Animals and science. This one was a bit slow for me to get through. I enjoyed all the things I learned about exactly how animals do things (though some details are still undiscovered, or at least at the time of this publication), but I didn’t always grasp the explanations, even though I could tell the author was simplifying matters for the general reader. In a nice way. And when equations came into the mix, my focus would start to slide. Mathematics and physics not really my thing. But I’m game to try and comprehend.
This book delves into heat conduction and energy transfer, Newton’s laws of motion, the properties of fluids and what that means for animals that move through it, on top of it, or simply want to avoid turbulence (in water or air); sound vibrations and how animals use or exploit them, likewise with electricity and magnetism, curious properties of how light travels, and quantum physics. I admit I got lost a few times. But the main subject- the animals- kept drawing my curiosity back to continue.
Some of the things I learned: some garter snakes pretend to be female to steal heat from others. Ground squirrels fight rattlesnakes by bluffing with their tails- about their size- via heat conductivity. Dwarf seahorses are super sneaky. Bees find flowers and detect if other bees have already visited them, via perception of electric fields. Oriental hornets can absorb sunlight and save it as energy using a pigment called xanthopterin! Ants navigate by polarized light- so they can find their way even on cloudy days. And there’s so much more, from how archerfish hit their targets in spite of light refraction through water, to why giant squids have such huge eyes and how geckos manage to walk on the ceiling, to the ways many other animals’ bodies work within and exploit the laws of physics- from harlequin mantis shrimp, bats, sea turtles, cuckoo chicks, elephants, bees, spiny lobsters and peacocks (shivering their tail feather display to create sounds outside the range of human hearing- but apparently very alluring to peahens), komodo dragons and mosquitoes, to your ordinary cats and dogs. Fascinating stuff, if also a bit tiresome. (It was a good go-to-sleep-at-night book).
Borrowed from the public library.
