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| Thanks to an engineer's slow-motion video, we now understand the fascinating science of how cats drink. |
The Element of Surprise
1. A cat's
tongue is magic. Well,
not really. But it sure seems that way if you watch a
slow-motion movie of a cat drinking water.
A cat's tongue breaks the surface of the water and returns to the mouth too
quickly for the human eye to follow well, dragging a column of water up with it.
The cat's mouth then captures the water before gravity pulls it down. We know
this because an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used one
of the university's specialized cameras to record the motion at 120 frames per
second, then analyzed the result. The result was published in the prestigious
journal Science in
November 2010. MIT professor Roman Stocker told Wired magazine that this discovery could
have implications when it comes to the design of robots.
2. Cats have
more bones in a key part of their spine than people do. Cats have a combined 20 thoracic and
lumbar vertebrae, compared with 17 in people. The number of bones in the
mid-spine region accounts in part for the power and flexibility cats have when
it comes to fast acceleration and leaping ability. Cats are capable of
attaining speeds of more than 30 mph for very short distances - just a few
yards - which is a perfect skill if you're a stalk-and-pounce predator. And
cats can jump several times their height, flying over fences to the disgust of
many a cat-chasing dog. Their other anatomical oddity is a free-floating
collarbone, which can enable a cat to fit through an opening the size of its
whisker span. That is, unless he's fat,
which too many cats are these days.
3. Some calico
cats are male. Yes, I still hear people saying that
all calico cats are female, along with tortoiseshell and related
"dilute" versions (gray instead of black fur and shades of yellow
instead of bright orangey-red). If you were to make a bet that a calico is
female, you would probably win, but there's no guarantee: Approximately one
calico in 3,000 is male, thanks to a genetic oddity known as "Klinefelter
syndrome," in which an animal has X and Y chromosomes, making it a male,
but also has an extra X chromosome (which allows for the expression of the
calico coat pattern). By the way, betting that an orange tabby is male isn't as
good a bet.
4. Cat sex
isn't fun. That's because the feline penis is
barbed, with about 100 painful points that scrape the inside of the vagina
during the mating process. That's why female cats yowl in pain when they're
bred and why male cats are often smacked by the claws of their angry mate -
she's lashing out. Biologists believe the scraping in part works to remove the
sperm of other males, but mostly what the pain does is stimulate the female to
release a hormone that starts to ripen the eggs in her ovaries. The procedure
is the same for lions and domestic cats - and every feline in between. It
certainly tells you how powerful the mating urge must be for cats to reproduce
despite a procedure that doesn't seem particularly satisfying.
5. Kittens are born
with blue eyes. In this, cats are like people. That's because melanin, the
substance that determines eye color, isn't in full play at birth. The more you
have of it, the darker your eyes, but that's only part of the story. When
babies open their eyes, the melanin in the irises starts to express itself,
thanks to exposure to ultraviolet light. (When an animal is an albino, there is
no melanin in the irises, which appear pink because of the blood vessels in the
eye.) Cats have an astonishing range of eye color, from China blue to brown,
with amber, green and hazel in between. Some cats have eyes of two different
colors, and a few even have irises of two different colors. But they all start
out with baby blues
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