Animal Commit Suicide-动物自杀案
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Did they able to think for commit suicide?
Did animals posses the mental faculties needed to end their own lives deliberately? Suicide involves a set of higher-order cognitive abilities. It requires an awareness of one’s own existence, an ability to speculate about the future, and the knowledge that an act will result in death. There are indications that certain animals have some of these capacities. Dolphins, many primates, magpies, and elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, suggesting self-awareness. Some animals know how to pretend during play activities, which indicates an ability to imagine counterfactual worlds. Still, no one really knows which animals, if any, can combine these capacities to perform an act similar to human suicide.
Reason for commit suicide
Depression or lonely: animals will inadvertently terminate their own lives when depressed or lonely. Highly bonded animals change their behavior when they lose a companion. For example, dogs in such situations sometimes go into depression and reject food and attention until they eventually die.
Toxoplasma gondii: the parasite Toxoplasma gondii affects the brains of rodents and causes them to be attracted to their enemy-the cat. A study made by University of Maryland researchers found that those with high levels of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies were more likely to have attempted suicide.
*Toxoplasma gondii is a species of parasitic protozoa in the genus Toxoplasma. The definitive host of T. gondii is the cat, but the parasite can be carried by many warm-blooded animals. It can have serious or even fatal effect on a fetus whose mother contacts the disease. It also indicated an influence of T. gondii on suicidal behaviours.
Driven by an instinct of self preservation: Self-destruction in the natural world is fairly common.For example, scorpions were thought to sting themselves when surrounded by fire. A deer jumped from a precipice to avoid capture by hunting dogs. Infected mole rats or bees that abandon the colony to prevent an epidemic, algae die for the good of the community.
There has one theory holds that when a sick individual heads to shore to die, the others follow.
Dogs commit suicide in Overtoun Bridge
In the rolling green foothills outside of West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, stands the impressive Victorian stone mansion known as Overtoun House. It was originally built in the 1860s as the private retreat of industrialist and philanthropist James White, the first Lord Overtoun, from locally quarried granite. It has the ornate look and size of a classic Scottish castle, and leading up to it is a bridge that is no less imposing. The heavy granite structure spans the shallow, rocky creek called Overtoun Burn, 15 meters below the roadway. Something about the bridge has an unusual affect on dogs. The story goes that over the past few decades, at least fifty dogs have leapt the walls and fallen to their deaths on the creek bottom far below. This bridge of doggie doom is known to some as "Rover's Leap", the place that compels dogs to suddenly, and deliberately, commit suicide.
They believe that dogs have psychic powers and maintain a psychic connection with their owners. The Daily Mail has featured reports of horrified pet owners who walked their dog over the bridge and, without warning, saw their pet leap over the bridge falling 50 ft to the rocky bottom below.
It is not known exactly when or why dogs began to leap from the bridge, but news stories and studies have indicated that these deaths might have begun during the 1950s or 1960s, at the rate of about one dog a month. The long leap from the bridge onto the waterfalls of the Overtoun Estate almost always results in immediate death. Inexplicably, some dogs have actually survived, recuperated, and then returned to the site to jump again.
Some point to the idea of the graveyard of the whales, or the secret place in the jungle where the elephants all go to die, as if they are precedents for a specific location favored by dogs to end their lives.
Jumbo squid mass suicide
In 2002, thousands of squid filled the beach at La Jolla Cove north of San Diego, California. At least 1500 of the squid ended up between San Diego and Los Angeles.
Some point to the idea of the graveyard of the whales, or the secret place in the jungle where the elephants all go to die, as if they are precedents for a specific location favored by dogs to end their lives.
In 2002, thousands of squid filled the beach at La Jolla Cove north of San Diego, California. At least 1500 of the squid ended up between San Diego and Los Angeles.
Red Devil is the nickname of this squid. This elusive Humboldt squid can reach 6 feet (1.8m) long. It has powerful arms and tentacles, excellent underwater vision and a razor-sharp beak that easily tears through the flesh of its prey. William Gilly, a biologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station had studied The Humboldt or Jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas). But its biology and habits are very little to known and are a mystery to scientists. Where they spawn and their eggs remain unknown. It is very hard to studying their behavior because they spent 95 percent of their lives at depths ocean. Scientists believe that they live at depths of 660 to 2300 feet (200 to 700m) during the day and they preferred about 220 feet (70m) during the night.
Why the squid ended their lives? William Gilly had predicted that the cause of the deaths might be a combination of squid spending too much time in warm water and eating something toxic. Scientists had studied the cause of death of squids. Scientists believe that the latter cause is reasonable. According to Gilly, there may be something neurologically wrong with the squid, they appeared to be mentally deranged. It is something abnormal because the squid are intelligence creatures. Scientists had found out that the toxin might domoic acid had lead squids to their aberrant behavior. Domoic acid produced by several microscopic poisonous algae known as diatoms or so call red tides. It can causes convulsions and death in marine mammals that feed on the same things that squid do. In addition, Eric Hochberg, a scientists at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History said that bad weather may played a part in the squid deaths.
This is only clues of the deaths of squid. Someday, someone will find the truth and definite cause of the squid deaths.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Three_Beached_Whales,_1577.jpg
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