Swarm Immunity

Honeybees run vaccination programmes, too. An old saw has it that there is nothing new under the sun. 【小题1】 Work just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Gyan Harwood of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, confirms that honeybees got there first. It also suggest that they run what look like the equivalent of prime-boost childhood vaccination programmes.

Being gregarious, honeybees are at constant risk of diseases sweeping through their hives. Most animals which live in crowded conditions have particularly robust immune systems, so it long puzzled entomologists that honeybees do not. 【小题2】

Part of the answer, discovered in 2015, is that queen bees vaccinate their eggs by transferring into them, before they are laid, fragments of proteins from disease-causing pathogens. 【小题3】 But that observation raise the question of how the queen receives her antigen supply in the first place, for she subsists purely on royal jelly, a substance secreted by worked bees which are at the stage of their lives (which precedes the period that they spend flying around foraging for nectar and pollen) when they act as nurses to larvae. Dr Harwood therefore wondered if the nurses were incorporating into the royal jelly they were producing, fragments from pathogens they had consumed while eating the victuals brought to the hive by the foragers.

To test this idea, he teamed up with a group at the University of Helsinki, in Finland, led by Heli Salmela. 【小题4】 Instead of nectar, they fed the nurses on sugar-water, and for these of the hives they laced this syrup with Paenibacillus larvae, a bacterium that causes a hive-killing disease called American foulbrood.

Dog owners say dogs are smarter. However, this may not be the case. Cats tend to hide their intelligence: they don’t want praise from their owners. Cats are independent, whereas dogs are social and mostly travel in groups. Because of this, many people believe that dogs are more intelligent, but the ways of measuring the intelligence of cats and dogs are different because they are different animals. Therefore, the intelligence of cats may be underestimated.

The senses of a cat are more developed than dogs. They hear and see better than dogs. The memory of cats is a lot better than dogs. Cats have both long-term and short-term memory. The memory of cats is two hundred times more than dogs. This means that the memory of cats is even better than monkeys and chimpanzees. Scientific American states that a cat can hold 1,000 times more “data storage” than a tablet computer.

Cats have better cognition (认知) than dogs. It is true that dogs have a better social IQ than cats, but that doesn’t mean that they are smarter than cats. Cats can solve complex problems, and can also distinguish between complex shapes. Also, the observation of cats is greater than that of any other domestic animal. If something new and different enters a house, the cat can quickly figure out what it is. This makes training a cat very easy because they are able to observe what happens very quickly, and are able to learn quicker than dogs.

In conclusion, cats have the brain, but they don’t want to show it because they don’t want love; they want food and just the basic necessities in order to survive. The Huffington Post says, “Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you.” This quote can show us that maybe cats are the smarter ones.

Most people agree that honesty is a good thing. But does Mother Nature agree? Animals can’t talk, but can they lie in other ways? Can they lie with their bodies and behavior? Animal experts may not call it lying, but they do agree that many animals, from birds to chimpanzees (大猩猩), behave dishonestly to fool other animals. Why? Dishonesty often helps them survive.

Many kinds of birds are successful at fooling other animals. For example, a bird called the plover sometimes pretends to be hurt in order to protect its young. When a predator (掠食动物) gets close to its nest, the plover leads the predator away from the nest. How? It pretends to have a broken wing. The predator follows the “hurt” adult, leaving the baby birds safe in the nest.

Birds called cuckoos (布谷鸟) have found a way to have babies without doing much work. How? They don’t make nests. Instead, they get into other birds’ nests secretly. Then they lay their eggs and fly away. When the baby birds come out, their adoptive parents feed them.

Chimpanzees, or chimps, can also be sneaky. After a fight, the losing chimp will put out its hand to the other chimp. When the winning chimp puts out its hand, too, the chimps are friendly again. But an animal expert once saw a losing chimp take the winner’s hand and start fighting again.

Chimps are sneaky in other ways, too. When chimps find food that they love, such as bananas, it is natural for them to cry out. Then others chimps come running. But some clever chimps learn to cry very softly when they find food. That way, other chimps don’t hear them, and they don’t need to share their food.

As children, many of us learn the saying “You can’t fool Mother Nature.” But maybe you can’t trust her, either.