They prefer to gaze in the moonlight, and this has added to their
humanlike appearance which has given rise to the mermaid legends.
One of the few persons to study the animal at close range, O. W.
Barrett, an American explorer, tells us the following concerning the
manatee:
“The animal still is fairly common in most fresh-water bayous, lagoons
and rivers along the east coast of Nicaragua. One of the best-known
herds on the Caribbean Coast inhabits the Indio River, just north of
Greytown, Nicaragua. Estimates of its number vary from a few score to
several hundred. The herd apparently is stationary there and does not
increase or decrease to any notable degree from year to year, although
the natives take a heavy toll....
“A manatee can remain under water from 20 to 30 minutes when
frightened. During the daytime the slightest unusual noise, like rain
falling on a tin pail or the spitting of the hunter, is sufficient to
keep the whole herd submerged for hours, yet while they are grazing the
hunter may go up and slap them on the back unnoticed.
“Families consisting of a bull, a cow, and one or two calves usually
... merge into a herd of from 10 to 50 or more individuals living in a
certain stretch of river, concentrating during the day and scattering
at night. They generally graze at night, although a few individuals may
be seen feeding in broad daylight. The body is held nearly vertical
while grazing. The head is held well out of water, while the armlike
flippers poke the grass toward the mouth. The noise made by the
flapping of the huge upper lip and the crunching of the large teeth
can be heard distinctly 200 yards or more away. The sound is much
like that of horses grazing in a pasture. Adult manatees appear to
average somewhere between 8 and 10 feet in length. Some—old females,
presumably—may reach 12 feet.”
A much more seclusive animal is the true “mermaid” of legend—the
dugong of the open ocean. Unlike the manatee, it is a creature of
the sea and seldom ventures into the fresh-water rivers and lagoons.
Few naturalists ever have actually seen one of the creatures. Mr.
Barrett’s first acquaintance with the creature came in Mozambique,
Portuguese East Africa, when some native fishermen caught in their net
what they described as a “white porpoise.” They were terrified and
gladly presented their catch to an Italian blacksmith. This man crudely
embalmed the animal, placed it in a rough coffin and freighted it to
Johannesburg, where he rented a show room and made a fortune exhibiting
“the only genuine mermaid—half fish, half human.”
For many years mariners in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea have told
of seeing objects resembling women standing waist high on the surface.
Zoologists of the Middle Ages described a “bishop fish” which had been
seen standing with outstretched arms, supposedly blessing the waters.
In nearly every case, it seems likely, the objects were strange water
animals—the dugongs. They have a curious resemblance to human beings,
especially naked women, when seen from a distance.
Nearly all mermaid stories have originated in water where dugongs
are abundant. Spanish and Portuguese sailors, the first Europeans to
encounter the animal, called it the “woman fish.” The creature is best
known to Malagasy fishermen of Madagascar who, while they prize its
flesh highly, attribute to it human qualities and affinities. After
capturing one the fisherman must perform various religious rites and
before he is allowed to sell the flesh at a public market he must take
an oath that there have been no unnatural relations between himself and
his mermaid victim.
The female’s breasts are roughly in about the position of those of
women. She has the habit of rising about halfway out of the water and
sometimes has been described as holding her baby in her flippers.
Little is known of the life history and habits of the dugong. It is a
creature of the shallow sea which never has survived long in captivity.
It seems to share with the elephant and with man the faculty of
shedding tears when it is in trouble or pain. One which was kept for
several months in the Colombo zoo in Ceylon constantly was weeping.
Malagasy fishermen used to torture the animals in order to collect the
tears, which they sold as love charms.
Another extant member of the “mermaid” family is the manatee, found
on both sides of the Atlantic in the warm, fresh water rivers of
Africa and South America. Although never mistaken for a human, it is
accorded considerable superstitious regard. The Kalaboi of Nigeria
regard it as a sacred animal and the incarnation of a human soul. If
a fisherman kills one, by accident or otherwise, he must undergo an
elaborate cleansing ceremony which involves offerings before images of
his ancestors and remaining indoors for three days. During this period
he is rubbed from head to foot with a yellow pigment by women of his
family. While the purgative rites are in progress the women sing at
dawn and dusk. On the third day there is a feast on the meat, but a bit
must be given to every household in the village to lay upon the shrines
of ancestors.
Both manatee and dugong, and formerly the extinct sea cow of Bering
Sea, are probably the closest living relatives of the elephant. They
have similar brain and heart structure. The molar teeth of the mermaid
family are like those of early elephants. The male dugong has tusks.
There also is a great extension of the upper lip which overlaps the
side of the mouth—a start in the direction of a trunk.
The next nearest relatives of the elephants are the hyraces, or conies,
of Africa and Syria, best known in the form of expensive fur coats.
They look and act like rabbits. A Hebrew prophet made them symbolic of
timidity. Only a taxonomist would suspect these little creatures could
claim any kinship to the largest of land mammals.
_Limbless Lizards and Glass Snakes_
A supposedly welcome guest in the underground chambers of leaf cutter
ants is the amphisbaena, a nearly limbless lizard about a foot long
which looks somewhat like a gigantic earth worm. These creatures,
seldom seen, can be found from Brazil north to lower California and
there is one isolated species in Florida.
“Those brought to me,” observed the noted British naturalist and
explorer of Brazil, Henry Walter Bates, “were generally not much more
than a foot in length. They are of cylindrical shape having, properly
speaking, no neck, and the blunt tail which is only about an inch in
length is of the same shape as the head. This peculiar form, added to
their habit of wriggling backwards as well as forwards, has given rise
to the fable that they have two heads, one at each extremity. They are
extremely sluggish in their motions, and are clothed with scales that
have the form of small imbedded plates arranged in rings around the
body. The eye is so small as to be scarcely perceptible.
“They live habitually in the subterranean chamber of the Sauba ant;
only coming out of their abodes occasionally in the night-time. The
natives call the amphisbaena the “mai das Saubas,” or mother of Saubas,
and believe it to be poisonous, although it is perfectly harmless.
They say the ants treat it with great affection and that if the
“snake” be taken away from the nest the ants also will forsake it.
I believe, however, that they feed on the saubas, for I once found
remains of the ants in the stomach of one of them.
“Their motions are quite peculiar. The undilatable jaws, small eyes and
curious plated integument distinguish them from other snakes. These
properties evidently have some relation to their residence in the
subterranean abodes.”
Closely related is the Florida worm lizard, rose-colored and completely
legless and earless. It is about a foot long and looks so much like an
earthworm that expert collectors have been fooled. A peculiarity is
that it always goes down into a burrow tail first.
The Arizona worm lizard, a somewhat fabulous animal of the same family,
is not, so far as is known, represented in any collection. One veteran
miner told of dragging “a purple snake with two legs on its neck” from
the gravel. A woman claimed to have kept as a pet for three months “a
purple snake with its legs where its ears ought to be.”
All these animals are in the same general family as the glass snakes
of Europe and the United States. These are long, slender, legless
lizards. They are burrowing animals which occasionally are turned up
by ploughmen, but they often come to the surface voluntarily at night.
Specimens occasionally found in daylight usually are hiding in dark
recesses.
Each animal consists of apparently quite separate parts, body and tail.
The body is from six inches to a foot long, according to species,
and the tail may be twice as long. The animal can disengage its tail
by a single twist when caught by that organ. The slightest injury or
rough handling causes this tail to fly to pieces. Each piece wriggles
energetically, supposedly to attract attention while the lizard itself
crawls to safety in its burrow. The body does not break up and does
not, as popularly reputed, come back later to gather up fragments
of its tail. Instead it grows a new tail, always smaller than the
original, from the stump.
_The Only Bug in the Sea_
Only one group of insects has taken to the sea—the small, gray
long-legged water striders. Unlike fresh water relatives of the same
genus, these have permanently lost their wings. They have no further
use for this means of movement in the ocean.
Great numbers have been found floating and swimming in the open sea
around Pacific islands. Both nymphs and adults sometimes are blown onto
the beaches by strong winds. They are awkward on land, seek shelter
in any depression in the sand, and fall easy prey to birds and the
multitude of ghost crabs which glide over the sands after dark.
On the surface of shallow water the insects are found in groups of
hundreds of thousands. Apparently they feed on plankton which rises
to the surface at night. They themselves are not eaten by fish. This
is probably due to scent glands which secrete a strong odor which is
repellant to the ever hungry vertebrates.
In small embayments are found enormous numbers of one type of water
strider, the female of which is less than a twelfth of an inch long.
The male is considerably smaller and rides on the back of his mate to
ensure that the two will not be separated by wind or tide.
Insects are by far the most abundant of all land animals; the reasons
why only one genus has invaded the sea have been the subject of much
speculation. On the continents, insects are found in salt water lakes
where the saline concentration is much greater than in sea water.
Other types live in torrential streams and waterfalls where they get
much rougher treatment than would come from wave action. There are two
probable reasons for the failure to invade the ocean. One is the fact
that no insect ever has been able to live in very deep water. The “bug”
race has evolved a special breathing mechanism admirably suited to life
on land but rather poorly adapted to life under water. Besides, the
seas have been taken over almost completely by the remote relatives of
the insects, the crustaceans. These include, besides crabs and shrimps,
the superabundant copepods, the “lice of the ocean.” Invaders from the
land never have been able to compete with them.
_A Crocodile With Life After Death_
There is an animal that can bite—it might even slash off a man’s
arm—after it is dead. Alive it is relatively inoffensive. Being killed
makes it positively mad.
Its uncanny ability to bite half an hour or more after its neck
has been broken is a major risk for followers of one of the most
adventurous of professions—the jungle crocodile hunters. Their story is
a saga paralleling that of the Antarctic whalers who first told of Moby
Dick. One of the most expert of them is Dr. Fred Medem, Smithsonian
collaborator and professor of zoology at the University of Bogota. He
has twice been bitten painfully by “dead” reptiles.
The animal is the caiman, smaller than either alligator or crocodile
and probably more closely related to the former. Its hide, like that of
its two fellow crocodillians, is valuable for leather and during the
past few years it has been pursued close to extinction by professional
hunters in Colombian and Brazilian jungles and lagoons. Dr. Medem is
an eminent zoologist. He doesn’t believe, of course, that any animal
that is completely dead can bite off a man’s arm, but he is hard put
to explain what he himself has experienced. He thinks that part of the
caiman’s nervous system which activates its snout and mouth is somehow
disconnected from the rest and does not die at the same time. Thus
the dead reptile has no consciousness when it bites. It is a reflex
action of one small segment of the nervous system that somehow is not
completely dead.
There is only one way to be safe for an indefinite period after the
caiman is killed. That is to chop a hole in its neck and run a pointed
stick into the medulla oblongata, the reflex action center at the base
of the brain. When this is destroyed the ability to bite is lost. One
can proceed to skin the animal without fear of losing an arm or a
finger. Ordinarily this reptile will not attack a human. It lives on
smaller animals—wild and domestic pigs and the pig-like capybaras—that
venture into the jungle rivers.
Dr. Medem has recently discovered a curious new sub-species of caimans
confined, so far as known, to the upper reaches of the Apaporis river,
a tributary of the Amazon. It is much more crocodile-like in appearance
than the rest of the family, with a very long, narrow snout. The others
have broad, flat snouts. It retains prominent bony ridges over its
eyes—one of the most striking characteristics that distinguish the
caimans from both crocodiles and alligators.
A much more dangerous animal is the Orinoco crocodile, a large reptile
which lives only in the Orinoco and its tributaries and has a taste
for human flesh. The creature is especially dangerous to bathers and
to women doing their washing in the rivers. This is one of the two
species of these dreaded reptiles known in South America. The other is
a smaller, less aggressive creature of seashore rivers and lagoons.
The inland species now is quite close to extermination. Until recently
it was pursued by both German and French companies of professional
crocodile hunters. Now they have given up because the profits have
become too small for the risk.
The technique for hunting caimans and crocodiles is strikingly like
that of the whale hunters and just as dangerous. The hunter goes out
on the river with a boat at night. The boat carries searchlights which
move over the surface of the water. Here and there appear glittering
red and yellow spots. The red spots are the eyes of crocodiles,
the yellow ones eyes of caimans. The boat is propelled by jungle
Indians who have developed the ability to paddle noiselessly. They
row to within about two yards of a pair of glittering eyes. Then the
hunter throws his harpoon, equipped with a special aiming apparatus.
He has developed skill in hitting precisely the right spot, judged
by the position of the eyes. For a crocodile he aims at where the
neck should be, for a caiman at the flank. The neck of the latter
reptile is protected by heavy scales. A gun never is used. The wounded
reptile simply would dive into deep water where its body could not be
recovered. After the harpoon, with a rope attached, finds its mark
there is a terrific struggle as the reptile tries to get into deep
water. The caiman finally is “killed” by chopping through its spinal
cord with a machete. That is, everything is dead except the brain and
the snout. The spine of a crocodile is broken by a blow with a large ax
just behind the shoulders. It stays dead.
The caimans migrate overland from lagoon to lagoon during the dry
season. When at last they find water they dig holes in the mud and
sleep until the heavy rains return, when they emerge and resume their
normal ways of life. Quite exciting stories are told of persons who
happen to meet migrating bands of these “barbillos”, creatures about
three feet long. Ordinarily they will not attack humans but they will
not hesitate to do so if they feel they are threatened. Once one of
them gets a grip it is almost impossible to break away unless one
happens to have a machete.
_The Salamander That Lives Like a Worm_
There is an animal related to the salamander and the frog which looks
like a gigantic earthworm and lives an earthworm’s life. It is seen
so rarely that probably not one person in a million is aware of its
existence.
It is the caecilian, a very ancient creature forming the third branch
of the order of amphibians which were probably the first back-boned
animals to establish themselves on land nearly 300,000,000 years ago.
There are about fifty species. Caecilians are found in most of tropical
America, Africa and Asia. They range in length from a few inches to
nearly a yard. The larger ones might be mistaken either for titanic
earthworms or small snakes. In the physical structure are combined
features of both salamanders and frogs.
These amphibians spend all their lives burrowing in the soil. They
live chiefly on earthworms and come to the surface only for brief
intervals after heavy rains. They usually are seen only by farmers who
uncover them while ploughing, or digging ditches. Since they are so
easily mistaken for snakes they are avoided, although they are entirely
harmless. They have sharp teeth but make no effort to bite when handled.
Most of the caecilians are egg-layers, the large eggs being attached to
one another like beads on a string and then wound up in a ball. This
is incubated by the mother who coils herself around it. The burrows
where the eggs are laid are always on a stream bank since the young,
like those of all amphibians, must pass part of their development
stage in water. These amphibians probably are fairly abundant animals.
Owing to the subterranean life they are nearly, perhaps in some cases
completely, blind.
The amphiuma, a species of salamander, also is often mistaken for a
snake. It spends most of its life in rivers buried in mud, where it
lives on larvae and on fish eggs. Since it is an air-breathing creature
it must come to the surface frequently to breath.
The amphiuma has rudimentary legs, almost microscopic in size. This
fact alone is enough to differentiate it from the snakes, who always
are legless.
This curious salamander is seldom encountered and is barely mentioned
in standard textbooks of natural history. Confined to the southeastern
United States, it often is considered a highly poisonous animal.
Actually it is harmless. Very rarely one is caught on a fishhook. It is
so slippery that it is almost impossible to hold in the hand.
The creature has some relatives which are not so secretive in their
habits and are much better known. One is the giant salamander of China
and Japan, the largest and most active of the race. It makes its home
in crevices under rocks in running streams. Another is the “mud puppy”
or “hell bender” which sometimes gets on the hooks of fishermen in
muddy streams.
The amphiuma is a degenerate member of the family. It has almost lost
its legs. It still retains its eyes, but these have become very small.
The animal can have very little use for them.
In India is found a wormlike caecilian, Ichthyopis, which lives under
stones and burrows after the fashion of earthworms. Superficially it
differs from an earthworm by its darker color. Its body is coated with
slime and it leaves a trail of mucous behind it when it crawls.
The earth snake Silybura is found in the same region. It usually is
mistaken for a worm, especially by birds to their own discomfort and
sometimes disaster. It ties itself in loops around a bird’s feet and
these loops are quite difficult to loosen. Among natives there is a
superstition that if it coils around a child’s finger the only way to
get rid of it is to amputate the member.
_Three-eyed Lizards of New Zealand_
Among sun-baked rocks on barren islands off the New Zealand coast basks
a solitary survivor of the days before the dinosaurs. It is earth’s
oldest back-boned inhabitant, a fugitive in time from nature’s harsh
law of the survival of the fittest—the tuatera, or three-eyed lizard.
Its big, dreamy hazel eyes have watched the procession of the ages for
300,000,000 years—the beginning and extinction of the dinosaurs to whom
it stood in about the relationship of a great uncle, the coming of
birds and mammals, milleniums of famine and milleniums of plenty, the
shattering and crashing together of continents. It has survived while
all its contemporaries of the earth’s ancient days have died, largely
because it has been willing placidly to watch the parade pass without
bothering to take any part in the tumult and shouting.
The feature of great interest about the tuatera, both popularly and
scientifically, is its third eye. This third, or pineal, eye is closer
to its original form in the tuatera than in any other living creature.
Just after the little reptile is hatched the organ appears as a dark
spot under a film of thin, semi-transparent skin. In a baby tuatera it
becomes a small knob on top of the head. Thick, opaque skin covers the
eye in the adult reptile and it is difficult to distinguish. Anatomists
doubt whether the animal actually sees with the pineal eye any more.
The fact remains that this organ can be distinguished easily and that
it retains, in degenerated form, the characteristics of a seeing eye
which has nerve connections with the visual cortex at the back of the
brain. Moreover, when the third eye of an infant tuatera is dissected
there is clear evidence that it once was a double organ.
The tuatera is about two feet long from its snout to the tip of a
crocodile-like tail. It has a scaly skin with a row of spines along its
back. Its large hazel eyes are its most conspicuous feature. They have
a soft, dreamy expression, and they never appear to blink. There are no
external ears, but the sense of hearing is highly developed. One way of
drawing the creature from its burrow is to play a tune on almost any
instrument.
It does not dig its own holes under the rocks. Usually it shares
the burrow of a black-and-white petrel—known in New Zealand as the
mutton-bird—and it remains there even when the bird incubates its eggs
and feeds its nestlings. Apparently a mutually satisfactory arrangement
has been reached between petrel and lizard. The former usually are
in their nests only at night. The tuatera spends most of the night
away from home, hunting for the insects which are its favorite food.
Occasionally, it has been observed, a host will become tired of his
persistent house guest and try to evict it. In such a case the tuatera
never puts up a fight. It leaves placidly and tries to find some other
petrel with whom it can share quarters. If this search fails it will,
as a last extremity, scoop out its own burrow, although apparently such
labor is against its deeply fixed principles of making no effort which
possibly can be avoided.
The lizard goes to sleep about the middle of April, the beginning of
winter in New Zealand, and wakes late in August, when spring is well
underway. Then for seven months it grows fat on insects.
The creature is reportedly capable of living for 500 years and more.
It shares its longevity with its distant relatives, the great turtles.
Its long life, during most of which it continues to breed, doubtless
has been a major factor in its racial survival.