Hello and welcome to your Daily Fun Fact From Flora

In biology we love to wonder why animals do shit.

How is an animal’s behaviour adaptive ? What fitness advantage is it giving them?

Well one way that you can figure that out is to ask one of your engineer friends (perhaps a Lucas or a Francis) to design an animal body or behaviour so that is optimises a certain criterion.

(also stock images of engineers are hilarious please enjoy)

You might want to know the body that moves fastest through water or obtains the most amount of energy.

You then compare that to the real animal and how closely matched they are. If the match is close then you can basically see that natural selection has “designed” the animals to match that criterion.

We are going to have a quick look at prairie dogs.

Now they live in burrows that have two “exits” to the surface. But what they do that is a bit odd is that they build different shaped mounds at each end. One end has two tall cone shaped mounds end and the other has two smaller rounded mounds.

Now the adaptive hypothesis for why this would be is that the mounds are somehow allowing for airflow through their burrows. Without airflow these guys would suffocate so it is pretty important that they have means of allowing for good ventilation.

So this group of researchers got an engineer to optimise the air flow through a tunnel and guess what.

The model showed a burrow with a higher, cone-shaped mounds at one end, because this burrow will have air flowing through it even with no surface wind.

This is something known as the Bernoulli effect.

And I just think it’s pretty nuts that these guys have been doing this for millennia and we figured it out a couple of hundred years ago.

Nature is damn smart.

Lots of love,

Flora

( this is for you Clare )