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It was a prolific year for scientists who study strange and unusual animal behavior.
Here are 12 weird and amazing things animals were seen doing, some of which have never been seen before.
1. A primate was spotted picking its nose for the first time
Kali, an aye-aye living at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina, shocked scientists when they caught her picking her nose and eating her snot on camera.
It was the first time that this primate was seen to have the behavior that most people associate with humans. On the same subject : Opinion | Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem.
Kali inspired scientists to investigate whether other primates would pick their noses. It turned out that at least 12 primate species had been reported to do so, a review published in the Journal of Zoology in October found.
Study author Anne-Claire Fabre of the University of Bern told the BBC at the time that this behavior is really understudied.
“There is very little evidence as to why we, and other animals, pick our noses. Almost every paper you can find was written as a joke,” he said in a press release.
2. Orcas were seen ripping out a shark’s liver with surgical precision
Rare footage showed killer whales killing a great white shark by tearing out its liver, leaving the rest of the shark’s body behind. On the same subject : Data Science vs. Decision Science: What’s the Difference?.
Scientists, who noticed dead great white sharks washing ashore, captured the behavior with drones in South Africa’s Mossel Bay.
They attribute the kill to two male killer whales hunting in Mossel Bay, nicknamed Port and Starboard.
Killer whales are known to be strategic killers and expend as little energy as possible to get the best reward, according to Michael Weiss, director of research at the Center for Whale Research.
“Shark livers are extremely fatty, so there are a lot of calories,” Weiss said.
Port and Starboard attacks have been so effective that great white sharks have learned to avoid Mossel Bay, completely changing the local food chain, according to a study accompanying the image.
“The ability of two animals to reshape an ecosystem is absolutely fascinating,” Weiss said.
3. Orcas tipped a seal off of floating ice using a killer wave
Orcas created a deadly wave as part of a coordinated attack on a seal. This may interest you : The biggest discoveries in computing in 2022.
Swimming side by side close to the surface, the whales created a wave that knocked the seal off its block of ice.
The footage, captured by the BBC documentary “Frozen Planet II,” is a rare example of a “crashing wave,” which has been seen in fewer than 100 whales, according to the documentary.
4. A dolphin swallowed 8 venomous sea snakes
A team of researchers secured GoPro cameras to two Navy-trained bottlenose dolphins as they roamed the waters off the coast of San Diego. The scientists wanted to see them do what they do best: catch fish.
But one of the dolphins opted for a riskier diet of venomous sea snakes.
Cameras caught her eating eight yellow-bellied sea snakes one day. Before this study, published in the journal PLOS ONE in August, there was no documentation of dolphins eating sea snakes, just playing with them and releasing them.
Ingesting poisonous snakes can be dangerous, but the dolphin seems to enjoy it. In one video, he then catches a snake and swims with it for a while, moving his head repeatedly to swallow the prey. It then emits a high-pitched “victory squeal,” according to the study.
5. A salamander went ‘skydiving’ from the top of a redwood tree
The Wandering Salamander, seen assuming a “skydiving” position. Christian
Aneides vagrans, also called the wandering salamander, lives atop California’s monumental redwoods, nestled in the lush treetops.
So scientists were amazed to see that when startled, the slender animal would launch itself from the 200-foot-tall giants.
It turns out that these salamanders can glide through the air, which was completely unexpected, study author Christian Brown, a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida, told Insider at the time.
Their long, narrow bodies don’t look particularly aerodynamic. Unlike their distant cousins, the sliding leaf frog and the flying gecko, they have no flaps of skin or webbing to help them glide.
By adopting a parachute-like stance, as seen in the video below, the salamanders could adjust their trajectory to drop down the tree trunk, safely escaping their predators:
The findings were published in May in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology.
6. Humpback whales went on a 3,700-mile booty call
One male’s journey from Mexico to Hawaii to find a mate. Google maps/Insider.
Scientists tracking humpback whales were surprised to find out how far the males would travel to mate.
Scientists analyzed a database of more than 450,000 images of whales in the wild to track them down. They found that some would swim thousands of kilometers during the mating season.
Two males were seen at two popular mating sites, one on the west coast of Mexico and one near Hawaii, less than two months apart. That’s a distance of about 3,700 miles.
The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Biology Letters in February.
7. Bees were less interested by flowers sprayed with fertilizers
A bumblebee searching for flowers to pollinate. Robert Pickett/Getty Images/Insider
Like us, bees are attracted to certain smells and colors of flowers. But they also rely on another factor to decide which plant to pollinate: electricity.
As bees fly through the air, their bodies become positively charged. Flowers, on the other hand, can be negatively charged, especially if they haven’t been pollinated in a while. When bees fly over plants, the hairs on their tiny bodies sense the flower’s electric field like a magnet.
But a new study suggests that fertilizers being sprayed on flowers may interfere with this fine-tuned system.
The mechanical action of spraying the fertilizers on the plants and the chemicals themselves appear to change the electric field around the flowers, making them unattractive to bees.
It’s not yet clear exactly what’s happening, but it appears that flowers almost become “too bright” for bees after they’re fertilized, study author and biophysicist Ellard Hunting told Insider at the time. of Bristol.
The results were published in November in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS Nexus.
8. ‘Look mom!’ A chimpanzee showed her mother a cool leaf just like a human child
The researchers saw a chimpanzee showing its mother a leaf, apparently just for the sake of seeing it. This may seem unremarkable: humans show themselves objects just to look at them all the time, but scientists previously thought that apes only pointed to things for a clear, practical purpose.
“He doesn’t offer it for food. He doesn’t want his mother to do anything. He just wants them to look at it together and say, ‘Oh, great, beautiful!'” Katie Slocombe of York University, a co-author of the study, he told The Guardian.
When the mother chimpanzee ignored the blade and lowered her eyes, the daughter threw it back at her face. When his mother finally looked at the blade, the younger ape finally withdrew it.
The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS in October.
9. Dolphins in the Black Sea stranded themselves more often than before, likely because of the Ukraine war
There has been an “unusual increase” in strandings and bycatch of dolphins in the Black Sea since the Ukraine war began, Insider’s Kelsey Vlamis previously reported.
More than 700 dolphin and porpoise deaths have been recorded in Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine, countries bordering the sea, in the spring and summer of 2022, according to a report by the Cetacean Conservation Agreement Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area (ACCOBAMS).
Erich Hoyt, a researcher with the UK-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation who consulted with the ACCOBAMS scientists, told Insider that the deaths are likely due to loud noises disrupting the dolphins’ daily activities.
“Dolphins and porpoises rely on sound to navigate, find their food and communicate with each other,” he said.
10. Rats bopped their heads to the beat of Lady Gaga
Scientists discovered that rats can lift their heads in time to music, just like humans can.
In a study published in November in the journal Science Advances, researchers at the University of Tokyo fitted 10 rats with miniature accelerometers that could detect the slightest head movements.
One-minute snippets of the songs, including Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and a Mozart piano sonata, were played at four different speeds. About twenty people also listened through headphones with accelerometers.
“Rats show innate, that is, without any prior training or exposure to music, rhythm synchronization is clearest between 120 and 140 bpm, at which humans also exhibit clearest rhythm synchronization,” the Professor Hirokazu Takahashi of the University of Tokyo, lead author of the work. study, he said in a press release.
11. Cool-headed raccoons were more likely to get into your trash
Raccoons are loved and lamented for rummaging through the city’s trash. Now researchers say one quality has allowed certain raccoons to thrive in cities: how calmly they respond to new situations.
In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in September, researchers from Laramie, Wyoming, explored how adaptable these mischievous mammals are by luring them with pet food in different scenarios.
Scientists believe that the ability to solve problems in novel situations, using reason and thought, is especially important for urban wildlife, the lead author said in a news release.
12. Monkeys in Indonesia seemed to use stones as a sex toys
Indonesian long-tailed macaques were seen possibly feasting on stones.
The researchers saw the monkeys rubbing or touching stones around their genitalia and were curious to see if this was sexual behavior, Insider’s Vlamis reported.
They found that the behavior was often closely followed by sexual physiological responses, such as an erection.
That means the monkeys appeared to be performing “a form of self-directed, tool-assisted masturbation,” Camilla Cenni, a doctoral student at the University of Lethbridge in Canada and an author of the study, told The New York Times.
The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethology in August.
Although animals have often been spotted with tools, they are usually used to give the animal a clear survival advantage.
There is much less research on tool use for sexual pleasure, which “may not be really adaptive or useful,” Cenni said.
