How Baby Bats Learn to Fly

Small mammals, on the whole, live fast and die young; a great many of them live for only a single year. And that's assuming they don't get eaten first, which, unsurprisingly, they often are. In order to maintain their numbers, then, it is essential that they breed early and often. In particular, they tend to have large litters, which they then need to get to adult independence as quickly as possible. The common house mouse, for example, can breed at least five times a year, and gives births to litters of typically around five to eight pups at a time, each of which is sexually mature within less than two months.

This is not, however, what we see with bats.

Why Forest Fires Are Good For You (if you're a big brown bat)

Big brown bats

Forest fires are both destructive and spectacular. Not quite up there with volcanoes or tsunamis, perhaps, but nonetheless pretty dramatic, wreaking havoc on the local environment. Human-caused fires, when they get out of control, can be very damaging to the ecosystem, which may take years to recover. Yet forest fires have been around since long before humans, and, for at least some forests, they are just a natural part of the cycle of life. Indeed, there are some plants whose seeds germinate specifically after a local wildfire. But how does this affect animal communities?

One such environment is that of sandhill forests. Sandhills are so named because of their sandy, well-drained soils, often dominated by ash, but (unlike the much more barren sand dunes) they support significant plant communities. In the southeast USA, between Virginia and eastern Texas, the dominant tree in these forests is the longleaf pine. Frequent fires are essential for this species to do well, and, left without fire for too long, the nature of the forests change dramatically, in this case being replaced by denser oak woodland.

Why Marsupials Can't Fly

A sugar glider is as close as it gets...

One of the significant features in the early evolution of mammals was the development of a different posture from their ancestors. Living reptiles, such as lizards and crocodiles, have a sprawling gait, with the limbs splayed out to the side, but, in almost all mammals, the limbs are held erect, directly underneath the body. This has a number of advantages. For example, the body no longer has to bend from side to side as the legs move, which allows the lungs to operate more efficiently - you aren't constantly having to squeeze one of them at a time as your chest flexes. Having the shoulder blades placed more vertically also allows them to have more of a direct involvement in limb movement, effectively giving an extra segment to the limb.

This feature is not unique to mammals, because it also evolved in dinosaurs, and in some prehistoric crocodiles - which, rather alarmingly, could run rapidly across dry land. Today, of course, it is also found in birds. Nonetheless, it is a key feature of mammals, and the starting point for a whole series of adaptations in mammalian limb structure. From this beginning, mammalian limbs have taken on a wide range of different forms, adapted to all kinds of different lifestyles.

One example would be the development of hooves. The stance of hoofed animals, standing on the very tips of their toes, is thought to give the limb greater flexibility and allow them to run faster. Hooves have therefore evolved in herbivores, to, at least in part, allow them to escape from predators. Given the speed at which, for example, a cheetah moves, hooves clearly aren't essential for rapid running, but they do seem to help, and one might wonder why no living predators - as keen to catch prey as the prey is not to be caught - possess them. The answer, most likely, is that claws are just too useful to carnivores, which use them as weapons to bring down their prey; something that wouldn't work with a hoof.

With the great variation of mammals that exist, its quite obvious that the proportions and shapes of limbs vary considerably between them. Still, there are some limits to this variation if you want to be able to walk or run effectively, and a couple of years ago, Manuela Schmidt and Martin Fischer of Jena University conducted a study comparing the limbs of a wide range of mammalian species to look at those limitations. One of their conclusions was that the hind limbs of mammals vary far less than the fore limbs.