I remember my mother one day giving me this very typical (for her) advice: “Be sure to wash your celery good. I was reading the other day that celery is extremely dirty and people should be more careful.”
To which I had to reply: “Where do you read these things?”
Well, I was reading the other day that termites like heavy metal music. Yes, I read it on the Internet, but there’s so much stuff on the Internet that you have to know what to look for.
The article didn’t say whether termites show taste in heavy metal – whether they like Queen and Jethro Tull but hate KISS – but researches inferred that termites prefer this music since they chew faster when they hear it. According to Erlich Pest Control Blog, rock is ideal work music for termites due to “the frequency of 2.5KHz outputs for bass and electric guitars, which are distinctive of the rock genre.”
Mammals can have idiosyncratic tastes in music. Dolphins purportedly love Radiohead. In Tracking and the Art of Seeing, Paul Rezendes describes a raccoon who “would often come in when the man was playing Bach on his stereo. As soon as the record was over, the raccoon would leave.”
I used to have a cat who liked loud classical music, the kind with lots of horns and cymbals. She would lay next to a boombox playing Wagner or The William Tell Overture and cry if it was turned off. She’s dead now, but in Misha’s memory I would like to share this rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, her favorite.