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.
_Communism Among the Bees_
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.”
_Candles on Bushes_
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.
_The Desert Rat Manufactures Water_
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 Caste System of the Termite_
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.
_The Shark That Stands Upright_
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.
_The Dead Man’s Vine_
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.
_The Insect With Fourteen Lives_
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.
_Shyness Characteristic of Giant Rats_
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.
_Nocturnal Potto_
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.
_Where Trees are Square_
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 Lamp That is a Beetle_
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.
_Rainstorms of Worms_
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.”
_The Icy Arctic Wonderland_
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.
_Fish That Live on Land_
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.
_The Special Language of Bees_
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.”