Chapter 1 of 22 · 3982 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.

THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

_A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature_

THOMAS R. HENRY

Public Affairs Press, Washington, D. C.

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-10881

INTRODUCTION

The challenges of Nature’s paradoxes have been sharp spurs to man’s search for knowledge since the start of science.

Fortunately the number of these paradoxes is infinite, and so the quests are endless. Man never will know a wonderless world. In the phenomena of life especially we have come only to the zone of morning twilight. The bright day of understanding is ahead. As its hours pass we can expect a constant succession of new paradoxes, new spurs to further advances.

Man would be in a sad situation were it otherwise. For the bright light of noon and afternoon inevitably precedes sunset and darkness and sleep.

This book is a compendium of some of Nature’s curiosities and contradictions in the field of life and as such it well may awaken that wonder which, as somebody has said, is the beginning of knowledge.

The author is one of the world’s best-known and most respected science writers. This book is a personal and unique distillation of the wisdom he has developed in a lifetime of dealing with man’s effort to resolve the paradoxes of nature.

LEONARD CARMICHAEL

_Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution_

PREFACE

Life has invaded nearly every crack and crevasse of the world during the billion years since it left its first traces on this planet. It has adjusted itself to all extremes of living, from nearly airless mountaintops five miles high to lightless floors of oceans five miles deep. It has found abodes in boiling hot springs and in the everlasting ice of Antarctic peaks. It very likely has invaded the cold, red deserts of Mars. Everywhere it has succeeded in altering the garments it wears to meet the stresses it has experienced.

It has achieved semi-infinite variety. There are approximately a quarter million species of plants now known in the world. Most abundant and varied life is that of the insects who may be on their way to displace man and his fellow mammals as lords of the earth. A rough estimate of the number of species identified up to now is 800,000. Several thousand hitherto unknown are described each year. Of mammals, including man, there may be as many as 14,000 distinct species and geographic races extant. About 8,500 species of birds are catalogued. Sub-species and geographic races increase this number to about 30,000. Known fishes number 40,000 species and sub-species.

Still, naturalists say, there are great mansions of life almost unknown to man. The collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington grow at the rate of about a million specimens a year, always including forms hitherto uncatalogued. Much of the material in the following pages is based on Smithsonian information, although other sources and personal observations have been liberally drawn upon.

The Smithsonian specimens, as well as those in other museums and collections throughout the world, are types. Once they were individuals with passions, fears, hungers, perhaps some dim wonderings and questionings. The type is the eternal reality. The individual is the brief-lived example of this reality, the flame of a candle fluttering in a windy moment.

I have brought together in these pages notes about the most extraordinary manifestations of nature that have come to my attention in the course of thirty years as a science reporter. Each example is, of course, based upon a distinctly individual expression of nature, but all are very much interrelated in this truly amazing world of ours.

THOMAS R. HENRY

_Washington, D. C._

_The Invisible Underground Jungle_

There may be as many as twenty-five million invisible plants and animals in a gram of soil about the size of a grain of sand. It would take a thousand such grains to make a marble.

The population of this microscopic jungle is composed chiefly of single-celled organisms—bacteria, molds, yeasts and protozoa. Total numbers vary enormously—from time to time and place to place—chiefly because of variations in the food supply. Although thousands of species have been identified, the greater part of soil life still remains unknown.

This jungle is a place of the hunter and the hunted—of an incessant and merciless struggle for survival. Invisible plants eat invisible animals and invisible animals eat invisible plants. Plants devour other plants and animals devour other animals.

Giants of this nether world—largely invisible, although the average size is more than a thousand times that of the bacteria—are thread-like white worms from a hundredth to a fifth of an inch long. Relatively they are not very plentiful—less than six million to a cubic foot of soil in most places. In both size and numbers in the earth population, they are like elephants compared to mice. Still they probably are numerically the most abundant of all animals which consist of more than a single cell. In the entire animal kingdom only the protozoa outnumber them.

These creatures are the nematodes, or eel worms. About ten thousand kinds have been described; there are probably as many more unknown to zoologists. Less than a hundred of these varieties cost American farmers and gardeners more than half a billion dollars a year. The rest of those species living in the soil are, so far as known, harmless or even slightly beneficial. Seas and fresh waters are full of other kinds. Still others, some very much larger than the soil organisms, are among the most dangerous parasites of animals and men. The little soil worms, in the opinion of Dr. Geoffrey LaPage of Cambridge University, “must be considered one of the major menaces of our civilization.”

Although always invisible, the activities of these countless billions of organisms underfoot can be measured in various ways. For example, carbon dioxide is constantly escaping from the surface of the ground. This comes from the breathing of the unseen animals and plants. Measurement of the gas outflow gives a rough estimate of how many are present. It shows that the numbers vary greatly from hour to hour.

The soil organisms are relatively immune to heat and cold, flood and drought. Even when a grain of soil has been made absolutely dry in the laboratory and then crushed to a very fine powder, they still remain. If it is placed in a sterile container filled with some fermentable material, a seething mass of microörganisms will appear in a few hours.

Some day this vast, unseen mass of life may be harnessed to the service of man. Only beginnings have been made to achieve this end. Some of the microscopic life forms are definitely helpful to plant life, while others undoubtedly are destructive. One service, without which plant life would be unable to continue very long, is the fixation in the soil of nitrogen from the air. One group of bacteria, the azotobacteria, do this in the laboratory and long have been supposed to be the effective agents in nature. But actual examination of soil samples, say Department of Agriculture specialists, fail to show more than a few thousands of these organisms per gram of soil anywhere, and sometimes none at all can be found in places where it is known that nitrogen fixation is in progress. Some still unknown form of microscopic life must be doing part of the work.

Another unknown organism is an agent partly responsible for breaking down the cellulose of dead plants in the soil. The mold, Aspergillus fumigatus, world-wide in its distribution, does this in the laboratory. Nowhere, however, is it found in nature in sufficient numbers to accomplish the titanic job attributed to it.

The great, invisible jungle, of course, must eat to live. Some organisms demand fresh food and are responsible for root rot in plants. The majority, however, find their sustenance in the enormous mass of dead and dying roots of annual vegetation. Decomposition of annuals is an explosive process involving the development of countless billions of bacteria.

_The Self-Perpetuating Sponge_

Close to primaeval chaos is the sponge—lowliest of animals. It is an animal without a brain, nervous system, heart, lungs, stomach, muscles or blood. But it has an _I Am_.

The sponge is in essence an anarchical horde of numberless cells. When the conglomeration is split up as can be done by a technique of squeezing through fine-meshed silk gauze, the cells continue to live as individuals. They crawl about. They take nourishment. But when a few thousands of them are thrown together into a tank of sea water they will conglomerate again, apparently into the same sponge that existed before the disintegration. If sponge animals of two different species are mixed in the tank they will combine into two sponges, duplications of the conglomerations from which they came. If cells of two sponges of the same species are mixed it may be that they will recombine into the two original individuals—but this experiment never has been tried and would be quite difficult to interpret.

The sponge is the simplest, most primitive of metazoa, or many-celled animals. It acts as an individual, although there is apparently no central government, like a brain, controlling the behavior of the millions of individuals constituting the conglomeration. It ranges in size from organisms a fraction of an inch long, by far the most numerous, to masses several feet in diameter. Various species present about all the colors of the rainbow. There are red, scarlet, green, yellow, blue and violet sponges, especially in shallow, tropical waters. Abysmal species tend to be a drab brown.

The living sponge when taken from the water is a slimy, rather repulsive mass which has the general appearance of a piece of raw beef liver perforated with holes and canals. The commercial sponge is merely the skeleton, the supporting framework of the gelatin-like tissues, which is composed of a substance similar in chemical and physical properties to silk, horn and the chitin which forms the shells of insects and crabs. This material is distributed in a fibrous network the pattern of which varies for each species.

The sponge has the most remarkable powers of regeneration of lost parts known in nature. It can regrow its entire body from a small fragment of itself. Thus if a sponge were cut into fine parts and each fragment cemented to a bit of rock each would grow into a complete, normal animal. Also if a sponge is cut or torn away from the sea bottom in such a way that some fragment remains attached this fragment will continue growing.

_Living “Stars” in Caves_

There is a cathedral-like grotto under the earth whose roof is lit eternally by living stars. It is an enormous labyrinthine chamber cut by a slow-flowing river in the base of a limestone mountain.

Its dome is like the dome of the heavens on a frosty October night. There shine the Big Dipper, the Southern Cross and the Belt of Orion. The Clouds of Magellan are on the southern horizon. There are millions of pale stars grouped in all sorts of astrological configurations. Some are isolated in space. Some are packed in dense galaxies. There are black voids between them, like the curtain of star dust that hides the center of the universe. They are only a few feet overhead. One can reach up and pluck these stars, one by one, out of the sky. Unlike the heavenly bodies, they do not twinkle. They shine steadily in complete motionlessness. Pale and weird, they illumine a realm of eternal night. It is a domain of absolute silence. Around the walls the strange starlight falls on carved figures of winged angels, of human faces laughing and human faces contorted in agony. Each star is a predacious living animal, a flesh-hungry hunter and killer. From it is suspended four or five foot-long strings of shining pearls, so delicate that they shimmer at a human breath.

This star-lit cave near the little city of Te Awaamutu is New Zealand’s greatest curiosity and certainly one of the weirdest and most intriguing spots on earth. The grotto constitutes about a third of the Waitome caverns in the center of Maoriland in the North Island, otherwise rather featureless, water-chiseled rooms in the depths of a mountain with the customary stalagmite and stalactite formations.

The stars are luminous, slimy, dirty-grey worms. They are rarely found anywhere else, and never in very great numbers. This is the one spot on earth ideally adapted to their unbelievably queer life cycle. The worm is the larva of a dainty, dark-winged fly about twice as large as a mosquito, which looks like a miniature daddy longlegs. It has no common name. Scientifically it is classified as Boletophela luminosa, a member of the sub-order of arachenocampa. It falls somewhere between true insects and spiders. There is no relationship between it and any other luminous insect—glow-worm or firefly—anywhere.

The light is a lure for prey to satisfy a voracious appetite. The lovely strings of pearls are modifications of the spider’s web. Nature has provided few other creatures with so intricate and ingenious a food-gathering mechanism as that which enables this *none* to survive in its strange environment Here evolution has schemed in an unique way to ensure the preservation of a species which apparently serves no purpose in the economy of nature except to procreate a beauty spot

The floor of the glow worm grotto is a subterranean branch of a river. The water is warm and almost absolutely motionless, for no breezes penetrate that far under the mountain. Thus it is an almost ideal spot for all sorts of insects to lay their eggs. There is a high probability that the great majority of them will hatch. As the young rise from the water they are attracted by the star-filled heavens overhead. They fly toward them as moths to a lamp. The same is true of many of the small adult insects, some of which are essentially microscopic. Once such an insect is caught on one of the threads it is lost beyond all hope. There it sticks, struggle as it may. The vibrations caused by its struggles attract the attention of the glow worm which quickly winds up the hanging thread. If it is not hungry at the moment it has been observed to play with its victim, drawing in and then letting out the line after the manner of a fisherman. Finally the prey is drawn into the silken sheath and entirely devoured, chitinous shell and all. It is not merely sucked, as is the fashion of the spider or the fly.

The “lamps” apparently are under an extremely delicate nervous control. The strings of pearls suspended loosely in the air must be extraordinarily sensitive to sound waves. The instant they pick up any sound unusual for the cavern the lights automatically go out. Stranger still is the fact that the darkening of all the stars is nearly simultaneous. This, of course, is a safety measure. Any disturbance of the cave routine means danger for the transparent caterpillars. In order to see the star-lit heavens effect the row boat in which one enters the glow worm grotto must be handled by skilled oarsmen so that there is no sound of splashing water. Visitors are warned not even to whisper, lest some string be disturbed and instantaneously transmit the warning to all the others.

_Parenthood Among Penguins_

One of nature’s miracles is the egg-laying and incubating of the emperor penguin in the darkness of the Antarctic night at temperatures of from 50 to 80 degrees below zero.

Dr. Edward Wilson, surgeon of Sir Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901 south polar expedition, found the first emperor rookery and was able to observe it for several days. His account became one of the classics of science. The big birds hatched their eggs, he found, standing on one foot on the ice and holding them against the breast feathers with the other foot. The task evidently was shared by both males and females. The male would take the egg from the female while she trekked to open water to feed on fish. After a few days, Wilson supposed, she would return while the male went after fish.

In 1956 Dr. Bernard Stonehouse of the Falkland Island Dependencies Administration found another emperor rookery and maintained observations for about ten weeks. The behavior observed was even more of a miracle than Dr. Wilson supposed.

After laying their eggs on the ice, Stonehouse noticed, the females leave immediately for open water and remain there for sixty days, the full period of incubation. Presumably they feed constantly during this period. The males take over entirely at the rookery. For two months the husband remains standing on one foot and holding an egg against his breast with the other—presumably shifting his feet now and then. Through the entire hatching period he eats nothing. When the eggs are about to hatch the mothers return from the sea, tidy up the nursery, and get ready to take over rearing the chicks. Then the males, who have exhausted their reserve of fat, stagger feebly in their own mass migration to open water to rebuild their reserves on fish. By the time of the Antarctic sunrise in October the chicks are about ready to fend for themselves.

Standing from three to four feet high and looking and acting deceptively like a human being, the emperor penguin undoubtedly is one of the most remarkable birds in existence. It presumably is confined to the Ross Sea side of the Antarctic continent. The bird—actually it is about two-thirds feathers—remains an evolutionary enigma. Theories have been advanced that it is the last surviving member of the fauna of the Antarctic continent about fifty million years ago when the shorelines were free of ice. It certainly is off any known road of evolution.

_The Strategy of Warrior Ants_

Total war is the way of life for army ants. The picturesque, devastating drives of their vast hordes have nothing whatever to do with exhaustion of food or anything of the sort. The wars come in fixed cycles, regardless of supplies.

There are two species of these ants on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal Zone. Each species has approximately 50 colonies and each colony consists of from a few hundred thousands to more than a million individuals. At the head of each colony is a single queen who lays all the eggs.

There is a new lot of larvae every 33 days—all workers or incompletely developed females. Development is restricted by the amount of food available. Since each brood consists of about 60,000 individuals, a colony theoretically might reach titanic proportions. However, it does little more than maintain its population. The death rate of soldier ants, in constant combat, is very heavy.

Once each year, at the start of the dry season in the tropics, a colony queen produces a sexual brood of about 3,000 males and six queens. The rest of the 60,000 eggs laid at this time are incapable of hatching and are fed to the new-born sexed individuals. They apparently have some of the nutritious properties of the royal jelly fed to queen bees.

This sexual brood is produced in what has been called a statory period in which the army maintains a fixed bivouac for about three weeks. During this time the new queens develop and around at least one of them a new group of workers, about half the whole, tends to congregate. A strange antagonism seems to develop between the old and new groups. Eventually the colony divides in two and each half starts moving in opposite directions. The other new queens are lost in the shuffle.

Most of the newly developed males are ‘excess baggage.’ During the winged, or mating, stage they fly into the forest where the great majority of them are eaten by birds. When the surviving ants light on a tree, on the ground or on some other object, the wings drop off. Then they apparently wander about aimlessly until they come to an army ant trail which they recognize by the odor and follow it until they come to the colony which has made it. If this happens to be a colony of their own relatives, they probably are killed by the workers. If it happens to be an entirely foreign colony, they may be accepted. This apparently is one of nature’s mechanisms for intruding new genes into a strain.

The raiding activities of a colony are carried out during the day from a central headquarters. During the daytime raiding individuals return to the colony from their forays and by dusk all have returned. At night the bivouac is changed, the whole colony moving forward along one of the trails blazed by the raiders. A new headquarters is thus established. A colony moves from six to seven hours before striking a new bivouac. Not infrequently, if no promising site is found, it moves from dusk to dawn.

This would seem like constant activity, too strenuous even for the constitution of an army ant. Actually the individual workers probably get plenty of rest. Each colony is divided into two units—the raiders and those that constitute the structural unit. The walls of the “headquarters” are made up of the bodies of the latter. These “living brick” do nothing throughout the day. They may be asleep. When the raiders return at dusk the structural unit breaks up and the members lead the migration to a new bivouac. The erstwhile raiders follow leisurely in the rear and in turn become the structural unit when a stopping place is selected.

When to rest? When to raid? There apparently is an irresistible war rhythm, like the rhythm of the tides, in the basic constitution of these ants. Some have postulated the same sort of thing, on a lesser scale, in man who goes to war every so often but camouflages the war tide with economic or political explanations.

These ants are remarkable not only as warriors but as architects. They build complex, air-conditioned, hanging houses out of thousands of their own suspended bodies. Within these structures the queen is sheltered, eggs laid, young hatched and reared. Much of the time the “houses” are constructed anew each night.

This home-building behavior is unique in nature, as Dr. T. C. Schneirla of the American Museum of Natural History has pointed out:

“Without any active excavating and without any manipulating of fallen materials, colonies of these species form a domicile with their own bodies. A typical bivouac is a cylindrical mass hanging from the underside of some projecting surface to the ground. In addition to the sides or under-surface of logs, other typical places are the spaces between gut tressed tree roots, masses of brush, undercut banks of stream beds, or the overhanging edge of a rock.

“The characteristic ability to cluster their bodies, as well as the manner of clustering, depends first of all upon an anatomical characteristic—the opposed, recurved hooks on the terminal tarsal segments of the workers’ legs. The first ants to settle in a new place catch into a rough or soft surface by means of the tarsal hooks, or rather are pushed into this anchored position as newcomers run upon them as they stand and stretch them out in a hanging position. In fact, the hooks are really anchored by the added weight of others that have crawled down over the body of the first ant, fixing it in place and soon immobilizing it.