Hopefully by now we understand that our Earth has many patterns that repeat over and over ...seasons, day and night, tides. If we look closer we might find even more. Well, it turns out that animals have a "super" power inside their bodies that is pretty interesting. It's called a "biological clock". Many animal species can predict environmental pattern changes and they can prepare for it and deal with it. Internal clocks are triggered by light, temperature and length of day. We experience something like this when we have "jet lag". Your biological clock thinks that it should be getting dark, yet you are traveling out of the shadow of the Earth into more light and a different time period. Your body says it's time to sleep, but your eyes are telling your brain, it's really light outside and I shouldn't be sleepy! Scientists have discovered that fruit flies know when to hatch out of their pupa stage because of 2 genes that "turn on" only at a specific time of day. Honey bees have a biological clock seen when bees "marathon dance". Under natural conditions, bees get really excited by very rich food sources. They may dance continually for up to several hours in the hive, without ever going out again to the food and without seeing the sun. But inside the hive, the angle of the bee's dance, it might be vertical or horizontal, the part of the dance that tells other hive members the direction of the food source, slowly changes at 15 degrees per hour, tracking the sun's movement and giving correct directions to the followers. It's actually called "the Waggle-waggle Dance". Is this all true? Morning songs of birds, the seeking of nuts and grains behavior of the squirrels in autumn, and the human tendency to get a little blue in the winter all seem to be the natural rhythms of life. The presence of internal biological clocks is one of the most universal traits shared by all living things, from bacteria to fruit flies to humans.
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Mrs. TaylorI love science! Everything about the world is interesting and never boring. I love to study plants, animals, insects, and people. My favorite subjects are my students who are the most unique organisms on the planet! Categories |