by Ted Dewan
Bats groom themselves for an hour a day, rubbing their wings with oil from glands on their faces, to keep them moist and supple. They can live for thirty years.
Vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) feed mainly on cattle, horses, tapirs and turkeys. If they do dine on humans, they usually go for the big toe, not the neck, but can only manage two tablespoons at one sitting. They are the only mammals to live exclusively on blood. It is a relatively low-energy food, so if a vampire fails to score over two consecutive nights it will die. To offset this, they have developed a sophisticated system in which adult females feed one another. They even remember who has helped them and make sure they get repaid first. A blood-thinning drug developed from vampire bat saliva, called draculin, is used to treat heart attack and stroke victims.
To the Chinese, bats are lucky: the word ‘fu’ means both ‘bat’ and ‘happiness’.
Bat guano is valuable as fertiliser and is a source of saltpetre used to make gunpowder. It is also nutritious: a quarter-pound of it contains more protein and minerals than a Big Mac.
Bear
Sleep, eat, sleep, sleep, eat
Male and female bears are known as boars and sows, despite being about as closely related to pigs as koalas are to bears, or pandas to cats. The bear family’s closest relatives are actually dogs, but one thing they do share with pigs is an omnivorous diet – most are as happy snacking on plants and fruit as they are gnawing on the leg of an elk. They can be fussy, too. Only a really hungry brown bear (Ursus arctos) eats a whole salmon. Most of the time it only goes for the high-nutrition bits: the brain, skin and eggs. And even the exclusively carnivorous polar bear (Ursus maritimus) has an odd liking for toothpaste. They have been known to raid Arctic tourist camps, knocking over tents and trampling equipment just to suck a tube of Colgate dry.
Bears spend much of their days eating, laying down fat reserves to get through the seven months they spend sleeping. Technically this isn’t hibernation but ‘torpor’ because their body temperature, respiration and metabolic rate hardly alter. During this whole time they don’t eat, drink, urinate or defecate but recycle their urea into protein and plug their anuses with a mixture of faeces, hair and bedding material called a ‘tappet’. Female bears even give birth in their sleep: the cubs are tiny and premature and weigh a tenth of those of similar-sized mammals. As a result bear’s milk is much richer than that of other carnivores and the cubs grow quickly. Newborn brown bears hum loudly while nursing, to help stimulate their mother’s milk production. Each cub in a litter is quite likely to have a different father. Unsurprisingly, female bears have little or no post-coital contact with their partners.
Bears can sleep for as long as a month in the same position if not disturbed. All other mammals, including humans, suffer from osteoporosis (a thinning and weakening of bone) if they maintain non-weight-bearing positions for a long time, but bears recycle calcium into their bones and wake up just as strong as when they nodded off.
Polar bears aren’t white. Their skin is black, and their fur is translucent – their apparent whiteness is the result of light being refracted from the clear strands.
If someone offers you a slice of polar bear’s liver, don’t be tempted. A pound contains enough vitamin A to kill you. A smaller dose will merely lead to headaches, blurred vision, loss of hair, drowsiness, diarrhoea and enlargement of the spleen and liver.
The government of Yukon, as part of its official advice on what to do when you meet a bear, says that it ‘can be dangerous to crowd a bear’s personal space’ – a statement which has about it the ring of truth. Brown bears can be black and black bears can be brown. Unfortunately, it’s important to know the difference: if confronted by a brown bear, you should play dead. If you do that to a carrion-loving black bear (Ursus americanus), it will start to eat you. Not that you are in any serious danger. In the US, you are twenty-five times more likely to be killed by a snake, 180 times more likely to die from a bee-sting and 90,000 times more likely to be shot, stabbed or beaten to death by a fellow human, than to die at the paws of a bear.
FRUIT AND NUT CASE
Beaver
Engineer, submariner, pharmacist
Beavers have a greater impact on their surroundings than any creature other than humans. They build instinctively: put a young beaver in a cage and even without trees or running water, it still mimes the process of building a dam. They can chop down a tree with a 6-inch diameter in less than an hour. Some scientists now think the disappearance of the Pennine forests and the creation of the Fens were due to the beavers that lived in Britain until the early thirteenth century (the town of Beverly in Yorkshire is named after them).
Beavers are rodents, like large squirrels. There are only two species: the Eurasian (Castor fiber) and the North American (Castor canadensis). Although similar in size and appearance the two have been separated for 24,000 years, so can no longer interbreed. They are larger than you might think. A fully grown beaver is the size of an eight-year-old human. The Giant beaver (Castor ohioensis), which became extinct 10,000 years ago, was the size of Mike Tyson.
Beavers can stay submerged for up to fifteen minutes. They have webbed hind feet, a flat tail to steer, transparent eyelids that work as goggles, fur-lined waterproof lips and closable ear and nostril openings to enable them to gnaw under water. The beaver’s four incisors are bright orange. The enamel contains iron, for extra strength, and they never stop growing.
Canada is built on dead beavers. MARGARET ATWOOD
Despite their ‘busy’ reputation, beavers can be rather lazy. During winter the average beaver only leaves its lodge once every two weeks. In spring and autumn the beaver’s tail doubles in size. Beavers store their energy in their tails, so the tail shrinks as the fat is used up throughout winter.
In 1760, the College of Physicians and Faculty of Divinity in Paris classified the beaver as a fish because of its scaly tail. This meant that French settlers in North America could officially eat beaver during Lent and on other fast days. Beaver tail is supposed to taste like roast beef.
Beavers were once seen as walking medicine cabinets. The secretion of two glands near their bladder was known as castoreum and, from the ancient Greeks onwards, it was used as a fail-safe remedy for headaches, fevers, epilepsy and as a purgative. The Sami, in Lapland, mixed it with snuff. It is now only used in perfume. Shalimar by Guerlain and Magie Noire by Lancôme both contain synthetic beaver juice.
Unfortunately, the high value of castoreum and the fact that it sounds like ‘castrate’ seemed to encouraged belief in the myth, propagated by Aesop and Pliny the Elder among others, that a hunted beaver gnaws off its own testicles to escape.
It doesn’t, but beavers were hunted nonetheless: in seventeenth-century Canada their pelts became a currency called a ‘made-beaver’ or ‘M-B’. A gun was worth 132 M-Bs. At the same time in Britain, ‘beaver’ came to mean ‘hat’. In 1628 Charles I declared ‘nothing but beaver stuff or beaver wool shall be used in the making of hats’. Beaver hats weren’t furry: their hair was ground, squeezed and heated to make water-resistant felt.
Bee
Do I know you?
The most sophisticated form of communication other than human language is the work not of an ape but an insect. Honeybees can tell one another the quality, distance and precise location of a food source by a complex sequence of movements and vibrations called the ‘waggle dance’. And, unlike most of the dolphin or primate ‘languages’, we can actually understand what the bees are saying to each other (each waggle, for example, represents about 150 feet from the hive). The discovery of this in 1945 was enough to earn Karl von Frisch the only Nobel Prize ever awarded for the study of animal behaviour.
More recent research has filled out the picture. Bees have a sense of time; being able to see in the ultraviolet range makes them more attracted to some flower colours and textures than others; they can learn by experience. They can even recognise human faces. Given that many humans struggle with this
once they’ve turned forty, it seems utterly remarkable in creatures whose brain is the size of a pinhead. Yet bees who are rewarded with nectar when shown some photos of faces, and not when shown others, quickly learn to tell the difference. Not that we should read too much into this. Bees don’t ‘think’ in a meaningful way. There’s no small talk; they only ever communicate on two subjects: food and where they should set up the next hive. The ‘faces’ in the experiment were clearly functioning as rather odd-looking flowers, not as people they wanted to get to know socially. Equally, a single bee, however smart, is severely limited in its appeal as a pet, when separated from its hive.
It’s not hard to see why bees were sacred to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians. Not only is the hive the epitome of a well-ordered society, it is also full of drama. A new queen, as soon as she’s murdered all her sisters, takes her ‘nuptial flight’, in which she mates in mid-air with up to fifteen drones. All the drones die (their penises explode with an audible pop, leaving the end inside her as a rather ineffective plug) and the queen returns with enough sperm on board to stock the entire colony on her own. A queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs each day during her three-year lifetime. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees. Very occasionally the chemical balance wobbles and female workers start to lay as well, but rebellions are put down ruthlessly and all the impostors’ eggs are immediately eaten by fellow workers.
Honeybees did not evolve in the New World: English colonists introduced them. Native Americans called them ‘white man’s flies’.
The species Apis mellifera also provides us with the only edible secretion, other than milk, that we can take from an animal without injury. Properly sealed and stored, honey is the one food that does not spoil. Archaeologists have tasted and found edible 3,000-year-old honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Honey is ‘hygroscopic’, meaning it can absorb and hold moisture so that any moulds and bacteria that touch it quickly lose their own moisture and die. But honey represents only a fiftieth of the true economic importance of bees. In the US alone, bees pollinate crops worth $19 billion each year. Without them there would be no agriculture: every third mouthful of food we owe to the bee.
AT THE COMBFACE
Beetle
The insect’s insect
If diversity and adaptability are the measuring stick for success, then beetles are the most successful animals on the planet. There are 350,000 known species, with up to eight million more out there waiting for names: new species are being discovered at an average rate of one an hour. If you lined up all animal and plant species in a row, every fifth species would be a beetle. There are about 750,000,000,000,000,000 individual beetles going about their business right now.
Beetles are not aristocratic, vain esoterics, like butterflies and moths, or communists, like ants and bees. They’e not filthy, opportunistic carpbet-baggers like flies. They are professional, with a skill. Thrre is nowhere that doesn’t, sooner or later, call in a beetle to set up shop and get things done.
A. A. GILL
Why are there so many? The simple answer seems to be flowering plants. Not much happened for beetles until the flowering plants began to diversify 120 million years ago. They were the beetles’ food of choice and as they crept across the planet, adapting themselves to new environments, the beetles followed. In the process, they far outstripped even the plants; able to burrow, fly and swim, beetles became the universal animal. If something’s edible, you can guarantee there will be a beetle out there to eat it. Ham, tobacco, ginger, bonemeal, paper, carpet, stuffed animals, strychnine, wood, all are grist to a particular beetle’s mandibles. The ‘short-circuit’ beetle chews through lead sheathing on telegraph cables to get to the tasty fibre insulator around the copper wires. A specialist called Zonocopris gibbicolis feeds only on the droppings of large land snails, hitching a ride inside the shell.
A BLISTER BEETLE HONEYTRAP
Their mating strategies are just as varied. Flour beetles have even found a way of reproducing by proxy. When it’s not chewing its way through the nation’s stores of grains and cereals, you’ll usually find Tribolium castaneum copulating. They are very promiscuous, even by insect standards. The male starts by using his spiny penis to sweep out a previous occupant’s load, before unleashing his own. Unfortunately, his rival’s sperm has a way of clinging to his tackle, so his next conquest stands a 1 in 8 chance of finding herself fertilised by a beetle she’s never met.
We have much to learn from beetle. But far from being just a grotesques’ gallery, they are a living laboratory, where almost every extreme has been tested, every obstacle overcome. The Bombardier beetles, who fire a boiling chemical spray out of their rears at 300 pulses per second, might help us to re-ignite jet engines that cut out during a flight. Tenebrinoid beetles from the rainless Namib desert, who can channel the morning dew into their mouths using the microscopic bumps and troughs on their backs, are being used to develop new fog harvesting technology; and the Jewel beetle (Melanophila acuminate) may hold the clue to early-warning system for forest fires. It has an infra-red sensor under one of its legs that can detect a fire over 50 miles away. Why? So that it can fly towards the blaze. It knows the smouldering tree trunks offer a rare predator-free opportunity to mate recklessly and lay its eggs.
Only a beetle …
Binturong
Smell my popcorn
High in the trees of southern Asia’s tropical forests there lives the only Old World carnivore that uses its tail for climbing. Commonly called a bearcat, it is neither a bear nor a cat, but a member of the civet family. Civets are related to cats, but are also cousins to the mongoose and the hyena. The bearcat, or binturong (Arctitis binturong), gets its name from a Malaysian language that no longer exists and at first glance it’s not hard to understand the confusion: it has the face and whiskers of a seal, the thick shaggy fur and flat feet of a bear, the tail of a monkey and the claws of a mongoose. And it’s no tiny, scampering marmoset: it weighs 3 stones and is 6 feet long (imagine a golden retriever that can use its tail to climb trees). So, although binturongs spend almost all their life in the canopy, they tend to move around quite slowly, which sometimes leads people to mistake them for sloths.
DON’T TRY THIS IF YOU ARE A BEAR
The binturong tail is a 3-foot long, muscular fifth arm with a bare leathery patch at the end for gripping, just like a monkey’s, although they evolved quite separately. Also, just like monkeys, they use their tail to pick and hold food as well as for hanging from branches. The tail is powerful enough for them to walk down a tree trunk head first, or upside down along a branch to pick hard-to-reach fruit.
Binturongs live mostly on fruit and have a very sweet tooth; in captivity, they show a strong preference for ripe bananas and mangoes but have been known to wolf down marshmallows, muffins, apple pies and milkshakes. This tends to bring on a sugar high, leading to an hour of uncharacteristically manic leaping and running around before they collapse exhausted and sleep it off. Despite this, wild binturongs are genuine carnivores and will occasionally snaffle a bird or catch a fish (they are excellent swimmers).
Several US colleges have sports teams called ‘Bearcats’ and refer to ‘a mythical animal that combines the power and ferocity of a bear with the cunning and quickness of a cat’. They obviously haven’t met the amiable binturong.
Like the other civets, the binturong marks its territory with a pungent oil. Civet oil was used for centuries as a valuable additive to perfume, collected from glands of civets and genets with a special spoon. The binturong has a large gland under its tail, and wipes it on branches, posts and other landmarks to leave a calling-card that lists precise details about sex, age and sexual status. Compared with some other civet species, the binturong’s scent smells pleasantly of buttered popcorn. It’s left by both males and females, although the female binturong wears the trousers: she is much bigger and – although it isn’t quite in the hyena league – has a large penis-like clitoris. Both sexes
have been hunted for their oil, and the male’s penis bone is a valuable ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, promoting virility and the conception of male children.
Unlikely as it sounds, the other reason binturongs are taken from the wild is that they make excellent pets; although presumably not indoor ones, because of their need to climb. They have become popular in the US, where a fertile adult can fetch up to $2,000. Apparently, they are easy to tame and the tail even acts as a built-in leash – they will grip your hand with it when you take them out for a waddle.
Bison
Seventy million killed in fifty years
The bison herds of North America’s Great Plains formed the greatest mass of land animals in the history of the planet. They could stretch 50 miles long by 20 miles wide. By 1890, there were only 635 bison left.
The American bison (Bison bison bison) is commonly called the buffalo, although it is not related to true buffaloes. It migrated from Asia into America 400,000 years ago and is now the biggest North American mammal: adult males weigh a ton, are 10 feet long, and stand 6 feet tall at the humped shoulder.
Bison are the most efficient machines yet developed for eating grass. Their teeth are wide, to maximise the volume of each bite; and long, to stop them wearing out quickly. Forty per cent of their body weight is digestive tract: their fourth stomach chamber holds 600 pints but a mouthful of grass takes up to ninety hours to digest. Bison chew the cud like cows, but extract a third more nutrients.
