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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 ...
answered Mar 16 '17 at 13:21
42
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 ...
39
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 ...
24
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 ...
24
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
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 ...
21
Cats and dogs can both view tv screens & monitors ... though their viewing experience is a little different to ours thanks to differences in cone structure leaving them color blind and giving low acuity.
Both species have lower levels of color vision than humans. Cats see slightly more color (in the blue green and yellow end of the spectrum) than dogs ...
21
Yes. Menopause is common for long-lived mammals. For instance, in the wild, killer whales go in a sort of menopause as reported in 2009 by Ward et al. Front Zool. 2009 Feb 3;6:4. So it is not due to captivity. According to a Nature review, reproductive cessation has also been documented in non-human primates, rodents, whales, dogs, rabbits, elephants and ...
19
Handedness has been studied in several different species of toads. As basal tetrapods, the authors argue that these taxa are unlikely to be influenced by human hand dominance and are thus a better model for studying the evolution of handedness.
Bisazza et al. (1997) studied "pawedness" in Bufo bufo, B. viridis, and B. marinus in wild-caught animals by ...
17
The male kakapo (Strigops habroptila) in that video is called Sirocco. Kakapo were (and still are) very close to extinction, so in the 1980s the Kakapo Recovery Programme was launched. As part of this programme, rangers monitor all known kakapo in the wild, visiting their nests and generally ensuring they are in good health. When Sirocco was a young chick, a ...
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 ...
16
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 pattern seen:
...
15
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
The female stood with the tail held sharply to one side, and the quills on
the back lying very flat. The male stood on his hind legs, while the
front legs grasped the sides of the female. There was no repetition of the act.
The male's urethra is 115-120 mm long, and his penis is 75 mm, so the he doesn't need to be as close to the female as one might ...
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 ...
12
While I am not sure I buy your assertion that all mammals know how to swim, I would say that humans are at least as good as dogs when swimming. If you drop a human in water we will instinctively flap around and try too keep our head out of the water in about as elegant a way as a dog. The main problem for humans is panicking. Someone who does not know how 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 ...
12
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 ...
11
As both @Rory M and @Alexander Galkin suggest, there are various non-visual mating behaviors to allow these species to select mates and also allow taxonomists and researchers to identify these species. And they hit on the two major ones, courtship rituals (mating calls, throat bulging, dancing) and pheromones.
Let's have a look at some two examples:
The ...
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-...
11
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 ...
11
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 ...
9
Unlike Terdon I think that you are generally correct in your assertion that animals can swim whereas humans can't (although I'm sure there are exceptions). However, I think his answer contains the real answer:
Dogs can't swim as such, they simply do the same motions in the water as they do on land. There is no different action happening, they don't ...
9
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 ...
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