2. How long does it take for an ice age to develop? What makes it end?
3. What other bees besides European honey bees (Apis mellifera) do a type of waggle dance? How does it work?
4. When and where did the first human (Homo sapiens) come to exist? How were they related to and distinguished from other primate relatives?
Pheromones by definition are chemicals emitted by living organisms to communicate to other organisms within their same species. Flowers do not communicate with other organisms by emitting chemicals. Therefore, they do not emit pheromones. However, they do emit fragrances and chemicals to attract insects which further help pollination.
ReplyDelete"Pheromones." Cornell University's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station. 21 July 2009 http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/pheronet/pherom.html.
Pichersky, Eran. "Scent engineering: toward the goal of controlling how flowers smell." ScienceDirect. 17 Jan. 2007. Elsevier B.V. 21 July 2009 http://www.mcdb.lsa.umich.edu/labs/pichersky/references/Scentengineering.pdf.
The waggle dance of honey bees is used as a source of animal communication to inform other nest mates about food sources. When the dance is performed, the hunter shakes her body back and forth, at the same time rotating her body at about 50° every second, while walking across the comb. The dance usually lasts about 30 minutes and the bee travels to the broodnest portion of the hive. The tremble dance sends out messages to the bees that there has been a profitable nectar source found. The tremble dance is a mechanism that balances a colony’s nectar processing rate with the nectar intake rate at times of greatly increased nectar invasion.
ReplyDeleteHowever there are certain ecological circumstances that play a role. In temperate habitats, there was no bee dance communication that took place. This implies that using the dance for food source locators must be more important in certain habitats. It was found that there were more clusters of the honeybees doing the waggle dance in tropical rainforests. The waggle dance seems to be some sort of adaptation to the habitats which the honeybees developed, which is possibly why there was no source of other types of bees performing the dance since it is used to site nectar.
1. Section of Neurobiology and Behavior, Seeley G. Mudd Hall, Cornell University, 14853 Ithaca, NY, USA. 1992.
2. Dornhaus, Anna and Lars, Chittka. Department of Behavioural Physiology and Sociobiology, Biozentrum, Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany
There has been a 100,000-year ice age cycle identified. Some think that an ice age develops from ice sheet dynamics; however that is not the case. The main ice age rhythm involves the response of the global carbon cycle. Ice lags three variables including atmospheric carbon dioxide, Vostok air temperature, and deep-water temperature that are in phase with orbital eccentricity, which means they act in an odd behavior. Though, orbital eccentricity is not the dominate peak in the ice volume spectrum. The global carbon cycle generates the eccentricity signal by causing changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. It ends up occurring every 100,000 year approximately.
ReplyDeleteShackleton, Nicholas. Science 15 September 2000: Vol. 289. no. 5486, pp. 1897 – 1902.
http://www.sciencemag.org.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/cgi/content/full/289/5486/1897