June 15, 1998
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Party
Animal Clever look at how creatures live, survive and socialise. By Subhadra Menon SURVIVIAL STRATEGIES... A question biologists have always asked is why an animal behaves the way it does, and much of the excitement of biology has stemmed from the crazy answers this throws up. There are a lot of answers now, which Raghavendra Gadagkar -- one of India's better-known biologists -- decided to write about. The result is a very readable, "Did you know?" kind of book. This work is about socialite animals. More about lions than tigers, more about bees than mosquitoes. A lion survives best in a pride and a bee that loses the way to its hive dies in a few hours. The author has tried to use spectacular aspects of nature to explain how these socialites communicate, cooperate, work out their leadership and labour laws . One nugget in the book relates to why Siberian cranes fly thousands of kilometres from Siberia to the wetlands of Bharatpur. Some say this is actually controlled by body physiology: when days become shorter up north, the bird's pineal gland picks up the change. Hormonal changes take place and lead to what biologists call the urge to migrate. All this adds up to an ecological advantage -- the better chance of survival in warmer southern climes. The cranes are central to Gadagkar's argument that there can be no single explanation for any kind of animal behaviour. The book's strength lies in its story-telling style. It tells you about crickets, those noisy insects. Yet, the "cricket's song" is not a song at all. In fact, crickets can't vocalise. So what explains the noise? The insect rubs its hind legs together to produce a sound that is important for a male to find a mate. But smart "satellite males" listen in on the song and move towards it knowing it leads to a female. So the smarter guy finds a female even without making a racket. No wonder Gadagkar writes, "Curiosity about nature is the only prerequisite for picking up this book." |
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