The magical "wisdom" of the animals
For a long time, all the actions of animals have been regarded as a manifestation of instinct, but they have been accumulated from generation to generation in the process of evolution. Each animal acts according to instinct, without its own thoughts, like an automatic machine that enters its operating procedures in advance. However, a series of studies and observations in recent years have shown that this is not the case. Animals are intelligent, and some of them are "wise" that even we humans can't reach.
Bee Spy Wars
termite
And bees
They can all build nests, and nesting requires large numbers of termites and bees to act in concert. There are tall termite mounds on the African savannah,
For termites, these hilles are undoubtedly skyscrapers. However, when building anthills, when to build columns and when to build domes, termites "know exactly what is in their hearts" and cooperate with each other. Bee nests do not have termites
The anthills are so big, but the bees nest in the most economical hexagonal shape. If we humans do not have drawings and no unified command, and want to build the same proportion of buildings according to our own size, we will certainly not be able to do it.
In addition to humans, many species of animals, such as dolphins, whales, orangutans, have certain language abilities. In the insect kingdom, bees convey information about pollen locations through dance language. In the past, people always thought that after receiving dance information, bees flew away out of genetic instinct and without thinking about it. But someone did an experiment that upended the idea: They grabbed some bees, put them in a small boat moored in the middle of the lake, let the bees eat molasses on the boat, and then let them go back. After eating the molasses, the bees flew back to the hive in a hurry, dancing vigorously, trying to tell their friends the good news. But none of the other bees wanted to go with them. In fact, in normal times, there is only water in the middle of the lake, and there can be no molasses, so the other bees probably think: "If there is any molasses in the lake, these guys must be pulling eggs!" "It seems that bees have their own minds, even though their heads are only the size of a grain of rice (there are only 850,000 neurons in the bee brain).
Bees have many predators, among which vespas are the most harmful to bees.
A single wasp can bite more than 40 bees in a minute and summon companions to the hive for mass slaughter. At this time, the bees can only abandon the nest and flee for their lives. After vespas occupied the hive, they plundered the honey and also took the bees
The larvae and pupae move back to their nests and feed their own larvae.
For the attack of wasps, bees also have certain means of defense. When the wasps are found circling in front of the nest, the bees will immediately hide back in the nest, and when individual wasps approach the nest, the guard bees will attack in groups and bite in clumps. A Japanese bee, will invade the hive after the wasp surrounded, the collective fan wings, so that the hive temperature continues to rise, the bee death temperature is 48 ~ 50 ° C, and the wasp lethal temperature is low, only 44 ~ 46 °C, when the hive temperature is as high as 47 ° C, the invading wasp will die of heat stroke. It's amazing.
One might think that this is just an accidental result of an unconscious commotion by bees encountering predators, but it does not mean that bees will consciously adopt this method to kill wasps. However, the following example is hardly an accidental unconscious behavior.
One year, in a Village on the outskirts of Beijing, a Chinese beekeeper village had a series of scenes in which the queen bee was killed and the bee colony was in chaos. In general, bee colonies are chaotic, or even slaughtered each other, mostly caused by some bees stealing the honey of other bees during the pollen season. However, beekeepers here place some molasses during the pollen season to prevent bees from fighting each other due to lack of food. In addition, bees generally do not attack each other's queen bees, so who is the murderer of the queen bee? Beekeepers had to invite bee experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to the village to help find the reason.
Experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences first turned their attention to the wasps. They put a wasp at the mouth of the hive, and immediately many of the bee guards surrounded the wasp, biting it and rolling it to the ground, unable to move. It seems unlikely that vespas will want to enter the hive of bees and attack the queen.
However, the queen bee of the village continues to die. When experts dissected the corpse of a queen bee, they found a poisonous needle of an Italian bee in the corpse, which they found very strange. Because the bee colony will never allow foreign bees to enter their own hives, how can Italian bees enter the hives of Chinese bees and kill the queen bees inside?
For ease of observation, experts changed the side of one of the Hives of the Chinese Bee to a transparent glass plate. Not long after, a scene that surprised everyone appeared: an Italian bee flew to the door of the hive,
The worker bee of the Chinese bee immediately stepped forward to stop it. The Italian bee began to flap its wings, and the Chinese bee actually gave way, allowing the Italian bee to swing into the hive. Experts then studied the vibration of Italian bee wings and found that its frequency is very close to the vibration frequency of chinese male wasp wings. It seems that the Chinese bee mistakenly believes that it is the male bee in its own hive, so it is released, and this time it really becomes a wolf into the house. The Italian spy bee mixed into the hive then staged a thrilling scene. After it entered the hive, it constantly flapped its wings, and the Surrounding Chinese Bee Worker Bees regarded it as the male bees in their nests, and one by one came forward to feed it to eat, drink, and be very attentive. After the Italian spy bee was "full of wine and food", he began to look for the queen bee of the Chinese bee. The queen bee saw that the situation was not good and hid around. The Italian spy bee was in the back and chased after him. In a panic, the queen bee fled the wilderness, escaped from the protective circle of her own worker bee colony, was surrounded by three Italian spy bees, and was stabbed to death. After the queen bee was killed, the Chinese bee swarm was in chaos and fled, and the hive was left unattended. The Italian beehives came out to enjoy the honey in the nest abandoned by the Chinese bees. The Italian bee has only been introduced to China for a few decades, but it is really incredible that it has learned sun tzu's strategy of "surrendering without fighting" and has also formulated a set of wonderful tactics of "catching the thief before catching the king".
Crows also use tools
Many birds, such as parrots and wrens, can imitate the sounds of humans and beasts. The champions in this regard may have to count the lyrebirds.
The lyrebird has a natural penchant for imitating sounds, and will imitate the sounds of hundreds of birds, other animals and even people. It can be said that there are almost no sounds that the lyrebird cannot imitate, including the sound of the chainsaws of the loggers in the forest and the shutter of the photojournalist's camera.
But to say that the most intelligent birds are also crows,
Some crows also "fish", they grab broken bread from elsewhere, throw it into the water to lure the fish, and when the fish swim to eat the broken bread, it swoops down from a hidden place and catches the fish. Walnut shells are very hard, birds are generally difficult to peck, some birds will take the walnut high and throw it down, smash it on the ground, and smash the walnut shell open. This method doesn't work all at once, and walnuts are often never found again when they are thrown to the ground. A Japanese crow invented a very ingenious way to eat walnut meat: it threw the walnut on the road and had the wheel crush the walnut shell. However, the road is too busy to fly to the road to eat walnuts. After experimenting a few times, it came up with a way. It threw the walnuts on the zebra crossing of the crosswalk, and when the crosswalk was green, the cars stopped, so it ate the crushed walnut meat incessantly.
Crows can also hook and hook fruits with thin branches in their mouths. Scientists once did such an experiment: they connected a vertical glass tube in the middle of a horizontal glass tube to form a T-shaped shape; then, at the closed end of the horizontal glass tube, they put a fruit and let the crow insert a thin branch into the glass tube to hook. When the crow is hooked, it is easy to let the fruit fall into the vertical glass tube, so that it cannot get the fruit. However, the crow is very clever, and when it hooks the fruit, it will carefully let the fruit go along the side wall of the horizontal glass tube, hooking the fruit out, without falling into the vertical trap.
The crow's brain weighs only 7.1 grams, but the crow's ability to make tools even exceeds that of chimpanzees, and the crow can find the right branches as tools, trim the leaves off the branches, and correct the length of the branches as needed. In one experiment, the crow was asked to use a wire hook to take the food of the glass tube, and after several failures, it bent the wire into a hook shape, and finally hooked the food.