Do animals really have a 6th sense? Brut nature asked the question to a veterinarian...
With L'animal et l'homme
With L'animal et l'homme
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
00:00The animal world is something that never bothered us.
00:20Before the end of the 20th century, if we consider well,
00:24it was only at the end of the 20th century that we began to understand that the animal was other than us.
00:29Up to this point, we were telling it, ah, it's an instinct, it's a sixth sense,
00:33which means absolutely nothing.
00:48Animals absolutely don't feel things like us.
00:50Let's take classic things, the famous dog's flair.
00:53The dog, compared to us, has a long muzzle.
00:56It has a lot of olfactory sensory cells, 200 to 250 times more.
01:01On the other hand, it has a brain that is completely different,
01:04where there is a much larger olfactory area.
01:07And it has an interest in the smell that we don't have.
01:10We are visual beings.
01:12It is olfactory, so it has an interest in that.
01:15All this means that it has about 10,000 to 100,000 times more olfactory sense than us.
01:22We only see in the visible spectrum,
01:24but there are a lot of birds that see in ultraviolet,
01:27which allows them to differentiate colors.
01:29They sometimes parade some animals by putting ultraviolet colors that absolutely don't appear to us.
01:34Some raptors can even see the urine of their prey, mice, when they are hidden.
01:40They see like a little ultraviolet puddle.
01:42It's something you can't imagine, and they detect where the animal is.
01:52Our range goes from 20 to 20,000 hertz.
01:55That's very little.
01:56When you see an elephant, it barks.
01:58At that moment, we hear it.
02:00But it can emit infrasounds of 0.2, 0.3 hertz.
02:04And from that moment on, it goes on several hundred kilometers.
02:07And it can prevent congenital problems.
02:11In the other range, there is the bat and the dolphin.
02:14They will work in the ultrasounds.
02:16They will send ultrasounds of 50,000 to 100,000 hertz,
02:19and thanks to that, analyze their environment.
02:22It's something that is very difficult to understand for us,
02:25because in fact, it's a vision through sound.
02:28They can thus know the environment, see their prey, warn congenitals.
02:33These are sounds that we don't hear in infrasounds or ultrasounds.
02:47Electromagnetic waves
02:52The senses that we don't perceive at all, for example,
02:55are the electromagnetic sense.
02:58The Earth has a ferrous core,
03:00and by rotating it, it creates electromagnetic waves.
03:03We don't feel them at all.
03:05It's the migratory birds that feel them.
03:07It seems innate, because animals like cuckoos,
03:10which are not raised by their parents,
03:12instantly detect electromagnetic waves.
03:15Another thing that we don't detect at all
03:18are electric senses.
03:20There are animals that, surprisingly for us,
03:22produce electricity.
03:24They are often animals in the water.
03:26There is the African trumpet fish,
03:28there is the retropie, which is very well known,
03:30which emits electricity,
03:32either to catch prey, like rays,
03:34or to apprehend their environment.
03:37And then there is more surprising,
03:39there are those who detect electric fields.
03:41There is the ornithorynx, like a mammal.
03:43It's the only mammal that does that.
03:45And there is the shark, which,
03:47apart from its hearing, its olfaction,
03:49and many other senses it has,
03:51thanks to the Lorenzini bulbs
03:53located on its head,
03:55can detect electric fields emitted by fish
03:57and thus consume them.
03:59All these senses are the result of evolution.
04:02There was an adaptation of the animal to its environment,
04:04it needed certain senses,
04:06and logically, they developed.
04:13Transcription by ESO. Translation by —