Post #14873

Smear yourself with disgust: Why do cigarettes, alcohol and perfume drive hedgehogs crazy? 99% of the time the hedgehog behaves absolutely adequately. It hides from predators and eats invertebrates, snakes and mice. Males fight for females, and females are thrilled by the abundance of attention. But if a hedgehog stumbles upon a cigarette butt, something in him will change. Instead of a timid and wary small predator, an obsessed one will appear, who will wheeze, bleed foamy saliva and smear it on his back. Did cigarettes drive him crazy? Answer: yes, they did. But not because hedgehogs are poisoned by the toxin and frantically get high on it, but because cigarette butts have a pungent, pronounced odor. It is this, and not the addiction, that causes hedgehogs to have a strong desire to lick the cigarette butt and rub saliva all over themselves. And if in place of the cigarette there was another source of strong odor - a fragrant flower, cotton wool with perfume or a crab stick - the small predator would fall into exactly the same frenzy. Which scientists call self-washing or self-lubrication. Self-washing is a unique behavior common to all hedgehogs, but only to them. And this is partly why we still do not understand what its biological benefits are, but this does not stop scientists from building hypotheses. According to one hypothesis, hedgehogs’ love for strange strong odors is one of the factors in their camouflage. After all, if a hedgehog smells not like a hedgehog, but like gasoline, iron or a pile of feces, then it becomes impossible to find it by smell. True, such a disguise can also turn against a hedgehog, because there is always a chance of swallowing parasites or sipping toxic liquids, of which humanity has invented an awful lot. Another option is that hedgehogs communicate this way. The strong smell serves as a beacon for them, allowing the secretive animals to find each other during the breeding season, which for ordinary hedgehogs will begin in the coming days. And, importantly, this idea does not contradict the previous one! Well, I like the third theory more than all the others: hedgehogs are driven by... curiosity! They smear themselves with a new smell not for communication, and not to hide from enemies, but to remember the new smell for the rest of their lives. In the wild, everything unfamiliar is a priori dangerous, and learning a new smell is a sure way not to fall into a stupor and not become stupid when meeting it later! All that remains is to understand: how to determine which hypothesis is correct? Author: Yaroslav Ilyin 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot