ANIMALS SHOW THEIR RAINBOW COLORS
Some animals’ most beautiful colors might be the ones you don’t normally see. We are sharing 2 stories about unexpected color spectrums: 1) Thermal imaging for elephants that is helping to save their lives 2) Rainbow Paper Wasps that create colorful nest sculptures. Check them out below.
Scientists from University of Guelph, Canada, used thermal imaging to study how elephants manage to regulate their body temperature.
Conducting their research at Busch Gardens Zoological Park, they observed that during the day, elephants maintained a steady overall temperature, with cooler areas appearing on their backs.
At night, however, thermal imaging showed that elephants’ hottest body parts are their trunks and their eyes.
Dr. Peter Wrege, of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Elephant Listening Project, has been recording elephant sounds for 10 years in Central Africa. One of the best places to gather their vocalizations is in natural clearings, called bais, where elephants gather to socialize and drink.
While elephant sounds were relatively easy to gather, visual observations were much trickier. That’s because, although they are not technically nocturnal animals, to avoid human encroachment and threat, they have adapted to reserve about 80% of their activities at bais for cover of night.
Wrege rigged the bai’s with night vision and thermal imaging equipment, along with his audio recording equipment. Together, they not only provided an amazing new collection of data about the lives of elephants, but they also monitored the activity of human poachers in search of ivory.
Wrege’s efforts, supported in part by USFWS African Elephant Conservation Fund since 2009, have made valuable contributions to elephant conservation.
European Paper Wasps eat paper and spit it out to form their nests. So when biology student Mattia Menchetti supplied colored construction paper to a busy wasp colony, rainbow nests happened!
Menchetti, who studies at The University of Florence, gradually fed the wasps (Polistes dominula) different colors of paper and they produced magnificent sculpted spectrums.
See more of Menchetti’s experiment on his website.
Wasp nests represent a nuisance that begins every year in spring. But now, their nest are colorful works of art!
Image: by Mattia Menchetti. Colored Paper Wasp Nest.
Read more about Rainbows all this week on BeautifulNow. And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Wellness, Impact, Nature/Science, Food, Arts/Design, and Travel, Daily Fix posts.
