The Secret Life of Animals [antikvár]

WELL-KEPT SECRETS In an age when humans can split the atom, travel to the moon and surf the Internet, it is sobering to reahse that our understanding of the natural world is still quite rudimentary. No one, for instance, has yet witnessed an event as large as a great whale being bom or explained how a uny bird finds its way across the world. Nevertheless, inquisitive scientists are now beginning to uncover some of the secrets that have been kept from the human gaze for so long. They have sat patiently recording every subtle movement that an animal makes. They have journeyed to remote and inhospitable places and discovered and described many animals quite new to science. They have entered the extraordinary world of the infinitesimally small to reveal the very workings of nature itself. Their revelations are remarkable, and sometimes unexpected, but they follow a tradition that was established The ancient need on the part of humans to watch and study animals in order to catch a meal has, over thousands of years, evolved into a sophisticated scientific study that is steadily revealing the animal kingdom's innermost secrets. when our ape-like forebears came down from the trees. Our distant ancestors must have had some awareness of the hidden workings of animals' lives because their very survival depended on a rudimentary knowledge of other species. They would have had to ascertain which were edible, for example, and where those animals could be found, and to understand the behaviour of dangerous predators in order to stay alive. The earliest attempts to document natural history can be traced back some 5000 years to Babylonian and Assyrian depictions of medicinal plants and veterinary medicine. The Vedic literature of India, dating from around 2300 BC, also includes references to the animal world. There were records, for example, of the cuckoo-like behaviour of the koel, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. However, it was not until the rise of the ancient Greek civilisation that the study of animal life became more systematic. A key figure in this development was the Ancient Plant Art An Egyptian basreUefwall decoration from Karnak (left) depicts a botanical scene. Right: Notes and illustrations from a ancient Arab manuscript show that thousands of years ago people were as fascinated by the wildlife around them as we are today. philosopher and scientist Aristotie, born in 384 BC in northern Greece, who became one of the first people to explore and record the activities of animals. Aristo-de looked at tile function of the parts or organs of animals, and die ways in which animals move and reproduce, and he observed similarities in the behaviour of different animals as well as in the way tiiey looked in order to establish relationships between them. He collected an enormous range of facts, and his Historia animalium, which drew attention to the similarities and differences between species in an orderly ivay, later became the basis for animal classification. Aristotle recorded the way in which whales and dolphins beach themselves - a mystery to this day - and recognised that dolphins, orcas, sperm whales and right whales are not fish but mammals as they suckle their young and breatiie ivith lungs.