by Gregory McNamee
If you were, say, a bunny rabbit or a field mouse, you might wonder of a quiet moment at the injustice of nature’s not having provided you with the means of hearing an owl’s wings as they came rushing toward you.Well, join the club. There’s scarcely a creature can hear an owl in flight, which is all to the owl’s advantage —and something that has puzzled researchers for a long time. In this late bit of news from a meeting late last fall of the American Physical Society‘s Division of Fluid Dynamics, a group that itself doesn’t often make a noise outside of its field, researchers from Lehigh University isolated three characteristics that enabled the owl’s silent flight: a series of stiff feathers along the wing’s leading edge, a flexible fringe of feathers on its trailing edge, and a downy material on the top of the wing, the last acting as a kind of baffle. It’s the trailing edge, those researchers believe, that is the most important element. Look for an adaptation in some military aircraft of the future.
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By contrast, vultures are ungainly things, loud and awkward. However much we might discount them for their clumsy appearance, however, they play an essential role in the ecosystem as scavengers. It comes as terrible news that their populations around the world are plummeting, by a shocking 95 percent in the last decade in South Asia alone, the victims of agricultural poisoning and of criminal activity (so that they don’t alert authorities to the presence of poachers in parks, for instance), among other causes. This brief BBC article gives other reasons to value vultures, among them the fact that they hold the record for high-altitude flying and have an astonishing ability to digest all sorts of unpleasant things without falling ill, a matter that is of much interest to biochemists seeking solutions for human digestive troubles.
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Bats are not much loved, either. They should be, if only for their role in ridding the night air of mosquitoes—bats of some species can eat half a pound of mosquitoes per diem, insects that might otherwise be heading toward your ankles. There is huge variability among those bats, both within and across species, illustrating the evolutionary principle of adaptive radiation. But bats also share numerous traits: they have short faces, as mammal faces go, for one thing, and terrifically strong biting power for another. Those two characteristics are related, reports an oddly entertaining article in the February issue of Popular Science. Read the piece to discover why the pugnacious fellows should have such markedly small mugs.
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You and I had better not attempt to multitask while, say, driving a car across town or trying to cross a busy street, lest we wind up statistics. Bumblebees have it a little easier; reports an article in the scholarly journal Animal Behaviour, they can watch out for predators while foraging for pollen, though such multitasking takes it out of the bees in terms of both energy and time.
One wishes that the monarch butterfly had the ability to detect the many threats it faces, from pesticides to the related loss of the wild milkweed habitat on which it depends. Like South Asian vultures, monarchs may one day be only exhibits in natural history museums, for the monarch, reports the World Wildlife Fund, has declined by nearly half since last year—and last year was a record low. The species’ odds of rebounding are vanishing apace, another of nature’s marvels brought to ruin by human ambition.