Does sleeping really do more than just prevent those wrinkles??

Who knows. Sleeping may do more than prevent those laugh lines. It may slow down the aging process all together.  That is what a researcher in Vienna is testing.  

The article, "Do lazy mammals live longer?," immediately drew me in because of the title. The first thought that came to my mind was, "I sure hope so, just tell me how.”

Now I just needed to learn the details.

As I continued to read, I soon realized these researchers weren’t talking about humans, but they were talking about the animals that can hibernate.

This article discussed the experiment that researcher Christopher Turbill of the Institute for Wildlife Ecology in Vienna conducted on Djungarian hamsters. He tested to see if hibernation factors into longer lives. He divided his trial hamsters into two groups and tested two different states of torpor.  Torpor happens during hibernation and is when a mammal temporarily lowers their body temperature and metabolism.
  
The first group was introduced into a state of shallow torpor, their body temperature dropping below 84 degrees Fahrenheit. The second group went into a deeper state, their temperature dropping below 77 degrees. 

The results showed that these daily doses of semi-hibernation helped preserve and even restore the animal's telomeres. Telomeres are little cap-like devices that sit on the end of chromosomes and protect the strand that is our genetic code. Nobel Prize winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn compared telomeres to those little plastic wraps on the "tips of shoelaces." Once they are gone, the whole lace begins to fray and fall apart. 

Basically, once an animal's telomeres begin to break down, it is all downhill from there. Or over the hill, whichever phrase you prefer. 
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Put bees next to mice on the list of things elephants are afraid of

It turns out elephants are afraid of bees. According to the Discovery news article  'Bees Protect Kenyan Crops from Elephants,' they are so afraid of them that if bees are anywhere near a potential food source, elephants will choose to eat somewhere else.

Biologist Lucy King discovered this information when she read a study published in 2002 that explained elephants will not eat from acacia trees that house beehives. She then took this information one step further and applied this knowledge in an attempt to save Kenyan farms from being raided by local elephants. She set up bee hive fences on 17 farms, connecting wires to the hives so that every time an elephant approached the farm the shake of the wire would set the alarm and swarms of bees would immediately follow.

Her approach worked 93% of the time, keeping the majority of elephants away. And it worked because an elephant’s long memory reminds them of their first encounter with those stingers; they didn't like it the first time around and they definitely don't want to endure it again. This memory plays such a powerful role in the minds of these tusked animals that even the sound of a beehive, the notorious buzzing sound, can effectively scare them off. And while scampering away, they warn their surrounding friends about the bees using infrasonic communication. This is the same type of communication discussed in an earlier post about why elephants may be able to sense earthquakes before humans.
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Christian the Lion

This is an absolutely beautiful story. In 1969, two men, John Rendall and Anthony, or "Ace," Bourke, bought a lion cub from Harrod's pet department in London and took him home to raise. Raising lions was legal at this time so they named him Christian and treated him like a dear friend. According to an interview with Rendell on MSNBC’s TODAY, Christian was never trained using physical force. The two friends used their tone of voice to make Christian understand what was right and what was wrong. Apparently it worked – Christian never bit anybody.

After a while, although, the lion got too big for their home and they decided to reintroduce him into the wild. Their attempt did not only work, but it was incredibly successful. In the year after they took him to Kenya, Christian became the leader of a pride.

But his former friends wanted to see him again. Even though they were warned that Christian may not remember them, this turned out not to be the case. They were not only welcomed by Christian, but by his family. At first Christian slowly approached the men, but after seemingly recognizing them he sped up and jumped into their arms, showing that he still remembered them.

On their very last trip to visit Christian in 1974, the lion had not been seen for three months. Oddly enough, the night before Rendall and Bourke landed, Christian was spotted sitting on a rock near their camp – as if waiting for his friends.

While living with Rendall and Bourke, Christian was treated as part of their family. He frequently joined his friends when they went out to restaurants around London, riding in the back of their Bentley. I believe that this close bond between human and animal was the combination of a highly intelligent animal and a loving and affectionate relationship. 


Strong relationships seem to be the reasoning behind much of the scientific experiments done with animals. Jane Goodall needed to have a good one with her chimps and, to cite an earlier post, Dr. Herzing needs one with her dolphins. 
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Cross-dressing in the wild

A report in Biology Letters and an article in the NY Times, 'Male Hawks in France Find More than their Feminine Side,' found that 40% of western marsh harrier males in France, a common hawk, are cross-dressing. The color of their case plumage is usually light grey on males. Although, they are beginning to change from their traditional color to a darker color, which is more commonly seen on the females.

These she-males have also started acting differently. They aren't attacked as much as the hawks that look male, but they do tend to be more aggressive. They defend their winter roosts more, recruited by the he-males to do the fighting and other dirty work. And when they are aggressive within their own species, it is directed more towards females instead of males.

But these personality shifts are not the reason for the physical changes. It is possible, like another bird species that has changed their features, that these birds may be doing this so they can get closer to the female hawks while avoiding competition. They can get "some" easier than those males with traditional features.

Birds are not the only species that do this. Garter snakes also mimic their female counterparts. After males come out of their winter dens, they emit female pheromones that attracts hundreds or more males. But their main goal is to get warm. In these huddles, enough body heat is produced that enables them to warm up after a long winter.

This article goes along with one of my earlier posts, the one about the squids who seemingly have bisexual tendencies. In the wild, there isn't a lot of uproar about animals doing whatever it takes. They aren't necessarily doing these things because of sexual preferences, but because of traits that have developed to increase their chances of survival and reproduction. This makes me wonder what types of tendencies have naturally developed within the human population? Did something over time trigger sexual preference changes in humans or are they just personal preferences that have always been there but have recently begun to surface more?  
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So much for that blue ribbon in the pie eating contest

Here is just another crazy thing that animals can do.

The article ’16-Foot-Python Killed in Florida; Deer Found in Stomach’ proved to me that snakes can easily eat animals whole who are much bigger than them, with no struggle on their part. A Burmese Python in the Everglades was found digesting a 76-pound deer, expanding its stomach to just over 44 inches. Apparently the female snake stalked its prey, seized it when it walked by and crushed it to death before swallowing it. The snake was found and shot shortly after its last meal.

The snake wasn't hunted for attacking the deer population, but because Officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission are trying to prevent the species from going even further north. They are not a native species, but are brought over by residents in the area to raise as pets. They are often released from captivity when the snakes become too big to handle. According to the article, one couple in Florida was actually found guilty in the death of their 2-year old daughter because their pet snake escaped from its aquarium and strangled her to death.

A similar article quoted Skip Snow, a python specialist, saying, "It shows you they can eat huge things." Ain't that the truth.
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Your aunt so fat...

Just a fun little article from The Washington Post. 


Ants reflect society. Well in a small kind of way. 
There is an ant in Argentina, the inch-long dinosaur ant, which is sort of divided up into a rich and poor class. As Marxists would say, the bourgeois and the proletariat. The way that scientists have figured this out is by calculating the body fat on these ants. The ones with the worst "jobs," or the physically intense jobs of the society, have the lowest amount of body fat. They work too hard to have time to lounge around and pack on the pounds. 

"The ‘working poor’ are the most nutritionally stressed,” said Chad Tillburg of Linfield College in Oregon. “The fattest ants, the ones with the most power, have cushy jobs at the center of the nest."

I think this directly relates to real life. People who have the money and time aren't the ones you see at McDonalds 3-4 times a week. They are the people at the gym and the ones grocery shopping at Whole Foods, living the recommended healthy lifestyle. 

I personally found this entertaining to see something along the lines of obesity and starvation applied to other groups of animals, not only the ones with drive-thrus. 
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To animals, ground vibrations mean more than a stampede

Mandara could feel that trouble was coming. Seconds before the earthquake struck, she grabbed her baby and fled to the highest place that she could find in her enclosure, seeking safety for them both.

Mandara is a gorilla at the National Zoo. According to zookeepers, she reacted approximately three seconds before the 5.8 magnitude earthquake hit Virginia Aug. 23rd.

The elephants were in on it, too. Shanthi, a relatively quiet elephant at the National Zoo, was heard blowing her trunk seconds before the quake. This is rare for her. She, and another elephant Ambika, then extended their trunks, perked up their ears, and bent their tails – all signs that something was wrong.

Elephants naturally feel for the vibrations coming from below their feet. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, theorized in 1992 that elephants can communicate up to twenty miles by making vibrations directed at the ground. She created this theory while studying elephants at Namibia’s Etosha National Park. Afterward, she spent a decade collecting evidence and conducting experiments to support it. Researchers found that elephants have special sensors in their feet and trunk, meissner and pascinian corpuscles, which detect these vibrations.

Feeling and sending messages this way is called infrasonic communication, according to Bob Langston, an Interpretive Specialist at the North Carolina Zoo. This may be the reason why elephants feel the vibrations from earthquakes before humans. “Simply liken this to finding yourself in a place where you hear sounds that make no sense or are not discernable,” says Langston. If elephants feel this unknown vibration, they may react and leave the area. 

The National Zoo’s animals are not the only documented case where animals have reacted prior to a disaster. The 9.1 magnitude earthquake that hit Sri Lanka in 2004 was an even greater mystery to observers. More than 24,000 human lives were taken by the tsunami that followed the quake, but there isn’t any evidence of a large amount of animal deaths. The water flooded two miles inland, directly into the Yala National Park, which is the country’s biggest wildlife reserve housing hundreds of wild elephants and other various wild animals. Out of all of these creatures, only two water buffalo died. Sixty human visitors at the park that day were found dead after the waves washed away.

Not all scientists agree with these theories of why animals appeared to react before earthquakes. In an interview with Odyssey, Matthew van Lierop, an animal’s behavior scientist at the Johannesburg Zoo, says that there may be observations of animal’s reactions, but he makes it clear that nothing has been proven.

Jane Randall, a biologist at San Francisco State University, takes O’Connell-Rodwell’s theory a bit further. She says that it is common for different species of animals to communicate via vibrations, including animals such as rodents and deer. She even states that humans once communicated this way through practices such as drumming dances and vibrating drums. Then modern forms of exchanging messages came and this type of communication has been forgotten.

Wild animals do not have this luxury. They still need to rely on their natural instincts to feel when danger is coming. And it seems to be working for them thus far. 
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