It's only been a few decades, I think, since we realized that Bees communicate fairly intricate information by means of complicated dances. Some scientists in the UK have recently figured out that mice leave trail markers for themselves.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2986235.stmReckon this counts as tool usage?
k
Wanna change your [ html]s to [ url]s?
ah, boogers.
thanks...that's better.
k
Fascinating.
WS has a quote for everything: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosohies, Horatio..." (Or something reasonably close to that.)
Edit:
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
--From Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - 1601 - Act I. - Scene 5
(to be precise)
In which we discover that humans are not, as was once thought, the second most intelligent species on the Earth, but the third most.
No, no, the white mice were lightyears ahead of us. Pan-dimensional beings, in fact.
Anyway, this explains why things I put down seem to move to some other place, completely of their own volition.
Legend tells us they were the ones who set this whole computer rolling in a vain and Nimrodian attempt to figure out the answer to some question which has long since been forgotten, but whose answer now lies on the floor of a 7 by 6 cell.
k
things I put down seem to move to some other place, completely of their own volition.
Hey, the same thing happens at our house! Maybe we share a poltergeist.
So mice are hanselngretling.
I would definitely prefer little white disks to the things mice left piles of in my apartment.
One thoing about mice leaving scent markers. I think the ability to detect their own odor
would be far less than the ability to detect odor of another mouse, because they are
cvonstantly exposed to their own odor, and any stimulus weakens rapidly over time.
But scent trails are very old. Ants are totally dependent on them.
Maybe we share a poltergeist.
No, no, Jackie, I think you mean you have poltermice. [groan-e]
I had a problem with ants returning to my pantry over and over again, despite repeated attacks by me with bug spray and ant traps, etc. (I found Windex to be a useful method of killing insects too.) No matter what I did they seemed to be back the next morning, en masse. I complained to my mother about it, and she informed me that the ants leave a trail of pheremones on the floor that leads them to sources of food, and that if I scrubbed the floor good and clean (a novel idea to be sure) the ants wouldn't return. It worked.
Interesting about the mice though. So if you have mice problems you need to continually rearrange the furniture. (It works especially well against blind mice.)
"Poltermice," says Bean.
Karl von Frisch is best known for two major discoveries about honey bees. First, he demonstrated that honey bees have color
vision, and published these findings in 191*. Second, in 193* he showed that honey bees use a dance language to communicate
food locations to other bees. (from Internet)
Thanks for the correction, Bill. The discovery dates quite a bit farther back than I'd thought - still not too awfully long ago.
k
ants leave a trail of pheremones on the floor that leads them to sources of food, and that if I scrubbed the floor good and clean the ants wouldn't return
as related by the good Doctor Feynman in Surely you're Joking...