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Can Fish Hear?

…STRANGE TESTS GAUGE SENSES OF DUMB CREATURES

“DUMB” animals are learning to talk. Not by ord of mouth, but in roundabout ways they are telling scientists how they feel, what they see and hear, and even what they think about. Age-old mysteries—always the source of controversy—are evaporating as research workers peer into the minds of inarticulate creatures.

Only recently have experimenters succeeded in hurdling what has long been an insurmountable obstacle— the fact that animals, unlike human laboratory subjects, cannot give verbal reports of their experiences and emotions. Through ingenious artifices that establish, in effect, a common language between the animals and their investigators, their innermost sensations are now being revealed.
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Use Five Farms as Big Laboratory to Watch Electricity at Work

AGRICULTURAL interests of twenty-four states have united in an effort to find out just what can be done with electricity on the farms of this country. At present the experiments are being made on five average farms in Maryland under the direction of the University of Maryland. On them electricity is being used for almost everything, from killing flies to turning on an alarm clock to wake the hens to a busy day of laying. When flies light on a screen through which a current is passing, sparks leap out and electrocute them.
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Can you guess what song is now stuck in my head?

“It’s raining trout. Hallelujah it’s raining trout!”

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It’s Raining Baby Trout

By Claude M. Kreider

LAST SUMMER almost 3,000,000 baby trout “rained down” over 662 blue lakes in California’s lofty Sierras.

This was not a miracle of nature brought about by the storm clouds hovering over the high peaks. It was a manmade phenomenon, the result of a long experiment in modern trout culture and the planting of fish by airplane.

For many years Sierra lakes, barren of fish life, and other lakes heavily fished, were stocked with trout by the use of pack mules, each carrying two 10-gallon cans of baby fish. Many were lost in transport, others injured. The packers had to stop often along the rough trails to replenish the water in the cans and thus provide the necessary oxygen to keep the fish alive.

Often there was no trail, even for the sure-footed mules, and the men had to complete the journey carrying the cans upon their backs. Several days were often required for one journey. And the cost was prohibitive, averaging almost $20 per thousand trout.
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Army Snake Hunters
SOUTH AFRICAN SOLDIERS SNARE POISONOUS REPTILES FOR VENOM

ODDEST army group among Allied forces, a South African Medical Corps detachment catches venomous snakes and extracts their poison for snakebite serum. Two of South Africa’s deadliest reptiles are most sought, the puff adder for its virulent blood poison and the yellow cobra, which produces a nerve poison. Twice a month the snakes, carefully tended on a “farm” after capture, are “milked” of their venom by massaging the tops of their heads while the fangs are held over the edge of a glass. The thin, clear liquid is dried and sent to the South African Medical Institute. There selected horses are injected with successively larger doses of the two venoms to make a serum which is saving soldiers’ lives on fronts all over the word. The three men insist that if you are gentle, snakes are easy and safe to handle.

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Taming Lions with Drugs

CAN a roaring, raging lion be permanently transformed into a tame and docile animal, by an amazing new drug treatment? Working under the supervision of Dr. Knight Dunlap and Dr. Howard Gilhousen, psychologists of the University of California at Los Angeles, Joseph Cooper is preparing to try the fascinating experiment. One of his subjects will be the most vicious of 155 lions and cubs that roam a five-acre enclosure at Gay’s Lion Farm, El Monte, Calif.

About two years ago, Cooper explains, a Hungarian anatomy professor discovered that some human mental disorders responded favorably to repeated injections of a drug called metrazol. After an initial shock to the nervous system, complete cures frequently resulted. Dr. C. C. Speidel, professor of anatomy at the University of Virginia, recently learned how such cures take place. Treating tadpoles under the microscope, he found that metrazol attacked certain nerve endings and junctions in the brain, so that they literally disappeared. New-ones soon grew in their places, and the sick brain became well once more. It was like breaking a poor telephone connection, and substituting a good one.
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FUR PAINTING by M. J. Laroche of Sir Anthony Eden is believed to be first portrait made from wild animal pelts.

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Amazing Snapshots of Animals

Bring Fame to Desert Photographer

IN A desert shack that cost less than fifty cents to build, Fred V. Sampson, of Barstow, Calif., has found not only contentment but a curious road to fame. Three years ago, he left his job as a commercial artist in Los Angeles and built the low, one-room hut on the edge of the Mohave Desert. Three wails are made of mud and stones, the fourth is formed of the gold-bearing rock of a steep hillside. Here, Sampson spends his days doing what he wants most to do, making friends with curious creatures of the desert and snapping pictures of the animals in action. These photographs—some of the most remarkable wildlife pictures ever made—are attracting wide attention.
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Walking Cage Protects Lion-Farm Guards

It looks as though the lion were the keeper, and the man the caged animal, in the photograph above, but the scene was really snapped on the world’s only commercial lion farm, at El Monte, Calif., to picture the mobile cage designed to protect trainers who may have to track down and kill any untamable beast that escapes from the confines of its pen. The floorless, three-wheeled cage has heavy wire protective netting mounted over a strong wood frame, with a gun slot to permit firing in any direction.

Latest Rural Head Lines

Bifocals Blackout Bulls. Farmers know a bull won’t charge when he can’t see. The Masbruch halter above, produced by the Russell Mfg. Co., Platteville, Wis., lets a bull walk and graze, but when he lowers his head to charge, his vision is blocked.

Horse Specs. Now come goggles to protect the eyes of race horses from mud clots and dust kicked up by their running mates. The specs are made by setting two Plexiglas bubbles into a regular set of blinkers. Showing off a pair, above, is Royal Hustle, first thoroughbred to wear them.

Kindly Weaner. Consisting of metal tabs that close over a calf’s mouth when it raises its head to nurse, the Shur-Way weaner, left, prevents injury to the mother cow and breaks the calf of its habit without punishment. Yet in no other way does it curb the calf’s freedom or keep it from feeding.

Rump Strap for Dairy Cow Stops Switching of Tail
Even though the barn is thoroughly sprayed twice daily to eliminate flies, dairy cows accustomed to switching their tails during the day in order to keep off the pests frequently continue this habit during milking. To prevent it, one dairyman attaches a loop of rope or webbing to the milking-machine strap and places the loop in the position pictured to keep “Bossy’s” switching tail under control.

Mine Detector Diagnoses Cows
The man in the white coat above doesn’t think that Bossy has a Tellermine in her cud, but he is checking to see if she’s munched a nail, screw, or bit of barbed wire. Because cows sometimes eat metal objects that cause sickness, British vets use mine detectors along with their stethoscopes. Other uses for surplus detectors are to locate metal embedded in logs that might shatter saw blades, and to spot the hairpins that women workers tend to shed into food-package assembly lines.

ELECTROCUTING WHALES
BIRGER HOLM-HANSEN, a Norwegian engineer, has invented a device for the instantaneous electrocution of whales. It consists of a small but powerful generator which is carried in the whaleboat, and a flexible, insulated line conveying a current of high voltage to the harpoon. At the in-slant the harpoon hits the whale the current is thrown on and the electric charge shot into the monster. Read the rest of this entry »