Among the most fantastic forms of animal behavior is that of the honey guides, African birds distantly related to the American woodpeckers. They “guide” men, baboons and ratels to the nests of wild honeybees—supposedly so that these nests will be broken open.
Throughout the three centuries since the unusual behavior of the bird was first reported by a Portuguese missionary it has been the subject of many fantastic accounts, some of which attribute a far higher degree of intelligence to the birds than they possibly could possess.
A long-continued study of this behavior has been made by Dr. Herbert Friedmann, Smithsonian curator of birds. Dr. Friedmann himself has observed at least 23 instances of the habit and has collected much other well authenticated data from African associates. He describes the behavior from his own observations:
“When the bird is ready to begin guiding it comes to a person and starts a repetitive series of churring notes, or it stays where it is and begins calling these notes and waits for the human to approach it more closely. These churring notes are very similar to the sound made by shaking a partly full, small matchbox rapidly sidewise. If the bird comes to the person it flies 15 or 20 feet from him, calling constantly and fanning its tail.
“It usually perches on a fairly conspicuous branch, churring rapidly, fanning its tail, and ruffing its wings so that at times its yellow shoulder bands are visible.
“As the person comes to within 15 to 50 feet the bird flies off with a conspicuous initial downward dip, and then goes off to another tree, not necessarily in sight of the follower, in fact more often out of sight than not. Then it waits there, churring loudly until the follower again nears it, when the action is repeated. This goes on until the vicinity of the bees’ nest is reached. It waits there for the follower to open the hive and usually until the person has departed with his loot of honeycomb, when it comes down to the plundered bee’s nest and begins to feed on the bits of comb left strewn about. The time during which the bird may wait quietly may vary from a few minutes to well over an hour and a half.”
African natives regard the bird as an almost infallible guide to honey. They try to attract it by grunting like a ratel or chopping on trees to imitate the sound of opening a nest. The habit is apparently instinctive; it presumably originated before human beings appeared, perhaps starting with the ratel or some of its honey-eating ancestors.
Curiously enough, the honey bird does not seem interested in the honey, per se, or in the grubs of bees found in the nests. It has an insatiable appetite for the wax, which it will take wherever it can be found. The first account of the bird was of an individual which fed on the wax candles of a church. It appears to have a peculiar ability to digest wax presumably to extract the nutritive elements contained.
A fish with the head of a Lilliputian horse, the tail of a monkey, the shell of a beetle and the pouch of a kangaroo...a creature that reverses the ordinary course of nature in that “child bearing” is exclusively a function of the male....Perhaps in no other animal have been packed so many anomalies as in the little hippocampus, popularly known as the “sea horse”.
These weird creatures are almost world-wide in their distribution through ocean waters where there are growths of sea vegetation. They have provided the models for some of the monsters of human nightmares. Actually they are small, feeble, almost defenseless creatures.
The head unquestionably is similar to that of a miniature horse in general outline. The neck, however, is not a neck at all. Fishes have no necks and hippocampus is no exception. What looks like a neck is the upper part of its abdomen, considerably contracted.
The body is covered with a jointed, chitinous shell, like many of the insects. This peculiarity left early naturalists in doubt as to whether it actually was a fish or some sort of monstrous water bug. It is, of course, a true fish with no insect affiliations. The hard shell makes it a feeble, inefficient swimmer. It is able, in fact, to swim at all only because of a large air bladder so delicately adjusted to the specific gravity of the animal that if a gas bubble the size of a pinhead is let out by a puncture the sea horse sinks to the bottom. There it can only crawl about clumsily until the wound is healed.
Because it is so poor a swimmer the hippocampus must have other means of adjustment to its salt water environment. This is afforded by a prehensile tail which it can wrap around the stems of water plants. This kind of a tail is found among a few mammals, notably the smaller monkeys. So far as is known, no other fish has anything of the sort. The animal is most frequently observed in a state of rest, its tail wrapped around a plant and its body standing nearly erect in the water.
Its food consists of tiny crustaceans and other sea organisms of like size. Because of its poor powers of locomotion, it must wait for those which come within reach of its jaws which work with lightning-like speed, or for those which will wait accommodatingly for it to come and get them.
Hippocampus can move its eyes independently of each other, thus looking backward and forward at the same time. It would be rather difficult for a predaceous organism to take it by surprise, but on the other hand it would have little ability to fight back or flee if attacked. Some species, at least, have considerable ability to change color to blend with the environment. Bright red, pink or yellow specimens when caught fade rapidly to normal mottled gray.
Probably the greatest anomaly of the hippocampus family is its way of reproducing the species. The male actually “gives birth” to living young. The process, so far as known, is unduplicated in nature. Unfertilized eggs are laid by the female. She places them, a few at a time, into a pouch-like organ on the underside of the male’s body. In some fashion still unknown to biologists they are fertilized in the transfer. Within this pouch the eggs are incubated and there the young remain for several days after they are hatched. Then, fully equipped to take care of themselves, they are expelled into the water. So far as has been observed, there is no further parental interest in them. This male pouch might be considered as filling the double function of the womb of a placental mammal and the pouch of a marsupial like the kangaroo.
The sea horse also has the distinction of being one of the species of fish that “talk”. In recent years “talking fish” have become a matter of considerable interest to the Navy because of the confusion they cause in the interpretation of underwater sounds. They give every indication of talking to each other. They produce loud clicks similar to the snapping of a finger. These also have been compared to the clicks of a telegraph. They were especially notable when an animal was first placed in the tank and apparently was confused by the new environment. It would cruise back and forth across the container, standing upright and its prehensile tail curled over its back, emitting the characteristic sounds at intervals of from a half to three quarters of an hour.
When two sea horses were kept in separate jars adjacent to each other in an experiment it appeared as if they were trying to converse. First one would emit a series of clicks. Then the other would answer. The sounds are produced by snapping the jaws together. In nature these probably are mating calls.
The great annual northward migration of the seals is one of the most remarkable phenomena of animal life. It seems to be without organization and without leadership, yet toward the end of March each year the hundreds of thousands of cow seals and pups scattered over thousands of square miles of water start at about the same time in three great groups bound for three specific places. It has been the same for centuries, perhaps millenia. Each animal moves at about the same rate so that all arrive within a few days of each other. They do not move in compact masses, like birds.
The American herd of about 1,500,000 is by far the largest of the three. It goes straight to the Pribiloff Islands where it goes ashore on two almost barren islands—St. Paul and St. George. The Japanese herd, numbering about 40,000, makes for Robben Island, off northern Japan. The Russian herd, now estimated at about 200,000, goes to a few rocky islands of the Commander archipelago, off Kamchatka.
The moving herds consist almost entirely of females and young. The bulls winter further north, tend to be solitary during the winter, and precede the cows to the summer homes. The breeding season lasts for about two months. During this time the bull never eats or touches a drop of water. He never leaves the land. He arrives sleek and fat from the ocean pasture and is able to survive entirely on stored energy. This keeps him alive, even when he fights scores of terrible battles with younger rivals. Towards the end of summer he naturally is a sorry-looking creature.
One day, actuated by some common impulse, cows and calves depart. Then the bulls, their arduous labors of race propagation over for ten months, draw back among the rocks and spend two or three days in sound sleep before returning to the sea to replenish themselves.
Cows have very little reserve energy and must return to the water every two or three days, leaving their nursing pups ashore. On her return from one of these feeding expeditions, a cow goes straight to her own pup among the thousands on the rocky beach. Presumably she locates it by the odor. Few animals grow more rapidly than the seal pup. Within a few weeks after birth it is almost as large as its mother. This is an essential provision of nature, for it must have sufficient size and strength to care for itself in the open sea, once the southward migration starts. It is fully the size of the mother when it comes back the next year. There is an old idea that seal pups must be taught to swim. This is denied by government observers at the Pribiloff breeding grounds. When thrown into the water for the first time they swim ashore without difficulty. They will not, however, venture into the sea voluntarily but must be pushed off the rocks by the mothers.
St. George and St. Paul islands are the only two spots under the American flag, except for certain atomic energy and military installations, which are absolutely barred to visitors without special government permits. These, as a rule, are given only to scientists studying the behavior of the seals. On each island there is an Aleut village whose inhabitants attend to the butchering of the animals each summer. This is confined entirely to three-year-old males who congregate by themselves. The only other killing permitted is by Aleuts along the coast for whom sealing is the traditional means of livelihood, but this now is so restricted that the annual toll is very small. The sealing must be done from an open boat, use of firearms is prohibited, and the Aleuts cannot be under contract to furnish skins.
“But if, retaining sense and sight, we could shrink into living atoms and plunge under water, of what a world of wonder would we form part. We would find this fairy kingdom peopled with the strangest creatures—creatures that swim with their hair, have ruby eyes blazing deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly into their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. Here are some riding at anchor, moored by delicate threads spun out from their own toes. There are others flashing in glass armor, bristling with sharp spikes or ornamented with bosses and flowing curves; while fastened to a green stem is an animal convulvulus that by some invisible power draws a never-ceasing stream of victims into its gaping cup and tears them to death with hooked jaws deep down in its own body.”—The Rotifera by C. T. Hudson and P. H. Goose, London, 1886.
The rotifers or wheel animalcules are fantastic creatures. They were first seen by the Dutchman Antonius van Leeuwenhoek, credited with being the inventor of the microscope. “On the 25th of August,” he wrote to the Royal Society of London with which group of savants patronized by Charles the Second he was in regular correspondence, “I saw in a leaden gutter on the front of the house for a length of five feet some rain water had been standing which had a red color. It occurred to me that this redness might be caused by red animalcules. I took a drop or two of the water and looked at it under the microscope.”
He found a confusion of “red-eyed monsters armed with teeth like those of the balance wheel of a watch, which appear to be projecting forward towards the head. They seem to whirl around with a very considerable velocity, by which means a rapid current of water is brought from a distance to the mouth of the creature who thereby is supplied with many invisible food particles.”
This discovery is of considerable significance in scientific history because, more than any of his previous findings, it caused the Amsterdam spectacle-maker to question the then widely held belief in the spontaneous generation of living things.
“They can,” he wrote the Royal Society in 1774, “continue many months out of water and be dry as dust, in which condition their shape is globular, the bigness exceeds not a grain of sand, and no signs of life appear. Notwithstanding, being put in water, the globule turns itself about, lengthens by slow degrees, becomes in the form of a lively maggot, and most commonly in a few minutes afterwards puts out its wheels and sweeps the water in search of food. But sometimes it may remain a long time in the maggot form and not show its wheels at all.”
Such tiny organisms capable of such long periods of suspended animation, Leeuwenhoek held, could be blown by the wind for long distances. Thus the sudden appearance of living animals in supposedly lifeless water did not indicate they had been born or created there.
The microscope designer had found, moreover, an hitherto unknown race, giants of the microscopic world and among the most fantastic of all animals—the rotifers.
These usually invisible animals with buzz-saws on their heads—the largest not more than a quarter-inch long and the majority less than a twentieth—seem to have gone further beyond life’s normally accepted frontiers than any other animals. One species lives comfortably in hot springs where temperatures go above 120 Fahrenheit. Others can be frozen in solid cakes of ice for weeks and show no ill effects. Sudden changes in temperature, however, often are fatal. On tops of Antarctic mountains projecting out of ice two miles thick, the little rotifers are found among sparse growths of lichens, the only animal life which approaches closely to the South Pole on land. There is no reason why they should not thrive in the hardly less hospitable mountains of Mars. They might have been carried there in light propelled earthdust.
The majority are fresh-water creatures. A few live in damp moss and a few species have obtained a foothold in the sea. Some live in immense colonies, permanently attached to stones. Some are free-living individualists who crawl like leeches, or swim rapidly. Some are parasites in the cells of water plants or in the gills of fresh water crabs. Others cling to floating plants or to water animals, to be carried from place to place. One highly social group lives in free-moving communities of forty or more individuals, attached to each other by their tail ends and radiating from a common center like wheel spokes. The usual color is reddish and most rotifers have one or more glittering red eyes. In a few cases these eyes are inside the bodies of transparent species.
Despite their minuteness, these predatory giants of the world invisible are highly developed animals. Each has a body divided, like that of a mammal, into three major segments—head, trunk, and extremities. In some the skin is hardened into an armor-like covering. Some have a panoply of defensive spines and bristles.
Inside the skin is a cavity full of watery fluid—it contains no corpuscles like blood—in which float the more important vital organs. In most animals there is tissue of some sort in which nerves, muscles, and glands are imbedded. In rotifers, however, there is very little of this connective tissue. Under a microscope one generally can see with some clearness each individual cell. These cells can be counted, for at the most there are only a few thousands, compared to the millions of millions that make up the bodies of larger animals. The muscles are not banded together, but consist of isolated strands whose job is to pull the head inside the armored trunk when faced with any threat, and to bend the body in various directions.
All rotifers have two organs unique to their race. First is the “buzz saw”. This is a crown of tentacles, quite similar in appearance under low magnification to a circular saw, which is constantly whirling. Its purpose is to create eddies in the water which will bring food particles to the mouth, a funnel-shaped opening on top of the head. In free-living species the saw may have some function as a propeller.
Second is the mastax, or “chewing stomach”. Every rotifer has two stomachs, one for masticating and one for digesting. The mouth opens directly into the first. It is provided with two horny, serrated jaws which crush toward each other and tear to bits the minute animals and plants which are the creature’s food. The jaws are provided with several hard parts, adapted for biting, crushing, holding, and tearing.
In the permanently anchored rotifers the rear of the body is prolonged into a stalk from the end of which a cement-like substance is secreted. This permanently attaches the animal to something, usually a stone. In some of the free-living forms the “foot” is replaced by one to twelve “leaping spines” by means of which the owner can spring suddenly forward several times its own length to capture an unsuspecting victim. This is most often some floating one-celled creature of the water-drop jungle, such as a protozoan elephant.
The male rotifer is usually much smaller than the female—sometimes nothing more than an appendage she carries about with her. The fantastic worlds of all sorts of rotifers are predominantly feminine worlds. For some species, in fact, males never have been found, but there is little doubt that they exist.
Two-headed snakes probably are quite common. About 200 cases have been reported. Dr. Bert Cunningham of Duke University, who has studied several living specimens, has this to report about such snakes: “The heads play together, fight over a morsel of food even though it will go into the same stomach through either mouth, attempt to swallow one another, and sometimes fight fatal duels. Each head has a brain of its own. Few grow to any size. In this case two heads are not better than one, especially when they disagree when a second means escape or death.”
Coral-forested waters around the Gilbert and Mariana Islands in the Pacific are yielding some of the most fantastic sea creatures known to science.
Extensive collections have been made since the war by Dr. Leonard P. Schultz, Smithsonian curator of fishes. Notable in the collections are snake, worm and moray eels, all bottom dwellers in tropical waters. Snake eels are, as the name indicates, superficially almost indistinguishable from serpents. On their tails they have hard points which are used as drills. They burrow straight downward in the bottom sand, tails first, until only the heads protrude above the surface. The worm eels belong to the same general group but are much smaller and slenderer—about the diameter of a lead pencil and reaching lengths up to two feet. Larger worm eels have been reported.
Both these groups consist of relatively timid, inoffensive creatures. Far different are the moray eels, members of a closely related family. They are as much as ten feet long, have razor-like teeth, and are described by Dr. Schultz as about the most vicious creatures in the sea. In disposition they probably are worse than the worst sharks and easily can bite through a man’s hand.
Probably the most poisonous creature in the collection is a variety of sting ray, weighing about 200 pounds, which was speared at the bottom of 20 feet of water. This animal, like all stingarees, has a tail armed with long, poisonous barbs. The venom could be lethal to a man. After it was speared, the ray remained very much alive and the problem of bringing it to the surface was difficult. This finally was accomplished by two of Dr. Schultz' collaborators. First one would dive, grasp the handle of the spear, and lift the creature a few feet, always holding it far enough away to be clear of the barbs. After the first man became exhausted, the other would relieve him while he came up for air. Thus the specimen finally was gotten on board through a series of relays.
Curiosities of the collection are the cardinal fishes—brilliant red, very active, and including some of the smallest marine fishes. A few species attain full growth at about three-fourths of an inch. These are the most notable of the “mouth breeders.” The female lays the eggs and the male carries them in his mouth until they hatch. Inch-long males sometimes carry as many as 400 eggs, nearly all of which hatch.
Other curiosities are the pipe fishes, hard-shelled animals which look like bits of small, segmented pipe. They range from two inches to a foot long and are related to the more familiar sea horses of temperate waters. They are sluggish burrowers in coral reefs. As among sea horses, the male gives birth to the young. The eggs are deposited in pouches on the male’s belly where they are carried until they hatch.
While “nevermore” apparently is not in the vocabulary of the raven this big black bird of the wilder parts of the country has a considerable variety of sounds nearly as ominous.
Raven “language” has been intensively studied by the noted ornithologist, Dr. Arthur Cleveland Bent. Citing various bird observers, he lists the following calls:
A distinct, hollow, sepulchral laugh, haw-haw-haw-haw, which may be heard at almost any time.
A series of “crawks” sounded while on the wing, interspersed with a musical note that sounds like ge-lick-ge-lee.
A strange call like thing-thung-thung which is similar to the mellow twang of a tuning fork.
Another expression has a metallic, liquid-like quality similar to the song of the red-winged blackbird, although greatly magnified in volume.
Ravens have a large range of notes from the melancholy croaks with which they chiefly are associated to striking imitations of other birds, such as geese and gulls. One of these birds will talk to itself for hours with a curious gargling sound. He becomes so absorbed in his own conversation that it often is not difficult to steal up on him during such a soliloquy.
“The raven,” Dr. Bent observes, “is one of our most sagacious birds—crafty, resourceful, adaptable, and quick to profit by experience. Throughout most of its range it is exceeding shy and wary. It is almost impossible to get within gunshot of one in the open. Yet it knows full well where and when it is safe. About northern villages, where it is appreciated as a scavenger and seldom molested, it is as tame as any barnyard bird.” This is especially true in Greenland where ravens infest American air bases.
Although in the north the raven frequents the seacoast and villages, from Pennsylvania southward it is entirely a mountain bird, usually living above 3,000 feet. From these heights the birds sometimes descend to the valleys, or even the islands along the coast, to forage among the colonies of sea birds. Most of them prefer to dwell among rocks and resort to perpendicular cliffs and to escarpments thrust above forests on the flanks of mountains.
Despite their microscopic size, nematodes (soil worms), are highly organized animals. They have muscles, quite specialized organs for feeding, a digestive system, a nervous system with a brain, and a well-developed reproductive system. Sexes are clearly differentiated. The creatures have evolved a long way from the primeval worm.
Eggs may be deposited in the soil, or in the plant on which the nematode feeds. In these eggs the immature forms, the larvae, develop and eventually hatch. If appropriate plants are available, they may begin to feed immediately. They develop through several distinct stages. At the end of each of these cycles a moult occurs.
Many of the forms which have been studied closely have a minimum life cycle, from egg to egg-laying female, of several days to several weeks. The maximum duration of life, however, may be much longer, since sexual maturity is not reached until the nematode begins to feed on the living plant. Up to this time it remains in the larval stage and lives on a reserve food supply originally derived from the egg. The time this reserve lasts depends on circumstances. In damp, warm soil the nematode will be very active and use it up in a few weeks. In cool or dry soil the supply lasts much longer, and can extend to many years.
The little worm’s life is a perpetual struggle for existence. It has many enemies in the soil—insects, fungi, and other free-living nematodes. Certain of the soil fungi have “traps” especially designed to catch nematodes. Some of these are shaped like loops which are pulled tight as the worm starts to crawl through. Others are sticky surfaces on which the victims are captured, like flies on flypaper. In either case, the fungus grows into the body of the worm and kills it.
Nevertheless, the nematode population is never in any great danger of extermination. A single female root knot nematode will produce about 300 eggs in a couple of weeks. Allowing four weeks for a generation, and assuming half the offspring are females, this implies a theoretically possible fifty trillion individuals at the end of the four generations of a single summer.
Practically all roots are attacked by some kind of nematode, but many species appear to specialize on one type of plant and will not touch a different variety, even if no other food is available. Plants immune to one species may be highly susceptible to some other. A few kinds of these worms, however, appear to eat almost anything they can find underground.
All the root-eaters have a feeding organ which is much like a hypodermic needle. This is pushed into the tissue and, it is believed, a digestive juice of some sort is injected. This liquifies and partially digests the food. Then the nematode sucks it through the needle into its mouth.
The largest of the nematodes, a parasite of whales, can reach a length of 27 feet. The smallest, a marine form, is a little more than a three-thousandth of an inch long.
The venom of the dreaded Black Widow spider is approximately fifteen times more potent than that of the rattlesnake. The comparison has been established by determining the amounts of rattlesnake and spider venom necessary to kill rats of the same weight. The extreme toxicity of the spider becomes of considerable significance since it has been reported from every state in the Union and may be increasing in numbers on the edges of cities. Probability of being bitten, however, is slight. The black widow is a timid creature, except towards her natural prey. At the first molestation of her web she retreats quickly to her central nest and does not venture out again for hours. She makes no attempt at defense, to say nothing of aggression. Her reputation is so bad, however, that in some cases pickers have refused to work in vineyards which she infested.
Among the curiosities often sold in American stores are so-called “air plants”—plants that will grow on air alone without sunshine or water. This is true, after a fashion. The “plants” actually are dried skeletons of marine animals. They belong to the group which includes the jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. Their skeletons have a striking resemblance to plants.
The species most commonly sold is sea moss or Neptune’s fern, an animal abundant in the North Atlantic, especially in the English channel and the Gulf of Maine. A closely related species, the “squirrel’s tail,” is abundant in the eastern Pacific where its silvery colonies often are washed ashore by storms. Dry beach material of these colonies is easily collected, dyed and sold as Christmas decorations.
“These are colonial forms consisting of thousands of individual animals,” according to the Chicago Museum of Natural History. “Colonies of two species of sea squirrel may be twelve inches or more long. Those of some species may be several feet in length. Usually they are attached to rocks or other substrata by a rootlike base, from which spring the delicate branched stems bearing hundreds of minute polyps.
“Most of these are hydranths (feeding polyps) that capture microscopic organisms. The reproductive polyps are less common, usually larger, and different in shape. The common stem is made up of external non-cellular material, mostly yellowish or brown in color.”
A remarkable chapter in the history of agriculture is the story of the tomato which now constitutes one of this country’s major crops. It appears to have first been used as a food by the Aztecs. It was introduced into Spain early in the 16th century and a century later was grown widely in England as an ornamental plant. Not until the next century, however, did it have any standing as a food. It was known as the “love apple” and was considered mildly poisonous. Folks ate one now and then on “dares.”
Then it caught on as a food in Italy and by the start of the 19th century was being grown on a field scale. So far as known, it was absent from the gardens of Colonial America, unless as a rare ornamental plant. Not until the middle of the 19th century was it reintroduced to its native western hemisphere as a food crop. For a long time it acquired no great popularity. A few vines in the family garden were considered enough, since there was no tomato market.
A U. S. Department of Agriculture report calls the tomato “the prodigy of the vegetable world.” Its present success is due in large part to the discovery of vitamins. Although used as a food for little more than a century it now is almost as widely distributed as wheat, a food plant which has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years.
Today the tomato crop covers about a half million acres in the U. S. alone. This crop consists of more than 20,000,000 bushels of fresh tomatoes and more than 300,000 tons of canned products. There are now about 150 known varieties, adapted to all sorts of purposes.
The summit of Adam’s Peak in south-central Ceylon, wrapped perpetually in priestly robes of grey clouds, is one of the holy places of the earth. There, through many centuries, the prayers of millions belonging to warring creeds have worn thin the curtain between the effable and the ineffable. It is a shrine of four of the world’s great religions. In the rock is a depression that looks like a giant’s footprint. Hindus believe it was made by snake-haired Siva, the destroyer. Moslems say it is the footprint of the first man, Adam, who was exiled to this mountaintop after he was thrown out of Paradise. Buddhists believe that it could have been made only by the great Gautama. Nestorian Christians maintain that it is a relic of the disciple Thomas, who brought the gospel of Christ into the East. To this spot, braving the road through leech-infested forests below and the perilous ascent along gale-swept ledges, have come generation after generation of devout pilgrims to voice a common prayer in different tongues through different intermediaries.
The pilgrim, standing by the footprint of Adam, looks down upon the forest-covered hills to the eastward. Over all the land spreads the grey shadow of the supernatural. Below him is one of the most imposing spectacles on earth—the middle slopes scarlet with the blossoms of dense forests of gigantic rhododendrons, the deep-blue patches of mountain lakes, and canyons which no human has entered—their mysterious depths hidden by wind-tossed fog. Great waterfalls roar over vine-covered cliffs. Strange sounds arise from jungles of white-stemmed palms. It is a wild land of ghosts and demons watched over by the holy mountains.
In this unearthly country native legend from ancient days has placed, most appropriately, the death valley of the elephants. There, in a pleasant hollow beside a lake of clear water—reached only by a narrow pass with high walled precipices on either side—these animals make their way from all over the island when they feel the chill drowsiness of approaching death. It has been an interminable procession of the doomed since time began. To the stricken old elephant, the coming of death brings an irresistible nostalgia which draws his faltering feet homeward to this mist-shrouded valley piled high with the white bones of his ancestors. It is his haven of rest from the weariness and disillusion of living.
The belief has deep roots in the ancient folk-lore of Ceylon. It has spread all over the East. It is embodied in the Arabian Nights. No man ever has entered this vale of death since Sinbad the Sailor, who was carried there in the trunk of a huge elephant after he had been knocked senseless when the tree in which he was hiding was uprooted by a herd of the animals. Sinbad at last found himself in this valley piled high with bones and knew that he was in the long-sought death place of the elephants.
Another Ceylon elephant cemetery is concealed in a dense forest near the ancient sacred city of Anardhupara. It is so well hidden that no man knows its exact location, although all know that it exists. Unless there are such cemeteries, the natives ask, what becomes of the remains of dead elephants?
The death of the jungle elephant remains a fantastic mystery. No very serious efforts have been made to provide a solution. Remains of these creatures that have died natural deaths seldom have been found, either in Asia or Africa. Yet obviously the great beasts are mortal, subject to various fatal ailments and to the inevitable decay of age. Evidently when one of them feels death approaching it retires to a place of the dead where it quietly breathes its last and adds its bones to those of the vast multitudes of its race that have gone before it into the unknown.
The belief is so strong that there has been a persistent search for these elephant Golgothas for the past century. Such a discovery, especially in Africa, probably would mean inestimable wealth in ivory. But, except for one or two questionable instances cited below, nobody ever has found such a place. Natives sometimes claim to know an approximate location from tradition, although they never have seen it.
Zoologists naturally frown upon the idea because of its very weirdness. They explain that the remains of very few tropical animals ever are found and that the elephant, for all its bulk, need be considered no great exception. Vultures, jackals, hyenas and other carrion eaters soon would tear the flesh from the bones. Insects would bear away the fragments they left. Jungle vegetation rapidly would cover and hide the naked skeleton.
Some credence is given to the native belief by Lieut. Col. Gordon Casserly of the British army. A persistent elephant hunter during years of service in India, he never came upon the carcass or bones of one of these animals which had met a natural death. “The idea of a vast death place of these modern mammoths hidden in the remote recesses of the Himalayas,” he states, “did not seem a far-fetched one to me when I lived in the shadow of those mighty mountains and heard at night the great elephant troops pass by the little outpost that I commanded on the frontier of Bhutan, as they clamber up towards the snow-clad peaks from the forest below.”
The British elephant hunter W. D. M. Bell once thought he had found one of East Africa’s elephant cemeteries in the country north of Lake Rudolph. He had followed an elephant path to a grassy plateau strewn with skulls and other elephant bones, some partially buried. None of the remains, however, were recent. Bell tasted the green water of a nearby pool and found it bitter with natron. The indications were that large numbers of elephants had been driven to this pool to drink during a time of drought and had been poisoned by the water.
Maj. P. H. G. Powell-Cotton tells of finding another spot strewn with bones in the same general region which might answer the specification for an “elephant graveyard.” “Here I was surprised,” he reported, “to find the whole countryside scattered with remains, the fitful sun lighting up glistening bones in every direction. In all my journeyings through elephant country I do not think I have ever come across before a skeleton of one of these beasts for whose death the guides could not account. My guide called this place ‘The-place-where-the-elephants-come-to-die’ and assured me that when the elephants fell sick they would come deliberately for long distances to lay their bones in this spot. I had heard of these cemeteries from Swahili traders who told me they had occasionally found more ivory than they could carry. The place was well known to the Turkana, who regularly visited it to carry off the tusks.”
The rarest plant in North America, found only four times by botanists, is a ground-hugging desert flower—the gold carpet. The plant appears, on rare occasions, in California’s Death Valley. Its appearance is that of a rosette of yellow leaves, sometimes as much as ten inches in diameter, lying flat on the ground. From this rosette arise innumerable tiny golden yellow blossoms, so that the whole seems like a patch of golden carpet in the brown desert. The reason for its rare occurrence is that its seeds can germinate only after a good rain. Such rains are rare in its habitat.
The plants must spring up within a few days. Ordinarily, even then, they die with the increasing drought before blossoming—thus forming no seeds. In order for them to produce the seeds for another generation there must be another rain following shortly upon the first.
The seeds become buried in the desert soil and, in the course of evolution, have developed the capacity of suspended animation over a number of years. In the old days, it is probable, these seeds retained their fertility only for a single season. Now there may be several years between rains sufficient to spur them to germination, and even longer periods between double rains which will enable them to form seeds.
The strange little plant first was discovered in 1891. There were only two specimens and search failed to reveal any more. Two years later, however, at about the same place another single plant was reported. No others were revealed by an intensive search through the entire area.
In 1931 and 1932 Dr. Frederick V. Coville of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and French Gilman, a California botanist, again made an intensive search but could not find a single plant. They came to the erroneous conclusion that the plant might be native to the mountains, from which occasional seeds were washed down after heavy rains. A few years later Mr. Gilman again took up the search and succeeded in locating the plant in four places. He found 14 individuals altogether and watched their growth carefully. Only three became large enough to flower and produce seed. The others dried up and died when they had only a few leaves and no branches. Later, however, Gilman found many specimens of the gold carpet scattered over low hills in the neighborhood.
These little hills all were whitish in color. This led to the idea that the chemical composition of the soil might have something to do with the appearance of the plants. Analysis, however, showed there was no basis for this assumption.
In the distant past, the gold carpet may have been a very abundant plant, germinating and flowering annually in a reasonably moist climate. Probably a few individuals developed the capacity of producing seed which would remain fertile over a lapse of years. When the climate changed these had a decided advantage over their fellows.
Apparently the gold carpet is a plant in the process of extinction. The continued existence of the species depends on the dormancy of a sufficient number of seeds to carry it over unfavorable years of inadequate, or inappropriately timed second rains. If Death Valley becomes drier and drier and years with suitable double rains become more and more infrequent the vitality of the seeds in the soil eventually will be insufficient to span the long periods when no seeds are produced.
It’s a long call from the birds with teeth that hovered over the strange world of the dying dinosaurs 150,000,000 odd years ago to the chorus of sweet singers whose music opens sleepy eyes on May mornings of the present. The long and devious road can be traced from the grotesque archaeopteryx and archaeornis—nightmare-like and long extinct flying creatures of the dawn—to the living wren and blackbird. But however complicated, the family tree of birds is simple compared to that of the reptiles or the mammals, since avian evolution has been confined within narrower lines.
Up to the time that the monster reptiles were beginning to disappear, it seems probable that all birds had teeth. Gradually, they disappeared as the group advanced into the dawn age of present life forms. First were the ancestral birds—the archaeornithes. They were essentially winged reptiles. Following them came the toothed true birds of the New World, known from very fragmentary fossil records. They included the hesperornis, the hageria and the ichthyornis. Then, representing a long advance, came creatures of the ostrich family, probably the most primitive of living birds. They are true birds but have not reached the typical modern pattern. At the top of the family tree, the highest branch of bird evolution, is the great sub-order of song birds. It includes fifty families ranging from the larks to the finches and buntings.
The swiftest bird flight ever recorded accurately is in the neighborhood of 175 miles an hour. Ordinary, unhurried flight averages from twenty to forty miles an hour.
The fastest flyer, according to official records, is the California duck hawk whose speed was measured with a stop watch from an airplane. Eagles apparently are much slower.
Among the more reliable bird flight speed measurements are those of herons, hawks, horned larks, ravens and shrikes. Rates range from 22 to 28 miles an hour. Flight in all these cases was normal and unhurried. Other speeds reported by the Smithsonian are: crows, 31 to 45 miles an hour; starlings, 38 to 49 miles; geese, 42 to 55 miles; ducks, 44 to 59 miles; falcons, 40 to 48 miles.
When frightened, most birds probably can nearly double their normal rate, but they cannot keep it up very long. When cruising about in search for food they fly so as not to waste their strength. This is particularly true on the great annual migrations.
Considering ten hours as a fair day’s flying time over land, the measured speeds would carry crows from 310 to 450 miles between sunrise and sunset and ducks and geese from 420 to 590 miles. Considering that they fly in straight lines, this means that they make very good time from point to point. It is highly probable, however, that most migrating birds proceed in a leisurely manner and that after a flight of a few hours they pause to feed and rest.
The silk worm’s brain has an instinct center contained in a speck of nerve cells with a mass of less than a millionth of an ounce. This center is a microscopic so-called “mushroom body”, found in both sides, or hemispheres, of the brain. The discovery, with possible far-reaching philosophical implications, came out of some of the most delicate conceivable microsurgery in which the area was destroyed almost cell by cell by means of an invisibly fine electric needle.
Doctors Carol Williams and William Van der Kloot of Harvard have made minute studies of an American silk worm, the cecropia (common along the Atlantic coast), which spins as strong and delicate threads as the Japanese or Italian domesticated silk worms. The cocoon is a marvel of apparent ingenuity, made of a single thread almost a mile long. It is made in three layers, roughly after the design of a thermos bottle. The outer layer is a tightly woven, waterproof silk bag. Inside this is a layer of loosely spun material which serves as an insulating layer. The third layer, woven around the body of the worm itself, is a bag of exceedingly fine, soft silk. Through each layer a “hatchway” is provided directly in front of the creature’s head. These must be placed one in front of the other with mathematical exactitude. Through them the self imprisoned animal must escape when the time comes, and the slightest error probably would make it a prisoner forever in a coffin of its own creation.
Inside the cocoon the worm remains, adequately protected from cold and damp, for nine months. It emerges as a winged moth, whose sole function in life apparently is to lay eggs to produce more silkworms.
Spinning such a cocoon with its three quite different layers requires extreme precision of movement. Nature has not allowed for any possible variations. Yet the masterpiece obviously is not the result of any thinking, education or practice. The little worm’s life span, for one thing, would not allow for any training. Every movement must be instinctive and presumably unconscious, directed by the same part of the nervous system into whose structure the pattern has been built by nature.
The house building must start at precisely the right time. Until that time, according to the Harvard physiologists, the responsible area of the brain is held in restraint by a hormone secreted from two tiny glands in the head. At the foreordained instant this inhibiting secretion ceases and the mushroom body can go into action. The spinning can be started at any time, however, by destroying the glands.
Williams and Van der Kloot tried effects of two gasses, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Both acted as potent brain depressants, but in quite different ways. The first eliminated the spinning behavior entirely and permanently. The worms wandered about aimlessly, apparently trying in vain to remember what some overwhelming internal drive was pushing them to do. The automobile exhaust gas, carbon monoxide, fatal to humans but without any serious lasting effects on invertebrates because of the lack of the red cells in the blood with which it combines in higher animals, caused them to spin a worthless and meaningless flat layer of silk as long as the effect continued. When this ended the worm started to spin what remained of the mile-long thread in the customary pattern, starting from the point it normally would have reached had it not been gassed.
The biologists then resorted to their unbelievably delicate surgery. They proceeded to destroy the silk worm brain a few score cells at a time. The brain contains hundreds of thousands of cells. The destruction had no effect on the spinning behavior until they reached the mushroom body. When a few cells of this area were killed by the electric current the worm no longer could spin a cocoon but continued to wind and weave its silken thread into three flat sheets, corresponding to the three normal capsules. The weaving continued with the destruction of a few more cells, but only in a single sheet. When a few more were destroyed the entire cocoon-making behavior came to an end.
Thus, Doctors Williams and Van der Kloot concluded, they had located a physical unit of behavior. Within it was capsuled the whole “memory” of the silk worm race with respect to spinning. More than a century ago this mushroom body was discovered by the French physiologist Dujardin, who called it the “seat of instinct.” At that time this was only a wild speculation on his part, without any supporting facts whatsoever.
The instinct center is found in the brains of all insects in whom group instinctive behavior has manifestation. In the honeybee worker, intellectual giant of the insect world, it reaches its greatest size. In drones and queens, who do not display much behavior of any sort, the area of the brain is quite small.
Under the tossing surface of southern seas is an inferno-like realm of everlasting darkness, inhabited by multitudes of strange animals which exist almost altogether by the laws of beak and fang. Some of them are grotesque beyond the reaches of a nightmare.
Countless generations ago their ancestors, driven by hunger and competition, abandoned the familiar sun-lit world for the perpetual night of the abysmal depths. Then with each family, it was a case of survival of the fittest and variation of form and structure to fit the environment.
Here is the stark struggle for survival with the mask of sunlight, green fields and flowers discarded. It is not different in kind but in degree from the struggle that goes on continually between living things at the surface of the ocean and on the land. Down there all must eat flesh. There is no plant life intermediary between beast and beast. Plants cannot grow below the light line of the sea depths.
Out of this fierce war for existence have come creatures mostly conspicuous for their defensive and offensive equipment. Some of the fish seem to have become little more than enormous mouths with rows of long, razor-like teeth with which they seize and kill. The bodies attached to these mouths are small and slender. Such a creature is mostly head and the head is mostly mouth. Nearly all the fish carry light organs of some kind near the mouth with which other animals are probably attracted within grabbing distance.
One of the largest collections of deep sea animals was assembled a few years ago near the Puerto Rico Deep, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, by a Smithsonian Institution expedition led by Dr. Paul Bartsch. This collection constituted a fair representation of the sea life at depths of about 3200 feet, nearly 2500 feet below the farthest reaches of the sun’s rays. There were shrimps with long, sharp claws which fold up after the fashion of an old-fashioned straight razor. Any small creature which came within striking distance of such a razor probably would be an immediate victim. There were strange mollusks with shells like corkscrews and eels like darning needles with long, sharp beaks.
Among the most fantastic was the needle-fish. It jaws are prolonged into extraordinarily slender points, like fine needles, so that the head is nearly as long as the rest of the body—that is, about six inches. This fish was lured to the net by an electric light.
A group of flat fish, or flounders, was obtained, all of which have two eyes on one side of the head and none on the other. Instead of right eye and left eye there is upper eye and lower eye.
Other strange forms in the collection:
The hunchback fish, a creature whose strangely shaped body suggests its name.
The lance fish with long, backward-reaching spines suggestive of lances just behind the eyes.
The forceps fish, one of the most aberrant of all with its greatly extended, forceps-like jaws. There is apparently but a single genus and species in existence.
The family of snout fish with snouts almost as long as the rest of the body. At the end of the snout is a mouth.
Another strange creature taken out of the depths by this expedition was Johnsonia eriomma—the “big eye fish.” Each of its two eyes is about a fifth as long as the diameter of its body. A man’s eye, in the same ratio, would be about a foot long and protrude about eight inches from its socket. It also has two false eyes on its sides, near the tail. They are of the same size and approximately the same pattern as the true eyes. They probably are indistinguishable from them by other fish. They are, however, only color spots and have no visual function. They constitute a feature hitherto unknown in the fish world. The purpose of the false eyes is unknown, unless they are intended to deceive the creature’s enemies. Since it is a slow-moving fish, these color spots probably create the illusion of fast movement which would fool a predatory animal of the abysses.
This fish is the second of its family ever found in the western world. The other was discovered a half century ago the genus have been found in Asiatic waters.
This eye-fish was obtained from a depth of between 150 and 300 fathoms—just about on the borderline of eternal darkness where eyes would be of no use. Fish of the depths have evolved in two directions—toward enormous eyes and toward greatly diminished ones. The first represents a struggle to see in the strange dusk. The second trend denotes giving up of a futile struggle on the part of the race. This trend is noteworthy among fish of the greater depths.
Another strange denizen of the depths is Peristedion bartschi, named in honor of Dr. Bartsch. It is an armored gurnard, of the family sometimes known as “sea robins.” The shell-growing tendency among fish is largely confined to certain fresh-water catfish of South America. This creature obviously is a bottom dweller. Its entire body is covered with spiny plates which probably would make it safe from any enemy. Each plate bears a very sharp spine, about a quarter inch long. There are nearly a hundred of these on the body. This fish would probably be about the most unappetizing morsel any predatory animal ever swallowed. It is bright red.
Still another species obtained by the expedition was one of the “lantern-fish” group. These are small, minnow-like creatures who live only in the open ocean. While most fish either remain near shore or have at least an association with the bottom these are found only in deep water far from land, and never near the sea floor. Most of the millions of them in the sea doubtless live and die without any realization that there is either bottom or shore. All have rows of luminous spots along their sides which probably serve as recognition marks.
Hordes of big black birds, about the nearest creatures imaginable to the harpies of Greek mythology, nest on desert-like South Pacific Islands. These are the vulture-like frigate birds—the Polynesian “iwas” or “thieves”—which are found by thousands in branches of the most prominent shrubs, the eight-foot-high, white flowering scaevola bushes. They are truly creatures of evil.
They carry in their feathers as parasites creatures nearly as malevolent in appearance as themselves—louse flies which look like giant, flattened black house flies. When these are shaken off they sometimes fly to small black automobiles which they mistake for their hosts.
The nests of the frigate birds are coarse, soil-cemented affairs constructed haphazardly of twigs and driftwood. During showers, the cement of this filthy building material dissolves away, allowing eggs to fall to the ground. Nesting material evidently is rare and highly prized, giving rise to theft. A bird in flight occasionally filches a loose piece from a carelessly guarded nest. The iwa will stoop to murder and cannibalism, flying off with an egg or newly hatched young to eat on the wing. There usually is one egg to a nest, entirely white and a little larger than a chicken egg.
Both sexes take turns sitting on the egg and later brooding the growing chicks. This is necessary not only to incubate the egg and keep the chick warm in cool weather, but also as protection against too intense sunshine. At the incubation time the males are resplendent with blood red, semi-transparent throat pouches blown out like balloons. These extend forward to the beak and downward to hide the breast. The color is due to innumerable blood-filled capillaries in the tissues of the pouch.
Not far from the rookeries of the iwas are those of the stupid, red-footed boobies, or gannets. The name booby is from the Spanish word “bobo”, meaning “idiot”. At times the rookeries of the aggressive marauders and the boob-victims overlap at the edges.
The frigate birds, according to a report of the Pacific Science Board, “escort the stupid, spoon-billed gannets out to feed on schools of squid and small fish. When the gannets get craws full and set sail for home to feed their young, the cruel, curve-billed iwas dive screaming after them, seize them by the tails, and sling the food out of the mouths of the smaller birds. This the iwas scoop up on the wing. This goes on from dawn to dusk. The war cries of the frigates and the plaintive screams of the fleeing gannets quiver down the trade winds like the wailings of lost souls.”
It is commonly reported that frigate birds, lacking webbed feet, never land on the surface of the water because they cannot take off again. This is not true; small flocks are frequently seen landing playfully on the Canton island lagoon, floating, and rising again seemingly without any effort whatsoever.
“The birds nesting in the scaevola,” says the report, “are tame or, depending on the point of view, too innocent or stupid to fly from their nests when approached. The explanation for this habit is their nesting from time immemorial in areas where no predatory animals, two or four legged, ever have existed. (This, by the way, is a notable characteristic of bird life in the Antarctic. The notorious skuas, with whom even the frigates could hardly compare for blood-thirstiness, will not even bother to move when men pass through a flock of them on the ice.) Tame birds were not killed off but lived to reproduce their kind. Now, unfortunately, Pacific islanders employed as laborers, occasionally club the nesting birds at night preparatory to a feast. Such vandalism and resulting pandemonium in the rookeries should be stopped by legislation.”
The ancestors of these and other kinds of sea birds have inhabited the islands during the nesting seasons for milleniums, catching fish and other sea life as food for themselves and their nestlings.
The proud eagle was once kept as a “domestic animal.” Memories of this practice have been obtained from the Shoshoni Indians of the Nevada desert. As recently as fifty years ago individual Indians owned eagle aeries in the mountains. These constituted about the only private property recognized by the tribe and rights were zealously maintained.
Expert climbers who scaled the cliffs took the young eagles from their nests. They were subsequently reared in cages or tied to rocks. The purpose was to harvest their feathers for arrows, decoration, or magical rites. The birds were fed pocket gophers and young groundhogs.
When the birds were full grown the feathers were plucked. Then the captives were taken to the top of a cliff and released.
Giant walking sticks seven to nine inches long, titan spiders that walk on water, little black crickets that dive and swim long distances under water are some of nature’s curiosities on mountainous, jungle-covered Kusaie, easternmost of the Caroline Islands.
Especially unusual are the winged-blue-and-green walking sticks with their fantastic hand-over-hand way of walking. Among the largest of all insects is a walking stick found on the nearby island of Truk. It is reddish-brown and wingless with a body nine inches long. The huge spider’s usual abode is the foliage of long grasses overhanging jungle streams. There it lies in wait for the insects which are its usual prey. When alarmed the big spider drops off the grass into the water and starts running swiftly over the surface. It is provided with “water shoes,” bristle arrangements on its feet. Probably it does not even get its feet wet.
The submarine crickets are little black insects about an inch long which live on damp basalt rocks along the sides of, and in, the streams. They are almost invisible in the dim jungle light but make themselves known by their continuous chirping. When frightened they make long, high dives from the rocks and swim for undetermined distances a few inches under water, where they are invisible.
By far the most fantastic spectacle found on Kusaie is that of the ghostly light which marks the banks of rivers. It is due to some species of ground-growing fungus. A Smithsonian party once was overtaken by darkness high in the mountains where no trails could be followed through the dank jungle. They started wading down a stream which, they knew, eventually must lead to the lowlands and the coast. They waded, sometimes neck deep, in a tunnel of overhanging branches through whose thick foliage no light could penetrate. But always, glowing on both sides of them, were the lines of luminous fungi.