posted
or, in other words, some people have way too much time on their hands.
From today's Toronto Star.
Walruses mostly do right thing Humans not alone in favouring a side Danish researcher trumpets study
CHRISTIAN COTRONEO STAFF REPORTER
Nette Levermann's homemade video collection could put the sandman to sleep.
It could also trumpet a startling scientific discovery.
Her tapes show the same theme over and over again: A walrus dives into the icy depths off the coast of Greenland and spots a clam.
Then, Levermann anxiously awaits the answer to one burning question: Does it use the right flipper or left?
A surprising 66 per cent of the time the walruses favoured their right flipper for underwater foraging.
"It's new knowledge," the Danish marine researcher proudly declares.
It may not seem like the Eureka of our time, but the discovery shatters a prevailing notion that only tool using mammals, i.e. humans, favour a certain hand or flipper.
The video footage, taken by a Swedish photographer in the summer of 2001, is part of a research project analyzing the eating habits of walruses in the wild.
Few diners attack fresh clams with the élan of the walrus. They scour the seabed, often having to dig them up from as much as 40 centimetres of silt. Their natural silverware includes a pair of flippers, a tough, prodding snout and an even a blast of water from the mouth.
"It sucks out the soft parts and pits out the empty shells," Levermann says.
Later, when researchers, viewed the tapes, they noticed a recurring pattern in the clam-munchers' dining habits.
"They were using the right flipper much more than they were using the left flipper. We weren't looking for these results. They just seemed really interesting when we found them. We just wanted to describe how walruses in the wild feed."
Only four per cent of the walruses studied used the left flipper, another one per cent foraged with a blast of water and 29 per cent were strictly nose.
People who are right-handed generally have longer bones in their right arm than their left because, scientists say, they use it more often. To determine if the same rule applied to walruses, the researchers examined bones from the skeletons of 23 animals.
"They were significantly longer in the right flipper than in the left flipper."
Knowing which flipper to shake doesn't make meeting a walrus any easier. Their roly-poly appearance belies a fierce, sometimes dangerous attitude that's led to several attacks against divers.
"Nobody's been able to dive and have someone recording in these wild waters," Levermann.
It took the walruses five summers to grow accustomed to the presence of the underwater photographer.
The researchers are still analyzing similar data collected from last summer and plan to join the walruses again in 2004.
Although its the first time researchers have seen a marine animal favouring a particular flipper for foraging, several past studies revealed a penchant for the right among humpback whales and catfish.
When humpback whales lay on shore, for example, they make sounds, predominantly with their right flipper. Likewise, catfish have been known to prefer the right flipper.
And what signal can humans take from our right-flippered friends?
"It can't be tool use alone which is the driving force in developing hand use in human beings," Levermann says.
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