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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Matthew Priebe

The God Given Gift of Animal Architecture - Part 2

This morning, we did the simpler forms of animal architecture.

We did the tubes that are built around animals' bodies.

We did some of the structures inside wood that are dug out by animals.

Very simple, by and large, even though we started to get more complicated with plant nests.

Now we're really going to start to crank it up to get to see some of the really, really complicated structures that have been built by animals.

So now we're going to start looking at structures that are put together with mud.

It's kind of all kind of globular mud stuck to a wall, but this is actually an architectural form built by an insect.

This is actually their home for their young.

This is a type of wasp, and there's a number of different wasps that use mud to create their homes.

And what they will do is they will collect a wet pellet of mud, and then they will plaster it against a wall, smash it into all the nooks and crannies and then that will be the spot where they will have a nice chamber for their young to live.

In this picture you can see where the darker mud has been put down, that's the fresh wet mud and the other parts are drier where it's had a chance to solidify.

Now here is a chamber that has been broken open because it shows each individual chamber that has been put in by these various, the insects as they have divided up into chambers.

Each 1 of those chambers will hold 1 of their young, and their young will develop in there with whatever food that has been put in for them.

Now, a number of different wasps go out and specialize in catching spiders.

They sting the spider and immobilize it with their venom, and then they carry that spider.

And sometimes it's a very heavy burden to carry, to get it to where they need to plug it into their structure.

And so they bring it along, and here's 1 who has returned to her mud nest that she has previously constructed, and she works her way down to the end of it, crawls inside, puts her food source in there, and then lays her egg and then seals it off, and then her baby will be able to hatch and grow out of this in a way that will be very well protected.

You can see then these holes running down these tubes, that's where the individual larvae, once they're fully developed, break out of their chamber and then begin their adult life.

Some of them are extremely elegant insects.

These are the organ pipe mud dauber wasps.

And they're called this because they make these rows of mud that look like organ pipes.

And each 1 will come and get a different bit of mud from a different spot, and so you can get these different colors of brown and white and orange, depending on what mud they sourced it from.

And then this will be their very elegant structure that they put together.

Now potter wasps are a little bit smaller than the mud daubers, but they also use mud.

They attach it to a wall, and this is hollow inside here, and they will then put their pollen and nectar that they've gathered and stick it inside, and then they lay their egg, and that will be where their young grows up.

They even make a little rim around the outside that will help to divert any predator from finding the entrance to that particular opening and finding their way inside.

This is the size of a dime, so it's not very large at all.

And this is a large bird nest that is found in tropical areas, a large mound about a foot high, maybe sometimes 2 foot high, made by a flamingo.

And flamingos pile up all this mud into a pile and make a little concave hole in the top, and that's where they're going to lay their egg.

And then that chick will hatch out of that, and for a while, they will stay right on top of that mud tower.

And then eventually, they will come out and begin life on their adult way after that.

These are called chuffs, and they are found in Australia.

And we were just fortunate to be able to see these guys 1 time on our trip down there recently.

And notice the beautiful red eyes that these birds have.

And they build a large mound of mud on a tree branch, and it's a foot and a half across.

And that's where they have their nests and eggs, and it's very, very sturdy and solid, and you can see it from long distances away up in the tree trunks.

Then there are the barn swallows and cliff swallows and other forms of swallows which actually make up their nest with pellets of mud and stick it into an underhang underneath some sort of a protected shelter area.

And this will allow them to be able to be out of the weather.

And so some of them will just build a platform like this, where the chick will then sit inside of it.

And that's where they are going to be raising their young.

But some of them will actually cover up the whole entrance way with mud.

So there's only a small entrance where a predator has less likelihood of getting inside.

And in that area, they will then be able to raise their young inside those various nests.

And this is something you find quite commonly, where there isn't any kind of an overhang where these guys are able to do it either on a bridge or somebody's house, because they need to be protected from the rain.

If the rain comes down and hits those mud nests, it's going to dissolve, fall apart, and they're going to lose their entire nest for that year.

Now this is what happens in natural conditions away from our forms of architecture.

They find some sort of a rock cliff where there's an overhang, and then you can look straight up and see all these nests crowded together like this.

And this is something quite common in desert and cliff-type habitats across North America.

So these guys are also very specialized in their mud dwellings.

The next group we're going to look at are other types of nests, miscellaneous.

And when we're looking at this, sometimes we are surprised by who are architects out there in nature.

And these next ones may quite surprise you.

Have you ever thought of fish as an architect?

Well, there's a bunch of fish that are found in freshwater habitat areas that will make a round, wide pit in the shallows of a pond or stream, and they will get rid of all the dirt and all the debris and only the rocks will be left there.

And then the males, this is all the males doing this, the males will then display to passing females that come take a look at my nest, I've done a great job just like what we were looking at this morning with the weaver birds.

And he will be keeping it very clean and very fastidious because the female comes along and lays her eggs inside that nest.

And then he keeps it free from dirt and debris and algae and whatever parasites might come along.

And so he's going to be guarding that nest, sometimes with her help, sometimes not.

Sometimes you can get a whole row of them.

Here's a male fish on his nest, and back here is another male fish on his nest, and they can be all along the lake shore, where each 1 is saying, come on, take a look at my nest, it's better than his.

And so this can be quite interesting to see them chasing each other away from each other's nest because they're a little bit too close for comfort sometimes.

There are a whole bunch of fish found in freshwater areas in the world called cichlids and there are hundreds of species of cichlids and many of them are nest builders And so you have a lot of different types of these cichlids which are making elaborate nests and some of them will then be making something that is taken care of by both parents or by 1 parent.

Some of them are very elaborate, some of them are very simple, but all are forms of architecture in 1 way or another.

And so this is something that quite a few fish are actually nest builders and architects.

This is a very geometrical pattern that is found in the ocean in very deep water areas off of Japan.

And divers swimming around looking at this said, what made that?

Because it's way too orderly to be made by natural processes, but when you look at this, It just is way too far away from anybody to figure out what was going on.

They went back to it several times until they finally found who was making this particular pattern.

It was a little bitty pufferfish 6 inches long.

Now this pufferfish male comes along and he makes this with his body by wriggling his body through the sand and making it into these elegant patterns and troughs and valleys and hills and eventually has this Extraordinary design that he has put together and this is just to get a female to come and choose him.

This is not actually for a nest in any way.

This is purely a attractant billboard to get a female to look at him more than the next guy.

And this was truly an astonishing way of animal architecture, using art in its pure form to get a female to choose him.

A truly extraordinary thing that has only been discovered in the last few years.

But actually, mother alligators are great art architects.

They will come onto shore when the breeding season is ready and they will pile up a huge mound of vegetation and brush and debris into a pile on the stream bank and then they're going to lay their eggs inside of that mound and then cover it all up and then it serves almost like a compost pile.

It actually heats up and keeps their eggs warm and incubates them, and then at this point they'll be nearby in the water waiting for the eggs to be ready to hatch.

And when the eggs hatch, they're actually communicating to their mother.

They're making little quirky noises inside the eggs and the mother is responding to them with deep rumbles and actually, she will talk to the her babies before they are actually hatching out of their shell.

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The God Given Gift of Animal Architecture - Part 2

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