Cat among the pigeons

by David Muirhead

  All brown hyenas seem obsessed with making sure that others of their kind know who they are, where they’ve been and when they were there. They do this by extruding two blobs of sticky paste from a special anal gland onto a grass stem in a process known as ‘pasting’. The larger blob is white and the smaller black, and together they contain all the necessary information for anyone who can decipher the message. A wandering brown hyena pastes a sticky note every 10 to 15 minutes. For lack of a better understanding, it’s as though it gives them comfort that someone, somewhere will care, as they amble alone in the night.

  Brown hyenas routinely visit the ruins of the old mining town of Kolmanskop on the Namib coast, long since given up to the desert sands by the human inhabitants. They sniff around where the bins must have been, as though they think the humans have just stepped out for a day or two and will soon be back with the shopping and continue their wasteful ways. The behaviour is poignantly reminiscent of the story of Greyfriars Bobby, a small Skye terrier who visited his master’s grave in Edinburgh every day for 14 years, until he himself found peace.

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  COELACANTH

  No one can accuse the coelacanth of overexerting itself. Its routine consists of snoozing all day in an undersea cave, waking when the sun sets and then lazily drifting with the ebb and flow, gobbling up any right-sized cephalopod or fish that occasionally happens by. After a less than hectic night at the office, it lugubriously paddles to the nearest cave in its home range. It has been doing that for well over 200 million years, or roughly 73 billion days and nights, weekends and public holidays included.

  Scientists harbouring the mad notion that human beings should fiddle with their genes to attain immortality would do well to pause and ponder this mind-numbing expanse of time. The coelacanth managed to tick off so many aeons on the calendar without going bonkers through boredom because brain matter fills less than 2 per cent of its brain case. The rest is fat.

  The fish caught by Captain Goosen off the Chalumna River mouth near East London back in 1938, that so excited Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and JLB Smith, was not itself 200 million years old, of course. It was not even a sprightly 65 million, which is the number of years that the coelacanth was assumed to have been extinct, given its sudden disappearance from the fossil record, along with the dinosaurs. The best guess is that the freshly deceased specimen brought ashore in East London that would so astonish the world, or at least the ichthyologists among us, was a modest 50 to 60 years old.

  The coelacanth’s real claim to immortality is that it has managed to live, reproduce and remain virtually the same for an awesomely long time. If you were to travel back 65 million years to an undersea canyon off the East African coast, the coelacanths you’d encounter would look, and probably behave, exactly like the ones you see today. If you then surfaced and went on land to visit our own nearest contemporaneous relative, you’d be introduced to a little shrew-like animal that ate bugs and lived in a hole in the ground.

  Gearing up for the long haul means avoiding unnecessary exertion, and coelacanths are very good at that. There’s no disco dancing below 50 fathoms. Their gills are small and their metabolism is slower than a watched clock. The point of snoozing in caves in the canyon wall is that they avoid having to swim against currents all day long just to stay in the same neighbourhood. For a large fish, they are also exceptionally well camouflaged. Their dark metallic-blue scales have irregular off-white spots, blending perfectly with the oyster shells peppering the black basalt cave walls. Being so well hidden means they don’t need to expend energy constantly fretting about predators.

  Not that there’s a queue of creatures eager to eat them anyway. They taste disgusting, so much so that even Comorean fishermen, unaware of their celebrity status, used to casually throw them back on the rare occasions that they actually caught one. Their flesh is exceptionally oily, containing high amounts of urea and other unpalatable compounds, and their scales constantly ooze mucus. It’s little wonder that sharks wrinkle their snouts and cruise on past to the cod and calamari section of the deep-sea buffet.

  Early researchers, including JLB Smith, who coined the name ‘Old Four Legs’, thought that the coelacanth used its lobed pectoral and anterior fins to stroll along the bottom of the seabed. This suggested the possibility that, back in the day, it might have been considering ambling up and out of the sea and maybe even be taking up jogging. That sounds strenuous and totally out of character, especially for a creature accustomed to such a laid-back lifestyle in a relatively unchallenging marine environment. Putting a final damper on the theory, modern research has shown that coelacanths don’t walk, or even pretend to, and are at best a side branch of the lineage that eventually gave rise to all land animals.

  Being more ancient than some of the earth’s rocks hasn’t meant that the coelacanth is completely out of touch with modern life. It is quite adept at handling highly specialised electronic equipment. A large organ in its snout is thought to be electro-receptive, allowing it to locate and assess buried prey and help it steer around objects. Its tiny, uncomplicated brain is situated right at the back of its cranium, possibly to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with the efficient working of this remarkable apparatus by actually thinking about something.

  Exactly how coelacanths manage to reproduce is a puzzle for aquatic voyeurs. They give birth to live young, but there are no obvious – ahem – external bits to indicate exactly how they manage to copulate. A coelacanth’s eggs are bigger than tennis balls, the largest of any known fish, qualifying the species for yet another record. With so much yoke to get through, the embryos take their own sweet time developing in the uterus, no doubt attending prenatal classes in lethargy, and only emerge after an extraordinary 13 months. That’s longer than a blue whale takes to reproduce, but then again, what’s the rush?

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  GORILLA

  Gorillas still hadn’t been formally introduced to polite society by 1859, the year in which Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published. Nobody in Europe had yet seen a live one but this minor detail didn’t prevent Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, from emphatically stating his opinion about ‘this gigantic ape, at once so much more and less than a man ... that has at times shown a human appetite for women’.

  Baudelaire made his remarks in reaction to a life-sized plaster sculpture created by Emmanuel Frémiet depicting a gorilla carrying off a scantily clad woman. The artist, who freely admitted that he was cashing in on ‘the noise being made about mankind and apes being brothers’, had submitted the sculpture to the Paris Salon late in 1859 where it was indignantly rejected as being ‘seriously offensive to public morality’. To be fair to Frémiet, nobody seemed to notice that the sculpture was clearly inscribed ‘gorille femme’, implying that the woman was being kidnapped by a female gorilla for culinary rather than sexual reasons.

  Baudelaire was nevertheless voicing the general view of the time, namely that the then still semi-mythical gorilla was a hairy nightmare: rapacious, ferocious and uncomfortably close to being a kind of degenerate superhuman. Even when captive lowland gorillas eventually began to appear in zoos in Europe and America, this view persisted. The classic movie King Kong, originally released in 1933, depicted all that an imagined gorilla should be: ridiculously huge, immensely strong and having a penchant for abducting beautiful young maidens.

  Appropriately, it would take a real young maiden to spread the truth eventually. Diane Fossey disappeared into the foliage on the slopes of Rwanda’s Virunga volcanoes in 1966 to study the little-known mountain gorillas in their natural habitat and in 1983 published Gorillas in the Mist. The bestseller, and the subsequent film of the same name, did much to dispel the myths, not least by revealing that people were killing and eating gorillas, rather than the other way around. It also turned out that Fossey had lived all those years in the forest without so much as having her bottom pinched by a male gorilla, let alone being ravished and raped by one. She was, of co
urse, subsequently murdered by a human being, a fate that often befalls those who convey unwelcome and inconvenient truths.

  Gorillas live only in the dense tropical forests that form a broad girdle across the belly of Africa, from Cameroon and Gabon, across the Congo Basin to Rwanda. Given the historic inaccessibility of much of this terrain, it is little wonder that they remained happily hidden until comparatively recent times. Small groups of Homo sapiens have managed to pull off the same trick in the Amazon and Borneo, remaining ‘uncontacted’, to use current parlance, into the present century. They used to be called ‘lost tribes’ but this implied a measure of carelessness on the part of the rest of us.

  Tucked away on the slopes of extinct volcanoes, mountain gorillas were the best hidden of all. They are the biggest, blackest and hairiest, and ironically now the most endangered of the apes – a mere few hundred remain alive in the wild and none at all in zoos. Less ponderously built and more numerous, and yet still critically endangered as a result of rapid habitat destruction and poaching, are the western and eastern lowland gorillas.

  Gorillas live mainly in small family groups, consisting of a dominant male who holds sway over several adult females and offspring of various ages. The silverback, as the pater familias is respectfully known, is more than twice the size of the females, cracking the bathroom scales at between 140 and 190 kilos. Family life is regulated entirely by him and the touchy subject of female emancipation never comes up. They all move when he moves, they rest when he rests, and if he decides to sleep in, so does everybody else. The upside from a female perspective is that incidents of spousal abuse are virtually non-existent and when the chips are down, the silverback will readily give up his life to defend the family.

  The daily routine for a family of gorillas seems fairly humdrum, revolving mainly around eating copious amounts of vegetation, sleeping, playing with the kids and, from time to time, energetically investing in the future of the species. That may sound like the kind of life that even a stockbroker would consider giving up his Ferrari to enjoy, but the reality is more complex. Gorillas are a genetic whisper away from being us, and subject to similar emotional stresses and strains in their personal relationships. But that is the least of their current problems. Unlike all the other creatures that we’ve pushed to the brink of extinction, gorillas are almost certainly aware on some cognitive level of what is happening to them, and equally aware that there’s little they can do about it.

  As night closes in, the troop settles down. Each gorilla above the age of four constructs its own nest, bending branches and saplings and laying down grass and leaves to make a cosy, though ephemeral, personal retreat. Only the young can sleep in the comparative safety of a tree. The adults are too heavy and instead cluster their nests around the silverback. What they dream of, Heaven only knows.

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  GEMSBOK

  According to one dubious theory, which romantics embrace and cynics dismiss, the fabled unicorn and the oryx are actually one and the same animal. Unicorns were apparently refused a boarding pass for Noah’s ark because they’d committed some unspecified transgression, but managed to survive the Flood by scrambling aboard anyway, cunningly disguised as Mr and Mrs Oryx. Ever since, they’ve been too afraid to remove their striking black-and-white masks for fear of being recognised.

  If one ignores its obvious flaws, the theory could at least help explain why the oryx chooses to live far away from prying eyes, in deserts and other desolate places. Other species of antelope would find the heat intolerable, and probably die of thirst, but the gemsbok, Oryx gazella, like its close relation the Arabian oryx, has evolved clever ways of coping.

  Staying out of the noon-day sun is a good start but in the Namib that’s not always possible, so the gemsbok has installed a kind of cerebral cooling system. Its body temperature is able to rise to levels that would normally prove debilitating, if not fatal, but unlike most other animals, gemsbok pant through their nose; an extensive network of surface veins embraces the nasal breeze and then cools the arterial blood by three or four degrees before it reaches the brain. It is thus able to keep a cool head while confronting the other challenges it faces.

  Ongoing water restrictions top the list. Drought is a perennial feature of their habitat and they often have to scratch up bulbs and eat wild melons and cucumbers to obtain the water they need. Grazing in the predawn also helps as the driest grasses can substantially increase their moisture content when the air cools overnight. The relatively small amounts of water they ingest this way needs to be used very efficiently, and every organ and orifice is under strict orders to conserve the stuff. Urinating is kept to a trickle and a gemsbok’s droppings would barely leave a mark on blotting paper. Some claim that their lungs are so water-wise that each exhalation contains virtually no moisture at all, and a mirror held up to their mouth would not mist up.

  As for all desert dwellers, water, or the lack thereof, dictates the gemsbok’s entire way of life. When it rains and the grasses grow in abundance, they tend to congregate in large herds, celebratory parties of up to 300 animals; but most of the time they form small groups, usually with fewer than 12 members. These loose family groups can typically be seen plodding through the Kalahari Desert scrub, or up and over the shifting red dunes of the Namib, in a constant search for decent grazing. They usually travel in single file, a female leading and an adult bull bringing up the rear.

  It is not always easy to tell who’s who in such orderly queues because gemsbok look alike at a glance, the sexes differentiated by size, and the length and thickness of their horns. Adult males tend to be larger and paradoxically have slightly shorter horns, thicker toward the base. Big-game hunters of old predictably blasted away at the gemsbok with the longest horns, only to find their victim was female, an ungallant and embarrassing blunder when measured by the bizarre etiquette of that chauvinist age.

  Breeding can occur at any time of the year, though spikes in the birth rate have been noted in concurrence with the immediate aftermath of plentiful rains. Courtship is a demure event, consisting of a male falling in behind any female passing through his territory that he judges to be in the mood. He politely taps her rear legs with his foreleg and if she’s receptive, she stands still and all’s well; if not, she tells him to keep his dirty hooves to himself and keeps on walking.

  Females separate from the herd when ready to give birth and, as with many other antelope species, the newborn is left to hide alone, curled up in the grass for the first three or four quaking weeks of life. The mother returns to suckle a couple of times during the day and usually remains with her calf during the night, though she won’t approach the hiding place if a predator is loitering in the vicinity. Each morning the little calf has to find a new spot, encouraged with exasperated maternal nudges and threats to pick itself up and get a move on.

  At four to five weeks old the calf is introduced to the herd. It proudly displays a fine set of small horns at this first public appearance and this gave rise to the notion that gemsbok are born with horns. Even now this piece of fake news is occasionally relayed in awed tones by folk contemplating the damage the small spikes must have done to the mother’s birth canal. In reality, the horns erupt and rapidly start growing soon after birth.

  A gemsbok’s straight or slightly curved horns are perhaps its most distinctive feature, which speaks to the dramatic coloration and elegance of the rest of the beast. Their horns can grow to enormous lengths, the measured record being 120 centimetres. When a gemsbok stands alone atop a lofty dune, side on, with its horns perfectly aligned, it is easy to see a unicorn instead, majestically emerging from the rays of the setting sun.

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  HEDGEHOG

  Shakespeare had a low opinion of hedgehogs. He placed them in the same category as ‘spotted snakes with double tongue’ and other unsavoury witch’s assistants. It was well known back then that hedgehogs stole hens’ eggs and invaded barns at night to steal milk from cows. Little wonder that, in me
dieval England, they were routinely exterminated, or rolled in clay and then baked in the oven. Despite being obnoxious little monsters, their cooked flesh was thought to settle the stomach and cure leprosy and elephantiasis, among other diseases and ailments, thereby proving that out of an imaginary evil can emerge imaginary good.

  In contrast, the Romans thought they were accomplished meteorologists, able to accurately forecast the change of seasons and predict the direction of the wind. The Chinese regarded them as sacred, while the Incas and the Eskimos didn’t have any kind of opinion because hedgehogs don’t naturally occur in the Americas, least of all in the frozen north.

  Charles Darwin, like many before him, believed that hedgehogs rolled around under fruit trees to impale the fallen fruit on their spines so that they could transport the haul back to their nests for later consumption. He even wrote to a magazine to relate how a friend of his had seen just such a thing in Italy. However, there is no evidence that hedgehogs have a fixed address, let alone a cosy underground home with larders, lounges and libraries. They tend to doss down wherever daybreak finds them, snuggling under leaf litter or disappearing into a convenient hole. As for the fruit trick, if you wander around like a toothpick dispenser, things are bound to get stuck on your back; it doesn’t mean you’re a hoarder.