Oct 1, 2024 06:53 PM
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidde...-20240930/
INTRO: Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers.
For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying — similar to the charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks — could be potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the air. Aquatic animals such as eels, sharks and dolphins are known to sense electricity in water, which is an excellent conductor of charge. By contrast, air is a poor conductor. But it may relay enough to influence living things and their evolution.
In 2013, Daniel Robert (opens a new tab), a sensory ecologist at the University of Bristol in England, broke ground in this discipline when his lab discovered that bees can detect and discriminate (opens a new tab) among electric fields radiating from flowers. Since then, more experiments have documented that spiders, ticks and other bugs can perform a similar trick.
This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks (opens a new tab) and roundworms (opens a new tab), hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight (opens a new tab) by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen (opens a new tab) to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators (opens a new tab).
This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate and infest other living things.
This developing field, known as aerial electroreception, opens up a new dimension of the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” said Anna Dornhaus (opens a new tab), a behavioral ecologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved with the work. “This whole field, studying electrostatic interactions between living animals, has the potential to uncover things that didn’t occur to us about how the world works.”
“We know from all these brilliant experiments that electric fields do have a functional role in the ecology of these animals,” said Benito Wainwright (opens a new tab), an evolutionary ecologist at the University of St. Andrews who has studied the sensory systems of butterflies and katydids. “That’s not to say that they came on the scene originally through adaptive processes.” But now that these forces are present, evolution can act on them. Though we cannot sense these electric trails, they may guide us to animal behaviors we never imagined... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers.
For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying — similar to the charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks — could be potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the air. Aquatic animals such as eels, sharks and dolphins are known to sense electricity in water, which is an excellent conductor of charge. By contrast, air is a poor conductor. But it may relay enough to influence living things and their evolution.
In 2013, Daniel Robert (opens a new tab), a sensory ecologist at the University of Bristol in England, broke ground in this discipline when his lab discovered that bees can detect and discriminate (opens a new tab) among electric fields radiating from flowers. Since then, more experiments have documented that spiders, ticks and other bugs can perform a similar trick.
This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks (opens a new tab) and roundworms (opens a new tab), hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight (opens a new tab) by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen (opens a new tab) to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators (opens a new tab).
This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate and infest other living things.
This developing field, known as aerial electroreception, opens up a new dimension of the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” said Anna Dornhaus (opens a new tab), a behavioral ecologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved with the work. “This whole field, studying electrostatic interactions between living animals, has the potential to uncover things that didn’t occur to us about how the world works.”
“We know from all these brilliant experiments that electric fields do have a functional role in the ecology of these animals,” said Benito Wainwright (opens a new tab), an evolutionary ecologist at the University of St. Andrews who has studied the sensory systems of butterflies and katydids. “That’s not to say that they came on the scene originally through adaptive processes.” But now that these forces are present, evolution can act on them. Though we cannot sense these electric trails, they may guide us to animal behaviors we never imagined... (MORE - details)