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

by Riskin, Dan

  31. The later during pregnancy the infection of the mother happens, the more dangerous it is for the baby. The threats posed by infection with the Toxoplasma parasite during pregnancy are reviewed by Wong and Remington (1994).

  32. The reaction time data come from Havlíček et al. (2001); the traffic accidents data come from Flegr et al. (2002). The overall effects of Toxoplasma on humans are reviewed by Flegr (2013).

  33. The potential influence of Toxoplasma on human cultures was explored by Lafferty (2006).

  34. The ears of moths evolved as a direct response to echolocation by bats and work only for hearing the high-pitched calls of bats (Windmill et al. 2007). As a counterstrategy, one bat, called the spotted bat, has lowered its voice to frequencies that moths can’t hear, but as a result the bat has become audible to humans (Fullard and Dawson 1997).

  35. This whole mites-on-the-ears-of-moths system is described by Treat (1957).

  36. The link between the mother’s immune system and the sexual preferences of her sons was studied by Blanchard (2001).

  Chapter 4. Gluttony

  1. There’s a nice discussion about why some plants and animals were domesticated while others were not by Diamond (2002). If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t farm zebras and water buffalo, when their close cousins, horses and cows, are so easy to get along with, I recommend giving that paper a read.

  2. Dr. Shah’s case summary from the 2003 study is available for download at http://www.sudhirneuro.org/files/mataji_case_study.pdf.

  3. The PDF of Dr. Shah’s hypothesis, explaining how a human might be able to live without food, is available for download at http://www.sudhirneuro.org/files/fast_the_hypothesis.pdf.

  4. For nonobese adults, the body is roughly 60 percent water (Ellis 2000).

  5. Astronaut water consumption was modeled by Hager et al. (2010).

  6. That’s 30 lb. of batteries! Here’s where I get that number: A person’s resting metabolic rate is roughly 1,250 kcal/day (Tranah et al. 2011), which in different units is around 1,450 watt-hours. An alkaline AA battery gives you about 2.5 watt-hours, so 580 batteries would do the trick.

  7. All oxygen-producing photosynthetic organisms come from a common single-celled ancestor that lived around then (Falkowski 2011).

  8. This acacia-ant relationship is described by González-Teuber et al. (2012).

  9. Elephants run into another species of acacia, which also uses ants, called the whistling-thorn tree. Elephants will eat those trees if there are no ants in them but avoid the trees when ants are present (Goheen and Palmer 2010).

  10. The number 200,000 comes from Mithöfer and Boland (2012).

  11. Cyanide lethality data come from Way (1984).

  12. That number comes from Vetter (2000).

  13. The “bombs” in this analogy are molecules of acetone cyanohydrin. The “detonator” is an enzyme called hydroxynitrile lyase. Bombs are kept in vacuoles and detonators in the tissues. When a vacuole gets broken open by a chewing animal, the enzyme breaks apart the acetone cyanohydrin to produce acetone and hydrogen cyanide (Vetter 2000).

  14. One study of gorillas found that they ate eighty-four different kinds of plants, only two of which contained hydrogen cyanide (Rothman et al. 2006).

  15. In Africa and Latin America, cassava is one of the three most important sources of food energy (Vetter 2000).

  16. The story of zonal geraniums, quisqualic acid, and Japanese beetles comes from Ranger et al. (2011).

  17. The gene pathway is called the Sonic Hedgehog signaling pathway. If you think that’s a funny name, you’re right. The pathway was named after a 1990s video game for Sega Genesis called Sonic the Hedgehog.

  18. It’s apparently the difference between the experience of being chewed versus having your juices sucked out that allows the plant to tell if a caterpillar or spider mite is at work (Leitner et al. 2005).

  19. Karban et al. (2004) even showed that some plants can sense the alarm chemicals secreted by plants of other species.

  20. All these questions about why plants release these chemicals are addressed in a nice review article by Heil and Karban (2010).

  21. The recruitment of parasitic wasps against caterpillars by plants is described by Paré and Tumlinson (1999).

  22. The emerald sea slug (Elysia chlorotica) feeds on an alga called Vaucheria litorea (Rumpho et al. 2008).

  23. The aphid is called Acyrthosiphon pisum (Valmalette et al. 2012).

  24. This bat’s tongue really is spectacular to see (Muchhala and Thomson 2009; Muchhala 2006).

  25. Improved seed germination after digestion has been shown for seeds that have gone through birds, monkeys, and bats (Fleming and Heithaus 1981).

  26. Bananas come from Southeast Asia, and their domestication has taken humans thousands of years (De Langhe et al. 2009).

  27. The habit of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) eating slow lorises (Nycticebus coucang) is documented by Utami and Van Hooff (1997).

  28. All this wolverine information comes from a review by Pasitschniak-Arts and Larivière (1995).

  29. The 6 percent for African elephants, which average a weight of 1,700 kg., comes from Laws (1970). That spectacular 384 percent number comes from a 3.35-gram shrew eating earthworms (Morrison et al. 1957).

  30. Here’s the math: You can fit about half a million 3.35-gram shrews inside a 1,700-kg. (3,747 lb.) elephant. The shrew’s consumption (384 percent body weight per day) is sixty-four times higher than the elephant’s consumption (6 percent body weight per day).

  31. The whale estimate of 165,000 kg. (363,000 lb.) comes from Lockyer (1976).

  32. That estimate of 1,120 kg. (almost 2,500 lb.) of krill per whale per day comes from Goldbogen et al. (2011). Krill weigh around 2 grams each.

  33. This whole process is explained by Vass (2001).

  34. I’ve already acknowledged that some of the energy in ecosystems comes from hydrothermal vents, but that’s in places like the deepest parts of the ocean or in pools of water at Yellowstone National Park. For the majority of the natural places humans visit, energy comes from the sun.

  35. For a list of 203 crop plants humans have domesticated, see Meyer et al. (2012). It’s kind of a fun list to look at.

  36. Had Sam been born in the USA in 1911, his life expectancy would be 49.9 years (Shrestha 2006). According to the US Census Bureau website (http://www.census.gov/population/international/), a boy born in 2011 has a life expectancy of 78 years if he’s born in the USA, or 81 years if he’s born in Canada (which Sam was).

  37. That estimate of 9 billion by 2050 comes from a meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO 2009).

  Chapter 5. Envy

  1. The invasion of Leptothorax colonies by Epimyrma ants is described by Buschinger (1989) and Iyengar (2008).

  2. That estimate of two hundred thieving ant species and the description of the “slave raids” by Polyergus ants come from a great article for popular audiences in Scientific American magazine (Topoff 1999). In case you’re wondering, roughly 10,000 kinds of ants have been described so far, but entomologists think that might be about half of what’s really out there.

  3. The use of web vibrations by Argyrodes to observe the movements of orb-weaving spiders was studied by Vollrath (1979).

  4. The use of stolen food as a nuptial gift by Argyrodes spiders is described by Uetz et al. (2010).

  5. The relationship of the tiny Curimagua spider and the much larger Diplura spider is described by Vollrath (1978).

  6. I would guess that there are other spider species like Curimagua hiding out there that we simply don’t know about yet because they’re so tiny.

  7. The biology of the (mostly) vegetarian spider Bagheera kiplingi is described by Meehan et al. (2009).

  8. Theft among lions, hyenas, and the other large African predators are documented by Iyengar (2008).

  9. The fact that cheetahs will stop hunting if they so much as hear lions and hyenas nearby was d
ocumented by Durant (2000).

  10. The avoidance of parks by African wild dogs to avoid lions and hyenas was documented by van der Meer et al. (2011).

  11. Carrier (1984) was the first person to put forward the idea that humans are “born to run.” That theory is fairly widely accepted now. See Bramble and Lieberman (2004) for a nice review.

  12. The study of Hadza scavenging was done by O’Connell et al. (1988).

  13. The capuchin experiments I describe here were done by van Wolkenten et al. (2007).

  14. These dog experiments were done by Range et al. (2009), and you’re welcome to try your own if you have access to two dogs.

  15. The species for which fairness (“envy”) experiments have been conducted are reviewed by Brosnan and de Wall (2012).

  16. The sexual behavior of the sac-winged bat Saccopteryx bilineata is described by Voigt and von Helversen (1999) and by Voigt et al. (2005; 2008).

  17. This information about toads comes from a classic paper by Sullivan (1983).

  18. The frog in question, the European common frog Rana temporaria, is found across Europe, as its name suggests. The behavior of “clutch piracy” was seen in Spain (Vieites et al. 2004).

  19. The mating habits of the frog Rhinella are described by Izzo et al. (2012).

  20. The mating behavior of marine iguanas is described by Wikelski and Bäurle (1996).

  21. The bioluminescent behavior of ostracods is described by Rivers and Morin (2009).

  22. The tendency of sneaker male cuttlefish to make themselves look like females is described by Hanlon et al. (2005).

  23. This outrageous tale of amphibian sexual mimicry is told by Arnold (1976).

  Chapter 6. Wrath

  1. The story of Tilikum the killer whale is the subject of a great article in Outside magazine by Zimmermann (2010) and of an independent film titled Blackfish (2013).

  2. Information about killer whale food comes from Ford et al. (2011).

  3. A description of killer whale behavior while hunting a really big whale can be found in Silber et al. (1990).

  4. The impaling behavior of shrikes is described by Yosef and Pinshow (2005).

  5. The accelerations of jellyfish stingers (nematocysts) were measured by Holstein and Tardent (1984).

  6. The mechanism of action of box jellyfish stings is reviewed by Yanagihara and Shohet (2012).

  7. The ability of blue dragons to eat harpoons without firing them was described by Thompson and Bennett (1969).

  8. The blue dragon is just one of a number of animals that can eat and then use jelly harpoons. How it all works is reviewed by Greenwood (2009).

  9. Cone snails produce analgesic compounds (Nelson 2004).

  10. The estimate of the number of human deaths due to cone snail envenomation comes from Nelson (2004).

  11. The mechanisms by which spider neurotoxins function are reviewed by Escoubas et al. (2000).

  12. For a review of how the Australian funnel-web spider’s venom works, see Nicholson et al. (2006).

  13. The lethality of Australian funnel-web spider bites is reviewed by Isbister et al. (2005).

  14. The giant fossil Brontoscorpio is described by Kjellesvig-Waering (1972).

  15. All these numbers come from a short but fascinating review of scorpion biology by Polis (1990).

  16. The biology of the pallid bat, Antrozous pallidus, is reviewed by Hermanson and O’Shea (1983). (Hermanson was my PhD advisor.)

  17. The information about how pallid bats deal with scorpions comes from conversations I had with Dave Johnston, who did his PhD on pallid bats and has studied them extensively since.

  18. The first version of the Schmidt Pain Index, from 1983, had much of the poetic writing that I like so much, but the list from 1990 has the most species on it (Schmidt et al. 1983; Schmidt 1990).

  19. The experience that man had with the sting of a Dinoponera ant is described by Haddad et al. (2005).

  20. The number of snake species known to science is tabulated at a website called the reptile database, http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/SpeciesStat.html. When I last checked, the number of snakes (suborder Serpentes) was 3,432.

  21. Estimates of numbers of deaths due to snake bites are from Warrell (2010).

  22. A truly heartbreaking photograph of a girl’s leg in exactly this condition, after she was bitten by a spitting cobra, can be found in Warrell (2010).

  23. For the different ways snake venom can affect the blood, see Braud et al. (2000).

  24. The difference in prognosis for a person bitten by a snake with one or the other of these neurotoxins (presynaptic or postsynaptic) is summarized by Del Brutto and Del Brutto (2012).

  25. The prognosis for a victim of a Malayan krait is outlined by Warrell (2010).

  26. The fact that rattlesnake venom helps the snake digest its food was shown by Thomas and Pough (1979).

  27. Estimates I use in this chapter for the percentages of species that went extinct during extinction events come from Jablonski (1994).

  28. That fifty-five-foot diameter estimate (seventeen meters) comes from Showstack (2013).

  29. Estimates of the K-Pg meteor’s size come from Urrutia-Fucugauchi et al. (2011).

  30. The importance of the K-Pg extinction event for mammalian success has been quantified recently by Meredith et al. (2011).

  31. Details about the P-Tr extinction and what caused it are reviewed by Benton and Twitchett (2003). The kinds of life that sprang up after that event are discussed by Sidor et al. (2013).

  32. Details of the Great Oxygenation Event can be found in Sessions et al. (2009).

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