Animals with Strange Bodily Functions

[00:00:03]The gardener's frog is one of the world's smallest frog species as it only reaches the size of around 11 mm, about a third of the size of a human fingernail.

[00:00:14]Another notable fact about the frog is that [music] it can hear through its mouth. Studies have revealed that the frog detects sound waves through a cavity in its mouth, which are then transmitted to the frog's brain. The frogs were previously thought to be deaf because they lack any visible ear and don't have a middle ear cavity, thus no eard drum for sound to bounce off.

[00:00:38]Most frogs here with tempenums, the flat oval shapes on the side of their head that connect to the middle ear. A few lack these structures, but still are known to call back and forth.

[00:00:49]When researchers tested to see if the frogs were actually deaf by recording the sound of the frogs and then playing it back to a different group of frogs, the creatures proved they could hear by responding to the [music] recording.

[00:01:03]Researchers then set to work to find out just how the frogs could hear. They produced simulations of the frog's head and found that the frogs were able to use their mouth cavity to amplify sound and transmit [music] it to the inner ear.

[00:01:18]This ability, turns out, is a result of an evolutionary adaption of having thinner tissue and fewer layers of it between a mouth and inner ear. The combination of a mouth cavity and bone conduction allows the frogs to perceive sound effectively without using a tempanic middle ear.

[00:01:37]Because gardener's frog can only be found on the tiny island nation of seyells. The frog's long existence in isolation may account for its unique approach to hearing. The frogs have been living isolated in the rainforest of the Seyells for 47 to 65 million years since these islands split away from the main continent. If they can hear, their auditory system must be a survivor of life forms on the ancient superc continent Gondana. [music] Did you know that fruit flies can taste with their whole body? Fruit flies have a distributed [music] sense of taste with taste receptors found on the bristles throughout their whole body, including their legs, abdomen, wings, mouth, [music] and even their ovapazer, an organ they use to lay eggs. This allows them to immediately detect any nutrients or toxins upon landing on a surface.

[00:02:36]Studies have shown that the fruit flies brain can map the location of the taste, [music] the type of taste, and whether the food is okay to eat. Although fruit flies don't have subtle taste distinctions like humans, their taste receptors can distinguish between sweet and bitter, much like the human tongue.

[00:02:56]When fruitly lands on a ripe or rotting fruit, it instantly receives information about whether the fruit is bitter or sweet. Sweetness indicates a caloric payday that cues the fly to feed.

[00:03:08]Bitterness prompts the fly to move on from the potentially toxic substance.

[00:03:13]Fruit flies are also first known animals that can taste alkaline [music] foods.

[00:03:18]Scientists have discovered an entirely new kind of taste receptor that allows fruit flies to detect alkaline substances, those that have a high pH and avoid [music] toxic meals and surfaces.

[00:03:31]In the insect kingdom, it's common to have taste receptors on various parts of the body. Butterflies and house flies taste with their feet, while honeybees and [music] some species of wasps have taste receptors on their antenna.

[00:03:44]Currently, the need for so many taste organs is not well understood. However, a clue for understanding their function comes from the anatomy of taste sensing neurons. These neurons send signals to different parts of the flies central nervous system and the taste information received from different parts of the body is processed differently in the brain. Therefore, different taste organs serve different functions which play important roles in the complex multi-step feeding behavior of fruit flies.

[00:04:21]The Chinese soft shell turtle can urinate from its mouth and it is the first known animal to excrete the majority of its urine [music] through its mouth rather than its kidneys.

[00:04:33]The turtles make their homes in fresh bodies of water and excrete ura from their mouths while submerged. But while on land, they often submerge their head in puddles of water for long periods, between 20 to 100 minutes, because they possess tiny specialized gill-like projections in their mouth that transport ura out of their [music] blood and into the water.

[00:04:56]Studies have found that only about 6% of ura is excreted via the traditional cloakal route while the vast majority is spat out through [music] the mouth. This method of oral urination is thought to have helped the turtles colonize brackish waters which contains more salt than fresh water. If the turtle passed ura through their cloica via their kidneys, the turtles would need to drink a lot of water to flush it through. That would mean taking a lot of salt, which would be difficult to get rid of.

[00:05:26][music] So rather than drinking the brackish water, the turtles habits allow them to simply rinse their mouths with it. Sea turtles are adapted to tolerate even saltier water. But instead of urinating through their mouth, they have specialized salt glands in the corner of each eye. When they drink salty water, the [music] salt enters their bloodstream and is transported to these glands where it is excreted as a very concentrated salty solution.

[00:05:54]Looking at the soft shell turtles DNA, researchers have also found what looked like a gene for ura transporter, a protein that carries ura molecules across membranes. The gene was active in the turtle's mouth and the gill-like projections, but not as it would be in humans or almost any other vertebrae animal in the kidneys.

[00:06:20]Elephants are undeniably one of the most intelligent animals on planet Earth.

[00:06:25]They possess the largest brains of any land [music] animal, exhibiting highle cognitive abilities, including self-awareness, deep empathy, tool use, long-term memory, and complex communication.

[00:06:39]When it comes to communication, these giants have a variety of ways to go about it. While known for their loud, trumpeting calls, they also use their head, trunks, ears, tail, [music] and other body movements to communicate.

[00:06:53]They primarily make a low frequency rumbling sound between 10 and 40 hertz that's too deep to be heard by human ears. We can't hear anything below 20 hertz because our ears are physically structured to resonate with higher frequencies and our basler membrane within the cookia is too small to vibrate efficiently at such [music] low speeds. Elephants, however, can communicate this way, even over long distances, sometimes over 10 km. These sounds can be felt as pulsations in the air and travel through the ground.

[00:07:30]Elephants also produce seismic waves with their vocalizations, which travel through the ground. They detect these vibrations thanks to bone conduction, specialized middle ears, and ultra sensitive toes and trunks, allowing them to sense messages from distant herds.

[00:07:49]Researchers call this feet seismic communication. Not only do they rumble to greet or tell each other about danger and sources of food, but subtle differences in the sound also allow an elephant to maintain contact by telling exactly where the noise is coming from and how to [music] respond.

[00:08:09]Members of the animal kingdom have plenty of abilities that we humans could only wish for. Electro reception is one such ability. This superpower allows animals to detect [music] electrical fields. As all living things have their own electrical field, [music] it comes in handy when catching prey or avoiding predators.

[00:08:31]It's mostly fish and amphibians that have electro reception because it works best in water. However, sharks have the most finely tuned sense of electro reception. While underwater, even when buried in sand or in darkness, these predators of the deep have been known to react to as low as 5 billionth of a volt of electricity. Sharks electro receptors which are called ampoli of laorenzini are a network of jellyfilled pores concentrated around their snout and head. Each pore has a bulblike structure called an ampella. Electrical currents flow through the jelly and across the surface of the ampella which then sends the signals to the shark's brain.

[00:09:14]Electro reception is critical for finding prey as it allows them to detect faint bioelectric fields generated by hidden preys muscle contractions and heartbeats.

[00:09:25]While typically effective at short ranges of several inches, some large sharks can detect electric fields from several feet away. Navigation researchers believe sharks may use electro reception to navigate by sensing ocean currents moving through the earth's magnetic field. This combined with their strong senses of smell and hearing makes sharks highly efficient predators.