by Ted Dewan
Even the lion’s mane – that universal symbol of virility – means something different to a lioness. Sporting a big, dark mane doesn’t make you a breeding hero; in fact, as a fifty-a-day beast, you’re probably history – manes are the leonine equivalent of nostril hair. But the absolute sign of a lion having given up trying to cut it as an apex predator or the King of the Jungle is when he turns man-eater. Slow, weak and always hanging around, we are easy prey: the lion’s equivalent of a night in front of the TV with beer and a pizza.
No smoothen the lion.
CZECH ZOO SIGN
Lizard
Pleasantly reptilian
When the remains of the giant reptiles of the Mesozoic era were first discovered, Sir Richard Owen dubbed them ‘dinosaurs’ from the Greek deinos sauros, ‘terrible lizard’. Encountering crocodilians in the New World, the Spanish called them el lagarto de Indias, ‘the lizard of the Indies’. This became ‘alligator’ in English. But though there are more than 4,675 species of lizard, dinosaurs and alligators are not among them. Lizards are the reptile equivalent of rodents, found all over the world. They have a ‘third eye’ in the centre of their heads beneath the skin; they smell using their tongues and the cracks in their bottoms go sideways. Some are legless and distinguishable from snakes only by their movable eyelids, which snakes do not have.
AUTOTOMATIC PILOT (Autotomy = ‘self-cut’)
The biggest group of lizards are skinks. They have tails with special fracture points. If a predator grabs them, their tails snap off and wriggle convulsively for several minutes, distracting the predator and giving the skink time to escape. The legless Glass lizards are even more dramatic: their tails shatter like glass if they’re assaulted. Armadillo lizards (Cordylus cataphractus) roll into balls; blue-tongued skinks stick their tongues out; horned lizards squirt blood from their eyes. Australian frilled lizards (Chlamydosaurus kingii) have a pleat of skin around their necks. When they are threatened, this opens out like a golf umbrella, making them seem much larger than they are. The flying dragons (Draco volans) of South-East Asia leap from trees, gliding to safety on brightly coloured parachutes. And lizards also escape by running – though none quite so stylishly as the basilisk, or Jesus Christ lizard (Basiliscus basiliscus), which has large webbed hind feet, enabling it to stand up and walk on water. The fastest lizards are six-lined racerunners (Cnemidophorus sexlineatus): at 18 mph they are the fastest reptiles on earth. Only one lizard lives in the sea: the Galápagos marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus), which dives 30 feet under water to nibble algae on the rocks. Some lizards are venomous but, luckily for humans, they secrete poison by chewing and need a good old gnaw to cause anything more than a mild swelling. The heaviest lizard is the 20-stone Komodo dragon; the lightest is a dwarf gecko so tiny it would fit on your fingertip.
Nile monitor lizards cunningly lay their eggs in termite mounds. The termites repair the damage around the eggs and the heat of the mound incubates them.
Geckos are popular house guests in hot countries because they eat insects at night. Brook’s half-toed gecko of West Africa (Hemidactylus brookii) even has a transparent belly to advertise to its hosts how many flies it has caught. Geckos can walk vertically up glass and scientists have recently discovered how. Their feet are covered in half a million tiny hairs, each of which splits into hundreds more with diameters less than the wavelength of light. This creates a powerful bond between the electrons in the two surfaces. Half a square inch of adhesive tape based on this principle has already been manufactured. If enough can be made to cover a human hand, you could hang by it from the ceiling. In China, lizard soup is used as medicine for asthma, colds, lungs and the heart. In Antigua, lizard soup is also said to be good for asthma. Provided the patient isn’t told what’s in it. Apparently. that just makes it worse.
Lobster
The swimming locust
The name lobster comes from the Old English loppestre, the product of a collision between the Latin for locust (locusta) and loppe, Old English for spider. As arthropods, they are closely related to both. The best-known lobsters are the European and the American, but there are about fifty species including the Hunchback locust lobster, the Velvet fan lobster and the Musical furry lobster. Lobsters from 140 million years ago were so like today’s that if you ate one for dinner you wouldn’t notice the difference.
Lobsters are peaceful, serious creatures, who know the secrets of the sea, and don’t bark.
GERARD DE NERVAL
Lobsters are surprisingly fast swimmers: with a flex of their tail they can shoot along at 15 feet a second. Some have been tracked covering distances of over a hundred miles a year, in search of food and sex. Lobster sex involves a lot of undressing and urination. Like mice, they use their urine to communicate. Their two bladders are handily located in their heads, so urine can be mixed with water and squirted from their gills into the face of a potential mate. Male and female lobsters usually attack each other on sight, but, luckily, male lobsters find the urine of a moulting female arousing. Males wait in their rock shelters, urinating out of the doorway. Females approach when ready to moult, and urinate back at them. They have sex in the missionary position: the male props open the female’s sperm pouch with his swimming legs and, after some leg-fanning foreplay, ejaculates gelatinous sperm capsules into her pouch. He protects her until her shell hardens – about two weeks later – and then hostilities resume.
ODD-CLAW ETIQUETTE
To grow, a lobster must shed its shell. Because the food-grinding teeth inside its stomach are part of the exoskeleton, it has to pull out the lining of its throat, stomach and anus to free itself. Not all lobsters survive this process. It also makes it hard to tell their age. Many of the ones we eat are over twenty years old, but a big specimen can weigh as much as a labrador and may have lurked on the ocean floor for over a century.
Fighting lobsters lock crushing claws until one of them submits. Sometimes, they attack each other’s antennae, legs, claws or eyes. A large crusher claw can exert as much as 1,000 lb per square inch on something small (like a human finger). To escape, they can jettison a limb using a special muscle at its base but because lobsters’ blood flows through their body cavities, not veins, they will bleed to death unless leaks are sealed quickly. Legs, antennae and claws can regenerate, but not eyes.
As long as their gills are damp, lobsters can breathe. They will survive for up to a week out of water. French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval used to take Thibault, his pet lobster, for walks in Paris using a blue ribbon as a lead.
Cooked lobsters are red because boiling transforms protein molecules in the shell into shapes that absorb everything except red light, which is reflected. There is no clear evidence about whether lobsters feel pain. Boiling water is probably the quickest method but there is no absolutely humane way of killing them.
Louse
Intimate informant
Lice are very small wingless insects, related to the bugs, aphids and cicadas. They live as parasites in the fur or feathers of mammals and birds, feeding on blood, dead skin or feather parts. Almost all animal species support one or two varieties, living on different parts of their body. Notable exceptions are bats, platypuses and echidnas, which are louse-free.
Humans carry three lice species: on our heads, our clothes and our pubes. By studying their DNA alongside those of other primates, we’ve learnt rather a lot about ourselves. The pubic louse (Pthirus pubis), for example, is very closely related to the gorilla louse (Pthirus gorillae). The DNA shows the two species split over three million years ago, so our hominid ancestors either occasionally slept with gorillas, or used abandoned gorilla nests as hammocks. Similar analysis of head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) tells us that we split from chimpanzees five and a half million years ago, and that we caught a second species from the heads of our now extinct cousins, Homo erectus, three million years later. Body lice (P. humanus humanus) live only on clothing and evolved from head lice about 70,000 years ago, thus tel
ling us when we first started getting dressed.
THE LOUSE CANNON
There is only one species of louse that is officially classified as ‘endangered’, the pygmy hog sucking louse (Haematopinus oliveri), attached to the dwindling pygmy hog population of the Indian savannah.
Adult lice look like tiny crabs, hence their nickname. They have powerful pincers on their front legs, which they use to anchor themselves close to their host’s skin, by grabbing hair or feather barbs. The shape of some bird lice has evolved to fit exactly in between the barbs so they can’t be removed by preening (which is why birds have dust baths).
Lice can’t jump, so you need contact to catch them. Some bird lice hitch a ride with a passing fly if their host dies or becomes too crowded. As a means of distribution, this is risky, as they can’t live on the fly. Most lice can only survive for a day or two if separated from their host. One of the least remarked-upon mass extinctions of recent times was that of the passenger pigeon louse, Lipercus extinctus. When the pigeons died out, so did the louse. Similarly, the programme to protect and breed Californian condors in captivity inadvertently destroyed the condor-chewing louse (Colpocephalum californici), when the remaining birds were all fumigated.
Sometimes lice do switch species. The dog louse (Heterodoxus spiniger) infests dogs everywhere except Europe, but it evolved in Australia to feed on wallabies and only moved to dingos when they arrived with Indonesian fishermen 4,000 years ago.
Some lice are actively harmful: the faeces of the human body louse carry typhus and trench fever viruses. Analysis of the lice found on the buried remains of French soldiers who died in Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow confirms that lice killed more of them than the Russians did.
The ‘nits’ that children catch from each other are the eggs of the head louse, which the louse sticks to the base of the hair using a special cement. It’s so strong that some females end up sticking themselves to a strand of hair and starving to death. They lay six eggs a day. The optimum population is about a hundred lice per head, which takes about a month to build up.
Mite
Invisible lodger
Mites are tiny, eight-legged members of the spider clan but most are too small for us to see. After insects, they are the most diverse group of animals on the planet. We don’t know how many species of mite there are; over 48,000 have been identified so far, but this is probably only a tenth of the total number. They can live almost anywhere, on land or sea, from the icy, sunless ocean depths to hot springs where the temperature would boil most other organisms. Only bacteria are more adaptable; mites can raise a family in the windpipe of the honey bee, or hitch lifts between flowers on the beak of a hummingbird. A single square foot of forest contains a million mites from over 200 different species.
IN-YOUR-FACE INCEST
Not that you have to go as far as the woods. As you read this, the follicle mite, Demodex folliculorum, is using its needle-shaped jaws to feast on the oil from the sebaceous glands at the base of your eyelashes. Demodex mites look like chubby toothbrushes, with a long abdomen and four pairs of clawed legs. They burrow into the follicle headfirst and have a digestive system so efficient they don’t produce any waste. When they die, they just dissolve in situ, with no harmful side effects.
Our homes are vast continents teeming with independent mite kingdoms: flour mites, cheese mites, furniture mites, prune mites, mould mites, each feeding and reproducing in its own microhabitat. Probably the most infamous is the dust mite (Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus – or ‘skin-eating feather-stabber’). They don’t feed on humans but on the flakes of skin that fall from our bodies. Considering each of us produces a small flour bag’s worth of skin flakes a year, there’s plenty for them to chew on. The musty smell that hits us when we empty our vacuum cleaner is caused by the digestive enzymes of dust mites: half a teaspoon of dust contains as many as a thousand mites and 250,000 pellets of their droppings. Although these droppings can aggravate asthma, caution is needed: dust mites do an important job ridding our environment of scurf and dander. Also, they are impossible to remove in the long term. Obsessive vacuuming just redistributes them and their eggs around the house and, worse still, sucks up their main predator, the larger Cheyletus mite that helps keep their population stable. Carpet cleaning is an even happier prospect: it creates just the warm, moist conditions in which they thrive (which is why they like our mattresses so much).
Demodex means ‘lard worm’. The notorious nineteenth-century biologist Sir Richard Owen, better-known for inventing the term ‘dinosaur’, named it.
That’s not to undermine the threat posed by mites and their subfamily, the ticks. They carry viruses on their bodies and in their saliva which cause scabies, Lyme disease, dermatitis and typhus in humans and mange in animals; a single species, Varroa destructor, came close to wiping out the world’s honey bee population. By far the largest number of mite species feed on plants and their effect on crops can be devastating, causing billions of pounds worth of damage each year. But the mites’ diversity may their Achilles’ heel. Even mites themselves have mites. In 2001, the green mite that had decimated the African cassava crop was arrested by the import of a predatory mite from Brazil, the plant’s original home.
Mole
The all-seeing nose
Moles aren’t blind, but their pinhead eyes can only tell light from dark. What really sets them apart is their noses, which they use for ‘feeling’ rather than smelling.
The nose of the Star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata) is unique. It looks like a pink sea anemone, but is really a twenty-two fingered, non-grasping hand that the mole uses to form a complete picture of its underground world. With a much higher density of nerve-endings than the average clitoris, it uses a similar brain capacity to that used for sight in other mammals, making it more of an eye than a hand.
‘Mole’ comes from ‘mouldwarp’, Old English for ‘earth-thrower’. The dialect name was ‘woont’, molecatchers were ‘woonters’ and molehills were ‘woonty-tumps’.
The Star-nosed mole holds two other records. It has the fastest reactions of any mammal: locating, identifying and eating an insect larva in an average of 227 milliseconds, which is less time than it takes to read the word ‘mole’ and three times faster than most of can us brake at a red light. It is also the only mammal to ‘smell’ under water, sprouting large air bubbles from its nostrils rather like a child blowing bubblegum.
If a mole goes without a meal for eight hours, it dies. The diet of the European mole (Talpa europaea) consists chiefly of earthworms: their tunnels are traps for worms to fall into. They need to eat about a hundred each day. By biting their heads to immobilise them, a mole can keep up to 500 worms alive in underground ‘larders’. Moles drink a lot, too, and at least one of their tunnels will come out by a ditch or pond. Contrary to myth, they do not eat plant roots or other vegetable matter.
If short of worms, a mole might dig 150 feet of new tunnels in a day, the equivalent of a human moving four tons (about a thousand shovel loads) every twenty minutes.
Moles are not nocturnal – it’s just that we rarely see them. In fact, they work in shifts alternating four hours of frantic digging and eating with four hours of sleep. They are highly territorial and solitary, each animal’s territory covering anything up to four football pitches. This solitary life is only relieved for the few hours each spring when they come together to mate, which sometimes happens above ground.
For the rest of the year, moles use their forty-four teeth to make sure other individuals keep their distance. This includes the females, who are equipped with another mammalian first: a pair of ovaries-cum-testicles that release eggs in the spring and testosterone in the autumn, when they need to defend their ground. There are differences. Males are slightly larger and their tunnelling behaviour is different. Females build an irregular network, whereas males, of course, tunnel in long, straight lines.
Molehills consist of exceptionally fine soil, prized by gardeners as see
d compost. In the second half of the nineteenth century, moleskin provided molecatchers with a very good income. It took a hundred skins to make a waistcoat, and by the turn of the century several million British moleskins were being exported to the USA annually.
The British mole population is now estimated at over thirty-five million. In 2002 the post of Mole-catcher Royal was revived with the appointment of Victor Williamson at Sandringham.
STARFACE
Monkey
Social tinker
Anyone who’s taken children to a zoo will know the tractor-beam-like attraction that monkeys exert. A monkey enclosure is like a 12A movie – scenes of mild peril with some sexual content. Children like monkeys because they feel a direct connection with them, and they are right: only the apes are closer relatives. It’s interesting that within a few decades of the word ‘monkey’ first being used (1530, although its origin is obscure), we had already begun to use it as an affectionate nickname for children.
The White uakari is one of the oddest-looking of all monkeys. It lives in the Brazilian rain forest where its bald, bright-red face and rather human ears have earned it the nickname ‘the Englishman’.
Wherever they are found in the world, monkeys live in big groups. Their relatively large brains, and the intelligence they confer, have enabled them to cope with the complex interactions required to keep a social order going. The more we learn about monkey societies, the more they seem like us. It’s obviously going to delight seven-year-old boys to discover that among Angolan black-and-white colobus monkeys (Colobus angolensis), a burp is counted a friendly greeting (like many monkeys they’re leaf-eaters, so wind is a constant in their lives). Also, the widespread use of grooming to suck up to the dominant male has a definite schoolboy logic to it, although most schoolboys stop short of removing dead skin and lice from the playground bully.
