When frightened, most birds probably can nearly double their normal rate, but they cannot keep it up very long. When cruising about in search for food they fly so as not to waste their strength. This is particularly true on the great annual migrations.
Considering ten hours as a fair day’s flying time over land, the measured speeds would carry crows from 310 to 450 miles between sunrise and sunset and ducks and geese from 420 to 590 miles. Considering that they fly in straight lines, this means that they make very good time from point to point. It is highly probable, however, that most migrating birds proceed in a leisurely manner and that after a flight of a few hours they pause to feed and rest.
The Remarkable Instincts of the Silk Worm
The silk worm’s brain has an instinct center contained in a speck of nerve cells with a mass of less than a millionth of an ounce. This center is a microscopic so-called “mushroom body”, found in both sides, or hemispheres, of the brain. The discovery, with possible far-reaching philosophical implications, came out of some of the most delicate conceivable microsurgery in which the area was destroyed almost cell by cell by means of an invisibly fine electric needle.
Doctors Carol Williams and William Van der Kloot of Harvard have made minute studies of an American silk worm, the cecropia (common along the Atlantic coast), which spins as strong and delicate threads as the Japanese or Italian domesticated silk worms. The cocoon is a marvel of apparent ingenuity, made of a single thread almost a mile long. It is made in three layers, roughly after the design of a thermos bottle. The outer layer is a tightly woven, waterproof silk bag. Inside this is a layer of loosely spun material which serves as an insulating layer. The third layer, woven around the body of the worm itself, is a bag of exceedingly fine, soft silk. Through each layer a “hatchway” is provided directly in front of the creature’s head. These must be placed one in front of the other with mathematical exactitude. Through them the self imprisoned animal must escape when the time comes, and the slightest error probably would make it a prisoner forever in a coffin of its own creation.
Inside the cocoon the worm remains, adequately protected from cold and damp, for nine months. It emerges as a winged moth, whose sole function in life apparently is to lay eggs to produce more silkworms.
Spinning such a cocoon with its three quite different layers requires extreme precision of movement. Nature has not allowed for any possible variations. Yet the masterpiece obviously is not the result of any thinking, education or practice. The little worm’s life span, for one thing, would not allow for any training. Every movement must be instinctive and presumably unconscious, directed by the same part of the nervous system into whose structure the pattern has been built by nature.
The house building must start at precisely the right time. Until that time, according to the Harvard physiologists, the responsible area of the brain is held in restraint by a hormone secreted from two tiny glands in the head. At the foreordained instant this inhibiting secretion ceases and the mushroom body can go into action. The spinning can be started at any time, however, by destroying the glands.
Williams and Van der Kloot tried effects of two gasses, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Both acted as potent brain depressants, but in quite different ways. The first eliminated the spinning behavior entirely and permanently. The worms wandered about aimlessly, apparently trying in vain to remember what some overwhelming internal drive was pushing them to do. The automobile exhaust gas, carbon monoxide, fatal to humans but without any serious lasting effects on invertebrates because of the lack of the red cells in the blood with which it combines in higher animals, caused them to spin a worthless and meaningless flat layer of silk as long as the effect continued. When this ended the worm started to spin what remained of the mile-long thread in the customary pattern, starting from the point it normally would have reached had it not been gassed.
The biologists then resorted to their unbelievably delicate surgery. They proceeded to destroy the silk worm brain a few score cells at a time. The brain contains hundreds of thousands of cells. The destruction had no effect on the spinning behavior until they reached the mushroom body. When a few cells of this area were killed by the electric current the worm no longer could spin a cocoon but continued to wind and weave its silken thread into three flat sheets, corresponding to the three normal capsules. The weaving continued with the destruction of a few more cells, but only in a single sheet. When a few more were destroyed the entire cocoon-making behavior came to an end.