Amos moved quickly, completing the task in half an hour. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

The feathers and dried dung he had brought with him were used by Levi to arrange the models made by carpenters.

Levi was on the side, ordering the carpenters who made the models to insert these feathers into the pre-prepared holes in advance. There are three models here. The first is a 1:1 solid model, the second is a 2:1 scaled-down solid model, and the third is a flat model with the same scale as the first, which is also 1:1. The last one, he made people paint the corresponding color.

Before inserting the feathers, he also had them smeared with dry dung: the smell of the ducks is very similar to that of dried droppings, which means that they contain the same odor substances.

After arranging these things, the preliminary preparations are completed.

After asking Amos for more details, Levi decided that the experiment would begin. This time, the butler in front of him prepared a total of ten rooms of ducklings for him, enough for him to conduct the first batch of experiments.

But at this moment, Levi himself was apprehensive - even if the experiment was successful, and he succeeded in finding a mechanism for the chick of the Dire Duck to recognize his relatives, he might not be able to deal with the thunder chick in his bedroom.

Not to mention the mutations found in it.

The mere nature of its recognition mechanism doomed him to the risk of failure.

It all starts with the stimulation filtering of animals.

The living environment of animals is an ocean that contains all kinds of information elements. Every animal is exposed to an infinite amount of environmental information at all times – physical, chemical and biological – all kinds of information. And of this vast amount of information, only a very small part of it is needed.

Therefore, one of the most important tasks for animals to survive and reproduce is to selectively sift through information and respond to these external stimuli.

Animals have two organ systems that can effectively filter information from the outside world, which are their sensory organs and their nervous organs. Due to these limitations, the ability of animals to screen information is also limited and developed accordingly.

For example, we humans perceive sound, and there is a limit to the frequency of sound.

Infrasound and ultrasound, which cannot be perceived, are useless information that is screened out by our sensory organs. But at the same time, we can't use it like bats.

Each animal, in the adaptation of its surroundings, has developed a unique system of behavioral stimulation.

This system, on the one hand, is limited by itself. One is the sensory organs, such as sight, hearing, and smell, which determine their perception of environmental information such as light, sound, and smell. There are also their nervous organs, which in turn determine their ability to further process external information.

On the other hand, there is a huge difference in the information about the surrounding environment itself. For animals, the value of their records is not the same. For example, some colors are far more vivid and eye-catching than others. Compared to those dull colors, they are more likely to be a point. This is the reason why poisonous creatures have bright appearances.

In this system, there is one phenomenon that has to be mentioned - and that is the key stimulus.

For example, if a cheetah hunts an antelope, the first thing it has to do is to distinguish the antelope from its environment. An antelope has a lot of information that can be perceived by the cheetah: its shape, color, size, unique smell, call, and even body temperature and electric field are all real information, which can be sensed by the cheetah - as long as the cheetah has this ability.

The information of several species of antelope is mixed together and can be called a complex stimulus.

The components of a complex stimulus can be separated individually and presented to the test animal one by one to determine which stimulus is critical and which is redundant.

Many animals are selective in their perception of stimuli.

For example, the pecking response of the silver gull chick can only be stimulated by the information on the beak of the parent bird. Therefore, an adult model of a silver gull, even if the other parts are very distorted, as long as some features on the beak remain unchanged, can still trigger this response in the young bird.

The reason for this is that we have to start with the benefits that the phenomenon of key stimuli brings to animals.

If the animal only reacts to a very small amount of information about the environment, its behavioral response will be greatly simplified and errors will be greatly reduced. As long as this information is available, it can represent objects in the biological sense - such as predators, prey, or dens, spawning grounds, etc. Other information is redundant, unnecessary, and even distracting, so just react to that.

One of the most important points of a critical stimulus is that it is unique in the environment.

Or an example of cheetah predation.

If there is a scent in an antelope that is unique, only it can emit it. It is possible that the smell may be a key stimulus that induces cheetahs' predatory behavior. Cheetahs are well known and even engraved into their genes, so much so that they form an instinct that has been passed down from generation to generation. But if this smell can be seen everywhere, any flowers and plants can emit it, and the cheetah will naturally not pay too much attention to it.

key stimuli and may be mutagenic into parastimuli.

A striking example is the cracked beak of the cuckoo chick. It is more striking than the beak fissure markings of chickadee chicks, which can better induce the feeding response of the parents.

In fact, the act of laying eggs in other nests of birds such as cuckoos, which are parasitic in incubating eggs, can be seen as another use of animal physiological behavior.

It is also a pot where the chick-recognition mechanism of the chickadees that they parasitize is underdeveloped.

Solitary birds, such as chickadees, have a breeding mechanism that ensures that their offspring are not mistaken for the extent that they have not developed a parent-child identification system in their long-term evolution. The cognitive nurturing of young birds is limited to a few simple and even imitative information stimuli, which makes old drivers like cuckoos take advantage of loopholes. The reason why there are such instincts is simply that the good still outweighs the disadvantages.

If you replace the with those that live in groups, because they are too close to each other's nests, and there are misfeeding of young birds in the process of rearing, it is not so easy for cuckoos to hatch and parasitize. These birds have more complex parent-child identification mechanisms and rely on a variety of information.

Now Levi only hopes that the chivalry recognition mechanism of the Dire Duck is just some simple key stimuli that he can imitate. If its internal mechanism is very complicated, it will definitely disappoint him.

The first experiment was a complete model experiment.

This time, the young bird was brought to the front of a wooden model of the same size as an adult dia duck, decorated with feathers, treated with dry dung, and equipped with a vocalization device.

It will determine whether the key stimulus to the mechanism of recognition is not among the elements in the chivalrous duck recognition mechanism.