Cat causes fire,Dog saves.
A family’s Golden Retriever is being called a canine hero, while the family’s cat should probably be sent to the “dog house.”
Bubba, the retriever, started barking when flames erupted inside the home at 224 North J Street just before midnight. It started in the front portion of the home, where Saundra Frazer had fallen asleep.
Animals behave as we do and in fact their familial attachment and group behavior is very interesting and intriguing.We, in our arrogance, believe that we are Superior to animals.Probably animals think they are superior.They might be wondering”What are these things doing?Going about, office, home, bank accounts, credit/debit cards,savings instead of eating what they could get, sleep when required , procreate and die when Time comes’
Story:
Virtually innocent of human contact, the chimps of Congo’s Goualougo Triangle display a sharp curiosity about us—and a sophisticated culture of toolmaking observed nowhere else.
A few years ago, while setting up camp deep in the Congolese rain forest, Dave Morgan and Crickette Sanz heard a party of male chimpanzees vocalizing raucously in the distance. The hoots grew louder, and they could tell the group was moving rapidly through the canopy.
The chimps, they realized, were headed straight for their camp and would soon be nearly on top of them. Then, just as the group seemed to be closing its distance to a few dozen yards, the forest went silent. A few seconds passed before Sanz and Morgan heard a gentle hoo from a tree almost directly above them. They looked up and saw a perplexed adult chimp peering down.
When wild chimps encounter humans, they typically flee in panic—understandable given that the relationship between our two species has often been one of prey and predator. This reticence around humans is part of what makes wild chimp research so difficult. Before the animals can ever be studied, they must learn not to bolt at the sight of a person, a process of habituation that requires many years of diligently trailing the animals around the forest.
One thing unhabituated chimps aren’t ever expected to do when they run into humans is call over all their buddies. But that’s exactly what happened. Another chimp showed up a moment later. Then a third. Then a fourth. Manic yelping enveloped the canopy. Morgan and Sanz may have been the scientists, but it was the chimps who were behaving as if they’d made some great discovery. The party sat on limbs above the camp all evening, watching excitedly as a fire was started, tents were pitched, and dinner was prepared.
“I thought, This is what loggers must have seen all through central Africa, and poachers shot them all,” says Morgan, 40, a conservation fellow with Lincoln Park Zoo and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Morgan has spent the better part of the past ten years living with Sanz in the Goualougo Triangle study area, a pristine 147-square-mile nub of lowland forest overlapping the Ndoki and Goualougo Rivers in northern Republic of the Congo. He and Sanz were awed by the close encounter, but they began to wonder when it might end. It was getting dark. Where were the chimps going to nest?
“Sure enough, they built their nests directly over our tents,” says Morgan. “I was like, This is great! But our trackers were like, No way, man, this is very bad news.” All night long, the chimps hollered from the trees, shook branches, urinated and defecated on the tents, and hurled sticks at the team. Nobody slept. At daybreak the chimps came down from their perches and watched from the forest floor as the group built up the fire and made breakfast. Then, quietly, one by one, the chimps slunk away and vanished into the thick underbrush.
When tales of the “curious” chimps of northern Congo—uncorrupted by misdealings with humans and apparently fully ignorant of our existence—were first reported in this magazine in 1995, more than a few primatologists scoffed. “People were like, Curiosity: Hmmm, how do you define that?” says Sanz, 34, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “Poor Dave, when he first told me about these chimps, even I didn’t believe him.” Though there had long been scattered anecdotes of fearless central African apes who trailed explorers around the jungle and behaved as if they’d never seen a human before, it beggared belief that there could be an entire forest full of them.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/02/congo-chimps/foer-text/2
In Africa and in the tropics, armies of tiny creatures make the twisting stems of acacia plants their homes.
Aggressive, stinging ants feed on the sugary nectar the plant provides and live in nests protected by its thick bark.
This is the world of “ant guards”.
The acacias might appear overrun by them, but the plants have the ants wrapped around their little stems.
Acacias… have very open flowers, but still, the ants don’t seem to go on to them. We wanted to know why.
These same plants that provide shelter and produce nourishing nectar to feed the insects also make chemicals that send them into a defensive frenzy, forcing them into retreat.
Nigel Raine, a scientist working at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK has studied this plant-ant relationship.
Dr Raine and his colleagues from the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Reading in the UK and Lund University in Sweden have been trying to work out some of the ways in which the insects and the acacias might have co-evolved.
He explains how the ants provide a useful service for the acacias.
“They guard the plants they live on,” said Dr Raine. “If other animals try to come and feed on the rich, sugary nectar, they will attack them.”
In Africa, one type of ant-guard, known as Crematogaster , will even attack large herbivores that attempt to eat the plant.
Ants will fiercely guard their acacia homes
“If a giraffe starts to eat the leaves of an acacia that is inhabited by ants, the ants will come out and swarm on to its face, biting and stinging,” says Dr Raine.
“Eventually, the giraffe will get fed up and move off.”
In the New World tropics, the Pseudomyrmex genus of ants fulfil a very similar guarding role.
For both species, the acacias provide little, reinforced structures that the ants hollow out and nest within, as well as sugar-rich nectar for them to eat.
“In return, both groups of ants protect their host plants from herbivores – both hungry insects and larger [animals],” explains Dr Raine.
Give and take
That is the plus side for the plants. But being inhabited by aggressive insects could make one important aspect of a plant’s life difficult – flowering.
Flowers need to be pollinated so the plant can reproduce. So what stops the ants from attacking the helpful little pollinators or stealing all the tasty nectar that attracts them?
“Some plants do this structurally, with physical barriers to stop ants getting on to the flower, or sticky or slippery surfaces that the insects can’t walk on,” said Dr Raine.
“Acacias don’t have these barriers. They have very open flowers, but still, the ants don’t seem to go on to them. We wanted to know why.”
One clever approach by the plant is a food “bribe”. “Extrafloral nectaries” are small stores of nectar on stems, from which the inhabitants can feed without going on to the flowers.
Acacias also produce structures called beltian bodies on the leaf tips.
Ants protect the leaves from large herbivores
These, Dr Raine explains, are nutritious structures produced by the plant to feed its resident colony of ant-guards.
But when this isn’t enough, it is a case of chemical warfare.
Flowers can produce a variety of chemicals. We can smell some of the volatile organic compounds they release when we sniff our favourite summer bloom.
But there is a more manipulative side to these scents.
Floral volatile compounds can act as signals – drawing in pollinators such as bees and hummingbirds in with their irresistible aromas.
To the ants, however, they are far from irresistible.
“The flowers seem to produce chemicals that are repellent to the ants,” said Dr Raine. “They release these particularly during the time when they’re producing lots of pollen, so the ants are kept off the flowers.”
In recent studies, described in the journal Functional Ecology, Dr Raine and his colleagues found that the plants with the closest relationships with ants – those that provided homes for their miniature guard army – produced the chemicals that were most effective at keeping the ants at bay.
“And that was associated with the flower being open,” he says. “So the chemicals are probably in the pollen.”
A bribe: Plants provide “nectaries” on their stems
When the pollen has all been taken away – by being brushed on to the bodies of hungry pollinators and helpfully delivered to other plants – the flowers become less repellent.
“So at this point, the ants can come on to the flowers and can protect them from other insects that might eat them, so that the developing seeds aren’t lost,” he explains.
Dr Raines’ team was able to test this using young flowers that had just opened and that contained lots of pollen.
The scientists wiped them on older flowers and on the acacia’s stems.
This showed them that the effect was “transferrable” – the stems and older flowers that had been wiped became more repellent.
“It gives this really neat feedback system – the plant is protected when it needs to be protected, but not when it doesn’t.”
Selective deterrents
The repellent chemicals are specific to the ants. In fact, they attract and repel different groups of insects.
“[The chemicals] don’t repel bees, even though they are quite closely related to ants. And in some cases, the chemicals actually seem to attract the bees,” says Dr Raine.
The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical “mimics” of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate.
“We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive” he explained.
“The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they’re being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat.”
Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.
The ants may be quick to swarm, bite and sting, but the harmless-looking acacias have remained one step ahead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8383577.stm
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