I wanted to write about President Obama’s Nobel Prize or perhaps the shocking predictions of the British economy but thankfully I found something more cheerful to discuss. Now, this may be old news to you since it occurred back in July but I had not heard it before. The story is as follows…
Yang Yun thought she was going to die when her legs were paralysed by arctic temperatures during a free diving contest without any breathing equipment.
Competitors had to sink to the bottom of an aquarium’s 20ft arctic pool and stay there for as long as possible amid the beluga whales at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China.
But when Yun, 26, tried to head to the surface she found her legs were crippled by cramps.
“I began to choke and sank even lower and I thought that was it for me – I was dead. Until I felt this incredible force under me driving me to the surface,” she explained.
Mila, the Beluga whale, had spotted her difficulties and using her sensitive dolphin-like nose guided Yun safely to the surface.
I think the extraordinary thing about this story is the idea that a whale could empathise with the plight of a human. It seems that certain mammals are innately inclined to help one another. In an experiment to study altruism (the tendency for organisms to be generous to one another for no obvious gain) pairs of monkeys were compared…
In one experiment, we placed two capuchin monkeys side by side: separate, but in full view. One of them needed to barter with us with small plastic tokens. The critical test came when we offered a choice between two differently coloured tokens with different meaning: one token was “selfish,” the other “prosocial”. If the bartering monkey picked the selfish token, it received a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner got nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewarded both monkeys equally at the same time. The monkeys gradually began to prefer the prosocial token. The procedures were repeated many times with different pairs of monkeys and different sets of tokens, and the monkeys kept picking the prosocial option showing how much they care about each other’s welfare.
Humans think we’re pretty special because we have elaborate social conventions that put us above other animals but maybe we are not that different after all. [I have subsequently added this post with some video of capuchin interactions. 21/07/14]
[References – Beluga story: Daily Telegraph Monkeys: Frans de Waal]
Questions…
- To which class of vertebrates to both beluga whales and capuchin monkeys belong?
- Describe one feature that puts them in that class.
- During anaerobic respiration, what waste products are produced in the muscles of humans?
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