Akimushkin wonders of nature. Igor Akimushkin - quirks of nature

Igor Akimushkin

Freaks of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva
Reviewer Doctor biological sciences, Professor W. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

At the dawn of his history, man built several unusual buildings for those times and arrogantly called them “the seven wonders of the world.” Neither more nor less - “light”! As if there is nothing more amazing and magnificent in the Universe than these structures of his.

Years passed. One after another, man-made miracles collapsed, and all around... The great and wordless Nature was rampaging around. She was silent, she could not tell the vain man that the miracles she created were not seven or seventy-seven, but hundreds, thousands of times more. Nature seemed to be waiting for him to figure everything out on his own.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

What is, for example, Egyptian pyramids compared to the palaces built by African termites? The height of the Cheops pyramid is 84 times more growth person. And the vertical dimensions of termite mounds exceed the body length of their inhabitants by more than 600 times! That is, these structures are at least “more wonderful” than the only human miracle that has survived to this day!

The Earth is home to, one might say, one and a half million species of animals and half a million species of plants. And each species is wonderful, amazing, amazing, stunning, stunning, marvelous, fantastic in its own way... How many more epithets are needed to make it more convincing?!

Every type without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the Herostratus-style temple of Artemis in Ephesus or to reduce this or that species to nothing. Human miracle it can be rebuilt. A destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. AND biological species“Homo sapiens” must remember this and only then will it justify its specific name.

However, enough assurances. In the book offered to the reader there is much evidence of the wonderful uniqueness of all kinds of animals. In it I tried to combine these uniquenesses, put them together and connect them with zoogeographic regions - areas where rare animals live. He also told about that living and amazing thing that, due to the fault of man, is in danger of death.

And this amazing thing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of the species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations or, conversely, a rare attachment to the place chosen for its habitat (as, for example, musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing running speed (cheetah) or interesting twists and turns in the discovery and study of an animal ( big panda). In a word, by “unusuality” I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was selected.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

I was once again convinced while working on the book that Nature is capable of arousing interest in itself even among people of professions far removed from it. Having become acquainted with the still unfinished manuscript, my friend journalist Oleg Nazarov himself became so carried away that we have already written some chapters about unusual animals of South America and Australia together. For which I offer him my sincere gratitude.

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago the ocean was at ease. Continents did not dissect its vast expanses. The land rose in a single mass above the salty waters. Scientists called this still hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagaea). In it, all modern continents were “fused” into one common landmass. This went on until the end Triassic period Mesozoic era- up to the time of 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana - a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana broke up: South America rushed, having separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected to Australia, to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still formed a single continent. This was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Current page: 1 (book has 20 pages in total)

Igor Akimushkin
Freaks of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva

Reviewer Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor V. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

What are, for example, the Egyptian pyramids compared to the palaces built by African termites? The height of the Cheops pyramid is 84 times the height of a person. And the vertical dimensions of termite mounds exceed the body length of their inhabitants by more than 600 times! That is, these structures are at least “more wonderful” than the only human miracle that has survived to this day!

Every type without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in Herostratian style or to reduce this or that species to nothing. It is possible to rebuild a human miracle. A destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. And the biological species “Homo sapiens” is obliged to remember this and only then will it justify its species name.

However, enough assurances. In the book offered to the reader there is much evidence of the wonderful uniqueness of all kinds of animals. In it I tried to combine these unique features, put them together and connect them with zoogeographic regions - areas where rare animals live. He also told about that living and amazing thing that, due to the fault of man, is in danger of death.

And this amazing thing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of the species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations or, conversely, a rare attachment to the place chosen for its habitat (as, for example, musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing running speed (cheetah) or interesting twists and turns in the discovery and study of an animal (giant panda). In a word, by “unusuality” I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was selected.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago the ocean was at ease. Continents did not dissect its vast expanses. The land rose in a single mass above the salty waters. Scientists called this still hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagaea). In it, all modern continents were “fused” into one common landmass. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and Gondwanaland, a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America, was the first to move south. Then Gondwana broke up: South America rushed, having separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected with Australia, to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still formed a single continent. This was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Both Americas will move even more to the west, Africa and especially Australia - to the northeast, India - to the east. The position of Antarctica will remain unchanged.

“Continents do not remain in place, but move. It is amazing that such a movement was first proposed about 350 years ago and has been put forward several times since then, but this idea only gained scientific recognition after 1900. Most people believed that the rigidity of the crust prevented the movement of continents. Now we all know that this is not true."

(Richard Foster Flint, professor at Yale University, USA)

For the first time, the most substantiated evidence of continental drift appeared in the book of the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener, “The Origin of Continents and Oceans.” The book was published in 1913 and went through five editions over the next twenty years. In it, A. Wegener outlined his now famous migration hypothesis, which later, significantly expanded, also received the names of the theory of movement, mobilism, continental drift and global plate tectonics.

There are few scientific hypotheses that have been so much debated and to which specialists from other sciences have so often resorted for help, trying to explain annoying inconsistencies in their research. At first, geologists and geophysicists almost unanimously opposed Wegener. Now the picture is different: it has found recognition among many researchers. The main provisions of his hypothesis, modernized and supplemented, were used in the construction of new, more advanced geotectonic theories.

But justice requires saying that to this day there are still scientists who confidently reject the possibility of continental migration.

If we accept the position: Pangea - no time former reality, then we can draw the following conclusion arising from this fact: in those days, one must assume, zoogeography would have been simple. In order to move and spread to all ends of a single landmass, animals did not know any significant barriers. Seas and oceans, insurmountable for land-based creatures (who cannot fly), were not separated by continents, as they are today.

Now Pangea has broken up into continents. And each of them bears its own faunal imprint. According to him, the entire space of the Earth is divided by scientists into different zoogeographical regions and kingdoms.

There are three of the latter: Notogea, Neogea and Arctogea (or Megagaea).

The distribution of vertebrates, mainly mammals, forms the basis of this division. Notogea is home to oviparous and marsupial animals. Oviparous animals do not live in Neogea, but there are still many marsupials. The kingdom of Arctogaea covers countries of the world in which there are no oviparous or marsupials, but only placental mammals.

Notogea and Neogea each have only one zoogeographic region - Australian and Neotropical, respectively. There are four of them in the Arctic: Holarctic, Ethiopian, Indo-Malayan (or Eastern) and Antarctic.

The location of the latter is clear from the name.

The Holarctic region occupies an area as vast as no other. It includes everything North America, all of Europe, most of Asia (south to India and Indochina), as well as North Africa to the borders of the Sahara with savannas.

The Ethiopian region extends south of the Holarctic domain in North Africa. It occupies all of Africa from this boundary, including Madagascar and the extreme south of Arabia, as well as nearby islands.

The Indo-Malayan region is India, Indochina, southeastern coastal strip China (with Taiwan), then the Philippines, the Indonesian archipelago to the Moluccas in the east. These islands, like New Guinea, New Zealand, Hawaiian and Polynesian islands, are part of the Australian region.

We still have the Neotropical zoogeographical region within the not yet designated boundaries. Its position on the world map is defined in two words: South and Central America (with the Antilles).

The story about the quirks of nature will be structured in accordance with this regional division of space where land (and fresh water) animals live. In the section "Oddities of Nature" northern latitudes“unusual and endangered animals of the Holarctic zoogeographic region are described. In the chapter “South of the Sahara” – Ethiopian. The title of the section “Indo-Malay Miracles” speaks for itself. “On the Southern Continent of the New World” means in the Neotropical zoogeographical region, and “Weirds on the Fifth Continent” means Australian wonders.

1. Oddities of nature in northern latitudes

Unusual in the ordinary

Blindness of instinct

Pine caterpillars march in a closed column in search of food. marching silkworm. Each caterpillar follows the previous one, touching it with its hairs. The caterpillars produce thin webs that serve as a guide for their comrades walking behind. The lead caterpillar leads the entire hungry army to new "pastures" on the tops of the pine trees.

The famous French naturalist Jean Fabre brought the head of the leading caterpillar closer to the “tail” of the last one in the column. She grabbed the guiding thread and immediately turned from a “commander” into an “ordinary soldier” - she followed the caterpillar that she was now holding on to. The head and tail of the column closed, and the caterpillars began to circle aimlessly in one place - they walked along the edge of a large vase. Instinct was powerless to get them out of this absurd situation. Food was placed nearby, but the caterpillars did not pay attention to it.

An hour passed, then another, a day passed, and the caterpillars kept spinning and spinning, as if enchanted. They were spinning for a whole week! Then the column disintegrated: the caterpillars became so weak that they could no longer move on.

Many people have seen dung beetles, but not everyone has caught them at work. They make balls out of dung and roll them with their hind legs: the ball is in front, the beetle is behind it in reverse!

Balls of low-grade, so to speak, manure go to feed the beetle itself. He will bury such a ball in a hole, climb into it and sit for several days until he eats the entire ball.

For feeding the children, that is, the larvae, the best manure is selected, preferably sheep. Beetles often fight over it, stealing other people's balls. The one who defended his property (or who took it from his neighbor) quickly rolls the dung ball. The beetle has amazing strength: it weighs two grams, and the ball weighs up to forty grams.

The English scientist R. W. Hingston, a researcher of the oddities of instinct, tested this mental capacity dung beetles: between the hole and the beetle, which was rolling its ball towards it, he placed a piece of thick paper, protruding only two centimeters beyond the entrance to the hole. The beetles (Hingston did this experiment with many dung beetles) rested against an obstacle and tried to break through it. None of them thought to bypass the paper sheet. They went ahead, trying to break through the barrier. For three days we pressed with all our might on the paper to no avail. On the fourth day, many left their balls, despairing of a direct way to get to the mink. But some continued this useless task in the following days.

Well, okay, bugs, maybe you stupid animals will decide. But the activity of solitary wasps requires a remarkable “intelligence.” They hunt various insects (many also spiders). The victim is paralyzed with a sting and carried to the mink. Prey is buried in it, having first placed the testicles on the body of a “preserved” insect or spider. And with these skilled “surgeons” R. W. Hingston performed a simple experiment that convinces us of the blindness of instinct.

From the dungeon in which the wasp had placed the victim with the egg, he retrieved both the prey and the wasp egg. And the wasp was just about to close the hole. Well, did she notice that the hole was empty? No, as if nothing had happened, she covered the empty hole with earth. One of the wasps in this experiment, “sealing” her pantry, even in the turmoil stepped on the prey she had brought and removed from the hole, but did not pay any attention to it and continued to calmly fill up the hole, although now this act of hers was completely meaningless.

Mason wasps usually build their nests in trees and camouflage them so skillfully to match the bark that the nest is difficult to notice. But sometimes they build their dwellings in houses, say, on a polished fireplace surround or somewhere else on the wooden trim of a room. In this case, their usual camouflage will only be harmful, since it is not painted at all to match the polished wood. Will the wasps decide to abandon their usual camouflage? No. Obeying instinct, and not reason, traditional camouflage is created, which in this case makes the nest very noticeable.

Camouflage is also common among dromius crabs. They wear "camouflage robes" their entire adult lives. Some cover themselves from above with a shell shell picked up from the bottom of the sea, others decorate their backs with a sponge. There are also those who deftly cut out twigs of algae or hydroid polyps with their claws, place them on themselves, holding them with their hind legs, and immediately a crab has become a bush!

In the aquarium, if there are no algae or polyps there, the dromia collect all kinds of debris and also place it on their backs. And if we put colored scraps in the aquarium, let’s say even red ones, the crab will pick them up and decorate himself with them. This results in unmasking, but the crab does not know this.

Many birds are easily confused if you do the following: move the nest to the side in their absence. Having returned to the nest, the birds look for it in the same place, completely ignoring their own nest, which is placed only a meter or one and a half meters from its previous position. When the nest is returned to where it was before the experiment, they will continue to incubate unperturbed. And if the nest does not move back, they build a new one.

Birds and eggs don’t know their own well. Eagles, chickens, and ducks, for example, can incubate any object that is shaped like an egg. And swans even try to hatch bottles, seagulls try to hatch stones, tennis balls and tin cans placed in the nest instead of eggs.

The eggs in the garden warbler's nest were replaced with the eggs of another songbird, the Accentor. After this, the warbler laid another egg. It didn't look like the other eggs in the nest. Slavka carefully examined the “suspicious” egg and threw it away. She mistook it for someone else's!

Why, birds, a cow, a more perfect creature, cannot always distinguish its newborn child from a crude fake (later the cow will no longer confuse her calf with anyone else!). British zoologist Frank Lane writes about this. The calf was taken from the cow. She seemed very sad without him. To console her, a stuffed calf stuffed with hay was placed in the barn. The cow calmed down and began to lick the rough fake. She caressed her with such cow tenderness that the skin on the stuffed animal burst and hay fell out of it. Then the cow calmly began to eat the hay and quietly ate the entire “calf.”

Rats are considered one of the smartest rodents. How narrow-minded their “mind” is is shown by the following funny episode. A white rat was making a nest. Obsessed with construction fever, she scoured the cage in search of suitable material and suddenly came across her a long tail. Now the rat grabbed him in his teeth and carried him to the nest. Then she went out on a new search, and the tail, naturally, crawled after her. The rat once again “found” him and carried him to the nest. Twelve times in a row she brought her own tail to the nest! Whenever the rat came across it, its instinct made it grab this twig-like object.

But it seems that we have found an intelligent creature in the animal kingdom! In America there is a small wood rat, the neotoma. Not a single predator would dare to poke into its hole: sharp spines stick out in the walls with their points towards the entrance. The rat itself arranges these barbed barriers. It climbs onto a cactus, gnaws off the spines, brings them into the hole and sticks them into the walls at the entrance with the tips up. Isn't this wisdom?

However, instead of cactus spines, give your neotome other sharp objects, such as pins or small nails. They may well replace cactus thorns as a barrier. But this does not reach the rat. Her ancestors developed the habit of using only cactus spines. They didn't have to deal with pins. And the rat itself, without the prompting of instinct, does not think of using them in action.

But then a clever predator appears on the scene - a skunk. The rat runs away. She instinctively rushes into the hole. But the hole is far away! The rat turns around and quickly hides in the thorny thickets of a cactus.

What's the matter? Why did an animal that had just demonstrated a complete inability to think, in a moment of danger, nevertheless manage to choose the most reasonable path to salvation?

The Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was able to explain this apparent discrepancy in the behavior of animals. He established that the actions of higher animals are guided not only by instincts. It turned out that vertebrates and some invertebrate animals have the ability to remember skills acquired as a result of life experiences well. A rat once apparently accidentally escaped from a predator under a thorny bush. She began to continue to seek salvation in the same shelter. In an animal, says I. P. Pavlov, it was formed in the brain conditioned reflex- a kind of memory that thorny bushes can serve as reliable protection from predators.

Conditioned reflexes help animals adapt to constantly changing, new conditions. The memory of successes and failures preserved by the brain allows the animal to better navigate a changing environment.

School of Life

Along with instinct, learning - important factor in animal behavior. A classic example of learning is training. The animals we see in the circus are trained by developing conditioned reflexes in them.

Through training, amazing results can be achieved, especially in higher animals.

...The paralyzed William Powell is now being cared for by a very unusual nanny - the capuchin monkey Krystle! Psychologist Mary Willard taught her this difficult task for an animal. Training using a special method lasted a year. Then the monkey moved in with the patient. How could she help him? It turned out that there were a lot of people: Krystle, following Powell’s signals, brought books and other things, turned the lights on and off, and opened the doors. She even knew how to turn on the record player and put different records on it! And she even spoon-fed the patient!

Mary Willard believes that her experience was a success, and she now continues to work with other capuchins.

A baboon named Ala, trained in this business on one of the farms in South Africa, also became an excellent goat herder.

At first, Ala lived in a pen with goats and became very attached to them. When the goats went to pasture, she went with them. She protected them, drove them away from other people's herds, gathered them into a herd if they were too scattered, and in the evening brought them home. In general, he behaved like the best herding dog. Even more! She knew every goat and every kid. One day she ran home from the pasture screaming. It turned out that they forgot to kick two kids out of the pen. And Ala noticed this, although there were eighty goats in the herd!

When the little goats got tired of walking, she took them and carried them, and then gave them to their bleating mother, tucking them right under the udder. If the kid was too small, she would lift it and support it while it suckled. Ala never confused the kids - she didn’t give them to someone else’s goat, not their mother. If triplets were born and the kid was taken away to be placed with a goat with one suckling, Ala would dispose of it in her own way and return it to its mother again. She even made sure that the goats' milk did not burn out if the kid did not suck it all out. Feeling the swollen udder, she sucked the milk herself. Such high responsibility in carrying out the work assigned to them was also noticed in other monkeys. Some chimpanzees, if the task assigned to them turned out to be beyond their strength, even suffered nervous disorders, falling into deep depression.

Animal training includes not only human training, but also adult teaching wild animals your little children. This has been observed, in particular, in monkeys. Orangutans, for example.

In zoos they saw how a mother orangutan, already on the tenth day after the birth of her baby, began to teach him to cling with his hands not only to her fur, which he never wanted to part with. She tore his arms and legs away from her and tried to force him to grab the bars of the bars. But even at three months he did not know how to do it properly. Then she changed the teaching method: she put the child on the floor of the cage, and she climbed higher. He screamed, but tried to crawl somehow. Then she came down and gave him a finger, which he immediately grabbed.

They teach it this way: tear it away from themselves, hold the cub in one hand and climb a tree. The baby, trying to find a more stable position, willy-nilly is forced to grab onto everything at hand, the branches first.

Imitation is very widespread among wild and domestic animals. Chickens, pigeons, dogs, cows, monkeys, having been full for a long time, will eat and eat if their other relatives are eating next to them. Not even only relatives: when mock-ups made to look like chickens “peck” at the grain, the heavily overfed chickens will also peck at it, risking bursting from gluttony.

“Hayes taught his pet chimpanzee to imitate his facial expressions on command, “Do as I do.” It turned out that a monkey in this respect is completely no different from a child of the corresponding age.”

(Remy Chauvin)

An interesting thing happened in England: tits started “stealing” - they pierced the caps of milk bottles left by milkmen at the doors of their customers with their beaks and ate the cream. Obviously, some tits learned this through trial and error, while all others borrowed science from them, imitating them. Moreover, soon from England such theft spread to the north of France. It is believed that English tits, having flown across the English Channel, taught French ones how to pierce the foil caps of milk bottles and enjoy cream.

In recent years it has become known amazing behavior Japanese macaques

“In the autumn of 1923, a one and a half year old female, whom we named Imo, once found a sweet potato in the sand ( sweet potato). She dipped him in the water - probably quite by accident - and washed off the sand with her paws.”

(M. Kawai)

Thus, little Imo began the extraordinary tradition for which the monkeys of Koshima Island are now famous.

A month later, Imo’s friend saw her manipulations with yams and water and immediately “beguiled” her cultural manners. Four months later, Imo’s mother did the same. Gradually, sisters and friends adopted the method discovered by Imo, and four years later 15 monkeys were washing sweet potatoes. Almost all of them were between one and three years old. Some adult five- to seven-year-old females learned a new habit from the young. But none of the males! And not because they were less smart, but simply were in different ranks than the group surrounding Imo, and therefore had little contact with the smart monkey, her family and friends.

Then the mothers adopted the habit of washing sweet potatoes from their children, and then they themselves taught their younger descendants, born after this method was invented. By 1962, 42 of the 59 monkeys in Imo's troop washed their sweet potatoes before eating. Only old males and females, who in 1953 (the year of invention!) were already old enough and did not communicate with mischievous youth, did not learn the new habit. But young females, having matured, from generation to generation taught their children from the first days of their lives to wash sweet potatoes.

“Later, the monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes not only in fresh water rivers, but also in the sea. Perhaps they tasted better salted. I also observed the beginning of another tradition, deliberately teaching it to some monkeys, but others adopted it without my help. I lured several monkeys into the water with groundnuts, and after three years all the cubs and young monkeys began to regularly bathe, swim and even dive into the sea. They also learned to wash wheat grains scattered in the sand in water especially for them. First, they patiently fished out each grain from the sand. Later, having collected a full handful of sand and grains, they dipped it into water. The sand sank to the bottom, and the light grains floated up. All that remained was to collect the grains from the surface of the water and eat them. By the way, this method was also discovered by Imo. As you can see, monkeys are endowed with very different abilities. Among the closest relatives of the inventive Imo, almost everyone has learned this habit, but of the children of the monkey Nami, only a few.”

(M. Kawai)

Imitation may even be involuntary. For example, during the first time caterpillars appear in nature - at the beginning of summer - few birds eat them. But then, as ethnologist Niko Tinbergen established, every bird that has discovered caterpillars and is convinced of the complete edibility of these butterfly larvae “forces” its spouse to get them.

The ammophila sand wasp also feeds its larvae with caterpillars. Ammophiles do not live in large communities like other wasps. Completely alone, alone, they struggle with the vicissitudes of fate.

The ammophila caterpillar paralyzes the caught caterpillar, injecting into the nerve centers with a sharp sting, then drags its victim into a hole dug in the sand. There it lays eggs on the caterpillar's body. The caterpillar is well preserved and therefore does not spoil. Then the wasp fills the hole with sand. Taking a small pebble in its jaws, the ammophila methodically and carefully compacts the sand poured over the nest with it until it is level with the ground, and even the most predatory and experienced eye cannot notice the entrance to the burrow.

Another ammophila, instead of a stone, takes a piece of wood in its jaws and presses it tightly to the ground, then lifts it and presses it again, and so on several times.

Ammophiles are found in both Europe and America. But it's strange: American species master the “tools” better. European ammophiles, apparently, do not all and do not always compact their burrows filled with stones.

Sea otters - sea otters - live here on the Commander Islands, and in America - on the Aleutian Islands. Sea otters are good at using “tools” – a stone, like an anvil. Before setting out for prey, the sea otter selects a stone on the shore or at the bottom of the sea and holds it under its arm. Now he is armed and quickly dives to the bottom. With one paw he picks up shells and hedgehogs and puts them, as if in a pocket, under his arm, where the stone already lies.

In order not to lose its prey along the way, the sea otter presses its paw tightly to itself and swims rather to the surface of the ocean, where it begins to eat. Moreover, the sea otter does not rush to the shore to have a snack - it is used to dining at sea. Lies on his back and arranges a “dining table” - a stone - on his chest, then takes one out from under his arm sea urchins and shells, smashes them on a stone and eats them slowly. The waves rock him rhythmically, the sun warms him - good!

Tool activity, according to some scientists, is a special form of learning. Insight - sudden appearance adaptive behavior without preliminary trial and error, correct solution a task faced by an animal in an experiment or in the wild.

It is possible that working with a pebble in ammophila is not an insight, since all representatives of this species of wasps are equally proficient in it. However, the discovery of African vultures - stone smashing ostrich eggs- an obvious insight. It, this skill, does not represent the property of the entire species. One vulture had an epiphany one day: desperate to break the shell of the egg of the largest bird in the world with his beak, he brought a stone and threw it on the egg. The egg cracked and revealed its contents to him. This smart vulture continued to act this way in the future. Other birds that saw this apparently adopted the method invented by their relative. This discovery has not yet reached the vultures of more remote areas, such as Asia.

The development of the ability to wield stone among sea otters obviously followed the same path.

The insight is also presented by the amazing behavior of our blood relatives in the animal kingdom described below.

At the American Institute for the Study great apes Once such an episode was filmed. The newborn chimpanzee was not breathing. Then his mother laid him on the ground, opened his lips and stretched out his tongue with her fingers. Then she pressed her mouth to his and began to breathe air into him. She breathed for a long time, and the cub came to life!

Several years ago, a male orangutan saved the life of his newborn son in the same way.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

Every type without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the Herostratus-style temple of Artemis in Ephesus or to reduce this or that species to nothing. It is possible to rebuild a human miracle. A destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. And the biological species “Homo sapiens” is obliged to remember this and only then will it justify its species name.

And this amazing thing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of the species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations or, conversely, a rare attachment to the place chosen for its habitat (as, for example, musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing running speed (cheetah) or interesting twists and turns in the discovery and study of an animal (giant panda). In a word, by “unusuality” I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was selected.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago the ocean was at ease. Continents did not dissect its vast expanses. The land rose in a single mass above the salty waters. Scientists called this still hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagaea). In it, all modern continents were “fused” into one common landmass. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and Gondwanaland, a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America, was the first to move south. Then Gondwana broke up: South America rushed, having separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected to Australia, to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still formed a single continent. This was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Both Americas will move even more to the west, Africa and especially Australia - to the northeast, India - to the east. The position of Antarctica will remain unchanged.

“Continents do not remain in place, but move. It is amazing that such a movement was first proposed about 350 years ago and has been put forward several times since then, but this idea only gained scientific recognition after 1900. Most people believed that the rigidity of the crust prevented the movement of continents. Now we all know that this is not true."

(Richard Foster Flint, professor at Yale University, USA)

But justice requires saying that to this day there are still scientists who confidently reject the possibility of continental migration.

If we accept the proposition: Pangea is a once-former reality, then we can draw the following conclusion following from this fact: in those days, presumably, zoogeography would have been simple. In order to move and spread to all ends of a single landmass, animals did not know any significant barriers. Seas and oceans, insurmountable for land-based creatures (who cannot fly), were not separated by continents, as they are today.

There are three of the latter: Notogea, Neogea and Arctogea (or Megagaea).

The location of the latter is clear from the name.

The Holarctic region occupies an area as vast as no other. It includes all of North America, all of Europe, most of Asia (south to India and Indochina), as well as North Africa to the borders of the Sahara with savannas.

On May 23, in the Central Children's Library for students of grade 3 “b” of MBOU Secondary School No. 16, a travel game “Nature is a miracle worker” was held.
Purpose: to introduce the work of I. Akimushkin; highlight the features of the writer's style.
Objectives: to develop cognitive interest among schoolchildren;
develop creativity, intelligence, curiosity, outlook,
cultivate interest in reading.
I. Akimushkin reveals to readers the magnificent world of animals and teaches them to perceive its diversity.
One of his first books, “Primates of the Sea” (1963), will be dedicated specifically to cephalopods- one of the most intelligent creatures among invertebrates. Igor Akimushkin is the author of 96 scientific, artistic, popular science and children's works about animals.
Igor Ivanovich wrote a number of books for children, using techniques that are typical for fairy tales and travel. These are: “Once upon a time there was a squirrel”, “Once upon a time there was a beaver”, “Once upon a time there was a hedgehog”, “Building animals”, “Who flies without wings?”, “Different animals”, “Why is a rabbit not like a hare” and etc.
“The World of Animals” is the most famous work of Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin, which has gone through several reprints. They summarize a huge amount of scientific material, use more modern scheme classifications of the animal world, many different facts from the life of animals, birds, fish, insects and reptiles, wonderful illustrations, photographs, funny stories and legends, incidents from life and notes from an observer-naturalist.
For teenagers, Akimushkin wrote books of a more complex genre - encyclopedic: “River and Sea Animals”, “ Entertaining biology", "The Vanished World", "The Tragedy of Wild Animals", etc. "Traces of Unseen Beasts" and "The Path of Legends" were among the first books on cryptozoology (the field of searching for animals considered legendary or non-existent).
Without exaggeration, Igor Akimushkin can be called a worthy successor to the traditions of not only such famous naturalist writers as M.M. Prishvin, G.M. Skrebitsky, V.V. Bianchi, B. Grzimek, D. Darrell, but also such a serious scientist who wrote the famous book “The Life of Animals” - A. Brem.
Akimushkin’s work amazingly combines Scientific research with a captivating artistic narrative, great love to animals with the interest of a research scientist, knowledge of psychology and the interests of children with the direct curiosity of a child.
The students were shown a slide show (according to Akimushkin’s stories), a game was held, which consisted of several competitions: “guess riddles”, “animals”, “guess the animal by the description of its tail”, “unseen animal”, “where, who lives? "
The teams showed their erudition, ingenuity, imagination, and artistic abilities.