GordonGrice.com

Hunger on the Wing (Part 1 of 3)

2012-01-30T11:00:00.000-06:00

An African sky filled with locusts

Here’s another story from The Book of Deadly Animals. (Thenew US paperback version hits book store shelves tomorrow; or order it onlinehere.) In the book, I didn’t have room for the whole story, since there weremore than 900 other animals to talk about. This longer version first appearedin Discover.

One summer in the Oklahoma panhandle the grasshoppers wereeverywhere. Every patch of weeds along the alley would erupt like a pan ofpopping corn if I set foot in it. When we drove the highway, we inadvertently slaughtereddozens. The collisions speckled our windshield with hemolymph. Their wings,coffee-colored fans striped with yellow at the outer edges, lodged in ourwipers and fluttered in the onrushing air. Sometimes an entire grasshopper, ormost of one, would lodge there as well, struggling to get free as the wind toreit to tatters.

They could be found in unaccustomed places that summer. Forseveral mornings running I saw two or three swimming in the dog's water dish.The rosebushes took on the riddled look of lace, as though the grasshoppers hadtasted the leaves and found them unappealing but serviceable. In the country,the cedar posts of barbed wire fences would seem at a glance to be shimmeringwith heat, like a water mirage on the highway, but a second glance would showthe effect was not an optical illusion. The posts were simply crawling withgrasshoppers moving up or down for no apparent reason. They seemed to be movingwith great caution, edging past each other. When a stationary grasshopper got bumped,it would draw its legs in tighter and shift its footing, like a personuncomfortable on a crowded bus.

Then there was the jackrabbit. We found it beside a dirtroad on the way to the mailbox. It was dead, probably road-killed. Grasshopperswere thick in the weeds and grass along that road, and dozens clustered on thecarcass. When someone poked at it experimentally, a few of the hoppers jumpedoff and opened their wings and were carried away by the wind. Others crawledoff sluggishly. Some stayed put. With the carcass now more exposed, we couldsee that it was bald in patches, and that its hide was wounded in shallowdivots, as if it had been hit all over with buckshot that failed to penetrate.It seemed that the grasshoppers had been eating it.

As the season wore on, the grasshoppers grew absurdly thick.Among the metallic green ones there were others, some yellow and spotted,others a brighter green. All these I was familiar with, though I had never madeany particular study of them. But I began to see things utterly new to me. Onegrasshopper was black and flecked with gray, like burned charcoal. Another wasblack but flecked with a Tabasco red. This variety has been explained to methus: In outbreaks, grasshoppers are so plentiful that they overwhelm theirusual predators, offering them more food than they can use. Other grasshopperspecies, rare enough to go unnoticed most of the time, get relief frompredators in this circumstance, and therefore are more likely to be around forpeople to notice.

Other things seemed different too—there were a great manylarge grasshoppers, thick as a lipstick. One morning on my driveway I found thelargest specimen I had ever seen, a yellowish creature longer than a soda can.It was dead—a fact that gave me some comfort. Streams of black ants led up toits carcass. Their presence was the first thing that convinced me I was seeinga once-living creature rather than a toy. I turned it belly-up with a stick.Its head and thorax were intact, but its abdomen was riddled with holes. I hadnot seen this damage at first because its long wings concealed it from above.Through the holes I glimpsed ants working at the grasshopper's half-hollowhull.

What I've been describing is an infestation, a localizedpopulation suddenly grown orders of magnitude beyond its usual numbers. Thecauses are not thoroughly understood. In the United States, hot, dry weatherhas something to do with it—the heat lets grasshoppers grow faster, and thedryness discourages the fungi that would otherwise check the population'sgrowth.

Swarms of locusts—giant flying species of grasshoppers—are atraveling variation on this phenomenon. They dominate a wide swath of this planetalmost every year. Moving in groups of millions, the locusts migrate over greatstretches of territory, settling down periodically to eat every bit ofvegetable matter in sight. They are hunger on the wing.

In the United States migratory swarms of locusts arepresumed to be a thing of the past. But a locust is really just an oversizegrasshopper in a gregarious mood. When grasshoppers of certain species gatherin great numbers, they begin to change their behavior. Normally, they aresomewhat solitary. If forced together they seem uncomfortable, leaping awayfrom each other. But hunger often forces them together when a bumper crop ofgrasshoppers encounters a meager supply of food and they must compete for it.If the crowding persists, the younger insects begin to change. The changes varywith the species, but in general their bodies grow to massive size. Their wingsbecome clear and strong. Their colors shift dramatically—for example, fromgreen and yellow to solid black. Their proportions alter, their shapeessentially changing to accommodate flight. So profound is this change that scientistsin the past have mislabeled the two phases, solitary and gregarious, asdistinct species.

The creatures behave differently, too. They eat withshocking voracity. They whirl into the air in groups, forming swarm clouds. Theswarms fly long distances, disrupting ecosystems for hundreds of miles. In the1870s, one swarm was tracked from Montana to Texas, a distance of 1,500 miles.Polluted layers of glaciers high in the Rockies show that their flightsometimes takes them to altitudes beyond the normal range of grasshoppers. In1874 a Nebraska doctor used telegraphs to find the far edges of a swarm heobserved flying overhead, establishing that its area exceeded that of Colorado.Factoring in their rate and the depth of the swarm cloud, he arrived at anestimate of 12.5 trillion grasshoppers. The Guinness Book of World Records liststhis swarm as the "Greatest Concentration of Animals" yet observed.More rigorous methods were used on a swarm in Kenya in 1954, yielding thefigure of 10 billion grasshoppers in a swarm, which happened to be only one of50 swarms in that country at the time.

Tigress Kills Farmer

2012-01-30T10:30:00.000-06:00

In rural India, officials are tracking a tiger that killed a farmer.

Killer tigress still at large in Patan Bori - Times Of India:

""The tigress continues to kill our animals, but the forest officials have not been able to track and capture her," said a villagers who lost his cow a few days ago.

When contacted, Chief Conservator of Forest Devendra Kumar confirmed the reports about tigress' attacks. "The tigress is attacking animals to teach hunting to her cubs," he said."

What Is This?: The Sequel--Answers

2012-01-29T11:30:00.000-06:00

Answers to Wednesday's quiz, in which I asked the immortal question, What the heck is this stuff? Photography by Nik Nimbus.

1. Ice

2. Spider web coated with pollen.

3. Magpie's feather.

4.Wings of a damselfly

5. Rhubarb leaf.

6. Tree sap.

Leopard Attacks Pregnant Woman

2012-01-28T10:30:00.000-06:00

Two people, including a pregnant woman, have been hurt by a leopard in the same Indian city that has witnessed two other attacks within a month. A total of nine people were injured in the attacks, one fatally.

Akila Bibi: Pregnant woman, 20s, suffers horrific injuries in leopard attack in India's Guwahati | Mail Online: "Moziz Haq suffered head injuries.

Speaking from his hospital bed, he told AFP news agency: ‘It was a thumping, slap-like feeling and I fell on the ground with blood splattered all over me’.

The animal was later tranquilised by forest officials and taken to a city zoo."

Related Post: Earlier Leopard Attack

Hawk Eats Squirrel

2012-01-27T11:00:00.001-06:00

Dee photographed this hawk in predatory action in the middle of the city.

Photography by Dee Puett.

What Is This?: The Sequel

2012-01-26T10:40:00.000-06:00

By popular demand, more of Nik Nimbus's amazing photos of the textures of living things. How many can you figure out?

Nik, by the way, has a new radio show, which I recommend highly. It's full of psychedelic sounds from bands like Evil Edna's Horror Toilet. I hadn't heard of Evil Edna's Horror Toilet, but it's easily the best named band in history. I'll be listening for more from them, as well as the Ullulators, Webcore, and Nik's own legendary band, Here and Now.

1.

(Answers will appear Sunday.)

Sedaris Recommends Book of Deadly Animals

2012-01-25T01:15:00.000-06:00

From David Sedaris's Facebook page:

David will be suggesting the book "The Book of Deadly Animals" by Gordon Grice as his next "Recommended Book" on his spring 2012 tour. Get a jump on your reading!

A Rash of Jellyfish in New Zealand

2012-01-24T10:00:00.000-06:00

Biusch/Creative Commons

On the beaches of New Zealand, swimmers have lately been troubled by hordes of larval thimble jellyfish. I wrote about these troublesome critters in The Book of Deadly Animals:

The larvae of this jellyfish are popularly called sea lice, but they are not related to the tiny crustaceans of that name. Though microscopic, thimble larvae cause a rash which sometimes endures for weeks and brings on secondary infections. The larvae generally sting only when trapped by clothing, a habit which concentrates the stings in the areas of the body covered by the swimsuit. (I pause a moment to let you take in the implications.) The larvae can survive dried out for months. Some people have found themselves attacked all over again when they put on the swimming gear they peeled off and hung to dry the summer before.

As the article linked below mentions, some beaches have been troubled by more formidable cnidarians (as jellyfish and their relatives are called). The portuguese man-o'-war (pictured above) is one such relative, a colony that behaves like a single animal. Its stings are, on rare occasions, fatal.

Jellyfish invade Auckland beaches - National - NZ Herald News:

"A similar outbreak of sea bather's eruption occurred last February as La Nina's warm currents encouraged the spread of the jellyfish on eastern Auckland beaches.
The larvae are usually found in warm, still water and are rarely a problem at beaches with heavy surf, such as Piha.
Dr Baker said the only sure-fire way to avoid the rash was to not swim at affected beaches. But swimmers could lessen their risk by not wearing large, baggy clothing and by removing their togs on leaving the water.
Last month, thousands of jellyfish washed up on Wellington's south coast beaches, including the dangerous bluebottle or Pacific man o' war, sparking warnings from authorities.
And a swarm of bluebottles, including one with 2.5-metre-long tentacles, closed Oreti Beach, near Invercargill, this month."

Bird-Eating Spiders

2012-01-23T11:00:00.000-06:00

by guest writer J. Rodney Karr

for Maria Merian
Suriname 1692

Maria mixes reds inside sketched wings
of Rufous hummingbirds, thickens a line
on cylindrical tongues. Guyanan sun
shades pulps of unknown fruits that color four
brown spinnerets still wet enough to smear.
She has watched for hours whistling loops
and light ascensions to delicate nests
in spurge trees. Science is art. The sun gleams
from ruddish feathers puffed in display
and gilds the hairs upon the spider’s legs.
But there is no death within this sunlight,
only truth. The bird and spider now join
beneath the palm bark brush, within the branch
beneath Maria’s eye where nothing moves
except the hummingbird’s eye’s eventual light
and color and her mind’s eye, color, light.

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium,
her life’s work, translated from the Dutch,
is scrutinized beneath thought and eye, disbelieved
until an Australian zoologist
explores the Amazon. A woman’s mind
cannot be trusted. The scientist sees
a tiny bird within the light that moved
centuries before within Maria.
He sees the sudden brown dash, the flinch,
the fang’s repeated insertions to liquefy
the viscera, then the bird quickly dragged away.
Within his book he writes in praise of God
the sun in its exactness never lies.

This poem first appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review.
Painting by Maria Merian.

Handling a Black Widow Spider

2012-01-22T11:00:00.000-06:00

Beautiful video by Thomas Shahan.

Bull Shark Kills Swimmer in South Africa

2012-01-21T11:00:00.000-06:00

SaCaDeLik/Creative Commons

Zambezi shark is another name for the bull shark (Carcharhinusleucas).

Zambezi Shark Attacks, Kills Swimmer in South Africa - Animal Attack - ubAlert:

"A swimmer from Port St. Johns was attacked by a shark and fought with it for five minutes using his surf board. Unfortunately, the shark severely injured him in both arms and in the chest. "

Update: The Irish Times has further information on this attack, plus others over the last few years in this area.

Meanwhile, the International Business Times has an article on recent shark attacks in Australia, including an attack by a ten-foot tiger shark and another apparently by a bull shark.

Australia: Scrub Python Attacks Toddler

2012-01-20T11:00:00.001-06:00

Mike/Creative Commons

Australia: Python Attacks Toddler, As Snake Tries To Suffocate Him | World News | Sky News:

"The child's mother said she heard the boy's "blood-curdling scream" and went to help but was unable to pull the snake off him.

Neighbours heard the mother cries and eventually freed the two-year-old victim.

The boy suffered four bite wounds after being attacked as he played with a ball in his back garden in Port Douglas.

The snake, which was not poisonous, bit his leg before looping itself around his body, his mother told the local Cairns Post newspaper."

Thanks to Croconut for the news tip.

Indonesia: Crocodile Killed After Eating Teenager

2012-01-19T11:00:00.000-06:00

Disturbing news item from Indonesia. Several species of crocodile live in this area, but the likely predator here is the saltwater croc.

Crocodile Killed After Eating Teenager | The Jakarta Globe:

"After killing the crocodile, people cut open its belly and found pieces of 14-year-old Rio Candra’s body.

“Parents now forbid their children from taking a bath in the river to prevent them from being eaten by a crocodile,” Syafullah said.

Rio was with his father, Syahrudin, looking for mangrove wood on the Merusi river when the crocodile attacked and dragged him into the water. His father, who witnessed the incident, could not do anything."

Thanks to Croconut for the news tip.

Crow Goes Sledding

2012-01-18T11:00:00.001-06:00

Is this play, or something harder to understand? I sometimes see crows standing atop the pines in thunderstorms, riding as the wind whips them about. It's not a safe place to be; the only reason I can think of for standing there is that it's fun.

Invasion of the Grebes

2012-01-17T11:00:00.004-06:00

In Utah, a massive flock of eared grebes smashed into snowy parking lots, apparently mistaking them for water. Yet another lesson about blindly following your leaders.

Thousands of Birds Dive-Bomb Utah Parking Lots - Yahoo! News:

"Thousands came down. They came down everywhere. We were able to rescue about 2,000, but most of them, of course, didn't survive the impact."

What Is This?--Answers

2012-01-16T11:30:00.000-06:00

Answers to yesterday's quiz:

1. The shed skin of a snake.

2. The feather of a pheasant.

3. The hide of a leopard slug.

4. A mushroom.

5. An orb-weaving spider.

6. The fur of a badger.

Photography by Nik Nimbus.

What Is This?

2012-01-15T11:00:00.000-06:00

A quiz for you. Here are photos of half a dozen natural objects seen in extreme close-up. All of them are (or were) part of living things-- like, for example, a wombat's toenail. How many can you figure out?

Photography by Nik Nimbus.

Answers tomorrow. Hint: "wombat's toenail" is not actually one of the correct answers.

Lion and Leopard Attacks in India

2012-01-14T11:00:00.001-06:00

Rupal Vaidya/Creative Commons

From India, a report of an attack by an lion. As is usually the case when these rare Asiatic lions hurt people, the boy was trying to protect livestock. The article also mentions several recent leopard attacks. The one a few days ago in the Guwahati made headlines because it came with dramatic photos, but leopard attacks in rural areas of India are not unusual.

Lion attacks youth near Khambha - The Times of India:

"At least three persons have been attacked by leopards in close vicinity of Khambha.

'Wild animals are a common sight around Khambha as it is located close to the Gir forest. Presence of wild animals in the human habitat is also one of the reasons why the incidents of animal-human conflicts are on rise. However, incidences of lion attacks on human are rare compared to leopards in this year. There must be some conflict and disturbance to the lion behind the attack.'"

Related Post: Big Cat Attacks in the Gir Forest

Hobo Spiders, Conclusion

2012-01-13T11:00:00.001-06:00

Giant House Spider--cousin, competitor, and occasional predator of the hobo

(The Book of Deadly Animals hits the US later this month. As with the recent UK release of the book, I’m going to celebrate by running here an expanded version of a story from the book.)

The hobo spider's danger to people is now widely recognized.The Centers for Disease Control list it (along with the widow and reclusespiders) as dangerous, medical textbooks concur, and publications like theJournal of the American Medical Association have published case studies.Doctors know the signs of hobo venom—a blistering wound ringed with yellow likethe moon in a halo of smog, devastating headache in many cases, disturbedthinking in an occasional one.

But skeptics remain. One is Greta Binford of Lewis and ClarkCollege. In an unpublished study, Binford and some colleagues at the Universityof Michigan attempted to replicate Vest's experiment. They were unable toproduce necrotic lesions by injecting hobo spider venom into rabbits. TheMichigan rabbits developed nothing worse than a red bump. Binford points outthat the hobo has never been implicated in human injuries in Europe, where ithas been known for centuries. She analyzed venom obtained from European andNorth American hobos and found no chemical differences.

Like several other prominent skeptics, Binford notes thatthe hobo spider is rarely caught in the act of biting and brought in foridentification by a competent specialist. Because the hobo's appearance is notespecially distinctive, the average bite victim can't be expected to sort itout from dozens of other spiders. Rod Crawford of the Burke Museum at theUniversity of Washington deals with hundreds of spider identifications eachyear. He points out that a species ID by a layman is virtually useless. Evendoctors get very little training in such identification and are likely to bemistaken. Still, Crawford is satisfied with Vest's evidence, which linked acaptured or crushed hobo with human symptoms in four cases.

But even here, it's possible to contest the evidence. RickVetter of the University of California, Riverside points out that one of thesevictims—the 42-year-old woman I mentioned earlier, who found a hobo spider inher clothing—had a history of phlebitis, a circulatory problem that sometimescauses necrotic lesions. The phlebitis, says Vetter, could have caused thesymptoms Vest blamed on the hobo. Vetter also notes that the Australianwhite-tailed spider, once widely accepted by doctors as a source of necroticarachnidism, has recently been exonerated. Researchers studied 130 cases ofdefinite white-tailed spider bites, finding not a single necrosis. Vetter wouldlike to see hobo bites subjected to a similarly rigorous study. He points outthat mistakes have serious consequences. For example, misdiagnosis of ailmentslike basal cell carcinoma, which can look like necrotic arachnidism, could befatal.

There's another complication: Venomous animals aren't alwaysvenomous. It has long been known that black widow spiders, like some venomoussnakes, can deliver "dry bites" to warn off larger animals withoutwasting venom on them. Typically, these are followed by a dose of venom if theharassment persists. Rebecca Vest, who worked with her brother Darwin in hisinvestigations (and who first proposed the name hobo spider to replace theinaccurate "aggressive house spider"), reports that dry bites arecommon for hobos. Widows vary in their toxicity with age, health, and gender,and these factors seem to come into play with hobo spiders as well. Forexample, male hobos pack a more potent venom than females. It is typically themale hobo, wandering away from its funnel-shaped web in search of a mate at theend of summer, that bites people.

People vary considerably in their reactions to venom. Only aminority of people, for example, show any lingering symptoms after a dose ofbrown recluse venom. I myself have been bitten by recluses a number of times.Though the stinging sensation I felt after a short delay made it clear that I'dbeen envenomed, I never developed a sore or any systemic symptoms. The wholeexperience was less painful than a mosquito bite—and, taking into account thepossibility of mosquito-borne disease, less dangerous. It may be that hobovenom is similarly selective. After all, its function is to subdue insects, andany effect it has on us comes about because we're related to insects. It wouldbe comforting to think that a few billion years of evolution have putconsiderable distance between us and our insect kin, but chemically, that's notthe case. We are only sometimes different enough to be immune to insect-killingvenoms.

Medical journals have attributed a handful of human deathsto the hobo spider. Crawford says perhaps 100 cases of medically significantbites are reported in Washington every year, but he adds that a physician'sdiagnosis is shaky evidence in the absence of the culprit. Like “recluse bite” beforeit, “hobo spider bite” has become what Binford calls "a medical dumpingground"—a default diagnosis when a better one can't be found.

Meanwhile, isolated cases have suggested that a few of thehobo's fellow agelinid spiders are occasionally dangerous. The Western grassspider (Agelenopsis aperta) has beenimplicated in a single human fatality. And a giant house spider (Tegenaria duellica) produced a serious injury in ahuman being—not because of venomous effects, but because of an allergicreaction.

The agelinidae are, as spiders go, remarkably tolerant ofeach other. I have seen a spindly male living on the fringes of a female's web,suffering no abuse from his larger mate. Perhaps he was helping to guard theeggs. I have seen, too, an entire bed of wandering jew covered with twenty orso discrete funnel webs, the inhabitants apparently unconcerned about theproximity of neighbors. But I've also seen what happens when two come intoconflict. A flurry of legs, then the sudden collapse of one spider. It folds upin the grasp of its enemy. The effect is something like a child's hand crushedin an adult's.

As it happens, this tendency for some agelinids to eatothers may help explain why the hobo has apparently harmed people in NorthAmerica but not in Europe. Darwin Vest, who considered pesticides anirresponsible way to control spiders, examined the question of what predatorsmight naturally control hobo populations. The most effective predators provedto be other spider species, like the cellar spider (Steatoda grossa) and theAmerican house spider (Achaearanea tepidariorum). Most effective of all was thegiant house spider, an agelinid with a leg span broad as a human palm. Thegiant is so closely related to the hobo that the two may interbreed, and it notonly preys on the smaller species, but also competes with it for food. Vestsuspected it was the giant that kept the hobo out of European houses all along.The giant has, in the last 25 years, established itself in the PacificNorthwest. Rebecca Vest reports that hobo populations in southern Idaho haveshrunk noticeably in that same period. It may be that the hobo, though equallyvenomous wherever it turns up, simply has fewer chances to bite in Europe. Andperhaps the same situation will eventually prevail here as the giant housespider, an unrecognized ally long ago suspected of spreading the Black Death,expands its range across America.

Hobo Spiders, Part 3 of 4

2012-01-12T11:00:00.000-06:00

Black Widow Spider (Photo by Hodari Nundu)

(The Book of Deadly Animals hits the US later this month. As with the recent UK release of the book, I’m going to celebrate by running here an expanded version of a story from the book.)

It used to be said that no US spider was really dangerous,and this view held sway well into the 1920s, despite well-attested reports ofdeaths from the bites of widow spiders. It was only after intrepid biologistslike William Baerg and Allan Blair subjected themselves to widow bites in thelab, and suffered horribly, that the prevailing opinion changed. It took thirtymore years for scientists to sort out the two syndromes apparently caused bywidow bites—one featuring extravagant pain spreading rapidly throughout thebody, the other the slow death of the flesh around the bite. Eventually it wasdemonstrated that the second syndrome should have been blamed all along on theunobtrusive recluse spiders.

That ought to clear everything up, but it hasn't.Specialists are routinely annoyed by pseudofacts claiming that the averageperson inhales four spiders per year in his sleep or that recluse bite symptomscan be cured with tazers. Many myths mix in a pinch of reality. The blushspider, for example, must have been inspired by the widow, which used to infestoutdoor toilets and bite people in the genitals. And the false reports of camelspider venom read like an exaggerated account of the true effects of reclusevenom.

It's taken a long time to sort out the truth behind hobospider bites. They produce symptoms similar to those caused by recluse venom,but they occur in areas outside the recluse's range—the Northwest quadrant ofthe US and adjacent parts of Canada. After the brown recluse's danger came topublic attention beginning in the 1950s, doctors in the Pacific Northwest beganto diagnose certain lesions as recluse bites. But these diagnoses didn't fitthe known range of the recluse. No member of its genus is regularly found inthe northern half of the US.

In the early 1970s, this mystery came to the attention oftoxinologist Darwin K. Vest, an autodydact whose work on cobras, rattlesnakes,and other venomous creatures had won him respect in scientific circles. Whileworking at Washington State University's Pullman campus, Vest learned that thezoology department there often received queries about "necroticarachnidism"—flesh-killing lesions apparently caused by spider bites. Vesttackled the problem by looking into the cases of 75 patients in the PacificNorthwest diagnosed with this affliction. He exonerated spiders in most ofthese injuries, blaming them on insect bites, cigarette burns, and othercauses. Vest surveyed the homes of 22 remaining patients. Collecting by handand with sticky traps, Vest and his team collected thousands of specimens. Noneof the homes yielded recluses, but sixteen of them revealed healthy populationsof the hobo spider. Sometimes a single sticky trap measuring about 15 by 30 cmwould fill with hobos overnight.

The presence of hobos in such numbers was suggestive, but itproved nothing. The average home in any temperate region is likely to hostseveral dozen species of spiders. Most people don't realize that they spendevery day of their lives close to spiders, so that seeing one the same day youget a bite or scratch proves nothing.

Vest decided to bring hobo spiders, and several othersuspect species, into the lab for tests. He and his team milked live spiderswith mild anesthesia and micro-pipettes under a dissecting microscope, workingcarefully so that the spiders could be released unharmed. The spiders were sosmall that the capillary action of the pipettes was often enough to draw venomfrom the fangs. When that technique didn't work, the researchers sometimes resortedto mild electric shock, using a nine-volt battery to make the venom glandscontract and prompt the release of a droplet or two. Since each spider producedonly a miniscule amount, the researchers had to milk a great many to obtain aworkable sample. Their result: The hobo spider venom produced necrotic lesionsin rabbits. To confirm this result, Vest shaved the backs of rabbits and held ahobo spider down on each bald patch, forcing a bite. The lesions that formedwere similar to those found in human victims.

Hobo Spiders, Part 2 of 4

2012-01-11T11:00:00.000-06:00

Camel Spiders

(The Book of Deadly Animals hits the US later this month. As with the recent UK release of the book, I’m going to celebrate by running here an expanded version of a story from the book.)

It's hard to say how many people have been hurt by hobospiders, because spider bites are remarkably difficult to diagnose. Part of theproblem is that they often don't hurt enough at first to draw any notice. Evenin the case of bites that develop serious symptoms like the ones I describedabove, it is unusual for the victim to bring in the guilty spider. Often thesupposed spider bite is just a wound or sore of unknown origin. It's beenestimated that 80% of the so-called spider bites physicians treat are reallysomething else entirely—the bites of lice, fleas, or ticks; the symptoms ofdiseases like Lyme disease and tularemia; strep or staph infections developingaround minor scratches. Even eczema or a too-vigorously scratched mosquito bitemay cast aspersions on some innocent arachnid. When several Americans came downwith skin lesions in 2001, symptoms eventually attributed to anthrax spread byterrorists, doctors first suspected brown recluse spiders.

Why do spiders so often get the blame? Part of the answerseems to lie in arachnophobia. People who notice a sore and, separately, aspider in the house may jump to the wrong conclusion. Serious arachnophobesoften report the feeling, which they themselves may recognize as irrational,that spiders are malicious, trying to frighten and harm human victims. Evenpeople without a full-blown phobia will sometimes fall into this way ofthinking. In fact, most spiders, if they're capable of biting people at all,only bite in defense of self, eggs, or territory, but many people aren't awareof, or even interested in, that fact.

Another source of confusion is folklore. Stories of venomousarthropods circulate so frequently that scientists tend to dismiss them out ofhand. Around 2001, I received emails warning of "blush spiders," tinybut deadly red spiders that hide under the seats of toilets on airplanes readyto bite the unwary traveler on his or her most sensitive parts. There'sactually no such thing as a blush spider. Its "scientific name," Arachnius gluteus, which would seem totranslate into something like "butt spider," is an easy tip-off.

In 2004, I received anxious queries about "camelspiders," accompanied by a shocking photo of a massively-fanged monster aslong as a man's leg. The camel spider, it was said, habitually runs along undercamels, leaping up to feast on the flesh of their bellies. Its venom was saidto dissolve flesh rapidly. It was claimed that these creatures represented adeadly menace to soldiers at war in Iraq. In fact, camel spiders are harmless,though scary-looking. They are known variously as sunspiders and windscorpions,but are really a little-known arachnid family unto themselves, the solfugids.The largest solfugids in the world are about the size of a woman's hand, whichis certainly awe-inspiring, but a mere fraction as large as the trick ofperspective in the well-circulated internet photo suggests. Solfugids don'tbite people—their mouthparts aren't hinged the right way, so it's the nextthing to physically impossible—and they don't pack toxin. Since their fangs areso massive for their size (proportionally the largest in the animal kingdom), theyrely on mechanical injury to kill their prey, not venom.

These are only two examples of the folkloric nonsense aboutarachnids constantly in circulation. Another bit, from the Middle Ages, heldthat spiders spread the Black Death that killed a third of the population ofEurope. It's been suggested that this myth underlies the arachnophobia soprevalent in Western culture.

With such drivel perpetually in the air, it's not surprisingthat many scientists and doctors have dismissed more credible claims out ofhand.

Next: Shaved Rabbits

Hobo Spiders, Part 1 of 4

2012-01-10T10:30:00.001-06:00

Tobias Mercer/Creative Commons

(The Book of Deadly Animals hits the US later thismonth. As with the recent UK release of the book, I’m going to celebrate byrunning here an expanded version of a story from the book.)

January, 1988. A 56-year-old woman from Spokane feltsomething bite her on the thigh. She came down with a migraine-style headacheand nausea. Her thinking became addled. In the coming days, a patch of deadtissue sloughed from the spot where she'd been bitten. It was perhaps two weeksbefore she sought help, and by then it was too late. She was bleeding from theorifices, even from the ears. Doctors found her blood deficient in severalbasic components. Her marrow had stopped making red blood cells. Havinglingered in the hospital for several weeks, the woman died of internalbleeding.

There were other cases.

November, 1995. In a suburb of Portland, Oregon, aten-year-old boy woke with a pair of bites on his leg. The wounds swelled, grewhot, blistered. Dead tissue dropped away. A week after the bites, his leg wasswollen and red. He suffered fever, nausea, and debilitating headaches. After amonth, the pain of the wounds was mostly gone, but a bruise-like patch of blueremained on his leg. The headaches lasted four months.

October, 1992. A 42-year old woman from Bingham County,Idaho, felt the burning bite of a spider on her ankle. She, too, came down witha headache and nausea, as well as dizziness. The bite blistered and burst,leaving an open wound that continued to grow. After ten weeks the crater wasbig enough to accommodate two thumbs and ringed with black flesh; it was stillgrowing. Eventually, more than two years after the bite, the wound had healedinto a sizable scar, beneath which the veins were clotted. The woman's abilityto walk and stand remained impaired, limiting her job options.

The spider she had found crushed within her clothing was ahobo spider, Tegenaria agrestis, amember of the family Agelinidae.

The Agelinidae are hairy, brown or gray, often big enough tostraddle the face of a pocket watch. They build flat webs with a sort ofbilliard pocket at one corner in which the spider lies at her ease to awaitprey. They're common as cliches, found in temperate places all over the world,in about 38 genera and 500 species. In England a type of agelinid, the lesserhouse spider (Tegenaria domestica),is found behind books on the shelf, its thick web tearing when a volume isconsulted. In the American Southwest I've often seen a gray agelinid with longblack stripes. Its abdomen is typically an ovoid tight and ripe as a Septemberplum. This species has eyes that shine like scattered emeralds in the dark, andits webs lie about on the ground cover like silk handkerchiefs—crisply white atfirst, but progressively dirtier with time and use. I have seen these spidersrush out of the funnel when an insect lands on the handkerchief. The spidercloses on its victim like a hirsute hand. It delivers what looks incongruouslylike a kiss to the prey's head, whereupon the prey ceases to struggle withshocking suddenness.

Soon the spider drags his prey into the funnel, where it is hardfor a nosy biped to watch. Usually all I can see are dark masses and anoccasional shadowy scrabbling of legs. What happens, of course, is that thespider injects its digesting venom into the prey, breaking its innards intosoup before sucking them down. The next day I often find a few insect legslittering the edge of the handkerchief.

Parker Grice

In the upper Midwest, where the outdoors is coldlyinhospitable to spiders several months a year, I have often noted anotherspecies of agelinid residing in basements. Anything left on the basement floorundisturbed long enough is likely to harbor a mass like a frayed handful ofcotton balls. In one such web I noticed a hummock shaped like a human graveformed over the body of some black creature. This carcass was apparently toomuch trouble to drag over the web’s edge. The spider had simply built over it.These northern agelinids are brown and rapid. I've found in their webscreatures as diverse as millipedes and mosquitoes. I touched one web,delicately as I could, and saw the spider heave itself out of its funnel-shapedretreat and immediately collapse back into it, so fast I could hardly have toldwhat it was if I hadn't already known. It reminded me of horror stories told byarachnophobes, about spiders emerging from bathtub drains. I withdrew my fingerwith considerable haste.

The web felt like cloth made of human hair. It didn't stickto me. This is typical of the agelinidae, including the hobo spider—their websaren't gluey, but depend on their deceptive surface to snare insects. Whatseems a solid, smooth place to land is actually a layered network of filaments.Most insects lack the foot-gear to negotiate this snare. Their feet fallbetween the strands, their claws snagging and delaying their escape long enoughfor the spider to seize them. The spider itself walks on the strands byclasping them between claws that oppose each other, much like the opposablethumb-and-finger arrangement of a primate.

The hobo spider shares the web style and habits of thesekinsmen. It is clad in brown herringbone and its body is typically just shortenough to fit on a Lincoln penny. Its genus name means mat-weaver; the speciesname suggests the agrarian lifestyle the species leads in Europe. But in NorthAmerica the hobo spider has taken up an urban lifestyle and made its presenceknown to the human community in ways its European experience never suggested.

Next:Myths and Fears

Leopard Attacks Four, Kills One

2012-01-08T17:45:00.000-06:00

Leopard Attacks People In House In India | Pictures, Photos:

"A man has had part of his scalp ripped off by a wild leopard, which became panicked and attacked four people when it walked into a bustling residential area in India.

The fully-grown leopard set upon the group when it walked into a house in a busy neighbourhood of Guwahati, a large city in north east India.

Dramatic photos show the leopard lashing out at a man, identified by Indian media as a cook named Hari, whose scalp is severely cut as he tries to fend off the animal."

According to a later report, one victim (not the one pictured here) has died of his injuries. The Indian Forestry Department blames this urban invasion on illegal deforestation, which it believes forced the animal from its jungle habitat. The leopard will be released into a remote jungle are.

Tons of Herring Found on Norwegian Beach

2012-01-08T10:17:00.000-06:00

Norwegian beach carpeted with 20 tons of herring - San Jose Mercury News:

"OSLO, Norway -- Tens of thousands of dead herring carpeted a stretch of coast in northern Norway -- and then disappeared again.

The fish appeared on New Year's Eve, and it was speculated that predators might have driven a huge school ashore or the fish could have been washed onto the beach by a powerful storm that hit Norway on Christmas Day.

Herring is traditionally eaten for good luck on New Year's Eve in some cultures, including by many Scandinavians."

Killer Leopard Trapped

2012-01-07T11:00:00.000-06:00

Killer leopard: Big cat caught while chasing dog – The Express Tribune:

"After it killed two children and cattle worth Rs2 million in the forest area of Baren Gali, wildlife authorities placed traps in the areas where the animal used to hunt frequently, but could not succeed despite several attempts. However on Saturday evening, the leopard appeared from the bushes and was trapped while chasing a dog, officials said. The cat was later sedated and shifted to the divisional wildlife officer’s office, from where it will be sent to a zoo."

Thanks to Hodari Nundu for the news tip.

Mother Orangutan

2012-01-06T11:00:00.000-06:00

Photography by Dee Puett

Mandrill Attack

2012-01-05T11:00:00.000-06:00

Assignment Houston One/Creative Commons

Critic Steven Pleithman mentions a news item that may have helped inspire Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which an orangutan invades a Parisian house through a window. In the news article, the invader is not an orangutan, but a mandrill, then known as a "rib-faced baboon."

"New Mode of Thieving"

Mrs. S. retired to her bedroom, and before her husband haddesisted from his supper enjoyments, some of the family was alarmed by a screamfrom her bedroom, and one of the inmates (a female) proceeding thither, wasattacked on entering the door, by a monkey (or a Ribbed-face Baboon) whichthrew her down, and placing his feet upon her breast, held her pinned firmly tothe ground. The screams of Mrs Smith brought up her husband, who, seeing thecondition of the prostrate female, assailed the monkey, and compelled him toquit his hold on the female, and thereby drew all his vengeance upon himself.The brute took up his position on the wash-basin stand; and every attempt todislodge him brought to the ground some fragile articles of furniture. . .till, on Mr Smith attempting to go into another room for his pistols, themonkey leapt on his back with the speed of lightning, made various attempts toreach his throat, broke his watch guard asunder in rage, and, dropping to theground, bit his leg, and again fled to the basin-stand. . . . But where did didthis Baboon come from? The animal had been danced through this town two orthree days by itinerant showmen; and had either escaped from them or been letloose for the sake of his plundering. . . . It appears he had dropped from theeaves of the house to the windowsill of Mrs. Smith's chamber, and got into theroom through the window, which as left partly open. The owner recovered theanimal from the housetops next morning, and escaped to Ludlow.

--from the Ipswich ShrewsburyChronicle (August 22, 1834)

Despite the cynicism of the Ipswich writer, it seems highly unlikely a mandrill would be trained for thievery. For one thing, they aren't particularly good at going unnoticed. This account reads a lot like modern reports of macaques and other monkeys raiding urban kitchens in Asia.

Related Post: The Fever Called Living

Poe's Orangutans: The Illustrations

2012-01-04T10:55:00.000-06:00

As promised Monday: Three illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue." Like most people of the Victorian era, these artists didn't know what an orangutan looked like. All three illustrations are reproduced in Stephen Peithman's The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

Aubrey Beardsley

Cougar Video, Plus an Attack in Michigan

2012-01-03T11:00:00.002-06:00

Interrupting this week's series on Edgar Allan Poe's orangutans for a couple of items about mountain lions. First, there's this interesting video. A mountain lion takes a long look at whoever's holding the camera. (Thanks to Greyson for the tip.)

In a different story, a woman in Michigan may have been attacked by a mountain lion.

Could it be a cougar? Animal attack has Allendale neighborhood on watch | MLive.com:

"Connie VenRoy, 44, stepped outside her door near the corner of 92nd Avenue and Lake Michigan Drive in the early morning hours of Dec. 16 to smoke a cigarette. Suddenly she heard thrashing ("like 10 men") in the tarp that covers a vehicle stored to the left of the door. It frightened her so much she instinctively dropped her cigarette, turned, and reached for the doorknob to get back inside.

Out of the darkness something came across the hood of the vehicle and hurled itself through the air, slamming against her right leg as she faced the door. VenRoy said she could see the animal's flat face, and teeth in an open mouth, a long body and tail. The open mouth hit her leg, but the animal did not bite, she said. It dropped to the ground. She screamed and kicked at it. It turned back to run around the vehicle, then disappeared.

VenRoy's father, Art VenRoy, who lives in the upper level of the house, came out with his shotgun to see if there was any sign of the animal, but could see nothing. "

Local police seem skeptical of this report.

Orangutans and Edgar Allan Poe

2012-01-02T11:00:00.000-06:00

"This," I said, "is the mark of no human hand."

"Read now," replied Dupin, "this passage from Cuvier." It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these Mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once.

That’s the solution to Edgar Allan Poe’s famous mystery “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” At the time of its first publication, Western science had no clear conception of the chimpanzee or the gorilla and was only beginning to understand the habits of the orangutan. Poe was accurate to the zoology of the time, though later information has made us understand that, for example, the orang is hardly "gigantic."

Besides the great biologist Cuvier, Poe probably drew on an 1830 account by Dr. Clark Abel. Aboard a ship bound from Java to England, Abel had occasion to observe a captive orangutan. The ape had free run of the ship. It played with the sailors, racing them into the rigging. (It won.) It slept at the masthead, wrapped in an extra sail or someone’s stolen shirt. It preferred fruit, but would take meat raw or cooked, bread, and eggs, and it would drink coffee, tea, and wine. Once it stole the captain’s bottle of brandy. When teased too mercilessly, the orang would seize a sailor and bite him. As far as I know, this young orang didn’t hurt anyone badly. But Europeans in Asia had already discovered that wild orangs, when angered, could cripple a man with bone-deep bites.

Abel’s orangutan survived only fifteen months in England, apparently a victim of the climate.

Orangutan photos by Wayne Alison:

Next: Illustrations of Poe's Orangutan

Crocodile Swipes Lawn Mower

2012-01-01T11:00:00.000-06:00

From an Australian reptile park:

Killer Whales vs. Sharks in New Zealand

2011-12-31T09:30:00.000-06:00

Interesting orca behavior in the video linked here--and a dog gets involved.

Orca attacks shark in surf zone as beachgoers watch in awe:

"The video clip shows what appears to be a male orca, or killer whale, fiercely harassing a shark near the small breakers, and a large shark beaching itself, perhaps in an attempt to escape the orca, only to be harassed by a barking dog. "

10 Wacky Animal Stories of 2011

2011-12-30T11:00:00.000-06:00

Kevin Deacon/Creative Commons

Live Science has this very entertaining write-up about the bizarre animal discoveries of the past year. The quote below may remind readers of the slow loris, whose toxic strategies I mentioned here a while back.

10 Wacky Animal Stories of 2011 | LiveScience:

"By utilizing the same plants that African tribesmen use to poison their arrows, the furry fury known as the African crested rat can incapacitate and even kill predators many times its size, research published in August found. The rat chews poisonous bark and spits the poison onto its furt coat, which has specialized hairs with pores to absorb the animal's poisonous spit, which protects them against predators like dogs."

Vultures Take Cattle

2011-12-29T11:00:00.001-06:00

(Dellex/Creative Commons)

Yet another unexpected effect of exterminating wildlife: From Spain comes the news that vultures are taking cattle. The vultures are no match for healthy adult cattle, but they take calves and, in the case reported in the news story linked below, a cow weakened by giving birth.

Scientists are attributing this behavior to the lack of easier meals--the dead animals, wild and domestic, the vultures would prefer. My correspondent Croconut, who alerted me to this story, tells me the vultures are protected, but there's been some success setting up feeding spots for them so they won't attack livestock.

Like the predatory kea parrots of New Zealand, the vultures simply begin to eat the livestock alive. The keas are known to take flesh from the vulnerable backs of sheep. The sheep often survive the attack, only to die of infection later.

Keas (klaasmer/Creative Commons)

The news story doesn't say which species of vulture is involved. I suspect it's the large and abundant griffon vulture, which can weigh over 15 pounds. Much rarer, and thus probably not the culprit here, is the cinereous vulture (pictured), by some accounts the largest bird of prey in the world. It can reach twice that weight, and its wings can span ten feet.

The article is in Spanish. English-speaking readers may get a hoot, but probably not much information, from Google's bizarre translation of it; I provide a sample below.

The vultures are finished with a cow and a newborn calf Pascualcobo. elnortedecastilla.es: "The vulture, scavenger, has no ability to directly kill cattle, unlike the wolf," he said from the agricultural organization, stressing that the fresh cow, unable to lift, "it was easy to start devour, peck peck on the back, in soft, just whence the calf. "

Thus, the cow had eaten the back "no kill", thus "great suffering" for the animal, while the calf started eating the eyes and the soft parts, "until the animal died of suffering and bled."

Cheetah the Chimp Dies?

2011-12-28T11:00:00.001-06:00

None of these is the same Cheetah who may have just died.

This chimpanzee supposedly played in Tarzan movies of the 1930s and has just now died at age 80. That would be a phenomenal age for a chimp.

Chimp from 1930s US 'Tarzan' films dead at 80 - Yahoo! News:

"The Florida chimpanzee -- which reportedly arrived at the sanctuary in 1960 -- loved finger-painting and watching football, and was soothed by Christian music, the sanctuary's outreach director Debbie Cobb told the Tampa Tribune.

Ron Priest, a sanctuary volunteer, told the Tribune that Cheetah stood out because he could walk upright with a straight back like a human. "When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them. He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between," Priest said."

Wasp

2011-12-27T11:00:00.000-06:00

Photography by D'Arcy Allison-Teasley

The White Cat

2011-12-26T09:54:00.000-06:00

I don’t usually run fiction here, but what the heck, let’s do something different. This short story originally appeared in Vestal Review. It’s read here by James Addison Conrad. Not for the faint of heart.

The Book of Deadly Animals on Ever So Strange

2011-12-25T11:00:00.000-06:00

Some nice (and funny) words for The Book of Deadly Animals the other day on Ever So Strange.

A Description of Water

2011-12-24T11:00:00.001-06:00

I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble, reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled about the bluff Boreal, which seemed to move as if careful not to bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds of the peach.

Text by M. P. Shiel

Photograph by Parker Grice

Wild Boar Attacks Woman in Ohio

2011-12-23T11:00:00.001-06:00

Wild Pig Attacks Woman in Lawrence County, Ohio: "The complaint, filed by Sgt. Randy Goodall states, "I observed some type of animal jump up and attack (Scott) around the neck and shoulders."

It goes on to state Goodall "fired two shots into the animal from atop the edge of the roadway at a distance of approximately 20 feet. The animal attempted to approach the couple and then turned and tried to run toward me. I fired an additional shot into the animal, killing it as it rolled down the hill."

Scott was bitten several times on her legs and hands.

"I don't care what people say," she says. "They're dangerous.""

Revisiting Dingo Attack on Baby

2011-12-22T11:00:00.000-06:00

The video summarizes the case made famous in a Meryl Streep movie: A dingo took a human baby from a tent, and the mother was blamed for it. As described in The Book of Deadly Animals, the evidence against Lindy Chamberlain was never credible, while the reasons for doubting a wild dog would prey on a human child were wishful thinking. A new study, mentioned in the link below, confirms that dingoes sometimes take large prey. This should be no surprise if we recall that they belong to the same species as wolves and dogs. The most telling evidence, however, is that other children have been killed by dingoes in the years since this case made news.

Evidence growing for Azaria dingo attack: "A 2011 study of dingo scats showed dingoes could prey on relatively large animals, like wallabies, not just small creatures like rats.

"The second body of evidence that may well be of interest are the events of Fraser Island, showing that when humans and dingoes are in relatively close proximity, that dingoes become sufficiently emboldened to attack humans," he said."

The Spider and the Rose

2011-12-21T11:00:00.001-06:00

Photography by D'Arcy Allison-Teasley

What Color Is This Cat?

2011-12-20T11:00:00.000-06:00

Further to yesterday's post about oddly colored pets, Croconut provides these photos of his cat. He says it looks green to him. Others say gray-black. I confess it looks brown to me, except maybe around the neck. Anybody want to say purple?

Red and White

2011-12-19T12:03:00.000-06:00

At the swimming pool I met a family whose pets were all the wrong colors.

Steve and his brother Eli cleared land with chain saws for a living. Steve had two daughters who had no fear of strangers (or at least of me). The ten year old asked me all sorts of questions: Where do you live? Where'd you get those ugly swimming trunks? Do you like hamburgers or hot dogs better?

That last question somehow led to me getting invited to the family cookout. I rode to their place in the back of Steve's pickup with Eli's dog, a red Doberman pinscher named Gertrude. I was a little apprehensive about getting close to a strange Doberman, but I felt better when she slunk over to me and pushed her head under my hand to be petted.

I had never seen a red Dobie. She looked about like the inside of a red velvet cake. Eli said she was one of only 60 in the country. He had paid good money for her. He mentioned all the surgeries she had had because of her stomach problems. "Didn't you have surgeries?" he said in a baby voice and kissed her on the mouth.

Once we arrived at Steve's place, he brought out his own pet. I nearly dropped my hamburger. The pet was white and had demonic red eyes, and the first thing it did was run up Steve's left sleeve and come out his right.

"It's an albino ferret," Steve said, too late to prevent my stomach from jumping onto my left shoulder blade.

I never found out why both brothers had chosen pets of unusual color. When I mentioned the subject, Eli said “I don’t consider Gertrude a pet. She’s more like a child.”

Later, Steve said, "Eli goes overboard about that dog. Doesn't he, Precious?" And he kissed the ferret.

Photo: Marshman/Creative Commons

Troubled Skies

2011-12-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

I hate the kind of calendar that shows me, for example, a snow scene in February. In February, I have seen plenty of snow, can see more of it any time I want by looking out my window, and really would prefer to see less of it. I'd like a calendar that shows the opposite of whatever I can see from my own window.

In that spirit, I offer a few spring skies. These first two shots are from shortly after dawn; the sky looked volcanic, but nothing much happened.

These next four shots were taken within four minutes in mid-morning, all from our back yard. The sky's color changed rapidly (all of these are the real colors, not manipulated). A storm rumbled in shortly.

Related Post: The Day after Summer

Photography by Parker Grice

Gibbon Attacks Toddler

2011-12-16T11:00:00.001-06:00

In a Malaysian zoo, a siamang has attacked and severely injured a three-year-old boy.

The siamang is the largest of the gibbons or "lesser" apes--as opposed to the better known "great" apes, including the chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. This article lists the attacker at 38 kilos (84 pounds), which is probably a typo; the average for this species is under 30 pounds, though they may stand four feet tall or so as they waddle on the ground. They'd prefer to swing by their arms.

The news report (linked below) gives no information on the reason for the attack, though all primates are potentially dangerous and can become aggressive for no obvious reason.

The most startling characteristic of the siamang, aside from biting zoo visitors, is its habit of inflating its neck to the size of a pumpkin and bellowing like a game show contestant imitating a pig. This sound can be heard by gibbons in the next neighborhood.

'Tame' gibbon attacks boy at zoo - General - New Straits Times: "I was shocked and screamed. My husband, who at first did not realise what was happening, acted fast and held the gibbon's head. But it refused to let go of my son's thigh. The gibbon only let go when another visitor kicked its stomach."

Escape of the Snapping Turtle

2011-12-15T11:10:00.000-06:00

Captured by kids, this snapping turtle strives to escape.

Released, it makes its break.

The kids follow and watch.

At last, with a little human help, the turtle reaches the safety of the river.

Photos by Elizabeth Murphy

The Times on Deadly Animals

2011-12-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

A nice mention for The Book of Deadly Animals the other day in the Times of London, which praises the book as "Nature writing--but not as you know it."

Arana Capulina -- A Black Widow Spider

2011-12-13T11:00:00.000-06:00

As readers of The Red Hourglass will know, the black widow spideris a special favorite of mine. Hodari Nundu recently sent me these photos of ablack widow he found building a web above his cat’s litter box.

Hodari captured the spider in a jar, then released it outdoors.

Hodari tells me that where he lives in Mexico, this spider is sometimes called viuda negra, which means black widow, and sometimes araña capulina, or black cherry spider. It’s a nifty name because, aside from the outward resemblance between spider and black cherry, both are also toxic. The leaves and seeds of the black cherry contain cyanide compounds that often kill livestock.

Rasbak/Creative Commons

A Warning to Intruders

2011-12-12T11:23:00.000-06:00

I directed my glass [i.e., telescope] to the house. There were no signs of life, but there was the ruined roof, the long mud wall peeping above the grass, with three little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all this brought within reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids,—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

When I was a kid, common wisdom was that you could keep coyotes out of your pasture by shooting one of them and draping its carcass over the barbed wire. Supposedly the other coyotes would take the hint. Maybe that was the thinking behind the carcass you see here. D’Arcy was out early one morning, photographing the prismatic frost that covered everything, when she noticed this dead raccoon. She was repulsed, but knew the duty of anyone with a camera and a blogging friend.

Book of Deadly Animals Reviewed in Mail on Sunday

2011-12-11T11:00:00.001-06:00

Another full-page rave for The Book of Deadly Animals, this time in Britain's Mail on Sunday.

"Though I can imagine this book making a perfect stocking-filler for adolescent boys, it's also a beautifully written, well-researched work," says reviewer James Delingpole. He gives it four stars.

The Book of Deadly Animals, By Gordon Grice - Reviews - Books - The Independent

2011-12-10T11:00:00.001-06:00

A good review in the Independent:

The Book of Deadly Animals, By Gordon Grice - Reviews - Books - The Independent:

"Gordon Grice treats his deadly subject with wit and wry humour, but he does not sensationalise it"

American House Spider

2011-12-09T03:18:00.008-06:00

With egg sacs

Photography by Dee Puett

The Daily Mail Takes on Deadly Animals

2011-12-08T11:00:00.001-06:00

Good news from Great Britain: The Book of Deadly Animals is the subject of a full-page rave review in the Daily Mail, the nation's largest non-tabloid newspaper. "This review can barely scratch the surface of its wonder," says reviewer Marcus Berkmann.

Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs, Conclusion

2011-12-07T11:00:00.000-06:00

by guest writer Mark Dery

Franco Folini/Creative Commons

Yet, in the mass imagination, the Jerusalem cricket is more than merely evil; it is uncanny. The insect’s folk names—niña de la tierra and cara de niño (Spanish for “child of the earth” and “child’s face,” respectively), wó see ts’inii (Navajo for “skull insect”) and, more recently, “Satan’s fetus”—hint at the psychological roots of its effect on us. In his inexhaustible essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud cites Ernst Jentsch’s theory that what makes the uncanny so disquieting is that it destabilizes the either/or logic of our culture, perverts the philosophical binaries that structure the Western worldview: inanimate/animate, organic/mechanical, and so forth. Uncanny things are border-crossers.

As “Satan’s fetus” and other such names suggest, the bald, bulbous-headed insect’s uncanniness has much to do with its humanoid appearance, specifically its disconcerting resemblance to a human baby—a resemblance enhanced by the widespread belief that stenopelmatids can cry like babies. (Not true, although they can produce a squeaking, called stridulation, by rubbing their hind legs against their abdomens.) JCs stand at the uncanny intersection of cute and eeeeeyewwwww. They put a face, at once cuddly and repugnant, on Daniel Harris’s argument in Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism that

cuteness is not an aesthetic in the ordinary sense of the word and must be by no means mistaken for the physically appealing, the attractive. In fact, it is closely linked to the grotesque, the malformed. [...] The grotesque is cute because the grotesque is pitiable, and pity is the primary emotion of this seductive and manipulative aesthetic that arouses our sympathies by creating anatomical pariahs, like Cabbage Patch Dolls... Something becomes cute not necessarily because of a quality it has but because of a quality it lacks, a certain neediness and inability to stand alone, as if it were an indigent starveling, lonely and rejected because of a hideousness we find more touching than unsightly.

Speaking for the vocal minority on PotatoBugs.com who find Stenopelmatus cute, a user named Wyldbrry argues Harris’s point:

[T]wo months ago...I saw a potato bug for the first time. [...] When I saw him I stumbled back in fear. But my curiosity got the best of me and I came forward and stared into his beady eyes. He must have slapped some kind of mind control mojo on me ‘cause my next thought was, “aw poor little fella, he’s kinda cute in an ugly sort of way.”

Not only are JCs uncanny, but like all insects they’re irrevocably alien; maybe even more so than most members of class Insecta. Californians marvel, for example, at the bizarre sight of JCs marching lemminglike into ponds or pools. Inevitably, the insects drown, at which point a wriggling, whip-like thing—the parasitic horsehair worm (Gordius robustus or Paragordius varius)—bursts forth (out of the insect’s anus, if you must know), swimming off in search of a mate and leaving its host to die. According to Weissman, JCs ingest the worm when eating “dead material.” The worm takes up residence in the insect’s gut, where it hatches, after which it “cleans out the Jerusalem cricket, eats its internal organs.” All the while, the host animal behaves like any normal JC, blithely unconcerned that it’s being gnawed hollow. When the time is right, the worm releases hormones that inspire the insect’s irresistible compulsion to drown itself. This sort of parasitism is common enough among insects; from an anthropocentric perspective, though, it looks unspeakably alien.

The cricket’s alien nature—alien from a human’s-eye view, at least—trips the wires of our species-centric xenophobia. “There is nothing man fears more than the touch of the unknown,” said Elias Canetti, to which we might add: whether it’s nature or culture. Most Californians’ chain of unreasoning, upon encountering Stenopelmatus for the first time, goes something like:

A. What is it? I’ve never seen anything like it. B. It’s weird. And ugly. Disgustingly ugly. Evil ugly.
C. Must kill it, kill it dead before it contaminates my world.

“People write to me and say, ‘Gee, I saw this thing; I smashed it; I poured lighter fluid on it and lit it—would you like it?’” says Weissman. “People have this extreme reaction...” JCs arouse our fear of nature, a cultural neurosis that is, at its roots, a pathological fear of all that is Other. In the popular unconscious, stenopelmatids stand in not only for The Wild but for the illegal alien, who emerges at night to tunnel under la linea, the wall of steel.

We have always had, since the day we settled here, a gentle understanding with the creatures who live beyond our borders: we do not stray into their woods; they do not come into our village.- M. Night Shyamalan, The Village

On landuse and planning maps, of course, the division between “developed” and “undeveloped” areas is drawn as a straight-edged border. Spuriously precise boundaries likewise define parks, wildlife refuges, national forests, and official wilderness areas. In reality, there is an infinitely more intricate interpenetration of the wild and the urban. [...] Coyotes and cougars...are unwelcome heralds of a breakdown in the clear-cut, impermeable, but essentially imaginary boundary between the human and the wild.- Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

In M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Village, a group of middle-class whites, post-traumatically stressed by the Senseless Violence of Our Times, build their own private Idaho—actually, a cruelty-free Colonial Williamsburg, hidden from the modern world by a wild wood on loan from the Brothers Grimm.

The only downside to this Fantasy Island for Real Simple readers is the ever-present menace of Those We Do Not Speak Of, hulking, hairy creatures who patrol the borders of the dark and trackless wood. Of course, borders are made to be breached: the village idiot sneaks into the Forbidden Woods, and the monsters from the wrong side of the tracks—er, trees—go wilding through the all-white village, leaving mutilated house pets as their calling cards.

Sure, the movie is a big, fat tub of Jolly Time® Blast-O-Butter® Popcorn for the mind. Still, Shyamalan’s bogeymen have a message for us: the age of tidy dualisms is well and truly over; in the chaos and complexity of our times, sharp distinctions are a philosophical mirage. White-flight exurbanites may circle the wagons, in gated communities, against gangbangers and border-crossers, and nativist demagogues may demand a ring of steel around Fortress America—a levee against the flood of immigrants threatening, in the immortal words of Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper, “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” But whatever we repress always comes back to bite us, whether it be the race-based inequities that breed Bloods and Crips or the economic dealmaking that turns a blind eye on illegal immigration or our centuries-old policy of eradicating whatever wild nature we can’t domesticate.

That’s why Shyamalan’s villagers are forever and always speaking of Those We Do Not Speak Of. And that’s why there’s a low-lying fear in California’s sprawl country, an anxiety that occasionally blossoms into collective panic attacks. Out where the McMansions meet California’s wild edge, white exurbanites’ worries assume mythic form. In the dark chaparral beyond the last street light, nebulous fears—of inner-city pathologies and the Browning of America and feral nature closing in—take palpable shape: pet-killing coyotes, cougars with a taste for birdwatchers and bikers, alien invaders from south of the border, Jerusalem crickets on the march.

To connoisseurs of California absurdism, the stealthy penetration of suburbia’s perimeter by small swarthy aliens on the prowl after dark sounds suspiciously familiar. In the cultural firefight over illegal immigration, defenders of our declining empire conjure visions of a Brown Peril, overrunning the border like some biblical plague. On the hairy-eyed nativist fringe, “cockroach” is a well-worn term of opprobrium, as in blog comments like: “Here in California, the Mexicans are breeding like cockroaches...it might sound racist, but its [sic] true. Their culture revolves around filth and corruption.”

In typical Trickster fashion, Chicanos have appropriated the slur and used it as a stick to beat the devil, as in The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s novel about the Brown Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Or La Cucaracha, Lalo Alcaraz’s stingingly funny comic strip about pochos (Spanglish-speaking Mexican-Americans, caught in the double consciousness of their parents’ Mexican traditions and the Gringolandia in which they grew up). Or this ha-ha-only-serious post on the blog Corrente:

Principles of cockroach people:

1. Avoid the Man. If the light shines on you, scatter.

2. Survive. Some of you will be stomped and gassed. Make sure the rest survive.

3. Don’t believe what you hear or read. Promises are just words.

4. There are more of you than there are of them who would destroy you.

5. Very few people like cockroaches. Beware of those who claim they do.

6. Gather what you need to survive.

7. The cockroaches have survived every attempt to eradicate them; they will prevail.

8. When the chance comes, move in a mass to secure food and territory.

In a sense, we are all cockroach people, pests, vermin, the sworn enemies of the bugman and his exterminators.

At a time when camo-clad vigilantes patrol the US-Mexico border and cazamigrantes (migrant hunters) have declared open season on illegal aliens, tales of suburbanites terrorized by vermin resembling giant cucharachas can’t help but sound like social satire. For Californians living in the free-fire borderlands, stumbling on a big, brown insect creeping surreptitiously through their homes is just one more Close Encounter with the Darker Other.

Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs, Part 2

2011-12-06T11:00:00.000-06:00

Matthias Blume/Creative Commons

by guest writer Mark Dery

As sprawl creeps eastward into what was once wild, more and more Californians are coming face to face with JCs. As Mike Davis recounts in Ecology of Fear, developers, their pro-growth political beneficiaries, and what Davis calls “a regional planning system dominated and corrupted by development interests,” have collaborated for generations on the chainsaw massacre of the state’s wild places. “[E]ntire Southern California ecosystems, including salt marshes, native grasslands, Engelmann oak savannas, and vernal pool communities, have become virtually extinct over the past century and a half,” he notes. Even so, the subdivision of Eden continues, paving the way (literally) for more McMansions, more malls, more freeway arteries.

As white-flight exurbanites stake their claims at the wild edge of eastern California’s chaparral-covered foothills, they’re confronting a border of another sort, trespassed by a new breed of alien. The border, in this case, is the “ecotone”—ecologists’ term for those transitional spaces where biological communities such as forest and prairie, or in this case lawn and chaparral, intersect and interact. The increase in confrontations between exurban homesteaders and large predators is evidence that hostilities between culture and nature are escalating. In news reports of coyotes adapting to a suburb-friendly diet of garbage, pets, and unattended toddlers, or of cougars attacking humans on the wrong side of the white-picket divide between manicured lawn and backcountry scrub, environmentalists hear the annunciatory trumpets of an ecological Judgment Day.

Despite their low media profile, Jerusalem crickets are emissaries from a world out of balance, too—sentinel species whose increasingly frequent run-ins with exurbanites are symptomatic of habitat destruction. “In Jerusalem crickets, you have so many species that are geographically limited to a sand dune, to a mountain peak, that if you develop that habitat you may cause a species to go extinct because it’s only found in a very limited area,” says Weissman. No one knows how many species of Stenopelmatus are dangling from the rim of extinction, he says, because he’s the only one studying the insect. “I’m trying...to document as many of these different species as I can, [to] show that they’re geographically limited,” he says, “and then [I’ll] try to get some of these habitats protected. Until I give them a name, we have no formal mechanism to do that.” There’s an Adamic loneliness to Weissman’s one-man quest to name every branch of the JC tree and record it in the Book of Life. Yet there’s a whiff of the apocalyptic about it, too: Bruce Dern as the hairy eyed tree-hugger in Silent Running, single-handedly defying myopic politicians in order to save what remains of Earth’s ecosystems.

Decades after the fact, I discovered that my late-night encounter with Stenopelmatus was far from unique. In all of its particulars, my experience was struck from the same mold as many of the first-person accounts archived on the tongue-in-cheek website, PotatoBugs.com (“dedicated to the fabrication and perpetuation of fear, hate, and disgust for the Potato Bug”). Time and again, the victims of stenopelmatid abuse sharing their recovered memories on PotatoBugs.com play variations on the themes I touched on, in my account of the Thing in the Moonlight. There is the same shock and awe at its unexpected weight (it’s the heaviest insect in California, according to Weissman, who has recorded specimens weighing 13 grams, more than some mice), the same revulsion at the sheer size of the beast:

[W]hile trying to decide what this monster-looking thing was, my husband informed me that it was a Potato BUG. No way, bugs do not come in a size large enough to wear a dog collar; yes it was that big. The size of a miniature dog of some kind. Now, my husband says that terror has a way of making me exaggerate but I stand by what I say I saw.

(For the record, Weissman has never encountered a specimen larger than three-and-a-half inches.)

There is the same panicked attempt to flush the beast into oblivion, the same crazed fear that it will rise again to exact a vengeance too monstrous to mention:

Called my son downstairs to handle the beast, he tossed it into the toilet and before the flush I swear that thing was swimming, ended up doing the backstroke as it went down. And eewww all I could think of all nite was that it could come back up. Now every little noise at nite in the dark house makes me think I'm living with a whole nest in my house!

Lastly, there is the same post-traumatic fallout, the mind-curdling memories that users insist have “scarred” them for life, condemning them to nightmares crawling with orthopteran horrors: “I have come here to post my story in hopes that I will slowly heal from my traumatizing encounter with the hideous creature known to all as the potato bug.”

But seriously: how does a largely subterranean, mostly nocturnal insect that poses no threat to humans become what PotatoBugs.com calls “the most universally feared, hated, and disgusting [creature] on the planet?” Despite its lowly but important role in Californian ecosystems (JCs are protein bars for predators) and its relative harmlessness (JCs can inflict a painful bite, but typically do so only when provoked and, contrary to popular belief, are not poisonous), the Jerusalem cricket is for many Californians the poster child for fear and loathing. It inspires a revulsion that channels cultural anxieties and Freudian fears, not to mention our primordial antipathy toward The Insect, the blank-eyed face of nature at its most inhuman.

“The single most disgusting creature known to man. Its tiny little head staring right at me, its mandibles on my bare skin”: in the ironic support group now in session on PotatoBugs.com, the word “disgust” is a mantra. But what, exactly, makes the Jerusalem cricket so disgusting? Let us count the ways: there are the dead, doll eyes, set in a bald head that is nauseatingly glossy, like a Tootsie Pop that somebody has been sucking on. Creepier still, Stenopelmatus is loathsome to the touch, unexpectedly fleshy for a creature with an exoskeleton: “When I picked it up (behind the head) I almost dropped it on instinct because it felt so vile: overfilled and soft, like a water balloon,” writes a user named Bitriot, on the website Everything2.com.

Yet, while undeniably rooted in the biological and inescapably visceral in nature, our disgust for the cricket is more than merely visceral. “Like all emotions, disgust is more than just a feeling,” William Ian Miller reminds us, in The Anatomy of Disgust.

Emotions are feelings linked to ways of talking about those feelings, to social and cultural paradigms that make sense of those feelings by giving us a basis for knowing when they are properly felt and properly displayed. Emotions, even the most visceral, are richly social, cultural, and linguistic phenomena. [...] Disgust is a feeling about something and in response to something, not just raw unattached feeling.

Disgust inclines toward moral judgment, he argues, inviting us to equate the foul with the fallen, defilement with depravity. Thus the reflexive linkage, in many PotatoBugs.com posts, of visceral recoil with moral reproach. The word “evil” thumps out a steady backbeat in the site’s discussion threads. JCs are evil because they live underground, the realm of the chthonic, and, like all unhallowed things, they only come out at night. They’re the untouchables of the insect world, battening on death and decay. Most of all, though, they’re evil because they’re ugly—disgustingly ugly.

To be continued tomorrow

Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs, Pt. 1

2011-12-05T11:03:00.000-06:00

Marshall Hedin/Creative Commons

by guest writer Mark Dery

Something was moving. In the heat of a San Francisco night, in the summer of 1982, something was scuttling across the floor toward the foam-rubber mattress where I lay. It was moving fast enough to jolt me out of a dead sleep. Not only was this thing coming toward me with alarming rapidity, it was big. From my perspective—lying on my side on a floor mattress, practically at eye level with the intruder—it might have been a good-sized mouse … if mice had six legs.

In a jump cut, I was out of bed, across the room, switching on the light to reveal a crawling horror: a humongous insect, thicker than a man’s thumb, maybe three inches in length. It had powerful, cricketlike hind legs and a caramel-colored abdomen, ringed with amber bands. Its head was dried-blood red, with the lacquered glossiness of a candied apple. It made me think of a skinned thumb, or the swollen head of an aroused penis, shiny with precum.

The creature was obscene in its ugliness. But what was it? David Cronenberg’s idea of a partial-birth abortion? A stool sample from the man-eating xenomorph in the movie Alien? A nightcrawler from the cultural unconscious?

Sweeping the thing into a dustpan, I shuddered at its weight as I carried it to the bathroom. To my horror, the creature swam against the tide when I flushed, scrabbling frantically at the toilet bowl. I flushed. And flushed. And flushed. (Die, monster, die!) At last, it disappeared down the porcelain gullet. The toilet made a gagging sound.

Trembling with revulsion, I laid the heavy ceramic lid of the toilet tank across the closed seat to ensure that no six-legged freak could exact revenge, even if it did manage to clamber up, out of the sewer. Not that I slept much that night. In the dark, I could still see those beady black eyes staring back at me unblinkingly as I sent the abomination swirling into Eternity with a final flush.

* * *

Decades later, I found myself looking into those eyes again, when a Google search put a name to the face in my nightmares: The Jerusalem cricket (order Orthoptera, family Stenopelmatidae, genus Stenopelmatus)—a large, wingless relative of the grasshopper and the katydid that spends most of its life underground except at night, when it leaves its burrow to scavenge for food or seek out a mate.

Curiously, the Jerusalem cricket is neither from Jerusalem nor is it, properly speaking, a cricket. (As Linda Richman used to say on Saturday Night Live: Discuss.) Most species live in the United States, west of the Rockies—specifically, in California, a world away from Jerusalem. And its resemblance to its namesake, the cricket, is only passing: Unlike the Gryllidae, the Jerusalem cricket doesn’t chirp, doesn’t hop, and the females of the genus don’t have long ovipositors like female crickets do. (To complicate matters, Stenopelmatus is also known, in those states where the sobriquet hasn’t already been claimed by the wood louse, as the Potato Bug. Predictably, it isn’t a true bug, nor is the potato a staple of its diet. Its typical fare is decaying plant matter and decomposing animals.)

As it happens, most of Stenopelamtus’s seemingly numberless species are also nameless because they’re all but impossible to tell apart, except by counting the spines on their hind legs. Identifying and naming the species of Stenopelmatus is a Herculean labor, made even more daunting by virtue of the fact that the scientist who has set himself this task, David Weissman, confronts it alone, in his spare time (entomology is his avocation; in his working life, he’s an anesthesiologist). He is the world’s foremost authority on JCs, as he jocularly calls them, because he’s the only entomologist who has devoted himself to studying the genus.

Based in the San Francisco Bay area town of Los Gatos, Weissman has identified forty-three new species in California alone, where JCs seem to be everywhere: in mountains, chaparral-covered foothills, oak woodlands, riparian belts, desert dunes, coastal sage scrub, and, increasingly, the homes of horrified suburbanites.

To be continued tomorrow

Flamingos

2011-12-04T11:00:00.000-06:00

Photography by Dee Puett

Eel Invades Man's Penis at Beauty Spa

2011-12-03T11:00:00.001-06:00

A story in the Metro tells of a man who went for a rejuvenating spa treatment that involved swimming among eels--and found one of them entering his penis. He was unable to stop its ascent and had to have an operation. Surgeons removed the fish, already dead, from his bladder.

Where to begin? First of all, this sort of treatment is not as odd as it may sound to the Western reader. A Mesopotamian carp called the reddish log sucker or doctor fish (Garra rufa) is often used as a treatment for psoriasis, eczema, and other skin problems. These fish normally feed on algae and other organisms that coat rocks submerged in water. When a patient immerses himself in a pool populated with them, they treat him as an algae-coated surface and go to work removing the dead skin, leaving the healthy, living parts unharmed. It is said that the doctor fish "eat" the dead skin, but apparently what they're doing is more like pulling it off in a futile search for food.

This medical treatment has also been used for merely cosmetic exfoliation. In a Youtube video with commentary too annoying to stream here, a man undergoing a fish pedicure claims it feels like electric current going through his feet.

Here's a video showing the use of doctor fish to treat psoriasis:

But back to our Chinese penis case. The fish used there weren't doctor fish, but, according to the story, some sort of eel. I wonder, though, if this errant one at least might really be a catfish. In South America, there are pencil catfishes, including the candiru, that live by swimming into the gills of other fish, anchoring themselves with spikes, and siphoning off some blood. They're like fleas feeding on mammals. Occasionally, as described in The Book of Deadly Animals, one of these pencil catfish mistakes the scent of human urine for the waste products exuded through a fish's gills. The pencil catfish then swims up the human urethra, to the discomfort of both parties. Before modern surgery, some people died, or lost important parts and wished they had died, because of these invasions of privacy.

Thanks to Croconut for the news tip.

Massive Animals

2011-12-02T11:00:00.000-06:00

Ginormous Grizzly

These photos came to me in various email forwards, often with claims about record sizes. I checked out the bear photo and found it's legit (i.e., not Photoshopped), though you could argue the foregrounding of the bear's head relative to the human exaggerates its size.The rest look convincing, but I don't vouch for them.

Immense razorback hog (feral pig)

Monumental rabbit

Excessive cat

Too much fish for just one dish

Giant dog with normal-sized horse and humans

A Gleaming Wasp Moth

2011-12-01T12:11:00.000-06:00

Birds and other predators associate this color scheme (black mixed with a bright color) with danger. It often occurs on stinging wasps. That’s an advantage for this harmless moth, who may escape through confusion.

While we're at it, here's another example of Batesian mimicry: a fly that benefits from its resemblance to a bee. If you look close, you'll see that it has only two wings (a fly trait), not four (a bee trait).

Recent research suggests that some animals even benefit from being bad mimics.

Photos by D'Arcy Alison-Teasley:

"Python" swallows "Hippo"

2011-11-30T11:00:00.000-06:00

I've been seeing this spectacular video around the web for a couple of years now, usually labeled as a python vomiting up a hippopotamus.

But, as a close look at the feet of the prey makes clear, that's no hippo. It appears that this is actually an anaconda vomiting a capybara. The capybara is an immense rodent, the largest kind in the world, but, at a top weight of around 140 pounds, it's smaller than all but the youngest infant hippos. Big constricting snakes typically regurgitate large meals when they are harrassed, since it's hard for them to flee when laden.

Here's a different video of an anaconda preying on a capybara:

Blister Beetle

2011-11-29T11:00:00.001-06:00

Nik Nimbus sends this video from a graveyard in England. The blister beetle is so named because it exudes an unpleasant chemical to ward off predators--though Nik says that, to his human nose, it actually smells like an agreeable incense. This particular kind of blister beetle lives by a sort of con game. Its larvae attract a male digger bee with pheromones. They board the lascivious male and use him as transport until he finds a female bee. She's the next leg of the trip. In her burrow, the beetle larvae feast on the pollen she's stored--and then on her young.

Grice at OSU

2011-11-28T07:00:00.000-06:00

I'll be speaking at Oklahoma State University tonight at 7PM in the Browsing Room of the library. Hope to see some of you there!

A Closer Look at That Turkey

2011-11-27T11:00:00.002-06:00

Sure, it tasted good, but these photos make me wonder why I ate it.

Photography by Parker Grice

A Keeper's Tale, Conclusion: Hope

2011-11-26T09:30:00.000-06:00

Green Anaconda (Steven G. Johnson/Creative Commons)

by guest writer Hodari Nundu

Because of that newly found respect for the life of insectsand rodents, I couldn´t help but feel uneasy while cleaning the rat cages.

It turned out that my friend who was scared of tarantulaswas also not particularly fond of rats. I couldn´t help but laugh at this, butI agreed to be the “rat handler” (the one who would take the rats out of thecages and into boxes during the cleaning) in exchange for him dealing with thepiles of rat excrement that were a lot less appealing to me.

We spent hours cleaning the rat cages and during all thattime, I couldn´t help but to notice that the rats would stand up on their hindlegs and look at me with great attention, following my every move. I wonderedwhat was going through their minds. Where they expecting to be fed? Or maybethey realized we were new? Whatever was in their minds, I couldn´t help but thinkthat they were rather cute. It was a shame that all of them would end up assnake food.

I wondered if the rats had any idea of what was going tohappen to them. And then I realized that I was talking to them. Whenever Imoved a female rat out of the cage, I would tell it that it was OK, that Iwouldn´t harm its pups, and that they would be reunited as soon as I cleanedthe cage. I would also announce that I had fresh, clean water for them. Andthen I would enjoy the sight of them happily drinking the clean water.

My friend, busy with the excrement and the huge garbage binin the other side of the room, wasn´t paying attention -- but I realized that Iwas being nice to the rats, and then it struck me that when the time came toget them out of the cages and break their necks. . . well, it would feel like treason. Maybe notfor the rats, because they were killed very quickly and painlessly (or at leastthat’s what Salvador told us). But to me, it would be worse than beating themto death with the dustpan. I had cared for them and provided food and water forthem, and even comforted them when they were scared. After all of that, killingthem didn´t feel right at all. Yes, I knew and accepted the fact that in thisworld, some creatures have to eat others to survive. It is the way of nature. Butat least in the wild the rat had a chance to escape. Here, they had no way of avoidingtheir grisly fate.

There was no point in lying to myself. I was not meant forthis job.

Burmese Python (Hodari Nundu)

The moment came to tell Salvador the truth. I wasn´t willingto kill rats to feed the snakes. I knew that it had to be done- I just didn´twant to be the one to do it.

I must confess I felt kind of embarrassed. For anadventurous teenager like I was, it felt like being weak. I also expected himto be irritated; after all, if you go to a zoo asking to be a zookeeper, you’resupposed to be ready to kill a few feeder rats, right?

But he was actually quite nice about it. He told me that heunderstood, and he even allowed me to stay and become sort of a “presenter” forthe reptile house.

From that moment on, my job consisted basically in carryinga huge Burmese python over my shoulders and talking to visitors about snakes,their importance, and how they weren´t slimy monsters created by the Devil totorment human kind. I must say I really enjoyed this job. It made me feel likeI was actually doing something important.

Mexico is still the richest country in the world when itcomes to reptiles. However, at the same time, it is a very bad place to live ifyou are one. People kill harmless snakes and lizards out of fear and ignorance.Attacks on humans by crocodiles (even attacks caused by the humans themselves)are often followed by petitions to have the ancient reptiles culled. Manyreptiles are endangered, or have already gone extinct. Some people believe itis too late to save our wildlife. Cities are growing fast, jungles and forestsare being devastated; the future looks grim for many creatures.

Then again, some people are too quick to give up.

I always felt this way whenever I saw children looking atthe Burmese python in awe, touching its skin, wanting to learn everything therewas to know about it. There was a lot of interest- especially from the youngervisitors. Older people seemed less enthusiastic about changing their mindsabout the animals they had learned to fear and despise, but children wereeasily fascinated by the cold blooded creatures.

A ten year old boy surprised me one day with hisnear-encyclopedic knowledge on pythons. We spent over an hour talking about thebiggest Reticulated Pythons ever found, and about the snakes’ amazing senses,hunting techniques and anatomical traits. I don´t think I ever had such a fluentconversation with an adult as I had that day with that kid. Nothing of what Itold him was new to him. Likewise, nothing of what he said was new to me, but Ithink he actually liked that. He probably had never spoken to another personwho enjoyed learning about snakes as much as he did.

Eventually, I had to take the python back to its enclosurewhen it became a little bit too interested in the boy’s face. His grandfatherwas terrified, but the kid was exultant. When I asked the old man how did theboy know so much about snakes, he said “They’re his passion. He is always reading about them”.

Some time later, I was standing in front of the GreenAnaconda’s enclosure. A little girl and her father were besides me. The girlread the information sign besides the snake’s terrarium, and asked her father:

“What does endangered mean?”

“It means that there are very few of them left” said theman.

“Why?”

“Well, because people have hunted them too much”.

The girl looked at her father, then at the thick, heavy,motionless green snake coiled in the corner of the terrarium. She looked at herfather again.

“That’s terrible!” she said “We have to save them!”

I couldn´t help but to smile.

If little boys read tons about pythons, and little girls wantto save the anaconda from extinction, then there must be hope for the rest of thecreatures.

It is not too late at all.

A Keeper's Tale, Part 4 of 5:: Hot Herps

2011-11-25T11:00:00.001-06:00

Cantil--a hot herp. Photo by Hodari Nundu

by guest writer Hodari Nundu

Salvador took us on a private “tour” of the reptile house,to show us how to feed and handle the different snake species he kept.

Most of them were harmless, but some were extremelydangerous. The most intimidating was without a doubt, the Green Rattlesnake,also known as the West Coast Rattlesnake. Found only in Western Mexico, it iseasily the largest rattlesnake in the country, sometimes rivaling even theEastern Diamondback in size. It is a particularly ill tempered snake, andbecause of its large size, the amount of venom it can inject into its victim isimpressive. Even though, being “hot herps,” the rattlesnakes were off limitsfor beginners, Salvador allowed us to join him in the enclosure to show us howto feed them, as long as we stayed behind him.

The snakes weren´t happy to see us. There were several ofthem in the enclosure, and every single one of them adopted an attack postureand started rattling its tail. The sound was amazingly loud, and incrediblyintimidating.

A couple years later, I would read that the effect of arattlesnake’s warning sound may be more powerful than we suspected. People whohad never heard it before, and even people who didn´t know what a rattlesnakewas, would become equally alarmed the moment they heard it.

But as intimidating as the rattlers were to my friend and me,they were not particularly scary to Salvador, who had worked with some of the deadliestspecies in the world.

He particularly remembered King Cobras. “They were veryscary” he said “even to an experienced snake handler. Some of them would risetheir heads vertically and look right at our eyes. And they can growl. Theygrowl like a turbine when they’re mad”.

He also had close calls with mambas and Gaboon vipers. Thezoo where he worked had both species together in the same enclosure. Thekeepers refered to that enclosure as “the terrarium of death.”

But although a mamba once slithered up his back and into hisshoulder, forcing him to remain completely motionless for over half an hourbefore the snake decided to climb down, he was never bitten by any of thoseAfrican species.

When I asked him what was the snake he feared the most, hedidn´t hesitate.

“I have kept all kinds of snakes, and I can tell yousomething” he said “I would prefer to work with cobras or mambas anyday ratherthan with lanceheads”.

The Spanish name for the lancehead snake is nauyaca real,which can be roughly translated as “royal pitviper”. Its scientific name,infamous among herpetologists, is Bothrops asper.

It is the most dangerous snake in Latin America, and kills morepeople in Mexico than any other species. It has every trait that makes a snakedangerous: an aggressive, nervous temperament, a potent venom, the habit ofapproaching human settlements in search of rodents, and a proclivity to bitemany times in a single attack, thus injecting huge amounts of venom. In ruralareas where medical attention is difficult to get, most people bitten by thissnake die, and those who survive are left horribly scarred or lose entire limbsto the creature’s highly necrotic venom.

There’s a legend, often repeated among snake enthusiastsaround here, about a gigantic venomous snake (according to some versions, itwas eight meters long), that was kept in the Guadalajara zoo and managed toinjure or kill three keepers in a matter of seconds.

When my friend and I asked Salvador about this, he smiled.

“It was a lancehead, actually” he said “and it is true thatit bit three handlers within seconds. They were trying to force-feed it, butthey forgot that these snakes can bite even with their mouths closed. The fangsare very long and retractable, so they can stick them out of the mouth. That’swhat this lancehead did; it used one of its fangs to scratch the handler thatwas grabbing its neck. The man released it in alarm, and the snake immediatelyturned in the air at the man grabbing the middle section of its body and bithis hand. When he let go, the snake fell to the ground and bit the third manwho had been holding its tail. It was all over in seconds. All of the handlerslived, but one lost his hand. So in a way, the legend is true. The only partthat was added was the bit about the snake being gigantic”.

After this conversation, Salvador showed us how to kill arat to feed it to a snake. Live rodents are rarely given to snakes in zoos;rodents are more than capable of biting snakes and causing them serious injury.This rarely happens in the wild, where the rodent has the much preferableoption of running away. In a small enclosure, however, rodents are no wimps.They will fight to the death to save themselves.

Before continuing I should probably mention that I don´tenjoy killing animals at all. I used to, though, when I was a kid. Me and mycat Pinky (in my defense, it was my sister who named him) would often team upto hunt insects in the house. I would swat the insects and Pinky would eat thecorpses. Whenever we encountered a dangerous specimen, like a scorpion(scorpions kill hundreds of people in Mexico every year), Pinky would replaceme as the main hunter and deal with the creature himself. Somehow, he alwaysmanaged to avoid being stung. Together, we were the perfect pest-managementteam during those rainy months when insects of all sorts wandered into thehouse.

I would also capture insects for a collection I had. I wouldtake the hapless insect and dip it into a jar with alcohol, alive. The insectwould struggle for a few moments before going still. Eventually, I had a smallmuseum of pickled cicadas, earwigs, scorpions and other arthropods, and wouldproudly show it to all my friends until my cat decided that it would be fun tosmash all the jars and spill the foul-smelling contents all over my bed.

This all changed when I was 13, and a mouse wandered intoour house. I immediately went after it, along with the cats. I don´t know how,but I got to the mouse before the cats did, and then, I used a dustpan to beatthe unfortunate rodent to death.

Once it was death, I just sat there, staring at themotionless body. Before that moment, all the lives I had taken had belonged toinsects. It is relatively easy to kill insects. They are small, they don´t havefacial expressions and they usually don´t make a sound when you squish them todeath. Yet the mouse, despite being small, was much more similar to a human. Itbled profusely, and it squeaked in fear and in pain when I struck it with thedustpan.

It made me feel terrible about myself. Had my cats caughtthe mouse, its fate wouldn´t have been much better; Pinky, in particular,enjoyed playing with live mice before eating them. But at least he was meant tokill mice. He was a cat after all. I had no need to kill the mouse. Not in sucha brutal manner, anyways.

That episode got me thinking about death a lot. Even insectcollecting seemed wrong now. Insects, I figured, had naturally short lifespans,and it didn´t seem right to make them even shorter just so I could show theirpickled corpses to people who really didn´t enjoy the sight anyways.

That was the end of my insect-collecting days. Nowadays,whenever I go hunting for bugs, it is with a camera. I must say, getting a goodpicture of a fantastic looking insect and then letting it fly away is much morerewarding than putting it into alcohol.

As for mice, whenever one gets into my house, well, that’swhat cats are for. I just hope they don´t start feeling remorse too oneday.

Next: Hope

A Keeper's Tale, Part 3 of 5: Crocodiles and Caimans

2011-11-24T11:00:00.001-06:00

by guest writer Hodari Nundu

I should probably say a few things about crocodiles in Mexico.We have four species of crocodilians. One of them is most familiar forAmericans-- the American alligator. Officially, gators have been extinct inMexico since the nineteenth century. However, a few of them are seen and evenphotographed every now and then in the country’s northernmost rivers and lakes.

In the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas lives a morecommon, but still seldom encountered relative to the alligator. It is thespectacled caiman, which can grow up to three meters long and is notoriouslyable to change color- although its ability to do so is very limited compared tothat of say, a chameleon.

Caimans are usually considered to be harmless to peopleunder normal circumstances; they rarely grow large enough to devour an adulthuman. However, they have quick reflexes and their teeth are sharper than acrocodile’s; they are, as all wild predators, better left alone.

In the southeastern states lives the Mexican crocodile, alsoknown as Morelet’s crocodile. Once on the verge of extinction due to hunting,it is now a protected species, and its population is on the rise. Recently, aswimmer was attacked by one near a popular touristic destination. However, mostattacks by these crocs are territorial, or triggered by a female’s maternal instinct.Indeed, Morelet’s crocs are ferociously protective of their nests and young.

I learned this during a trip to a crocodile breeding centerin Colima. The area was natural American croc habitat; there was a lake whereyou could see the larger crocodiles -- the males -- patrolling for potentialintruders.

There were also Morelet’s crocodiles, but since they weren´tnative to the area, they were kept in enclosures to keep them apart.

I noticed that one of the female Morelet’s had a nest, and gotan idea for a little experiment. You see, one of my secret talents is mimickinganimal calls. I am particularly proud of my American alligator mating call --which I certainly do not intend to use in gator country. Although some peoplehave praised my mockingbird-like talents, truth is I appreciate critiques byanimals even more. I took it as a compliment when I managed to frighten thezoo’s chital deer by mimicking their tiger alarm, or when I caused a maleleopard to go ballistic after mimicking the big cat’s territorial call. Becausethe leopard had seemed ready to leap out of its enclosure that time, I hadpromised myself to stop mimicking animal calls in front of the real things.

But that day in the crocodile breeding center I simplycouldn´t resist. Seeing that the mother crocodile was basking besides its nest,I started imitating the chirping call of a baby crocodile.

The female’s reaction was explosive. I don´t know what wentthrough her mind; maybe that her babies were about to be born, and that thehuman standing beside her enclosure had to be frightened away immediately. Ormaybe she assumed that I had abducted one of her babies, seeing as the soundcame from outside the enclosure. I also considered the possibility that shemight have recognized my call as a fake, and was angered at my vocalincompetence to the point of charging the fence, slamming her heavy armoredhead against it and letting out a veryloud warning hiss.

I didn´t bother her further after that. I was lucky therewas a fence between her jaws and me!

The fourth and largest crocodile species in Mexico is theAmerican crocodile. In Spanish, it is often called the “cocodrilo de río”,meaning “river crocodile”, whereas the Morelet’s crocodile is called “cocodrilode pantano”, “swamp crocodile”. However, these names can lead to confusion asboth species can be found in either rivers or swamps. In fact, the Americancrocodile is not very picky about where it lives. It has been seen even in the sea,and recently a man was attacked by one while repairing his yatch in the Pacificcoast. This is why it is also known as the “American saltwater crocodile”.

When Steve Irwin visited Mexico, he expressed his surpriseat the docility of American crocodiles. But although they may seem mellow whencompared to their infamous Australian relatives, American crocs are not to beunderestimated. In the US, where crocodiles are extremely rare, attacks onhumans were unknown until very recently. In Mexico, it is a very differentstory. American crocodiles are numerous and widespread -- protected by the law,they have recovered after decades of ruthless extermination. Attacks on humans,many of them fatal, have been recorded along both coasts of the country.Usually the victims are drunken men who ignore warning signs and go for a swimin crocodile-infested rivers. Sometimes, it is playing children who getsnatched. Livestock, including horses and cattle, are also taken.

American crocodiles are responsible for most predatoryattacks on humans in the country. Compared to them, American black bears,jaguars and cougars seem rather shy.

Although the eight-meter long individuals reported by afamous zoologist from Chiapas seem to be a thing of the past, large malesmeasuring over five meters are still found regularly. The same breeding centerwhere I provoked the female Morelet’s used to be home to a six and a half-meterlong American crocodile, said by the gamekeepers to be possibly over a hundredyears old.

Unfortunately, this giant was murdered when it wandered awayfrom the lake and into the woods, where it was found by hunters.

The breeding center kept the giant crocodile’s skull as areminder of the huge size attained by these reptiles, provided they are giventhe opportunity to grow up in peace.

It was this largest, most aggressive species we’d be workingwith at the park. But before we were allowed into the croc enclosure, we had tostart with other, less dangerous reptiles.

Top photo: Morelet's Crocodile/Hodari Nundu

Bottom photo: American Crocodile/Hodari Nundu

Next: Part 4: Hot Herps

A Keeper's Tale, Part 2 of 5: Iguana-Infested Woods

2011-11-23T11:00:00.001-06:00

Wayne T. Allison

by guest writer Hodari Nundu

Being rejected as a shark keeper meant that I had to findanother job. That’s when I got the cartoonist job at the local newspaper. Iactually had applied to be an article writer, but the director told me thatthey didn´t need any at the moment-- they were instead looking for a politicalcartoonist.

Now, I hate politics. I don´t even believe in democracy.This doesn´t mean I don´t like theconcept- I just think true democracy can never be achieved. When I was inhighschool, I wrote an essay on that. I think it was called The Evolutionary Reasons for Democracy Beinga Utopia, or something like that. Myteachers hated it. They also hated me for a while.

But I really needed a job, and I could draw, so I thought,“what the heck? Let’s give it a shot”.

I took the job, and the cartoons, as ugly as they were,became an instant hit. Even the local politicians being spoofed asked me forthe originals to frame them on their office walls! My boss was so happy with mywork that he gave me a raise in my second week.

At about the same time, I was trying to figure out whatcareer to study. A friend of mine suggested that I studied the same as him;graphic design. After all, it would be easy for me, seeing as I could draw verywell already.

I wasn´t so sure about this, because I knew graphic designinvolved more technical drawing (which I always sucked at). However, I had noidea what other thing to study. Zoology and paleontology don´t exist as careersaround here. So I eventually agreed to travel to my friend’s hometown andbecome his roommate.

His hometown was the city of Colima, near the coast of thePacific. Foreigners perhaps know about Colima because it’s near Manzanillo, apopular tourist destination which claims to be “the sailfish capital of theworld” (although I’m told certain American cities make the same claim).

Anyways, I had always lived in relatively colder places, soliving in Colima was a complete change for me. The heat was almost unbearable;so much in fact that we barely went out of the house during daytime. The goodnews was that, being a tropical place, Colima was much richer when it came tocreepy crawlies of all kinds. My friend wasn´t very happy about it. One day, wefound a Mexican Red-Knee Tarantula near the garbage bins outside the house. Myfriend couldn´t believe it when I picked the hand-sized spider up and allowedit to crawl over my shoulders and neck. “It’s really not that dangerous,” Isaid. “Its venom is weak. The worst thing it could do would be to send its saetae into your eyes. That would be nasty but,it won´t do it unless it feels threatened”.

Hodari Nundu

That wasn´t very comforting to him. He was relieved when Ireleased the tarantula in the iguana-infested woods near the house.

Seeing as my friend was scared of a relatively harmlesstarantula often kept as a pet by small children, it may seem ironic that he wasmadly in love with crocodiles. In fact, it was he who invited me to try my luckas a zookeeper once again, when he found out that a local park kept Americancrocodiles (the largest species in the country, reaching up to six meters long,sometimes more).

“We could both apply for a job there,” he said. “It’s notvery far away”.

Of course, I loved the idea.

The park was not very large. In fact, there were very fewanimals in the zoo -- a couple male lions in a cage, a jaguarundi with abroken-tail, some spider monkeys, and tons of rabbits. As I would later findout, the rabbits weren´t really meant to be an exhibit. They were bred asreptile fodder.

My friend and I immediately went to the reptile house. Therewere two crocodiles in an enclosure, both were about three meters long. Smallfor an American crocodile, but big enough to overpower a man.

There were almost no visitors in the park, and it wasn´thard to find the chief zookeeper- who was also the chief vet and residentbiologist. He had worked once in the same zoo where I had tried to become ashark keeper, and after moving to Colima, he had founded his own reptile house.Reptiles, he told us, where his passion.

“So, are you guys studying Biology?” he asked.

“No,” we said nervously. We immediately assumed he only tookBiology students as assistants.

However, he didn´t seem disappointed. “It’s OK. My only assistantright now is actually a computer programmer,” he said, referring to a guy wehad seen offering advice to a ball python owner whose pet wouldn´t touch itsfood.

Salvador (that was his name) told us that he couldn´t pay usa lot, but that he would be happy to accept us as assistant zookeepers.

“There’s one thing, though,” he warned. “Lions are offlimits for beginners. So are hot herps (very venomous snakes).”

“What about crocodiles?” I asked.

Surprisingly, he said crocodiles were fine, as long as hewas there to guide our every step. And that’s how my brief career as anassistant zookeeper began.

Next: Crocodiles and Caimans

A Keeper's Tale, Part 1 of 5: Sharks

2011-11-22T11:00:00.002-06:00

by guest writer Hodari Nundu

I am kind of an artist. I’ve been drawing since I was threeyears old. That’s also about the time I became obsessed with dinosaurs and allsorts of wildlife both living and extinct. Most of my drawings depicteddinosaurs, rattlesnakes with impossibly long rattles, and sharks, along withcomically square cars with oversized radio antennae. Today, I believe I ampretty good at drawing dinosaurs, rattlesnakes and sharks- my cars still lookthe same, though.

I have a job as a cartoonist in a newspaper and I draw a lotwhen I have free time. Also, I write- both fiction and non-fiction. In otherwords, I use my fingers quite a lot. This is the reason why, despite wishing tobecome a zookeeper since age 15, I always hesitated a bit.

Anyone who has read anything about wild animals in captivityknows that being a zookeeper is no joke. All young boys and girls who dream ofbeing zookeepers or animal trainers seem to operate under the impression thatthey will magically develop a close bond or relationship with their animalcharges, and that it will be awesome to have a ferocious tiger or gigantickiller whale following your commands and being as loving and obedient as apuppy as the crowd watches in awe.

But I always knew reality was nothing like that. I knew that zookeepers had adangerous job. They were often mauled, envenomated, trampled, even crippled orkilled. Although wild animals are indeed capable of bonding with their keepers,provided they are treated with respect and that their needs are fulfilled as muchas possible, that doesn´t mean they become puppies. A leopard cannot change itsspots. And leopards have been eating humans since prehistory. Even years oftraining can´t beat millions of years of predatory instincts.

What worried me the most, as a teenager trying to figure outwhat he wanted to do in the future, was not the (very real) danger of beingmauled to death by a zoo animal. I wasn´t very afraid of death at the time. Iwas more worried about my fingers. I had been told that one of the most commoninjuries zookeepers suffered was the amputation of fingers. Either directly,due to the bite of an animal (and a surprising number of finger-choppers werenot even predatory), or indirectly, as a desperate measure to save someone fromdying a painful death. A friend of my father’s had worked at the local zoo. Hetoo was an artist- he painted the jungle-mimicking backgrounds to the snakeenclosures in the reptile house. He told us that an unfortunate snake-keeperhad been bitten in a hand by a Gaboon viper- one of the deadliest snakes in theworld, and the record-holder when it comes to the longest fangs of any snake.

Gaboon Viper (Ltshears/Creative Commons)

There was no antivenom available at the time, and so theyhad to chop the man’s hand with an axe to prevent the venom from spreading to hisbody. He lived, but his story was scary enough for me to think twice about mywild dream. After all, as much as I loved animals, I loved drawing and writingjust as much, and I needed my hands and fingers intact to do that.

For a little while, I forgot about the zookeeping dream.Then, one day, the local zoo made anannouncement. The exhibit formerly known as the Nocturnarium was to be closedpermanently, and all the animals in it- which had been caught in a nearbynatural preserve- were to be released back into the wild, except,unfortunately, for the vampire bats, since the risk of having them infect thewild ones with a disease was too high (it had to do with the vampire habit ofregurgitating blood meals into the mouths of hungry mates).

The good news was, the Nocturnarium building would beadapted into an Aquarium. And there were going to be sharks.

Now, sharks are among my favorite animals. When I was a kid,a group of friends and I found a requiem shark’s severed head in a beach. Somebelieved that the shark had been beheaded with a machete, perhaps by afisherman. However, it made little sense to me, as I figured a fisherman whotakes the time to hack a shark’s head off would probably keep the head insteadof throwing it away. Besides, it didn´t look like it had been cut off with a machete.In fact, the head bore every sign of having been bitten off by another, biggershark. I asked a local diving guide if there were any large sharks around. Hesaid the biggest he had seen were about four meters long.

However, my favorite encounter with a shark, although notvery close, was when my family and I went on a brief tour in Puerto Vallarta onboard of a small yatch. The yatch was taking us to a small island nearby (which,as we eventually learned, was teeming with leeches). It was the journey to theisland that was interesting. I saw hundreds of bright blue Man’O’War andjellyfish, and a pod of bottlenose and spotted dolphins swam besides the yatchfor a while.

Also, we saw a shark. I couldn´t tell what species it was.All I know is that it was too busy feeding on a huge fish shoal to pay us anyattention. But even the brief glimpses of its dark, triangular dorsal fin wereenough to hypnotize me. I had seen a shark, alive, in its natural habitat. Myfascination with these animals was even greater since that day.

So of course, as soon as the sharks arrived to thenewly-inaugurated Aquarium, I went to visit. Once again, I was captivated bytheir beauty, their elegance, the way they glided through the watereffortlessly, almost as if they were ingravid creatures from another dimension.I spent over two hours standing in front of the tank, ignoring the noisychildren around me, and the desperate guard who kept telling people, to noavail, that it was forbidden to touch or hit the glass. After a while, Idecided that I wanted to be a shark keeper. I knew it was dangerous and Isuspected that no self-respecting zoo would allow an unexperienced boy to dealwith such umpredictable animals without previous training. But I still wantedto try my luck. I went looking for the Aquarium managers and asked them manyquestions about the sharks. I was told that all of the Aquarium’s sandbarsharks were females (although I had already deduced this by looking at their pelvicfins), and that they all had names. The names were all rather comical- it is apart of Mexican culture to make a joke out of everything. Unfortunately, I haveforgotten the names. They also told me that the keepers only went into the tankwhen it was absolutely necessary.

When I asked them if I could apply to be a shark keeper,they told me just what I expected. I needed previous experience working withanimals. The zoo was very strict about who got to work with the creatures. Onlyvets and veteran biologists had that privilege. Of course, they said, I couldalways apply for a more normal job at the zoo- a cleaner, for example.

Needless to say, I didn´t even consider it. Not because Ithink being a cleaner is demeaning-- but because what I wanted was to be in thewater with the sharks, to look at their eyes and touch them and feed them,hopefully with some other creature’s flesh instead of mine.

I was a little bit disappointed but at the same time, I wasrelieved. My hands weren´t in danger of being bitten off for the time being.

I still dream of swimming with wild sharks, or going on oneof those cage-diving trips to Isla Guadalupe, an island in the Gulf ofCalifornia which is known as one of the best spots to see great white sharks upclose. To date, none of my friends or relatives understand why I would want togo into the water with a two-ton predator known to bite human limbs off as ifthey were made of butter.

I really don´t know the answer, to be honest. Maybe I’m justan adrenaline junkie. Maybe I’m just madly in love. I am terrified of death,but there is one thing that terrifies me even more; the idea that the greatwhite shark may go extinct before I get to look directly into its dark blueeyes. Somehow, I feel I will not becomplete until I do.

Next: Part 2: Iguana-Infested Woods

Grice Comes Home to OSU

2011-11-21T11:00:00.001-06:00

I'll be returning to my alma mater, Oklahoma State University, next week! Monday night (7PM in the library's Browsing Room), I'll read something thrilling from my books. It's free and open to the general public. Tuesday morning, I'll join OSU's own distinguished nonfiction writers for a panel discussion. (I imagine that one's just for OSU students and faculty, but I won't tell anyone if you sneak in.)

Video: Spider Monkeys vs. Drunk

2011-11-20T11:00:00.000-06:00

Video: Drunk zoo visitor attacked by monkeys - Telegraph:

"Joao Leite Dos Santos, a mechanic from Sao Paulo, decided it would be fun to join a colony of spider monkeys in their enclosure to see if they wanted to play.

After climbing the fence he waded across the dividing pool where a group of the primates gathered on the bank. Thinking that they were inviting him to join them, Mr Dos Santos reached out to touch them. But [one of] the fiercely territorial monkeys bit his wrist, while another bit and clawed his elbow and shoulder."

Dos Santos has admitted to drinking before his adventure.

The Importance of Alpo

2011-11-19T11:00:00.000-06:00

Starved Dogs Devour Owner

Interesting news report from Indonesia:

A neighborhood guard was curious when he saw luggage lined up at the front of Andre Lumboga's house, days after the 50-year old arrived back home. He approached the house, smelled something foul and called the police, according to a report.

"His skull was found in the kitchen, and his body was found in the front of his house," Eriyana, a local police chief in Batam, an island off Sumatra, told VIVAnews website.

Thanks to Faye for the news tip.

Crawdad

2011-11-18T11:00:00.001-06:00

Photography by D'Arcy Allison-Teasley

Documentaries on Exotic Animals in the US

2011-11-17T11:00:00.000-06:00

This documentary, The Elephant in the Living Room, sounds interesting. Anybody seen it?

Another film with similar concerns is The Tiger Next Door. I haven't seen it yet either. (Thanks to Jay for putting me onto this one.)

Pet Hippo Kills Owner

2011-11-16T11:00:00.000-06:00

South African farmer killed by pet hippopotamus - Telegraph:

"Marius Els, 41, was attacked by Humphrey on Saturday night. The farmer’s mutilated body was discovered submerged in a river running through his 400 acres in rural South Africa.

Earlier this year Mr Els was pictured happily riding on his pet bull hippo’s back.

'Humphrey’s like a son to me, he’s just like a human,' he said at the time.

'There’s a relationship between me and Humphrey and that’s what some people don’t understand.'"

Weird Deer: The Beautiful and the Damned, Part 2

2011-11-15T11:00:00.000-06:00

Dee's day at La Cygne wasn't all so disturbing. She also photographed this white deer. There are "ghost deer" in Wisconsin, and a whole herd in New York state, but I didn't know about any in Kansas. The Wisconsin and New York ghosts are simply variants of the native white-tailed deer.

I asked the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks about this unusual animal, and the biologists there were concerned. They identified this as a fallow deer, which is native to Europe and Asia. White is one of several common colors for the fallow deer. Invasive species can wreak havoc with an ecosystem; in Georgia, for example, imported fallow deer damage the trees -- and all the organisms that depend on them. So the biologists weren't pleased to see this one loose in a state conservation area. Dee was able to help them locate the farm this privately owned deer escaped from. It's been returned.

Photography by Dee Puett

White Deer of New York:

Weird Deer: The Beautiful and the Damned, Part 1

2011-11-14T11:00:00.001-06:00

At the La Cygne conservation area [see correction below] in Kansas, my correspondent Dee Puett photographed some unusual deer. First, there's this mangy-looking doe:

The whole herd looked small, and many had scabs like the ones on this doe's face and neck. Dee fears that unhealthy appearance could be a sign of chronic wasting disease. Deer afflicted with CWD lose weight, develop odd neurological symptoms (like drooling and walking in circles), and eventually die.

CWD is one of an unusual group of diseases called “transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” caused by prions. A prion is a molecule of a normal brain protein bent into an abnormal shape. In the central nervous system of a mammal, it converts its fellows to its own shape. These malcontent molecules stop doing their work and cause neurons to fracture and die. At an autopsy, the brain tissue of one so affected is spongy, full of cavities, as if blasted with birdshot.

It appears that most people are immune, or at least genetically inclined toward resistance. The rare infection is glacial, taking years or even decades to make itself apparent. Once it does manifest, the victim has only a few months to live. His nervous system will gradually fail. The first signs in humans are clumsiness, tremors, and slurred speech. Next may come bizarre laughter, mood swings, dementia, and uncontrollable movements, as if he were occasionally receiving an electric shock. Finally the body stops responding to the mind; incontinence, paralysis, coma, and—inevitably—death ensue.

Prions can occur because of a mutant gene, which may kill the possessor and his children. In another scenario, a person may spontaneously develop prion infection—a brief quirk of his biochemistry leads, years later, to his death. The third way to get a prion disease is by contamination: surgical instruments, grafts, and even human growth hormone have transmitted the infection from one human to another. The Fore people of New Guinea used to pass a spongiform disease called kuru by eating their own dead. (Among the world’s diverse cultures, cannibalism of one sort of another is not an especially unusual funerary practice.)

Eating other animals is another way to get infected. People have known scrapie, the prion disease of sheep and goats, for centuries, though it does not seem to pass directly to humans. But a change in rendering methods may have caused this infection to pass to cattle, where it manifested as the notorious mad cow disease, known to scientists as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Hundreds of thousands of domestic cattle fell to this disease in the 1980s and 90s; the practice of turning cattle organ meat into food for other cattle magnified the incidence of the otherwise rare disease. More than 130 cases passed from cattle to human consumers. In the human victims, this particular prion disease is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Various spongiform diseases have turned up in other animals—minks, deer, antelope, cats. So far, there is little to suggest that these pose any danger to humans. Some doctors have proposed that eating squirrel brains can cause a spongiform disease, but solid evidence of this has not yet appeared. The widespread occurrence of CWD in North America—it’s been found in a dozen US states and two Canadian provinces, in moose, elk, white-tailed deer, and mule deer—raises the question of whether people can get sick from eating the venison. So far, we don’t know.

Meanwhile, my correspondent D'Arcy Allison-Teasley spotted this deer in her own yard early one morning. (It looks hazy because there wasn't much light yet.) D'Arcy noted the odd growths on the deer. Our Wisconsin DNR told her this viral fibromatosis is not especially harmful to the deer, but I wonder whether it affects their chances of getting a date to the spring cotillion.

I'd like to hope that this disease, or something equally minor, is behind the unhealthy appearance of the Kansas deer.

Update: Dee writes with a correction and further (chilling) information:

Hey, just wanted to let you know that the place I shot thosedeer photos isn't a conservation area. It is called Lake La Cygne, and it ispart of the Linn County Park. I never heard back from anyone I wrote to aboutthe deer. My personal thoughts are that the herds are probably poisoned fromthe sludge ponds from the power plant that sets just opposite of the park.There are signs all over the place that say "Do Not Swim" andwarnings to get off the lake if the warning siren sounds at the plant. It is acoal generator, not nuclear and the sludge ponds for the waste are just a fewscant feet from the lake. The power station itself was listed number 16 on themost polluting power plants in the US.

Next: Ghost Deer

More Dragonflies

2011-11-12T11:03:00.000-06:00

Photography by Dee Puett

Fishing Cat: New Uses for Your Bathtub

2011-11-11T11:09:00.000-06:00

Near Lucknow, Uttar Predesh, India in 2009, some sort of feline was responsible for a series of attacks on humans. Some theorized the culprit was a leopard; others blamed a fishing cat.

The fishing cat, as you'll see in these photos, is a beautifully patterned animal about twice the size of a house cat. My correspondent Croconut tells me there are other reports of fishing cats snatching children in Southeast Asia. Beacham's Guide to International Endangered Species says they are "ferocious and dangerous. Even for Felidae, fishing cats are especially powerful and are known to be able to drive off a pack of dogs; one in captivity broke out of its enclosure into one holding a female leopard and killed the leopard, which was twice its size. They can do significant harm to humans or other large animals they deem threatening."

Croconut also pointed me to these fascinating photos of a fishing cat kept as a pet by a Russian family. The link has more.

Хуясе КОТИК (PHOTO) - 10 Февраля 2008 - Здесь всё что Вам нужно!:

Metamorphosis of a Monarch

2011-11-10T11:00:00.000-06:00

We caught a couple of monarch butterfly caterpillars and put them in a cage.

After a few days, they hung themselves by the tails and curled up.

At first the chrysalises they spun were green with gold trim.

Soon, we could see the butterflies' colors showing through.

Each chrysalis grew dark.

It became easy to see the precise pattern of the butterflies' wings.

They emerged with crumpled wings.

. . . but the wings soon straightened.

When we released them, this one crawled onto my hand, looking for a higher spot to fly from.

It landed in a pine tree before flying away for good.

Photography by Parker Grice

Edgar Allan Poe's Trees

2011-11-09T11:30:00.000-06:00

from a photo by Jerzy Strzelecki

Since I've been posting about trees the last couple of days, here's an interesting passage from Poe's "The Island of the Fay." Poe's better known for horror and mystery, of course, but I like his nature writing too. ("Fay" means fairy.)

It wasduring one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of mountainlocked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarn writhing or sleepingwithin all—that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon themsuddenly in the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath thebranches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I contemplated thescene. I felt that thus only should I look upon it—such was the character ofphantasm which it wore.

On allsides—save to the west, where the sun was about sinking—arose the verdant wallsof the forest. The little river which turned sharply in its course, and wasthus immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no exit from its prison, but tobe absorbed by the deep green foliage of the trees to the east—while in theopposite quarter (so it appeared to me as I lay at length and glanced upward)there poured down noiselessly and continuously into the valley, a rich goldenand crimson waterfall from the sunset fountains of the sky.

About midwayin the short vista which my dreamy vision took in, one small circular island,profusely verdured, reposed upon the bosom of the stream.

So blendedbank and shadow there

That eachseemed pendulous in air

—somirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely possible to say at whatpoint upon the slope of the emerald turf its crystal dominion began.

My positionenabled me to include in a single view both the eastern and western extremitiesof the islet; and I observed a singularly-marked difference in their aspects.The latter was all one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushedbeneath the eyes of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers. Thegrass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed. The treeswere lithe, mirthful, erect—bright, slender, and graceful,—of eastern figureand foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deepsense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out theheavens, yet every thing had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro ofinnumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.

The other oreastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade. A sombre, yetbeautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The trees were dark incolor, and mournful in form and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad,solemn, and spectral shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimelydeath. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its bladeshung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small unsightlyhillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, butwere not; although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered.The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itselftherein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied thateach shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenlyfrom the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream;while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of theirpredecessors thus entombed.

This idea,having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited it, and I lost myselfforthwith in revery. "If ever island were enchanted," said I tomyself, "this is it. This is the haunt of the few gentle Fays who remainfrom the wreck of the race. Are these green tombs theirs?—or do they yield uptheir sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In dying, do they not ratherwaste away mournfully, rendering unto God, little by little, their existence,as these trees render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substance untodissolution? What the wasting tree is to the water that imbibes its shade,growing thus blacker by what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be tothe death which engulfs it?"

As I thusmused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank rapidly to rest, and eddyingcurrents careered round and round the island, bearing upon their bosom large,dazzling, white flakes of the bark of the sycamore-flakes which, in theirmultiform positions upon the water, a quick imagination might have convertedinto any thing it pleased, while I thus mused, it appeared to me that the formof one of those very Fays about whom I had been pondering made its way slowlyinto the darkness from out the light at the western end of the island. Shestood erect in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantomof an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitudeseemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as she passed within the shade.Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and re-entered theregion of light. "The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,"continued I, musingly, "is the cycle of the brief year of her life. Shehas floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year nearerunto Death; for I did not fail to see that, as she came into the shade, hershadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making itsblackness more black."

And againthe boat appeared and the Fay, but about the attitude of the latter there wasmore of care and uncertainty and less of elastic joy. She floated again fromout the light and into the gloom (which deepened momently) and again her shadowfell from her into the ebony water, and became absorbed into its blackness. Andagain and again she made the circuit of the island, (while the sun rushed downto his slumbers), and at each issuing into the light there was more sorrowabout her person, while it grew feebler and far fainter and more indistinct,and at each passage into the gloom there fell from her a darker shade, whichbecame whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length when the sun had utterlydeparted, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self, went disconsolatelywith her boat into the region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence atall I cannot say, for darkness fell over an things and I beheld her magicalfigure no more.

Secrets of the Siberian Elm, Conclusion

2011-11-08T11:30:00.000-06:00

My doctor had recently told me I was allergic to elms, but Iknew it before then. Early in the springI would notice the sudden buds on their twigs, bulging like bloodblisters. On a morning soon after that Iwould wake sneezing, and that would prove to be the morning their buds hadopened into tiny burgundy flowers. Theywere odd, gritty flowers that seemed to have erupted, rather than bloomed. A few days later still I would find mywindshield clotted with specks of a substance indistinguishable in color andviscosity from Super Glue. This stuff isthe blood elms spill as aphids attack them. Such attacks rarely do them any lasting damage.

Nor were those my only grievances. I remembered that elm roots clog sewers. I remembered the pale disks of elm fruit thatblew in under the door every May, which resisted the broom and the vacuum withannoying tenacity. I further reflectedon the dismal scratching sound that sometimes woke me on windy winternights—the reaching branches of the elm, grasping at the furnace vent on theroof. Of course often enough I was awake before the sound, writing or rehearsingmy griefs; maybe the elm only took the blame. In any event, I pruned thoselimbs far back every summer; every winter, they scratched to prove they hadreached the house again.

I resolved to kill the thing, or at least prune it so farback the winter would finish it for me. I went at it with a telescoping pruner and a ladder and a handsaw. The early work went well; I took off a branchor two every evening, and the patch of lawn where the grass would never growwas suddenly flooded with light. Thescratching on the roof stopped. Thegray-brown bark yellowed with oozing sap beneath the wounds I made.

And while I inflicted this gradual violence on my enemy, Iwas falling in love with it. I wasdiscovering an ecosystem new to me, one that had existed just over my head allmy life. The roach-hunting wasp was onlymy first discovery in this new world. Another day I came upon a baseball-sized gray nodule. I assumed it to be merely an aberrant growthin the wood, but when I tried to steady myself against it, it bubbled beneathmy hand, and the air was suddenly full of a smell reminiscent of bad banana anddistant skunk. It was a mass of squashbugs, the shield-shaped, thumbnail-sized gargoyles I encountered in greatprofusion in my garden every summer. Ihad always wondered where that foul-smelling congregation went between attackson my garden. Here they were,camouflaged in the shelter of the elm’s bark.

I found the yellow-and-black larvae of the elm leaf beetle,recognizable because their colors matched the adults’. I had seen the adults often enough--theyreigned for a week or so every summer, through profusion rather thanmight. About the size and shape of asunflower nut-meat, an elm leaf beetle is the feeblest creature imaginable,breaking at any touch. I find themclotted beneath the windshield wipers on my car, or orbiting the porch light,or littering the skeins of the garden spiders that rest by day in a patch ofmarigolds beneath my kitchen window. Some nights I see the spiders cutting the elm leaf beetles looseuneaten, as if such food were bad for one’s cholesterol.

The larvae were soft as bread dough. I could touch one and find my finger markedwith a sort of yellow nicotine stain—the oily excreta of its accordionskin. The damage they did to the elm wasastounding: its green curtains of leaves became lacy in the space of threedays. Even when I climbed the ladder tosearch, it was hard to find an unmolested leaf. Some leaves had been drilled with a few round holes. Others had been worked along the side, theirnormally serrated edges chewed into a different pattern of serration, thenotches of which matched the span of a larva’s mouthparts. Still other leaves had been reduced to theirpliant green spines.

Yet nothing much came of this assault. The tree in my backyard transformed itself inanother few days, tossing its tattered leaves to the ground and erupting withthe folded beginnings of new ones.

As my pruning project expanded to fill weeks and thenmonths--I admit I skipped an evening here and a month there--my admiration forthe Siberian elm grew. The aphids hadhardly slowed it; the elm leaf beetles had proved only a minor inconvenience;my own mutilations had inspired the tree to do a hydra routine, putting out atleast two leaf-laden twigs at the rim of every oozing wound I made. This toughness explains why a tree murdererfrom the Oklahoma Panhandle should find himself pondering a plant from Siberia.

The Panhandle is notorious for its weather: late freezes;Indian summers that fool plants into suicidal early bloomings; fluctuatinghumidity; temperatures diving forty or fifty Fahrenheit degrees in a few hours;drought; an occasional tornado. Onespring a single storm deposited four feet of hail on the highway, but knockedonly two old branches and a little greenery off my elm. The climate is inhospitable to many plantsthat do well elsewhere. That’s why people around here brought in a shade treefrom a place with even tougher weather: Siberia. My forebears promptly named the tree theChinese elm, probably on the theory that all exotic locales to the east may aswell be China. Confusingly, another treereally is called the Chinese elm, but its flat bark, which flakes off in leprouspatches, is nothing like the furrowed geography of the Siberian species.

Several of the thirty-odd species of elm expanded theirranges in the 1930s because of the Roosevelt administration’s ShelterbeltProject, wherein rows of trees were planted to counter erosion. The Oklahoma Panhandle, the very core of thedust bowl, needed shelter belts, and the hardy Siberian elm was the tree ofchoice. The reason the Siberiansucceeded where other trees, even other elms, failed, was an aggressive rootsystem. When much of the topsoil isliterally in the air, only a plant that can drill its own well has a chance.

My own Siberian elm was already in leaf one April when alate blizzard dropped the temperature into the single digits for twonights. The freeze seemed to demolishevery bit of green on the tree. Afterward, the melting snow was filthy with a dust made of brittle bitsof elm leaf. A few days after thisapocalypse, the tree was leafing out again. By summer it looked as hardy as it ever had.

I shouldn’t give the impression that the Siberian elm isimpervious to harm. Dutch elm diseaseand other fungal infections attack the species, and so do a broad range ofbacteria, nematode worms, viruses, and even mycoplasms. The cemetery in my hometown is calledElmhurst. It is full of Siberian elmsmore than half a century old. Some arehealthy. Others bear goiters the size ofhuman heads. The bark on these diseasedexcrescences snaps off easily in my hand. The naked wood beneath seems made of thick liquid movements now frozen,like the pattern in the surface of hardened fudge. Tiny spikes of wood protrude here and there. But these trees have been alive in this deformedcondition, putting out new growth each spring, for decades.

The Siberian elm is tolerant of most herbicides. It often breathes polluted air and bathes in acid rain with impunity. Even the salting of its soil is not a sureway to kill it. It grows in sunlight orshade, in dry sand or riverbank mud. Theonly forces that seem to do it real harm are the acts of God: fire and ice,lightning and wind.

The tree in my back yard has beaten me. I have pruned its limbs as far up as I canreach, and still it thrives. The cementwalk is littered with disks of elm fruit, cast like coins to a beggar. At the foot of the tree’s trunk stands a newsapling, sprung from old roots. In acorner of the yard is an amputated limb, as long as I am and thicker than mythigh. Since I cut it down, its flankshave unfolded a dozen slender sprouts, each now tatted with tender green.

THE BOOK OF DEADLY ANIMALS