World Building Day 4

How intelligent are animals?

Scientifically we have no idea how smart anything is. In science, can you prove something and can someone else run that test and get the same result. Science does not know if animals communicate. We can believe that they do, but there is no proven results. Energetics - do you consume more energy than you use. If you do than you are alive and if you don't you are dead. I've got to eat something that will give me more energy that it took to catch it. It needs to be small enough to not hurt me when catching it and be easily digestible. An alligator will eat a turtle once or twice a week because it is cold blooded, it gets its heat from the environment. Warm blooded animals have to eat a lot more to maintain their body heat.

There is no one at the top. Everyone can take down someone. How much energy will they spend to get their meal? Bears in the forest do not eat all of the salmon that they catch. They do not eat all of the salmon, they eat the middle of it and throw off the rest of the salmon into the forest which fertilizes the soil. Bears have few young where as salmon have thousands.

A polar bear's sense of smell is acute, its the most important sense for detecting prey on land. A polar bear can smell a seal from over a km away. Hag fish are eel shaped marine animas that release goo to catch their prey, hoping it will get stuck. The pistol shrimp can snap its claws to create a sound that will result in a bang that is louder than a jet engine and hotter than the sun. Vampire bats have an anti-coagulant in its saliva so that it can drink the prey's blood till full.

Predators hone in on a specific prey. Lions do not hunt a herd of Zebras, they pick a specific one. Until a lion knocks a zebra down, the Zebra has all of the advantages. Jellyfish just float, thats why they have tentacles to catch food. When categorizing toxicity, we measure based on if it is toxic to us. All spiders are poisonous to someone, just a few can effect us. Seals generally hunt on their back because the surface of the water is light, thus it is easy to see when a fish swims by. Great grey owls hunt in the snow and it must be able to hear a mouse walking under the snow. Its face is designed to amplify tiny sounds, enough to measure accurately where the mouse is. Their ears are also offset which allows them 3 dimensional hearing, thus being able to exactly pin point a sound.

Consider that creatures may have had to adapt. Whales evolved from land mammals, same with seals, where as frogs were water animals that evolved to be on land. For larger creatures, you need to know how fast you need to move and how much your bones can handle.

Humans in colder environments would have shorter appendages so as to not lose as much heat. Blood vessels would be deeper, thus paler with less color on the surface. Eskimos have additional fat on the palms of their hands and bottoms of their feet that keep them warmer when standing on the ice.





Stuff Due:

Planet Skin and Panorama - put in a google folder then share it with Howard. Have name on file gretchenlefflerskin.png / When you send him the email put 'World Building' in the subject line
Extra Credit: description with idea of life forms: record it and make it a wav file (no more than 90 sec) include in google doc folder

Panorama - Make the pixel hight higher, hight being 8 times the hight of the width and keep the sky transparent and see the lifeforms on the planet. A life form with some unique properties.