A plant now being cultivated in the newly established botanical garden of the University of Caracas may prove to be nature’s greatest boon to pestered husbands and harassed mothers. It is described only under the popular Spanish name of “planta del mudo.” It looks like sugar cane. According to reliable reports anybody who chews the stem is stricken dumb for 48 hours.
Other curiosities of the garden include a plant which allegedly can stimulate hair growth on bald heads and a bush whose blossoms open snow-white in the morning and turn red at noon. Here also blooms the exotic “Queen of Night,” a climbing cactus with a white flower five inches in diameter which opens at sunset and closes at sunrise.
From the days of the Hebrews prophets a visitation of locusts has been considered one of the plagues of God. A migration of millions of these grasshopper-like insects in clouds obscuring the sun leaves behind a countryside devastated as though by fire. In flight they sound like a forest fire being spread by a brisk wind. Whenever they come to earth areas of hundreds of square yards almost immediately are denuded of everything green.
In history their raids have been associated chiefly with the Near East. Quite similar creatures have caused far-reaching destruction over most of the world including the United States.
The last such phenomenon was about 1880. Since then grasshoppers have hopped, not flown. There have been some great invasions, but the insects have moved along the ground where it is easier to combat them.
The reason for the transformation was found a few years ago by entomologists. Hopping grasshoppers are changed into flying grasshoppers by heat and hunger. Grown in test cages at high temperatures and deprived of succulent green food, the insects acquired longer wings, became slimmer, and took on brighter colors.
It apparently is a curious provision of nature to preserve the grasshopper race. When on the edge of perishing, they are supplied with wings to carry them to green pastures a few hundred miles away. Lately there has been some indication that those in the western United States might again enter the flying phase in the near future. During the great drought of the early thirties there was a stimulus almost sufficient to make them undergo the complete transformation.
At present there seems little prospect that there will be another flying cloud in this part of the world. By planting cultivated crops on land formerly covered by grass, man provides good egg-laying grounds and plenty of green food.
Adequate information still is lacking on what makes grasshoppers increase and decrease. Also a mystery is the mechanism by which the harmless solitary phase is transformed into the dangerous gregarious phase. Several types occur in both phases and each can change itself into the other, altering their habits so that they attack in mass rather than as individuals.
During the late 1870s the flying clouds caused terror all over the world. In parts of Minnesota where the locusts landed they covered the ground three inches thick. Crops were destroyed throughout the prairie states.
The most remarkable incident was reported from Russia in 1878:
“A detachment of Gen. Lazeroff’s expedition against the Turcomans met with a curious misadventure near the Georgian town of Elizavetopol. A few versts from the town the soldiers encountered an army of locusts about 20 miles long and broad in proportion. The officer in charge did not like to turn back, repelled by mere insects. The soldiers soon were surrounded. The locusts appear to have mistaken them for trees and swarmed by the thousands around them—crawling over their bodies, lodging themselves in their helmets, penetrating their clothes and knapsacks, filling the barrels of their rifles and boring into their ears and noses.
“The commander gave the order for the troops to push on the double-quick for Elizavetopol, but the road was so blocked that the soldiers became frightened and, after they wavered a few minutes, a stampede took place. Led by a non-commissioned officer who had espied a village a short way from the road, the troops dashed across the fields, slipping about on the crushed and greasy bodies as if on ice. They were detained prisoners by the insects for 45 hours, and on the way to Elizavetopol found every blade of grass and green leaf destroyed.”
That same year a cross-continental train was held up for three hours near Reno, Nevada, by a host of locusts that covered the rails for several miles.
Trees change size from hour to hour. The circumference of a tree trunk gets bigger and smaller with unpredictable perversity. For light on this phenomenon the world is indebted to Dr. John A. Small of Rutgers University.
About a decade ago tree scientists were provided with an instrument which could measure continuously the radial growth of a tree with an accuracy of a thousandth of an inch. With such an instrument it seemed plausible that it would be possible to tell just how much a tree had grown in a single day and its rates of growth in different seasons. A lot of the conclusions reached in this connection must now be discarded. The circumference of a tree certainly changes but not in a straight line. It may be bigger one day, smaller the next.
Dr. Small’s experiments were carried out with the white ash. He found that circumference changes followed yearly, monthly and even daily rhythms but the changes in the same tree might vary by as much as 200 percent when measurements were made at different times. Daily variations have shown a tendency to reach maximum readings about 6:30 a.m. and sink to minimum in the late afternoon or early evening. Eccentric jumps and drops can be found almost any time.
Seventeen-year locusts build great subterranean “cities” during their long sojourn in the earth’s depths. The years underground are by no means a resting period—an episode of being buried alive. All the time the young locusts, in various metamorphoses, are busy building and eating. The eggs of the strange insects are laid during a few weeks late in summer inside twigs. From these eggs come minute nymphs, which at once make their way into the ground. There they shed their shells and grow rapidly. Their food is juice sucked from roots. They make successive mud dwellings attached to these roots. The largest observed in the eastern United States were eighteen inches below the surface. Each was a rough ball of earth about two inches long and three-fourths of an inch wide. The ball is lined on the inside by smooth mud and contains only one nymph. Every time an individual moults and grows larger it must make a new house.
When they emerge from the last of their feeding chambers, the locusts dig rapidly upward and construct a somewhat different type of dwelling some inches below the surface. These are two-chambered, with upper and lower rooms connected by tunnels five to ten inches long. These are so ingeniously constructed, according to Dr. E. A. Andrews of Johns Hopkins University, that they provide “the advantage of safety along with quick access to the surface when the proper time comes. In the shaft the nymph climbs close to the surface or falls rapidly to the bottom to escape attacks. The lining of the shaft is smooth mud a few millimeters thick. The shafts are by no means always straight or of uniform diameter, but may be sinuous and present swollen regions.” In one area examined he found at the topsoil was such a mass of small stones and roots that the insects must actually have cut their way through roots. Large obstacles often were avoided by a change in direction.
“The chief implements used in making cavities in the earth”, according to Dr. Andrews' report, “are the big first legs. Here, as in other legs, the end segment is used chiefly in walking and may be folded down when not needed. The second segment from the tip is used to pick off particles of earth. The third segment is the largest and, like a powerful thumb, acts with the opposing second segment as a forceps to pick up pellets of earth and small stones. The minute particles picked loose from the earth are raked together by the tip segment to make a pellet, which the forceps can carry or shove into the walls of the cavity. However, all parts of the body may come into use, for the hind legs and the abdomen may help shove earth aside and the head may carry earth plastered upon it. In vertical tunnels the animal braces its legs against the sides and, if disturbed, relaxes and drops down.”
The last dwelling is large enough for the nymph to turn around inside and usually has a flattened floor. The top comes quite close to the surface without actually breaking through, leaving only a few millimeters of earth through which the insect must dig when the transmutation to an adult locust takes place. Examination of many of these tubular dwellings shows that there are no interconnections between them. Each has its own individual exit and along its course avoids contact with other chambers, although they often are very close together. This last home of the locust, before it emerges from the everlasting darkness to the world of light and quick death which is its pre-ordained destiny, is not necessarily restricted to the earth but may be contained above the surface. Aerial extensions may, in fact, be abundant and are in the form of turrets, towers, cones, chimneys, huts and adobe houses. The walls are of dense mud, not natural soil. Externally they are made of tiny mud pellets, but lined internally with the same smooth layer found in the underground dwellings.
An explorer in the desolate heights of the Santa Marta mountains in northeastern Colombia, fog-wrapped and 10,000 feet above sea level, may see a flock of sheep grazing placidly among rocks ahead of him. Then, looking the other way, he may see an assembly of cowled, robed priests, apparently in the midst of some weird ecclesiastical ceremony. But when he reaches the places where he thought he saw these things there are neither sheep nor priests. He finds instead two strange varieties of the aster family, both among the real curiosities of the plant kingdom.
The vegetable sheep are bushy plants which grow on nearly barren ground near the mountain tops. The individual plant consists of thickly branched stems, about the size of a human finger, bearing many layers of leaves covered with wool-like hairs. Sometimes these leaves are so thick that the point of a pencil cannot be thrust through them. Some of the plants may be as large as a living-room sofa.
The extreme compactness of these plants and their dense covering of hairs is an adaptation to the hostile conditions under which they must live. The habitat consists of rocky slopes where the hot, dry winds of summer and the snows, low temperature and violent gales of winter expose them to a perpetual alternation of desert and Arctic conditions.
In the same general region are the monk plants, belonging to a different family, who have responded in the same way to similar conditions. Seen from a distance on a mountainside, especially through a light fog, a patch of these plants looks decidedly like a congregation of several hundred priests.
The vegetable sheep also are found in New Zealand, but there are no known intermediaries between the closely similar species growing on opposite sides of the earth.
Worms that give birth to their own grandchildren, animals that have no digestive, muscular, nervous, glandular or excretory organs—such paradoxical creatures are the “dicyemid mosozoans”, tiny worms that live inside octopuses. These little worms are among the most curious living things in nature. It is quite uncertain whether they are a step upward in evolution from the single-celled protozoans or, like some other worms, a degenerate form of many-celled animals. It might be maintained that they represent a distinct branch of the animal kingdom.
The body of a dicyemid consists of a single cell, almost half an inch long, in the form of a hollow tube, surrounded by a layer of small cells. The immediate offspring are formed and, in some cases, live their entire lives and reproduce in turn, inside one of these “skin” cells. The grandchildren break through the body of the grandparent at any place they choose, apparently without causing any wound, and live for a short time as free-swimming animals until they find an octopus whose kidneys they can enter. Then the whole life cycle starts over again.
Apparently the infestation in no way injures the octopus and the worms are of no practical importance in the world. Each kind of octopus or squid in coastal areas has its own particular species of these parasites of which about 35 kinds are known.
The worm’s body contains no organs, tissues or glands in the usual sense of the word.
Before being born the larvae attain their full complement of body cells, are able to swim about, and have within them the germ cells that will give rise to the next generation. Birth is very simple. The larvae just push out, or are squeezed out, through the sides or ends of their parent at almost any point. The parent continues to develop and bear more larvae in the same manner. The number developing at any one time in the cell may range from one or two to 100 or more.
These larvae remain in the octopus as fully developed worms. But at certain times the germ cells develop into much smaller individuals, called infusorigens, hard to distinguish from large protozoa. These never leave the birth cell inside the parent, but produce germ cells of their own which develop into free-swimming creatures known as infusoriforms. These break away from the grandparent worm and from the octopus and become free-swimming animals. They are microscopic, less than a 300th of an inch long. They live from three days to a week. Here may be the borderline between single-celled and multi-celled animals—or perhaps the greatest degeneration in animal life.
A gigantic black bear, probably the largest of flesh-eating animals, lives in the dense, hardly explored pine forests of southern Kamchatka. This creature still is unknown to science. So far as known it never has been seen by a white man. There is, however, considerable evidence for its existence presented in a report made several years ago by Dr. Sten Bergman of the State Museum of Natural History at Stockholm, who spent two years on the Kamchatka peninsula.
Photographs have been taken of this animal’s footprints in the snow. It leaves a track 15 inches long and ten inches wide. Dr. Bergman was shown a pelt of the giant bear. It was the largest bearskin he ever had seen, deep black in color, and covered with short hair in striking contrast to the long hair of other Kamchatkan bears. He also saw a gigantic bear skull, the teeth of which indicate that it belonged to a young individual.
Apparently this Kamchatkan black bear exceeds in size the Kodiak Island bear, which lives across Bering Strait and is the largest known flesh-eating mammal. The wildness of the country and its dense vegetation have protected the giant bear from naturalists and hunters. The whole land is a veritable paradise for bears who hide away in the dense thickets along the Kamchatkan rivers and subsist on the abundant salmon. They are so numerous that a native does not dare venture into the bush in summer without first shouting to let the bears know he is coming. They will keep out of a man’s way if they are warned, but are likely to attack him if surprised.
The great majority of the Kamchatkan bears are relatively small animals, comparable to those of northern Europe. Some are black, but the majority are yellowish-white or light brown. The giant animal may be an extreme variation of this race, or may represent an entirely different species. He naturally is the subject of much native legendary. Some stories have been interpreted as indicating that mammoths existed within the time of man in the northern wildernesses of both hemispheres, but such a giant bear would fit the descriptions as well as would a small elephant-like creature.
If it were not for the great numbers of smaller bears, man scarcely could subsist in this country. There are, for example, no roads through the desolate land between the villages. But all along the rivers and through the forests are well-marked paths made by the bears who seem to have an engineering instinct in choosing the most logical places for crossing morasses and mountains. These paths are about the only means of human communication and eventually, if the land ever is settled, will become the roads. In the same way elephant trails in Africa and India and bison trails in the United States became the hard-surfaced highways of today. Engineers hardly can improve on the instinct of the animals.
The small bears also play an important part in the domestic economy of the few inhabitants. The thick, warm pelt is used as a bed. Out of the skin the natives make reins, snowshoes and dog traces. The meat is much appreciated. In remoter parts of the country the linings of the intestines are used for windows instead of glass. Many of the native medicines are derived from the bear.
Both among the Kamchatka natives and the Ainu of northern Japan the animal is revered as a god—the concept being that the great celestial bear out of his benevolence to men provides creatures in his own form to furnish them food and clothing.
Most fearsome of all sharks in appearance is Isistius braziliensis, found in the tropical Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. It is a wine-brown colored creature with sharp teeth set in 20 rows which glow at night with an unearthly light.
“When the specimen, taken at night, was removed into a dark apartment it afforded a very extraordinary spectacle,” relates naturalist F. D. Bennett. “The entire inferior surface of the body and head emitted a vivid, greenish phosphorescent gleam, imparting to the creature, by its own light, a truly ghastly and terrible appearance. The luminous effect was constant and not perceptibly increased by agitation or friction.
“When the shark expired, which was not until it had been out of the water more than three hours, the luminous appearance faded entirely from the abdomen and more gradually from other parts, lingering longest around the jaws and on the fins. The only part of the under surface of the animal which was free from the luminosity was the black collar around the throat.”
One of the sea’s strangest denizens is the bramble shark. It is a shark of medium size whose body is almost completely covered with short, sharp spines. This fantastic creature apparently is widely distributed through the Atlantic and Pacific, but it is not likely to come into the hands of collectors. Its general flabbiness stamps it as a deep water animal and the anomalous position of its fins indicates that it is a weak swimmer. Its spiny armament obviously is designed for protection.
Entirely harmless, it is probable, are the giant “basking sharks”, which sometimes reach a length of forty feet. When encountered they rarely, if ever, try to defend themselves but attempt to escape by swimming slowly away. Stories that this monster dives when harpooned and sometimes will drag a small boat with its crew to the bottom now are discredited. Although it reigns as a monster among sharks it is not actually as dangerous as the common dogfish shark.
Perhaps the most dangerous are the so-called “carchaodons”, found in most warm seas although nowhere in abundance. They are among the most powerful and voracious of fishes, but still far less frightful than their fossil ancestors. The latter were the largest of all fishes; they were probably twice the length of the largest basking or whale sharks. Some were more than 88 feet long.
Honey bees have achieved an ideal communistic state. All the 50,000 or more members of a family—all progeny of a single queen—share and share alike. A single sample of sugar or nectar brought into the hive by a forager is participated in by all the bees. Thus all get essentially the same diet. They all acquire a common odor by which they can recognize each other. This odor constitutes a “scent language” which is the basis of the extremely complex bee social life.
These observations, based on experiments with radioactive sugar, are reported by Dr. Roland Ribbands of Cambridge University. In one of these experiments, Dr. Ribbands reports, “a marked bee is trained to collect sugar solution from a small glass tube, and when radioactive sugar is substituted the bee continues to collect the radioactive syrup quite happily. It returns to the hive and what happens to the labeled sugar can be followed quite easily. Every bee that receives some can be spotted by means of a Geiger counter. By collecting a sample of bees from the hive, one can discover what proportion of the colony has acquired some of the sugar. One stomachful can be shared among almost all the bees of a large colony. The experiments indicate that this sharing is a random affair. The sugar is passed on irrespective of the recipient’s age or occupation.”
Building up of a colony odor through universal sharing of the food supply enables members of the colony to recognize each other. This apparently makes little difference when food is abundant but becomes of great importance in periods of scarcity.
“At those times of the year,” Dr. Ribbands points out, “when there are insufficient flowers to provide all the bees with food, they often try to steal the honey stored in other colonies. Then the ability to recognize hive mates and to distinguish them from other honey bees will enable a colony to defend itself against attempts at robbery.
“However, the honey bee community does not defend itself by attacking every invader that does not possess the community odor. Strangers are attacked only under certain circumstances. In order to investigate these circumstances two colonies of differently colored bees were placed close together, with their entrances only two inches apart, so that bees often went into the wrong colony by mistake. When good supplies of nectar were available, the intruders were allowed to enter the strange colony, but when nectar was short the strangers were attacked and thrown out, often being killed in the process.
“Production of a common and distinctive odor which enables the colony to defend itself against members of other communities is a very important consequence of the habit of food-sharing. Better sharing means better defense and so a greater likelihood that the community will be able to survive and perpetuate its kind. The habit plays the key role in the system of communication which enables the new forager to learn about suitable crops, in that the new recruit always receives a sample of the crop the colony is working. The first flight becomes a search for a crop with a similar scent. The habit enables the worker bees in a colony to be apprised of the presence of their queen. A substance derived from her body is conveyed from bee to bee in the shared food, and in the event of any deficiency in the substance they take steps to rear another queen.
“In addition, it probably helps to ensure an effective division of labor in the colony, which has to be so integrated that a suitable proportion of the worker population carries out each of the various tasks necessary for maintenance of the colony.”
In parts of Colombia candles in the form of white, wax-like berries grow on bushes. These berries produce oil of such excellent quality that it is used almost exclusively for altar lamps in Catholic churches throughout the country.
The berries grow abundantly on a jungle plant with leaves like those of rhubarb. In only one part of the country is the plant cultivated. It is a crop of the semi-hostile Paez Indians. Harvesting is somewhat difficult because the oil-containing white seed is inside a burred coat. This must be removed and the seeds placed in hot water. The oil rises to the surface where it can be skimmed off.
When it is desired to make candles a dozen or more berries are strung on a stick. Such a candle gives off a beautiful, soft light.
All animals require water in their bodies, but some can get it without actually drinking. The desert rat which lives among the bare sand dunes of California’s Death Valley, can get along indefinitely without water and with only dry barley seeds for food. In spite of this about 65 percent of its body weight is water. Most of the water is actually made in the animal’s body. The rat’s digestive processes extract the hydrogen contained in the barley seeds and combine it with oxygen in the air to create water.
The oldest civilization on earth is that of the termites. The super-organization which these blind white creatures of the dark have achieved precedes by thousands of millenia those of the ants and the bees. Termites have a far longer history on earth, being considered modifications of the ancient cockroaches who were among the first insects to leave any traces of their existence on land. Cockroaches swarmed in the club moss forests at least 250,000,000 years ago. The termite order is at least 30 million years old; some of its most primitive forms still are alive.
In most of the approximately 2,000 species of termites which have been identified all over the world there are five castes, apparently determined from birth although not so rigidly as among ants. First are the winged males and females with large brains and eyes and hard, dark shells. These depart in great swarms from the ancestral nest once or twice a year, usually in spring and fall. They are feeble flyers and depend chiefly on transportation by air currents. The majority are eaten by birds. The few surviving pairs from such a flight excavate cells in the earth or in wood and start new colonies. There is at least one king and one queen in each cell. Sometimes there are two or more pair. They remain partners for life. Both are imprisoned within the cell. Before entering it they slough off their wings, which henceforth would be worthless.
The termite queen becomes an inert, egg-laying machine, sometimes the size of a small potato. In some species she lays an average of sixty eggs a minute, or 80,000 a day. She may live as long as ten years. Thus each queen ideally produces about a half billion new individuals. Her bulk increases as much as 50-fold in adult life—about the most phenomenal growth in nature.
The second termite caste, for which there is no parallel among the ants, consists of both males and females with only rudiments of wings, less fully developed reproductive organs, and somewhat smaller eyes and brains. They presumably serve only as an auxiliary royalty, functioning in case the true rulers die. Apparently by some subtle alchemy known only to termites they can be transformed into fully functioning sexual individuals if an emergency arises.
A third caste is made up of smaller insects with extremely minute eyes and brains and barely discernible reproductive organs. Below them come the entirely unpigmented, soft-bodied workers with still smaller eyes and brains—usually, in fact, with no eyes at all. These still are potentially males and females, in distinction to any society where all workers and soldiers are female. Lowest in the scale are the big-headed, blind soldiers, also of both sexes, with barely a trace of brain.
Relative numbers in these castes differ from species to species. An analysis of an Australian termite colony accounted for 1,560,500 workers, 200,000 soldiers, and 44,000 potentially reproductive individuals.
Monster of Gulf of Mexico waters is a shark which weights from ten to twelve tons and is from 30 to 50 feet long. Largest of its ancient family and an entirely inoffensive creature, this strange animal literally stands upright while feeding.
On a recent trip a U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service ship encountered several large schools of black-finned tuna. In the middle of each school was a large object which looked like a barrel. This object was the snout of a whale shark.
The creature kept opening its enormous mouth two or three inches below the surface. From 50 to 100 gallons of water would flow into the mouth and be strained out through the gills. This water was full of larval crustaceans, or banded shrimps, about a half-inch long.
In each observed case the body of the shark stood vertically. Why each shark should select a school of tuna and put itself almost precisely in the center of the swarming fish is a complete mystery. It does not eat tuna, except possibly very small ones. Presumably, however, it feeds on about the same sort of material as the fish. It knows there is food where the tuna congregate.
The whale shark is among the most mysterious of the larger sea animals. It is a solitary creature, seldom seen. Its tiny teeth are only about one fifteenth of an inch long and it is supposedly entirely a feeder on plankton, the minute organisms which abound in sea water.
A semi-legendary plant in Colombia is the ayahuasco or dead man’s vine. From it Indians make a brew which, it is claimed, is quite similar to the imaginary drug by which Dr. Jekyll split the good and evil elements of his character. When a medicine man first gulps the brew—this is an ethnological report which the botanists cannot confirm—he turns deadly pale, trembles in every limb, and the expression on his face is one of intense pain and horror. This is followed in about a minute by a reckless fury in which he seizes whatever lies at hand and starts beating the trees and ground. In about ten minutes the excitement leaves him and he falls to the earth, completely exhausted. There are not as yet any scientific accounts of the plant’s influence.
A pinhead-sized wormlike larva of a louse may possess one of life’s ultimate secrets—an elixir of controlled growth.
The strange ways of life of hormophis hamamelidid—which goes through fourteen different life stages in the course of a year’s lifetime—are being studied by scientists in the hope of isolating a mysterious something which may open the door of some of the greatest paradoxes of biology.
The insect is an aphis which causes galls, growths comparable to animal cancers, on witch hazel leaves. These growths result when the aphis injects into the leaf by means of a microscopic apparatus like a hypodermic needle an infinitesimally minute amount of an unidentified substance. The gall grows around and over the insect. It becomes the tiny creature’s home.
The substance completely changes the nature of the plant cells. They normally would become leaf cells, highly specialized to fit into leaf growth. Now they become gall cells. Something similar happens in cancer, except that the new cell growth, having escaped from the government of the animal body, is entirely uncontrolled. The gall cells, however, still remain under some sort of control. They always form galls and they do not kill the leaf, which is necessary for their existence.
Marvelous is the life story of the aphis itself. The sequence starts with a “stem mother”, a newly hatched female. She injects the substance into the leaf and the house builds itself around her. Inside this house she passes through four stages. Her structure changes completely four times. That is, she becomes in a sense four different animals, one after another. In the fourth stage she gives birth to from fifty to a hundred living young.
Each of these young, in turn, goes through four stages. In the last of these they have wings. The winged insects crawl out through a hole in the bottom of the gall. Each produces from ten to twenty young on the bottom of the leaf. Each of the young, in turn, goes through five stages. During the last they are both males and females. This is the only time the male makes its appearance in the life cycle. All the other births are by parthogenesis.
Each of the females lays eggs in the winter on the witch hazel. The buds are destined to become leaves in the early Spring. The eggs hatch a few days before the leaves appear. Each of the newly hatched aphids—all females—injects some of the house-building material into the leaf upon which she finds herself. She becomes a new “stem mother” and the strange process starts all over again.
The rapid reproduction rate might well be overwhelming to the witch hazels, and consequently suicidal for the insects, except for certain enemies which keep down the numbers of the “lice”. Such tiny forms of life as larval lacewings are able to crawl through the hole in the bottom of the gall and feed on the occupants during their various stages.
University of Virginia biologists who have been giving particular attention to the aphis are interested primarily in the substance injected into the leaves. It must be one of the most potent growth factors in nature. The amount any one aphid is able to inject is indescribably minute, even though some of them make as many as 50 separate injections. The material causes the leaf cells to become larger and to multiply much more rapidly until a “house” many times the size of the aphis is complete in a few days. The structure is perfect, even including a “picket fence” of tiny hairs around its base to keep out invaders.
The substance exists in such minute amounts that thus far it has been impossible to isolate it in anything approaching a pure form. The Virginia biologists have set themselves a task requiring infinite patience over many years—tracing the increase of the amount in the salivary glands of each individual through each of its fourteen lives, and also through the eggs with which the strange life cycle starts.
The present clues indicate that the substance is a filterable virus—tiniest of living things compared with which the pinhead-sized aphis is like a whale compared to a fly.
Biggest of the extant true rats is the giant rat of Liberia. It is two feet or more in length and is similar in appearance to the Norway rat which infests houses all over the world. Fortunately this creature never has invaded the homes of men. It is a shy animal of the cane brakes.
One of the weirdest of living mammals is the potto—“ghost monkey”, of West African jungles. It is about the size of a squirrel, with soft, yellow fur and protruding yellow eyes which shine like malevolent witch lights in the darkness of the jungle nights. The potto is a nocturnal animal of the tree tops. Its weird, whimpering cries are believed by natives to be the voices of evil spirits. The little creature is an aberrant member of the family of lemurs, ancient offshoots of the same family from which sprang the monkeys and great apes.
A few miles north of the Panama Canal Zone is “the valley of square trees.” This is the only known place in the world where trees have rectangular trunks. They are members of the cottonwood family. Saplings of these trees now are being grown at the University of Florida to find out if they retain their squareness in a different environment. It is believed, however, that the shape is probably due to some unknown but purely local condition. That the cause is deep-seated is indicated by the fact that the tree rings, each representing a year’s growth, also are square.
The most brilliant animal luminescence known is that of the carbuncle beetles of Puerto Rico. They emit a light so brilliant that one or two inside an inverted tumbler illuminate a room of moderate size so that one can read a newspaper at night. Fields are illuminated brilliantly every night by these beetles, flying about a foot above the ground. The light is not intermittent, and seems nearly continuous. It varies from yellow to green for different species; occasionally it is yellowish-red.
Rains of worms often have been reported. After a summer shower surfaces of puddles sometimes will be found covered with countless thread worms or nematodes. These worms have just come out of the bodies of water beetles and other insects, where they have developed as parasites. Before the shower the insects were dormant. These little worms in farm watering troughs led to the long-held belief that horsehairs sometimes changed into worms.
This does not, however, explain the following report in the Levant Times, an English newspaper published in Constantinople, of August 6, 1872:
“A letter from Bucharest reports a curious atmospheric phenomenon which happened there on the 25th ult. a quarter past nine in the evening. During the day the heat had been stifling and the sky was cloudless. In the evening everybody went out walking and the gardens were crowded. The ladies were mostly dressed in white, low-necked robes.
“Toward nine o’clock a small cloud appeared on the horizon and a quarter of an hour afterwards rain began to fall which, to the horror of everybody was found to consist of black worms the size of ordinary flies. All the streets of Bucharest were strewn with these curious animals.”
Abundant and fantastic are the creatures of the shallow Arctic sea bottom. All are invertebrates—worms, sea anemones and a host of other creatures—most of whom spend their lives buried in the mud.
Some of the creatures and their curious ways of life:
Ribbon worms which, when washed ashore, literally tie themselves in knots, curl up in balls, and secrete bags of mucous around themselves.
Bright green spoon worms about three inches long. These formerly were eaten by Eskimos.
Billions of small, transparent and essentially invisible arrow worms. One species, about a half inch long, apparently is the kangaroo of the worm world.
An important element of the bottom fauna at Point Barrow, Alaska, are the lace worms. Hardly a stone in the area does not have at least one lace or moss patch.
There is a delicately peach-colored sea anemone, a bottom-dwelling animal remotely related to the coral polyps, which display an amazing phenomenon, according to a Smithsonian report by Dr. G. E. MacGintie: “When it was subjected to unfavorable conditions, such as overcrowding in a pan of water,” he says, “It cast out through the mouth a translucent, white inner lining with transparent, stubby tentacles. These tentacles were tiny anemones. If conditions remained adverse more offspring were cast off, each lot smaller than its predecessor.” That is, when in trouble the animal spits out babies—presumably an emergency measure for preservation of the species and a way of reproduction not hitherto recorded. Apparently the same phenomenon occurs in the sea. Partly-grown specimens of these offspring dredged from the bottom, at first were mistaken for new species. Some of these sea anemones are quite colorful—one purplish red, one lavender, one lemon-yellow, and one with translucent, peach-colored tentacles.
Numerically the most abundant animals of the Arctic are the amphipod fleas which form an important food source for fish and seals. Great numbers live on the undersides of ice cakes from which the bearded seal sweeps them with its whiskers.
Siam and Burma are the lands of queer fish—climbing fish, stone-eating fish, hunting fish, dry-land fish, singing fish and archer fish.
In the distant geological past, life on this planet was confined to the seas. Eventually some creature belonging to the common ancestry of terrestrial animals and fish emerged from the water and over a period of countless generations, established itself on land. Something of the same general sort of development may be taking place in Siamese lakes and rivers today, with a new kind of land animal in the process of evolution. Currently, two or three species of fish are learning to live out of water for considerable periods. At least one of them appears to have reached the stage where it must breathe air to survive.
These evolving dry land fish were studied intensively by the late Dr. Hugh M. Smith, fisheries advisor to the Siamese government for twelve years. One is a species somewhat like a perch in general appearance. It belongs to a group which has an accessory respiratory organ, perhaps the beginning of a lung, situated in a cavity above the gills, by which oxygen may be taken directly from the atmosphere. The gills themselves appear inadequate to sustain life. The fish probably would drown, although the process would be very slow, if kept too long under water.
A common method of fishing in Siam is with a spade. Some fish spend as much as four months of each year buried in damp soil. Local fishermen dig two or three feet deep in the marshes for them.
Study of bee language now has advanced to differentiation of bee dialects. Some years ago Dr. Karl von Frisch of the University of Munich established the fact that bees actually possessed a means by which they could communicate with each other and without which the remarkable organization within the swarm would have been nearly inexplicable. Their language consists primarily of signs, like that of deaf and dumb persons. Dr. von Frisch reached the point where he could get some idea of what the bees were talking about and even predict their behavior from their conversation.
Recently Dr. von Frisch has found that different varieties have quite different languages, perhaps as far apart as French and German; one variety cannot tell what another is discussing. He has gone one step further—to the discovery that the insects probably talk also in sounds that are inaudible to the human ear. The audible buzzing is not a means of communication.
“There are indications,” he says in a report to the Rockefeller Foundation, “that sounds, probably in the supersonic range, play a role in their communications.
“Physiologically it would be interesting to know how they judge distance. Their dances indicate with remarkable exactness the distance between the hive and the feeding place. How do they adjust themselves to the changing positions of the sun when they use it as a compass? Apparently they have an excellent memory for time, for they seem to know that the sun at a certain time will occupy a certain place in the heavens.”
Dr. von Frisch and his colleagues at the University of Munich are also making an intensive study of the insect eye and the physiology of the insect sense of smell. Previous research has shown that worker bees have a special scent gland under voluntary control. Only when a good source of nectar is found is the fragrance, evidently quite powerful and attractive to other bees, released. Then it permeates the immediate neighborhood. It is the bee language equivalent for the word “Here.” When a cruising worker gets a whiff of this odor it knows there is a plentiful supply of nectar close at hand and starts a search for it.
Bees cannot distinguish red from black, Dr. von Frisch has found. This probably is the reason so few red-blossoming plants depend on these insects for distributing their pollen. Nearly all red-blossoming species depend on birds and butterflies, both of which are acutely sensitive to red. One notable exception, however, is the European poppy whose brilliant red blossoms carpet the landscape in late Spring. The German experimenter has found that these blossoms are not “red” to the bee. They possess a color which cannot be described because it cannot be experienced by the human eye. The poppy blossoms reflect a great deal of the ultraviolet light in sunshine and to this the bee eye is extremely sensitive. The color must be quite different from any of the shades at the blue end of the spectrum which are visible to man. To the bee it is probably somewhat like violet.
Even the more or less degenerate human nose can be trained to discriminate some of the bee odors that apparently have so much meaning in the life of the hive. After practising for a few months Dr. N. E. McIndoo of the U. S. Department of Agriculture was able to recognize the three castes—queens, drones and workers—merely by smelling them. With more practice he was able to make even finer discriminations, as he reports:
“The younger the workers the less pronounced is the odor emitted. To the human nose the odor from nurse bees and wax generators is much less pronounced than is that from old workers. Workers just emerged from the cells have a faint, sweetish odor, but lack the characteristic bee odor and workers removed from the cells just before they begin cutting their way out omit a still fainter sweetish odor.
“Old queens have a strong sweetish odor, while that of queens just emerged from cells is much pronounced as is the bee odor of the workers. The majority of old drones have a faint odor while every young drone has a stronger one. It is slightly different from that of young workers and is less sweetish.
“All the offspring of the same queen seem to inherit a peculiar odor from her, which becomes the family odor. Apparently each worker emits an individual odor which is different from that of any other worker.
“Of all odors, that of the hive is most important. It seems to be the most fundamental factor upon which the social life of the colony depends, and upon which the social habit perhaps was acquired.”
Taste discrimination is roughly parallel to that of humans. The bee certainly can distinguish the primary tastes, sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It naturally is keenly sensitive to different degrees of sweetness, yet some sugars which are extremely sweet to man are tasteless to the insects. The same is true of such sweeteners as saccharin. The bee’s sense of smell also runs parallel to that of man, both in the ability to discriminate fine difference in odors and in the thresholds of sensitivity. This appears to be a very important factor in the location of nectar-bearing flowers. However, the bee appears unable to detect an odor from any great distance. It is probably due to the sense of smell that scout bees are able to locate good feeding grounds. After marking them with their own peculiar secreted odor they return immediately to the hive to tell the others about them. The dance of a returned scout varies in intensity according to the richness of the find and the workers who witness it become correspondingly excited. If the scout executes only a feeble dance there is only a small exodus from the hive.
One of the most dreaded of all sea creatures is the venomous sting ray of which there are several hundred species distributed over the world, mostly in tropical waters. On the upper side of the tail is a saw-toothed bone dagger from two to fifteen inches long which can be driven through a man’s leg. The teeth extrude a venom quite similar to that of the rattlesnake.
Largest is the giant sting ray of Australian waters. A full-grown specimen weighs about 800 pounds. The fearsome and gruesome bat sting ray of the California coast weighs up to 200 pounds and is quite abundant.
All the rays are bottom dwelling animals, leading sedentary lives on flat, sandy ground. All are carnivorous, devouring smaller fish and mollusks. Fortunately they are not very aggressive and will flee from man if given warning. Still, life guard stations along the California beaches reported nearly 400 injuries from the creatures in the summer of 1952.
A half dozen vanished civilizations make their contributions to the American Thanksgiving dinner: onions from ancient Egypt, peas from Ethiopia, parsnips and turnips from ancient China.
Aztec, Maya, the skin-wrapped Cro-Magnon all did their part in the darkness of pre-history to make possible the plates which are loaded so lavishly. They did better than they knew. Very few new vegetables have been introduced in historic times. In many cases little improvement has been made on the products of the ancients.
The story of potatoes alone contains enough romance and adventure for a good-sized novel. Its origin is unknown but its wanderings from America to Europe and back to America again constitute a fascinating story.
Cultivated lettuce never has been found wild. It is believed to have been derived from India or Central Asia. It is one of the oldest known vegetables. Herodotus, Hippocrates and Aristotle mention it in references to Greek gardens. Chaucer notes its cultivation in England in 1340. Sixteen varieties are listed as being grown in American gardens as early as 1806.
Celery is a biennial plant native to the marshlands of southern Europe, North Africa and southwestern Asia. It long was considered poisonous and was not used as food until modern times.
The Israelites complained to Moses in the Wilderness because they couldn’t have onions to which they had become accustomed during the captivity in Egypt. The cultivated onion probably originated in Afghanistan.
Pumpkins and squashes were grown in America long before white men came on the scene. Evidence of both have been found among ruins of settlements of the Basket Makers, about the earliest agricultural people on this continent. They probably came from Mexico. The Hubbard squash came to light in Marblehead, Mass., in 1855. It had been growing there for more than 50 years.
Peas are the oldest known vegetables. They are believed to have originated in Ethiopia but to have spread over Europe and Asia long before the dawn of history. They were eaten—perhaps even cultivated after a fashion—by men of Europe’s Stone Age. Columbus planted some in the West Indies in 1493. They spread rapidly among the Indians and became one of the chief crops of the Iroquois.
The species from which cabbage is derived grows wild in North Africa and along the European shore of the Mediterranean. It has been cultivated for 4,000 years. Greeks and Romans grew it in their gardens. Most of the American varieties, however, originated in North Europe.
The turnip is a native of central and western China. Seed probably was brought to America by some of the earliest European settlers.
The radish is a native of China and India. It was cultivated by both the Greeks and the Egyptians. The parsnip is another Asiatic root crop. It first was planted in Virginia in 1690. Only recently has it gotten away from the home garden to become a commercial crop.
Popcorn is peculiarly American. In early Spanish writings reference is made to a ritual of the Aztecs in which “one hour before dawn there sallied forth all these maidens crowned with garlands of maize, toasted and popped, the grains of which were like orange blossoms—and on their necks thick festoons of the same which passed under the left arm.”
An entire generation of worms commits suicide every year. Every individual casts off its own head.
These worms are a Himalayan variety of naids, fresh water animals vaguely related to earthworms. They are reddish-brown and seldom more than an inch long. The majority of the worms live with their heads buried in the mud, tail ends waving freely in the air. Upon any alarm their bodies contract leaving no signs of life.
Early in the Spring these worms literally lose these heads and die. Compared with those of most worms, their regenerative powers are quite feeble. It is believed that the decapitation is due to the fact that egg-laying is accompanied by such violent contractions of the body that the front segments are disconnected.
Every few years there is a report from somewhere in the United States or Europe of enormous numbers of dead earthworms covering the ground. A correspondent of the British scientific journal, Nature, reported in 1921: “About the middle of March I saw millions of dead worms morning after morning on pavements, roads and paths. They were great and small, young and old, of every known species and genus. They lay prone and even when they were able to reach a grass plot alive they lacked the power to burrow.” The phenomenon is unexplained. Examination of the dead worms shows no unusual parasite or evidence of disease.
There is a realm of “supercooled life.” Its denizens are deep water fish that live long and happily in temperatures below the freezing point of their blood. But whenever one of them comes in contact with even a single crystal of ice it freezes almost instantly. This strange phenomenon of marine life has been observed by biologists of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
These particular fish live at the bottom of Hebron fjord in northern Labrador. The temperature there is about 1.7 below zero centigrade. Some have been caught, brought to the surface, and then plunged into a bath of sea water cooled to exactly the same temperature. They survived for several hours. When, however, one of them came in contact with an ice crystal, it froze stiff in a few seconds. The explanation, it appears, is that these fish normally live below the depth at which it is possible for ice crystals to form in water.
Very careful experiments have shown that water can be carried far below its normal freezing point if it is kept entirely motionless and is absolutely free from minute particles of any sort which are necessary for the formation of ice crystals. This is about the condition that exists at the fjord bottom. Eventually, if the temperature is taken lower and lower, such water will solidify, but into a form far different from ice. It is noncrystalline and can best be compared with glass. But even if this happened in the Hebron fjord it would not necessarily bother the fish. Their blood presumably would turn to glass. There would be no breaking of body cells such as results from the swelling of ice crystals. After an indefinite period the animals might be brought out of the solid state, if the thawing could be accomplished quickly enough, none the worse for their experience. This has been accomplished with very minute organisms, but any techniques which might be used with higher plants or animals have not yet been discovered.
The extent of life in the supercooled world is unknown. It hardly can be confined to fish. All sorts of mollusks, echinoderms and worms also are bottom dwellers in Arctic and Antarctic waters. It’s not cold, but ice, that kills.
The lethal dose Socrates was condemned to swallow by the stuffed-shirtism of ancient Athens was d-propyl-piperidine. This is the deadly alkaloid in the spotted hemlock, a common European weed which now grows extensively over most of the eastern United States. A closely related European species is the cowbane which cows instinctively will not nibble.
The devastating illness which fell upon 10,000 Greeks of the Anabasis, Xenophon would have been interested to know, was caused by andromedotoxin. This is a resinous substance common to plants of the heath family the world over. It is the poisonous constituent of rhododendron, mountain laurel and some kinds of azalgias. Honey from the blossoms of plants containing it is extremely poisonous.
When pioneers first pushed their way over the Appalachians their settlements were ravaged by epidemics of a fatal disease—milk sickness. Farms and villages were abandoned as terror-stricken settlers fled from the scourge. It was due to tremetol, a complex chemical which has been found in several plants—chiefly white snakeroot which causes the disease east of the Mississippi. When cows eat the snakeroot the poison passes into the milk.
By far the most virulent plant growing in the United States is very little known although it has caused many fatalities. This is the water hemlock or cicula—very different from the spotted hemlock whose extract was forced upon Socrates. It grows in low, swampy places nearly everywhere. When the ground is soft in the spring its roots can be pulled easily from the soil and have a pleasant odor that attracts children. It causes heavy losses of livestock.
Next in virulence of all American plants is the whorled milkweed which contains a closely allied resinous material not yet satisfactorily analyzed. It has caused the death of countless cattle.
There are worm-snakes, snake-worms, and wormlike animals that instinctively imitate snakes. This is especially true of certain South American caterpillars—defenseless creatures whose only security is in mimicry.
A large, green tree-living caterpillar in British Guiana ordinarily remains motionless and looks like part of a vine stem. But when the branch is shaken it rears the front part of its body and stretches horizontally. At the same time it gives a twist expanding its front segment into a bulbous enlargement with a big menacing black eyespot surrounded by a yellow ring. This it remains for a few minutes, looking very much like a poisonous tree snake that lives among green leaves.
Serpent caterpillars abound in Brazil. The best example is Leucorhampha triptolemus, a creature that hangs vertically from stems of plants. When disturbed it twists and shows a front extremely resembling the head and back of a snake. The curve of the caterpillar is just like that of a serpent. It keeps up a swaying, side-to-side movement for several seconds. The whole effect is to change what seems an innocent plant stem suddenly into an open-mouthed snake with red jaws and ferocious eyes.
All green foliage gives off an invisible deep red—almost black—light. This phenomenon is one of the most fundamental processes of life. It is associated closely with the photosynthesis upon which depends all life on earth. This important discovery was made recently by biologists at the Oak Ridge laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission while studying changes in a chemical known as adenosine triphosphate in plants engaged in photosynthesis, the formation of starches and sugars out of hydrogen from the soil and carbon from the atmosphere in the presence of light. Newly acquired knowledge about the process is paving the way to improved agricultural methods.
The biologists used extracts from the bodies of fireflies which give off a bright light when this chemical—an important source of energy in muscle—is present. Then they found that chloroplasts, the parts of plants most closely associated with the photosynthetic process, also would give off light when mixed with firefly juice and illuminated. They then made the unexpected discovery that living extracts of green plants give off a light of their own without any mixing.
The light given off by the chloroplasts now is believed to be the exact opposite of the first chemical step in photosynthesis. Light absorbed by the chloroplasts forms unstable chemical bonds within the plant. A small fraction of these chemically induced compounds recombine. The energy liberated by this process is trapped by the chlorophyll molecule, which in turn gives off the mysterious light.
It has been established that leaves, if frozen while exposed to illumination, retain their light-producing ability for several months. It also has been found that certain extracts prepared from leaves undergoing exposure to light contain substances which give off a bright light when certain chemicals are added to them.
There are jet black worms that live in red snow. They come out of their snow burrows only during the late summer evening, crawl sluggishly on the surface, and disappear at sunrise the next morning. They have been observed swimming in shallow pools that form on the surface of the great Malaspina glacier which flows down the slope of Mount St. Elias in Alaska.
Presumably during the long sub-Arctic winter these worms burrow deep in the snow and remain in a torpid state. They subsist chiefly on the microscopic red algae which give the glacial snow fields a reddish tinge. The black worms themselves are innumerable. They have been photographed covering a trail a quarter-mile long at an elevation of 5200 feet in Oregon. They are enchytraeids, relatives of earthworms. The common white variety now is raised commercially in vast numbers, on diets of oat meal and sour milk, as food for fancy varieties of aquarium fish. Both worms and insects that normally live in snow fields are black.
An investigator of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory once found a multitude of white enchytraeids in cakes of ice cut from a Massachusetts pond the previous winter. They were active when the ice thawed but all died in a few days. The same investigator kept thirty specimens of another species in a tumbler of water placed on a ledge outside his laboratory window. On a cold night the water froze solid with the worms in a tangled mass in the center of the ice cake. All but three or four were alive and appeared normal when the ice was thawed.
About 75 years ago housewives of Salina, Kansas, complained that the ice delivered from door to door was “wormy.” Cakes were found honeycombed with tiny white worms, probably enchytraeids. They swam about actively when the ice thawed and infested food stored in refrigerators. All died when the temperature reached about 60 F.
Whether any worm—except possibly the most minute—can survive complete freezing is doubtful. They live in little holes that form naturally when water freezes and that are kept open by heat generated by the bodies of the creatures themselves.