Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You: A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World

by Riskin, Dan

  Find a nonprofit that is working on an issue you care about and join it. Consider the World Wildlife Fund, Amnesty International, or even Bat Conservation International. Read books. Vote for political parties that respect women’s rights, environmental sustainability, social programs, and basic science research. Tell people why you vote that way. Change minds. Volunteer in your community. Volunteer in someone else’s community. Work with kids. Do something to improve other people’s lives.

  Just rub it in your DNA’s face.

  It’s quite possible that the last time organisms on Earth had as much influence on the globe as humans do today was during the Great Oxygenation Event. But our legacy doesn’t need to be one of destruction. We have the power to choose our own destiny, so let’s create a utopia here on Earth, based on human rights, equality, and environmental sustainability.

  To do nothing about those issues and stay immersed in our own personal, selfish experiences is the most natural thing to do. So give your natural instincts the finger, and be unselfish. It’s not enough to feel good when you see other people effecting those changes. For this to work, we need to do it as individuals. This is between you and the molecules inside you. Make the world a better place, even though it will be more work for you and cost you more money than doing nothing. We’ve been doing everything our DNA asked of us for long enough. Rise up, meat robots!

  Shelby and I have big plans to take Sam around the world to see the wonders of nature. Someday maybe we’ll even hunt out those bioluminescent ostracods, the emerald sea slug, or that vegetarian spider Bagheera. I can barely imagine the thrill of sharing those experiences with Sam. Maybe Shelby and I will even take Sam to our campground in Texas and scratch the sand together with him to call in those pallid bats. Until then, though, my plan is to just let myself be in love—in love with Sam, in love with Shelby, and in love with the fragile, wonderful natural world.

  * * *

  I. You can watch it on YouTube. It’s only a minute and a half long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn41do.

  II. In 1973, Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay in the American Biology Teacher with the eleven-word title “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” That sentence just nails it, and the essay does too. It’s a classic, well-written piece, and I recommend it if you’re looking for ways to argue evolution skeptics out of the dark (Dobzhansky 1973).

  III. This problem is called “the tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, thank you for reading this book.

  There are many people to thank for helping me put this book together. I am grateful to Jeff Kleinman and Michelle Brower of Folio Literary Management for asking me what book I’d most like to write and then pushing me to think beyond the bat book I proposed in response. I’m also extremely grateful to Michelle Howry of Touchstone for believing in this book, for her edits and comments as I wrote, and for her patience and positivity throughout the writing process.

  I also thank Susan Moldow, Stacy Creamer, David Falk, Sally Kim, Jessica Roth, Meredith Vilarello, Ana Paula de Lima, Martha Schwartz, George Turianski, Joy O’Meara, and Peg Haller, at Touchstone Books in New York, along with Kevin Hanson, David Millar, Alison Clarke, Sheila Haidon, Felicia Quon, Maximillian Arambulo, Michelle Blackwell, Andrea Seto, and April Gibson at Simon & Schuster Canada, for their enthusiastic support of this book.

  I am grateful to the scientists who have helped me shape my view of the world. Brock Fenton, John Hermanson, Sharon Swartz, and Tom Kunz supervised me through my graduate studies and postdocs, but there have been countless others—professors, postdocs, instructors, graduate students, and undergraduates who have also contributed to my education. I reached out to a few of those people while writing this book, and I thank Attila Bergou, Gerry Carter, Rulon Clark, Christina Davy, Yvonne Dzal, Leif Einarson, Brock Fenton, Patrick Flight, Megan Frederickson, Matt Heard, John Hermanson, John Hutchinson, Emily MacLeod, Troy Murphy, Matt Ogburn, John Ratcliffe, Shelby Riskin, Jaime Tanner, and Amity Wilczek for their helpful responses. I’m also grateful to the legion of scientists who wrote the two hundred plus scientific articles I drew upon while writing this book. None of this would be possible without their curiosity and hard work.

  In the world of TV, Beth Hoppe has been very much like an academic advisor to me. She gave me my start on a show about evolution and then spent several years training me to be an effective communicator of science. The fact that I had the opportunity to write this book is a direct result of her support.

  I wrote this book while working full-time at Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet, and I thank my colleagues there for their patience while I did so. I’m especially grateful to Paul Lewis, Ken McDonald, Kelly McKeown, and Ziya Tong, but there are more than a hundred other people there who help make that show happen five days a week, and I thank them all for their support while I worked on this book. Thanks also to Marilyn Haft for helping me juggle these various parts of my career.

  I thank my mother, Mary W. Walters, who is a great editor (and also a fabulous author of fiction, by the way), for helping me tighten my writing and for supporting my wacky career in general. Mom, you’re brilliant, and if I look half-smart sometimes, it’s only because you teached me so good. I also thank my family for their support.

  It’s somewhat perverse that I took so much time away from Sam and Shelby to write a book about my love for Sam and Shelby, but somehow that’s what happened. Shelby knew how much this book meant to me, helped me free up the time I needed to get it written, and offered many invaluable suggestions to help me improve the book itself. Thank you both.

  Toronto

  September 2013

  © VANESSA HEINS. PHOTOGRAPH USED WITH THE PERMISSION OF EXPLORATION PRODUCTION INC.

  Dan Riskin was born in 1975 in Edmonton, Canada. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Alberta (BSc, 1997), his master’s at York University (MSc, 2000), and his doctorate at Cornell University (PhD, 2006). He did postdoctoral research at Brown University (2006–10) and at the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology of Boston University (2006–07). His work is mostly focused on the biomechanics of bat locomotion—the physics behind crawling on the ground, jumping into flight, flapping through the sky, and landing on the ceiling. Dan has traveled around the world for his research and won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty refereed articles in such journals as the Journal of Experimental Biology, the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, and Nature.

  Dan’s first work for TV was on the Emmy-nominated History Channel show Evolve. Soon afterward, he contributed to Animal Planet’s Monsters Inside Me, and because of the success of that show, he appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Dan has also appeared on Human Nature (Discovery Science) and Bedbug Apocalypse (Animal Planet).

  In 2011, Dan left academics to become the cohost of the world’s only daily science program, Daily Planet, on Discovery Canada. He is a regular guest on Canada AM, CTV NewsChannel, and CTV National News in Canada, and in the USA on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

  Dan lives in Toronto with his wife, Shelby; their son, Sam; and their Boston terrier, Elliott. He is on Twitter as @riskindan. This is his first book.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.ca

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Dan-Riskin

  Facebook.com/SimonandSchusterCanada

  Twitter.com/SimonSchusterCA

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Touchstone eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  NOTES

  Introduction: Geor
gia on My Mind

  1. For a detailed description of the human botfly’s biology, complete with grotesque photos, visit the University of Florida Entomology and Nematology Department’s “Featured Creatures” page: http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/flies/human_bot_fly.htm.

  Chapter 1. Greed

  1. Lions do not kill zebras at random (Mills and Shenk 1992).

  2. Biologists call this a distinction between interspecific competition (worrying about members of other species, like predators for example) and intra specific competition (worrying about members of your own species).

  3. The selfish sheep study was by King et al. (2012).

  4. Penguin huddle temperatures are from Gilbert et al. (2006).

  5. This strategy is called asynchronous hatching. The snowy owl story is summarized by Murie (1929) and Parmelee (1992). Similar stories exist for blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii) and cattle egrets (Bubulcus ibis). There’s a great review of “avian siblicide” by Mock et al. (1990).

  6. The Verreaux’s eagle (Aquila verreauxii) is also sometimes called a black eagle (Mock et al. 1990). The incident of 1,569 pecks was observed by Gargett (1978).

  7. A thorough description of the sand tiger shark’s “intrauterine cannibalism” can be found in Gilmore et al. (1983).

  8. The whole story of the mice of Gough Island is told nicely by Cuthbert and Hilton (2004) and by Wanless et al. (2007).

  9. The phrase “most important seabird island in the world” is used by a lot of people to describe Gough Island. I’m quoting Cuthbert and Hilton (2004).

  10. The idea that mice can drive seabird extinctions is discussed by Wanless et al. (2007).

  11. This event is called the Australian Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. For details about the species that disappeared, and a nice picture showing their sizes, see Flannery (1990).

  12. The relative importance of hunting and wildfires to the Australian Pleistocene megafaunal extinction is discussed by Miller et al. (2005).

  13. You guessed it: it’s called the North American Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. To get an idea of the animals that lived in North America when humans first got there but that are now missing, see Janzen and Martin (1982).

  14. The South Pacific extinction events happened in the Holocene, after the Pleistocene extinctions of Australia and North America, with two-thirds of extinctions happening between first human settlement and European colonization of an island (Duncan et al. 2013).

  15. The nautical disasters were analyzed by Elinder and Erixson (2012).

  Chapter 2. Lust

  1. The lives of Antechinus are reviewed by Naylor et al. (2008).

  2. The researchers who chased the spiders around with paintbrushes are Li et al. (2012).

  3. The Korean eunuch data are from Min et al. (2012).

  4. These statistics about female survival of pregnancy come from the World Health Organization (2012).

  5. Information about hyenas comes from Watts et al. (2009) and Glickman et al. (2006).

  6. The social structure of spotted hyenas is nicely laid out by Watts et al. (2009).

  7. You can watch Todd Akin make his political-career-ending statements at http://fox2now.com/2012/08/19/the-jaco-report-august-19-2012/.

  8. Information about the mating habits of the northern pintail are from Sorenson and Derrickson (1994). Penis length data are from Brennan et al. (2007).

  9. These comparisons across species have been made by Brennan et al. (2007).

  10. This information about garter snakes comes from a paper by Shine et al. (2003).

  11. The biology of bedbugs, from feeding to mating, is summarized by Reinhardt and Siva-Jothy (2007).

  12. What it is specifically that female túngara frogs like to hear is described by Akre et al. (2011).

  13. Unisexual reproduction among vertebrates is discussed by Neaves and Baumann (2011).

  14. You can read all about penis fencing in a paper by Michiels and Newman (1998).

  15. That estimate of 1 billion years is based on a paper by Butterfield (2000).

  Chapter 3. Sloth

  1. Global obesity data are from Swinburn et al. (2011).

  2. Parasites influence how energy flows through ecosystems, how well the animals in ecosystems can compete, and, ultimately, how many different species an ecosystem can hold. Therefore, the more parasites you can find in an ecosystem, the healthier that ecosystem can be (Hudson et al. 2006).

  3. Details about vampire bat saliva are available in Tellgren-Roth et al. (2009). The details about hunting come Greenhall and Schmidt (1988).

  4. The common vampire bat jumps with a peak force equivalent to roughly 9.5 times its own body weight in around thirty milliseconds, sending its body upward at a speed of 7.8 feet per second (Schutt et al. 1997).

  5. Biologists have been excited about blood sharing by vampire bats ever since it was first described by Wilkinson (1984). Gerry Carter has done some great follow-up work since then on the rules by which the bats decide for whom they will puke up food (Carter and Wilkinson 2013).

  6. For details about the stretching stomach of the common vampire bat, complete with X-rays of bats that have fed on barium-laden blood, see Mitchell and Tigner (1970).

  7. Squirrels have roundworms (Crompton 2001), birds have feather mites (Proctor 2003), giant pandas have at least six kinds of parasitic worms (Zhang et al. 2011), and emperor penguins are infected with tapeworms, lice, and the bacterial disease chlamydia (Barbosa and Palacios 2009).

  8. Almost 50 percent of all known animal species are parasites, and Poulin and Morand (2000) make some great logical arguments about why the majority of the species we don’t yet know are probably parasites. (In a nutshell, it’s because they’re harder to find.)

  9. For more details about the lives of mosquitoes, see Christophers (1960).

  10. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a very informative website with data about parasite life cycles and their effects on humans. The page about malaria is at http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/.

  11. The CDC webpage about elephantiasis is at http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lymphaticfilariasis/.

  12. The raccoon roundworm that can burrow through your body, eat your organs, and kill you is Baylisascaris procyonis. The eyeball-eating amoeba (which wasn’t a human parasite at all until contact lenses were invented, by the way) is Acanthamoeba keratitis. The pinworm I’m talking about is Enterobius vermicularis, though there are several other kinds of pinworms you can get infected with as well.

  13. Leeches pick an animal they want to feed on, then move toward it in bursts, continually getting updates about the animal’s location (Harley et al. 2013).

  14. These examples of facial ripping, including a very graphic image of a woman’s face after a dog bit her cheek off, are from Koch et al. (2012).

  15. Getting DNA of endangered animals out of leeches in their habitats is brilliant. Details of the procedure can be found in Schnell et al. (2012).

  16. For more about bioluminescence by marine animals, and the relationships animals set up with light-producing bacteria, see Haddock et al. (2010).

  17. To be honest, I don’t know for sure that it was a Krøyer’s deep sea anglerfish that attacked them in that movie, but it was definitely an anglerfish of some kind.

  18. This business of tiny males acting like parasites of females isn’t restricted to the Krøyer’s deep sea anglerfish. It’s found in a bunch of different anglerfishes (Herring 2007).

  19. The argument that male anglerfish don’t really count as parasites, despite their lazy lifestyles, is made nicely by Vollrath (1998).

  20. The CDC webpage for schistosomiasis is at http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/schistosomiasis/.

  21. Whether the schistosome sets up shop in the blood vessels near the bladder or the intestines depends on the species. Schistosoma haematobium eggs come out in your urine, but the eggs of S. mansoni and S. japonicum exit in your feces.

  22. For more about swimmer’s i
tch, see Verbrugge et al. (2004).

  23. The “dog on a leash” analogy comes straight from the scientific paper that describes all this (Gal and Libersat 2008).

  24. The paper about the larvae spitting antimicrobial chemicals all over the place is by Herzner et al. (2013).

  25. These numbers, about how common parasitoid species are, come from Eggleton and Belshaw (1992) and Feener and Brown (1997).

  26. The biomechanics of poop launching by the skipper caterpillar are described in mouthwatering detail by Caveney et al. (1998).

  27. Here’s how I “put that in human terms”: The insect is around 2 inches long and launches its poop 30 inches. That’s 15 body lengths. If you multiply the body length of a 5-foot-tall woman 15 times, you get 75 feet.

  28. Carl Zimmer has done a wonderful job of exploring these themes in his book Parasite Rex (2000).

  29. Details about the effects of the Toxoplasma parasite on the behavior of rats can be found in some outstanding papers from Robert Sopolsky’s lab at Stanford (Vyas et al. 2007; House et al. 2011).

  30. The estimates of the number of people infected with the Toxoplasma parasite come from Havlíček et al. (2001) and Montoya and Liesenfeld (2004).