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Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle
Ações de livro
Comece a ler- Editora:
- Macmillan Publishers
- Lançado em:
- Nov 11, 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781429947398
- Formato:
- Livro
Descrição
WINNER OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA AWARD IN SCIENCE
The story behind the stunning, extreme weapons we see in the animal world--teeth and horns and claws--and what they can tell us about the way humans develop and use arms and other weapons
In Animal Weapons, Doug Emlen takes us outside the lab and deep into the forests and jungles where he's been studying animal weapons in nature for years, to explain the processes behind the most intriguing and curious examples of extreme animal weapons—fish with mouths larger than their bodies and bugs whose heads are so packed with muscle they don't have room for eyes. As singular and strange as some of the weapons we encounter on these pages are, we learn that similar factors set their evolution in motion. Emlen uses these patterns to draw parallels to the way we humans develop and employ our own weapons, and have since battle began. He looks at everything from our armor and camouflage to the evolution of the rifle and the structures human populations have built across different regions and eras to protect their homes and communities. With stunning black and white drawings and gorgeous color illustrations of these concepts at work, Animal Weapons brings us the complete story of how weapons reach their most outsized, dramatic potential, and what the results we witness in the animal world can tell us about our own relationship with weapons of all kinds.
Ações de livro
Comece a lerDados do livro
Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle
Descrição
WINNER OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA AWARD IN SCIENCE
The story behind the stunning, extreme weapons we see in the animal world--teeth and horns and claws--and what they can tell us about the way humans develop and use arms and other weapons
In Animal Weapons, Doug Emlen takes us outside the lab and deep into the forests and jungles where he's been studying animal weapons in nature for years, to explain the processes behind the most intriguing and curious examples of extreme animal weapons—fish with mouths larger than their bodies and bugs whose heads are so packed with muscle they don't have room for eyes. As singular and strange as some of the weapons we encounter on these pages are, we learn that similar factors set their evolution in motion. Emlen uses these patterns to draw parallels to the way we humans develop and employ our own weapons, and have since battle began. He looks at everything from our armor and camouflage to the evolution of the rifle and the structures human populations have built across different regions and eras to protect their homes and communities. With stunning black and white drawings and gorgeous color illustrations of these concepts at work, Animal Weapons brings us the complete story of how weapons reach their most outsized, dramatic potential, and what the results we witness in the animal world can tell us about our own relationship with weapons of all kinds.
- Editora:
- Macmillan Publishers
- Lançado em:
- Nov 11, 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781429947398
- Formato:
- Livro
Sobre o autor
Relacionado a Animal Weapons
Amostra do livro
Animal Weapons - Douglas J. Emlen
same.
PART I
STARTING SMALL
1. Camouflage and Armor
It is November 1969, and dark. Moonlight glints off of tree branches, casting small shadows beside pebbles and twigs on the fresh dirt. A tiny metal door opens and two mice rush out, like gladiators released into the Roman Colosseum. They dash into the darkness in search of cover, but there isn’t any, and only one of the mice will survive this race. Above them an owl sits on a perch, watching. Its head snaps into position as it spots a mouse and, with a graceful swoop utterly devoid of sound, it attacks. One moment both mice are running. The next, just like that, one of them is gone. Droplets of blood on the dirt are the only evidence of what has occurred.
Six concrete enclosures lie side by side, encased in chicken wire to keep the owls from escaping. Twelve feet wide and thirty feet deep, they are more vast to a mouse than Mile High Stadium is to you or me. In three of them the soil is rich and dark, imported from a nearby field. In the others, the soil is sandy and pale, trucked from coastal dunes. Otherwise, the enclosures are the same, and each houses an owl, patiently waiting. Over and over the race is repeated, as pairs of mice—one brown, one white—sprint across the dirt. All told, almost six hundred mice will rush into the South Carolina night, all to answer one question: which color mouse will the owls catch first?
Owls eat astonishing numbers of mice. When owls feed, they pack fur and bones and other indigestible parts of their prey into their gizzards, coughing them up later as dense little pellets that they spit onto the ground. Diligent biologists can harvest these pellets and pick through them, counting and identifying bones, to reconstruct an owl’s diet on any given night. A single owl can eat four or five mice a night, and well over a thousand in a year.¹ Scaled up to the landscape, owls kill between 10 and 20 percent of mouse populations in a typical year—up to one-fifth of all mice die in the talons of an owl.²
Despite the brutal toll exacted by owls and other predators, oldfield mice thrive across the southeastern United States. They live in abandoned corn and cotton fields, along hedgerows, in forest clearings, and throughout all sorts of shrubby fields. These mice also live along coastal beaches in sand dunes tufted with coarse grasses, and they have colonized many of the small offshore barrier islands of Alabama and northern Florida.
In the mid-1920s, Francis Bertody Sumner, the leading mouse biologist of his day, heard about the strange white mice of Florida beaches. He worked his way across their range, meticulously sampling animals from population after population. Some he brought into his lab to breed, but most he killed, stretching their little pelts for archiving in museum collections. The pattern he documented was striking: mice from inland populations—stubble fields and clearings across Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and interior Florida—were dark brown in color, much like that of other field mouse species found elsewhere in the United States. But along the coasts and out on the sandy offshore islands, the mice were white. And, if you marched a line from inland to coast, there was an abrupt transition separating brown mice from white. The boundary fell about forty miles inland from the shore, and it tracked the coast like a contour line on a map.³
Sumner noticed that around this transition zone, the soil also changed color. Inland, the soil was loamy and dark, filled with organic detritus from decaying vegetation. Near the shore, soils were sandy and white—in some cases mice lived on dunes of bleached sand so bright they resembled giant mounds of sugar. Ninety years later, Lynne Mullen and Hopi Hoekstra, biologists at Harvard University, retraced Sumner’s steps and sampled the populations again. A thousand mouse generations separated the two samples, but the pattern held. Soil color changed abruptly from brown to white, and mice matched this transition with a shift in fur color.⁴ Brown mice lived inland, and white mice lived on the beaches.
In all other respects, inland and beach mice are similar. They make the same kind of burrows, for example. They cut in at an angle, leveling off into a horizontal nest chamber about a foot below ground. Many of them also make an escape hatch
—a vertical tube that extends from the nest chamber straight up, stopping just an inch below the surface.⁵ If a snake or weasel pokes into their burrow entrance, they can explode
through the thin soil capping this shaft to escape. Inland and beach mice eat the same foods, including insects, seeds, and the occasional berry or spider. By all metrics except color, these mice are the same. So why are the coastal mice white and inland mice brown?
This was the question Donald Kaufman sought to answer with his gladiatoresque doctoral dissertation experiment that November back in 1969. Over and over, night after night, he released dark mice and white mice into cages side by side. Each time the owl snatched one of the mice, Kaufman recorded which one died, and which survived. He showed that both soil color and mouse color mattered. When the mice dashed across dark soil, the white mouse was most often taken. When the soil was pale, the pattern was reversed. Owls snatched the darker mouse. There were additional nuances to the owls’ behavior. For example, on the darkest nights the pale mice fared especially poorly on the dark soil. Their white fur contrasted starkly with the blackness of their surroundings. On the other hand, bright, moonlit nights and light soils made the dark mice stand out most sharply. Mouse survival depended to some extent on ambient moonlight and local conditions but, overall, the pattern was clear: mice whose fur color contrasted with their backgrounds got eaten.⁶
Hopi Hoekstra and her colleagues completed this story by tracking down the genes, and even the particular mutations to these genes, responsible for fur color in mice.⁷ Once Hoekstra’s team knew the molecular machinery responsible for genetic variation in mouse color, they could reconstruct precisely how mice evolved in response to recent changes in the direction of natural selection. Most oldfield mice are brown, and this color is favored by selection across the majority of fields inhabited by this species. At some point in the past—possibly as recently as a few thousand years ago—mice spread into open areas along both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, where they dug their burrows into sand dunes and grassy embankments. Beach mice now raced across a vastly different background than their inland ancestors, and in these new environs dark mice got plucked from the sand.
By chance, some of the beach mice carried in their DNA new mutations to one or both of two genes involved in the production of dark pigments. Mice inheriting these mutations carried copies of the pigment-influencing genes that were just a little bit different from the copies carried by other mice (alternative versions of a gene are known as alleles), and as a result they developed with lighter fur. Mice bearing the new alleles survived better than mice inheriting the ancestral versions of the genes, and these survivors populated the beaches with their pups. Over time, mice with the new alleles increased in frequency, while those with the original alleles disappeared, and the result was an evolutionary shift from dark to