Ze Frank provides some hilarious facts about the Tarsier.
Enjoy!
Tag: Nature
Why Do Cats Land on Their Feet?
Short Answer: Because they can!
Cats make it look so easy: leaping or falling from some high shelf or piece of furniture only to land gracefully on all four feet.
But there’s some complicated feline effort that goes into falling with such style.
Cats have a highly-tuned sense of balance and have very flexible backbones (because they have more vertebrae than humans), which allows them to twist their bodies around to right themselves when they fall — an innate ability known as their “righting reflex.”
When a cat jumps or falls from a high place, it uses either its sight or its vestibular apparatus (a balance system located in the inner ear) to determine up from down, and then rotates its upper body to face downward. Its lower body follows suit.
How A Mosquito Survives A Collision With Raindrops
A raindrop hitting a mosquito in flight is like a midair collision between a human and a bus. Except that the mosquito survives.
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Video Description:
In the study of insect flight, adaptations to complex flight conditions such as wind and rain are poorly understood. Mosquitoes thrive in areas of high humidity and rainfall, in which raindrops can weigh more than 50 times a mosquito. In this combined experi- mental and theoretical study, we here show that free-flying mosquitoes can survive the high-speed impact of falling raindrops. High-speed videography of those impacts reveals a mechanism for survival: A mosquito’s strong exoskeleton and low mass renders it impervious to falling drops. The mosquito’s low mass causes raindrops to lose little momentum upon impact and so impart cor- respondingly low forces to the mosquitoes. Our findings demonstrate that small fliers are robust to in-flight perturbations.
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