How Do Animals Know When To Hatch

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How do animals recognise their progeny? Are they conscious that they reproduce? Male lions kill the cubs of other males, simply not their own, notwithstanding cuckoos get abroad with it. How?

Garry Trethewey Cherryville, South Australia

Some animals, like many fish and reptiles, don't recognise their offspring at all, eating them or later mating with them. Only even amidst those that appear to recognise their offspring, I doubtable that what they recognise is recent proximity – an babe that they were caring for lately, for case.

And so there is the result of the mechanism of recognition. Does this happen past olfactory property, sound, sight or in some other way? Exceptions to the rule are illustrative. If a lamb dies, and the female parent of another lamb dies, a farmer can go the ewe to adopt the orphan by skinning the dead lamb and tying the skin around the alive one. Information technology appears that the mother then smells her own lamb and allows suckling. It looks tentative at first. She appears to be thinking: "Are you really my baby?" Simply after the first feed, she seems to bail with information technology.

When it comes to male person lions killing the cubs of other males, but non their ain, I am inclined to say that a male lion doesn't actually recognise his ain or another cub. What drives him is the time since acquisition of a new harem. If he has recently moved in, he will tend to kill any cubs, but subsequently a while, he won't kill new cubs.

Researchers have studied how we humans recognise our offspring, specially with regard to incest avoidance. Nosotros really don't recognise genetic relationships. Information technology turns out that if two adults lived in close proximity as children, then sexual attraction is diminished. Unrelated children brought up together in collective communities such every bit kibbutzes later tend to seek sexual partners outside that grouping, for instance.

And so how do cuckoos get away with leaving other birds to enhance their young? Cuckoo chicks do all the things that their adoptive parents recognise: their open beaks are the right shape and colour, and they make the correct sounds. And, of course, they are sitting in the right nest.

What does this tell us almost whether animals are witting that they reproduce? It is reasonable to say that animals live in the "at present". Some mating act from a month or more ago is forgotten. A baby has arrived? Feed it. Y'all fed it yesterday, so keep feeding it.

From a slightly more than philosophical bending, we don't need to be conscious of something, or even to recognise it, for it to change our behaviour. When I am hungry, my behaviour changes, fifty-fifty if I am not witting of the feeling and don't "recognise" that I am hungry.

Mike Follows Sutton Coldfield, W Midlands, UK

Most mammals use smell to recognise their young, whereas birds tend to use sound. Other factors tin can besides play a office, including location and timing.

Males of some species – notably big cats – will kill their mates' young if they are born too shortly afterward they arrived on the scene. Female panthers and primates can go into pseudo-estrus (false heat) so that a new male volition mate with them, hoodwinking him into believing that he is the father when the offspring are born.

Odor is much less important for recognition among birds, which makes it easier for the common cuckoo to trick other bird species into raising their immature. The colour of the cuckoo egg matches that of the host bird, but why doesn't the host bird refuse the cuckoo chick? Information technology seems that the parents imprint on, or bail with, any hatchling that appears in their nest.

"The parents tin't recognise their chick past sight, sound or smell, so it is doomed if it falls from the nest and can't get back in"

Indeed, the gray-headed albatross relies on the fact that its chick is in the nest. The parents can't recognise their hatchling by sight, sound or smell, and then a chick is doomed if it falls out of the nest and can't climb back in.

Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel laureate famous for studying bird behaviour, observed that greylag goose goslings imprint on the first moving stimulus that looks a bit like a bird. Incubator-hatched geese would imprint on his boots and follow him.

This strategy is fine when the parent is leading its young to food, but it wouldn't work for birds like penguins, where i parent has to leave to fodder for food. In this case, sound is more important for recognition – penguins can discern the call of family members confronting the background din of a colony.

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