分类目录归档：animal
[Why don't we eat bugs?]
For centuries, people have consumed bugs,
everything from beetles
to caterpillars, locusts,
grasshoppers, termites, and dragonflies.
The practice even has a name:
entomophagy.
There is an environmental mystery afoot,
and it begins with a seemingly trivial detail
that reveals a disaster of global proportions.
One day, you notice that the honey you slather on your morning toa
Almost 2000 years ago,
the Roman philosopher Seneca peered at his book through a glass of water.
Suddenly, the text below was transformed.
The words magically became clear.
But it wasn't until a mill
To human eyes, the world at night is a formless canvas of grey.
Many nocturnal animals, on the other hand,
experience a rich and varied world bursting with details, shapes, and colors.
What is it, the
Humans know the surprising prick of a needle,
the searing pain of a stubbed toe,
and the throbbing of a toothache.
We can identify many types of pain and have multiple ways of treating it.
But what ab
For the microscopic lab worm, C. elegans
life equates to just a few short weeks on Earth.
Compare that with the tortoise, which can age to more than 100 years.
Mice and rats reach the end of their li
In order to become a butterfly,
a caterpillar’s body dissolves almost completely
and is rebuilt from its own juices.
As inconvenient and even downright dangerous as this process sounds,
it’s actuall
A male firefly glows above a field on a summer’s night,
emitting a series of enticing flashes.
He hopes a nearby female will respond with her own lightshow
and mate with him.
Sadly for this male,
it
This is Mabel.
Mabel is an aphid, a small insect in the same order as cicadas, stink bugs,
and bed bugs.
All these bugs pierce their prey and suck out vital fluids.
Aphids’ prey are plants.
And what
A cat’s bladder can only store a golf ball’s worth of urine.
For humans, it’s a coffee mug and for elephants, a kitchen trash can.
An elephant’s bladder is 400 times the size of a cat’s,
but it doe