Animals always amaze us with their fascinating cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities. Some recent research adds to this growing collection of scientific data about the amazing things that animals do.
Consider male antelopes called topi, living in Kenya. When males want to "get it on" they pretend there are predators in the neighborhood. This type of deception is described as follows: "When a female appears to be leaving, the male will run in front of her, freeze in place, stare in the direction that she is going and snort loudly. Typically, that snort means that a predatory lion or cheetah was spotted, but in this case the male is faking it." While it's known that males will dupe other males to gain access to females, this is the first observation of a male actually deceiving his own mate. How widespread is this behavior? It's not known but it's likely that further research will show that it occurs in other species.
While deception suggests there's a lot going on the brains of the animals engaging in these sorts of behavior patterns, consider what frogs do when they want another frog to "back off." It turns out that red-eyed tree frogs communicate with one another using vibrations caused by shaking the branches of plants (see also). "When one male frog feels that another might be encroaching on his territory, he starts to move aggressively, contracting and extending his little limbs about 12 times a second, which sends vibrations through the plant to the other frog. Often the other frog will send the same signal back." This is the first example in vertebrates of plant-based vibration signaling. The research was conducted by Michael Caldwell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Now consider what birds called bar-tailed godwits can do. These small birds are able to fly more than 7000 miles nonstop over water in nine days. Other birds are also able to fly long distances nonstop. To be able to do this the godwits elevate their metabolism about 8-10 times, whereas cyclists in the Tour de France elevate their metabolism about 5 times their resting rate. The godwits also fly at around 40 miles per hour! There's also an astounding technical aspect to this research, as the transmitters the birds now carry weigh only six-tenths of an ounce.
How do the birds do it? Before they begin their epic journey their bodies are 55% fat. And they tank up in areas where there are few predators and then - in some unknown way - use their onboard GPS system to navigate over water.
These three examples show just how amazing other animals really are. And there's no doubt that future research will reveal even more interesting and mysterious behavior patterns. How lucky we are to share our world with such talented beings.
