Do any animals cook their food like humans? In the wild, the closest culinary parallel seems to be the buckspoor spiders of deserts in southern Africa, says Ellen Husain.
They hide beneath thin webs bound with sand, indistinguishable from the desert surface. When an unwitting dune ant strays over the web, the spider rushes up and, extending its legs from under the sand carpet, pins it to the searing +50°C surface, cooking it to death. We think this probably makes them worthy of a place on our weirdest spiders list.
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Japanese honeybees also use heat as a defence mechanism. When a hornet attacks a hive a group of worker bees generate heat by vibrating their wing muscles, making it too hot for the hornets to handle and they are essentially boiled to death.
Humans, however, cook things that are already dead, and this is seen as a key evolutionary step.
Cooking made food less likely to poison us, and more easily digestible – freeing up energy that allowed our brains to grow, making us smarter.
But we’re no longer the only ones. Hot on our heels, a captive bonobo in the USA called Kanzi has learned to assemble a pile of twigs, light it with a lighter or matches, and toast a marshmallow that he puts on his own stick. Skipping straight to dessert – that’s clever.
Top image credit: Rudolph Steenkamp, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
