<
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-world-of-electrostatic-ecology-20240930/>
"Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is
small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport
your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and
plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see
colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect
odors from distant flowers.
For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that
we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying — similar to the
charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks — could be
potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the
air. Aquatic animals such as eels, sharks and dolphins are known to sense
electricity in water, which is an excellent conductor of charge. By contrast,
air is a poor conductor. But it may relay enough to influence living things and
their evolution.
In 2013, Daniel Robert, a sensory ecologist at the University of Bristol in
England, broke ground in this discipline when his lab discovered that bees can
detect and discriminate among electric fields radiating from flowers. Since
then, more experiments have documented that spiders, ticks and other bugs can
perform a similar trick.
This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms,
hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior
known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch
charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind.
And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to
butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.
This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It
also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric
sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small
creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate and infest other living
things.
This developing field, known as aerial electroreception, opens up a new
dimension of the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” said Anna
Dornhaus, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Arizona who was not
involved with the work. “This whole field, studying electrostatic interactions
between living animals, has the potential to uncover things that didn’t occur
to us about how the world works.”
“We know from all these brilliant experiments that electric fields do have a
functional role in the ecology of these animals,” said Benito Wainwright, an
evolutionary ecologist at the University of St. Andrews who has studied the
sensory systems of butterflies and katydids. “That’s not to say that they came
on the scene originally through adaptive processes.” But now that these forces
are present, evolution can act on them. Though we cannot sense these electric
trails, they may guide us to animal behaviors we never imagined."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/273-cathedral-thinking/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
