Part 18

These worms are a Himalayan variety of naids, fresh water animals vaguely related to earthworms. They are reddish-brown and seldom more than an inch long. The majority of the worms live with their heads buried in the mud, tail ends waving freely in the air. Upon any alarm their bodies contract leaving no signs of life.

Early in the Spring these worms literally lose these heads and die. Compared with those of most worms, their regenerative powers are quite feeble. It is believed that the decapitation is due to the fact that egg-laying is accompanied by such violent contractions of the body that the front segments are disconnected.

Every few years there is a report from somewhere in the United States or Europe of enormous numbers of dead earthworms covering the ground. A correspondent of the British scientific journal, Nature, reported in 1921: “About the middle of March I saw millions of dead worms morning after morning on pavements, roads and paths. They were great and small, young and old, of every known species and genus. They lay prone and even when they were able to reach a grass plot alive they lacked the power to burrow.” The phenomenon is unexplained. Examination of the dead worms shows no unusual parasite or evidence of disease.

_Fish That Survive Freezing_

There is a realm of “supercooled life.” Its denizens are deep water fish that live long and happily in temperatures below the freezing point of their blood. But whenever one of them comes in contact with even a single crystal of ice it freezes almost instantly. This strange phenomenon of marine life has been observed by biologists of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

These particular fish live at the bottom of Hebron fjord in northern Labrador. The temperature there is about 1.7 below zero centigrade. Some have been caught, brought to the surface, and then plunged into a bath of sea water cooled to exactly the same temperature. They survived for several hours. When, however, one of them came in contact with an ice crystal, it froze stiff in a few seconds. The explanation, it appears, is that these fish normally live below the depth at which it is possible for ice crystals to form in water.

Very careful experiments have shown that water can be carried far below its normal freezing point if it is kept entirely motionless and is absolutely free from minute particles of any sort which are necessary for the formation of ice crystals. This is about the condition that exists at the fjord bottom. Eventually, if the temperature is taken lower and lower, such water will solidify, but into a form far different from ice. It is noncrystalline and can best be compared with glass. But even if this happened in the Hebron fjord it would not necessarily bother the fish. Their blood presumably would turn to glass. There would be no breaking of body cells such as results from the swelling of ice crystals. After an indefinite period the animals might be brought out of the solid state, if the thawing could be accomplished quickly enough, none the worse for their experience. This has been accomplished with very minute organisms, but any techniques which might be used with higher plants or animals have not yet been discovered.

The extent of life in the supercooled world is unknown. It hardly can be confined to fish. All sorts of mollusks, echinoderms and worms also are bottom dwellers in Arctic and Antarctic waters. It’s not cold, but ice, that kills.

_Plants That Kill_

The lethal dose Socrates was condemned to swallow by the stuffed-shirtism of ancient Athens was d-propyl-piperidine. This is the deadly alkaloid in the spotted hemlock, a common European weed which now grows extensively over most of the eastern United States. A closely related European species is the cowbane which cows instinctively will not nibble.

The devastating illness which fell upon 10,000 Greeks of the Anabasis, Xenophon would have been interested to know, was caused by andromedotoxin. This is a resinous substance common to plants of the heath family the world over. It is the poisonous constituent of rhododendron, mountain laurel and some kinds of azalgias. Honey from the blossoms of plants containing it is extremely poisonous.

When pioneers first pushed their way over the Appalachians their settlements were ravaged by epidemics of a fatal disease—milk sickness. Farms and villages were abandoned as terror-stricken settlers fled from the scourge. It was due to tremetol, a complex chemical which has been found in several plants—chiefly white snakeroot which causes the disease east of the Mississippi. When cows eat the snakeroot the poison passes into the milk.

By far the most virulent plant growing in the United States is very little known although it has caused many fatalities. This is the water hemlock or cicula—very different from the spotted hemlock whose extract was forced upon Socrates. It grows in low, swampy places nearly everywhere. When the ground is soft in the spring its roots can be pulled easily from the soil and have a pleasant odor that attracts children. It causes heavy losses of livestock.

Next in virulence of all American plants is the whorled milkweed which contains a closely allied resinous material not yet satisfactorily analyzed. It has caused the death of countless cattle.

_Caterpillars That Pretend to be Snakes_

There are worm-snakes, snake-worms, and wormlike animals that instinctively imitate snakes. This is especially true of certain South American caterpillars—defenseless creatures whose only security is in mimicry.

A large, green tree-living caterpillar in British Guiana ordinarily remains motionless and looks like part of a vine stem. But when the branch is shaken it rears the front part of its body and stretches horizontally. At the same time it gives a twist expanding its front segment into a bulbous enlargement with a big menacing black eyespot surrounded by a yellow ring. This it remains for a few minutes, looking very much like a poisonous tree snake that lives among green leaves.

Serpent caterpillars abound in Brazil. The best example is Leucorhampha triptolemus, a creature that hangs vertically from stems of plants. When disturbed it twists and shows a front extremely resembling the head and back of a snake. The curve of the caterpillar is just like that of a serpent. It keeps up a swaying, side-to-side movement for several seconds. The whole effect is to change what seems an innocent plant stem suddenly into an open-mouthed snake with red jaws and ferocious eyes.

_All Plants Are Luminous_

All green foliage gives off an invisible deep red—almost black—light. This phenomenon is one of the most fundamental processes of life. It is associated closely with the photosynthesis upon which depends all life on earth. This important discovery was made recently by biologists at the Oak Ridge laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission while studying changes in a chemical known as adenosine triphosphate in plants engaged in photosynthesis, the formation of starches and sugars out of hydrogen from the soil and carbon from the atmosphere in the presence of light. Newly acquired knowledge about the process is paving the way to improved agricultural methods.

The biologists used extracts from the bodies of fireflies which give off a bright light when this chemical—an important source of energy in muscle—is present. Then they found that chloroplasts, the parts of plants most closely associated with the photosynthetic process, also would give off light when mixed with firefly juice and illuminated. They then made the unexpected discovery that living extracts of green plants give off a light of their own without any mixing.

The light given off by the chloroplasts now is believed to be the exact opposite of the first chemical step in photosynthesis. Light absorbed by the chloroplasts forms unstable chemical bonds within the plant. A small fraction of these chemically induced compounds recombine. The energy liberated by this process is trapped by the chlorophyll molecule, which in turn gives off the mysterious light.

It has been established that leaves, if frozen while exposed to illumination, retain their light-producing ability for several months. It also has been found that certain extracts prepared from leaves undergoing exposure to light contain substances which give off a bright light when certain chemicals are added to them.

_Worms That Live in the Snow_

There are jet black worms that live in red snow. They come out of their snow burrows only during the late summer evening, crawl sluggishly on the surface, and disappear at sunrise the next morning. They have been observed swimming in shallow pools that form on the surface of the great Malaspina glacier which flows down the slope of Mount St. Elias in Alaska.

Presumably during the long sub-Arctic winter these worms burrow deep in the snow and remain in a torpid state. They subsist chiefly on the microscopic red algae which give the glacial snow fields a reddish tinge. The black worms themselves are innumerable. They have been photographed covering a trail a quarter-mile long at an elevation of 5200 feet in Oregon. They are enchytraeids, relatives of earthworms. The common white variety now is raised commercially in vast numbers, on diets of oat meal and sour milk, as food for fancy varieties of aquarium fish. Both worms and insects that normally live in snow fields are black.

An investigator of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory once found a multitude of white enchytraeids in cakes of ice cut from a Massachusetts pond the previous winter. They were active when the ice thawed but all died in a few days. The same investigator kept thirty specimens of another species in a tumbler of water placed on a ledge outside his laboratory window. On a cold night the water froze solid with the worms in a tangled mass in the center of the ice cake. All but three or four were alive and appeared normal when the ice was thawed.

About 75 years ago housewives of Salina, Kansas, complained that the ice delivered from door to door was “wormy.” Cakes were found honeycombed with tiny white worms, probably enchytraeids. They swam about actively when the ice thawed and infested food stored in refrigerators. All died when the temperature reached about 60 F.

Whether any worm—except possibly the most minute—can survive complete freezing is doubtful. They live in little holes that form naturally when water freezes and that are kept open by heat generated by the bodies of the creatures themselves.

_The Strange Ways of Snails_

Among earth’s deadliest creatures are cone snails which inject into their victims a poison as virulent as that of the rattlesnakes. These snail-like animals have a poison-secreting gland in the head and the venom is injected through the skin of the victim by tiny, needle-sharp, harpoon-shaped teeth. It is deadly not only to many kinds of sea animals but also to man. The poison, acting on the nervous system, may in some cases kill in several hours.

Fortunately cone-shells are timid, retiring, slow-moving creatures. They are among the loveliest of all sea shells. Most valuable is the “glory-of-the-seas” cone which is worth several hundred dollars. Of the twenty known specimens in the world, only three are in American collections. Of the 300 or more known varieties only five or six from the Indo-Pacific area are definitely known to be venomous.

The “emperor’s top shell” is among the earth’s most exquisite and, until recently the rarest of sea shells. This shell, about five inches in diameter, belongs to a sea snail of a genus fairly abundant during the Mesozioc geological period about 300,000,000 years ago and supposedly extinct until about eight years ago when one was found alive in a Japanese lobster trap. Thereafter the snail was seen very rarely until the present Emperor of Japan ordered that all specimens be preserved for his private collection. Fortunately his interest encouraged Japanese fishermen to keep a special look-out for the creatures and since then they have been found quite frequently. They apparently are distributed around the world in semi-tropical waters. Two species have been located in the West Indies and a new one recently has been reported in South Africa. The shells are rich golden-orange in color, highlighted with reds and salmons.

In the Smithsonian collections are specimens of the “original shell collector”—the snail that collects shells. This sea snail, widely distributed in tropical waters, has the habit of gluing to its own shell fragments of the shells of other animals, bits of coral, and almost every kind of debris it can pick up. The purpose is not known, but it may be for protective camouflage. Seen in shallow water, the creature looks like a little pile of broken shells on the sea bottom.

There is a “worm snail” that builds great limestone causeways and bridges. This is the shelled sea-snail of the Mediterranean—Termetus (wormlike). When the creature is young its shell is a regular spiral which the owner, free to move about, carries on its back and into which it can retreat when alarmed. As the snail ages the shell becomes twisted and contorted, like a tube, and is attached to an offshore rock. The animal crawls inside and soon dies. There are inestimably great numbers of these gastropods. They fix their shell tombs close together. These coil around each other to form solid masses of rock. Quatrefages, describes them in these words: “In Sicily where calcarous rocks projected into the sea I found they were surrounded by a kind of causeway which, without varying much in width, yet followed all the sinuosities of the shore almost exactly on a level with the surface of the water, filling up narrow chasms in some places and forming solid archways in others. Thus it afforded a smooth and easy path to one who did not object to having his legs washed by the waves. One might suppose the white and compact cement had been consolidated by man.”

The love life of some snails is confusing to Freudians. Each animal is provided with a quiver full of arrows, located in the right side of the neck. These darts can be discharged with considerable force. They are straight or curved shafts of carbonate of lime which taper to exceedingly fine points. During the breeding season the little mollusks meet in pairs. A couple will station themselves about an inch apart and start shooting at each other. Several darts are exchanged and each finds its mark. After this love duel the two embrace and, since each is both male and female, both lay eggs. The darts presumably were first developed as defense weapons and, outmoded for service of Mars millions of generations ago, now have been turned to the service of Eros.

Showers of snails have been reported intermittently. One of the most notable took place back in 1892 at the German town of Padeborn. Late in August a great yellow cloud was seen over the town. In a few minutes it burst into a torrential rain. Afterwards the pavements were covered with water snails, all with shells broken after their long fall from the sky.

Some snails can bore holes in solid rock. One, found chiefly on the French channel coast near Boulogne, has bored holes six inches deep and an inch in diameter with a cup-shaped cavity at the bottom. The cavity is used for the animal’s hibernation.

A few snails are natural barometers. They reputedly are extremely sensitive to changes in humidity. One, generally grey, turns yellow just before a rain and blue afterwards.

Snails admittedly are very tenacious of life and can endure extremes of heat, cold and dessication. Many instances have been cited, some nearly incredible. In 1846, for example, a desert snail from Egypt was fixed to a paper tablet in the British Museum in London. Four years later it was observed that he had discolored the paper in his attempt to get away. Finding escape impossible he had again retired. This led to his immersion in tepid water. The creature again came to life. He was “alive and flourishing” a week later.

There are snail harpists and even singing snails. The former were described by Rev. H. G. Barnacle, British missionary-naturalist, in a scholarly paper written in 1848: “When up in the mountains of Oahu, I heard the grandest but wildest music as from hundreds of aeolean harps wafted to me on the breeze and a native told me it came from singing shells. It was sublime. I could not believe it but a tree close at hand proved it. Upon it were thousands of the snails. The animals drew after them their shells which grated against the wood and so caused the sounds. The multitude of sounds produced the fanciful music.”

The singing snails in Ceylon’s blackish Lake Batticaloa were described by the British naturalist Sir Emerson Tennent: “Sounds came up from the water like gentle thrills of a musical chord or like the faint vibrations of a wine glass when the rim is rubbed by a moistened finger. It was not one sustained note but a multitude of tiny sounds, each clear and distinct in itself. On applying the ear to the woodwork of the boat the vibrations greatly increased in volume. The natives said they were made by singing snails.”

_Vision-Producing Plants_

Among the plants used by California Indians for food, medicine, and magic is wild tobacco. It is smoked in a hollow elder stick, about eight inches long, from which the pith has been removed. A few inhalations of the smoke early in the morning are enough to overcome the smoker so that he is unable to stand on his feet. He inhales until extreme dizziness is achieved and then he touches tobacco no more for the rest of the day. Indians can give no good reason for this concentrated form of smoking. It is simply the way of their ancestors.

A mixture of plants, the honey of bumblebees, and the red scum off an iron spring constitute a popular love charm. The mixture is placed in a buckskin bag and carried under the arm. When the favor of some particular maiden is desired it is necessary only to secure something associated with her and add it to the charm. The easiest to get is a pinch of soil upon which the lady has spat. This is used not only by lovers but also by husbands wishing to secure the return of errant wives.

Almost equally as important as tobacco in the life of these California Indians is a vision-producing plant closely related to the common garden trumpetflower and to the deadly nightshade. The leaves from the east side of the plant are smoked; this brings about a state of exaltation in which various animals are seen to come and offer their help to the dreamer. Leaves from the west side are never smoked. It would mean certain death; the Indians associate the west with death.

Much the same effect is obtained by drinking a blue-frothy decoction of the root. It not only produces visions but acts as a powerful anesthetic. It is highly poisonous, however, and only those Indians who know the proper dosage make use of it. The plant is known as “grandmother,” because of its comfort-bringing qualities.

_The Abominable Snow Man_

Mysterious beast of the high Himalayas is the “abominable snow man,” so-called by natives. It is evidently a four-footed, five-toed mammal that weighs from 150 to 200 pounds and lives in family groups. This much, at least, can be deduced from its tracks in the snow, according to Dr. Edouard Wyss-Dunant, leader of the Swiss Mt. Everest expedition of 1952. He found the footprints in a snow covered frozen lake at an altitude of about 15,000 feet.

Although the tracks are bear-like, the animal apparently has a quite unbearish ability to leap from crag to crag in migrations from one high valley to another. The snow prints were first reported by Himalayan explorers to be ape-like, or even almost human, and this led to speculations that some still unknown type of big ape might have evolved in the high mountains.

The tracks, says Dr. Wyss-Dunant in his recent report to the Royal Geographic Society, are undoubtedly those of a large “plantigrade animal”—that is, one that walks on the sole of the foot with the heel touching the ground. This is the way of both bear and man. The sole of the foot is from four to five inches long by the depth of the tracks, compared to those made by men of known weights. Some smaller footprints were found, believed to be those of young animals. Three of the tracks showed imprints of claws. Small triangular markings on the heels of two of them were attributed to tufts of hair that grows on the bottom of the feet.

Tracks of one animal were followed until they came to a rock several feet high over which it was necessary for the creature to jump. On the other side imprints of three feet were found close together. Apparently the animal had landed on these three feet. The tracks of the fourth foot were some distance ahead, indicating preparations for another jump. Beyond, Dr. Wyss-Dunant picked up other trails. Three were coming out of a deep valley. The fourth came off the side of a glacier. These paths joined and thenceforward continued as a single set of tracks. The animals apparently step in each others' footsteps while they proceed in single file. This is a customary procedure for mountaineers crossing a glacier where there is danger of falling into crevasses.

Nepal mountaineers have been familiar with the mysterious tracks for years but nobody has been found who claims to have seen the animal. They call it a “yeti.”

“I could find no trace of meals, nor of excrement,” the Swiss explorer declared. “This confirms my opinion that the animal only passes through and does not frequent these heights. We should at least have found a place of refuge, if not a lair, if the yeti was living and hunting in the neighborhood. I rather think it passes between adjacent peaks only when, having scoured one valley, it tries to reach another. This animal is a wanderer, avoiding zones inhabited by man. It probably is not a carnivore since there is very little other animal life even in the high valleys upon which it could feed. It obviously is an animal of quite superior intelligence to subsist at such high altitudes and to have kept itself hidden from humans so long.”

_Fish That Sing in the Moonlight_

There may be a fish that actually sings—that is, utters melodious sounds with a perceptible rhythm or beat which can be recorded in simple musical notation. This “singing” fish, which nobody actually has been able to identify, is one of the curiosities invariably called to the attention of visitors in the Batticoloa province of eastern Ceylon. It frequents only one deep lagoon and can be heard when the water is calm. Moonlight seems to draw the organism closer to the surface. On dark, calm nights the music still can be heard, but it seems to be coming from greater depths.

The “singing” sound at least, is a verifiable fact, according to the Rev. J. W. Lange, a Jesuit priest in Batticoloa who has tried for several years to determine what sort of an organism is responsible.

It is certain, he contends, that the sounds are made by something under the water. They are heard best when the head is held under the surface. By lowering a hydrophone attached to an amplifier into the lagoon, he was able, to record the sounds. From this record a friend familiar with musical notation was able to put them on paper.