By ANDREW RUANO
Staff Writer
Keeping track of time is essential for perceiving what’s happening around us and responding to it. In order to tell where a voice is coming from, we time how long it takes for the sound to reach both ears. When we respond to the voice by speaking to ourselves, we need precise timing to make ourselves understood. Our muscles in the mouth, tongue, and throat must all twitch in carefully timed choreography. Scientists are finding that telling time is also important to animals. At the University of Edinburgh, researchers built fake flowers with sugar inside to reveal how hummingbirds tell time. After hummingbirds drink nectar from real flowers, it takes time for the flowers to replenish their supply. The Scottish researchers refilled some of their fake flowers every 10 minutes and others every 20 minutes. Hummingbirds quickly learned just how long they had to wait before coming back to each kind. Scientists at the University of Georgia have discovered that rats do an excellent job of telling time too. They can be conditioned to wait two days after a meal to poke their noses into a trough and rewarded with food. We are not free from time, in other words, but we are not its slaves either. We stretch and twist it to serve our own needs. Time, in other words, is just a tool.