Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 10:31 AM Subject: book club meeting: Wednesday, 2/23 Present: Jim, Kathleen, and Peter. We discussed "Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival" by Bernd Heinrich. Heinrich is a professor of biology at the University of Vermont who spends time living in the forests of western Maine. His observations have led him to conclusions such as: * Birds originally evolved long flight feathers on forelimbs to reduce wetting of the insulating down and contour feathers. * Golden-crowned kinglets feed not on springtails as winter food, as reported in the literature, but on caterpillars of the Geometrid moth One-Spotted Variant (Hypagyrtis unipunctata). * Red squirrels do not always build underground nests, as reported in the literature, but often spend the night in tunnels under decaying stumps. The kinglets are bird-brained: their brain comprise 6.8% of body weight (compared to 1.9% for humans). Brains are metabolically expensive, and in the kinglet the relatively large brain can be a source of heat loss in the harsh Maine winter; but the intelligence helps them search for scarce food on winter twigs, and kinglets are constantly foraging for food to fuel their tiny bodies and large brains. Turtles, on the other hand, have miniscule brains that don't require constant upkeep. An air-breathing painted turtle can survive 6 months buried in oxygen-poor mud under water. What is death to a turtle, Heinrich asks? He found a road-kill snapping turtle and chopped off its head to end its miseries and feed the carcass to his ravens. But by next day the birds had not touched the meat: the turtle was still capable of retracting her legs inside the shattered shell. Heinrich also speculates that mammals do not hibernate through the winter because they need to periodically heat up to sleep - perchance to dream? Animals in winter torpor do not show the EEG activity associated with sleeping and dreaming. Hibernation or winter torpor are periods of reduced respiration to conserve fuel, and should not be called "winter sleeping" as some sources I have seen state. Our next meeting will be Tuesday 4/19, 7pm, the book will be "The Sea Around Us", by Rachel Carson. Peter http://www.nicertutor.com/doc/book/