More and more cases of "abnormal behavior" of animals are registered every year. Why are our smaller brothers going crazy and showing monstrous aggression not only towards humans, but also towards representatives of their own species? Scientists put forward several versions, but sometimes the real reason can only be understood after decades. And many questions related to animal attacks on people still remain unanswered
People in panic run through the streets, trying to escape from thousands of angry seagulls. Completely distraught, diving birds smash shop windows and house windows. Is this nonsense, fiction or a dream? No - just an episode from the famous movie "Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock. However, the picture is based on real events that happened almost half a century ago. But the secret of the attack by a giant flock of petrels on the coastal town of Capitola, near San Francisco, has only been uncovered today.
Hitchcock made a film about the unexplained madness of birds after reading a newspaper article describing how on a warm evening the Capitola was subjected to a real "air raid" by gray petrels. Those that fell and crashed to death were replaced by more and more birds.
In one of the houses, a whole flock entered through the chimney. The winged "villains" destroyed all the furniture and wounded the hostess, entangled in her dress. Only recently have scientists determined that domoic acid was the cause of the seabird madness. This toxin, which disturbs memory, in some cases turns off the receptors of excited neurons and leads to inappropriate behavior of petrels and gulls. Where does the hallucinogen come from in the bird's body? From flowering diatoms, which feed on molluscs, which are also eaten by birds. An insidious chemical element is formed in algae as a result of the release of urea, an ingredient in agricultural fertilizers, into the sea.
Capitola is better known for its annual begonias festival than for the bizarre bird attack in the summer of 1961.
The behavior of mammals is influenced by another factor - the cosmic one. It turns out that with an increase in solar activity in many animals, the work of the adrenal glands is disrupted. Excited endocrine system drives hordes of tetrapods into the arms of death. On a suicidal march, they fill cities and towns; destroying crops, polluting the area and poisoning water bodies. This was the case, for example, in Primorye, when the Far Eastern squirrels swam across the full-flowing Amur and moved north.
They carried with them an epidemic of encephalitis, but it was impossible to stop them. Emaciated rodents walked and walked in one direction, despite the worn out paws, not paying attention to people and obstacles. Having met the moat, the animals did not look for another road, but filled it to the brim with their swarming bodies, along which thousands of others continued to move. Having reached the Tatar Strait, the squirrels threw themselves into the water and swam towards death. The instinct of self-preservation inherent in all living things was completely disabled for them.
In Russia, more than a dozen bird attacks on people are recorded annually. As a rule, the ubiquitous crows act as aggressors, and most often this happens in the spring, during their nesting period.
HUNGER IS NOT AUNT
According to news agencies, in recent years, attacks by vipers on people have become more frequent in the Yaroslavl region. This is due to the deforestation and the construction of summer cottages in those places where snakes have long lived. Now there is only one alternative - either to exterminate the reptiles to the end, or to learn to live with them in a state of "permanent truce". The second option is quite possible, because the viper never attacks a person first. Hearing footsteps, she will try to remain unnoticed, to hide.
The worst is when people by their actions violate the ecological balance of a region. After the pipelines of the oil pipeline in Yakutia laid through the migration corridors of brown bears, the behavior of the latter became unpredictable. The overlap of the paths that are abundant with berries leading to rivers full of fish, led to the fact that the animals went in search of new places for hunting and food, as a result, the rods got into the habit of getting food in garbage dumps near human habitation. Anyone who appears in his field of vision, the bear perceives as a competitor and tries to drive away from the gratuitous feeder.
Due to human intervention in the centuries-old ecosystem in southeastern Turkey, wolves descended from the mountains, which began to terrorize domestic animals and attack children. Biologists from Ankara explain the aggressive behavior of wolves by the military actions in Iraq: the constant hum of aircraft, explosions and the smell of gunpowder drove the predators from their homes.
Elephant attacks are often associated with revenge for a slain brother or bad attitude from the drovers. Once in Bangladesh, a herd of thick-skinned giants devastated a village where a poacher lived who shot one of the females. Angry elephants uprooted trees, destroyed homes, trampled crops, and sent residents to flight. Then they surrounded the corpse of the murdered elephant, raised their trunks up and trumpeted plaintively.
And in one of the districts of Thailand, two young elephants escaped from the corral, unable to withstand the abuse. At the head of the wild herd, they began robbing sugarcane trucks. The scheme was perfect. The leaders blocked the road for the cars, and when the truck stopped, the rest of the elephants quickly "unloaded" the treat.
INSECT FLIGHT
In a medieval Arabic manuscript, a locust invasion is described as follows: “An innumerable host has come. It covers the earth and devours everything on the surface. 8 the moment of her flight the sun darkens and the stars go out. Entomologists still don’t understand how it is that billions of insects fly up and down at once, as if on a single command? In a column of flying locusts, a single individual cannot be stopped or forced to turn off the path. Moving at a speed of 100 km per day, the living river flows around obstacles in the form of houses and towers, overcomes fences, throws itself into fire, but continues to move in the same direction. Insects consume everything: leaves, trunks, ears, fruits, bark and even janitor's brooms. In a short time, millions of hectares of vegetation are destroyed, and the effect of spraying with poisons is zero. It seemsin the fight against the insidious enemy, people tried all means, but none led to victory.
In 2007, a group of scientists from the Joint Center for the Control of Locust Outbreaks synthesized a special pheromone that controls the behavior of males in a flock. In the course of experiments, it turned out that even a small dose of the drug disorients the movement of insects and makes them disperse. It remains only to wait for the start of the massive use of this tool to see if it is really effective.
Another parasite practically does not fly through the air. The Colorado potato beetle spends the winter deep underground, waiting in the wings, and as soon as the potato tops begin to turn green, the females lay tiny orange testicles on the underside of the leaves. The hatched larvae help the parents to ruin the bush and prevent tubers from forming. During the season, the female lays up to 1 thousand eggs, but not a single bird feeds on the larvae of the Colorado potato beetle, with the exception of the pheasant. In the fight against the "leaf beetle" pesticides no longer help - the beetles have long developed immunity to them. They say that the original remedy works best of all: a specially bred pycnomerus bug. During the winter diapause, the eggs of this predator are able to survive severe frosts. They can be stored in the refrigerator throughout the year and removed as needed.
SIBERIAN PIRANHAS
Naturalist Alfred Brehm described these toothy fish as follows: “The gluttony of piranhas, which are called river hyenas, surpasses any likelihood, they attack any animal, even fish that are 10 times larger in size. The piranha's teeth are very sharp and strong: a stick made of hard wood is instantly nibbled by this fish, even thick fishing hooks cannot resist the strength of their teeth."
With an increase in solar activity in many animals, the work of the adrenal glands is disrupted, and the excited endocrine system drives hordes of tetrapods into the arms of death.
The most dangerous piranhas belong to the Serrasalminae niger family and reach 40 cm in length. It's better not to mess with such a fish. Having pounced on the victim, the piranha with razor-sharp teeth instantly cuts off a piece of meat, and after swallowing it, it digs into the flesh with renewed vigor. In their homeland of South America, piranhas behave calmly during the rainy season. But their aggressiveness increases many times over during drought, when rivers become shallow and turn into streams. Small lakes appear everywhere, in which fish, caimans and river dolphins splash. The predators cut off from the river do not have enough food, they are ready to eat everything that moves. Any living creature caught in the reservoir is immediately attacked. God forbid a thirsty cow or horse to lower its muzzle into the lake!
Recently, piranhas have increasingly come across in Russian reservoirs. For many thousands of kilometers from the tropical Amazon, a resident of Samara caught a black toothy fish in one of the Volga's branches. And on Lake Surskoe (Ulyanovsk region) last year, along with the disappearance of frogs, gnawed roach and scavengers began to come across fishermen's nets. But that's what it is! As it turned out, bloodthirsty predators feel quite comfortable in Siberia! On one of the tributaries of the Ob in the Novosibirsk region, three piranhas were taken out of the net, and one of them managed to snatch a stunned fisherman.
Very often even "armored" crocodiles take flight in front of a flock of piranhas. In order not to be devoured, the crocodile turns over in the water with its unprotected belly up, but even this sometimes does not help.
They say that lovers of exotic fauna, having played enough with piranhas, release them from aquariums into the river. Another reason for the appearance of predators in domestic waters is the obvious greenhouse effect. Due to the increase in average annual temperature and background radiation, piranhas are able to adapt to our environment. Will it really be scary for us to swim in Siberian reservoirs soon?
SERVANTS OF THE COLLECTIVE MIND
Millions of gray rats crawl out of the basements and chimneys, out of gratings and hatches. There are relatively few cases of open attacks by Pasyukov on people, but the rat's passion for gnawing wires is costly for society. More than half of all short circuits and associated fires are caused by rats. But the statistics of infections transmitted by rodents looks even worse. 6 XIV century in alliance with the causative agent of the bubonic plague, rats destroyed about a third of the population of the then Europe. And now humanity is not immune from a new epidemic.
On average, there are eight tailed animals per inhabitant of a large metropolis.
The duration of the war that people wage with rats suggests that man and pasyuk are opponents worthy of each other. It is incredibly difficult to catch gray robbers - they quickly change their locations, avoid traps and do not touch poisons. Rats are able to survive even in locked freezers, feeding on frozen foods and breeding offspring. Moreover, they have a rather complex brain structure. The human ear perceives only a small part of the sounds that rats make when communicating with each other. During an experiment in one of the laboratories in Germany, it turned out that a one-year-old Pasyuk, when "talking" with relatives, uses about 5 thousand signals of different frequencies - more than a person uses for everyday communication. In addition, rats have developed paws with sensitive toes. They say that in one theater of animals there was a casewhen the rats opened the cage lock and escaped.
According to one of the hypotheses, rats adopted many of the properties of humans, and in some ways even outstripped him. The collective mind began to control the behavior of each individual. This explains the presence of fantastic intuition, which warns the rats in advance about the possibility of an imminent catastrophe and helps to avoid imminent death.
Denis DOZE - ethologist, professor at the Max Plann Institute for Evolutionary Biology (Germany)
In his book Aggression, one of the founders of ethology, the science of animal behavior, Konrad Lorenz wrote: "Almost every animal with any weaponry, starting with small rodents, fights fiercely if it cannot escape." Indeed, the protection of yourself and your offspring is the main reason for the attack of animals on people. Even a hare driven into a corner will desperately cling to a person, but as soon as the opportunity presents itself to escape, she will do it without hesitation. In most cases, other animals will do the same. As an objection, examples are usually cited, based on newspaper publications, which describe attacks by sharks and crocodiles, leopards and orangutans, monitor lizards and bulls, kangaroos and bats. Like, what to talk about, even if such a connoisseur of wildlife,how "crocodile hunter" Steve Irwin died from a stingray prick in the chest.
The answer to this is as follows.
All these are isolated cases of aggression. They were all to blame for the provocative behavior of the victim, because he approached the animal at an unsafe distance or even tried to pick it up. It is not difficult to explain this, but it is more important to understand the reason for something else - why is there still a senseless, unmotivated aggression towards people on the part of "our smaller brothers"? The same Lorenz, speaking of herd animals, introduced the concept of "mobbing" into scientific use - a union for life and joint attack.
This mode of existence is extremely effective, since the acquired experience is preserved for a long time between the members of the pack and there is an almost instantaneous transmission of news. That is why the gray rat - the most successful biological enemy of man - is very difficult to fight. While in their mobbing, gray rats easily exchange information and use the same methods as Homo sapiens.