As a human being that needs glasses to see the accepted norm of 20/20, I’ve always been interested in how our visual perspective of the world varies so greatly. Even among humans there are color discrepancies and a difference in our ability to focus.
I love thinking about how animals see the world and all the things our human eyes aren’t able to perceive. Our ingenuity through science and technology leads to gadgets that give us the ability to comprehend what it looks like to see these wavelengths.
Using that information it is possible to hypothesize the reasons for these unique animal abilities.
Derby the dog was born with malformed front legs. Derby’s awesome owner sought help after being unsatisfied with the current wheeled options to assist disabled dogs.
The result was a set of custom designed, 3D printed prosthetic legs that allow Derby to run and play, just like any normal dog.
These short documentaries by Matthew Killip feature people who work with monkeys and apes around the world. Some work partnerships between man and monkey bring them closer together by employing the intelligence of our ape cousins.
It is widely known that the interesting-ness of an animal is proportionate to how difficult it is to figure out where its butthole is. The octopus therefore is very interesting.
True Facts About The CuttleFish
Cuttlefish are the kings of camouflage and their mating begins when the male delicately grabs the female by her face and inserts another specialized tentacle into an opening near her mouth, which hopefully is not her nose.
Cephalopods, the class of mollusks which scientists classify octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses, can change color faster than a chameleon. They can also change texture and body shape, and, and if those camouflage techniques don’t work, they can still “disappear” in a cloud of ink, which they use as a smoke-screen or decoy.
Cephalopods are also fascinating because they have three hearts that pump blue blood and are thought to be the most intelligent of invertebrates. – Dr. Wood, Cephalopod Researcher
Nature is up to its amazing feats once again. The ant colony featured in this video is so big that it would be the equivalent of building the great wall of china.
Now I can’t speak on the method of excavation, concrete dumped into the colony then excavated, but I do hope that the majority of the colony moved on before the concrete came down to freeze this epic structure in time.
This giant ant hill is a testament to the complexity of life on this planet, all living things continue to grow and evolve creating things that we have never seen before, there is tons of excitement left in what we don’t know.
The Golden Turtle includes various creative competitions aimed at identifying the best works and projects demonstrating the beauty and harmony of nature.
Imagine how hard just one bee works in a single day.
Bees tend to at least 2,000 flowers daily, with tiny wings beating 10,000 times per minute, carrying pollen, and dramatically assisting our food supply.
Sound exhausting? Bees get thirsty, and they need safe water sources. The problem is water is not always readily available.
Bees need very shallow water to drink from. However, shallow water evaporates quickly. Birdbaths are not the best option as bees tend to drown if the water isn’t shallow enough. As for river and lakes, bees risk their lives trying to get water in the presence of fishes, frogs, and other wildlife, not to mention the risk of being swept away in water currents.
To help hydrate our little pollinators, set up a bee bath by filling a pie pan with marbles and then water. The marbles give the bees a spot to land so that they don’t drown when they come to drink.
Now you have your very own Bee Bath and no more drowned bees!
Dogs in Australia lick the hallucinogenic sweat off cane toads to get high in this clip from Cane Toads: The Conquest.
Some dogs are so desperate for a fix they deliberately hunt down the frogs to stimulate the excretion of the psychedelic sweat, then lick their prey.
To say a dog or a cat is having an hallucination is impossible, but some do star gaze or track something across the room that isn’t there and others just stare out of the cage while we’re monitoring them – Jonathon Cochrane, University of Queensland’s School of Veterinary Science
Unfortunately, there is only a small amount of the psychoactive chemical Bufotenin secreted compared to the dangerous toxins in the sweat. Most dogs are able to overcome the poison by instinctively limiting the amount they lick.
Kanzi the bonobo lives in America and has learned how to build a fire, light it using matches and toast marshmallows on it. The behavior shows how similar we are to our primate family and is another great example of animal intelligence.
In another clip from BBC’s Monkey Planet, we get a glimpse of what monkeys do for fun:
Dive Bombing Macaques
Rhesus macaques in Jaipur, India, dive bomb off a lamp post into a foot of water to have fun, implying that monkeys can be capable of feelings.
Whether it’s a cigarette break after a high-powered business meeting, a cold beer after a hot day on the job or a half-ounce of shroom juice injected directly into the scrotum to ease the stress of writing, people love their intoxicants.
But it turns out that it’s not strictly a human convention. Experts have found that animals also seek out a quick chemical high from plants, bugs and, well, wherever they can find it.
8 Animals That Love Getting High More Than We Do
Elephants
Elephants drugs of choice are liquor and opiates.
Throughout history, elephants have been worshiped as gods, lauded for their wisdom and memory, and made into mascots for the Republican Party. Like people, elephants are very complex, social animals. This means they exhibit a lot of humanlike behavior. They nurture their young, mourn their dead and love to get absolutely fucked up. Seriously.
Horses prefer to get high on potted locoweed, a type of legume that acts as a mind-altering drug.
Apparently locoweed is to horses what nicotine is to people: an extremely addictive drug that kills them slowly over the course of several years. During the lean winter months, locoweed is the only green plant available in some pastures.
Horses first seek it out for its nutritious goodness, but keep coming back for its psychoactive effects.
Latawnya, The Naughty Horse, Learns To Say “No” To Drugs – A Dramatic Reading
Bighorn Sheep
Bighorn sheep like to get high on narcotic lichen.
And luckily for them, in the vast wilderness of the Canadian Rockies lives a unique species of yellow-green lichen that will fuck you up.
The lichen is extremely rare (it can take decades for them to grow over a single rock) and only grow in very inhospitable regions of the Rockies. Despite the fact that it is dangerous to get at and contains no nutritional value, the sheep will risk life and limb to get some.
Once they reach the lichen, they will rub their teeth down to the gum line to scrape off every last bit of it – in the process getting super high.
Reindeer
Reindeer apparently love shrooms, their favorite being the amanita muscaria strain.
Let’s talk about urine for a moment.
The body does not actually metabolize psychedelic mushrooms, so most of the psychoactive compounds get washed out with the user’s pee. If you collect that urine and drink it, you will trip almost as hard as if you’d eaten the mushrooms yourself.
Many native Alaskan tribes stretch out their supply of mushrooms this way. The priests eat the ‘shrooms and the followers drink their urine. How does this tie into reindeer?
Like most wild herbivores, reindeer have a very firm constitution that allows them to eat all manner of nasty plants and fungi without getting sick. Many strains of hallucinogenic mushrooms are toxic to human beings, but not toxic to reindeer.
Being the practical sort of fellows that primitive shamans were, the priests started collecting reindeer urine and drinking it to get high. But the piss train didn’t stop there. The reindeer discovered that they could get the same high off of human urine. Thus was born…
THE CIRCLE OF PISS:
Reindeer eat mushrooms and pee.
Humans collect the pee and get high.
Humans pee, and reindeer drink their own people-filtered-urine to get high again.
Scientists have noted that drunk bees are less likely to fly, less likely to engage in social behavior and prone to random fits of violence.
Some bees get so blitzed that they lose the ability to do anything but lay on their back and kick their fuzzy legs feebly in the air.
Drunk Bees
Jaguars
Jaguars drug of choice is banisteriopsis caapi, a root found in the jungles of South America.
Jaguars love to get high, and their choice in intoxicants is badass. Wild cats looking for a high will seek out the roots of the caapi plant and gnaw on them until they start to hallucinate. It looks even cuter than it sounds.
Jaguar Gets High
Caapi root contains a variety of powerful MAOIs (chemicals like you find in antidepressants), which allow the animal’s brain to be flooded with DMT, causing them to trip balls.
In fact, some scientists believe that humans first learned to use the root by observing jaguars getting high off of it.
Capuchin Monkeys and Lemurs
These two species love to get high on hallucinogenic millipedes.
Yes, both capuchin monkeys in South America and lemurs in Madagascar have learned how to get high off of passing insects. Apparently, several species of millipedes squirt out a poisonous compound when agitated.
By covering themselves with the poison, lemurs and monkeys are able to ward off parasitic insects and get a delightful narcotic buzz.
Unfortunately, millipede venom is also filled with cyanide, which is deadly to pretty much everything.
Of course the risk of agonizing death has never stopped anyone from getting high, so the capuchins (one of mankind’s closest relatives) gather in huge groups and swap hits of ‘pede.