Do bees have GPS?

Did you ever wonder how bees always find honey?  They tell each other.  And no, bees do not have voices to speak with.  They communicate with each other by doing a little dance.  After a bee finds a flower with pollen, it returns to the hive.  There, it dances for the other bees.  The orientation of the dance describes the angle to travel away from the sun.  The length of the dance communicates how long it will take to fly to the flowers. 

There is a great video created by researchers at Georgia Tech here that shows how the bees do their waggle dance.

Ugh, skunk!

It is that time of year in Chicago – the skunks are coming out, we can smell them!  The last two years in a row, our little white dog was skunked in February.  I am hoping we avoid the smelly hat trick this year.  Have you ever smelled a skunk?  They smell like a mixture of rotten eggs, burnt rubber and garlic.

So, why do skunks smell?  Skunks spray as a defensive mechanism.  Skunks release a fluid from two scent glands on their backsides.  The spray can fly through the air from five to sixteen feet!  For example, when my little white dog goes up to a skunk and wants to play with it, (see picture of Cortland after a trip to the groomer) the skunk gets scared, turns around, lifts his tail and sprays him in the face.  The spray bothers Cortland, burns his eyes and makes him sneeze.  While Cortland is dealing with that issue, the skunk can run away.  Skunks spray the smelly scent to protect themselves from predators.

By the way, the best way I have found to clean Cortland is equal parts hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and Palmolive soap.  I didn’t want to use tomato juice and turn the little white dog pink.

Here is a great video of the chemical compounds in the skunk spray.  Here is a video of baby skunks - they are kind of cute when they are small!

Why do kangaroos carry their babies in a pouch?

Joeys (the name for a baby kangaroo) are born at a very young age and are about the size of jelly bean.  At birth, they crawl up the mother’s body and enter a pouch where they attach to a teat to feed.  As it grows, the joey begins to spend more time outside of the pouch and fully leaves the pouch of its mother at about 7 to 10 months of age.

Kangaroos are marsupials – meaning that they give birth to very young babies that cannot survive outside their mothers.  Koalas and opossums are also marsupials and have pouches. There are 47 different types of kangaroos including Wallabies (the smallest) and the Red Kangaroo (the largest).  Kangaroos are herbivores.  They eat grasses and young shoots of plants. Kangaroos need very little water to survive and can go for months without drinking any at all.

Here is a cute video of a baby jumping out of her mother’s pouch. 

This video is from National Geographic – it is a fairly graphic video of the birth of a joey and his journey to his mother’s  pouch. 

Why do seahorses look like horses?

A recent scientific study shows that seahorses evolved from pipefish to support their feeding style.  Pipefish and seahorses are related and similar.  Both feed on small animals, plankton and brine shrimp by slurping them up (kind of like slurping your noodles).  Pipefish swim around and pursue their prey.  Seahorses, however, wrap their tail around a stationary object, like sea grass or coral, and wait for their prey to swim by at which point they reach out their neck and slurp up their prey.

Since the seahorses are not strong swimmers, they adapted to strengthen their hunting style to get food that is further away.  The seahorses evolved the S-shape because it allows them to tense their muscles and snap forward to slurp up their prey.

There is a fabulous two and a half minute video by Nature Video called “How the seahorse got its shape” showing the seahorses and explaining the findings of the recent study by Sam Van Wassenberg, Gert Roos and Lara Ferry called “An Adaptive Explanation for the horse-like shape of seahorses” published in Nature Communications.  Click on the highlighted words to see the video and the study.