Thinking Beyond Science

What do hibernating hedgehogs dream of?

During the really deep phase of sleep, metabolic rates are extremely low and there’s hardly any dreaming going on, because the brain uses a lot of energy in the highly active state of dreaming. Therefore without metabolic activity, there are definitely no movies being played in their minds. But what about that light sleep above about 6 degrees Celsius? If hedgehogs can dream then – after all, their energy use rises – the pictures might be more like nightmares from which the hedgehog would like to wake, but can’t. Whatever is going on inside its head, the situation is life-threatening and perhaps the animal realizes this in its drowsy state as it struggles in vain to wake up. Poor little thing. Climate change will, unfortunately, bring more of these warm winter interludes.

Body temperature of insects fluctuates along with the air temperature, and they don’t have a mechanism to keep it at a certain level. In autumn, insects burrow into the ground or under tree bark or into plant stems so that they don’t freeze solid. To ensure that any ice that forms in their cells doesn’t cause the cells to burst, they store substances like glycerin, which inhibits the formation of larger and sharper ice crystals.

Bees are also born into a society with a strict division of labour There’s the queen, which develops from a normal, ferti-lised larva. Whereas other baby bees are fed a mixture of nectar and pollen, larvae destined to hatch into royalty receive a special food called royal jelly. It’s produced in the hypopharyngeal glands of worker bees, and while normal larvae develop into mature bees in less than twenty-one days, the turbo-diet of jelly produces a new queen after just sixteen days. A queen flies only once in her life: her nuptial flight. And it is during this flight that she mates with drones (male bees). After her return to the hive, for the rest of her life (about four or five years) she lays up to 2,000 eggs every day, interrupted only by short winter breaks.

For their part, the female worker bees spend every moment of their short lives hard at work. In the first days after they hatch, their job is to feed the larvae. After ten days they are also responsible for storing nectar and converting it to honey. Once three weeks have passed, they are finally allowed out into meadows and pastures to collect nectar for another three weeks. Then they are worn out and die. Only the overwintering bees that wait for the next spring, huddled together in a tight cluster around the queen, get to live a little longer. The sole task for the drones is to inseminate queens, and because that happens only once, and only a few of them get this opportunity, most of the time they just hang around with nothing much to do.

Everything, then, is strictly pre-programmed, down to the smallest processes. Inside the hive, the bees dance to communicate information about nectar sources and how far away they are. They turn nectar into honey by adding glandular secretions and drying the mixture on their tiny tongues. They sweat out wax and form it into artful combs. Scientists recognise the bees’ accomplish-ments, but because, in their opinion, small insect brains are unable to rise to intellectual heights, the individual bees are considered to be components of a super-organism and their cognitive accomplishment is called ‘crowd intelligence’. In such an organism, all the animals are like cells working together in a much larger body.

Whereas the individual animals are considered to be quite stupid, the interaction of the different processes, as well as the ability of the whole to react to stimuli in the world around it, is recognised as intelligent. This perspective does not recognise bees as individuals; instead, each bee is reduced to a building block, a piece of a larger puzzle. Consequently, in the language of German bee-keepers of old, the colony of bees was called the bee’, referring to the population of bees as though it were a single entity.

Rabbits, which are slightly more perverse even than crows when it comes to matters of taste. At least the birds only peck around in the faecal matter of others and restrict themselves to eating the seeds they find there, but rabbits and hares devour their own excrement. Though it must be said that they don’t eat all their droppings indiscriminately, just the special ones. Like all herbivores, they have bacteria in their gut that help them dissolve and digest chewed grasses and other herbaceous matter. There are specialized species in the caecum, in particular, that break down greens into their component parts. However, some of the end-products can only be absorbed in the small intestine, which, annoyingly enough, comes before the caecum.

And so the beneficial brew slides unused through the digestive tract and inevitably ends up in the outside world once again. What better idea than to smack your lips and enjoy this product from the caecum fresh from the anus, ingest it anew and extract valuable calories during its journey through the small intestine? The final processed waste – hard droppings – are completely ignored and are clearly regarded as faecal matter.

Animals must be able to taste things in order to tell the difference between what is appropriate as food and what is not – and also what is poisonous. By all accounts, however, it seems that many other species don’t taste things the way we do. For example, there’s a reason the popular children’s book character Pooh Bear likes honey and his friend Tigger doesn’t. Large carnivorous cats such as lions and tigers, and even marine carnivores such as sea lions, have lost their taste receptors for sweetness over the course of evolution. Clearly, sugary food is of no particular interest for these animals, and it’s easy to understand why: meat doesn’t taste sweet at all.

Source : The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion — Surprising Observations of a Hidden World by Peter Wohlleben

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37572446-the-inner-life-of-animals

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