Part 17

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.”

Dr. von Frisch and his colleagues at the University of Munich are also making an intensive study of the insect eye and the physiology of the insect sense of smell. Previous research has shown that worker bees have a special scent gland under voluntary control. Only when a good source of nectar is found is the fragrance, evidently quite powerful and attractive to other bees, released. Then it permeates the immediate neighborhood. It is the bee language equivalent for the word “Here.” When a cruising worker gets a whiff of this odor it knows there is a plentiful supply of nectar close at hand and starts a search for it.

Bees cannot distinguish red from black, Dr. von Frisch has found. This probably is the reason so few red-blossoming plants depend on these insects for distributing their pollen. Nearly all red-blossoming species depend on birds and butterflies, both of which are acutely sensitive to red. One notable exception, however, is the European poppy whose brilliant red blossoms carpet the landscape in late Spring. The German experimenter has found that these blossoms are not “red” to the bee. They possess a color which cannot be described because it cannot be experienced by the human eye. The poppy blossoms reflect a great deal of the ultraviolet light in sunshine and to this the bee eye is extremely sensitive. The color must be quite different from any of the shades at the blue end of the spectrum which are visible to man. To the bee it is probably somewhat like violet.

Even the more or less degenerate human nose can be trained to discriminate some of the bee odors that apparently have so much meaning in the life of the hive. After practising for a few months Dr. N. E. McIndoo of the U. S. Department of Agriculture was able to recognize the three castes—queens, drones and workers—merely by smelling them. With more practice he was able to make even finer discriminations, as he reports:

“The younger the workers the less pronounced is the odor emitted. To the human nose the odor from nurse bees and wax generators is much less pronounced than is that from old workers. Workers just emerged from the cells have a faint, sweetish odor, but lack the characteristic bee odor and workers removed from the cells just before they begin cutting their way out omit a still fainter sweetish odor.

“Old queens have a strong sweetish odor, while that of queens just emerged from cells is much pronounced as is the bee odor of the workers. The majority of old drones have a faint odor while every young drone has a stronger one. It is slightly different from that of young workers and is less sweetish.

“All the offspring of the same queen seem to inherit a peculiar odor from her, which becomes the family odor. Apparently each worker emits an individual odor which is different from that of any other worker.

“Of all odors, that of the hive is most important. It seems to be the most fundamental factor upon which the social life of the colony depends, and upon which the social habit perhaps was acquired.”

Taste discrimination is roughly parallel to that of humans. The bee certainly can distinguish the primary tastes, sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It naturally is keenly sensitive to different degrees of sweetness, yet some sugars which are extremely sweet to man are tasteless to the insects. The same is true of such sweeteners as saccharin. The bee’s sense of smell also runs parallel to that of man, both in the ability to discriminate fine difference in odors and in the thresholds of sensitivity. This appears to be a very important factor in the location of nectar-bearing flowers. However, the bee appears unable to detect an odor from any great distance. It is probably due to the sense of smell that scout bees are able to locate good feeding grounds. After marking them with their own peculiar secreted odor they return immediately to the hive to tell the others about them. The dance of a returned scout varies in intensity according to the richness of the find and the workers who witness it become correspondingly excited. If the scout executes only a feeble dance there is only a small exodus from the hive.

_Poisonous Platters of the Sea_

One of the most dreaded of all sea creatures is the venomous sting ray of which there are several hundred species distributed over the world, mostly in tropical waters. On the upper side of the tail is a saw-toothed bone dagger from two to fifteen inches long which can be driven through a man’s leg. The teeth extrude a venom quite similar to that of the rattlesnake.

Largest is the giant sting ray of Australian waters. A full-grown specimen weighs about 800 pounds. The fearsome and gruesome bat sting ray of the California coast weighs up to 200 pounds and is quite abundant.

All the rays are bottom dwelling animals, leading sedentary lives on flat, sandy ground. All are carnivorous, devouring smaller fish and mollusks. Fortunately they are not very aggressive and will flee from man if given warning. Still, life guard stations along the California beaches reported nearly 400 injuries from the creatures in the summer of 1952.

_Our Un-American Food_

A half dozen vanished civilizations make their contributions to the American Thanksgiving dinner: onions from ancient Egypt, peas from Ethiopia, parsnips and turnips from ancient China.

Aztec, Maya, the skin-wrapped Cro-Magnon all did their part in the darkness of pre-history to make possible the plates which are loaded so lavishly. They did better than they knew. Very few new vegetables have been introduced in historic times. In many cases little improvement has been made on the products of the ancients.

The story of potatoes alone contains enough romance and adventure for a good-sized novel. Its origin is unknown but its wanderings from America to Europe and back to America again constitute a fascinating story.

Cultivated lettuce never has been found wild. It is believed to have been derived from India or Central Asia. It is one of the oldest known vegetables. Herodotus, Hippocrates and Aristotle mention it in references to Greek gardens. Chaucer notes its cultivation in England in 1340. Sixteen varieties are listed as being grown in American gardens as early as 1806.

Celery is a biennial plant native to the marshlands of southern Europe, North Africa and southwestern Asia. It long was considered poisonous and was not used as food until modern times.

The Israelites complained to Moses in the Wilderness because they couldn’t have onions to which they had become accustomed during the captivity in Egypt. The cultivated onion probably originated in Afghanistan.

Pumpkins and squashes were grown in America long before white men came on the scene. Evidence of both have been found among ruins of settlements of the Basket Makers, about the earliest agricultural people on this continent. They probably came from Mexico. The Hubbard squash came to light in Marblehead, Mass., in 1855. It had been growing there for more than 50 years.

Peas are the oldest known vegetables. They are believed to have originated in Ethiopia but to have spread over Europe and Asia long before the dawn of history. They were eaten—perhaps even cultivated after a fashion—by men of Europe’s Stone Age. Columbus planted some in the West Indies in 1493. They spread rapidly among the Indians and became one of the chief crops of the Iroquois.

The species from which cabbage is derived grows wild in North Africa and along the European shore of the Mediterranean. It has been cultivated for 4,000 years. Greeks and Romans grew it in their gardens. Most of the American varieties, however, originated in North Europe.

The turnip is a native of central and western China. Seed probably was brought to America by some of the earliest European settlers.

The radish is a native of China and India. It was cultivated by both the Greeks and the Egyptians. The parsnip is another Asiatic root crop. It first was planted in Virginia in 1690. Only recently has it gotten away from the home garden to become a commercial crop.

Popcorn is peculiarly American. In early Spanish writings reference is made to a ritual of the Aztecs in which “one hour before dawn there sallied forth all these maidens crowned with garlands of maize, toasted and popped, the grains of which were like orange blossoms—and on their necks thick festoons of the same which passed under the left arm.”

_Worms That Commit Mass Suicide_

An entire generation of worms commits suicide every year. Every individual casts off its own head.