Tag: Biomechanics

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Redundant Vets by Sarah Das Gupta

A cat has nine lives
each belongs to an old witch
what need for a vet

by Sarah Das Gupta

“And therof hath come the prouerb as trew as common, that a Cat hath nine liues, that is to say, a witch may take on her a Cats body nine times.” William Baldwin, Beware the Cat.

Cats may have been worshipped in ancient Egypt but by the time of Shakespeare superstitions about cats were largely negative despite their usefulness at hunting rats and mice. In fact, in medieval France cats were burnt alive as a form of entertainment, with some believing that the ashes of burnt cats gave good luck.

In the medieval and early modern period, people believed witches had nine chances of turning into their feline familiars. If a witch turned into a cat for a ninth time then they would be unable to turn back. The first written mention of this comes from William Baldwin’s ‘Beware the Cat’. Written in 1553 and published in 1570, ‘Beware the Cat’ is thought by many to be the first novel ever published in English. The gap between its writing and publication is down to the book’s anti-Catholic sentiments at a time when the devoutly Catholic Mary I was on the English throne.

“Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives.” From Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare.

The idea that witches could turn into cats is tied to the Cat-sìth of celtic mythology – a large black cat with a white spot on its chest that resides in the Scottish Highlands. The Cat-sìth was thought to be either a fairy or a witch, and is linked to the British folk tale ‘The King of the Cats’, references to which appear in both Baldwin’s ‘Beware the Cat’ and William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Tales of the Cat-sìth may actually have been sightings of the Kellas cat, an interspecific fertile hybrid between the Scottish wildcat and the domestic cat.

“A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays and for the last three he stays.” Old English proverb

The origins of the nine lives myth are hard to know accurately, but many cultures believe that cats have multiple lives: in some European countries cats have seven lives whilst in Arabic traditions the number is six. Regardless of the specific number, many believe that the myth of having multiple lives is down to the quick reactions and righting reflexes that enable cats to survive perilous situations.

Whilst impressive, a cat’s ability to survive falls from great heights is not infallible, and neither is our ability to study this achievement. A study by Whitney and Mehlhaff (1987) suggested that the chance of injury from falling increased with falling height… up to a point. A falling cat reaches a terminal velocity of ~60 mph after falling about five storeys. The researchers found that up to this point the numbers of injuries increased but after seven storeys the number of injuries deceased. The explanation given by Whitney and Mehlhaff was that over a short distance a cat tenses and arches its back to turn in mid-air, but over a longer fall the cat adopts a more relaxed body state leading to fewer injuries.

Whilst there’s truth to their findings in terms of how cats behave whilst falling and the different injury types prevalent from different heights as a result, the hypothesis that heights greater that seven storeys lead to fewer injuries isn’t supported by the methodology.  The study was based on cats that had been brought into a veterinary surgery for care but cats that had fallen and not survived were, for obvious reasons, not brought into the surgery and not included in the study’s fall survival and injury statistics. Indeed, a later study by Vnuk et al. (2004) found that falls from the seventh storey or higher were associated with more severe injuries.

Cats may not always need vets but they can certainly help preserve each of their many lives!

Further reading:

‘Beware the Cat’, William Baldwin, https://www.presscom.co.uk/halliwell/baldwin/baldwin_1584.html

‘Beware the Cat’, Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beware_the_Cat

‘Cat-sìth’, Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-s%C3%ACth

‘A cat that can never be tamed’, Scientific American, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/a-cat-that-can-never-be-tamed/

‘High-rise syndrome in cats’, W. Whitney and C.J. Mehlhaff, 1987, https://europepmc.org/article/med/3692980

‘Feline high-rise syndrome: 119 cases (1998–2001)’, D. Vnuk, B. Pirkić, D. Matičić, B. Radišić, M. Stejskal, T. Babić, M. Kreszinger, and N. Lemo, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfms.2003.07.001

Author bio:

Sarah Das Gupta is a young 81 year old. Loves writing haiku and most forms of poetry. Is learning to walk after an accident. Main outside interests include equine sports. Lives near Cambridge, UK. Read other sciku by Sarah here.

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Aye-Aye!

The northern monkey.

Never in need of a lift

with its pseudothumb.

The aye-aye is a curious primate found in Madagascar that has possibly the most unusual hands in the animal kingdom. Their hands are so elongated that they account for around 41% of their total length of the forelimb. The aye-aye’s long, bony third finger is its calling card – unique in the animal kingdom, it’s a specialised tool for getting grubs out of deep holes and probing for food whilst foraging.

Yet such specialisation can have costs, including weakening the ability of aye-ayes to grip. Hartstone-Rose & Dickinson et al. (2019) suggest that the aye-aye’s pseudothumb may have evolved to combat this disadvantage. The researchers found the pseudothumb has bony, cartilaginous and muscular features, suggesting that it enhances the aye-aye’s grip of smaller items such as thin branches.

A note about the sciku – Aye-ayes are lemurs and are not monkeys (they’re strepsirrhine primates). The sciku calls them northern monkeys because ‘aye’ is a common term in the north of England and in Scotland meaning ‘yes’, and ‘why-aye’ or ‘wey-aye’ are northern (mainly Geordie) terms for ‘well yes’ or ‘well, yes of course’. The term northern monkey is also a derogatory term in the UK for someone from the north of England (the counter of which is southern fairy).

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23936

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Secretive flatworms

Secretive flatworms

divide coyly in darkness

by three-stage fission.

 

Freshwater flatworms are able to reproduce asexually by dividing in half – the head and tail pieces then each become a new worm. This process of binary fission was previously difficult to study as it occurred in darkness, halts with any disturbance and occurs infrequently (about once a month) but researchers now have more of an understanding of how the process occurs.

Malinowski et al (2017) found that fission occurs in three steps: 1) a local constriction along the body of the flatworm as if a waist is forming, 2) pulsations that apply stress to the ‘waist’ ultimately leading to 3) a rupture at the waist and the creation of two pieces which then re-grow their missing halves. The researchers also developed a linear mechanical model of the fission enabling a better understanding of the division process and accurate predictions of where on the body of a flatworm it will occur.