Category Animal World

How wood frogs freeze?

Wood frogs inhabit parts of the U.S., Canada and the Arctic Circle which means, they must be prepared to deal with sub-zero temperatures. While different animals do different things – such as burrowing underground and migrating to warmer places – to escape the cold, creatures such as wood frogs embrace it – they simple freeze! Let’s see how they do it.

They become frogcicles!

When winter arrives and the first ice crystals fall on this freeze-tolerant frog’s skin, the frog begins to freeze. As this happens, the liver starts to produce large quantities of glucose. Once this glucose is released from the liver, it mixes with the bloodstream and is carried throughout the body through the pumping of the heart. Research says urea – produced by the frog’s urine – also blends with the glucose. This mixture helps prevent the cells from freezing completely, because that would mean the death of the frog. Only about 70% of its body fluid freezes. Meanwhile, the frog stops breathing, its heart too stops beating, and organs become inactive. The frog hardens – this is offhandedly referred to as a frogcicle, drawing from the word icicle. The creature is motionless and appears dead. This continues through the winter. While the role of glucose in keeping it alive when it is frozen has been understood, it is still not clear what causes the stopping of a beating heart. As for the frog, when Spring arrives, it begins to thaw, regains consciousness and recovers from its state within a day. And, life goes on – with a freeze-thaw cycle in place.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Who are wombats?

Odd-looking, but cuddly

The pudgy and furry wombat is one of the oddest-looking animals on Earth – rather like a pig, bear and koala all rolled into one.

There are three species of wombat: the common wombat (Vombatus ursinus), the northern hairy-nosed wombat (Laisorhinus krefftii), and the Southern hairy nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons). You will be able to see all three in Australia and Tasmania, usually in forested and mountainous area.

Marsupial

Wombats are marsupials, related to koalas and kangaroos. They usually live up to 15 years in the wild, but can live past 20 and even 30 years in captivity. Rotund, with stubby tails, short ears and tiny eyes, wombats grow to around one metre in length and weigh anything between 20 and 40 kg. their fur is either sandy brown or grayish-black and this helps them blend with the landscape – a way of safeguarding themselves from predators.

Big eaters

These animals are nocturnal and emerge from their burrows to feed at night. Being herbivores, they feed on grasses, herbs, bark, and roots. They spend a lot of time, eating. They have sharp large incisors like rodents which help them gnaw at thick vegetation. Their teeth never stop growing. But they are slow to digest their meal – it takes around 8-14 days for them to fully digest their food. But this helps them adapt to Australia’s arid conditions. Since they derive most of the moisture they require from plants, they don’t need to drink much water either. And interestingly, they are the only creatures in the world to excrete poop that is cube-shaped!

Burrowing away!

They are amazing burrowers and dig lengthy burrow systems with their razor-sharp teeth and claws. Common wombats are shy and solitary and inhabit their own burrows, while the other two species may be more social and live together in large groups in their warren.

Quick sprinters

Wombats may look plump and slow, in fact, their walk is more of a waddle. Despite their podgy bodies and stubby feet, they can run really fast – even up to 40 km/h.

Just communicate

They communicate with one another in various ways – vocalizations, aggressive displays, and markings on logs and branches made by rubbing against them repeatedly. Wombats tend to be more vocal during mating season. When angered, they can make hissing sounds.

Jellybean or joey?

Female wombats give birth to a single young one known as a joey in the spring, after a gestation period of 20-21 days. When the joey is born, it is the size of a jellybean and not completely developed. The joey climbs into it mother’s pouch right after birth to finish developing and stays there for about five to six months. Wombats are weaned after 15 months.

Once pests, now protected

In 1906, the Australian government declared wombats pests and encouraged people to kill them. From 1925 to 1965, some 63,000 wombats skins were redeemed for cash. Fortunately, this practice has stopped. All species of wombats are protected in every state except for Victoria.

Powerful posterior

Startled wombats can charge humans and bowl them over, with the risk of broken bones from the fall, besides wounds from bites and claws. When running away from predators like Tasmanian devils and dingos, wombats rely on their thick rump skin to protect them. Their rear-ends are mostly made up of cartilage, which makes them more resistant to bites and scratches. At the end of a chase, wombats will dive into their burrows and block the entrance with their posterior. They’re also capable of using their powerful backs to crush intruders against the roofs of their burrows.

Wombat facts

  • A group of wombats is known as wisdom, a mob, or a colony.
  • Believe it or not, wombats can jump! Some have been known to jump over metre-high fences.
  • The giant wombat, an ancestor of modern-day wombats, lived during the Ice Age and was the size of a rhinoceros.
  • Since 2005, Wombat Day is observed in Australia on October 22.
  • Wombats have featured in Australian postage stamps and coins and ‘Fatso’, the wombat, was the unofficial mascot of the Sydney 2000 Summer Games.

 

Picture Credit : Google

How do animals communicate?

Strange are the ways of the animal world. We think animals are “dumb”, but they have surprising ways of talking to each other. How do animals say “Hey, want to play chase-the-tail?” or “You think we can eat this?” Animal languages don’t have names and we can’t tell what they are saying, but we do know that dolphins whistle, hyenas laugh, wolves howl, lions roar, elephants trumpet, birds whistle, tweet and chirp, frogs croak – to send messages across. And making sounds isn’t the only way they can say “I love you!” They use a dictionary of non-verbal means!

Touch

Chimpanzees greet each other by holding hands, monkeys groom each other by picking off dead skin. Pets and domestic animals lick to show affection. But elephants would be the best examples for communicating through touch. They deliberately touch one another with their trunk, tusks, feet, tail and sometimes through their entire body – to explore, play, protect, fight. Have you seen elephants greeting others with a raised trunk? Use their ears to rub a mate affectionately? Push a calf to join the queue? So it is a crime to keep elephants alone!

Colour

The male koel has a shiny coat, the peacock is a vision when it spreads its wings full of “eyes”. Leaf insects sit on green leaves, stick insects look like dry sticks. Brightly-coloured butterflies are either poisonous butterflies.

Big cats merge beautifully with the tall, dry grass. The fennec fox that lives in deserts has a coat in sand-colour. Using the colour of the background to hide is called “concealing colouration.”

Doesn’t the chameleon change colours repeatedly to match its changing habitat?

Chemical marking

The dog sniffs and pees from time to time on the sidewalk to mark its territory. This “chemical communication” is mostly through pheromones (substance released to convey a message) and through body fluids such as urine and venom. Chemical signals can be air-or-waterbone. You see, snakes can “taste” enemies from a distance by using their forked tongues and the roof of their mouth to collect pheromones. Most big cats mark their territory by urinating. Dogs sniff each other’s hindquarters for information. Cats rub their heads against a person or object to release pheromones to say, “You’re mine!”

Auditory

Animal cries signifying danger or distress are now understood well by humans. Sound travels long distances and becomes an effective medium of communication. Almost all animals call – the cuckoo sings to find its mate, doves coo, frogs croak, male crickets chirp to attract and to warn. Female cicadas respond by snapping their wings. Mammals in the oceans, like whales and dolphins, “speak” at ultrasonic frequencies to communicate over long distances, since visibility is poor in water.

 

Picture Credit : Google

What is special about koalas?

They may look like soft, cuddly teddy bears with their big ears and black button eyes, but koalas are not even remotely related to bears and they are certainly not soft! Their silver-grey fur is similar to the coarse wool of sheep.

Koalas are marsupials, animals that carry their young in a pouch. Marsupials are native to both Australia and the Americas, but the largest number of species is found in Australia, New Guinea and nearly islands.

Found in southeastern and eastern Australia, mainly in Victoria and Queensland, koalas live in eucalyptus forests. Their sole diet consists of leaves from a handful of eucalyptus species. They also live high in the branches of eucalyptus trees, safe from predators who would otherwise find them easy prey because they move so slowly and sleep so much.

Koalas need time to digest their meal. Eucalyptus leaves are poisonous to most animals but koalas have special bacteria in their gut that break down the toxic compounds. They have cheek teeth to help grind the tough leaves. Digestion takes along time since all the nutrients and water have to be extracted from leaves which hardly contain any! This is why koalas sleep almost 20 hours a day and move only if they have to.

Even their bodies are adapted to living in the crooks of branches. They have a barely-there tail, a cushiony, rounded rear end and and a curved spine. Their hands and feet are ideal for clinging to branches, with two opposing thumbs that make for a tight grip. The hands are tipped with sharp claws to dig into the bark. The feet have a long grooming toe and a clawless toe as well that behaves like a thumb!

When a koala baby (called a joey) is born, it is the size of a jelly bean and can’t see or hear. It crawls into the mother’s backward-facing puch and drinks milk from one of two teats. There it remains, warm and safe for six months. The mother also feeds it with her own faeces to give it more immunity.

The joey rides on its mother’s belly and when full-grown, on her back. It becomes independent when a year old.

The male koala’s scent glands are located in a bare patch on his chest. He rubs it on a tree trunk to leave his smell. The scent is made up of 35 different chemicals. The male is smelliest in spring, the mating season!

Today, the koals is listed as vulnerable. It is threatened not only by dogs and being run over by cars, but by habitat loss and disease. There are an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 of these cute animals left in the wild.

 

Picture Credit : Google

How animals stay clean and make themselves presentable?

Grooming (also called preening) among animals is the art of cleaning and maintaining parts of the body. It is a species-typical behaviour.

Animals groom themselves in many ways – rats lick their bodies, zebras take dust baths, birds preen their feathers, monkeys pick lice from their fur and insects rub their antennae to keep them clean and functional.

Individual animals regularly clean themselves and put their fur, feathers or other skin coverings in good order. This activity is known as personal grooming, a form of hygiene.

Extracting foreign objects such as insects, leaves, dirt, twigs and parasites are all forms of grooming. Among animals, birds spend considerable time preening their feathers. This is done to remove ectoparasites, keep the feathers in good aerodynamic condition, and waterproof them. To do that, they use the preen oil secreted by the uropygial gland, the dust of down feathers, or other means such as dust-bathing or anting. During oil spills, animal conservationists that rescue penguins sometimes dress the in knitted sweaters to stop them from preening and thereby ingesting the mineral oil, which is poisonous.

Cats are well known for their extensive grooming. Cats groom so often that they often produce hairballs from the fur they ingest.

Animals also groom other members of their species (social grooming). The manner of grooming is so typical of a species that it can be used to distinguish it from a closely related one.

Grooming is pre-wired in the brain. If a mouse that is grooming its face with its paw is interrupted in the act, it ‘automatically’ begins to rub the air in front of its face with the other paw! Animals use their head, paws, claws, beak, tongue, etc. for grooming.

Some animals like the starfish have special, pincer-shaped organs called pedicillariae to remove debris from the body surface.

It was earlier believed that animals groomed themselves to maintain hygiene but now it is known that grooming serves many purposes – signaling, courtship, coalition-building and appeasement.

When two mountain rams fight for dominance, the one who loses licks the neck and shoulders of the victor to appease him. The winner may even kneel down to receive he apparent salute.

In a beehive it is essential for all the worker bees to recognize the queen bee’s scent, which assures them of her presence and vitality. A few worker bees pick up the queen’s scent when they groom her by licking her. The workers then move through the nest and contact other workers with their legs, tongues and antennae. Bee-to-bee grooming spreads the queen’s scent quickly and thoroughly.

Many social animals adapt preening and grooming behaviours for other social purposes such as bonding and the strengthening of social structures. Grooming plays a particularly important role in forming social bonds in many primate species, such as chacma baboons and wedge-capped capuchins. Among primates such as chimps, close relations groom one another loyally. This is called allogrooming. On the other hand, outsiders tend to groom members higher up on the social structure.

Grooming apparently gives an animal an advantage that helps in obtaining privileges at a later date.

 

Picture Credit : Google

What are the different species of beetles?

Beetle Abodes

Beetles are found almost everywhere except in the oceans, seas and Antarctica. They live in all kinds of habitats including scorching deserts, freshwater lakes and freezing polar ice caps, but are most abundant in tropical rain forests.

They make their homes in diverse places. Some burrow underground or in wood or even in the carcasses of animals. Others prefer ant and termite nests where they have a symbiotic relationship with their hosts.

Just Move It!

Most beetle species have thick, hard front wings called elytra and protective back wings. Desert species trap moisture under their wings while water beetles trap air so they can live underwater. Most beetles can fly, though they move in a slow, lugubrious fashion.

Antennae Alerts

The long, flexible antennae on a beetle’s head are feelers that help it find a mate, food, and a place to lay its eggs. They also catch vibrations in the air to warn it of predators. The body and legs of a beetle are covered with tiny hairs that are hyper sensitive to touch, sound, smell, light and taste.

Some beetles have extensions on their head that resemble horns or antlers.

“Eye” See You!

Most beetles have compound eyes and colour vision. Ground beetles that depend on vision for hunting or breeding (like fireflies) have larger eyes. Whirligig beetles swim on the surface of ponds and use their divided eyes for seeing both above and under water at the same time!

Legging It

Beetles sport all kinds of legs, ranging from long and slender for the speedy ground beetles; the dung beetle’s broad and ridged legs for digging; curved and shaped like a paddle for swimming in water beetles and large hind legs for hopping such as in the flea beetles. A sticky pad on the bottom of each foot on some beetles helps them walk on glass for instance. All species have a pair of claws on each foot.

Dining Etiquette

Beetles eat plants, other insects, carcasses, pollen, and dung. Beetles living in water eat small fish, tadpoles and even snails. Rove beetles catch flying insects with a long, sticky tongue. Some beetles feed on nectar.

Bug-bears

Many beetles are also considered pests (the potato beetle and the boll weevil for example), that infest and destroy crops, vegetables and fruits.

Beetle Benefits

Beetles are great recyclers because they feed on anything including animal carcasses and dung. Some like ladybirds eat aphids which are pests.

Largest and Smallest

The Titan beetle is the world’s largest and can grow up to 17cm long. It lives in the South American rainforest. It has both jaws and claws strong enough to tear into animal and human flesh, but is doesn’t attack unless provoked.

On the other end of the scale is the feather-winged beetle which measures around 0.325mm, the smallest free-living insect (as opposed to parasitic insects which are smaller).

 

Picture Credit : Google