Part 12

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 Vanishing Golden Carpet_

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.

_Evolution of the Bird_

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.

_Speed Ace of the Air_

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 Remarkable Instincts of the Silk Worm_

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.

_The Strange World of the Sea_

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.

_The Cannibal Birds of the Pacific_

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.