Igor akimushkin - whims of nature. Igor Akimushkin: Oddities of nature

On May 23, in the Central Children's Library for students of grade 3 "b" of MBOU secondary school No. 16, a game-journey "Nature is a miracle worker" was held.
Purpose: to introduce the work of I. Akimushkin; emphasize the style of the writer.
Tasks: to form cognitive interest among schoolchildren;
to develop creative activity, ingenuity, curiosity, horizons,
develop an interest in reading.
I. Akimushkin reveals to readers the magnificent world of animals and teaches them to perceive its diversity.
One of his first books - "Primates of the Sea" (1963) - will be devoted specifically to cephalopods - one of the most intelligent creatures among invertebrates. Igor Akimushkin is the author of 96 science fiction, popular science and children's works about animals.
For kids, Igor Ivanovich wrote a number of books, using techniques that are typical for fairy tales and travel. These are: “Once upon a time there was a squirrel”, “Once upon a time there was a beaver”, “Once upon a time there was a hedgehog”, “Animals-builders”, “Who flies without wings?”, “Different animals”, “How does a rabbit look like a hare” and etc.
"The World of Animals" is the most famous work of Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin, which has withstood several reprints. They summarize a huge scientific material, use a more modern classification scheme for the animal world, a lot of various facts from the life of animals, birds, fish, insects and reptiles, beautiful illustrations, photographs, funny stories and legends, cases from life and notes of an observer-naturalist.
For teenagers, Akimushkin wrote books of a more complex genre - encyclopedic: "Animals of the River and Sea", "Entertaining Biology", "The Vanished World", "The Tragedy of Wild Animals", etc. "Traces of Unseen Beasts" and "Trail of Legends" were among from the first books on cryptozoology (the field of finding animals considered legendary or non-existent).
Without exaggeration, Igor Akimushkin can be called a worthy successor to the traditions of not only such well-known naturalist writers as M.M. Prishvin, G.M. Skrebitsky, V.V. Bianchi, B. Grzimek, D. Darrell, but also such a serious scientist who wrote the famous book "Animal Life" - A. Brema.
Akimushkin's work surprisingly combines scientific research with a fascinating artistic narrative, a great love for animals with the interest of a research scientist, knowledge of the psychology and interests of children with the direct curiosity of a child.
The students were shown a slide show (according to Akimushkin's stories), a game was played, which consisted of several contests: “guess riddles”, “animals”, “guess an animal by describing its tail”, “an unseen animal”, “where, who lives? ".
The teams showed their erudition, ingenuity, imagination, artistic abilities.

Genre: collection of short stories

The main characters of the story "Nature is a miracle worker" and their characteristics

1. Various animals: tarantula, toucan, anaconda, cuttlefish, hammerhead fish, kvass, burdock, muzzle, porcupine.

1. tarantula spider
2. toucan nose
3. strong anaconda
4. Cuttlefish ink
5. Hammerhead head
6. home for tadpoles
7. Traveler
8. Thermal imager
9. shooter with needles

1. Amazing animals live in the vastness of our planet.
2. This is a spider that can eat a bird, and a toucan with a huge nose.
3. This is an anaconda, as tall as four elephants, and a cuttlefish that bleeds ink.
4. This is a hammerhead fish, whose eyes are two meters apart.
5. This is kvasha, which builds a house for tadpoles, and a burdock flying to Africa.
6. This is the cottonmouth, which sees heat, and the porcupine, which shoots quills.

What does the story "Nature is a miracle" teach
The story teaches to love nature, to be interested in nature, animals, their features, and way of life.

Feedback on the story "Nature is a miracle"
I really enjoyed this colorful book. It contains stories about animals, which in themselves are miracles. They have unusual abilities, and can surprise anyone. I myself wanted to see some of these animals.

Proverbs for the story "Nature is a miracle"
Live in the world, see miracles.
The more you live in the world, the more you will see.
Sometimes a hen crows like a rooster.
The hedgehog has grown ten times, it turned out to be a porcupine.
The best snake is still a snake.

Spider-tarantula.

This spider can even hunt birds. It is huge in size, about 20 centimeters, hairy and poisonous. Fortunately for us, lives in the tropics.
During the day, the spider hides under the roots, and at night it comes out to hunt. He does not weave cobwebs, but runs along forest paths and catches insects, lizards, and frogs.
This is the largest spider in the world.

Toucan.

A bird from South America surprises us with its nose. Its beak can be longer than the bird itself, and painted in the brightest colors - orange, red, green, black.
The toucan feeds exclusively on nuts and fruits.

Anaconda.

This is the largest snake on the planet. In length - as four elephants. The anaconda lives in the water and even attacks crocodiles. There is no beast in South America stronger than the anaconda.

Cuttlefish.

This marine life swims head back. She has ten tentacles on her head, and between them is a beak, like a parrot.
The cuttlefish can release ink, a special liquid that camouflages the mollusk when threatened. It is not easy to catch this relative of octopuses and snails.

hammerhead fish

This amazing shark wears a hammer on its head, and its eyes are located on opposite sides of the hammer, two meters apart. Despite this, hammerhead swims excellently, and it is very easy to catch fish.
This wonderful shark lives in tropical seas.

Kvasha the blacksmith.

This amazing frog croaks like it's hitting iron with a hammer. And he builds houses for his tadpoles, though without windows, without doors. Kvasha sculpts a round wall of clay and silt in shallow water. Inside the pool, outside there are predators that cannot reach the tadpoles through the wall. And the kids grow up in such a house in complete safety.

Painted lady.

The burdock butterfly seems inconspicuous to us, invisible among others. It flutters from flower to flower, and looking at it you will never think that the burdock leaves for the winter thousands of kilometers away, to Africa. What a traveler!

Cotton muzzle.

An amazing snake can be found in our steppes. She can see heat, and finds prey without using sight or hearing.
Special dimples under the eyes capture heat rays. Like a night vision device.

Porcupine.

In the very south of Russia lives a porcupine, a rodent overgrown with needles. The needles are long, up to half a meter long. A leopard will attack a porcupine, put out needles, injure a predator's paw, and can remain a cripple for life.
They say about the porcupine that he can shoot needles, but scientists did not believe in this. Until you are convinced. Once in the zoo, a porcupine got angry at the guard, shook its quills, and some came off and flew away. They stuck into a wooden fence. Do not anger the porcupine in vain!

Drawings and illustrations for the story "Nature is a miracle worker"

Igor Akimushkin

Whims of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva
Reviewer Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor V. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

A man at the dawn of his history built several buildings unusual for those times and arrogantly called them "seven wonders of the world." Neither more nor less - "light"! As if there is nothing in the Universe more amazing and magnificent than these buildings of his.

Years passed. Man-made miracles collapsed one after another, and all around… Great and wordless Nature raged around. She was silent, unable to tell the conceited man that the miracles she created were not seven or seventy-seven, but hundreds, thousands of times more. Nature seemed to be waiting for him to guess everything himself.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

What, for example, are the Egyptian pyramids compared to the palaces built by African termites? The height of the pyramid of Cheops is 84 times the height of a person. And the vertical dimensions of termite mounds exceed the body length of their inhabitants by more than 600 times! That is, these structures are at least “more wonderful” than the only human miracle that has survived to this day!

There are, one might say, one and a half million species of animals and half a million species of plants on Earth. And each view is wonderful, amazing, amazing, amazing, stunning, marvelous, fantastic in its own way ... How many more epithets are needed to make it more convincing ?!

Every species without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in the Herostratian way, or to nullify one or another view. The human miracle can be rebuilt. The destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. And the biological species "reasonable man" is obliged to remember this and only then will it justify its species name.

However, enough assurances. In the book offered to the reader there is a lot of evidence of the wonderful uniqueness of all kinds of animals. In it, I tried to combine these uniquenesses, bring them together and connect them with zoogeographic regions - habitats of rare animals. He also spoke about that living and amazing thing, which, through the fault of man, is threatened with death.

And this amazing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of a species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations, or, conversely, a rare attachment to a chosen habitat (as, for example, in musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing speed of running (cheetah), or interesting vicissitudes of discovering and studying an animal (giant panda). In a word, by "unusual" I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was chosen.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

The fact that Nature is capable of arousing interest even among people who are far from her professions, I was once again convinced while working on the book. Having become acquainted with the manuscript, which has not yet been completed, my journalist friend Oleg Nazarov himself became so carried away that we have already written some chapters on the unusual animals of South America and Australia together. For which I express my sincere gratitude to him.

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ocean was at ease. Continents did not cut through its boundless expanses. The land in a single array towered above the salty waters. Scientists have named this as yet hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagea). In it, all modern continents were “soldered” into one common land route. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until the time of 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana - a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana also broke up: South America rushed, separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected with Australia - to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still constituted a single continent. Such was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Both Americas will move even more to the west, Africa and especially Australia - to the northeast, India - to the east. The position of Antarctica will remain unchanged.

“Continents don't stay still, they move. It is astonishing that such a movement was first proposed about 350 years ago and has been put forward several times since then, but this idea was accepted by scientists only after 1900. Most people believed that the rigidity of the crust precluded the movement of the continents. Now we all know it's not."

(Richard Foster Flint, Professor at Yale University, USA)

For the first time, the most substantiated evidence of continental drift appeared in the book The Origin of Continents and Oceans by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. The book was published in 1913 and went through five editions in the next twenty years. In it, A. Wegener outlined his now famous migration hypothesis, which later, significantly supplemented, also received the names of the theory of displacement, mobilism, continental drift and global plate tectonics.

There are few scientific hypotheses that have been so much debated and so often resorted to for help by specialists in other sciences, trying to explain the annoying inconsistencies in their research. At first, geologists and geophysicists were almost unanimous in their opposition to Wegener. Now the picture is different: it has found recognition among many researchers. The main provisions of his hypothesis, modernized and supplemented, are used in the construction of the latest, more advanced geotectonic theories.

But justice requires to say that even today there are still scientists who confidently reject the possibility of migration of continents.

If we accept the position: Pangea is once a former reality, then we can draw the following conclusion, which follows from this fact: in those days, presumably, zoogeography would have been simple. For movement and distribution to all ends of a single landmass, animals did not know significant barriers. Seas and oceans, insurmountable for terrestrial creatures (not able to fly), did not separate the continents, as they do now.

Current page: 1 (total book has 20 pages)

Igor Akimushkin
Whims of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva

Reviewer Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor V. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

A man at the dawn of his history built several buildings unusual for those times and arrogantly called them "seven wonders of the world." Neither more nor less - "light"! As if there is nothing in the Universe more amazing and magnificent than these buildings of his.

Years passed. Man-made miracles collapsed one after another, and all around… Great and wordless Nature raged around. She was silent, unable to tell the conceited man that the miracles she created were not seven or seventy-seven, but hundreds, thousands of times more. Nature seemed to be waiting for him to guess everything himself.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

What, for example, are the Egyptian pyramids compared to the palaces built by African termites? The height of the pyramid of Cheops is 84 times the height of a person. And the vertical dimensions of termite mounds exceed the body length of their inhabitants by more than 600 times! That is, these structures are at least “more wonderful” than the only human miracle that has survived to this day!

There are, one might say, one and a half million species of animals and half a million species of plants on Earth. And each view is wonderful, amazing, amazing, amazing, stunning, marvelous, fantastic in its own way ... How many more epithets are needed to make it more convincing ?!

Every species without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in the Herostratian way or to nullify one or another view. The human miracle can be rebuilt. The destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. And the biological species "reasonable man" is obliged to remember this and only then will it justify its species name.

However, enough assurances. In the book offered to the reader there is a lot of evidence of the wonderful uniqueness of all kinds of animals. In it, I tried to combine these uniquenesses, bring them together and connect them with zoogeographic regions - habitats of rare animals. He also spoke about that living and amazing thing, which, through the fault of man, is threatened with death.

And this amazing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of a species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations, or, conversely, a rare attachment to a chosen habitat (as, for example, in musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing speed of running (cheetah), or interesting vicissitudes of discovering and studying an animal (giant panda). In a word, by "unusual" I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was chosen.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

The fact that Nature is capable of arousing interest even among people who are far from her professions, I was once again convinced while working on the book. Having become acquainted with the manuscript, which has not yet been completed, my journalist friend Oleg Nazarov himself became so carried away that we have already written some chapters on the unusual animals of South America and Australia together. For which I express my sincere gratitude to him.

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ocean was at ease. Continents did not cut through its boundless expanses. The land in a single array towered above the salty waters. Scientists have named this as yet hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagea). In it, all modern continents were “soldered” into one common land route. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until the time of 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana, a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana also broke up: South America rushed, separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected to Australia - to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still constituted a single continent. Such was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Both Americas will move even more to the west, Africa and especially Australia to the northeast, India to the east. The position of Antarctica will remain unchanged.

“Continents don't stay still, they move. It is astonishing that such a movement was first proposed about 350 years ago and has been put forward several times since then, but this idea was accepted by scientists only after 1900. Most people believed that the rigidity of the crust precluded the movement of the continents. Now we all know it's not."

(Richard Foster Flint, Professor at Yale University, USA)

For the first time, the most substantiated evidence of continental drift appeared in the book The Origin of Continents and Oceans by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. The book was published in 1913 and went through five editions in the next twenty years. In it, A. Wegener outlined his now famous migration hypothesis, which later, significantly supplemented, also received the names of the theory of displacement, mobilism, continental drift and global plate tectonics.

There are few scientific hypotheses that have been so much debated and so often resorted to for help by specialists in other sciences, trying to explain the annoying inconsistencies in their research. At first, geologists and geophysicists were almost unanimous in their opposition to Wegener. Now the picture is different: it has found recognition among many researchers. The main provisions of his hypothesis, modernized and supplemented, are used in the construction of the latest, more advanced geotectonic theories.

But justice requires to say that even today there are still scientists who confidently reject the possibility of migration of continents.

If we accept the position: Pangea is once a former reality, then we can draw the following conclusion, which follows from this fact: in those days, presumably, zoogeography would have been simple. For movement and distribution to all ends of a single landmass, animals did not know significant barriers. Seas and oceans, insurmountable for terrestrial creatures (not able to fly), did not separate the continents, as they do now.

Now Pangea has broken up into continents. And each of them bears its own faunal imprint. According to him, the entire space of the Earth is divided by scientists into different zoogeographic regions and kingdoms.

The latter are three: Notogea, Neogea and Arctogea (or Megagea).

The distribution of vertebrates, mainly mammals, is the basis of this subdivision. Oviparous and marsupial animals live in Notogea. Oviparous do not live in Neogea, but there are still many marsupials. The kingdom of Arctogeus covers such countries of the world in which there are no oviparous and marsupials, but only placental mammals.

In Notogea and Neogea, there is only one zoogeographic region each - Australian and Neotropical, respectively. There are four of them in Arktogey: Holarctic, Ethiopian, Indo-Malayan (or Eastern) and Antarctic.

The location of the latter is clear from the name.

The Holarctic region, on the other hand, occupies an area as vast as any other. It includes all of North America, all of Europe, most of Asia (south to India and Indochina), as well as North Africa to the borders of the Sahara with savannahs.

The Ethiopian region extends south of the Holarctic domain in North Africa. It occupies all of Africa from this point, including Madagascar and the extreme south of Arabia, as well as the nearby islands.

The Indo-Malayan region is India, Indochina, the southeastern coastal strip of China (with Taiwan), then the Philippines, the Indonesian archipelago to the Moluccas in the east. These islands, as well as New Guinea, New Zealand, the Hawaiian and Polynesian Islands, are part of the Australian region.

The Neotropical zoogeographic region has remained with us within the borders that have not yet been designated. Its position on the world map is defined in a nutshell: South and Central America (with the Antilles).

The story about the whims of nature will be built in accordance with this regional division of space, where land animals (and fresh waters) live. In the section “Oddities in the nature of the northern latitudes”, unusual and endangered animals of the Holarctic zoogeographic region are described. In the chapter "South of the Sahara" - Ethiopian. The title of the section "Indo-Malay Wonders" speaks for itself. “On the Southern Continent of the New World” means in the Neotropical zoogeographical region, and “Weirds on the Fifth Continent” are Australian curiosities.

1. Oddities of the nature of northern latitudes

Unusual in the ordinary

Caterpillars of the pine walking silkworm march in a closed column in search of food. Each caterpillar follows the previous one, touching it with its hairs. Caterpillars release thin cobwebs that serve as a guiding thread for comrades walking behind. The head caterpillar leads the entire hungry army to new "pastures" on the tops of pines.

The famous French naturalist Jean Fabre brought the head of the leading caterpillar closer to the "tail" of the last one in the column. She grabbed the guiding thread and immediately turned from a "commander" into an "ordinary soldier" - she followed the caterpillar, which she was now holding on to. The head and tail of the column closed, and the caterpillars began to circle aimlessly in one place - they walked along the edge of a large vase. Instinct was powerless to get them out of this ridiculous situation. Feed was placed nearby, but the caterpillars paid no attention to it.

An hour passed, another, a day passed, and the caterpillars kept spinning and spinning, as if enchanted. They've been circling for a whole week! Then the column broke up: the caterpillars were so exhausted that they could no longer move on.

Many saw dung beetles, but not everyone caught them at work. They mold balls from manure and roll them with their hind legs: in front of the ball, behind it is a beetle in reverse!

Balls of low-grade, so to speak, manure go to feed the beetle itself. He will bury such a ball in a mink, climb into it and sit for several days until he eats the whole ball.

For feeding children, that is, larvae, the best manure is selected, preferably sheep. Beetles often fight for him, steal other people's balls. He who has defended his property (or who has taken it away from a neighbor) quickly rolls a ball of dung. The beetle has amazing strength: it weighs two grams, and the ball weighs up to forty grams.

The English scientist R. W. Hingston, a researcher of the oddities of instinct, tested the mental abilities of dung beetles in this way: between a mink and a beetle that rolled its ball towards it, he placed a piece of thick paper that protruded only two centimeters beyond the entrance to the mink. Beetles (Hingston did this experiment with many dung beetles) ran into an obstacle and tried to break through it. None of them thought to bypass the paper sheet. They went ahead, trying to break through the barrier. For three days, unsuccessfully, with all their might, they pressed on the paper. On the fourth day, many left their balls, despairing of making their way to the mink in a direct way. But some continued this useless business in the following days.

Oh well, bugs, maybe you stupid animals decide. But the activity of single wasps requires a remarkable "mind". They prey on various insects (many also spiders). With a prick of a sting, the victim is paralyzed and carried to the mink. Prey is buried in it, having previously laid the testicles on the body of a “canned” insect or spider. And with these skillful "surgeons" R. W. Hingston did the simplest experiment that convinces us of the blindness of instinct.

From the dungeon in which the wasp laid the victim with the testicle, he retrieved both the prey and the hornet's egg. And the wasp was just about to close the hole. Well, did she notice that the hole was empty? No, as if nothing had happened, she covered the empty mink with earth. One of the wasps in this experiment, "sealing" her pantry, even in the confusion stepped on the prey she brought, taken from the mink, but did not pay any attention to it and continued calmly filling the mink, although now this act of hers was completely meaningless.

Mason wasps usually build their nests in trees and camouflage them so skillfully in the tone of the bark that it is difficult to notice the nest. But sometimes they build their dwellings in houses, say, on the polished facing of the fireplace or somewhere else on the wooden decoration of the room. In this case, their usual disguise will only be harmful, since it is not painted at all to match the polished wood. Will the wasps be able to abandon their usual camouflage? No. Obeying instinct, not reason, traditional camouflage is introduced, which in this case makes the nest very noticeable.

Dromia crabs also have camouflage in custom. They wear "camouflage robes" throughout their adult lives. Some cover themselves from above with a shell shell picked up at the bottom of the sea, others adorn their backs with a sponge. There are also those who deftly cut out branches of algae or hydroid polyps with their claws, hoist them on themselves, holding them with their hind legs, and immediately there was a crab - there was a bush!

In the aquarium, if there are no algae or polyps, they collect all kinds of rubbish and also put it on their backs. And let's put colored shreds in the aquarium, let's say even red ones, the crab will pick them up and decorate them with them from above. It turns out unmasking, but the crab does not know this.

Many birds are easily confused by doing the following: moving the nest aside in their absence. Returning to the nest, the birds look for it in the same place, completely ignoring their own nest, placed just a meter or one and a half meters from its previous position. When the nest is returned to where it stood before the experiment, they will continue to incubate unperturbed. And if there is no reverse movement of the nest, a new one is built.

Birds and eggs do not know well. Eagles, chickens, ducks, for example, can incubate any object shaped like an egg. And swans even try to hatch bottles, seagulls - stones, tennis balls and tin cans, put instead of eggs in the nest.

The eggs in the garden warbler's nest were replaced with the eggs of another songbird, the hawker. After that, the warbler laid another egg. It was not like the other eggs in the nest. Warbler carefully examined the "suspicious" egg and threw it out. She mistook him for someone else!

Yes, birds, a cow, a more perfect creature, cannot always distinguish its newborn child from its rough fake (later a cow will not confuse her calf with anyone!). British zoologist Frank Lane writes about this. The calf was taken away from the cow. She seemed to miss him greatly. To comfort her, a stuffed calf stuffed with hay was placed in the barn. The cow calmed down, began to lick a rough fake. She caressed her with such cow tenderness that the skin on the stuffed animal burst and hay fell out of it. Then the cow calmly began to eat hay and imperceptibly ate the whole "calf".

Rats are considered one of the smartest rodents. How close their "mind" shows the next amusing episode. The white rat was making a nest. Obsessed with construction fever, she scoured the cage in search of suitable material and suddenly stumbled upon her long tail. Immediately the rat grabbed him in the teeth and carried him to the nest. Then she went on a new search, and the tail, of course, crawled after her. The rat once again "found" him and carried him to the nest. Twelve times in a row she brought her own tail to the nest! Whenever the rat bumped into it, instinct would make it grab that twig-like object.

But now, it seems, we have found a rational being in the animal kingdom! In America, there is a small neotome forest rat. Not a single predator dares to poke its nose into its hole: sharp thorns stick out in the walls with sharp points towards the entrance. The rat itself arranges these prickly barriers. It climbs a cactus, gnaws off the thorns, brings them into the hole and sticks them into the walls at the entrance with the points up. Isn't that wisdom!

However, instead of cactus thorns, give the neotome other sharp objects, such as pins or small cloves. They may well replace cactus thorns as a barrage. But it doesn't reach the rat. Her ancestors developed the habit of using only cactus thorns. They didn't have to deal with pins. And the rat itself, without a hint of instinct, does not guess to use them in business.

But then a clever predator appears on the scene - a skunk. The rat takes off running. She instinctively rushes into the hole. But the hole is far away! The rat turns and yurk hides in the prickly thickets of the cactus.

What's the matter? Why did an animal that had just demonstrated a complete inability to think, in a moment of danger, however, manage to choose the most reasonable path to salvation?

The Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was able to explain this apparent discrepancy in the behavior of animals. He established that the actions of higher animals are guided not only by instincts. It turned out that vertebrates and some invertebrates have the ability to remember well the skills acquired as a result of life experience. The rat once, apparently, accidentally escaped from a predator under a thorny bush. She began to continue to seek salvation in the same shelter. The animal, says I.P. Pavlov, has formed a conditioned reflex in the brain - a kind of memory that a thorny bush can serve as a reliable defense against predators.

Conditioned reflexes help animals adapt to constantly changing, new conditions. The memory of experienced successes and failures, stored by the brain, allows the animal to better navigate in a changeable environment.

Along with instinct, learning is an important factor in animal behavior. A classic example of learning is training. The animals that we see in the circus are trained in the method of developing conditioned reflexes in them.

Amazing results can be achieved by training, especially in higher animals.

... A very unusual nanny is now taking care of the paralyzed William Powell - the capuchin monkey Krystle! The psychologist Mary Willard taught her this difficult task for the beast. Training by a special method lasted a year. Then the monkey settled with the patient. How could she help him? It turned out to be a lot: Krystle, on Powell's signals, brought books and other things, turned the lights on and off, opened the doors. Even the player knew how to turn on and put different records on it! And even fed the patient with a spoon!

Mary Willard believes that her experience was a success, and she now continues to work with other capuchins.

A baboon baboon named Ala, trained in this business on one of the farms in South Africa, also became an excellent goat herder.

At first, Ala lived in a pen with goats and became very attached to them. When the goats went to pasture, and she left with them. She guarded, drove away from other people's herds, gathered them into a herd if they dispersed too much, and drove them home in the evening. In general, behaved like the best shepherd dog. Even more! She knew every goat and every kid. One day, she ran home from the pasture screaming. It turned out that two kids had been forgotten to be kicked out of the paddock. And Ala noticed this, although there were eighty goats in the herd!

When the little kids got tired of walking, she took them and carried them, and then gave them to the bleating mother, slipping them under the very udder. If the kid was too small, she lifted him up and supported him while he suckled. Ala never confused the kids - she did not give them to a stranger goat, not a mother. If triplets were born and the goat was taken away to be placed with a goat with one suckling, Ala disposed of in her own way and again returned him to his mother. She even made sure that the milk of the goats did not burn out, if the kid did not suck everything. Feeling the swollen udder, she sucked milk herself. Such a high responsibility in the performance of the work entrusted to them was noticed in other monkeys. Some chimpanzees, if the task set before them was beyond their strength, even suffered from nervous breakdowns, falling into a deep depression.

Animal education includes not only human training, but also the teaching of small children by adult wild animals. This has been observed, in particular, in monkeys. Orangutans, for example.

In zoos, they saw how an orangutan mother, already on the tenth day after the birth of her baby, began to teach him to cling to his little hands not only for her hair, with which he did not want to part for anything. She tore off his arms and legs and tried to force him to grab the bars of the grate. But even at the age of three months he did not know how to do it properly. Then she changed the method of teaching: she put the child on the floor of the cage, and she climbed higher herself. He screamed, but tried to somehow crawl. Then she went down, gave him a finger, which he immediately grabbed.

They also teach it this way: tearing it away from themselves, they hold the cub in one hand and climb a tree. The kid, trying to find a more stable position, willy-nilly forced to grab everything that is at hand, the branches in the first place.

Imitation is very widespread among wild and domestic animals. Chickens, pigeons, dogs, cows, monkeys, already full for a long time, will eat and eat if their other relatives eat next to them. Even not only relatives: when mock-ups forged as chickens "peck" grain, chickens, heavily overfed, will also peck at it, risking bursting from gluttony.

“Hayes taught his beloved chimpanzee, on the command “Do as I do,” to repeat his grimaces. It turned out that the monkey in this respect does not differ at all from the child of the corresponding age.

(Remy Chauvin)

An interesting thing happened in England: tits engaged in “theft” - they pierced the caps of milk bottles left by milkmen at the doors of their customers with their beaks and ate cream. Obviously, some tits learned this by "trial and error", and all others borrowed science from them, imitating them. Moreover, such theft soon spread from England to the north of France. It is believed that English tits that flew across the English Channel taught the French how to pierce foil corks from milk bottles and feast on cream.

In recent years, the striking behavior of Japanese macaques has become known.

“In the autumn of 1923, a one and a half year old female, which we named Imo, once found a sweet potato (sweet potato) in the sand. She dipped it into the water - probably quite by accident - and washed the sand away with her paws.

(M. Kawai)

So baby Imo started the extraordinary tradition for which the monkeys of Koshima are now famous.

A month later, Imo's friend saw her manipulations with sweet potatoes and water and immediately "mimicked" cultural manners. Four months later, Imo's mother did the same. Gradually, the method discovered by Imo was adopted by sisters and friends, and four years later, 15 monkeys washed sweet potatoes. Almost all of them were between one and three years old. Some adult five to seven year old females have learned the new habit from the young. But none of the males! And not because they were less smart, but simply were in different ranks than the group that surrounded Imo, and therefore had little contact with the smart monkey, her family and friends.

Then the mothers adopted the habit of washing sweet potatoes from their children, and then they themselves taught their younger offspring, born after this method was invented. In 1962, 42 of the 59 monkeys in the flock in which Imo lived washed sweet potatoes before eating. Only old males and females, who in 1953 (the year of invention!) were already old enough and did not communicate with mischievous youth, did not learn the new habit. But young females, having matured, from generation to generation taught their children from the first days of their life to wash sweet potatoes.

“Later, monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes not only in the fresh water of rivers, but also in the sea. Perhaps salted, they tasted better. I have also observed the beginning of another tradition, deliberately teaching it to some monkeys, but others have adopted it without my help. I lured a few monkeys with peanuts into the water, and after three years it became a habit for all the cubs and young monkeys to bathe, swim and even dive in the sea regularly. They also learned to wash wheat grains scattered in the sand in water especially for them. At first, each grain was patiently fished out of the sand. Later, having collected a full handful of sand with grains, they dipped it into the water. The sand sank to the bottom, and light grains floated up. All that remained was to collect the grains from the surface of the water and eat them. By the way, this method was also discovered by Imo. As you can see, monkeys are endowed with abilities in very different ways. Among the closest relatives of the ingenious Imo, almost all have learned this habit, but of the children of the monkey Nami, only a few.

(M. Kawai)

Imitation can even be involuntary. For example, at the first time of the appearance of caterpillars in nature - at the beginning of summer - few birds eat them. But then, as the ethnologist Niko Tinbergen established, every bird that has discovered caterpillars and is convinced of the complete edibility of these butterfly larvae “forces” its spouse to get them too.

The sand wasp ammophila also feeds its larvae with caterpillars. Ammophiles do not live like other wasps in large communities. All alone, one on one, they fight against the vicissitudes of fate.

Ammophila paralyzes the caught caterpillar, inflicting injections into the nerve centers with a sharp sting, then drags its prey into a mink dug in the sand. It lays eggs on the caterpillar's body. The caterpillar is well preserved, and therefore does not deteriorate. Then the wasp fills the hole with sand. Taking a small pebble in her jaws, Ammophila methodically and carefully rams the sand poured over the nest until it is level with the ground, and even the most predatory and experienced look cannot notice the entrance to the mink.

Another ammophila, instead of a stone, takes a piece of wood in its jaw and presses it tightly to the ground, then lifts it and presses it again, and so on several times.

Ammophiles are found both in Europe and in America. But it's strange: the American species are better at using "tools". European ammophiles, apparently, do not all and not always tamp the covered minks with stones.

Sea otters - sea otters - live here on the Commander Islands, and in America - on the Aleutian Islands. Sea otters are good at "tools" - stone, like an anvil. Before setting off for prey, the sea otter selects a stone on the shore or at the bottom of the sea and holds it under his arm. Now he is armed and quickly dives to the bottom. With one paw, he picks up shells and hedgehogs and puts them, as if in a pocket, under his arm, where the stone already lies.

In order not to lose the prey along the way, the sea otter tightly presses its paw to itself and swims rather to the surface of the ocean, where it is taken for a meal. Moreover, the sea otter is not at all in a hurry to the shore to have a bite - he is used to having dinner at sea. He lays down on his back and arranges a "dining table" on his chest - a stone, then takes out one sea urchin and shells from under his arm, smashes them against a stone and eats slowly. The waves gently rock it, the sun warms it up - good!

Tool activity, according to some scientists, is a special form of training. Insight is the sudden appearance of adaptive behavior without preliminary trial and error, the correct solution of a problem that has arisen before an animal in an experiment or in the wild.

It is possible that working with a pebble in ammophiles is not an insight, since all representatives of this species of wasps equally own it. However, the discovery of African vultures - breaking ostrich eggs with a stone - is an obvious insight. It, this skill, does not represent the property of the whole species. One vulture once had an epiphany: desperate to break the shell of the egg of the largest bird in the world with his beak, he brought a stone and threw it on the egg. The egg cracked and revealed its contents to him. This quick-witted vulture continued to act like this in the future. Other birds that saw this apparently borrowed the method invented by their relative. The vultures of more remote areas, for example, Asia, have not yet reached this discovery.

The development of the ability to use a stone among sea otters, obviously, followed the same path.

Insight also represents the astonishing behavior of our blood relatives in the animal kingdom, described below.

The American Institute for the Study of Great Apes once filmed such an episode. The newborn baby chimpanzee was not breathing. Then the mother laid him on the ground, parted his lips and stretched out his tongue with her fingers. Then she pressed her mouth to his mouth and began to inhale air into him. She breathed for a long time, and the cub came to life!

A few years ago, a male orangutan saved the life of his newborn son in the same way.

Igor Akimushkin

Whims of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva
Reviewer Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor V. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

A man at the dawn of his history built several buildings unusual for those times and arrogantly called them "seven wonders of the world." Neither more nor less - "light"! As if there is nothing in the Universe more amazing and magnificent than these buildings of his.

Years passed. Man-made miracles collapsed one after another, and all around… Great and wordless Nature raged around. She was silent, unable to tell the conceited man that the miracles she created were not seven or seventy-seven, but hundreds, thousands of times more. Nature seemed to be waiting for him to guess everything himself.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

What, for example, are the Egyptian pyramids compared to the palaces built by African termites? The height of the pyramid of Cheops is 84 times the height of a person. And the vertical dimensions of termite mounds exceed the body length of their inhabitants by more than 600 times! That is, these structures are at least “more wonderful” than the only human miracle that has survived to this day!

There are, one might say, one and a half million species of animals and half a million species of plants on Earth. And each view is wonderful, amazing, amazing, amazing, stunning, marvelous, fantastic in its own way ... How many more epithets are needed to make it more convincing ?!

Every species without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in the Herostratian way, or to nullify one or another view. The human miracle can be rebuilt. The destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. And the biological species "reasonable man" is obliged to remember this and only then will it justify its species name.

However, enough assurances. In the book offered to the reader there is a lot of evidence of the wonderful uniqueness of all kinds of animals. In it, I tried to combine these uniquenesses, bring them together and connect them with zoogeographic regions - habitats of rare animals. He also spoke about that living and amazing thing, which, through the fault of man, is threatened with death.

And this amazing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of a species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations, or, conversely, a rare attachment to a chosen habitat (as, for example, in musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing speed of running (cheetah), or interesting vicissitudes of discovering and studying an animal (giant panda). In a word, by "unusual" I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was chosen.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

The fact that Nature is capable of arousing interest even among people who are far from her professions, I was once again convinced while working on the book. Having become acquainted with the manuscript, which has not yet been completed, my journalist friend Oleg Nazarov himself became so carried away that we have already written some chapters on the unusual animals of South America and Australia together. For which I express my sincere gratitude to him.

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ocean was at ease. Continents did not cut through its boundless expanses. The land in a single array towered above the salty waters. Scientists have named this as yet hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagea). In it, all modern continents were “soldered” into one common land route. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until the time of 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana - a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana also broke up: South America rushed, separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected with Australia - to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still constituted a single continent. Such was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.