The tenth gray tree frog
Frogs need to keep their eggs moist and avoid predators. Some frogs risked hiding their eggs under forest cover. However, there is a frog that has a soft spot for buildings. For African grey tree frogs, mating is a very troublesome thing, because they need to build a big building when breeding. When releasing the eggs to fertilize the male frog, the female frog's skin will secrete a foamy liquid, and then other frogs will help build the little frog's house together. This animal ranks tenth on our list, because these bubbles, like concrete, build a comfortable nest to shelter from the wind and rain.
There is a good example that animals must be close to our nature in order to survive. Grey tree frogs always let their babies back into the water after a period of time. Like astronauts, the gray tree frog will stay in a small house in the air for a while, but after a few weeks, the house made of bubbles will begin to dissolve. At this time, tadpoles will find the eternal truth of real estate-location is always the most important. Tree frogs always build this kind of foam house on the water, so that their babies can fall into the water safely.
The ninth ape
The biggest difference between humans and other architects in the animal kingdom is that we humans can use tools. However, if you look closely at apes, you will find that gorillas, orangutans or chimpanzees can use tools. Orangutans have a problem. It found a beehive, but its long fingers could not reach the honey. What shall we do? It is simple to make a tool for extracting honey, but few animals can make it.
However, the wisdom of apes is not the reason why they rank ninth on the list, but the architect's face. Their best work is their bed. At night, the orangutan will climb to the top of the tree, find a new tree and start knitting a new bed. They go through the forest every day, so they build a new bed every day. Calculated, they will build10.5 million beds in their lifetime. Fortunately, these apes are content to be the best bed makers in the world. Think about it, what will the world be like if they start building houses with tools? They build cities, make laws and have their own religion. They will rob guns to attack imbecile and timid humans. Fortunately, at present, these apes are obviously not interested in becoming world rulers.
The eighth male bowerbird
A bird is like a gardener, which nature should be proud of. The eighth animal is such a master builder. It has created the most beautiful love hut and luxury residence in the world, and has high-quality buildings with exquisite interior design. 1872, when the first naturalist saw this incredible and magical building, he thought it was a masterpiece of human beings. No bird can weave such a wonderful nest, which is the best gift for a beloved partner.
There are 19 species of garden birds in Australia and New Guinea. They will use different building techniques to build beautiful homes to attract their spouses. There is a kind of satin blue pavilion bird, nicknamed Jacques, which is famous for building beautiful pavilions. Jacques knows that his girlfriend only likes one color, blue. So I took the trouble to collect blue things everywhere. Even so, Jacques can't compare with Fogg's bowerbird. It also likes to collect gorgeous flowers and replace them with new ones before they wither. Male birds also like to collect all kinds of beautiful things, such as beetle wings, feathers, mushrooms and even a naturalist's colorful socks.
This bird also built the most wonderful nest on the planet without the help of friends. On the plains of Africa, gregarious weaver birds will build a huge nest on a big tree. This kind of nest weighs 1 ton and can be called an apartment building, which can accommodate more than 400 birds. There is such a nest that has been used for 100 years, which is much more durable than the first apartment built by humans before 2000. At that time, all the roads here really led to Rome, so the urban planners in Rome had to find ways to provide accommodation for these swarming people. Fortunately, the Romans had concrete at that time, and they built multi-storey apartments in imitation of the weaver bird's nest. But at that time, people didn't know how to strengthen the house, which limited the height of the building. Today, thanks to reinforced concrete and steel technology, our skyscrapers are at least 20 times taller than apartments in ancient Rome. But they can't be taller than the Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Each tower is supported by 16 concrete columns, pushing the building to the sky. It took 7,000 people five years to finish it, but architects can't compare with weavers in any case, because they only used hay to build nests that could last 100 years.
The seventh spider
The most beautiful building in nature, and perhaps the most deadly, is the house built by our seventh contestant, Spider. All spiders will release silk thread from their tail glands, but soon it will solidify into silk thread and be used to weave deadly cobwebs. Spiders will use their own network in the air to catch all kinds of food in the sky. However, cobwebs are not ordinary fishing nets because they need a very special material to catch insects flying at high speed. In order to prevent insects from escaping, the spider web is coated with glue. So, why don't spiders fall into the net by themselves? If you look at the spider silk carefully, you will find some obvious glue drops, and the spider will walk freely on the spider web across these glue drops. Spider webs must be strong enough. This tropical web spider weaves the largest and strongest spider web in the world. Its cobwebs are even strong enough to bind the birds that accidentally fly in.
Spider silk is a magical building material. Under the same weight, spider silk is twice as elastic as nylon and six times as tough as steel. No wonder spiders can create structures that human architecture can't match. If our human building materials can support a weight equivalent to 4000 times our own weight, what will our building look like? However, cobwebs are recyclable products. Can human engineers reuse them by eating their own garbage? Spiders are famous for their unusual textile ability.
Some spiders' webs are not used for hunting, such as the Peruvian white-tailed spider, whose silk is used to build tents. They live in many parts of the tropical rain forest. Their tents will provide them with enough humidity. If the air is too dry, they will stay in the tent.
Spiders have been using silk since childhood. Spider eggs are all wrapped in silk shells, which are the first food that little spiders eat. The silk of different spiders has different functions. Some spider silk is used to build houses, some to package food and some to travel. Because little spiders can only climb high by spider silk, and spider silk can also be used as a parachute for little spiders. Although the silk thread is light enough to be blown away by the wind, it is flexible enough to carry young spiders. It can fly all the way up, sometimes even up to 30,000 feet, although it will be dangerous.
The sixth woodchuck and mouse
There were big cities in America thousands of years ago, but none of the citizens in those cities could drive. This chubby little rodent doesn't look like an ordinary resident here. This is our sixth master architect. It built the best little house on the grassland. They are groundhogs and mice. Every mound here is a house, and many houses form a city of dogs and mice on the grassland. But to see the woodchuck's room, you have to go underground. Their tunnel construction is unparalleled. If all the underground dog and mouse tunnels are connected, you will find an underground metropolis. And the number of residents there can even make the human metropolis feel ashamed. It is estimated that there are 400 million dogs and mice living in a prairie dog and mouse city in Texas, USA.
Some people also spend a lot of time digging underground passages, but unlike groundhogs and mice, they need to use a huge machine. The largest hard rock drilling rig in human history can drill 60-foot-long tunnels from rocks every day. It weighs more than 900 tons and needs 25 people to work normally. However, prairie dogs and rats can build huge underground tunnels without any tools. If you want to dig a cave with a bedroom, a bathroom and a nursery, you will naturally dig out a lot of soil. However, these soils can be used to build a useful dam, because if there is no protective embankment on the flat grassland, rainwater can easily flow into their warm homes. Moreover, this raised mound is a good lookout. You know, there are many dangers on the grassland. When groundhogs and mice enter caves, it is difficult to get them out unless they are vacuum cleaners. That's what people in Utah do. They used an improved sewer cleaner to suck out groundhogs and mice. Although this way is not decent, at least people still suck dogs and mice out instead of burying them. Marmots and mice are really great architects on our planet.
The fifth stone moth
In winter in West Virginia, if people carefully observe the leaves in the water, you will find traces left by architects. However, these small holes also mean that it will be difficult for us to find them. This leaf is now the home of stonemoth, and stonemoth larvae are our fifth construction expert, because they can build houses with anything. These unusual architects are vegetarians, so they need to find a way to avoid terrible carnivores. They will build a small house and disguise themselves as part of the river bed. If the building materials are too big, they will quickly cut them into suitable shapes with powerful jaws. Then, they will use saliva as glue to bond various building materials by secreting a filamentous liquid. Stone moths will stick these things in their mobile homes. Small houses built as camouflage masters can often fool hungry predators.
With a little processing, the stone moth's residence will become a unique bead and become the best raw material for human beings to make treasures. In this process, we won't hurt the stone moth. We raise them and let them go once they are adults. Because no matter how beautiful the house is, it becomes worthless to Lord Shi moth. You know, after leaving the water, what adults think about is not building a house or looking for food, but mating. Some stone moths can only live for a few days, so they can't wait to find a mate.
The fourth nautilus
If you want to build a house in deep water, you have to bear a lot of pressure, because every time you dive 100 feet, you have to bear an extra 45 pounds of pressure. However, there is an animal that can cope with this phenomenon. It is the Nautilus, our fourth master shipbuilder. This strange mollusk generally lives at the bottom of the sea 1000 feet. If some deep-sea fish are dragged to the surface, they will die because of the change of pressure. But the nautilus comes to the surface every night. It swims to shallow water and looks for prey by jet propulsion like its close relative squid. But when the sun rises, Nautilus will sink to the bottom of the sea. Nautilus can withstand great pressure changes, thanks to their hard shells. Bruce Carlson of Waikiki Aquarium in Hawaii said that this shell structure is indeed an original design. The little nautilus is simply the epitome of the adult nautilus, and its shell is constantly expanding with the increase of its size.
Nautilus can become the fourth architectural expert because they can build a shell to cross the deep sea just by secreting calcium carbonate. No wonder jules verne, a science fiction writer in the19th century, found inspiration from this mollusk. In his most famous novel Two Wan Li under the Sea, he named his submarine Nautilus. Nautilus is much like a submarine in our modern world. Just like submarines, the deeper they swim, the greater the pressure on their shells. However, the pressure that Nautilus can bear is limited. If its diving depth exceeds 1500 feet, their shells will burst. However, their shells are only about a millimeter thick, but it is quite remarkable that they can rely on it to go deep into the seabed at 1500 feet. In order to help you understand extraordinary things, we can imagine people's situation. Because there were no volunteers, people made heads out of polystyrene. Of course, no one can hold their breath for a long time at the depth of Nautilus, and the strong pressure will squeeze the head made of polystyrene to half its original size. Although jules verne described the submarine as early as 1870, I'm afraid it will not be until the next century that humans can build a submarine that can dive to the depth of Nautilus. Modern science fiction writers still dream of building their homes in the deep sea, but so far that strange world belongs only to Nautilus.
The third bee
Our third-ranked architect is a small animal with a soft spot for flowers, and bees are well-deserved first-class architectural engineers. They collect honey and pollen from flowers and then turn this raw material into beeswax, which is an extraordinary building material. A hive as big as this weighs hundreds of pounds, and there are more than 50 thousand bees living in it.
Beehives are made entirely of beeswax, and there are rows of beehives in them, which Charles Darwin called the most outstanding architectural art. These beehives are used to store food, so we call them beehives. An average-sized bee colony will store 40 kilograms of honey for the winter, and thousands of bee larvae grow up slowly in these nurseries made of beeswax every year. A medium-sized beehive is made of about 2.5 pounds of beeswax.
If you want to know where these beeswax come from, you must observe the bees' tails carefully. Bees secrete beeswax through glands between abdominal segments, and then use beeswax to build honeycombs. But it is not easy to do this. You know, the beeswax produced by bees at one time is not as big as the tip of a needle. This kind of beeswax needs about 500,000 drops to store a pound of substance, and each drop of beeswax should be carefully poured into hexagonal beehives. There are nearly 6,543,800 such beehives. Because honey is stored in beehives, bees are undoubtedly our favorite animal architects. We even made artificial stumps for them to live in, and today we also made wooden beehives.
In the past, beekeepers used conical baskets made of straw and rattan. Interestingly, in the 1960s, this kind of beehive became popular again. Women will take great pains to make a beehive hairstyle, but even such a noble beehive hairstyle can't compare with the masterpiece of bees.
The second beaver
When it comes to large buildings, nothing can compare with dams, and in nature, there is an animal that is born with a genius for building dams. Beavers have been building dams for five million years. The dams they built can reach 65,438+0,000 feet, and they are strong enough to resist a family car. Beavers like to stay in the water. For the sake of safety, they will build their home in an artificial lake surrounded by themselves. This residence is like a castle, and the moat around it is the garden of beavers, which is full of all kinds of food they like. Man will not build a dam with his own teeth. Since Egypt built the first dam in the world 5000 years ago, human beings have been busy building all kinds of dams to subdue the surging river like beavers. Today, the largest dam in the world is about to appear in China. People are building a huge dam on the Yangtze River, the third largest river in the world-the Three Gorges Dam, which will become the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. However, unlike the situation of beavers, if these valleys are filled with rivers, more than 6.5438 million residents will leave their homes, and beavers will also cause some damage. The sharp teeth of this rodent threaten all trees. They can bite off a piece of wood as thick as a rolling pin in 15 seconds. The teeth of these animals are as sharp as chisels, and hundreds of trees can be destroyed in one winter.
You can call beavers tugboats in the water, because their water quality is amazing, they can pull big logs through the water, and they have four sets of lips, which can not only hold things with their teeth, but also prevent water from pouring into their mouths. Many people think that beavers' tails are the driving force for their swimming, but in fact they only act as rudders, not propellers.
The first termite
To find the top buildings, you must travel all over the world. People like to build skyscrapers and monuments to show our strength and wealth. But there is an animal that can build a better high-rise building than us. The Empire State Building in New York and its first floor 102 easily leave a deep impression on us. However, if our number one animal is as big as human beings, they will build skyscrapers four times as large as the Empire State Building in proportion. However, the building will be empty because the architects all live in the basement, and there are 5 million of them. The Empire State Building in the Animal Kingdom is located on the great plains of Africa. A huge castle 20 feet high is the home of our number one architect. It's just that we're going underground to find them.
The top architect in the animal kingdom is termites, which make up for the lack of size in a huge number. Queen ants give birth to a baby every 15 seconds, so they will not lack worker ants to build their homes. And they always have countless things to do, because the structure of termites is extremely complicated. The whole termite castle is a mixture of saliva, soil and feces, and all these materials need to be blended in their mouths. The work may not be clean enough, but the mixture is as strong as concrete, and they can also be cast into the internal structure of the house. Such as air conditioning systems, covered roads, gardens, etc. But their buildings have no windows, because termites are born blind.
The pyramids in Egypt are also huge buildings without windows. Workers who build pyramids don't need to mix soil and feces with their mouths. Instead, they invented the earliest concrete. So far, this kind of concrete has a history of more than 4000 years, and it took about 30 years to build the Great Pyramid. It was the tallest building in the world before 1889. It is hard to imagine that a building taller than the Statue of Liberty can be built of stones, which weigh two tons. It took 2.5 million such stones to build the Great Pyramid. If we use modern building technology, we will be able to build more than 40 Empire State Buildings with these stones. Termites don't use stones to build fortresses, but their buildings are also unforgettable. Although their buildings are only made of saliva and feces, they can last 100 years. No wonder when we talk about architecture, we think termites are the top architects in the animal kingdom.