Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture Review

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(More customer reviews)If you look at a skyscraper made by humans, you can't help being impressed by the complexity of the construction and the coordination of hundreds of planners and workers that went into it.And yet termites build proportionately bigger structures which show planning in such things as ventilation and heat regulation.How is it that animals with such tiny brains can create such massive and complicated structures?If building by a group of creatures is remarkable, then surely also remarkable are the webs built by spiders, or the nests (especially the woven ones) built by birds.What is going on in the brains of creatures who build?We don't have firm answers, but in _Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture_ (Oxford University Press), biologist Mike Hansell tries to make sure we are asking the right questions, and he describes research accomplished and proposed to get the answers.He has written academic works on this subject, and this is his first one for the non-specialist.He dips into technical discussions just enough, and the topic is inherently fascinating.Animals build homes all over the place, for protection from weather and predators, but they also build traps, and male bowerbirds make structures that have no purpose other than impressing potential mates.This is an excellent overview of what animals build, with plenty of examples and with fascinating discussions about the experiments used to tease out answers to how the creatures learned construction.

Hansell first introduces the Central American caterpillar _Aethria carnicauda_, which uses the same sort of protective gadget.When it is ready to make itself into a pupa, it first picks a straight plant stem.Then it starts plucking hairs out of its body, hairs that it will not need within its pupa or as a moth.It has tweezer jaws to pluck hairs one by one, and each hair it sticks with silk to the stem it has selected.It makes a disk of radiating bristles, and may make four of these defense lines, obstacles to anything coming along the stem that might disturb its upcoming transformative slumber.Only then does it build its cocoon.Think about this behavior and you can't help but wonder: how does such a simple creature know to build a relatively sophisticated barrier?Does it have a plan?It's hard to imagine that a caterpillar has any sort of consciousness, but its nervous system must make some sort of decision about the time to build its bristle defense, and where the next hair gets placed.We might even identify with the caterpillar as a constructor of such a clever defense, and throughout this book Hansell gives warnings of the dangers of anthropomorphizing, of our attributing to animals thoughts and goals without proper evidence.We can't enter the minds of these creatures, but Hansell is a little more generous about the sin of anthropomorphism, saying not only that it can generate hypotheses that might stir further investigation, but that also the question of what animals think or feel as they build is not completely outside of scientific enquiry (although not much headway has been made so far). _Aethria_ is just one of scores of animals evaluated here, including ants, termites, birds, prairie dogs, and beavers.

There is a whole chapter here on the webs of spiders, and once again, using simple materials (of their own secretion) and simple instructions, a spider can produce a wonder of complexity, a web for trapping insects.Astonishingly, not everything in a web may be behaviorally programmed as even spiders have the capacity to learn.It is easier for a spider to run downwards on a web to a caught insect rather than run upwards, but in a fascinating experiment on one particular species, some spiders weren't given the chance to run.The experimenter simply fed them flies as they were sitting in the middle of their webs.When they re-built their webs, they continued to make as much web above themselves as below.Spiders who did real catching, however, learned to build webs that had more catching-space down below, and spiders who were artificially fed insects that were inserted above them in the web built webs with a bigger topside.There are so many interesting experiments described here.In the final chapter on bowerbirds, Hansell winds up his discussion of how the female could show by posturing how interested she is in the male: "This suggests that a male could infer whether or not a female is likely to make her escape from the avenue by the degree of crouching she shows.Cue an experiment with a robot female satin bowerbird!"I thought Hansell was making a joke; he wasn't.The robot has been built, and when it assumes different positions, the male changed the intensity of his courtship dance.This is an engaging book summarizing an expert's view of the results from clever animals and clever researchers.

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