Mammals. Listening

Mammals

Video transcript

Mammals, from giant whales to small mice, and to great apes much like ourselves, are among the most advanced of earth’s creatures. All mammals share two traits – we feed our young with mother’s milk and we have hair, more or less.

Mammals nursing their young produce fewer offspring than other animals but the youngsters have a much higher rate of survival than newly hatched birds, reptiles and insects. This young orangutan will stay with its mother for eight years.

Hair, like the coats worn by these high alpine guanacos, offers mammals another advantage. Hair, and the sweat glands that come with it, helps mammals stay warm in cold climates and mammals have moved into nearly all of earth’s habitats. Polar bears have adapted to life in the Arctic where the inhospitable cold makes fur coats essential.

Marine mammals like porpoises and humpbacked whales thrive in cold oceans. They still have a few hairs around their mouths but a more efficient underwater insulator is a thick layer of fat keeping heat in and cold out.

Elephants battle heat. Their skin, covered in fine hairs, is wrinkled making it easy to trap cooling mud in the creases.

Spots on the coats of leopards and cheetahs help them to hide. Their fur works to camouflage the big cats stalking prey in tall grasses.

There are 7 500 species of reptiles and amphibians and some 8 600 species of birds, only 4 100 species of mammals exist but they dominate the land and the sea.

Mammals have evolved with greater speed and agility than most other animals. Limbs that are lined up to support weight and drive mammals forward help browsing mammals run from mammalian predators, armed with tooth and claw.

And when natural advantages fail, some mammals fashion tools to help them out. This orangutan is working on a spoon to help him scoop ants out of a tree.

Tool-making was once thought to be a skill exclusive to the human mammal but all great apes and some other animals make tools.

So what separates us from the rest of the mammals?

Our ability to communicate? To parent? To show emotion?

Perhaps a better question is to ask what makes us all so alike?