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The Strangest Things In The World: A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations Of Nature

Thomas R. (Thomas Robert) Henry

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THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature THOMAS R. HENRY Public Affairs Press, Washington, D. C. Copyright, 1958, by Public Affairs Press 419 New Jersey Avenue, S. E., Washington 3, D. C. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-10881...

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INTRODUCTION

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 sit

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PREFACE

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 th

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The Invisible Underground Jungle

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 soi

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The Self-Perpetuating Sponge

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

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Living “Stars” in Caves

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

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Parenthood Among Penguins

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 fe

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The Strategy of Warrior Ants

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

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Uganda’s Miniature Dinosaur

Uganda’s Miniature Dinosaur

A grotesque creature abundant in the Kishasha Valley of Uganda is the three-horned chameleon. It grows to a length exceeding twelve inches and the males look like miniature versions of the ancient dinosaur monster, triceratops. Three curious horns, an inch to an inch-and-a-half in length, protrude from the nose and between the eyes of males. These are extremely pugnacious animals; they use their horns in fights to the finish. At times the contests develop into prolonged pushing matches with the

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The Strange Ways of Spiders

The Strange Ways of Spiders

“With other classes of animals, and even with plants, man feels a certain kinship—but spiders are not of his world. Their strange habits, ethics and psychology seem to belong to some other planet where conditions are more monstrous, more active, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than on our own. Frightfulness and ruthlessness appear a part of their nature and we stand appalled when it dawns upon us that they are far better armed and equipped for their life work than we for ours.” Thus w

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Worms With a Thousand Eyes

Worms With a Thousand Eyes

There are worms with a thousand eyes. They are, for the most part, animals of the dank, dark floors of tropical rain forests. They are narrow, brilliantly colored ribbons of slimy skin which glide at a speed of about six feet an hour over damp moss and leaves in the everlasting twilight. When alarmed they can break up instantly into scores of “blobs of slime” and in a few hours each piece will become a complete new worm. One of them can eat five-sixths of its own body and entirely recover. These

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Queer Fish, But Definitely

Queer Fish, But Definitely

There are more than 40,000 kinds of fish in the world. Their habitats range from the profoundest depths of the seas to cold lakes and brooks on mountain timberlines. They show a bewildering diversity in their ways of life. The smallest of fish is a Philippine goby, less than a third of an inch long and weighing a fraction of an ounce. The largest is the whale shark, found in all warm seas. Some individuals exceed twenty tons. Some fish burrow in the mud, some swim, some walk, some fly, some brea

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Love Life Among the Spiders

Love Life Among the Spiders

There is love and courtship among spiders, as among birds and mammals, but with a unique—and fatal—difference. An observer thus describes a courtship scene in the Cambridge Natural History : “When some inches from her he stood still. She eyed him eagerly, changing her position from time to time. He, raising his whole body on the other side, leaned so far over he was in danger of losing his balance which he only maintained by sidling rapidly toward the lower side. Again and again he circled from

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The Lace Weavers

The Lace Weavers

For 300,000,000 years tiny animals have been weaving delicate lace. They weave constantly, rapidly and in lovely, open mesh patterns. They make a stiff stable lace. Their own limestone entombed bodies are the threads. Night and day, millenium after millenium, they weave and weave, for the curse of weaving is forever upon them. Through time they have covered hundreds of square miles with white and green veils. For the most part these are fragile and short-lived, but in a few cases they have been

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The Ways of Crabs

The Ways of Crabs

Crabs that wear clothes, others that carry arms, and still others that march like regiments of soldiers are among the curiosities of Australia’s Great Barrier coral reef. One crab forces the coral polyp to build a limestone palace for its abode. The female of this species lodges on the polyp when it is in the larval state and causes an irritation which forces the host animal to build up the walls. The resulting house is just big enough for the crab to move about in comfortably. There always is a

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Ticks With Noses in Their Legs

Ticks With Noses in Their Legs

Ticks, remote spider relatives, smell with their front legs. When these legs are amputated the tick shows no reaction to odors. It cannot smell blood but will feed on any sort of liquid sucked through a warm, moist membrane like the skin. Presumably such a tick in nature recognizes an animal as a proper source of food by smell, while a combination of warmth and moisture from the skin gives a stimulus for feeding....

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The Fourth Realm of Life

The Fourth Realm of Life

There is a wind-tossed green-grey ocean between earth and sky. It is a sea on stilts, the world’s fourth realm of life. There are plants and animals of the land, of the water, and of the air—and there are plants and animals of the canopy of the rain forest, a thousand-mile-wide broken belt around the world. It covers several million square miles—the jungles of South America extending northward into southern Mexico, the basins of the Niger and the Congo, strips of southern India and Ceylon, much

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Rubber-Band Worms that Stretch and Stretch

Rubber-Band Worms that Stretch and Stretch

There is a worm ninety feet long. It is the giant of a family of white, red, yellow, green, purple, and violet worms whose habitat ranges from sea bottoms to jungle treetops. The worms shoot poison-tipped harpoons out of their brains. Most can shrink at will to less than a third of their ordinary length. They always shrink when they die. Some can break up into hundreds of fragments, each of which will grow into a complete new worm. They tie themselves into inextricable knots. They build their ho

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Frog Versatility

Frog Versatility

Animals of many talents are the frogs. Some grunt like pigs, others cackle like hens. Some chirp like crickets, others caw like crows. Still others quack like ducks. There are golden frogs, scarlet frogs that play dead, frogs that build houses. All this assembly is found in one small corner of the world, southeastern Brazil. This particular tropical countryside long has been known for the abundance and variety of its amphibian life. Some of the frogs in this area are particularly notable for the

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The Horned Viper Spears Other Animals

The Horned Viper Spears Other Animals

Best-known Egyptian cobra is the so-called “spitting serpent” or Libyan asp. It supposedly has the ability to spit in the eyes of its enemies, such as dogs, and the saliva temporarily blinds the victims. The cobra was a sacred animal in ancient Egypt. It was associated with the sun and with royalty. It formed part of the head dress of solar deities and was represented in the crowns of kings and queens. Toward the end of the 20th dynasty, when it became the custom to preserve sacred animals, it w

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The World of Insects

The World of Insects

The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote of ants in the Himalayas “the color of a cat and as large as an Egyptian wolf.” Pliny naively had accepted tales of travellers but the actual curiosities of the insect world are almost as strange as anything he related. There are bugs that live in ice, bugs that are happy only in near boiling water, snow white bugs that dwell deep in the earth, bugs that make their homes in petroleum pools. None are as big as wolves, but the insect world has its giants as well as

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Gigantic Serpents of the Sky

Gigantic Serpents of the Sky

Titanic pink serpents coiled and wheeled in the sky. The earth below was plunged in a chill twilight as they shut out the December sun. These cosmic reptiles were two or three miles long. They moved about a mile a minute. They made a noise like a tornado punctuated with the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Thus the naturalist John Audubon described a mass passenger pigeon flight over Kentucky which, he estimated, included more than a billion birds. As they came out of the northeast they looked like

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The Limbless Lizard

The Limbless Lizard

A supposedly welcome guest in the underground chambers of leaf cutter ants is the amphisbaena, a nearly limbless lizard about a foot long which looks something like a gigantic earth worm. This creature, seldom seen, ranges from northern Brazil to lower California. When out of its habitat the amphisbaena is almost helpless and moves along the ground with feeble wriggles. Some species lay eggs; other give birth to living young....

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The Maddening Tarantula

The Maddening Tarantula

The tarantula of southern Europe—a large, hairy spider—long was credited with causing a weird, infectious madness by its bite. The first reported effect of its poison—actually quite mild—is said to have been to put the victim into a deep lethargy from which he could be roused only by music which set into motion an overpowering impulse to get up and dance. Once the victim started to dance he could not stop until he fell to the ground from exhaustion. Then the condition supposedly was cured for a

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A Flower That Grows Through Solid Ice

A Flower That Grows Through Solid Ice

A plant that drills through several inches of solid ice to bloom in early spring is the blue moonwort of the Swiss Alps. It belongs to the primrose family. In autumn it develops thick, leathery leaves. These lie flat on the ground, expectant of the snow and ice sheet that may cover them to a depth of several feet. When spring arrives and the hot sun melts most of the snow and some of the ice, water trickles down to the rootlets and arouses growth in the sleeping plant. Internal combustion ensues

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The Versatile Ant Farmers

The Versatile Ant Farmers

There are microscopic “farmers” whose fields are measured in fractions of inches. They are ants—the most widespread fungus-growers in the Western Hemisphere. Their range extends from Florida to Brazil. They are tiny creatures, seldom noticed, who cultivate a species of yeast which is their sole food. The ways of life of this curious ant with the formidable scientific name of cyphomyrmex rimosus minutus, have been studied throughout their habitat by Dr. Neal A. Weber of Swarthmore College. “The a

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Ostracoderms: Ancestors of True Fish

Ostracoderms: Ancestors of True Fish

The race of fish first appeared about 350,000,000 million years ago in the Silurian geological era. It was made up of grotesque, clumsy, heavily armored animals who crawled over the ooze of the sea bottoms with very little, if any, capacity to rise or propel themselves in the water. The ascent from such an unpropitious beginning to the swift, graceful swimmers of today is one of the wonder stories of evolution. These Silurian animals were the ostracoderms. They belonged to the general fish compl

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The Ever Faithful Hornbills

The Ever Faithful Hornbills

Lady hornbills are trusting wives and gentlemen hornbills are unbelievably faithful husbands. The hornbills are birds with enormous beaks. They have the size of small turkeys and are usually found in pairs in the forests of East Africa. They are perhaps best known from the curious instinctive behavior of the female. Before laying her annual quota of two eggs she walls herself with mud, collected by the male, into a hole near the top of some high jungle tree. There one of the eggs—apparently seld

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Ants With Tailor Skills

Ants With Tailor Skills

Ants developed the craft of sewing long before humans. There are species of tailor ants in Australia, Africa and India that have distinctly ingenious habits. They make nests of leaves sewed together with silken threads, secreted by their own larvae, which they use both as needles and shuttles. When the nest is torn in any way certain soldiers and workers, apparently specialized for this particular job, rush to the scene. The soldiers arrange themselves to protect the workers. These first try to

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Fiend Symphonies of the Jungle

Fiend Symphonies of the Jungle

Out of green jungle depths at sunrise rises the choral hymn of the damned. It is a symphony of earth’s evil, of ancient dinosaurs and flying reptiles, of vampires and witches. It comes from the throats of jet-black, long-bearded, fiend-like creatures wearing red shawls. They are the howler monkeys. The world’s loudest-mouthed bluffers and braggarts are these dwellers in the high treetops. They swear in an ancient tongue evolved over centuries for the effective cursing of hovering white hawks, bl

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Tyrants of the Polychaete Race

Tyrants of the Polychaete Race

Knight-warriors and Amazons of the worm world are the aphroditids. They are the aristocrats and tyrants of the polychaete race. Like the oriental Aphrodite whose name they bear—she was the mythical goddess of love and war who rose from the sea foam armed with golden spears which were the rays of the moon and sun she personified—they crawl over the beach sands resplendent in a bristling panoply of gold and green. Heavily armed for both offense and defense, their prey are all living things remotel

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Eating Habits of Spiders

Eating Habits of Spiders

Spiders digest most of their food before eating. They must subsist on a liquid diet. A powerful digestive fluid from the stomach is discharged on the prey. This completely liquifies the soft tissues. So potent is this fluid that spiders sometimes can devour small back-boned animals, such as fish and lizards, which they kill with their poison fangs. One African species can liquify almost completely a fish two inches long in less than three hours. Another has been observed in captivity to dispose

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The Suicide Instinct of Iguanas

The Suicide Instinct of Iguanas

Some iguanas seem to have the ability to commit suicide without any visible means. Some of these lizards, hitherto unknown to science, captured alive and uninjured in Cuba by Dr. Paul Bartsch of the Smith sonian Institution, died a few minutes later as if a mere wish to end their lives were sufficient to achieve death. “These iguanas are vegetable feeders,” Dr. Bartsch recorded in his field notes. “They are fairly tame and persisted in chasing the nooses on the ends of our sticks, instead of run

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Forests That Eat Meat

Forests That Eat Meat

Relic groves of the great meat-eating forests of 150,000,000 years ago still thrive on the floors of deep, warm seas. These are made up of plant-animals—predacious trees with red blood and hearts—the crinoids. There are about 700 extant, compared to more than a thousand extinct, species. For a hundred million years they were among the ocean’s dominant life forms. Fossil crinoids, or “stone lilies,” make up great marble beds in both American and Europe. In 1934 the Smithsonian Johnson expedition

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Cave-Dwelling Birds

Cave-Dwelling Birds

True creature of night is the guacharo, or “oil bird”, of northern South America. It is reddish-brown, about the size of a barnyard hen. Excessive layers of fat built up about its abdomen formerly were valued highly by natives for eating purposes, resulting in the slaughter of countless thousands every year. The guacharo spends its days a half mile or more deep in the interior of mountain caves. Here it roosts and builds its nests in crevices high in the rock walls. It leaves in groups of twenty

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Where Snails Become Flowers

Where Snails Become Flowers

The lowly snail reaches an apotheosis—rivalling flowers and butterflies as an expression of nature’s artistry—in Cuban forests. Delicate sunrise tints of pink, blue, violet, green and yellow make the shells of two or three genera of tree-dwelling mollusks like rare jewels. Most conspicuous are snails of the genus Polymita, confined to the Oriente province. Here they cover some trees so completely that the effect is like that of a tree of flowers. Only upon close observation can one detect that t

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Termites That Eat Lead

Termites That Eat Lead

On Barro Colorado island in the Panama Canal Zone the Smithsonian Institution maintains an “experimental cemetery.” It consists of rows of upright posts which look like gravestones, half buried in the soil. The purpose is to test the propensities of the island’s 42 species of termites—just about man’s most persistent and expensive enemy in the tropics—to eat different kinds of wood impregnated with different kinds of repellants and poisons. To date approximately 35,000 tests have been made. The

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The Plant That Eats Animals

The Plant That Eats Animals

There are life-and-death battles in the microscopic world between tiny shelled animals and flesh-devouring fungi. The phenomenon can be compared to that of a tree catching and eating big turtles. When a culture of diseased plant roots is made, there soon appear great numbers of microscopic plants and animals—bacteria, fungi, amoebae, nematodes and other life forms. Immediately the struggle for survival starts. The animals try to eat the plants and the plants attempt to devour the animals. Among

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The Ocean’s Sound Barrier

The Ocean’s Sound Barrier

A densely woven carpet of life covers the floor of the world of light under the sea—just below the level reached by the most penetrating rays of the sun. It is a carpet of many colors and of flashing lights, the strands of its texture rapidly moving, predaceous, warring organisms. They probably are a mixture of lantern-carrying fish, ten-tentacled squid with malevolent red eyes, and small, luminous, shrimp-like creatures known as euphasids. Their nature can only be deduced by the echoes of sound

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Snakes That Act and Look Like Worms

Snakes That Act and Look Like Worms

There are snakes that look like snarls of six-inch-long pieces of wrapping twine. These worm snakes are the world’s closest imitators of worms. Among the most secretive of living things, they rarely come in contact with man. When they are seen they usually are mistaken for worms. Only zoologists can put them in their true families. These living strings live exclusively under the earth, sometimes in tangled snarls of scores of individuals. They are the smallest of snakes. Their closest relatives,

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A Porcupine of the Sea

A Porcupine of the Sea

Among the weirdest creatures of the deep is also one of the latest to become known to science—the sea urchin (closely related to star fish) astropyga magnifica. It is the largest sea urchin yet found in the Atlantic. It has approximately 200 bright blue eyes arranged in double rows. The body is covered with several hundred sharp, barbed black spines nearly a foot long. That so conspicuous an animal, living in such a densely populated region—one of the most intensively studied in the world by bio

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Worms That Are Unkillable

Worms That Are Unkillable

In nematodes life may have reached its greatest capacity for survival. The remarkable persistence of these soil worms has been studied by C. W. McBeth, researcher of the Shell Oil Company. One form, he reports, has been known to survive after 25 years in a glass bottle in a laboratory. Another, a pest of wheat kernels, apparently came back to life after 28 years in laboratory storage. A nematode which had invaded a rye plant, collected in Kansas in 1906, revived after 39 years of complete dehydr

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The Remarkable Brachiopods

The Remarkable Brachiopods

A part of the fantastic living world of 200,000,000 years ago has been dissolved out of about thirty tons of yellowish-brown limestone by a Smithsonian paleontologist. The rock comes from a low mountain range in southwestern Texas—the Glass Mountains, about 250 miles east of El Paso. During the Permean geological period, when some of the earliest known forms of animal life appeared on land, the site of the Glass Mountains was a muddy bottom, probably close to the shore of a warm sea. A bewilderi

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Feathers on Birds Adapt to the Seasons

Feathers on Birds Adapt to the Seasons

There is a definite seasonal variation in the number of feathers on most birds. It amounts to a “natural adjustment in dress to the needs of the season”. This fact has been determined through the laborious process of actually counting the feathers of birds of the same species at different seasons. The number of feathers declines steadily from early spring until the end of summer when the so-called “post-nuptial” moult takes place, after which the bird gets a new coat to last it a year. The bulk

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Why the Dodo Became Extinct

Why the Dodo Became Extinct

Smithsonian ornithologists have “rebuilt” a dodo. The dodo was a large, pigeon-like, flightless bird which was abundant on Mauritius and neighboring islands in the Indian ocean during the seventeenth century. It became a symbol—first of stupidity and later of extinction. In its restricted environment it apparently had known no serious enemies prior to the coming of man. It had grown heavy, taken to a ground existence, and lost the ability to fly. It showed no fear of man and, because of its clum

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The Shark of the Soil

The Shark of the Soil

There is a protozoan, wormlike monster of the microscopic world, seen only about forty times in two centuries, which gobbles up its fellow one-celled creatures a hundred at a time, walks backwards and forwards at once, and hunts in packs. It is fifty times the size of the most familiar of one-celled animals, the paramecia, which constitute the dominant population (in numbers) of the invisible creation. It moves among the paramecia like a giant, flesh-eating dinosaur among humans. It is a cumbers

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The Eerie Eyes of Animals at Night

The Eerie Eyes of Animals at Night

He uses a reflecting headlamp, similar to a hand flashlight, worn on the forehead and connected with a three-cell battery in his pocket or attached to his belt. This is necessary because the rays of reflected light must parallel closely the line of sight of the observer. The “shines” range in color from pale silvery through silver, blue-green, pale gold, gold, reddish gold, brown, and amber to pink, with a range of intensity from dull to very brilliant. The eyes of alligators and crocodiles “giv

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World of the Blind

World of the Blind

There is a fifth realm of life—the wet, heavy, black darkness of limestone caves whose chambers, ponds and streams harbor almost a hundred species of worms, pseudo-worms, fish, insects and salamanders which have become adapted to life in this cheerless world over millions of generations. Nearly all are white and blind. Blind white fish chase and eat blind white worms. Blind white spiders spin nets to trap blind, white flies. All are sluggish creatures. Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave alone contains appr

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The Remarkable Clam Worms

The Remarkable Clam Worms

Fantastic giant of the nemertinean race is Cerebratulus lactus, commonly known as “the clam worm” along the Atlantic Coast from Florida to Massachusetts. It is from ten to twelve feet long, can contract to two feet, and is an inch wide. Its favorite dwelling is a burrow six to eight inches below the surface, usually in an old mussel bed among broken shells and stones where it is almost impossible to sink a clam hoe. Outside the burrows it is seldom seen except occasionally at high tide, gliding

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Winged Reptile

Winged Reptile

The largest flying animal the world has known was a winged reptile, the pterodactyl, of a hundred million years ago. It had a wing spread of more than twenty feet, supporting in the air a body which would hardly have weighed more than thirty pounds. Its head was nearly four feet long with a dagger-like, narrow, pointed toothless beak. It lived around the ancient sea which once extended northwestward from the present Gulf of Mexico through most of Kansas. Presumably it lived entirely on fish and

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Vicious Fire Ants

Vicious Fire Ants

One of the most vicious of insects is the fire ant of South America—a small red ant whose sting burns like the point of a red hot pin pushed into the skin. Hordes of these creatures have forced the populace to abandon Brazilian towns. The soil of a village can be completely undermined by the ants. The ground is thoroughly perforated by the entrances to their subterranean galleries. “The houses are overrun by them,” says Edward Bates in A Naturalist on the Amazon . “They dispute every fragment of

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The Architectural Genius of Birds

The Architectural Genius of Birds

Birds rival ants and termites as architects. One species builds nests as big as small human dwellings—as much as 25 feet long, 15 feet wide and ten feet high. This is the sociable weaver bird of the desert western areas of South Africa. Such an apartment house, woven out of sticks and straw, may contain as many as 95 individual nests. It is the community product of a flock of from 75 to 100 pairs. The sheer bulk of the nesting material gathered is striking evidence of the impelling year-round ur

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The Ferocious Leech Worms

The Ferocious Leech Worms

Armies of billions of ferocious worms defended and preserved a fabulous 1,000-year-old Arabian Nights kingdom for three centuries. This kingdom was templed Kandy in the center of Ceylon, encircled by low, densely forested mountains. It was the site of one of the most picturesque ancient civilizations of the Orient which had degenerated into a brutal despotism when the first European invaders, the Portuguese, came to the island early in the sixteenth century. Armed with arquebuses, the white man

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The Complex Spider’s Web

The Complex Spider’s Web

A single strand of a spider’s web may consist of several thousand separate filaments. On the creature’s abdomen are four to six teat-like organs. Each secretes through several hundred extremely minute tubes a viscous fluid which hardens immediately when exposed to air. The spider attaches its abdomen to some solid object and pulls out the threads by moving its body forward. The hind feet are used to bring the hundreds of filaments into a single thread....

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Monsters of the Deep: The Great Squids

Monsters of the Deep: The Great Squids

Giants of the mollusk family and about the most loathsomely fantastic creatures on earth are the great squids. One may weigh as much as half a ton. The largest known specimen, a replica of which is among the Smithsonian Institution exhibits, was 55 feet long. It had ten arms, two of them approximately 35 feet long and two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Its eye measured seven by nine inches. Many strange sea serpent stories have been told by persons who merely saw a writhing arm of one of these c

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The Vanishing Whippoorwill

The Vanishing Whippoorwill

Probably not one person in a thousand has ever seen a whippoorwill. Its melancholy song is one of the most familiar chords in the symphony of the summer evening but to the majority of listeners it is only a disembodied voice in the dark. The singer has come about as near to achieving invisibility as any living creature. The whippoorwill is a migrant bird, spending its winters in Florida and its summers from March to October in the north. It travels entirely at night, sometimes in large flocks. I

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Ants Can Smell Almost Anything

Ants Can Smell Almost Anything

The sense of smell is remarkably acute in all ants—at least equalling that of dogs. The outstanding ant odor is that of formic acid, which is somewhat like that of illuminating gas, exuded from the bodies of all species. But this is only the smell of the race. It must be subject to an infinite number of variations to most of which ants alone are sensitive. They know their comrades, even after a long separation. Famed naturalist Sir John Lubbock once returned some ants to their old nest after a s

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Fish That Fish For Fish

Fish That Fish For Fish

There are fish that fish for fish with worms. That is, they use wormlike appendages of their own bodies, developed through millenia of evolution, to catch worm-eating fellow fishes. This curious quirk of fishing fish is revealed in a bulletin of the International Oceanographic Foundation. The practice is confined to the pediculati, known as angler fishes. The best known of them lies on the bottom partially concealed in sand or mud. One of the spines of its dorsal fin is extended in the form of a

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Worms That Are Flowers

Worms That Are Flowers

There are carnation worms and chrysanthemum worms. There are fairy gardens of worm asters and cornflowers at the bottom of the sea. Pink, red, purple, green, and yellow petals are tentacles of worms whose tube-encased bodies, stems of the flowers animals, are buried in inshore bottom ooze or mud-filled rock crevices. Among these worms are masons and architects that build the houses in which they pass their lives brick by brick and pebble by pebble, with an exquisite craftsmanship hardly rivaled

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The Heavy Toll of Bird Migrations

The Heavy Toll of Bird Migrations

A migration that takes a toll of millions of lives takes place every year between North and South America. Dr. Alexander Wetmore of the Smithsonian has had the experience of standing on a lonely beach on the coast of Venezuela and actually watching North American birds arrive at the end of their gruelling journey, exhausted and emaciated. Every day over his camp on the shore passed familiar birds from home—sandpipers, yellowlegs, bobolinks, barn swallows and warblers. “There was brought to me mo

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Deadly Snakes That Take Life Easy

Deadly Snakes That Take Life Easy

Deadliest of serpents are the Pacific sea snakes. A bite almost certainly would be fatal to a human being. Yet native children of the Palau Islands in the South Pacific play with these reptiles with complete impunity. They pick them up and toss them from one to another just as American children play “catch.” Natives of the Palaus look upon the reptiles with complete indifference. The term “sea snake” is somewhat of a misnomer. Actually the creatures spend most of their days asleep among rocks on

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Weird Plant-Animals

Weird Plant-Animals

Near the bottom of life’s pyramid there is a weird race of plant-animals. They are among the closest of all many-celled living things to the primaeval protoplasm from which all life arose. They are the slime molds found on decaying logs and tree stumps in damp woods or on piles of rain-soaked dead leaves in shady gardens. The nightmarish mycetozoa—botanists call them myxomycetes—are timeless survivals out of living creation’s dank, warm cradle. Some of the weirdest imaginings of malevolent life

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Weird Ways of Birds

Weird Ways of Birds

Among the most fantastic forms of animal behavior is that of the honey guides, African birds distantly related to the American woodpeckers. They “guide” men, baboons and ratels to the nests of wild honeybees—supposedly so that these nests will be broken open. Throughout the three centuries since the unusual behavior of the bird was first reported by a Portuguese missionary it has been the subject of many fantastic accounts, some of which attribute a far higher degree of intelligence to the birds

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The Fantastic Sea Horse

The Fantastic Sea Horse

A fish with the head of a Lilliputian horse, the tail of a monkey, the shell of a beetle and the pouch of a kangaroo...a creature that reverses the ordinary course of nature in that “child bearing” is exclusively a function of the male....Perhaps in no other animal have been packed so many anomalies as in the little hippocampus, popularly known as the “sea horse”. These weird creatures are almost world-wide in their distribution through ocean waters where there are growths of sea vegetation. The

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The Great Seal Migrations

The Great Seal Migrations

The great annual northward migration of the seals is one of the most remarkable phenomena of animal life. It seems to be without organization and without leadership, yet toward the end of March each year the hundreds of thousands of cow seals and pups scattered over thousands of square miles of water start at about the same time in three great groups bound for three specific places. It has been the same for centuries, perhaps millenia. Each animal moves at about the same rate so that all arrive

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Monsters With Buzz Saws

Monsters With Buzz Saws

“But if, retaining sense and sight, we could shrink into living atoms and plunge under water, of what a world of wonder would we form part. We would find this fairy kingdom peopled with the strangest creatures—creatures that swim with their hair, have ruby eyes blazing deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly into their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. Here are some riding at anchor, moored by delicate threads spun out from their own to

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Two-Headed Snakes Aren’t Rare

Two-Headed Snakes Aren’t Rare

Two-headed snakes probably are quite common. About 200 cases have been reported. Dr. Bert Cunningham of Duke University, who has studied several living specimens, has this to report about such snakes: “The heads play together, fight over a morsel of food even though it will go into the same stomach through either mouth, attempt to swallow one another, and sometimes fight fatal duels. Each head has a brain of its own. Few grow to any size. In this case two heads are not better than one, especiall

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Fantastic Sea Creatures

Fantastic Sea Creatures

Coral-forested waters around the Gilbert and Mariana Islands in the Pacific are yielding some of the most fantastic sea creatures known to science. Extensive collections have been made since the war by Dr. Leonard P. Schultz, Smithsonian curator of fishes. Notable in the collections are snake, worm and moray eels, all bottom dwellers in tropical waters. Snake eels are, as the name indicates, superficially almost indistinguishable from serpents. On their tails they have hard points which are used

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The Varieties of Raven Language

The Varieties of Raven Language

While “nevermore” apparently is not in the vocabulary of the raven this big black bird of the wilder parts of the country has a considerable variety of sounds nearly as ominous. Raven “language” has been intensively studied by the noted ornithologist, Dr. Arthur Cleveland Bent. Citing various bird observers, he lists the following calls: A distinct, hollow, sepulchral laugh, haw-haw-haw-haw, which may be heard at almost any time. A series of “crawks” sounded while on the wing, interspersed with

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Worms With Hypodermic Needles

Worms With Hypodermic Needles

Despite their microscopic size, nematodes (soil worms), are highly organized animals. They have muscles, quite specialized organs for feeding, a digestive system, a nervous system with a brain, and a well-developed reproductive system. Sexes are clearly differentiated. The creatures have evolved a long way from the primeval worm. Eggs may be deposited in the soil, or in the plant on which the nematode feeds. In these eggs the immature forms, the larvae, develop and eventually hatch. If appropria

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The Fatal Black Widow Spider

The Fatal Black Widow Spider

The venom of the dreaded Black Widow spider is approximately fifteen times more potent than that of the rattlesnake. The comparison has been established by determining the amounts of rattlesnake and spider venom necessary to kill rats of the same weight. The extreme toxicity of the spider becomes of considerable significance since it has been reported from every state in the Union and may be increasing in numbers on the edges of cities. Probability of being bitten, however, is slight. The black

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Plants That are Animated

Plants That are Animated

Among the curiosities often sold in American stores are so-called “air plants”—plants that will grow on air alone without sunshine or water. This is true, after a fashion. The “plants” actually are dried skeletons of marine animals. They belong to the group which includes the jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. Their skeletons have a striking resemblance to plants. The species most commonly sold is sea moss or Neptune’s fern, an animal abundant in the North Atlantic, especially in the English ch

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The Tomato—Cinderella of Vegetables

The Tomato—Cinderella of Vegetables

A remarkable chapter in the history of agriculture is the story of the tomato which now constitutes one of this country’s major crops. It appears to have first been used as a food by the Aztecs. It was introduced into Spain early in the 16th century and a century later was grown widely in England as an ornamental plant. Not until the next century, however, did it have any standing as a food. It was known as the “love apple” and was considered mildly poisonous. Folks ate one now and then on “dare

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The Holiest Place on Earth

The Holiest Place on Earth

The summit of Adam’s Peak in south-central Ceylon, wrapped perpetually in priestly robes of grey clouds, is one of the holy places of the earth. There, through many centuries, the prayers of millions belonging to warring creeds have worn thin the curtain between the effable and the ineffable. It is a shrine of four of the world’s great religions. In the rock is a depression that looks like a giant’s footprint. Hindus believe it was made by snake-haired Siva, the destroyer. Moslems say it is the

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The Vanishing Golden Carpet

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 it

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Evolution of the Bird

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

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Speed Ace of the Air

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. F

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The Remarkable Instincts of the Silk Worm

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 Wil

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The Strange World of the Sea

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

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The Cannibal Birds of the Pacific

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 lo

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Eagles as Indian Pets

Eagles as Indian Pets

The proud eagle was once kept as a “domestic animal.” Memories of this practice have been obtained from the Shoshoni Indians of the Nevada desert. As recently as fifty years ago individual Indians owned eagle aeries in the mountains. These constituted about the only private property recognized by the tribe and rights were zealously maintained. Expert climbers who scaled the cliffs took the young eagles from their nests. They were subsequently reared in cages or tied to rocks. The purpose was to

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The Giant Insects of the Carolines

The Giant Insects of the Carolines

Giant walking sticks seven to nine inches long, titan spiders that walk on water, little black crickets that dive and swim long distances under water are some of nature’s curiosities on mountainous, jungle-covered Kusaie, easternmost of the Caroline Islands. Especially unusual are the winged-blue-and-green walking sticks with their fantastic hand-over-hand way of walking. Among the largest of all insects is a walking stick found on the nearby island of Truk. It is reddish-brown and wingless with

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The Valley Where Dusk is Death

The Valley Where Dusk is Death

A belt of poison night where death strikes with the dusk extends down the western slope of the Peruvian Andes. This death belt, first reported by a Spanish physician in 1630, consists of a few narrow valleys at an elevation of from 3,000 to 8,000 feet in an arid, very desolate and sparsely inhabited country. Nearly everyone who spends a night there is afflicted a few days later by a severe anemia which often proves fatal. This is the “verruga” disease. The red blood cell count drops very rapidly

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Enigma of Evolution: the Snake

Enigma of Evolution: the Snake

Snakes once had legs. There is evidence in their anatomy that they are descended from four-legged land animals. This evidence is found especially in certain bones near the base of the tail of one of the largest of living snakes, the python, which is the most primitive of the order and presumably nearest to the hypothetical ancestor. Although the snake remains an enigma of evolution, there is no doubt that it got rid of its legs because they were a distinct hindrance to its peculiar ways of life.

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The Fastest Growth on Earth

The Fastest Growth on Earth

In the beginning was vestureless life. It was the capacity for self perpetuation and growth in nature, the property of a single complex chemical mixture—protoplasm. This protoplasm may have come here from another star, a single grain of cosmic dust blown out of the infinite. It may have been mixed by chance in the warm seas of the earth at the beginning of time. It may have been put together according to the design of some cosmic intelligence. It tended to segregate into billions of trillions of

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Birds That Duel

Birds That Duel

Birds that hold fencing tournaments are the big-billed toucans of Barro Colorado Island, the Smithsonian Institution’s tropical preserve in Gatun Lake, Panama Canal Zone. They fence with their formidable beaks but seem careful not to hurt one another. One scientist who studied Barro Colorado’s bird life described the birds as follows: “I saw fourteen toucans scattered about in a big leafless tree in the center of the jungle. Two appeared to be fencing. They stood in one spot and fenced with thei

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Brakes on Plant Life

Brakes on Plant Life

There is a “brake” on plant development—perhaps one of nature’s most fundamental controls over surging life. It is a relatively narrow band of light on the edge of the invisible infrared in the solar spectrum. Plant life, and through plants all life, is tied intimately to certain solar wave bands. It has long been recognized that the cornerstone of all life on earth is the process of photosynthesis by which plants, through energy provided by sunlight, are able to synthesize carbohydrates from wa

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Snails Are the Flowers of the Sea

Snails Are the Flowers of the Sea

There are more than 80,000 kinds of snails in the world. They swim, jump, crawl, burrow, live at the bottom of the sea and in the tops of trees. They range in size from the horse conch of Florida, two feet long, to animals hardly the size of a grain of sugar. About half of all species live in the seas. Most are bottom dwellers, unable to swim, but several spend their lives on the surface. One, the purple janthina, floats upside down on a raft of air bubbles trapped in a special kind of mucous wh

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The Brutal South Pole Birds

The Brutal South Pole Birds

The southernmost birds on earth—the only higher animal except man and his dogs that go close to the South Pole—are the Antarctic skuas. They are fierce, brutal little killers. Dwellers in the earth’s most inhospitable habitat, they have been able to survive largely because of their extreme rapaciousness. All other Antarctic birds, such as the penguins, stay close to the shore of the desolate continent. The skua has been seen at least 300 miles inland, and occasionally may fly across the pole its

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Silk-Bearded Clams

Silk-Bearded Clams

Jason’s golden fleece may have been woven from the beard of a silk-bearded clam. The same sort of cloth, in fact, still is produced on a small scale in Italy, chiefly for the tourist trade. A silk glove of modern manufacture now is in the Smithsonian collections. The clam is a giant Mediterranean species, the pinna marina. Its shell reaches a maximum length of about three feet, but the average is less than half this. From a gland in its “foot” it secretes milk-like strands with which it attaches

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Pearls Grow in Brooks

Pearls Grow in Brooks

Excellent pearls occur occasionally in fresh water clams. A pearl of perfect form and pure color was found in such a clam taken from a brook near Paterson, New Jersey, in 1857. It sold at Tiffany’s for $1,000 and shortly afterwards was resold in Paris for $2,200. This started pearl hunts in brooks all over the country. On the arrival of Europeans in Florida, Louisiana and Virginia, fabulous legends were circulated about the enormous treasures to be obtained by plundering Indian graves. A contemp

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Grasshopper-Infested Glaciers

Grasshopper-Infested Glaciers

Among America’s natural curiosities are “grasshopper glaciers.” These are great masses of glacial ice containing layers of imbedded, frozen grasshoppers. Such layers are probably remnants of vast migrations which have taken place at irregular intervals over several centuries. Great hordes of the insects either flew over the glacier or were carried there by winds, and while there sudden snow storms or cold air rising from the ice field caused them to drop. They were imbedded so quickly in the fal

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Monster Clams of Polynesia

Monster Clams of Polynesia

Largest of clams and largest of all shellfish is a native of Polynesian seas. The two halves may weigh as much as 500 pounds. The flesh is eaten raw by natives. The interior of the shell is like polished marble. Such shells frequently were used as founts for holy water in European churches. A particularly large one attracted much attention in the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris. Such clams are found at depths up to 17 fathoms. They fasten themselves to rocks by a process so tough that it can only

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Corals Combine Plants and Animal Life

Corals Combine Plants and Animal Life

A coral reef is a gigantic “plant-animal.” It is a community of countless billions of plants and countless billions of animals which act as a single organism, like the countless millions of specialized cells that make up the body of a man or a mouse. It is probably the most efficient of all earthly creatures. It is self-sufficient, creating its own constant food supply. It is essentially immortal. It is hungry like an animal. It is motionless like a plant. It is both and combines the attributes

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The First Engineers—Termites

The First Engineers—Termites

Termite civilization probably has reached its greatest heights in architecture and engineering. Australian mounds, built by workers out of earth particles cemented together by a salivary gland secretion, are steeple-shaped, as much as twenty feet high, and with bases twelve feet in diameter. Hundreds of such structures may be scattered over a few acres. Such an assemblage looks like a large native village, although architecturally the structures are far beyond the abilities of primitive man. The

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Oyster Oddities

Oyster Oddities

An oyster can change its sex several times during its life. This has been determined by Dr. Paul Galtsoff of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service by observing an experimental colony. In the first year 8% of the males changed to females and 13% of the females became males. In the second year 11% of the males changed sex and 12% of the females. One sex change, Dr. Galtsoff found, makes the same individual more likely to undergo another. A single Pacific coast oyster produces approximately 10,000,00

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The World’s Biggest Sneeze

The World’s Biggest Sneeze

The sneeze of the elephant has been described as “like the bursting of a boiler of considerable size.” When the elephant feels the onset of one of these titanic eruptions it appears to realize that a momentous event is about to take place. It becomes extremely restless and is seemingly unable to stand still for a moment. The sneeze is preceded by a tremendous, wall-shaking bellow. Although elephants are subject to frequent colds the sneeze is a rare phenomenon. For this reason it is regarded as

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The Luminescent Ctenophores

The Luminescent Ctenophores

There are windless nights when Caribbean waters seem like fields of green fireflies. This is due to vast numbers of luminescent ctenophores or comb-bearers. One the most abundant and least known forms of animal life, they are also among the most delicate. Although they are related to the planarian worm and the jelly fish, they are quite unique. Superficially they seem little more than animate bags of water with skins thinner than the most delicate tissue paper. They abound in staggering numbers

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The Forest That Time Forgot

The Forest That Time Forgot

Knee-high red and pink ferns fill the jungle hollow. Around them are green leaves covered with parallel white lines in sets of five with dots on the lines which look like notes of music. These leaves are known as “music paper.” There is no record that anybody has tried to play the tunes nature has written on them. Mixed with them are “sandpaper leaves” with surfaces so rough that they are used locally for the same purpose as sheets of sandpaper elsewhere. Sinister hangman’s ropes swing, as if aw

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The Versatility of the Elephant’s Trunk

The Versatility of the Elephant’s Trunk

The elephant’s trunk is a tool surpassed in effectiveness only by the hand of man. It is a muscular prolongation of combined nose and upper lip, which have grown together. It is associated closely with the motor and sensory centers in the brain cortex and is under such delicate voluntary control that with its enormous strength is combined extreme fineness of movement. The trunk terminates in one of two fingerlike projections which seem capable of almost as delicate voluntary movements as are hum

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Fiendish Vampires of the Night

Fiendish Vampires of the Night

About the middle of the eighteenth century belief in vampirism spread like an epidemic across France and England. Dead men hellishly condemned to live forever came out of their sepulchres at midnight, took the forms of various animals, and feasted on the blood of the living (who, in turn, died and became vampires). This was a superstition which previously had been confined largely to Slavic countries. Its influence in France and England seems to have started with tales brought back from the New

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Remarkable Orchids

Remarkable Orchids

A flower that opens only in moonlight is one of Venezuela’s plant curiosities. It is an ivory white, velvety orchid with a dazzling blossom. For full fertilization it depends entirely on nocturnal butterflies which sip nectar while pollenization takes place. This curious flower is one of approximately 800 orchid species, some of them among the most beautiful in the world, which grow in Venezuela. Among these is probably the prettiest and rarest of all orchids, the mother-of-pearl flower which ca

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Nature’s Insecticide: The Millipede

Nature’s Insecticide: The Millipede

Far leas malevolent than the centipede—and probably a somewhat more primitive form of animal life—is the millipede or “thousand legs”. It is a strictly vegetarian creature that lives under stones, logs or in rotting tree trunks and feeds on soft roots, leaves and fruits. Millipedes are seldom seen. They shun light, although in the tropics they sometimes come out of their retreats after heavy rains and crawl over the ground. The animal has twenty to forty legs, two pair on each segment of the bod

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Bats Have Built-in Radar

Bats Have Built-in Radar

Bats “see” with their ears. Echoes of sounds inaudible to man enable the flying mammals to find their way through the almost absolute darkness of deep cavern or jungle. These creatures might be considered inventors of the Navy’s sonar device by which underwater obstacles are located by echoes—or even, in a sense, of radar. Almost entirely creatures of night and late twilight, bats have small and poorly developed eyes. When one is on the wing it emits an almost constant succession of inaudible “s

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Crabs That Climb Trees

Crabs That Climb Trees

A fantastic race of small, pale hermit crabs are the most numerous and conspicuous animal inhabitants of war-wrecked Pacific islands. The multitudes of these crustaceans may have a considerable role, beneficial and otherwise, in present efforts to cover these white sand wastes with grass and trees. Of all creatures which start life in the sea, hermit crabs have become best adapted to continual existence on land. Like others of their race they are shell-less and soft-bodied. For protection agains

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The Ferocious Centipede

The Ferocious Centipede

“Natives of Brazil call the centipede the ambua. These creatures of a thousand legs, some of which are more than a foot long, bend as they crawl along and are reckoned very poisonous. In their going it is observable that on each side of their bodies every leg has its motion, one regularly after the other; being numerous, their legs have a kind of undulation and thereby communicate to the body a swifter progression than one would imagine where so many short feet are to take so many short steps th

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The Plant That Makes Men Dumb

The Plant That Makes Men Dumb

A plant now being cultivated in the newly established botanical garden of the University of Caracas may prove to be nature’s greatest boon to pestered husbands and harassed mothers. It is described only under the popular Spanish name of “planta del mudo.” It looks like sugar cane. According to reliable reports anybody who chews the stem is stricken dumb for 48 hours. Other curiosities of the garden include a plant which allegedly can stimulate hair growth on bald heads and a bush whose blossoms

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The Scourge of the Earth: Locusts

The Scourge of the Earth: Locusts

From the days of the Hebrews prophets a visitation of locusts has been considered one of the plagues of God. A migration of millions of these grasshopper-like insects in clouds obscuring the sun leaves behind a countryside devastated as though by fire. In flight they sound like a forest fire being spread by a brisk wind. Whenever they come to earth areas of hundreds of square yards almost immediately are denuded of everything green. In history their raids have been associated chiefly with the Ne

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Trees Can Grow Smaller

Trees Can Grow Smaller

Trees change size from hour to hour. The circumference of a tree trunk gets bigger and smaller with unpredictable perversity. For light on this phenomenon the world is indebted to Dr. John A. Small of Rutgers University. About a decade ago tree scientists were provided with an instrument which could measure continuously the radial growth of a tree with an accuracy of a thousandth of an inch. With such an instrument it seemed plausible that it would be possible to tell just how much a tree had gr

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Underworld Cities

Underworld Cities

Seventeen-year locusts build great subterranean “cities” during their long sojourn in the earth’s depths. The years underground are by no means a resting period—an episode of being buried alive. All the time the young locusts, in various metamorphoses, are busy building and eating. The eggs of the strange insects are laid during a few weeks late in summer inside twigs. From these eggs come minute nymphs, which at once make their way into the ground. There they shed their shells and grow rapidly.

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Plants That Create Mirages

Plants That Create Mirages

An explorer in the desolate heights of the Santa Marta mountains in northeastern Colombia, fog-wrapped and 10,000 feet above sea level, may see a flock of sheep grazing placidly among rocks ahead of him. Then, looking the other way, he may see an assembly of cowled, robed priests, apparently in the midst of some weird ecclesiastical ceremony. But when he reaches the places where he thought he saw these things there are neither sheep nor priests. He finds instead two strange varieties of the aste

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The Octopus Worm: Evolution’s Mystery

The Octopus Worm: Evolution’s Mystery

Worms that give birth to their own grandchildren, animals that have no digestive, muscular, nervous, glandular or excretory organs—such paradoxical creatures are the “dicyemid mosozoans”, tiny worms that live inside octopuses. These little worms are among the most curious living things in nature. It is quite uncertain whether they are a step upward in evolution from the single-celled protozoans or, like some other worms, a degenerate form of many-celled animals. It might be maintained that they

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The Monster Bear of Kamchatka

The Monster Bear of Kamchatka

A gigantic black bear, probably the largest of flesh-eating animals, lives in the dense, hardly explored pine forests of southern Kamchatka. This creature still is unknown to science. So far as known it never has been seen by a white man. There is, however, considerable evidence for its existence presented in a report made several years ago by Dr. Sten Bergman of the State Museum of Natural History at Stockholm, who spent two years on the Kamchatka peninsula. Photographs have been taken of this

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Strange Denizens of the Deep

Strange Denizens of the Deep

Most fearsome of all sharks in appearance is Isistius braziliensis, found in the tropical Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. It is a wine-brown colored creature with sharp teeth set in 20 rows which glow at night with an unearthly light. “When the specimen, taken at night, was removed into a dark apartment it afforded a very extraordinary spectacle,” relates naturalist F. D. Bennett. “The entire inferior surface of the body and head emitted a vivid, greenish phosphorescent gleam, imparting to

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Communism Among the Bees

Communism Among the Bees

Honey bees have achieved an ideal communistic state. All the 50,000 or more members of a family—all progeny of a single queen—share and share alike. A single sample of sugar or nectar brought into the hive by a forager is participated in by all the bees. Thus all get essentially the same diet. They all acquire a common odor by which they can recognize each other. This odor constitutes a “scent language” which is the basis of the extremely complex bee social life. These observations, based on exp

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Candles on Bushes

Candles on Bushes

In parts of Colombia candles in the form of white, wax-like berries grow on bushes. These berries produce oil of such excellent quality that it is used almost exclusively for altar lamps in Catholic churches throughout the country. The berries grow abundantly on a jungle plant with leaves like those of rhubarb. In only one part of the country is the plant cultivated. It is a crop of the semi-hostile Paez Indians. Harvesting is somewhat difficult because the oil-containing white seed is inside a

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The Desert Rat Manufactures Water

The Desert Rat Manufactures Water

All animals require water in their bodies, but some can get it without actually drinking. The desert rat which lives among the bare sand dunes of California’s Death Valley, can get along indefinitely without water and with only dry barley seeds for food. In spite of this about 65 percent of its body weight is water. Most of the water is actually made in the animal’s body. The rat’s digestive processes extract the hydrogen contained in the barley seeds and combine it with oxygen in the air to cre

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The Caste System of the Termite

The Caste System of the Termite

The oldest civilization on earth is that of the termites. The super-organization which these blind white creatures of the dark have achieved precedes by thousands of millenia those of the ants and the bees. Termites have a far longer history on earth, being considered modifications of the ancient cockroaches who were among the first insects to leave any traces of their existence on land. Cockroaches swarmed in the club moss forests at least 250,000,000 years ago. The termite order is at least 30

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The Shark That Stands Upright

The Shark That Stands Upright

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

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The Dead Man’s Vine

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

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The Insect With Fourteen Lives

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 le

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Shyness Characteristic of Giant Rats

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....

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Nocturnal Potto

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

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Where Trees are Square

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 th

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The Lamp That is a Beetle

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....

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Rainstorms of Worms

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

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The Icy Arctic Wonderland

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, tra

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Fish That Live on Land

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 tod

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The Special Language of Bees

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 be

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Poisonous Platters of the Sea

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 s

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Our Un-American Food

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

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Worms That Commit Mass Suicide

Worms That Commit Mass Suicide

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

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Fish That Survive Freezing

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

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Plants That Kill

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. Th

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Caterpillars That Pretend to be Snakes

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 bu

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All Plants Are Luminous

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 f

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Worms That Live in the Snow

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

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The Strange Ways of Snails

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, slo

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Vision-Producing Plants

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.

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The Abominable Snow Man

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 appare

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Fish That Sing in the Moonlight

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 night

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Brazil’s Vicious Glow Worm

Brazil’s Vicious Glow Worm

One of the most unusual of all luminous creatures is an insect larva found by farmers ploughing damp soil in Brazil and Uruguay. It is a reddish-brown little worm with rows of green lights on both sides and a vivid red lamp on the front of its head. The red light is actually red—not white light shining through a reddish skin. Adult females of the species retain the same luminous pattern. Male adults have only feeble, yellow lights. The larva are extremely vicious little creatures, predators on w

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Grasshoppers Like Chameleons

Grasshoppers Like Chameleons

There is a jet-black grasshopper that turns sky-blue at sunrise. The curious creature is found on the summit of Mount Kosciusco, highest peak in Australia, where snow lingers into late summer and nights are bitter cold. The insect is of peculiar interest because of a temperature control mechanism otherwise unknown in nature. Several animals, notably chameleons and some fish, can change color, usually to match their environment. The changes are brought about by certain hormones, released by stimu

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Beetles That Helped an Army

Beetles That Helped an Army

During the invasion of Normandy in 1944 Army jeep drivers prohibited from using headlights of any sort, were able to follow winding country roads on the blackest nights by rows of millions of flashing green lights which outlined the roadsides. Wingless, wormlike female beetles, (Lampyris hoctiluca, the European glow worm) were trying to attract their winged, lightless mates. Their nocturnal lovemaking as they clung to roadside weeds and bushes was a far from insignificant factor in the Normandy

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Worms in Medical History

Worms in Medical History

Earthworms have an important place in folk medicine, especially in the Near East. Muzhatu-L-qylut of Hamd Allah, an ancient Persian natural history, states: “Earthworms are red worms living in the damp earth. Baked and eaten with bread they reduce the size of stones in the bladder. When dried and eaten they cure the yellowness of jaundice. In difficult labor they bring on delivery immediately. Their ashes applied to the head with oil of roses make the hair to grow.” Says a seventeenth century En

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Toads That Make Poison Gas

Toads That Make Poison Gas

Among the weirdest of American amphibians are certain of the giant toads of southwestern United States and northern Mexico which, when frightened or in pain, diffuse a deadly gas which will kill objects some distance away. A very large toad found almost everywhere throughout the Panama Canal Zone can squirt a poison which may permanently blind a man if it hits the eyes. Nobody would bother it except that from its skin is made of the softest and most expensive of all leather. Most toads have skin

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Plants That Thrive on Ice-Bloom

Plants That Thrive on Ice-Bloom

There are plants that grow in ice and snow. This phenomenon—known to botanists as cryovegetation—has been the subject of intensive study at Mt. McKinley National Park in Alaska. The plants are responsible for the strange phenomenon of ice-bloom. Ice fields at various seasons take strange colors. The plants are very minute members of the almost universal algae family which are among the most primitive forms of life on earth. They are able to extract the nourishment they require from the surface o

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Poison Arrow Frogs

Poison Arrow Frogs

There is a green frog, about the size of a half dollar, that is one of the most virulently poisonous creatures on earth—but only after it has been roasted alive. It is common at the Smithsonian Institution’s tropical wild life preserve in the Panama Canal Zone. When living it is quite harmless, at least to human beings although some believe it can poison other frogs. When it is roasted over a slow fire, however, a toxin is exuded from its skin which is a potent nerve and respiratory poison. It o

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The Seal That Can “Lose” Its Head

The Seal That Can “Lose” Its Head

An animal that can pull its head almost completely into its neck has recently been added to the mammal collections of the Smithsonian Institution. This is the Ross seal, one of the rarest of all the seal family in the Antarctic. A frozen specimen captured by the Navy’s polar expedition in 1956 arrived at the U. S. National Museum in Washington in excellent condition. This seal—about 8 feet long—dwells exclusively on the drifting ice pack of the Ross Sea. So far as is known it never comes on land

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The Delectable Horned Viper

The Delectable Horned Viper

All along the Nile and the Red Sea coast is found the horned viper which lives buried wormlike in the sand with only its eyes and the upper part of its head visible. Its horns are said to look like barley grains and to entice birds. It is found often in rodent holes. This horned viper is extremely tenacious of life. It has been kept alive in a glass jar, without food, for two years. It can hurl itself forward as much as three feet. A full-grown specimen is about 18 inches long and quite poisonou

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Flying Snakes, Frogs and Toads

Flying Snakes, Frogs and Toads

There are flying snakes as well as flying frogs and toads. Such reptiles and amphibians should be considered expert parachutists rather than actual flyers. The tree snakes dendrolaphis and chrysopelea leap from high limbs, stretched out lengthwise and both flatten and broaden the body so that it presents a concave surface. They glide to earth slowly, at an angle to the vertical, and land apparently without injury. Frogs of some species have enormous webs between the fingers and toes which serve

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Eagles Build Log Cabin Nests

Eagles Build Log Cabin Nests

The white-headed eagle became the national bird of the United States by act of Congress on June 20, 1782. For nearly two centuries it has remained the American symbol of fearlessness and freedom. The same bird—Haleoletus leucocephalus and not the more familiar golden eagle found in the West—had been the supreme totem animal of the Six Nations of the Iroquois from whom many institutions of the new republic indirectly may have been derived. This eagle still is fairly abundant in the fringes of for

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The Predatory Mantid

The Predatory Mantid

Why does the “praying mantid” pray? The prayerlike pose of this near relative of the cockroach is its normal position both for seizing its victims and for defending itself. For their size mantids are among the most predatory animals in existence. They are also among the least known of the insects. There are more than 1500 species in the world, mostly tropical. Only 19 are known in the United States which is on the northern fringe of their normal habitat. One of the most remarkable features of th

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Fireflies as Electricians

Fireflies as Electricians

The flashing of a field of fireflies is an expensive show. For two generations one of the ideals of science has been to produce artificially “cold light”—radiation confined entirely to those wavelengths to which the retina of the human eye is sensitive without any energy being wasted in the form of heat or invisible light. Could the ideal be attained with the same expenditure of fuel and power as is required for light production at present the world’s bills for illumination would be decreased en

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The Mollusk Vampire of Hell

The Mollusk Vampire of Hell

Black demon of the realm of everlasting dark is Vampyrotouthis infernalis. Most nightmarish of living animals, this “vampire of hell” has a midnight-black body about two inches long, red-brown round face on a head almost as large as the rest of the body, red eyes an inch in diameter encircled by narrow bands of pinkish-orange, rows of ivory white teeth, ten wriggling, ever-probing tentacles extending from the head. On the sides of the neck are two powerful, flashing lights each of which is a clu

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Climbing and Flying Frogs

Climbing and Flying Frogs

A family of frogs that climb trees, burrow and are learning to fly are the tree frogs of Mexican tropical forests. Various members of the family are at different stages in their physical adaptation to tree life. They constitute a striking example of evolution at work as a race struggles to shake itself free from one environment and conquer another despite considerable odds. The ends of the fingers and toes of those frogs are provided with adhesive disks by means of which the animals are able to

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Mad Dog Cycles

Mad Dog Cycles

There may be mad dog cycles. Dogs are much more vicious in June than in the so-called “dog-days” season of July and August. The tiny poodle and the pekingese share with the big German police dog and the Italian bull rank among the 10 most vicious of domestic canines. These are some of the conclusions reached by Dr. Robert Oleson of the U. S. Public Health Service on the basis of data about dogs in the metropolitan New York area for 27 years. During this period, Dr. Oleson’s study shows there wer

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The Amazing Survival of the Opossum

The Amazing Survival of the Opossum

The opossum, sole survivor in the New World of a primitive and very ancient family, represents an overlooked principle in evolution—survival by endurance. How this clumsy, persecuted animal has endured through millions of generations in the midst of savage and hungry foes is the subject of a revealing study by Dr. J. D. Black of the University of Kansas. Dr. Black examined closely the skeletons of 95 opossums in the university museum—all killed in the immediate vicinity. Thirty-nine of them gave

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Mammal Prototypes of the “Mermaid”

Mammal Prototypes of the “Mermaid”

The prototypes of the “mermaids” of legend are among the least known of all animals to naturalists because of their underwater habitat and their secretive habits. They are the manatees of the Caribbean region and the dugongs of the Indian Ocean. They constitute the only remaining species of the serenia, or moon creatures, distant relatives of the elephant. Both have a somewhat human facial appearance. They feed standing upright in the water, their flippers held out before them like arms. Sometim

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Limbless Lizards and Glass Snakes

Limbless Lizards and Glass Snakes

A supposedly welcome guest in the underground chambers of leaf cutter ants is the amphisbaena, a nearly limbless lizard about a foot long which looks somewhat like a gigantic earth worm. These creatures, seldom seen, can be found from Brazil north to lower California and there is one isolated species in Florida. “Those brought to me,” observed the noted British naturalist and explorer of Brazil, Henry Walter Bates, “were generally not much more than a foot in length. They are of cylindrical shap

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The Only Bug in the Sea

The Only Bug in the Sea

Only one group of insects has taken to the sea—the small, gray long-legged water striders. Unlike fresh water relatives of the same genus, these have permanently lost their wings. They have no further use for this means of movement in the ocean. Great numbers have been found floating and swimming in the open sea around Pacific islands. Both nymphs and adults sometimes are blown onto the beaches by strong winds. They are awkward on land, seek shelter in any depression in the sand, and fall easy p

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A Crocodile With Life After Death

A Crocodile With Life After Death

There is an animal that can bite—it might even slash off a man’s arm—after it is dead. Alive it is relatively inoffensive. Being killed makes it positively mad. Its uncanny ability to bite half an hour or more after its neck has been broken is a major risk for followers of one of the most adventurous of professions—the jungle crocodile hunters. Their story is a saga paralleling that of the Antarctic whalers who first told of Moby Dick. One of the most expert of them is Dr. Fred Medem, Smithsonia

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The Salamander That Lives Like a Worm

The Salamander That Lives Like a Worm

There is an animal related to the salamander and the frog which looks like a gigantic earthworm and lives an earthworm’s life. It is seen so rarely that probably not one person in a million is aware of its existence. It is the caecilian, a very ancient creature forming the third branch of the order of amphibians which were probably the first back-boned animals to establish themselves on land nearly 300,000,000 years ago. There are about fifty species. Caecilians are found in most of tropical Ame

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Three-eyed Lizards of New Zealand

Three-eyed Lizards of New Zealand

Among sun-baked rocks on barren islands off the New Zealand coast basks a solitary survivor of the days before the dinosaurs. It is earth’s oldest back-boned inhabitant, a fugitive in time from nature’s harsh law of the survival of the fittest—the tuatera, or three-eyed lizard. Its big, dreamy hazel eyes have watched the procession of the ages for 300,000,000 years—the beginning and extinction of the dinosaurs to whom it stood in about the relationship of a great uncle, the coming of birds and m

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Prodigious Fertility of Insects

Prodigious Fertility of Insects

The capacity of insects to reproduce is almost incalculable. A single over-wintering house fly theoretically might have 5,598,729,000,000 descendants in a single year. It has been calculated that a single cabbage aphis, which weighs less than a thirtieth of an ounce, might give rise in a year to a mass of descendants weighing 822,000,000 tons, about five times as much as all the people in the world. Fortunately nearly all insects have an enormous mortality rate....

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The Lizard That Runs Out of Its Own Skin

The Lizard That Runs Out of Its Own Skin

There is an animal that can get out of its own skin. It is a little brown lizard, a gecko, which lives in native houses on the Palau Islands in the South Pacific. This creature, about six inches long, is closely related to the house geckos, which are found throughout the tropical Pacific islands and as far north as Florida in the New World. The Palau species is almost impossible to capture by hand. Grabbed by the tail, it immediately sheds that organ. This is a rather common practice among certa

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High Living in the Himalayas

High Living in the Himalayas

The highest land-dwelling animals on earth are small, black attid spiders. They live in islands of broken rock on Mount Everest at an altitude of 22,000 feet. This is far above the line of perpetual snow and nearly a mile above the last vegetation. Since there is no other living thing near them, they have to eat one another for sustenance. Presumably their ranks always are being repleted by new arrivals from below. Highest of all living things are red-legged, black-feathered choughs, birds of th

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Barking Spider Monkeys

Barking Spider Monkeys

Barking spider monkeys that fight off unwelcome human invaders are dominant animals in the “green mansions” of Panama jungles. They live in semi-nomadic troops, each of which occupies a fairly restricted area of the forest, sometimes overlapping slightly with areas of other groups. Within their territory members of a troop wander freely, but their activities tend to center around food and lodge trees. In reporting on his observations of their activities Dr. C. R. Carpenter of Columbia stated: “A

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The Insect That is Born Pregnant

The Insect That is Born Pregnant

Among nature’s weirdest tricks is the strange phenomenon known as merokinosis, reported for a single family of almost microscopic insects. The little creatures are fathers and mothers before they are born. They are a species of mite which infests grass. They belong to a family which, almost alone among insects, gives birth to living young. Nearly all insects are egg layers. The eggs, usually deposited in enormous numbers, hatch outside the body of the mother. Then the individuals go through a se

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Bull-dog Animals

Bull-dog Animals

A repressed tendency towards the bulldog face apparently is deep-seated among mammals. Foxes, cattle and pigs with bulldog appearance have been reported. In three species of dogs—the bulldog, pug and the pug-nosed dog of ancient Peru—this characteristic is dominant. It could have been caused by a pronounced shortening of the rostral portion of the skull due to the failure of facial bones to develop....

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Foresight of Kangaroo Rats

Foresight of Kangaroo Rats

A recent report by Dr. William T. Shaw tells of observations of giant California kangaroo rats whose food consists largely of the seeds of pepper grass. The seeds are gathered busily all day and stored in shallow surface caches where they are dried by the dust and heat of the sun. During the night, the animals work busily removing the dried seed to much larger chambers deep underground where it is to be stored for the winter. In some way the highly intelligent animal has learned the secret of pr

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The Primitive Proturans

The Primitive Proturans

The proturans—blind, wingless minute bugs found under bark and in leaf litter—are earth’s most primitive insects. They are seldom seen and when they are noticed are likely to be mistaken for larvae of some other insect. So obscure are the creatures that they were not discovered until early in the present century. They are about a twentieth of an inch long, yellowish, and covered with a protective shell of chitin. Sluggish and slow-moving proturans have three pairs of legs, only two of which are

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Air-Conditioned Homes of Beavers

Air-Conditioned Homes of Beavers

Air ventilation of homes appears to be an engineering accomplishment of beavers. “The beaver hut seen from the outside,” according to Sigvald Salveson of Aamli, Nowayd, “appears to be so tight that it seems astonishing that the occupants can get sufficient air. In winter, when the lodge is covered with snow and ice one would not think it possible that the animals could live in apparently air-tight dwellings. Near my home is a small lake where a beaver built a dam and a great lodge. In the outlet

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The Demon of Puerto Rico

The Demon of Puerto Rico

In deep sunless ravines of Puerto Rico’s Pandura mountains dwells the demon frog. It is a ghostly voice from mountainsides strewn with great, decomposing granite boulders and so thickly covered with tropical vines and bushes that it is almost impenetrable to man. Until twenty years ago it was only a voice, for none of the strange little creatures ever had been seen. The mere sight of the animal, according to many of the natives, would be fatal. “One might as well try to bribe a mountaineer to ca

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Man-Made Plants

Man-Made Plants

At least a half dozen species of plants are man-made. They are hybrids which can transmit their basic and unique characters to future generations. The fact that what long was considered an impossibility in the plant kingdom has been achieved is revealed by Dr. H. Bentley Glass, professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University. With newly developed techniques which make possible the doubling of chromosomes, bunches of genes which are the units of heredity, the creation of species may be just at i

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The Great Seal Migration

The Great Seal Migration

The great annual northward migration of the seals is one of the most remarkable phenomena of animal life. It seems to be without organization and without leadership. Yet toward the end of March each year the hundreds of thousands of cow seals and pups scattered over thousands of square miles of water start at about the same time in three great groups bound for three specific places. It has been the same for centuries, perhaps milleniums. Each animal moves at about the same rate so that all arriv

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The Magic Bark of the Cinchona Tree

The Magic Bark of the Cinchona Tree

The shadow of a pale Spanish lady, dead for almost three centuries, has returned to the dense rain forests of the western slopes of the Andes. The shadow is that of the Countess of Chinchon, wife of the redoubtable Don Luiz Geronimo de Cabrera Bobadilla y Mendoza, colonial viceroy of Peru. She was dying of a strange disease in Lima in 1638. Her Jesuit confessor, the story goes, gave a medicine to her doctor made from the bark of a common Peruvian tree. It supposedly saved her life and two years

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Colombia’s Ant Tree

Colombia’s Ant Tree

In the sparsely inhabited, tropical portion of eastern Colombia is an ant tree known as the barrasanta. It is a small, slender tree with showy, red flowers which grows 25 to 30 feet in height. Both trunk and branches are hollow and filled with masses of vicious, biting ants. As soon as the tree is disturbed the insects swarm upon the invader. As a result the tree is generally left alone both by Indians and white settlers. The ants are protected by the branches and in turn protect the host with t

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The Strange Behavior of Plants

The Strange Behavior of Plants

The behavior characteristics of some American plants are strange indeed. The compass plant, a bristly perennial of the aster family which grows in abundance over the prairies, is a living compass. It turns the edges of its leaves in a general north-south direction. Another American plant, the wild lettuce, does the same thing. The result is that when the intensity of sunlight is weakest in the morning and evening the flat surfaces of the leaves are in a position to receive the maximum available

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Venezuela’s Nocturnal Orchid

Venezuela’s Nocturnal Orchid

A flower that opens only by moonlight is one of Venezuela’s plant curiosities. It is an ivory-white, velvety orchid which depends entirely on nocturnal butterflies to sip its nectar while pollenization takes place. The plant is one of 800 species of Venezuelan orchids. Among these is probably the prettiest and rarest of the orchid family, the mother-of-pearl flower, which can sometimes be found in the deep jungles of the Gran Sabana area at altitudes of more than 3,000 feet. Still another high m

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The Plant That Strikes Men Dumb

The Plant That Strikes Men Dumb

A plant cultivated in the gardens of the Venezuelan National University at Caracas might well be a boon to pestered husbands and harassed mothers. It is described under the popular Spanish name of “planta del mudo.” It looks like sugarcane. According to the probably exaggerated claims, anybody who chews the stem is stricken dumb for at least 48 hours, presumably due to some paralyzing effect on some part of the vocal apparatus. It is not known whether anybody has tried to extract the marvelous t

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Combat of Moth and Shrew

Combat of Moth and Shrew

A strange fight between a grey shrew, smallest of North American mammals, and a black “witch moth” has been described by Laurence M. Huey of the San Diego Society of Natural History. The moth, with a wing spread of about four inches and a body size almost equal to that of the shrew, was placed in a cage with the mammal. The shrew proved too much for the insect after the odds had been equalized by clipping a great part of the latter’s wings. “Even with this severe handicap”, reports Mr. Huey, “th

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The Ferocious Snake Weasel

The Ferocious Snake Weasel

From South Africa comes a report from Dr. Raymond B. Cowles of a fight between a deadly reptile and a little known mammal, the inyengelizi, or snake weasel. The habitat of the snake weasel, unknown in any zoo, is the Umzumbe Valley in Natal Province, where it is one of the rarest of carnivores. Natives either refuse to bring in inyengelizis or demand exorbitant prices for their skins. All parts of the body are used in the native pharmacopoeia and elders wear a narrow strip of the fur to ward off

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The Rabbit That Swims

The Rabbit That Swims

Life history and habits of a swimming rabbit are the subject of a report to the American Society of Mammologists. The animal is the little known marsh rabbit of the South Carolina coast. It spends most of its life on the tidal marshes and hence, alone of the rabbit family, has become a partially aquarian animal. Almost strictly nocturnal in its habits, its ways of life hitherto have eluded naturalists. By far the best known trait of the species is its liking for water. Individuals sometimes are

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Gorilla Warriors of the Belgian Congo

Gorilla Warriors of the Belgian Congo

A study of mountain gorillas in a part of the world which they have all to themselves has been reported by Captain C. S. R. Pitman, British zoologist. The only humans who ever penetrate the dense forests on the Uganda border of the Belgian Congo, where these animals are found, are pigmies, with whom the great apes live on the best of terms. Captain Pitman is one of the few white men ever to have entered the area. The mountain gorilla is probably the highest of all the gorillas, next to man. One

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The Biggest “Rat” in the World

The Biggest “Rat” in the World

Close relative of the porcupine, but without quills, is the aquatic coypu, or nutria, of South America. It has become quite valuable in recent years because of its soft fur. Weighing about 20 pounds, it often is referred to as the “biggest rat in the world”. It shares with the porcupine large, orange-colored incisor teeth which give it a frightful appearance. Like its barbed northern cousin it is a strict vegetarian, living exclusively on water weeds in its native habitat. Before the last war co

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The Suicide Marches of Lemmings

The Suicide Marches of Lemmings

Mass death marches of lemmings long have intrigued biologists and psychologists. The Lapland lemming is a short-tailed animal, related to the meadow mouse, that looks like a miniature rabbit. Through the sub-Arctic winter it lives completely buried under snow through which it burrows in search of mosses and lichens. It is extremely prolific; females produce two litters of from four to six offspring every year. The numbers soon become far too great to subsist on the sparse supply available in the

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The Ferocity of the Tiger

The Ferocity of the Tiger

Symbol of ferocity in the animal world is the tiger. When troops of the American 101st Division entered the German city of Halle in 1945 it probably was considered effective psychological warfare tactics on the part of the Nazis to open the zoo cages and let loose the tigers. So far as known, however, the animals did not attack any Americans. Whether the reputation of the tiger is entirely justified is debatable. “The tiger”, says Dr. William M. Mann, long-time director of the National Zoologica

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The Fearsome Porcupine

The Fearsome Porcupine

There are more than 1,000 minute barbs on each of a porcupine’s many quills. This is the reason why such a quill is very difficult to withdraw from the flesh. The armament of quills, from a half inch to three inches long and developed from hairs of the underfur, renders the “spiny pig” of northern woodlands almost immune to attack. About its only enemy in nature is the giant weasel, the fisher, which has learned the trick of quickly turning the porcupine on its back. The quills are very lightly

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The Plant That Stimulates Visions

The Plant That Stimulates Visions

In 1560 a Franciscan monk wrote of Aztecs eating a plant called peyotl “which gives them terrible and ludicrous visions, alleviates hunger and thirst, gives strength and incites to battle.” It was used, he reported “to bring about a state of ecstasy in which one had prophetic visions.” This was the first known reference in literature to the mescal cactus, Lopophora williamsii , whose remarkable effects on the human mind ever since have aroused wonderment. Many have experimented with eating the s

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The Puzzling Platypus

The Puzzling Platypus

Fantastic combination of mammal, bird and reptile is the egg-laying, toothless water animal of New South Wales and Tasmania, Australia, the duck-billed platypus. It is clearly a mammal but, with a single exception, it stands quite alone among these warm-blooded animals. The creatures from which it is a survivor probably have been extinct for fifty million years. It is an animal about twenty inches long from the tip of its horny beak to the end of its broad, flattened tail. It is covered with sof

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