animals (Page 15)

It’s been discovered that salamanders can count and dogs can do calculus. When salamanders have a choice between tubes containing two fruit flies or three, they always go for the tube of three. And dogs always figure out the most efficient route to take when catching a ball.

However, the mathematical abilities of salamanders are limited, according to researcher Claudia Uller, who says they “failed in the same way that babies and monkeys do” when confronted by more than three objects.
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Scientists have studied geckos, the lizards that like to walk on the ceiling, and have created a sticky tape that will allow humans to do the same thing. Each gecko toe is covered by billions of tiny hair-like structures which set up tiny electrical charges, allowing the animal to cling to a wall or ceiling. So far, scientists have only been able to create a tiny piece of the tape. Andre Geim says, “We demonstrated this actually with a small toy of spiderman which we found in the nearest shop. We covered his hand with the gecko tape and he can stick to horizontal glass plate from underneath.”
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We feel more rapport with animals every day?we now know that mice construct road signs so they can find their way around and birds can be duped by “advertising.”

Pavel Stopka and David Macdonald wondered how wood mice find their way through fields. They discovered the mice move objects around to mark sites that contain food or a quick route home to their burrow. As the mice explore, they rear up on their back legs to look for one of their signposts.
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One sign of climate change is that birds fly south later in the fall, or migrate to new areas when it gets cold. Bird watchers on the East Coast have been amazed to find that hummingbirds are still around, even though most of the other birds in the area have flown south for the winter. “Twenty or 25 years ago, if you said you saw a hummingbird in November, people would be wondering if you had been tipping the sherry,” says ornithologist Mary Gustafson.
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