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Short Answer
Yes. handedness (or Behavioral Lateralization) has been documented in numerous vertebrates (mammals, reptiles and birds) as well as invertebrates.
This includes domestic cats (see Wells & Millsopp 2009).
Long Answer
There have been numerous studies that have documented behavioral lateralization in many groups of animals including lower ...
answered Mar 16 '17 at 13:21
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Adult butterflies don't eat! I mean.... not in the sense of chewing on food. They rather drink. They get their nutrients via ingestion of liquid substances. Their mouth consists of a long tube called a proboscis that acts as a straw.
What do butterflies feed on?
The vast majority of butterflies eat nectar from flowers. Many species are quite specialized ...
40
According to Cornell's All About Birds website, you will have to wait about a month for the nest to be cleared.
The egg incubation period is 12–14 days.
Following hatching, the nestlings will remain in the nest for another 13 days (i.e., the "nestling period" is 13 days).
However, there are two caveats to this:
A typical robin clutch size (i.e. the # of ...
answered May 10 '17 at 15:16
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It is difficult to find a scientific answer to this question, but let me insert this citation from a specialist site:
Contrary to popular belief, beaver cannot plan the direction in which trees will fall. Many trees become hung up in the branches of surrounding trees and are lost to the colony. In heavily forested areas, this loss may amount to one-half ...
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I'm almost certain that your question is based on the press that Patricia J Yang's research is receiving (e.g., here and here).
Yang and her co-authors examined the structure and mechanics of some dead wombats to investigate this question further. They found that varying degrees of pressure in the latter portion of the wombat's intestines (in conjunction ...
answered Nov 19 '18 at 22:43
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Several species of the order Lepidoptera don't feed at all in adult form, surviving entirely on the reserves made while they were larva. Two examples I'm aware of are the Atlas moth (as well as most of the family it belongs to) and the clothing moth.
Also, many butterflies and moths which normally do feed stop doing so after the mating (for males) or after ...
23
It's its ovipositor & it's trying to dig a hole to lay its eggs.
"How Do Grasshoppers Dig Holes to Lay Their Eggs? After breeding, female grasshoppers dig a hole in the ground in which to lay their eggs by using a special tube in their abdomen known as an ovipositor. The ovipositor is first used to dig the hole, and then to deposit the eggs one by one ...
22
A tiny Japanese puffer fish creates a grand sand sculpture on the featureless seabed by using his fins to dig furrows. He uses this to attract the attention of passing females.
Why do puffer fish build sandcastles? (BBC)
Further observation revealed that this “mysterious circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty. Attracted ...
16
How come most animals never seem to evolve over millennia?
The word "seem" in your question should not be disregarded. You seem to assume that cockroaches (or most animals as you say) did not change much the last tens or hundreds of thousands of years. But what do you know about that (no offence here)? Have you actually reviewed many kinds of research that ...
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This "nest" is created by a male pufferfish for both courtship and for rearing young.
The male puffer fish uses its body and fins (a combination of pectoral, anal, and caudal -- see here) to break up the sand into fine particles and to move it around into the pattern seen above. It swims in channel-like (or furrow) patterns to create the ray ...
answered Mar 15 '19 at 21:04
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Lions
Lions are a classic example of cannibalism. To understand why this occurs we have to understand their mating system.
Males have a harem of females and males fight in order to access a harem (Note: females may also take part in the battle depending on which male they prefer). When a male takes over a new harem, he kills the young ones of the previous ...
15
Like so much of biology, we just don't know!
I'll preface this answer by disappointing you; this answer doesn't entirely answer your question. That's because this is a pretty big mystery in research and a fascinating topic. I'll start with a couple of quotes that maybe explain why!
"If you search on the Web of Science database for papers on the emotion ...
14
I'm going to focus on the why do carnivores exist part of this question, which should be extendible to answer why humans eat meat.
Let's start a thought experiment in which we only allow the consumption of vegetation (plants). In the simple system, we have our plants (lettuce) and our herbivores (rabbits). The lettuces have a constant population size and ...
13
Flies use any object they can find as a landmark.
The flies patrol well-defined airspaces underneath landmarks like lampshades. ... Male flies approach a landmark from below and, in the absence of other flies, settle to patrol an airspace close to the landmark. A second male approaching the same landmark chases, or is chased away by, the patrolling fly ...
13
A major cause of squirrel death is predation:
Survival and mortality of the Arizona gray squirrel (Sciurus arizonensis)
Causes of red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) mortality in England
You won't see those bodies, for obvious reasons.
Disease, starvation, and harsh weather are other major causes of death. Squirrels dying in these ways are probably likely to ...
12
Limiting the conversation to mammals, and taking relative brain size as a proxy for intelligence (which, of course is not necessarily "true", but at least is quantifiable), the answer is yes: body-size relative brain size correlates with body-size relative longevity in mammals.
using a global database of 493 species, we provide evidence showing that ...
11
Well, first off, they have eyes, so there's that.
However, a lot of what ants wish to achieve can be done through a combination of a random walk and chemical trails.
When ants are exploring their surroundings, they are essentially wandering about without much in terms of a sense of purpose; laying down a chemical signature as they go.
When they find ...
11
It was moistening its respiratory and osmoregulatory organs:
Woodlice as all other terrestrial arthropods face the major challenge of preserving water balance. In their case the two systems that immediately suffer from desiccation are osmoregulation itself and respiration. In woodlice these two functions are carried out mostly by the pleopods: modified leaf-...
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This is a good question. This type of behavior -- pecking at a branch, wiping the side of the beak on a branch, pulling off twigs and dropping them, or knocking off pieces of bark -- is quite common among many corvid species, particularly when they are interrupted by something or someone that they might consider a threat. This includes not only potential ...
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Humans and other animals have lots of innate behaviors that are not learned from observation, i.e. behaviors that are hard-wired into our nervous system, and this is one of them. Suckling reflexes in mammals and the Moro reflex is human babies (which we grow out of) are other simple examples.
The stretching behaviours you are referring to are usually ...
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Yes, it is a common behaviour and is called necromone signaling (Yao et al 2009, see references in paper for many examples), and is probably used to avoid predators, parasites and disease. The chemicals used are often similar (unsaturated fatty acids), and seem to have an old evolutionary history (~400 million years). Many groups of species can also detect ...
9
This is a story I have been told as well when I was a kid. Usually this is related to the foreign smell that the humans leave on the chick. However, this seems to be an urban legend, as birds have not a great sense of smell.
Snopes says about this:
However, Mother birds will not reject their babies because they smell
human scent on them, nor will they ...
9
The behaviour that you describe is common in most animal species, as part of the natural trade-off between access to food, minimizing risk, habituation and hunger. Animals usually choose to forage in high-quality habitats that has a low risk of predation, but if food sources are depleted (or competition and/or territoriality is high) they will move to other ...
9
Yes, there are many examples. Those species are said to be gregarious. See below for examples.
Level of sociality
When it comes to social behaviour, it is common to categorize species into one of four categories: Solitary, gregarious, presocial, and eusocial.
Note that definitions may vary among authors and that there are limit cases that make the question ...
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Crall et al., 2015, studied bumblebee collision avoidance (note the senior authors are the same from your link). It seems that, contrary to popular belief and experience, bumblebees are actually quite good at avoiding collisions, but they are also in an environment that has a lot of obstacles, so collisions still happen frequently.
There is a lot of ...
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On a more serious note than my comment, and as a supplement to theforestecologist's answer, it's worth pointing out that a cube with rounded corners and edges has larger surface area to volume ratio than a spherical dropping, making it more efficient for the reabsorbtion of moisture, which would be an evolutionary advantage in a place where water is in short ...
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Question summary: is dam building learned or instinctive in beavers?
A blog post from 2011 references an article in the Juneau Empire titled Running water is sound of spring for beavers. This article is no longer hosted on the Juneau Empire website, but archived versions are available.
Here's an excerpt (emphasis mine) --
Swedish biologist Lars Wilsson ...
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