In this world, the most caring for children is the parents, whether it is humans or other mammals, because they can not have a few hundred million eggs, everyone takes extra care of their children and is afraid of losing them one day. In human society, parents are always staring at their children and are eager to take a rope to tie their children to their side, after all, no one wants to lose their children. In the forests of madagascar there is such a mammal called the lowland hedgehog. Lowland hedgehog mothers don't have ropes or the thumbs necessary to grasp the ropes, but they think of other ways to avoid losing their children while foraging at night, even with a bit of rock and roll —using their bristles to transmit sounds.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the only mammal that rubs the sound</h1>
The lowland hedgehog looks like a hedgehog dressed as a bumblebee on Halloween, covered with bright yellow and black spines. On their backs, there are a small tuft of functionally special bristles, about 13 to 16 of them, and the low-lying hedgehog will rub these bristles to create a sharp sound that sounds a bit like the sound of a hand quickly scratching a comb, and its unique mode of managing children is very interesting.
The principle of low-lying hedgehogs making sounds is called "friction pronunciation", which is the same basic principle as that of male crickets rubbing their wings to make sounds to attract the opposite sex, except that no other mammal will use this method to communicate with their peers except low-lying hedgehogs. The lowland hedgehog is absolutely unique. Lowland hedgehog life on the island of Madagascar is very prosperous. The island of Madagascar was originally part of the ancient land of Gondwana, which broke away from the ancient land about 90 million years ago to become an independent island. One day, 30 million years after independence, a small mammal came to the island, which later evolved into different species of lowland hedgehogs, occupying different ecological niches.
For example, one low-striped hedgehog loves to swim and grows fins, while other low-striped hedgehogs run into the bushes. Lowland hedgehogs evolved the characteristics of diurnal nocturnal and grouped outgoing, with groups of up to 20, each with a long nose, communicating with each other through friction in the night. A female low-lying hedgehog can give birth to 11 cubs per litter, which is already a lot. You know, every time the lowland hedgehog goes out to hunt, the whole family will act separately, and each cub may run about three or five meters away. Thus, in the rainforest of the lively island of Madagascar, the emblematic sound of friction becomes a beacon for lost children to return home.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > unique vocal communication of low-lying hedgehogs</h1>
The first scientist to discover the low-lying hedgehog's unique way of communicating was Edwin Gould, and in the 1960s and 1970s, he believed that the friction sound was the way the mother of the low-striped hedgehog controlled the movements of her child, so he set up a square area and placed speakers in two corners. Gould put a low-ground hedgehog cub into the area and played the sound of bristle rubbing, and 15 of the 19 cubs he tested went straight to the loudspeaker. The second experiment took place outdoors, where Gould applied glue to the mother's bridles of the lowland hedgehog so that it could not rub the pronunciation. This time, the cubs, though still able to move freely, followed their mother closely, and the smell seemed to replace the friction sound and became the way they locked the mother's position.
However, the significance of the lowland hedgehog's use of this unique communication style is not just to prevent the cubs from getting lost. The lowland hedgehog is not the only carnivorous mammal on the island of Madagascar. The same habitat also inhabits the ring-tailed badgers, whose body surface cloth has stripes that intersect black and flame colors, and the hue is similar to that of the lowland hedgehog. There is also the Horse Island Badger, a small animal belonging to the family Cyperaceae, which looks a lot like a cat, but is actually closer to a badger. In his experiments, Gould released any of the above predator odors to lowland hedgehogs, causing a violent reaction from lowland hedgehogs. The spines on the neck of the low-lying hedgehog do not rub against the pronunciation, these thorns are usually flat but will stand up when stimulated, looking like the sharp, yellow mane of a male lion. At the same time, the low-lying hedgehog also makes a "poof" sound. If the other person is not impressed, the low-ground hedgehog will raise its volume, make a "crunching" sound, and will look up fiercely, piercing its neck with a broken thorn into the predator's head or claws.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > wonderful echo localization</h1>
Low-lying hedgehogs can use sound for more magical purposes—Gould has done more experiments to show that low-lying hedgehogs can even perform echolocation. He placed a 1.5-meter-high pole in a pitch-black room with a disc at the top of the pole, and a platform under the disc, which connected to the slope, and below the slope was a chest containing food and drink rewards. Gould divides the lowland hedgehogs into two groups. One group wears earplugs, the other group does not wear their goals and heads down to the secondary platform and rushes to the food bin. The group without earplugs did well, but the other group didn't do as well. Gould found that the group of low-ground hedgehogs wearing earplugs came to the edge of the disc more often to look for the secondary platform, took longer, and often missed when jumping off the disc.
It is true that low-lying hedgehogs can also sense the location of food boxes through their sense of smell, but this experiment proves that hearing is also important for the navigation of low-lying hedgehogs. Gould recorded all the sounds in the experiment, and it was confirmed that the low-lying hedgehog did not rub the pronunciation when exploring the way, but was positioned by flicking its tongue, and the frequency was generally fast. They don't just do this during platform experiments—Gould notices that an ambitious lowland hedgehog has escaped from his lab, running and hitting its tongue. From this he concluded that, like bats, low-lying hedgehogs seem to be echo-localized. They emit sound waves and receive echoes to confirm the condition of their surroundings. It seems that bats are not the only animals that use echolocation, and perhaps this wonderful little hedgehog does not live on an isolated island, and it will become a biomimetic sample for our study of radar.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
Our little low-lying hedgehog mother, although she is not good-looking, is a master of sonic manipulation wandering in the dangerous and dark rainforest of Madagascar, constantly rubbing and sounding and echo positioning when the children are running around, and if you think about it, its management model is similar to the ropes used by our parents, but the latter is too rigid, and the former is full of natural art.