Hungry fruit bats are ready to face the costs of intoxication to obtain food. Photo from Wikipedia Common.

Ethanol, the chemical name for drinking alcohol, does not only affect humans but also many other animals. However, unlike humans, animals in general try to avoid alcohol intoxication. This is though not always as easy as one would think. Micro-organisms such as yeast utilize the sugars in fruits as energy and generate waste compounds such as alcohol in the process. As fruits ripen their ethanol content increases. Whereas alcohol in high doses have severe effect on behaviour and motor coordination, alcohol in small doses actually are beneficial as they provide the animal with a source of nutrition. Israeli scientists from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have in a new study examined the Egyptian fruit bats willingness to ingest ethanol rich fruit, when they are hungry and when they are well-fed.

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Titan arum in the botanical garden of Bonn, Courtesy: University of Bonn, Germany

It is the largest flower known on earth and it is rarely to see in botanical gardens world wide: Amorphophallus titanum (Titan arum) - growing naturally in Indonesia in rainforests  - now gave the honour to some 10.000 visitors at the botanical garden in Bonn, Germany. Only some 2-3 days the impressive spectacular is lasting. Only 10-15 times since 1937 this giant plant showed its 3 metre flowers.

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A foraging leafcutter ant returning to its nest. Scientists have shown that ants use a magnetic compass for orientation. Photo courtesy of Scott Bauer, US Department of Agriculture.

Social insects are among the most fascinating creatures on Earth, their complex societies and highly developed mounts, hives and nest are a continuous source of wonder and inspiration. Especially fascinating are the Central and South American leafcutter ants. There colonies can consist of several million individuals of distinct castes with large soldier ants more than 10 times larger than their smaller nest mates. Most impressive, however, is their agriculture or should we say fungiculture. The ants live in a mutualistic relationship with a fungus from which they get all their nourishment. In return they provide the fungus with leaves and other plant material and protect it from pests and moulds. It is while collecting food for their fungus that we get the characteristically columns of ants carrying leaves vertical on their backs. However, it has been something of a mystery how these night active ants find their way back to the nest in the rainforest floor where no polarised light reach.

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Bats navigate by using magnetite to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

Navigation in animals has puzzled people for centuries and still provides challenges for scientists. How for instance can a Monarch butterfly with a brain weighing less than 0.02 grams find its way to its overwintering site more than 4,000 km away? Or how can the Arctic Tern circumnavigate the globe with a precision better than human navigators before the invention of the GPS system? We know now that one of the most widely used methods of navigation in the animal kingdom is to use the Earth’s magnetic field as a compass. This method is predominantly found in birds, fish and insects, but has also recently been demonstrated in bats. However, questions remain as to how the animals detect the magnetic field. Scientists from Princeton University and Caltech in the United States have investigated this in the Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus).

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