I am appalled to admit that the creatures who did this are of my same species:

An elephant that was pregnant died in Kerala, standing in water, last Wednesday, after she faced one of the most brutal forms of animal abuse. She ate a pineapple filled with firecracker, offered to her allegedly by some locals. The fruit exploded in her mouth, leading to the inevitable tragedy.

[…]

So powerful was the cracker explosion in her mouth that her tongue and mouth were badly injured. The elephant walked around in the village, in searing pain and in hunger. She was unable to eat anything because of her injuries.

I am more disturbed by this incident than I can put into words. Poor, poor elephant, expecting a minimum — the very minimum — of cross-species friendliness, and receiving not just death, not just agony, but excruciating, hours-long torture. The creatures that did this don’t deserve to share the Earth with anyone.

The elephant stood in the Velliyar river for hours, refusing help and in ‘searing pain’, until it died standing in the water. (via NDTV).

The news report was based on accounts from a forest officer on social media who went to respond to the situation, and has no mention of whether anyone has been arrested for this. The creatures that did this should face consequences at the very least according to the laws of their own species, surely. (That would be inadequate and the bare minimum, but the rest of us are, after all, bound by such things as codes of conduct, and laws, and morals.)

Anyway, this here is the relevant Indian Penal Code section:

[Section] 429. Mischief by killing or maiming cattle, etc., of any value or any animal of the value of fifty rupees.—Whoever commits mis­chief by killing, poisoning, maiming or rendering useless, any elephant, camel, horse, mule, buffalo, bull, cow or ox, whatever may be the value thereof, or any other animal of the value of fifty rupees or upwards, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both.

Whoever did this needs to be behind bars. Anyone that could have spoken up and didn’t needs to be behind bars too. 5 years, the penal code says. I think that’s too few; there’s no mention of torture in the code, and ‘mischief’ is quite inadequate to capture the extent of this monstrosity. Put them all in jail, and slap fines large enough that they spend the rest of their lives just paying them off.

Poor, poor elephant.

In this study, we continuously monitored Egyptian fruit bats for months, recording audio and video around-the-clock. We analyzed almost 15,000 vocalizations, which accompanied the everyday interactions of the bats, and were all directed toward specific individuals, rather than broadcast. We found that bat vocalizations carry ample information about the identity of the emitter, the context of the call, the behavioral response to the call, and even the call’s addressee. Our results underline the importance of studying the mundane, pairwise, directed, vocal interactions of animals.

This is brilliant. They were able to correlate their data analysis of the bats’ vocalizations with the behavior and responses that they observed… so now we know more about how bats communicate! Simply by listening to the vocalization, the context, addressee, and even “the outcome of the interaction can be predicted above chance level”. Fascinating.

From the discussion:

It is important to note that we used one set of acoustic features for classification. However, many other multi-dimensional spectro-temporal representations can be tested. The bat’s brain could thus be using some other representation that encapsulates much more information regarding different social aspects. The bat may be able to classify the context of an interaction with higher confidence, based on some acoustic feature which it evolved to use and is yet to be determined. Our analysis is thus probably only a lower bound on what a bat is capable of extracting from aggressive social vocalizations. For example, we did not include any temporal information in our analysis.

In any acoustic signal, and especially where communication is involved, the time parameter is usually crucial and will add rich layers of information. For example, just imagine taking a piece of human speech, and (a) only looking at the overal speech parameters, versus (b) observing how the speech parameters change during the speech. Case (b) will provide far more information than case (a). I think we will discover over time that bats have a pretty well-evolved communication scheme.

This is fascinating stuff.

I’ve written about the naked mole rat before, about how it seems to be immune to acid.

Well, it turns out it has more tricks up its genetic sleeve.

To compare how the naked mole rat made their proteins, they inserted an engineered gene in the naked mole rat as well as in mice, which allowed them to compare the rate of errors in making proteins. And here’s what they found:

[The naked mole rat] built the engineered protein far more accurately, in other words. Naked mole rats, the scientists found, made anywhere from four to ten times fewer mistakes. Yet the naked mole rats can make their proteins as quickly as the sloppier mice.

This seems to be a fascinating creature the more we study it!

I wonder, though, why other species did not pick up this brilliant piece of evolution. Are there side effects to this that are detrimental, overall, to other species but which don’t affect the naked mole rat? As I said in my earlier post, intriguing.

(Original source, quoted by National Geographic: Jorge Azpurua et al.“Naked mole-rat has increased translational fidelity compared with the mouse, as well as a unique 28S ribosomal RNA cleavage.” PNAS 2013

Species that reproduce sexually usually need two partners to reproduce, right? Right. What I didn’t know was, females of some species (that usually reproduce sexually) have apparently been observed to be able to reproduce without a mate—rarely, and when they’re in captivity and away from potential mates.

But now, virgin births have been observed in snakes–in the wild, with males present nearby!

They captured pregnant copperhead and cottonmouth female pit-vipers from the field, where males were present.

The snakes gave birth, allowing the scientists to study the physical and genetic characteristics of the litters. […]

“That’s between 2.5 and 5% of litters produced in these populations may be resulting from parthenogenesis.

“That’s quite remarkable for something that has been considered an evolutionary novelty,” he said.

No insights yet on how and why this happens, though, or what implications it may have.

But this is fascinating, nonetheless.

This is a very interesting article about why the naked mole rat can’t feel pain from acid burns. Apparently it was already known that they don’t feel the pain; their hypothesis about why it happened—that the acid sensing ion channels that tell neurons to transmit pain would be missing—was not true.

Because it turns out that mole rats — despite being the only known vertebrates that are insensitive to the painful stimulus of acid — have the same two fully-functional, acid-sensing channels regulating their pain receptors as the rest of us, and even produce the channels in similar quantities. And this is where things get interesting.

Now they know the actual reason. There’s another way neuron-firing can be controlled, and it is this (sodium) channel that is highly inhibited in the naked rat mole. Similar phenomenons are observed in humans too:

Furthermore — and this doesn’t happen often — humans lacking the Nav1.7 channel have been known to feel no pain whatsoever.

Very interesting, yes, but my question is this: the naked rat mole is insensitive to pain due to acids; but does that mean that it is in fact unaffected by acids? It does not seem so—the phenomenon is purely neurological, and there seems to be nothing physiological that would protect the rat against acids.

Does this not make this a counterproductive adaptation? Why would this adaptation survive? Is it because the natural environments of these rats are entirely devoid of harmful acids, thus making that pain sensation redundant? (Is this also why they’re “naked”, rather than furry?)

Intriguing.