How a few members of the animal kingdom handle the transition to adulthood?

African elephants

These beautiful beasts come close to imitate teen rebellion. Calves spend a decade with their mothers in female-dominated groups ---- and ladies stay there ---- but adolescent boys leave mom for noisy crews of bros. In their 20s, they often downsize to smaller male groups.

Orangutans (猩猩)

Slow metabolism allows these primates to survive food shortages ---- times when weather makes ripe fruit scarce. But energy efficiency comes at a cost; growth and maturation take time. Orangutan mamas nurse their young longer than any other wild creature does.

Orcas(逆戟鲸)

Killer whales join their mother’s familial group for life. This lasting-relationship seems to increase a pup’s chance of survival; if mom dies, a young male (under 30) is three times more likely to die than a peer whose mother is alive. Risk of death post-mom-mortem rises as kids get older.

Harp seals

A harp seal’s “childhood” lasts just 12 days. A pup’s sole purpose during that brief period of coddling(宠爱) is to constantly nurse, gaining a fifth of its birth weight in blubber(鲸脂) every day. Once it’s fat ---- they become greater from 25 to 80 pounds ---- it slides off the ice and takes on the sea.

Wolf spiders

Every parent knows that tired toddlers love to hitch a piggyback ride. The wolf spider straps all her babies (40 or 50, on average) onto her back at once, carrying the brood until they are capable of fully functional spider-hood. But luckily she only has to pull them for a few days.

If you ask most people what water tastes like, they’ll probably tell you that water has no taste and they may give you a funny look. But if you were a fruit fly (果蝇), asking another fruit fly, that question might have a different answer.

To a fruit fly, water has a taste. Scientists want to know how the fruit fly knows water because this information may help in learning how other animals — or even individual cells (细胞) — manage to use water in the right way. Water is important to life, but too much or too little can be deadly to a living creature (生物). So by understanding how the fruit fly tastes water, researchers may learn more about other living things.

According to the new study, a protein (蛋白质) called PPK28 makes it possible for a fly to taste water. Proteins build cells and tissues, fight disease and carry messages between cells. It’s not surprising that a protein is responsible for the fruit fly’s ability to taste water.

The PPK28 protein is part of a larger family of similar proteins. One of these related proteins is used by mammals (哺乳动物) (including humans) to taste salt. Scientists have not found a protein that enables humans to “taste” water.

In the experiment, Cameron and his team compared normal fruit flies with fruit flies whose taste cells had been disabled. The fruit flies were given a special chemical that would glow (发光) when the fly used the PPK28 protein. Then the scientists led the flies to water. When the normal flies tasted the water, the PPK28 protein lit up — showing that it was in use.

The fruit fly in particular is so interesting that some scientists are hard at work creating a complete map of the fruit fly brain. This map will show all of a fly’s neurons (神经元) and help scientists understand how the neurons work together.

In the African bush in southern Kenya, Lucy King watched an elephant rest under a big tree, seemingly bothered by an overhead beehive. It was 2007, and King had just published a behavioral study confirming a belief, widely held by local communities for thousands of years, that elephants are frightened by bees.

King, a zoologist at the nonprofit organization Save the Elephants (STE), asked her research assistant to throw a stone at the hive. “And then suddenly, the bees just erupted,” King says, “the elephants just fled.” That moment led King to a novel design for using live beehives as “fences” to protect farm crops from hungry elephants.

An elephant can eat a farm’s entire harvest in one day, seriously threatening a family’s income and food security. To protect their livelihoods, some farmers have taken to shooting elephants. In an attempt to find a nonlethal solution, nearly 10,000 bee fences like those in King’s initial design are now built into sites in 20 African and Asian countries, she estimates. STE team members focus on providing bee-fence kits to farmers in areas of serious human-elephant conflicts.

In a 2017 field study, King documented that bee fences installed at 10 farms near a national park in Kenya deterred elephants 80 percent of the time. Meanwhile, bee fences have provided some farmers with new income. As part of the STE program, they are taught beekeeping and provided with protective gear such as suits, smokers, rubber boots and gloves.

Farms with bee fences and healthy hives have also inspired another type of enterprise. Mavis Nduchwa started a honey-collecting business in Botswana — a country that has a farm-based economy and is also home to the world’s largest elephant population. The company offers beekeeping training to women at farms with bee fences and helps them sell the resulting honey through her business. The benefits go beyond extra income, she says. “We have seen a decline in the number of gender-based violence cases as women are more empowered and have jobs,” says Nduchwa, who employs more than 1,500 female farmers. “It might sound crazy, but a jar of honey saves elephants and feeds more families.”