook for a huge number of random facts, very conditionally combined into several sections. No offense to the author, but I just saw how he sat for days in front of the TV and outlined programs about wildlife. Moreover, he managed to record only catchy, bright, scandalous or shocking moments, and decided to omit the logical connection between them. The author, of course, is trying to prove the seriousness of his intentions by giving, as it should be in science, a list of references at the end of the book. I looked it up, it's English language. NG channel and www.science.discovery.com immediately caught my eye, and the rest, whether it was at least five times scientific and serious, no longer mattered.
It must be said that the information content of the book is very high. But among the several thousand facts, the lion's share is disgusting and unpleasant. For example, monkeys make up for the lack of fat in their diet by hunting monkeys from other tribes, and the first thing they do is eat out the brain of prey. When a vulture is attacked by a predator, the vulture spews vomit towards the enemy. 90% of the total amount of methane is produced by herds of sheep and cows, another 4% is termites. Well, all in the same vein. The language of the book is simple, and many of the facts are interesting and unusual (did you know that there are 40,000 muscles in an elephant's trunk, and 650 in the whole human body?). This suggests recommending the book to a younger student, but at the same time, information about cannibalism, a huge number of facts about mating (in search of synonyms, the author often touchingly calls it making love) the average parent will be forced to put the book on the farthest shelf.
In general, the question of target audience this book is also open. A grown man will miss scientific explanation many moments, and the schoolboy primary school it will not be interesting to read this: “Crocodiles are able to hold their breath underwater for more than an hour. The resulting carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide) is converted in the blood of reptiles into bicarbonate ions, which causes the hemoglobin contained in red blood cells to release new portions of oxygen into the blood.
In a word, the book is entertaining, but useless. Still, I like it more when they tell even if only about one animal, but in detail and completely about all areas of his life.
