Be careful if you have a fear of giants! There is a 3-meter-long catfish here! | Natural Trumpet

In the past two weeks, we have collected the following interesting and fun natural news and research:

1) When talking to her cubs, the mother dolphin also speaks in a coquettish voice

2) Hummingbird secretly drinks every day and never gets drunk

3) Two species of flying squirrels in Hainan have invented a secret to storing nuts

4) Genetically editing corn snakes to reveal the secrets of scale patterns

5) Wild boars perform a great deed: they discover a tree that bears flowers and fruits underground

6) The world's largest catfish: 2.85 meters long

Dolphin baby talk

When you talk to a child, do you unconsciously raise your voice and change your tone? Dolphin mothers do the same!

Scientists recently installed special microphones on 19 female bottlenose dolphins with their pups to record their voices. They found that their voices were higher-pitched and had a wider range of pitches when they spoke to their pups , but returned to their normal pitch when they were swimming alone or communicating with other adult dolphins.

During health checks on dolphins, researchers placed special microphones on their heads | References [1]

The special sounds that adult animals make when communicating with babies are called " baby talk ." Studies have shown that talking to children in baby talk can enhance their attention and cognitive abilities, and help them learn to speak. This is not unique to humans and dolphins, as rhesus monkeys and zebra finches also raise their voices and slow down their speed when talking to their young.

Bottlenose dolphin mother with her baby | Peter Asprey / Wikimedia Commons

Scientists don't yet know whether baby talk can help young dolphins learn language faster, but it can at least attract the attention of children - in the noisy ocean environment, high-pitched sounds can make children realize that " Mom is talking to me! "

Hummingbird Drunkard

Hummingbird drinks every day in private, but never gets drunk.

Hummingbirds feed on nectar, eating up to 80% of their body weight in nectar every day. Nectar is also the best food for yeast and bacteria, which produce alcohol when metabolized, turning nectar into an "alcoholic beverage" for hummingbirds .

Hummingbird drinking nectar | Lorie Shaull / Wikimedia Commons

Do hummingbirds like to drink? Scientists fed hummingbirds sugar water with 1% alcohol content and found that hummingbirds loved to drink it, and their preference was almost the same as non-alcoholic sugar water. But if the alcohol content in the sugar water was increased to 2%, the amount they drank was halved, but the amount of alcohol they finally consumed remained the same - it seems that hummingbirds are very moderate, they love to drink but they will not drink too much.

Even more amazing is that scientists have discovered that hummingbirds never get drunk . Hummingbirds have a very high metabolic rate, and the sugar and alcohol in the nectar are consumed very quickly after they eat it. They need to eat a lot of food every day to make up for the huge energy consumption.

Hummingbird drinking sugar water at a feeder | nearsjasmine / Wikimedia Commons

Some people install hummingbird feeders with sugar water in the park, which actually become "alcoholic beverages". Scientists have found that after two weeks of fermentation, the alcohol concentration produced by the fermentation of feeders filled with only sugar water will reach 0.05% - it doesn't sound high, but hummingbirds drink 80% of their body weight every day. If calculated based on a 70 kg adult, this is equivalent to consuming 28 grams of alcohol in a day, which is about 1 kg of beer with a concentration of 3.8% .

Flying Squirrel Inventor

The master inventor of the flying squirrel world has invented a wonderful way to hide nuts!

This was an accidental discovery by the researchers. When they first started investigating plant diversity in Hainan, they kept finding nuts stuck in tree branches. The nuts were so tightly fixed that no matter how they shook the tree, the nuts would not budge.

A Stuck Mystery Nut | References [3]

Where do nuts come from? Confused researchers set up infrared cameras in the woods and captured two mysterious little animals - the Hainan flying squirrel (Hylopetes phayrei) and the black and white flying squirrel (H. alboniger).

This is a behavior that humans have never discovered before - these two species of flying squirrels first use their teeth to carve a circle of grooves on the nuts . The size of the grooves seems to have been carefully designed to match the width of the branches exactly. Afterwards, the flying squirrels will carefully adjust the position of the nuts so that the nuts can be stuck between the Y-shaped branches . Some perfectionists will rework again and again.

A flying squirrel and its beloved nut on a tree branch | Reference [3]

This method is considered a pioneer in the entire flying squirrel world, and only these two species of flying squirrels are known to have this unique skill. Most animals bury nuts in the soil, and they will germinate after 2 to 3 months; but scientists checked these nuts stuck on the branches after 3 and a half months and found that they did not germinate at all , presumably because of this unique storage method. Moreover, the nuts hanging high on the branches are mostly out of reach of other animals, so flying squirrels don't have to worry about their stored food being stolen.

Gene-edited snakes

The first gene-edited snake is born!

Scientists bred this snake mainly to study the hexagonal pattern on the snake's body - the scales on the snake's back and sides form a nearly perfect hexagon, while the scales on the abdomen are arranged in a single row. In order to figure out how the hexagonal pattern of the scales is formed, scientists used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology to breed the world's first genetically modified corn snake .

Hexagonal scales on the back and sides of a snake and single rows of scales on its belly | University of Geneva

Scientists have previously introduced EDA gene mutations into lizards and bred lizards without scales, proving that the EDA gene is required for scale formation. This transgenic corn snake also carries the EDA gene mutation. Amazingly, the hexagonal scales on their backs and sides disappeared, but the scales on their abdomens are exactly the same as those of normal snakes .

Genetically modified corn snake, the scales on the snake's abdomen are still in a row, but there are no hexagonal scales on the back and sides | University of Geneva

Scientists have found that the scales on the abdomen of snake embryos develop first. After the abdominal scales are formed, two independent substrate "waves" appear. They approach each other and eventually meet to form a hexagon, which is the pattern on the back and side of the snake. Gene-edited snakes have proved that the abdominal scales of snakes do not need the EDA gene to form, but are determined by the positional information of the underlying somatic cells.

A normal corn snake on the left and a gene-edited snake on the right | University of Geneva

Palm blossoms quietly

Scientists have discovered a special palm tree in Borneo that blooms and bears fruit quietly underground !

The red fruit grows underground | Randi Agusti

This palm tree is called Pinanga subterranea. It is shorter than common palm trees and was often thought to be a juvenile palm tree in the past . It was not until 1997 that botanists pushed aside the fallen leaves around a young palm tree in order to take a full picture of it, and discovered the secret underground - this palm tree was not a juvenile, but had secretly bloomed underground and even produced red fruits!

But it is not easy to find this new species. Fortunately, there are wild boars. During the investigation, the researchers found a group of wild boars busy digging beside a palm tree , and what they dug out from the ground were the bright red fruits of the palm tree.

Researcher poses with palm trees | Ben Kuhnhaeuser

This palm tree is the only known palm plant that flowers and bears fruit completely underground . Most angiosperms flower and bear fruit above ground to facilitate seed dispersal, or flower above ground and bear fruit underground like peanuts, but only a handful of them flower and bear fruit completely underground.

How do these palm trees, which bloom and bear fruit completely underground, spread their seeds? Researchers speculate that although their fruits are very hidden from humans, they are very attractive food to wild boars with a keen sense of smell . The wild boars work hard to dig and eat the fruits, allowing the seeds to be spread with their feces. This also helps the researchers a lot - if it is too difficult to find fruits, then just collect seeds directly from pig feces!

Local Borneo bearded pigs: Can't find a flowering palm tree underground? Move over while I poop! | Rufus46 / Wikimedia Commons

Giant catfish

The world's largest catfish has been discovered! This giant catfish is 2.85 meters long !

Giant catfish | Alessandro Biancardi

Alessandro Biancardi caught this fish. A 23-year veteran, he felt like he had hooked a "monster" when he hooked this epic Welsh catfish (also known as "European catfish") in the Po River in Italy. He was curious about how heavy the fish was, but he didn't want to put too much pressure on this once-in-a-century fish, so he just measured it, took a photo, and put it back into the river.

A close-up of his face | | Alessandro Biancardi

The Welsh catfish was originally distributed in eastern and central Europe, but has entered other parts of Europe in the past 25 years. Currently, the second largest Welsh catfish caught by humans is 2.81 meters long and was also caught from the Po River. Before that, the largest Welsh catfish came from Sweden, which was only 1.95 meters long and about 70 years old.

Researchers believe that this nearly 3-meter-long catfish may only be 20 to 30 years old , because the local climate is warm and the river is rich in food, which is very suitable for the growth of catfish. In Sweden, due to the cold weather, the growth rate of Welsh catfish is very slow, and it may take 100 years to grow to the same size.

References

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300262120

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230306

[3] https://elifesciences.org/articles/84967

[4] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adf8834

[5] https://palms.org/journal/vol-67-no-2-june-2023/

[6] https://madcat-fishing.com/news/shocks-the-whole-catfish-world-with-a-285cm-monster-record

Author: Cat Tun

Editor: Mai Mai

Image credit: Alessandro Biancardi

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)

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