Chapter VII: Part 7

The sneeze of the elephant has been described as “like the bursting of a boiler of considerable size.” When the elephant feels the onset of one of these titanic eruptions it appears to realize that a momentous event is about to take place. It becomes extremely restless and is seemingly unable to stand still for a moment. The sneeze is preceded by a tremendous, wall-shaking bellow.

Although elephants are subject to frequent colds the sneeze is a rare phenomenon. For this reason it is regarded as a good luck sign, especially among Moslems of India, who gather around and wait patiently for the event. When it starts they bow their heads and pray for the realization of their wishes.

_The Luminescent Ctenophores_

There are windless nights when Caribbean waters seem like fields of green fireflies. This is due to vast numbers of luminescent ctenophores or comb-bearers. One the most abundant and least known forms of animal life, they are also among the most delicate. Although they are related to the planarian worm and the jelly fish, they are quite unique.

Superficially they seem little more than animate bags of water with skins thinner than the most delicate tissue paper. They abound in staggering numbers over most of the world. One of the most familiar types is the American mnemiopsis. On calm summer days the amber green species sometimes covers completely thousands of square yards of sea—like a raft formed of millions of individuals floating just below the surface. A classic ground for this phenomenon is Narragansett Bay.

Like the rest of its race, this ctenophore is like a fragment of moonlight on the sea. It is so fragile that the slightest current of water in its neighborhood is sufficient to tear it to bits. It is about as elusive as moonlight. When grasped gently the jelly-like substance slides through the fingers. Taken in a net and placed in salt water it vanishes completely on the way from boat to laboratory. Intact specimens are almost unknown in scientific collections.

Ordinarily they live at considerable depths in the zone of absolute calm where all wave movement ceases. Great hordes rise to be the surface only on nights when the surface of the ocean is like a sheet of glass.

They are among the loveliest of all sea creatures. The delicacy of their coloring is that of spring arbutus or anemone. Their presence is indicated chiefly by the brilliant flashes of rainbow colors as they pass a few inches below the surface.

The majority are pear-shaped. Giant of the race is Venus' girdle, best known in the Mediterranean but found in most sub-tropical seas and sometimes swept as far north as the coast of New England. It is an undulating, iridescent ribbon as much as five feet long and two inches wide. The mnemiopsis of southern New England waters is ball-shaped with a diameter of about four inches.

Ctenophores are most varied in the Bay of Naples; there 18 species have been identified. There are 14 species now known in the Caribbean. In absolute numbers, however, the fragile creatures are most abundant in North Atlantic and sub-Arctic waters where, because of ordinarily rough seas, they seldom are seen. There they constitute one of the major menaces of the cod fisheries. Despite their fragility they are vicious little animals, devouring cod eggs and fry in incalculable numbers.

Each living water bag has a slit-like mouth on top and what apparently is a sense organ of some kind on the bottom. The minute, struggling prey are seized in two pincer-like tentacles and pushed into the mouth. They are digested quickly by the juices in the water sack in which float about whatever vital organs the Ctenophore possesses.

The ctenophores are by no means aberrant jellyfish, which they resemble only in the extreme tenuousness of their bodies. They have no umbrellas and no stinging cells. Two forms are known which have flattened bodies like planarian worms and which creep on the sea floor. Because of various similarities in the development of both creatures some zoologists believe they are immediate descendants of a unknown common ancestor.

The function of their weird green luminescence is unknown. It would seem of questionable value in attracting prey and it is difficult to imagine that these most fragile and evanescent of earth’s creatures have any sort of love life. Nevertheless lightmaking seems to constitute a purposeful part of their activities.

_The Forest That Time Forgot_

Knee-high red and pink ferns fill the jungle hollow. Around them are green leaves covered with parallel white lines in sets of five with dots on the lines which look like notes of music. These leaves are known as “music paper.” There is no record that anybody has tried to play the tunes nature has written on them.

Mixed with them are “sandpaper leaves” with surfaces so rough that they are used locally for the same purpose as sheets of sandpaper elsewhere. Sinister hangman’s ropes swing, as if awaiting their victims, from branches along the jungle paths.

Such are a few random notes from a cloudland jungle—in many ways like a forest of prehistoric days—in Venezuela’s Henry Pittier national forest. Here flourishes the giant tree fern, most characteristic tree of the vast ancient forests from which coal deposits were formed. In the tree fern fronds lurk worms and amphibians not vastly different from the tree creatures of the Devonian geological area.

This is a forest of the central tropics. Paradoxically it is also, when seen from a little distance, a New England forest of late September with groves of straight, white-trunked palm trees which look like birches and patches of flame color in the treetops which look like maple leaves starting to put on their autumn coloring. The temperature, in fact, is about that of a warm Autumn day in New England, especially as dusk comes and a white veil of mist rolls over the mountaintops from the sea.

The patches of flame color which look like maple leaves are orange and red blossoms of the gallito or “cock flowers,” so called because the bloom resembles so much the body of a miniature rooster. The gallito appears high in the treetops. It is about the most abundant and conspicuous flower of the cloud jungle. It grows on big, grey-trunked trees whose bark looks like rough-woven linen. Each blooming tree is filled with brilliantly colored humming birds and red and green parrots.

Trees in the high jungle hills wear thick green overcoats of moss and lichens. There is one dark-green form of moss which grows about an inch high and looks like a miniature cedar leaf. Many of the older trees, especially palms, are “rusty” with a species of red lichen which spreads rapidly over the trunks. Among them is a blossoming tree with a straight, spined grey trunk from 30 to 40 feet high which is a close relative of the potato.

The cloud forest is predominantly the home of the epiphytes, such as long, dangling masses of red, pink and pearl orchids which grow on the trees. They require plenty of moisture. In this mountain swamp the trees always are soaking wet. This is an ideal environment for the eight or ten varieties of moss which grow so luxuriantly.

There are green-walled cave openings ten feet high and ten feet wide in the bottoms of the trunks of giant trees. Exposed roots lie across the paths, covered with moss in which there are leprous white spots. They look like enormous, writhing malevolent green serpents.

_The Versatility of the Elephant’s Trunk_

The elephant’s trunk is a tool surpassed in effectiveness only by the hand of man. It is a muscular prolongation of combined nose and upper lip, which have grown together. It is associated closely with the motor and sensory centers in the brain cortex and is under such delicate voluntary control that with its enormous strength is combined extreme fineness of movement. The trunk terminates in one of two fingerlike projections which seem capable of almost as delicate voluntary movements as are human fingers.

The trunk is a supernose. As a sensory organ it is the elephant’s chief means of securing information about his environment. With it the animal can detect the direction, and perhaps the distance, of olfactory stimuli from all sorts of sources. It is as vital in an elephantine scheme of things as are eyes to a human being.

The trunk is the elephant’s chief servant Without it the monster is the equivalent of a blind man. It has approximately 40,000 muscles and a highly developed sensory and motor nerve supply. The organ has enormous strength, sufficient to tear up a tree by its roots.

Here are some of the things the animal is credited with being able to do with the trunk: pick up a pin from the ground, select and secure a single tussock of appetizing herbage, uncork a wine bottle, untie a slip knot, unbolt a gate, throw up and catch a baseball, pull the trigger to fire a gun, ring a bell.

A female elephant owned by the Duke of Devonshire in the 1880’s was allowed almost a free range over the park of his estate. She made herself useful by sweeping the paths with a broom and by carrying a garden watering pot. Her most celebrated achievement was that of opening a tightly corked wine bottle. She would hold it against the ground at about a 45 degree angle with one of her front feet and gradually twist out the cork—barely protruding above the neck of the bottle—with her trunk. After emptying the contents into her mouth she would hand the empty bottle to her keeper.

_Fiendish Vampires of the Night_

About the middle of the eighteenth century belief in vampirism spread like an epidemic across France and England. Dead men hellishly condemned to live forever came out of their sepulchres at midnight, took the forms of various animals, and feasted on the blood of the living (who, in turn, died and became vampires). This was a superstition which previously had been confined largely to Slavic countries. Its influence in France and England seems to have started with tales brought back from the New World by Spanish explorers of actual vampires—sinister, black-winged, fiend-faced flying mammals who actually fed on the blood of sleeping humans. Thenceforth the popular conception of a vampire was that of a large bat, hovering over the unsuspecting, eternally doomed sleeper.

The stories doubtless were greatly ornamented and exaggerated. However, the vampire bat of the American tropics is a gruesome reality. It is now known to be a carrier of the rabies virus.

It is a small, brown bat condemned by nature to live exclusively on blood. Its throat is too small to swallow solid particles. Its stomach is especially adapted for rapid digestion. It feasts on all sorts of mammals, including man, and the incisions of its razor-sharp teeth are so nearly painless that a sleeper seldom is awakened. Supposedly it always bites man on the bottoms of the toes.

The loathsome little creature does not actually suck blood, as long was supposed. Instead, according to observers, it laps up blood with its tongue. Its saliva is believed to contain an anti-coagulant which keeps a wound bleeding for hours. From 20 to 25 minutes is required for a meal, during which the animal gorges itself until its body becomes spherical.

“We slept so soundly”, records an Amazon explorer, “it was not until morning we discovered that we had been raided during the night by vampire bats and the whole party was covered with blood stains from the many bites. It may seem unreasonable to the uninitiated that we could have been thus bitten and not disturbed in our sleep but the fact remains that there is no pain produced at the time of the bite, nor for several hours afterwards.”

It feeds only at night Like most New World tropical bats, it sleeps during the day in the total darkness of caverns where it hangs in clusters from the ceilings. Such a bat cave, about as gruesome a place as could be found on earth, was explored a few years ago by Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars of the American Museum of Natural History. This cave, which the bats shared with scorpions who had wing spreads of five inches, was found in the Chagras Valley of Panama.

The mammal has a strikingly spider-like appearance. Probably alone among bats it can walk as a quadruped, using its wings as front feet. That, of course, is what they were originally before the grotesque creatures invaded the air.

_Remarkable Orchids_

A flower that opens only in moonlight is one of Venezuela’s plant curiosities. It is an ivory white, velvety orchid with a dazzling blossom. For full fertilization it depends entirely on nocturnal butterflies which sip nectar while pollenization takes place.

This curious flower is one of approximately 800 orchid species, some of them among the most beautiful in the world, which grow in Venezuela. Among these is probably the prettiest and rarest of all orchids, the mother-of-pearl flower which can be found, and then only rarely, in the Gran Sabana country at altitudes of more than 3,000 feet. Only a few specimens ever have been brought out by collectors.

Another high mountain variety has square petals with fringed edges. Found in the jungles of the upper Orinoco is an orchid with blossoms measuring up to 16 inches in diameter. A completely unique orchid has been found growing in water. (All other species live as parasites on trees or rocks—or in the soil like other plants.)

Throughout the world there are more than 20,000 species of orchids, the great majority of which are found only in the mountainous regions of the tropics. A few, however, can be found growing as far north as the Arctic Circle.

_Nature’s Insecticide: The Millipede_

Far leas malevolent than the centipede—and probably a somewhat more primitive form of animal life—is the millipede or “thousand legs”. It is a strictly vegetarian creature that lives under stones, logs or in rotting tree trunks and feeds on soft roots, leaves and fruits.

Millipedes are seldom seen. They shun light, although in the tropics they sometimes come out of their retreats after heavy rains and crawl over the ground. The animal has twenty to forty legs, two pair on each segment of the body—a characteristic in which it differs striking from the centipedes to whom it is only distantly related. Movement is in an almost mathematically straight line, with a series of wave-like undulations in which apparently all the legs on one side of the body move in unison. All millipedes are essentially blind. Their eyes are able only to distinguish light from dark, but as they crawl every inch of their path is explored by their delicately sensitive antennae.

So secretive is their life that relatively little is known of their behavior. The female of one European species burrows in the earth, moistens bits of soil with a sticky fluid from the salivary glands in her mouth, and thus makes tiny bricks. These she builds into the form of a hollow sphere, about the size of a walnut, with a hole in the top through which she lays from 50 to 100 eggs. Others lay their eggs in bunches in the soil and coil around them until they hatch. Mothers may even remain with the young for a few days.

The bite of the millipede, unlike that of the centipede, is not poisonous. But the animal has “stink glands” from which a foul-smelling liquid containing the extremely poisonous prussic acid is exuded. This presumably affords an adequate protection against driver ants and birds, the natural enemies. The secretion is so powerful that a couple of millipedes placed in a can kill insects as effectively as a small dose of potassium cyanide.

One member of the race, spirobolus marginatus, as much as four inches long and with a body made up of fifty-seven segments, is fairly common under logs in the northeastern United States. At certain seasons these creatures become restless, leave the soil and come into houses. They may swarm in basements and on ground floors. They crawl up walls and drop from ceilings. These invasions usually take place in the autumn and presumably are associated with migrations to find winter quarters. In some cottages surrounded by trees as many as seven hundred have been counted in a room in one evening. However embarrassing to hosts, it must be realized that millipedes never bite and that they do no damage to furniture. The only accusation yet made against them refers to one species, the so-called greenhouse millipede, which may cause considerable damage to potted plants.

In emergencies the millipede is able to roll itself in a tight ball like its presumed ancestors, the primaeval trilobites. In one Madagascan species this ball is as big as a golf ball. Some millipedes are less than a twentieth of an inch long.

Gigantic millipedes are known from the tree fern swamps of the Carboniferous geological period when the great coal deposits were formed. They were about a foot long and their bodies were covered with long, sharp spines. This apparently was to make them distasteful to the giant amphibians, remotely related to present day frogs and toads, who were the dominant four-footed animals in the world at the time. Thus the millipede has almost as lengthy a history on earth as the more insect-like cockroach of those same forests of 250,000,000 years age.

_Bats Have Built-in Radar_

Bats “see” with their ears. Echoes of sounds inaudible to man enable the flying mammals to find their way through the almost absolute darkness of deep cavern or jungle. These creatures might be considered inventors of the Navy’s sonar device by which underwater obstacles are located by echoes—or even, in a sense, of radar.

Almost entirely creatures of night and late twilight, bats have small and poorly developed eyes. When one is on the wing it emits an almost constant succession of inaudible “squeaks” at a sound frequency of between 25,000 and 70,000 vibrations a second. The human hearing range reaches only to 30,000. Each squeak, according to measurements by Dr. Donald R. Griffin of Cornell University, lasts about two-hundredths of a second. In ordinary flight over open country it is repeated about ten times a second. By means of the echoes it apparently is possible to detect and avoid any obstacle, even one as small as a strand of silk thread strung across the path, within a distance of ten or twelve feet.

The bat does not hear its own squeaks. Each time one is uttered an ear muscle contracts automatically, thus momentarily shutting off the sound itself so that only the echo can be heard. It is possible that each animal has its individual sound pattern and is guided only by its own echoes. Otherwise, it would seem, there would be complete confusion from the echoes of several hundred bats moving in a flock.

Largest of the bats are northern India’s flying foxes. The body is shaped almost precisely like that of a small fox and is covered with fine, dark-brown hair. The wing spread is about three feet. These flying foxes move in flocks of thousands. They are exclusively fruit eaters and forest dwellers. They are the only bats eaten by man. Their flesh is said to resemble chicken.

Insect-eating bats are prisoners of the air. Once on the wing they must remain in flight all night until they return to the dark caves where they sleep all day, suspended head downwards. Flying from dusk to dawn requires an enormous amount of energy for which a lot of food is required. One of these animals probably must eat about a third of its own weight in insects each night. Thus it is a good friend of the farmer and one of the potent factors in keeping the balance of nature.

If a bat lit on the ground or on any solid object it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to get it on the wing again. This is accomplished only by falling from its sleeping place.

The hibernation of temperate zone bats appears very close to complete lifelessness and is probably the most deathlike sleep experienced by any mammal. Animals close to a cave entrance have been found completely coated with ice, as moisture has congealed on the fur. Yet when they wake in the spring they appear none the worse for the experience.

_Crabs That Climb Trees_

A fantastic race of small, pale hermit crabs are the most numerous and conspicuous animal inhabitants of war-wrecked Pacific islands. The multitudes of these crustaceans may have a considerable role, beneficial and otherwise, in present efforts to cover these white sand wastes with grass and trees.

Of all creatures which start life in the sea, hermit crabs have become best adapted to continual existence on land. Like others of their race they are shell-less and soft-bodied. For protection against enemies and against being dried out by the glaring sun, they live in houses—the abandoned shells of other sea creatures which have been cast ashore. They carry their houses on their backs. When a crab outgrows its shelter it moves to a larger one, changing its dwelling four or five times during a normal lifetime. There is never any housing shortage for those in the small stages of growth. However, the sole refuge for the crab which has reached full size is the “cats-eye,” the shell of a marine snail as much as three inches in diameter with an opalescent pink inner lining which glistens like the eye of a cat. Only the hermits which can find such shells survive.

In searching for food the crabs climb the trunks and branches of kou trees which grow all over the Pacific islands. They eat the bark along the upper side of the branches; most trees show long scars which are the results of past injuries.

A common habit, especially of the undersized individuals, is cleverly to tear off and eat only the ovaries and stamens of blossoming plants. “These are certainly not isolated acts,” says a Pacific Science Board report, “but ones perfected by practice and perhaps instinct. The crabs probably decimate the flora, feeding particularly on tender seedlings. They largely are responsible for the paucity of different kinds of plants on some islands. The seeds of any new kinds of plants washing to its shores are subject to their inspection and, if palatable, sacrificed to their appetite. The foreign plants now being introduced as seeds and seedlings must not only surmount the drastic condition of drought and salinity but also the hurdle of these voracious animals.”

In the spring the females carry their numerous maroon colored eggs attached to their abdomens. When do they return to the ocean to allow these eggs to hatch their free-swimming larvae that resemble so closely the shrimp-like ancestor of all hermit crabs? Where do they throw off the hard, non-expanding shells they have requisitioned as they increase in size, in burrows on land or in the ocean? How, with gills adapted for respiration in water, have they perfected respiration on land? Questions such as these are still unanswered.

_The Ferocious Centipede_

“Natives of Brazil call the centipede the ambua. These creatures of a thousand legs, some of which are more than a foot long, bend as they crawl along and are reckoned very poisonous. In their going it is observable that on each side of their bodies every leg has its motion, one regularly after the other; being numerous, their legs have a kind of undulation and thereby communicate to the body a swifter progression than one would imagine where so many short feet are to take so many short steps that follow one another, rolling on like the waves of the sea.”

The eighteenth century British naturalist Charles Owen was not alone in considering the millipedes and centipedes as kinds of snakes; nor in being confused, as naturalists still are, at their curious, complicated way of moving. There had been highly exaggerated reports. The Spaniard Ulloa, Columbus' gold assayer, described some centipedes he saw on the northern coast of South America as a yard long and six inches wide. Their bite, he contended, was fatal.

“In the Kubbo-Kale valley,” reported British naturalist H. S. Wood in 1935, “I saw a centipede ten inches long. Its general color was electric blue with bright coral red fangs. It was the most terrible thing I have seen in my tramps through the forest.” Wood was stung by one of these Indian centipedes; he described the sensation as “exactly like that of a third degree burn.”

These animals are neither snakes, insects nor worms. They constitute an independent and intermediate order of animal life. They are considered a little nearer to the spiders than to true insects. They have retained the ways of life of the ancestral worm.

Most of the centipedes are active, ferocious, flesh-eating animals. Their poison fangs are deadly to their normal prey—earthworms and insects. Some of the larger species do not hesitate to attack lizards and small mice. A bite, however painful, probably never is fatal to a human. All are land animals which creep or crawl under logs and bark. They usually remain in seclusion during the day but come out of their retreats at night when they wander over the ground and attract attention to themselves by their phosphorescence. A few have been described as sea dwellers but these do not actually live in the water. They crawl along the shore and are submerged by each tide. Some or completely blind, others have many eyes.

The centipedes are among the most repulsive of all animals, yet there are accounts of South American Indian children who drag very large ones out of the earth and eat them. Religious fanatics among North African Arabs swallow them alive as proof of their supernatural powers.

Tropical America has many varieties with varied and curious habits, like the Nicaraguan species described by Thomas Belt:

“Among the centipedes was one which had a singular method of securing prey. It is about three inches long and sluggish in its movements but from its tubular mouth it is able to discharge a viscid fluid to a distance of about three inches, which stiffens with exposure to the air to the consistency of a spider’s web, but stronger. With this it can envelope and capture its prey, just as a fowler throws his net over a bird.

“Some of the other centipedes have phosphorescent spots in the head, which shine brightly at night, casting a greenish light for a little distance in front of them. I think these lights may serve to dazzle or allure the insects on which they prey.”

Centipedes have been observed attacking earthworms. One may grapple with its victim for several hours before killing it. Then it sucks the blood.

A fairly familiar visitor in the southern United States is a house centipede which thrives in damp basements and sometimes invades ground floors. It is a wormlike creature, about an inch long, with fifteen pairs of long legs. In the female the last pair are twice as long as the rest of the body. The animal is yellowish grey with white bands on its legs. It is poisonous, but its jaws are weak and it seldom bites human beings. Despite the evil reputation of its race, this centipede should be a welcome guest for it feeds on cockroaches, flies, spiders, moths, and other domestic pests. It is a fast runner but often stops suddenly, remains absolutely motionless for a moment, and then darts for concealment.

_The Plant That Makes Men Dumb_

A plant now being cultivated in the newly established botanical garden of the University of Caracas may prove to be nature’s greatest boon to pestered husbands and harassed mothers. It is described only under the popular Spanish name of “planta del mudo.” It looks like sugar cane. According to reliable reports anybody who chews the stem is stricken dumb for 48 hours.

Other curiosities of the garden include a plant which allegedly can stimulate hair growth on bald heads and a bush whose blossoms open snow-white in the morning and turn red at noon. Here also blooms the exotic “Queen of Night,” a climbing cactus with a white flower five inches in diameter which opens at sunset and closes at sunrise.

_The Scourge of the Earth: Locusts_

From the days of the Hebrews prophets a visitation of locusts has been considered one of the plagues of God. A migration of millions of these grasshopper-like insects in clouds obscuring the sun leaves behind a countryside devastated as though by fire. In flight they sound like a forest fire being spread by a brisk wind. Whenever they come to earth areas of hundreds of square yards almost immediately are denuded of everything green.

In history their raids have been associated chiefly with the Near East. Quite similar creatures have caused far-reaching destruction over most of the world including the United States.

The last such phenomenon was about 1880. Since then grasshoppers have hopped, not flown. There have been some great invasions, but the insects have moved along the ground where it is easier to combat them.

The reason for the transformation was found a few years ago by entomologists. Hopping grasshoppers are changed into flying grasshoppers by heat and hunger. Grown in test cages at high temperatures and deprived of succulent green food, the insects acquired longer wings, became slimmer, and took on brighter colors.

It apparently is a curious provision of nature to preserve the grasshopper race. When on the edge of perishing, they are supplied with wings to carry them to green pastures a few hundred miles away. Lately there has been some indication that those in the western United States might again enter the flying phase in the near future. During the great drought of the early thirties there was a stimulus almost sufficient to make them undergo the complete transformation.

At present there seems little prospect that there will be another flying cloud in this part of the world. By planting cultivated crops on land formerly covered by grass, man provides good egg-laying grounds and plenty of green food.

Adequate information still is lacking on what makes grasshoppers increase and decrease. Also a mystery is the mechanism by which the harmless solitary phase is transformed into the dangerous gregarious phase. Several types occur in both phases and each can change itself into the other, altering their habits so that they attack in mass rather than as individuals.

During the late 1870s the flying clouds caused terror all over the world. In parts of Minnesota where the locusts landed they covered the ground three inches thick. Crops were destroyed throughout the prairie states.

The most remarkable incident was reported from Russia in 1878:

“A detachment of Gen. Lazeroff’s expedition against the Turcomans met with a curious misadventure near the Georgian town of Elizavetopol. A few versts from the town the soldiers encountered an army of locusts about 20 miles long and broad in proportion. The officer in charge did not like to turn back, repelled by mere insects. The soldiers soon were surrounded. The locusts appear to have mistaken them for trees and swarmed by the thousands around them—crawling over their bodies, lodging themselves in their helmets, penetrating their clothes and knapsacks, filling the barrels of their rifles and boring into their ears and noses.

“The commander gave the order for the troops to push on the double-quick for Elizavetopol, but the road was so blocked that the soldiers became frightened and, after they wavered a few minutes, a stampede took place. Led by a non-commissioned officer who had espied a village a short way from the road, the troops dashed across the fields, slipping about on the crushed and greasy bodies as if on ice. They were detained prisoners by the insects for 45 hours, and on the way to Elizavetopol found every blade of grass and green leaf destroyed.”

That same year a cross-continental train was held up for three hours near Reno, Nevada, by a host of locusts that covered the rails for several miles.

_Trees Can Grow Smaller_

Trees change size from hour to hour. The circumference of a tree trunk gets bigger and smaller with unpredictable perversity. For light on this phenomenon the world is indebted to Dr. John A. Small of Rutgers University.

About a decade ago tree scientists were provided with an instrument which could measure continuously the radial growth of a tree with an accuracy of a thousandth of an inch. With such an instrument it seemed plausible that it would be possible to tell just how much a tree had grown in a single day and its rates of growth in different seasons. A lot of the conclusions reached in this connection must now be discarded. The circumference of a tree certainly changes but not in a straight line. It may be bigger one day, smaller the next.

Dr. Small’s experiments were carried out with the white ash. He found that circumference changes followed yearly, monthly and even daily rhythms but the changes in the same tree might vary by as much as 200 percent when measurements were made at different times. Daily variations have shown a tendency to reach maximum readings about 6:30 a.m. and sink to minimum in the late afternoon or early evening. Eccentric jumps and drops can be found almost any time.

_Underworld Cities_

Seventeen-year locusts build great subterranean “cities” during their long sojourn in the earth’s depths. The years underground are by no means a resting period—an episode of being buried alive. All the time the young locusts, in various metamorphoses, are busy building and eating. The eggs of the strange insects are laid during a few weeks late in summer inside twigs. From these eggs come minute nymphs, which at once make their way into the ground. There they shed their shells and grow rapidly. Their food is juice sucked from roots. They make successive mud dwellings attached to these roots. The largest observed in the eastern United States were eighteen inches below the surface. Each was a rough ball of earth about two inches long and three-fourths of an inch wide. The ball is lined on the inside by smooth mud and contains only one nymph. Every time an individual moults and grows larger it must make a new house.

When they emerge from the last of their feeding chambers, the locusts dig rapidly upward and construct a somewhat different type of dwelling some inches below the surface. These are two-chambered, with upper and lower rooms connected by tunnels five to ten inches long. These are so ingeniously constructed, according to Dr. E. A. Andrews of Johns Hopkins University, that they provide “the advantage of safety along with quick access to the surface when the proper time comes. In the shaft the nymph climbs close to the surface or falls rapidly to the bottom to escape attacks. The lining of the shaft is smooth mud a few millimeters thick. The shafts are by no means always straight or of uniform diameter, but may be sinuous and present swollen regions.” In one area examined he found at the topsoil was such a mass of small stones and roots that the insects must actually have cut their way through roots. Large obstacles often were avoided by a change in direction.

“The chief implements used in making cavities in the earth”, according to Dr. Andrews' report, “are the big first legs. Here, as in other legs, the end segment is used chiefly in walking and may be folded down when not needed. The second segment from the tip is used to pick off particles of earth. The third segment is the largest and, like a powerful thumb, acts with the opposing second segment as a forceps to pick up pellets of earth and small stones. The minute particles picked loose from the earth are raked together by the tip segment to make a pellet, which the forceps can carry or shove into the walls of the cavity. However, all parts of the body may come into use, for the hind legs and the abdomen may help shove earth aside and the head may carry earth plastered upon it. In vertical tunnels the animal braces its legs against the sides and, if disturbed, relaxes and drops down.”

The last dwelling is large enough for the nymph to turn around inside and usually has a flattened floor. The top comes quite close to the surface without actually breaking through, leaving only a few millimeters of earth through which the insect must dig when the transmutation to an adult locust takes place. Examination of many of these tubular dwellings shows that there are no interconnections between them. Each has its own individual exit and along its course avoids contact with other chambers, although they often are very close together. This last home of the locust, before it emerges from the everlasting darkness to the world of light and quick death which is its pre-ordained destiny, is not necessarily restricted to the earth but may be contained above the surface. Aerial extensions may, in fact, be abundant and are in the form of turrets, towers, cones, chimneys, huts and adobe houses. The walls are of dense mud, not natural soil. Externally they are made of tiny mud pellets, but lined internally with the same smooth layer found in the underground dwellings.

_Plants That Create Mirages_

An explorer in the desolate heights of the Santa Marta mountains in northeastern Colombia, fog-wrapped and 10,000 feet above sea level, may see a flock of sheep grazing placidly among rocks ahead of him. Then, looking the other way, he may see an assembly of cowled, robed priests, apparently in the midst of some weird ecclesiastical ceremony. But when he reaches the places where he thought he saw these things there are neither sheep nor priests. He finds instead two strange varieties of the aster family, both among the real curiosities of the plant kingdom.

The vegetable sheep are bushy plants which grow on nearly barren ground near the mountain tops. The individual plant consists of thickly branched stems, about the size of a human finger, bearing many layers of leaves covered with wool-like hairs. Sometimes these leaves are so thick that the point of a pencil cannot be thrust through them. Some of the plants may be as large as a living-room sofa.

The extreme compactness of these plants and their dense covering of hairs is an adaptation to the hostile conditions under which they must live. The habitat consists of rocky slopes where the hot, dry winds of summer and the snows, low temperature and violent gales of winter expose them to a perpetual alternation of desert and Arctic conditions.

In the same general region are the monk plants, belonging to a different family, who have responded in the same way to similar conditions. Seen from a distance on a mountainside, especially through a light fog, a patch of these plants looks decidedly like a congregation of several hundred priests.

The vegetable sheep also are found in New Zealand, but there are no known intermediaries between the closely similar species growing on opposite sides of the earth.

_The Octopus Worm: Evolution’s Mystery_

Worms that give birth to their own grandchildren, animals that have no digestive, muscular, nervous, glandular or excretory organs—such paradoxical creatures are the “dicyemid mosozoans”, tiny worms that live inside octopuses. These little worms are among the most curious living things in nature. It is quite uncertain whether they are a step upward in evolution from the single-celled protozoans or, like some other worms, a degenerate form of many-celled animals. It might be maintained that they represent a distinct branch of the animal kingdom.

The body of a dicyemid consists of a single cell, almost half an inch long, in the form of a hollow tube, surrounded by a layer of small cells. The immediate offspring are formed and, in some cases, live their entire lives and reproduce in turn, inside one of these “skin” cells. The grandchildren break through the body of the grandparent at any place they choose, apparently without causing any wound, and live for a short time as free-swimming animals until they find an octopus whose kidneys they can enter. Then the whole life cycle starts over again.

Apparently the infestation in no way injures the octopus and the worms are of no practical importance in the world. Each kind of octopus or squid in coastal areas has its own particular species of these parasites of which about 35 kinds are known.

The worm’s body contains no organs, tissues or glands in the usual sense of the word.

Before being born the larvae attain their full complement of body cells, are able to swim about, and have within them the germ cells that will give rise to the next generation. Birth is very simple. The larvae just push out, or are squeezed out, through the sides or ends of their parent at almost any point. The parent continues to develop and bear more larvae in the same manner. The number developing at any one time in the cell may range from one or two to 100 or more.

These larvae remain in the octopus as fully developed worms. But at certain times the germ cells develop into much smaller individuals, called infusorigens, hard to distinguish from large protozoa. These never leave the birth cell inside the parent, but produce germ cells of their own which develop into free-swimming creatures known as infusoriforms. These break away from the grandparent worm and from the octopus and become free-swimming animals. They are microscopic, less than a 300th of an inch long. They live from three days to a week. Here may be the borderline between single-celled and multi-celled animals—or perhaps the greatest degeneration in animal life.

_The Monster Bear of Kamchatka_

A gigantic black bear, probably the largest of flesh-eating animals, lives in the dense, hardly explored pine forests of southern Kamchatka. This creature still is unknown to science. So far as known it never has been seen by a white man. There is, however, considerable evidence for its existence presented in a report made several years ago by Dr. Sten Bergman of the State Museum of Natural History at Stockholm, who spent two years on the Kamchatka peninsula.

Photographs have been taken of this animal’s footprints in the snow. It leaves a track 15 inches long and ten inches wide. Dr. Bergman was shown a pelt of the giant bear. It was the largest bearskin he ever had seen, deep black in color, and covered with short hair in striking contrast to the long hair of other Kamchatkan bears. He also saw a gigantic bear skull, the teeth of which indicate that it belonged to a young individual.

Apparently this Kamchatkan black bear exceeds in size the Kodiak Island bear, which lives across Bering Strait and is the largest known flesh-eating mammal. The wildness of the country and its dense vegetation have protected the giant bear from naturalists and hunters. The whole land is a veritable paradise for bears who hide away in the dense thickets along the Kamchatkan rivers and subsist on the abundant salmon. They are so numerous that a native does not dare venture into the bush in summer without first shouting to let the bears know he is coming. They will keep out of a man’s way if they are warned, but are likely to attack him if surprised.

The great majority of the Kamchatkan bears are relatively small animals, comparable to those of northern Europe. Some are black, but the majority are yellowish-white or light brown. The giant animal may be an extreme variation of this race, or may represent an entirely different species. He naturally is the subject of much native legendary. Some stories have been interpreted as indicating that mammoths existed within the time of man in the northern wildernesses of both hemispheres, but such a giant bear would fit the descriptions as well as would a small elephant-like creature.

If it were not for the great numbers of smaller bears, man scarcely could subsist in this country. There are, for example, no roads through the desolate land between the villages. But all along the rivers and through the forests are well-marked paths made by the bears who seem to have an engineering instinct in choosing the most logical places for crossing morasses and mountains. These paths are about the only means of human communication and eventually, if the land ever is settled, will become the roads. In the same way elephant trails in Africa and India and bison trails in the United States became the hard-surfaced highways of today. Engineers hardly can improve on the instinct of the animals.

The small bears also play an important part in the domestic economy of the few inhabitants. The thick, warm pelt is used as a bed. Out of the skin the natives make reins, snowshoes and dog traces. The meat is much appreciated. In remoter parts of the country the linings of the intestines are used for windows instead of glass. Many of the native medicines are derived from the bear.

Both among the Kamchatka natives and the Ainu of northern Japan the animal is revered as a god—the concept being that the great celestial bear out of his benevolence to men provides creatures in his own form to furnish them food and clothing.

_Strange Denizens of the Deep_

Most fearsome of all sharks in appearance is Isistius braziliensis, found in the tropical Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. It is a wine-brown colored creature with sharp teeth set in 20 rows which glow at night with an unearthly light.

“When the specimen, taken at night, was removed into a dark apartment it afforded a very extraordinary spectacle,” relates naturalist F. D. Bennett. “The entire inferior surface of the body and head emitted a vivid, greenish phosphorescent gleam, imparting to the creature, by its own light, a truly ghastly and terrible appearance. The luminous effect was constant and not perceptibly increased by agitation or friction.

“When the shark expired, which was not until it had been out of the water more than three hours, the luminous appearance faded entirely from the abdomen and more gradually from other parts, lingering longest around the jaws and on the fins. The only part of the under surface of the animal which was free from the luminosity was the black collar around the throat.”

One of the sea’s strangest denizens is the bramble shark. It is a shark of medium size whose body is almost completely covered with short, sharp spines. This fantastic creature apparently is widely distributed through the Atlantic and Pacific, but it is not likely to come into the hands of collectors. Its general flabbiness stamps it as a deep water animal and the anomalous position of its fins indicates that it is a weak swimmer. Its spiny armament obviously is designed for protection.

Entirely harmless, it is probable, are the giant “basking sharks”, which sometimes reach a length of forty feet. When encountered they rarely, if ever, try to defend themselves but attempt to escape by swimming slowly away. Stories that this monster dives when harpooned and sometimes will drag a small boat with its crew to the bottom now are discredited. Although it reigns as a monster among sharks it is not actually as dangerous as the common dogfish shark.

Perhaps the most dangerous are the so-called “carchaodons”, found in most warm seas although nowhere in abundance. They are among the most powerful and voracious of fishes, but still far less frightful than their fossil ancestors. The latter were the largest of all fishes; they were probably twice the length of the largest basking or whale sharks. Some were more than 88 feet long.

_Communism Among the Bees_

Honey bees have achieved an ideal communistic state. All the 50,000 or more members of a family—all progeny of a single queen—share and share alike. A single sample of sugar or nectar brought into the hive by a forager is participated in by all the bees. Thus all get essentially the same diet. They all acquire a common odor by which they can recognize each other. This odor constitutes a “scent language” which is the basis of the extremely complex bee social life.

These observations, based on experiments with radioactive sugar, are reported by Dr. Roland Ribbands of Cambridge University. In one of these experiments, Dr. Ribbands reports, “a marked bee is trained to collect sugar solution from a small glass tube, and when radioactive sugar is substituted the bee continues to collect the radioactive syrup quite happily. It returns to the hive and what happens to the labeled sugar can be followed quite easily. Every bee that receives some can be spotted by means of a Geiger counter. By collecting a sample of bees from the hive, one can discover what proportion of the colony has acquired some of the sugar. One stomachful can be shared among almost all the bees of a large colony. The experiments indicate that this sharing is a random affair. The sugar is passed on irrespective of the recipient’s age or occupation.”

Building up of a colony odor through universal sharing of the food supply enables members of the colony to recognize each other. This apparently makes little difference when food is abundant but becomes of great importance in periods of scarcity.

“At those times of the year,” Dr. Ribbands points out, “when there are insufficient flowers to provide all the bees with food, they often try to steal the honey stored in other colonies. Then the ability to recognize hive mates and to distinguish them from other honey bees will enable a colony to defend itself against attempts at robbery.

“However, the honey bee community does not defend itself by attacking every invader that does not possess the community odor. Strangers are attacked only under certain circumstances. In order to investigate these circumstances two colonies of differently colored bees were placed close together, with their entrances only two inches apart, so that bees often went into the wrong colony by mistake. When good supplies of nectar were available, the intruders were allowed to enter the strange colony, but when nectar was short the strangers were attacked and thrown out, often being killed in the process.

“Production of a common and distinctive odor which enables the colony to defend itself against members of other communities is a very important consequence of the habit of food-sharing. Better sharing means better defense and so a greater likelihood that the community will be able to survive and perpetuate its kind. The habit plays the key role in the system of communication which enables the new forager to learn about suitable crops, in that the new recruit always receives a sample of the crop the colony is working. The first flight becomes a search for a crop with a similar scent. The habit enables the worker bees in a colony to be apprised of the presence of their queen. A substance derived from her body is conveyed from bee to bee in the shared food, and in the event of any deficiency in the substance they take steps to rear another queen.

“In addition, it probably helps to ensure an effective division of labor in the colony, which has to be so integrated that a suitable proportion of the worker population carries out each of the various tasks necessary for maintenance of the colony.”

_Candles on Bushes_

In parts of Colombia candles in the form of white, wax-like berries grow on bushes. These berries produce oil of such excellent quality that it is used almost exclusively for altar lamps in Catholic churches throughout the country.

The berries grow abundantly on a jungle plant with leaves like those of rhubarb. In only one part of the country is the plant cultivated. It is a crop of the semi-hostile Paez Indians. Harvesting is somewhat difficult because the oil-containing white seed is inside a burred coat. This must be removed and the seeds placed in hot water. The oil rises to the surface where it can be skimmed off.

When it is desired to make candles a dozen or more berries are strung on a stick. Such a candle gives off a beautiful, soft light.

_The Desert Rat Manufactures Water_

All animals require water in their bodies, but some can get it without actually drinking. The desert rat which lives among the bare sand dunes of California’s Death Valley, can get along indefinitely without water and with only dry barley seeds for food. In spite of this about 65 percent of its body weight is water. Most of the water is actually made in the animal’s body. The rat’s digestive processes extract the hydrogen contained in the barley seeds and combine it with oxygen in the air to create water.

_The Caste System of the Termite_

The oldest civilization on earth is that of the termites. The super-organization which these blind white creatures of the dark have achieved precedes by thousands of millenia those of the ants and the bees. Termites have a far longer history on earth, being considered modifications of the ancient cockroaches who were among the first insects to leave any traces of their existence on land. Cockroaches swarmed in the club moss forests at least 250,000,000 years ago. The termite order is at least 30 million years old; some of its most primitive forms still are alive.