Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

The programming of nature has always fascinated me... Animals and insects always seem to have some mysterious ways of handling environmental calamities and surviving.

I recall an incident a few years ago here where I live in Australia. We live close to a series of cliffs overlooking a beach, and I walk along those cliffs every morning. There was one day when I noticed strange lumps on the grass and walking track. Upon closer observation, I saw that these were hundreds, nay, thousands of hermit crabs, and they were crawling across the ground and heading for every tree and bush in the vicinity, then climbing up them as high as they could.

I had NEVER seen hermit crabs do this before.

Then, two days later, we had a huge storm hit, and combined with unusually high tides, it ended up with most of the cliff top areas being flooded or overrun with water.

How on earth did all these hermit crabs know that this was about to happen 48 hours in advance of the event?? How did they know that they had to climb the cliffs and seek out higher ground within the trees and bushes there?

There must be an amazing environmental consciousness just thrumming along outside of 'civilised' human perception that I wish we could tap back into...

So many birds and insects seem to be sensitive to the magnetic forces deep within the planet. I've never met a human being who was consciously aware of these forces, but I've met plenty of spiritualists who called them something else. Ask any old person whose body reacts to pressure changes in the weather, and they'll point out which bones ache when a storm is approaching. They're usually right.

As humans, we brush it off. It's just a feeling, or we're having a bad headache, and need to take some medicine. To a small insect whose entire world can change in a flash though, these signals are a monumentally important part of how they sense the world. Especially I think in absence of more complex visual perception that we humans use to bridge the gap.

Nature is amazing! The more we study it, the less we realize we actually know.

I do recall reading about an experiment many years ago where a group of university students were blindfolded and taken to a remote hill outside of their town. They were then (still blindfolded) asked to point to their homes, and it turns out that most of them managed to point fairly accurately in the direction where they lived.

No idea of the validity or scientific basis for that 'experiment', but as you mentioned - that mysterious ability for older people to 'feel' weather changes in parts of their bodies, or that 'gut feeling' that a lot of people get when they are being watched by hostile eyes... There is a lot more going on to our unconscious perception of the world that we realise.

There are some facets however, that are easily explainable, such as people "smelling the rain coming" when it is in fact the higher moisture content in the air making our smell receptors work better at smelling the everyday environment around us... But there are some phenomena which aren't as easily explained.

I hope that we can begin to be more adept at recognising the unconscious prompts, which I think will make us much better are relating to the world around us.

> They were asked to point to their homes and most of them managed to point fairly accurately in the direction where they lived.

Blind people can still hear, smell and perceive the wind direction and use it to make a mental map of their (well known) surrondings. Zero mystery here and no scooby snack for those scientists.

Note that the supremacy of science is so absolute that mystics need to anchor their theories back to it somehow: "magnetic forces deep within the planet" as an explanation (vs. something obviously mystical / supernatural / pretend such as demons or spirits).

Since the scientific process is so powerful in its ability to understand reality, let's follow it all the way through to the end. Meaning: let's ask a zoologist about hermit crabs anticipating a storm, rather than a spiritualist.

The crabs likely have a 'notion' of the tides. In this case perhaps the high tides were increasing past the point where the crabs 'remembered' them ever going. Then the approaching storm dropped the air pressure which additionally boosted the high tide and perhaps was also directly sensed by the crab.

Just thinking around the idea of emergent behavior through evolution.

Definitely a relationship there. The trick is discovering those relationships and interpreting them.

Once when I was out at a remote Aboriginal community, one of the locals there was telling me that the women of the community know when it is time to go and harvest the mussels in the bay because a particular flower will be in bloom. Could be pure coincidence or particular weather patterns which stimulate both, but the idea that shellfish proliferation is linked to a land flower's blooming cycle is freaky.

Similarly, my mother in law had a particular orchid that only flowered once a month - always at the peak of the full moon. Was it a combination of night luminescence and gravitational pull that told the plant when to flower?

It would seem that so called 'primitive' people seem to sense, feel and interpret these things more so than city dwellers of today.

> Was it a combination of night luminescence and gravitational pull that told the plant when to flower?

Almost definitely light response - orchids are pollinated by a wide variety of insects, including night active moths.

Almost definitely not 'gravitational pull' as the moon's mass does not vary based on the amount of light it reflects towards one particular direction.

It is a lot easier to tune into nature when you aren't inundated with WiFi signals, radio waves, lights, city noise, etc. Just go camping for a week without any devices to get a small sense of this.

You might enjoy the AntsCanada channel on YouTube. This guy somehow makes 15 minute videos about ants quite enthralling. I'm hooked!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCONd1SNf3_QqjzjCVsURNuA

Never thought I'd see Ants Canada on HN. It's a great channel!

Its a tautology (circular reasoning)- that which survives has figured out how to survive. In other words, fitness is that which survives.

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