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Midterm E

- African gorillas remain mysterious despite over a century of study, as they live in dense jungles and no scientist has been able to observe them closely in the wild. Their social patterns and full intelligence remain unclear. - Bats use echolocation through emitted squeaks and receiving echoes to navigate and locate insects to eat, similar to sonar and radar technology. This was an unexpected discovery about how some bats use sound. - Snakes evolved venom from their original mild saliva, and different snakes developed very different types of potent neurotoxic or hemolytic venom, but venom provides snakes an easy way to catch prey with little effort compared to other predators. The evolution of such potent venoms, especially in some

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Bin Li
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70 views

Midterm E

- African gorillas remain mysterious despite over a century of study, as they live in dense jungles and no scientist has been able to observe them closely in the wild. Their social patterns and full intelligence remain unclear. - Bats use echolocation through emitted squeaks and receiving echoes to navigate and locate insects to eat, similar to sonar and radar technology. This was an unexpected discovery about how some bats use sound. - Snakes evolved venom from their original mild saliva, and different snakes developed very different types of potent neurotoxic or hemolytic venom, but venom provides snakes an easy way to catch prey with little effort compared to other predators. The evolution of such potent venoms, especially in some

Uploaded by

Bin Li
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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African gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one know him very well.

For a hundred
years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history
museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the
stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly
scientific) link with our ancestral past.

Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a
wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in
the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties,
and now lies buried among the animals he loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla
lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the
final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when
French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman
who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.

Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to that extraordinary discovery of echo-
location in bats to see a case in which the voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.

To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent human inventions. Everyone knows
that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid
obstruction, the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping on the hull of a ship will
be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the time Interval between the taps and the receipt of the
echoes the depth of the sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus, now in
general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying according to the size and nature of the object. A
shoal of fish will do this. So it is a comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of fish.
With experience, and with Improved apparatus, It Is now possible not only to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring,
cod, or other well-known fish, by the pattern of its echo.

A few years ago It was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving the echoes they could locate and steer
clear of obstacles - or locate flying insects on which they feed This echo-location in bats is often compared with
radar, the principle of which is similar.

How it came about that snake manufactured poison is a mystery. Over the periods their saliva, a mild, digestive juice
like our own, was converted into a poison that defies analysis even today. It was not forced upon them by the surival
competition: they could have caught and lived on prey without using poison just as the thousands of non-poisonous
snakes still do. Poison to a snake is merely a luxury; it enables it to get its food with very little effort, no more effort
than one bite. And why only snakes? Cats, for instance, would be greatly helped; no running fights with large, fierce
rats or tussles with grown rabbits - just a bite and no more effort needed. In fact. It would be an assistance to all the
carnivora - though it would be a two-edged weapon when they fought each other. But, of the vertebrates,
unpredictable Nature selected only snakes (and one lizard). One wonders also why Nature, with some snakes
concocted poison of such extreme potency.

In the conversion of saliva into poison one might suppose that a fixed process took place. It did not; some snakes
manufactured a poison different in every respect from that of others, as different as arsenic is from strychnine, and
having different effects. One poison acts on the nerves, the other on the blood.

The makers of the nerve poison Include the mambas and the cobras and their venom is called neurotoxic. Vipers
(adders) and rattlesnakes manufacture the blood poison, which is known as hemolytic. Both poisons are unpleasant,
but by far the more unpleasant is the blood poison. It is. said I that the nerve poison is the more primitive of the two,
that the blood poison is, so to speak, a newer product from an improved formula. Be that as it may, the nerve poison
does its business with man far more quickly than the blood poison. This, however, means nothing. Snakes did not
acquire their poison for use against man but for use against prey such as rats and mice, and the effects on these of
viperine poison is almost immediate.

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