How Your Body Knows What Time It Is - Issue 83: Intelligence

"The funny thing about life is that it's temporary; that is to say, temporary in the'temporal' sense of the word, meaning that all living things and all that we do are subject to the precepts and effects of time." Many organisms perform best at certain hours of the day. The slug species Arion subfuscus, living in almost total darkness, knowing nothing about the Gregorian calendar, lays its eggs between the last week of August and the first week of September.1 Bees forage for nectar, knowing the best times to visit the best fields and the exact timing of nectar secretions for individual species of flowers. In the mid-20th century, the Austrian Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch provided enormous insights on honeybee communication and foraging time. He discovered that bees have internal clocks that tell them not only where the nectar is to be found but also precisely when that food will be ready. "I know of no other living creature," he wrote in his book on bee language, "that learns so easily as the bee when, according to its'internal clock,' to come to the table."2 Even without a light clue, the plants were able to tell time.