WhiskeyintheJar Romance

In 2003 the British composer Sarah Angliss held an experimental concert at London’s Purcell Room, playing music laced with infrasound at a frequency of 17Hz. More than a fifth of the audience claimed to have felt anxious, scared or sorrowful, or to have sensed chills down the spine. 

I find stuff like this so interesting, you know the military is experimenting with infrasound. I can't really remember but a couple years ago, was that in Cuba? where people in the embassy thought something like infrasound was used against them? I always wonder about things out there that humans can't organically detect and science isn't there yet. I wouldn't have liked to have been a human guinea pig in the experimental concert.

Others emit sound at a frequency they can’t hear – at least, not until the noise bounces back.

Planes always play havoc on my ears, they become very plugged. It is difficult to talk without hearing myself, I'm uncertain about how much to regulate my volume. Bats that are emitting sounds they can't hear, to use, is wacky to me. How do they trust they are really doing it and correctly??

Many moths have developed ears that hear ultrasound to warn of hunting bats. Fighting back works: moths that have ears tend to be preyed on less by bats than their non-eared mothy cousins.

Moths that have ears! I did not know about this and consequently, it was all I could think about the night I read this. Also, "Biologists call this skewing of the odds the life/dinner principle." Do psychologist apply/incorporate this in a way for human actions? 

raising one foot puts more weight on the others, helping them pick up vibrations from the ground. And having three feet in place rather than four could make it easier for the elephant to work out where the sound is coming from using triangulation.

Elephants and electric eels battled for my favorite in these two chapters. I did not know about elephants and their raising one leg triangulation. I'm again awed by evolution and how it, well, evolves. Using their feet and ears is brilliant. 

It’s a time-critical business as female elephants’ eggs are ripe for fertilising for only four to five days every four to six years.

What??? I did not know elephants cycles were like this. This is probably something I'll go read more about because I'm wondering how this plays into their herd numbers.

California spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) is top of the strange-sounds charts.

If you have time, you should definitely go to the Discovery of Sound in the Sea  and listen to this. They also had a better Mantis Shrimp. I spent an hour listening to everything. Their Fact and Myths section was fun/enlightening, too.

electric eels are up to 2.5m (8ft) long

8 Feet. No.

they rise to the surface every 10 minutes to breathe air before sinking back to the river bed. They have strange reproductive habits too: the female lays her eggs in a nest the male makes from saliva.

Electric eels are wild, y'all! I do think, though, that every ten years I read about electric eels and gasp about strange or different they are, forget, and then become shocked(lol!) again about their wildness. I went to YouTube to see if they had any videos of the male eel making their saliva nests and couldn't find anything, if anyone has a link that would be much appreciated. I didn't look too long as I can across a video of the eel flying out of the water to attack and I had to bounce because I was going to bed and that was enough nightmare fuel for the night. 

 It’s a fact marketers don’t highlight on the packaging – honey is basically bee vomit.

I've known this for a while but it is one of my favorite knowledge bombs to drop. The look on people's faces warms the cold cockles of my heart. Knowledge, pass it on!

Only one in 4,000 hatchlings makes it to adulthood.

So tough out there in the wild kingdom. Bees have my warrior banner on land but sea turtles have it on water. 

During that time, many of the growing turtles circle the Atlantic in a 15,000km (9,000 mile) once-in-a-lifetime round trip. ‘They swim and drift around the Sargasso Sea, cross over to the coast of Spain and Portugal, move south along the northern coast of Africa, and then loop back to North America,’ explains Lohman.

This was something that I vaguely "knew" but I'm not sure the hard facts, distance and time, ever penetrated until I read it with actual numbers and in black and white. 5-10 years to complete this journey, I feel like the sea turtle world is full of Katharine Norburys and/or David Foster Wallaces.

but it turns out wasps (or at least some of them) are masters of electricity and expert at quantum mechanics.

Because of course they are. This has done wonders for my already very afraid of wasps attitude. 

This section had more animals that fascinated me, elephants, electric eels, sea turtles, and, god help me, quantum wasps but I feel like I didn't learn as much. Possibly, I just happen to know more about what they talked about this time but I felt like less technical knowledge (more surface feeling) was included in these two chapters.