Chapter VIII: Part 8

In most of the approximately 2,000 species of termites which have been identified all over the world there are five castes, apparently determined from birth although not so rigidly as among ants. First are the winged males and females with large brains and eyes and hard, dark shells. These depart in great swarms from the ancestral nest once or twice a year, usually in spring and fall. They are feeble flyers and depend chiefly on transportation by air currents. The majority are eaten by birds. The few surviving pairs from such a flight excavate cells in the earth or in wood and start new colonies. There is at least one king and one queen in each cell. Sometimes there are two or more pair. They remain partners for life. Both are imprisoned within the cell. Before entering it they slough off their wings, which henceforth would be worthless.

The termite queen becomes an inert, egg-laying machine, sometimes the size of a small potato. In some species she lays an average of sixty eggs a minute, or 80,000 a day. She may live as long as ten years. Thus each queen ideally produces about a half billion new individuals. Her bulk increases as much as 50-fold in adult life—about the most phenomenal growth in nature.

The second termite caste, for which there is no parallel among the ants, consists of both males and females with only rudiments of wings, less fully developed reproductive organs, and somewhat smaller eyes and brains. They presumably serve only as an auxiliary royalty, functioning in case the true rulers die. Apparently by some subtle alchemy known only to termites they can be transformed into fully functioning sexual individuals if an emergency arises.

A third caste is made up of smaller insects with extremely minute eyes and brains and barely discernible reproductive organs. Below them come the entirely unpigmented, soft-bodied workers with still smaller eyes and brains—usually, in fact, with no eyes at all. These still are potentially males and females, in distinction to any society where all workers and soldiers are female. Lowest in the scale are the big-headed, blind soldiers, also of both sexes, with barely a trace of brain.

Relative numbers in these castes differ from species to species. An analysis of an Australian termite colony accounted for 1,560,500 workers, 200,000 soldiers, and 44,000 potentially reproductive individuals.

_The Shark That Stands Upright_

Monster of Gulf of Mexico waters is a shark which weights from ten to twelve tons and is from 30 to 50 feet long. Largest of its ancient family and an entirely inoffensive creature, this strange animal literally stands upright while feeding.

On a recent trip a U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service ship encountered several large schools of black-finned tuna. In the middle of each school was a large object which looked like a barrel. This object was the snout of a whale shark.

The creature kept opening its enormous mouth two or three inches below the surface. From 50 to 100 gallons of water would flow into the mouth and be strained out through the gills. This water was full of larval crustaceans, or banded shrimps, about a half-inch long.

In each observed case the body of the shark stood vertically. Why each shark should select a school of tuna and put itself almost precisely in the center of the swarming fish is a complete mystery. It does not eat tuna, except possibly very small ones. Presumably, however, it feeds on about the same sort of material as the fish. It knows there is food where the tuna congregate.

The whale shark is among the most mysterious of the larger sea animals. It is a solitary creature, seldom seen. Its tiny teeth are only about one fifteenth of an inch long and it is supposedly entirely a feeder on plankton, the minute organisms which abound in sea water.

_The Dead Man’s Vine_

A semi-legendary plant in Colombia is the ayahuasco or dead man’s vine. From it Indians make a brew which, it is claimed, is quite similar to the imaginary drug by which Dr. Jekyll split the good and evil elements of his character. When a medicine man first gulps the brew—this is an ethnological report which the botanists cannot confirm—he turns deadly pale, trembles in every limb, and the expression on his face is one of intense pain and horror. This is followed in about a minute by a reckless fury in which he seizes whatever lies at hand and starts beating the trees and ground. In about ten minutes the excitement leaves him and he falls to the earth, completely exhausted. There are not as yet any scientific accounts of the plant’s influence.

_The Insect With Fourteen Lives_

A pinhead-sized wormlike larva of a louse may possess one of life’s ultimate secrets—an elixir of controlled growth.

The strange ways of life of hormophis hamamelidid—which goes through fourteen different life stages in the course of a year’s lifetime—are being studied by scientists in the hope of isolating a mysterious something which may open the door of some of the greatest paradoxes of biology.

The insect is an aphis which causes galls, growths comparable to animal cancers, on witch hazel leaves. These growths result when the aphis injects into the leaf by means of a microscopic apparatus like a hypodermic needle an infinitesimally minute amount of an unidentified substance. The gall grows around and over the insect. It becomes the tiny creature’s home.

The substance completely changes the nature of the plant cells. They normally would become leaf cells, highly specialized to fit into leaf growth. Now they become gall cells. Something similar happens in cancer, except that the new cell growth, having escaped from the government of the animal body, is entirely uncontrolled. The gall cells, however, still remain under some sort of control. They always form galls and they do not kill the leaf, which is necessary for their existence.

Marvelous is the life story of the aphis itself. The sequence starts with a “stem mother”, a newly hatched female. She injects the substance into the leaf and the house builds itself around her. Inside this house she passes through four stages. Her structure changes completely four times. That is, she becomes in a sense four different animals, one after another. In the fourth stage she gives birth to from fifty to a hundred living young.

Each of these young, in turn, goes through four stages. In the last of these they have wings. The winged insects crawl out through a hole in the bottom of the gall. Each produces from ten to twenty young on the bottom of the leaf. Each of the young, in turn, goes through five stages. During the last they are both males and females. This is the only time the male makes its appearance in the life cycle. All the other births are by parthogenesis.

Each of the females lays eggs in the winter on the witch hazel. The buds are destined to become leaves in the early Spring. The eggs hatch a few days before the leaves appear. Each of the newly hatched aphids—all females—injects some of the house-building material into the leaf upon which she finds herself. She becomes a new “stem mother” and the strange process starts all over again.

The rapid reproduction rate might well be overwhelming to the witch hazels, and consequently suicidal for the insects, except for certain enemies which keep down the numbers of the “lice”. Such tiny forms of life as larval lacewings are able to crawl through the hole in the bottom of the gall and feed on the occupants during their various stages.

University of Virginia biologists who have been giving particular attention to the aphis are interested primarily in the substance injected into the leaves. It must be one of the most potent growth factors in nature. The amount any one aphid is able to inject is indescribably minute, even though some of them make as many as 50 separate injections. The material causes the leaf cells to become larger and to multiply much more rapidly until a “house” many times the size of the aphis is complete in a few days. The structure is perfect, even including a “picket fence” of tiny hairs around its base to keep out invaders.

The substance exists in such minute amounts that thus far it has been impossible to isolate it in anything approaching a pure form. The Virginia biologists have set themselves a task requiring infinite patience over many years—tracing the increase of the amount in the salivary glands of each individual through each of its fourteen lives, and also through the eggs with which the strange life cycle starts.

The present clues indicate that the substance is a filterable virus—tiniest of living things compared with which the pinhead-sized aphis is like a whale compared to a fly.

_Shyness Characteristic of Giant Rats_

Biggest of the extant true rats is the giant rat of Liberia. It is two feet or more in length and is similar in appearance to the Norway rat which infests houses all over the world. Fortunately this creature never has invaded the homes of men. It is a shy animal of the cane brakes.

_Nocturnal Potto_

One of the weirdest of living mammals is the potto—“ghost monkey”, of West African jungles. It is about the size of a squirrel, with soft, yellow fur and protruding yellow eyes which shine like malevolent witch lights in the darkness of the jungle nights. The potto is a nocturnal animal of the tree tops. Its weird, whimpering cries are believed by natives to be the voices of evil spirits. The little creature is an aberrant member of the family of lemurs, ancient offshoots of the same family from which sprang the monkeys and great apes.

_Where Trees are Square_

A few miles north of the Panama Canal Zone is “the valley of square trees.” This is the only known place in the world where trees have rectangular trunks. They are members of the cottonwood family. Saplings of these trees now are being grown at the University of Florida to find out if they retain their squareness in a different environment. It is believed, however, that the shape is probably due to some unknown but purely local condition. That the cause is deep-seated is indicated by the fact that the tree rings, each representing a year’s growth, also are square.

_The Lamp That is a Beetle_

The most brilliant animal luminescence known is that of the carbuncle beetles of Puerto Rico. They emit a light so brilliant that one or two inside an inverted tumbler illuminate a room of moderate size so that one can read a newspaper at night. Fields are illuminated brilliantly every night by these beetles, flying about a foot above the ground. The light is not intermittent, and seems nearly continuous. It varies from yellow to green for different species; occasionally it is yellowish-red.

_Rainstorms of Worms_

Rains of worms often have been reported. After a summer shower surfaces of puddles sometimes will be found covered with countless thread worms or nematodes. These worms have just come out of the bodies of water beetles and other insects, where they have developed as parasites. Before the shower the insects were dormant. These little worms in farm watering troughs led to the long-held belief that horsehairs sometimes changed into worms.

This does not, however, explain the following report in the _Levant Times_, an English newspaper published in Constantinople, of August 6, 1872:

“A letter from Bucharest reports a curious atmospheric phenomenon which happened there on the 25th ult. a quarter past nine in the evening. During the day the heat had been stifling and the sky was cloudless. In the evening everybody went out walking and the gardens were crowded. The ladies were mostly dressed in white, low-necked robes.

“Toward nine o’clock a small cloud appeared on the horizon and a quarter of an hour afterwards rain began to fall which, to the horror of everybody was found to consist of black worms the size of ordinary flies. All the streets of Bucharest were strewn with these curious animals.”

_The Icy Arctic Wonderland_

Abundant and fantastic are the creatures of the shallow Arctic sea bottom. All are invertebrates—worms, sea anemones and a host of other creatures—most of whom spend their lives buried in the mud.

Some of the creatures and their curious ways of life:

Ribbon worms which, when washed ashore, literally tie themselves in knots, curl up in balls, and secrete bags of mucous around themselves.

Bright green spoon worms about three inches long. These formerly were eaten by Eskimos.

Billions of small, transparent and essentially invisible arrow worms. One species, about a half inch long, apparently is the kangaroo of the worm world.

An important element of the bottom fauna at Point Barrow, Alaska, are the lace worms. Hardly a stone in the area does not have at least one lace or moss patch.

There is a delicately peach-colored sea anemone, a bottom-dwelling animal remotely related to the coral polyps, which display an amazing phenomenon, according to a Smithsonian report by Dr. G. E. MacGintie: “When it was subjected to unfavorable conditions, such as overcrowding in a pan of water,” he says, “It cast out through the mouth a translucent, white inner lining with transparent, stubby tentacles. These tentacles were tiny anemones. If conditions remained adverse more offspring were cast off, each lot smaller than its predecessor.” That is, when in trouble the animal spits out babies—presumably an emergency measure for preservation of the species and a way of reproduction not hitherto recorded. Apparently the same phenomenon occurs in the sea. Partly-grown specimens of these offspring dredged from the bottom, at first were mistaken for new species. Some of these sea anemones are quite colorful—one purplish red, one lavender, one lemon-yellow, and one with translucent, peach-colored tentacles.

Numerically the most abundant animals of the Arctic are the amphipod fleas which form an important food source for fish and seals. Great numbers live on the undersides of ice cakes from which the bearded seal sweeps them with its whiskers.

_Fish That Live on Land_

Siam and Burma are the lands of queer fish—climbing fish, stone-eating fish, hunting fish, dry-land fish, singing fish and archer fish.

In the distant geological past, life on this planet was confined to the seas. Eventually some creature belonging to the common ancestry of terrestrial animals and fish emerged from the water and over a period of countless generations, established itself on land. Something of the same general sort of development may be taking place in Siamese lakes and rivers today, with a new kind of land animal in the process of evolution. Currently, two or three species of fish are learning to live out of water for considerable periods. At least one of them appears to have reached the stage where it must breathe air to survive.

These evolving dry land fish were studied intensively by the late Dr. Hugh M. Smith, fisheries advisor to the Siamese government for twelve years. One is a species somewhat like a perch in general appearance. It belongs to a group which has an accessory respiratory organ, perhaps the beginning of a lung, situated in a cavity above the gills, by which oxygen may be taken directly from the atmosphere. The gills themselves appear inadequate to sustain life. The fish probably would drown, although the process would be very slow, if kept too long under water.

A common method of fishing in Siam is with a spade. Some fish spend as much as four months of each year buried in damp soil. Local fishermen dig two or three feet deep in the marshes for them.

_The Special Language of Bees_

Study of bee language now has advanced to differentiation of bee dialects. Some years ago Dr. Karl von Frisch of the University of Munich established the fact that bees actually possessed a means by which they could communicate with each other and without which the remarkable organization within the swarm would have been nearly inexplicable. Their language consists primarily of signs, like that of deaf and dumb persons. Dr. von Frisch reached the point where he could get some idea of what the bees were talking about and even predict their behavior from their conversation.

Recently Dr. von Frisch has found that different varieties have quite different languages, perhaps as far apart as French and German; one variety cannot tell what another is discussing. He has gone one step further—to the discovery that the insects probably talk also in sounds that are inaudible to the human ear. The audible buzzing is not a means of communication.

“There are indications,” he says in a report to the Rockefeller Foundation, “that sounds, probably in the supersonic range, play a role in their communications.

“Physiologically it would be interesting to know how they judge distance. Their dances indicate with remarkable exactness the distance between the hive and the feeding place. How do they adjust themselves to the changing positions of the sun when they use it as a compass? Apparently they have an excellent memory for time, for they seem to know that the sun at a certain time will occupy a certain place in the heavens.”

Dr. von Frisch and his colleagues at the University of Munich are also making an intensive study of the insect eye and the physiology of the insect sense of smell. Previous research has shown that worker bees have a special scent gland under voluntary control. Only when a good source of nectar is found is the fragrance, evidently quite powerful and attractive to other bees, released. Then it permeates the immediate neighborhood. It is the bee language equivalent for the word “Here.” When a cruising worker gets a whiff of this odor it knows there is a plentiful supply of nectar close at hand and starts a search for it.

Bees cannot distinguish red from black, Dr. von Frisch has found. This probably is the reason so few red-blossoming plants depend on these insects for distributing their pollen. Nearly all red-blossoming species depend on birds and butterflies, both of which are acutely sensitive to red. One notable exception, however, is the European poppy whose brilliant red blossoms carpet the landscape in late Spring. The German experimenter has found that these blossoms are not “red” to the bee. They possess a color which cannot be described because it cannot be experienced by the human eye. The poppy blossoms reflect a great deal of the ultraviolet light in sunshine and to this the bee eye is extremely sensitive. The color must be quite different from any of the shades at the blue end of the spectrum which are visible to man. To the bee it is probably somewhat like violet.

Even the more or less degenerate human nose can be trained to discriminate some of the bee odors that apparently have so much meaning in the life of the hive. After practising for a few months Dr. N. E. McIndoo of the U. S. Department of Agriculture was able to recognize the three castes—queens, drones and workers—merely by smelling them. With more practice he was able to make even finer discriminations, as he reports:

“The younger the workers the less pronounced is the odor emitted. To the human nose the odor from nurse bees and wax generators is much less pronounced than is that from old workers. Workers just emerged from the cells have a faint, sweetish odor, but lack the characteristic bee odor and workers removed from the cells just before they begin cutting their way out omit a still fainter sweetish odor.

“Old queens have a strong sweetish odor, while that of queens just emerged from cells is much pronounced as is the bee odor of the workers. The majority of old drones have a faint odor while every young drone has a stronger one. It is slightly different from that of young workers and is less sweetish.

“All the offspring of the same queen seem to inherit a peculiar odor from her, which becomes the family odor. Apparently each worker emits an individual odor which is different from that of any other worker.

“Of all odors, that of the hive is most important. It seems to be the most fundamental factor upon which the social life of the colony depends, and upon which the social habit perhaps was acquired.”

Taste discrimination is roughly parallel to that of humans. The bee certainly can distinguish the primary tastes, sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It naturally is keenly sensitive to different degrees of sweetness, yet some sugars which are extremely sweet to man are tasteless to the insects. The same is true of such sweeteners as saccharin. The bee’s sense of smell also runs parallel to that of man, both in the ability to discriminate fine difference in odors and in the thresholds of sensitivity. This appears to be a very important factor in the location of nectar-bearing flowers. However, the bee appears unable to detect an odor from any great distance. It is probably due to the sense of smell that scout bees are able to locate good feeding grounds. After marking them with their own peculiar secreted odor they return immediately to the hive to tell the others about them. The dance of a returned scout varies in intensity according to the richness of the find and the workers who witness it become correspondingly excited. If the scout executes only a feeble dance there is only a small exodus from the hive.

_Poisonous Platters of the Sea_

One of the most dreaded of all sea creatures is the venomous sting ray of which there are several hundred species distributed over the world, mostly in tropical waters. On the upper side of the tail is a saw-toothed bone dagger from two to fifteen inches long which can be driven through a man’s leg. The teeth extrude a venom quite similar to that of the rattlesnake.

Largest is the giant sting ray of Australian waters. A full-grown specimen weighs about 800 pounds. The fearsome and gruesome bat sting ray of the California coast weighs up to 200 pounds and is quite abundant.

All the rays are bottom dwelling animals, leading sedentary lives on flat, sandy ground. All are carnivorous, devouring smaller fish and mollusks. Fortunately they are not very aggressive and will flee from man if given warning. Still, life guard stations along the California beaches reported nearly 400 injuries from the creatures in the summer of 1952.

_Our Un-American Food_

A half dozen vanished civilizations make their contributions to the American Thanksgiving dinner: onions from ancient Egypt, peas from Ethiopia, parsnips and turnips from ancient China.

Aztec, Maya, the skin-wrapped Cro-Magnon all did their part in the darkness of pre-history to make possible the plates which are loaded so lavishly. They did better than they knew. Very few new vegetables have been introduced in historic times. In many cases little improvement has been made on the products of the ancients.

The story of potatoes alone contains enough romance and adventure for a good-sized novel. Its origin is unknown but its wanderings from America to Europe and back to America again constitute a fascinating story.

Cultivated lettuce never has been found wild. It is believed to have been derived from India or Central Asia. It is one of the oldest known vegetables. Herodotus, Hippocrates and Aristotle mention it in references to Greek gardens. Chaucer notes its cultivation in England in 1340. Sixteen varieties are listed as being grown in American gardens as early as 1806.

Celery is a biennial plant native to the marshlands of southern Europe, North Africa and southwestern Asia. It long was considered poisonous and was not used as food until modern times.

The Israelites complained to Moses in the Wilderness because they couldn’t have onions to which they had become accustomed during the captivity in Egypt. The cultivated onion probably originated in Afghanistan.

Pumpkins and squashes were grown in America long before white men came on the scene. Evidence of both have been found among ruins of settlements of the Basket Makers, about the earliest agricultural people on this continent. They probably came from Mexico. The Hubbard squash came to light in Marblehead, Mass., in 1855. It had been growing there for more than 50 years.

Peas are the oldest known vegetables. They are believed to have originated in Ethiopia but to have spread over Europe and Asia long before the dawn of history. They were eaten—perhaps even cultivated after a fashion—by men of Europe’s Stone Age. Columbus planted some in the West Indies in 1493. They spread rapidly among the Indians and became one of the chief crops of the Iroquois.

The species from which cabbage is derived grows wild in North Africa and along the European shore of the Mediterranean. It has been cultivated for 4,000 years. Greeks and Romans grew it in their gardens. Most of the American varieties, however, originated in North Europe.

The turnip is a native of central and western China. Seed probably was brought to America by some of the earliest European settlers.

The radish is a native of China and India. It was cultivated by both the Greeks and the Egyptians. The parsnip is another Asiatic root crop. It first was planted in Virginia in 1690. Only recently has it gotten away from the home garden to become a commercial crop.

Popcorn is peculiarly American. In early Spanish writings reference is made to a ritual of the Aztecs in which “one hour before dawn there sallied forth all these maidens crowned with garlands of maize, toasted and popped, the grains of which were like orange blossoms—and on their necks thick festoons of the same which passed under the left arm.”

_Worms That Commit Mass Suicide_

An entire generation of worms commits suicide every year. Every individual casts off its own head.

These worms are a Himalayan variety of naids, fresh water animals vaguely related to earthworms. They are reddish-brown and seldom more than an inch long. The majority of the worms live with their heads buried in the mud, tail ends waving freely in the air. Upon any alarm their bodies contract leaving no signs of life.

Early in the Spring these worms literally lose these heads and die. Compared with those of most worms, their regenerative powers are quite feeble. It is believed that the decapitation is due to the fact that egg-laying is accompanied by such violent contractions of the body that the front segments are disconnected.

Every few years there is a report from somewhere in the United States or Europe of enormous numbers of dead earthworms covering the ground. A correspondent of the British scientific journal, Nature, reported in 1921: “About the middle of March I saw millions of dead worms morning after morning on pavements, roads and paths. They were great and small, young and old, of every known species and genus. They lay prone and even when they were able to reach a grass plot alive they lacked the power to burrow.” The phenomenon is unexplained. Examination of the dead worms shows no unusual parasite or evidence of disease.

_Fish That Survive Freezing_

There is a realm of “supercooled life.” Its denizens are deep water fish that live long and happily in temperatures below the freezing point of their blood. But whenever one of them comes in contact with even a single crystal of ice it freezes almost instantly. This strange phenomenon of marine life has been observed by biologists of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

These particular fish live at the bottom of Hebron fjord in northern Labrador. The temperature there is about 1.7 below zero centigrade. Some have been caught, brought to the surface, and then plunged into a bath of sea water cooled to exactly the same temperature. They survived for several hours. When, however, one of them came in contact with an ice crystal, it froze stiff in a few seconds. The explanation, it appears, is that these fish normally live below the depth at which it is possible for ice crystals to form in water.

Very careful experiments have shown that water can be carried far below its normal freezing point if it is kept entirely motionless and is absolutely free from minute particles of any sort which are necessary for the formation of ice crystals. This is about the condition that exists at the fjord bottom. Eventually, if the temperature is taken lower and lower, such water will solidify, but into a form far different from ice. It is noncrystalline and can best be compared with glass. But even if this happened in the Hebron fjord it would not necessarily bother the fish. Their blood presumably would turn to glass. There would be no breaking of body cells such as results from the swelling of ice crystals. After an indefinite period the animals might be brought out of the solid state, if the thawing could be accomplished quickly enough, none the worse for their experience. This has been accomplished with very minute organisms, but any techniques which might be used with higher plants or animals have not yet been discovered.

The extent of life in the supercooled world is unknown. It hardly can be confined to fish. All sorts of mollusks, echinoderms and worms also are bottom dwellers in Arctic and Antarctic waters. It’s not cold, but ice, that kills.

_Plants That Kill_

The lethal dose Socrates was condemned to swallow by the stuffed-shirtism of ancient Athens was d-propyl-piperidine. This is the deadly alkaloid in the spotted hemlock, a common European weed which now grows extensively over most of the eastern United States. A closely related European species is the cowbane which cows instinctively will not nibble.

The devastating illness which fell upon 10,000 Greeks of the Anabasis, Xenophon would have been interested to know, was caused by andromedotoxin. This is a resinous substance common to plants of the heath family the world over. It is the poisonous constituent of rhododendron, mountain laurel and some kinds of azalgias. Honey from the blossoms of plants containing it is extremely poisonous.

When pioneers first pushed their way over the Appalachians their settlements were ravaged by epidemics of a fatal disease—milk sickness. Farms and villages were abandoned as terror-stricken settlers fled from the scourge. It was due to tremetol, a complex chemical which has been found in several plants—chiefly white snakeroot which causes the disease east of the Mississippi. When cows eat the snakeroot the poison passes into the milk.

By far the most virulent plant growing in the United States is very little known although it has caused many fatalities. This is the water hemlock or cicula—very different from the spotted hemlock whose extract was forced upon Socrates. It grows in low, swampy places nearly everywhere. When the ground is soft in the spring its roots can be pulled easily from the soil and have a pleasant odor that attracts children. It causes heavy losses of livestock.

Next in virulence of all American plants is the whorled milkweed which contains a closely allied resinous material not yet satisfactorily analyzed. It has caused the death of countless cattle.

_Caterpillars That Pretend to be Snakes_

There are worm-snakes, snake-worms, and wormlike animals that instinctively imitate snakes. This is especially true of certain South American caterpillars—defenseless creatures whose only security is in mimicry.

A large, green tree-living caterpillar in British Guiana ordinarily remains motionless and looks like part of a vine stem. But when the branch is shaken it rears the front part of its body and stretches horizontally. At the same time it gives a twist expanding its front segment into a bulbous enlargement with a big menacing black eyespot surrounded by a yellow ring. This it remains for a few minutes, looking very much like a poisonous tree snake that lives among green leaves.

Serpent caterpillars abound in Brazil. The best example is Leucorhampha triptolemus, a creature that hangs vertically from stems of plants. When disturbed it twists and shows a front extremely resembling the head and back of a snake. The curve of the caterpillar is just like that of a serpent. It keeps up a swaying, side-to-side movement for several seconds. The whole effect is to change what seems an innocent plant stem suddenly into an open-mouthed snake with red jaws and ferocious eyes.

_All Plants Are Luminous_

All green foliage gives off an invisible deep red—almost black—light. This phenomenon is one of the most fundamental processes of life. It is associated closely with the photosynthesis upon which depends all life on earth. This important discovery was made recently by biologists at the Oak Ridge laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission while studying changes in a chemical known as adenosine triphosphate in plants engaged in photosynthesis, the formation of starches and sugars out of hydrogen from the soil and carbon from the atmosphere in the presence of light. Newly acquired knowledge about the process is paving the way to improved agricultural methods.

The biologists used extracts from the bodies of fireflies which give off a bright light when this chemical—an important source of energy in muscle—is present. Then they found that chloroplasts, the parts of plants most closely associated with the photosynthetic process, also would give off light when mixed with firefly juice and illuminated. They then made the unexpected discovery that living extracts of green plants give off a light of their own without any mixing.

The light given off by the chloroplasts now is believed to be the exact opposite of the first chemical step in photosynthesis. Light absorbed by the chloroplasts forms unstable chemical bonds within the plant. A small fraction of these chemically induced compounds recombine. The energy liberated by this process is trapped by the chlorophyll molecule, which in turn gives off the mysterious light.

It has been established that leaves, if frozen while exposed to illumination, retain their light-producing ability for several months. It also has been found that certain extracts prepared from leaves undergoing exposure to light contain substances which give off a bright light when certain chemicals are added to them.

_Worms That Live in the Snow_

There are jet black worms that live in red snow. They come out of their snow burrows only during the late summer evening, crawl sluggishly on the surface, and disappear at sunrise the next morning. They have been observed swimming in shallow pools that form on the surface of the great Malaspina glacier which flows down the slope of Mount St. Elias in Alaska.

Presumably during the long sub-Arctic winter these worms burrow deep in the snow and remain in a torpid state. They subsist chiefly on the microscopic red algae which give the glacial snow fields a reddish tinge. The black worms themselves are innumerable. They have been photographed covering a trail a quarter-mile long at an elevation of 5200 feet in Oregon. They are enchytraeids, relatives of earthworms. The common white variety now is raised commercially in vast numbers, on diets of oat meal and sour milk, as food for fancy varieties of aquarium fish. Both worms and insects that normally live in snow fields are black.

An investigator of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory once found a multitude of white enchytraeids in cakes of ice cut from a Massachusetts pond the previous winter. They were active when the ice thawed but all died in a few days. The same investigator kept thirty specimens of another species in a tumbler of water placed on a ledge outside his laboratory window. On a cold night the water froze solid with the worms in a tangled mass in the center of the ice cake. All but three or four were alive and appeared normal when the ice was thawed.

About 75 years ago housewives of Salina, Kansas, complained that the ice delivered from door to door was “wormy.” Cakes were found honeycombed with tiny white worms, probably enchytraeids. They swam about actively when the ice thawed and infested food stored in refrigerators. All died when the temperature reached about 60 F.

Whether any worm—except possibly the most minute—can survive complete freezing is doubtful. They live in little holes that form naturally when water freezes and that are kept open by heat generated by the bodies of the creatures themselves.

_The Strange Ways of Snails_

Among earth’s deadliest creatures are cone snails which inject into their victims a poison as virulent as that of the rattlesnakes. These snail-like animals have a poison-secreting gland in the head and the venom is injected through the skin of the victim by tiny, needle-sharp, harpoon-shaped teeth. It is deadly not only to many kinds of sea animals but also to man. The poison, acting on the nervous system, may in some cases kill in several hours.

Fortunately cone-shells are timid, retiring, slow-moving creatures. They are among the loveliest of all sea shells. Most valuable is the “glory-of-the-seas” cone which is worth several hundred dollars. Of the twenty known specimens in the world, only three are in American collections. Of the 300 or more known varieties only five or six from the Indo-Pacific area are definitely known to be venomous.

The “emperor’s top shell” is among the earth’s most exquisite and, until recently the rarest of sea shells. This shell, about five inches in diameter, belongs to a sea snail of a genus fairly abundant during the Mesozioc geological period about 300,000,000 years ago and supposedly extinct until about eight years ago when one was found alive in a Japanese lobster trap. Thereafter the snail was seen very rarely until the present Emperor of Japan ordered that all specimens be preserved for his private collection. Fortunately his interest encouraged Japanese fishermen to keep a special look-out for the creatures and since then they have been found quite frequently. They apparently are distributed around the world in semi-tropical waters. Two species have been located in the West Indies and a new one recently has been reported in South Africa. The shells are rich golden-orange in color, highlighted with reds and salmons.

In the Smithsonian collections are specimens of the “original shell collector”—the snail that collects shells. This sea snail, widely distributed in tropical waters, has the habit of gluing to its own shell fragments of the shells of other animals, bits of coral, and almost every kind of debris it can pick up. The purpose is not known, but it may be for protective camouflage. Seen in shallow water, the creature looks like a little pile of broken shells on the sea bottom.

There is a “worm snail” that builds great limestone causeways and bridges. This is the shelled sea-snail of the Mediterranean—Termetus (wormlike). When the creature is young its shell is a regular spiral which the owner, free to move about, carries on its back and into which it can retreat when alarmed. As the snail ages the shell becomes twisted and contorted, like a tube, and is attached to an offshore rock. The animal crawls inside and soon dies. There are inestimably great numbers of these gastropods. They fix their shell tombs close together. These coil around each other to form solid masses of rock. Quatrefages, describes them in these words: “In Sicily where calcarous rocks projected into the sea I found they were surrounded by a kind of causeway which, without varying much in width, yet followed all the sinuosities of the shore almost exactly on a level with the surface of the water, filling up narrow chasms in some places and forming solid archways in others. Thus it afforded a smooth and easy path to one who did not object to having his legs washed by the waves. One might suppose the white and compact cement had been consolidated by man.”

The love life of some snails is confusing to Freudians. Each animal is provided with a quiver full of arrows, located in the right side of the neck. These darts can be discharged with considerable force. They are straight or curved shafts of carbonate of lime which taper to exceedingly fine points. During the breeding season the little mollusks meet in pairs. A couple will station themselves about an inch apart and start shooting at each other. Several darts are exchanged and each finds its mark. After this love duel the two embrace and, since each is both male and female, both lay eggs. The darts presumably were first developed as defense weapons and, outmoded for service of Mars millions of generations ago, now have been turned to the service of Eros.

Showers of snails have been reported intermittently. One of the most notable took place back in 1892 at the German town of Padeborn. Late in August a great yellow cloud was seen over the town. In a few minutes it burst into a torrential rain. Afterwards the pavements were covered with water snails, all with shells broken after their long fall from the sky.

Some snails can bore holes in solid rock. One, found chiefly on the French channel coast near Boulogne, has bored holes six inches deep and an inch in diameter with a cup-shaped cavity at the bottom. The cavity is used for the animal’s hibernation.

A few snails are natural barometers. They reputedly are extremely sensitive to changes in humidity. One, generally grey, turns yellow just before a rain and blue afterwards.

Snails admittedly are very tenacious of life and can endure extremes of heat, cold and dessication. Many instances have been cited, some nearly incredible. In 1846, for example, a desert snail from Egypt was fixed to a paper tablet in the British Museum in London. Four years later it was observed that he had discolored the paper in his attempt to get away. Finding escape impossible he had again retired. This led to his immersion in tepid water. The creature again came to life. He was “alive and flourishing” a week later.

There are snail harpists and even singing snails. The former were described by Rev. H. G. Barnacle, British missionary-naturalist, in a scholarly paper written in 1848: “When up in the mountains of Oahu, I heard the grandest but wildest music as from hundreds of aeolean harps wafted to me on the breeze and a native told me it came from singing shells. It was sublime. I could not believe it but a tree close at hand proved it. Upon it were thousands of the snails. The animals drew after them their shells which grated against the wood and so caused the sounds. The multitude of sounds produced the fanciful music.”

The singing snails in Ceylon’s blackish Lake Batticaloa were described by the British naturalist Sir Emerson Tennent: “Sounds came up from the water like gentle thrills of a musical chord or like the faint vibrations of a wine glass when the rim is rubbed by a moistened finger. It was not one sustained note but a multitude of tiny sounds, each clear and distinct in itself. On applying the ear to the woodwork of the boat the vibrations greatly increased in volume. The natives said they were made by singing snails.”

_Vision-Producing Plants_

Among the plants used by California Indians for food, medicine, and magic is wild tobacco. It is smoked in a hollow elder stick, about eight inches long, from which the pith has been removed. A few inhalations of the smoke early in the morning are enough to overcome the smoker so that he is unable to stand on his feet. He inhales until extreme dizziness is achieved and then he touches tobacco no more for the rest of the day. Indians can give no good reason for this concentrated form of smoking. It is simply the way of their ancestors.

A mixture of plants, the honey of bumblebees, and the red scum off an iron spring constitute a popular love charm. The mixture is placed in a buckskin bag and carried under the arm. When the favor of some particular maiden is desired it is necessary only to secure something associated with her and add it to the charm. The easiest to get is a pinch of soil upon which the lady has spat. This is used not only by lovers but also by husbands wishing to secure the return of errant wives.

Almost equally as important as tobacco in the life of these California Indians is a vision-producing plant closely related to the common garden trumpetflower and to the deadly nightshade. The leaves from the east side of the plant are smoked; this brings about a state of exaltation in which various animals are seen to come and offer their help to the dreamer. Leaves from the west side are never smoked. It would mean certain death; the Indians associate the west with death.

Much the same effect is obtained by drinking a blue-frothy decoction of the root. It not only produces visions but acts as a powerful anesthetic. It is highly poisonous, however, and only those Indians who know the proper dosage make use of it. The plant is known as “grandmother,” because of its comfort-bringing qualities.

_The Abominable Snow Man_

Mysterious beast of the high Himalayas is the “abominable snow man,” so-called by natives. It is evidently a four-footed, five-toed mammal that weighs from 150 to 200 pounds and lives in family groups. This much, at least, can be deduced from its tracks in the snow, according to Dr. Edouard Wyss-Dunant, leader of the Swiss Mt. Everest expedition of 1952. He found the footprints in a snow covered frozen lake at an altitude of about 15,000 feet.

Although the tracks are bear-like, the animal apparently has a quite unbearish ability to leap from crag to crag in migrations from one high valley to another. The snow prints were first reported by Himalayan explorers to be ape-like, or even almost human, and this led to speculations that some still unknown type of big ape might have evolved in the high mountains.

The tracks, says Dr. Wyss-Dunant in his recent report to the Royal Geographic Society, are undoubtedly those of a large “plantigrade animal”—that is, one that walks on the sole of the foot with the heel touching the ground. This is the way of both bear and man. The sole of the foot is from four to five inches long by the depth of the tracks, compared to those made by men of known weights. Some smaller footprints were found, believed to be those of young animals. Three of the tracks showed imprints of claws. Small triangular markings on the heels of two of them were attributed to tufts of hair that grows on the bottom of the feet.

Tracks of one animal were followed until they came to a rock several feet high over which it was necessary for the creature to jump. On the other side imprints of three feet were found close together. Apparently the animal had landed on these three feet. The tracks of the fourth foot were some distance ahead, indicating preparations for another jump. Beyond, Dr. Wyss-Dunant picked up other trails. Three were coming out of a deep valley. The fourth came off the side of a glacier. These paths joined and thenceforward continued as a single set of tracks. The animals apparently step in each others' footsteps while they proceed in single file. This is a customary procedure for mountaineers crossing a glacier where there is danger of falling into crevasses.

Nepal mountaineers have been familiar with the mysterious tracks for years but nobody has been found who claims to have seen the animal. They call it a “yeti.”

“I could find no trace of meals, nor of excrement,” the Swiss explorer declared. “This confirms my opinion that the animal only passes through and does not frequent these heights. We should at least have found a place of refuge, if not a lair, if the yeti was living and hunting in the neighborhood. I rather think it passes between adjacent peaks only when, having scoured one valley, it tries to reach another. This animal is a wanderer, avoiding zones inhabited by man. It probably is not a carnivore since there is very little other animal life even in the high valleys upon which it could feed. It obviously is an animal of quite superior intelligence to subsist at such high altitudes and to have kept itself hidden from humans so long.”

_Fish That Sing in the Moonlight_

There may be a fish that actually sings—that is, utters melodious sounds with a perceptible rhythm or beat which can be recorded in simple musical notation. This “singing” fish, which nobody actually has been able to identify, is one of the curiosities invariably called to the attention of visitors in the Batticoloa province of eastern Ceylon. It frequents only one deep lagoon and can be heard when the water is calm. Moonlight seems to draw the organism closer to the surface. On dark, calm nights the music still can be heard, but it seems to be coming from greater depths.

The “singing” sound at least, is a verifiable fact, according to the Rev. J. W. Lange, a Jesuit priest in Batticoloa who has tried for several years to determine what sort of an organism is responsible.

It is certain, he contends, that the sounds are made by something under the water. They are heard best when the head is held under the surface. By lowering a hydrophone attached to an amplifier into the lagoon, he was able, to record the sounds. From this record a friend familiar with musical notation was able to put them on paper.

It has been established that several species of fish in the lagoon make distinctive sounds. One, a large black fish with a yellow belly and four whiskers on each side of its face, expresses sounds like a baby’s fretful crying. A large chocolate-colored fish found among the bottom rocks makes a sound “like the distant echo of a large firecracker.” There is a curious little scaleless fish found in schools of 100 or more; as the school moves through the water it produces a chorus of tinkling sounds. A phosphorescent light comes from inside the throats of these animals. Among all his catches Fr. Lange has found nothing which can be identified with the singing fish, but he is convinced the music comes from a living organism.

That fish can and do make sounds now is well-known. This was demonstrated conclusively by U. S. Navy investigators during the late war. They determined the characteristic sounds made by a large variety of sea creatures whose chatter was interfering with underwater sonic devices.

_Brazil’s Vicious Glow Worm_

One of the most unusual of all luminous creatures is an insect larva found by farmers ploughing damp soil in Brazil and Uruguay. It is a reddish-brown little worm with rows of green lights on both sides and a vivid red lamp on the front of its head. The red light is actually red—not white light shining through a reddish skin. Adult females of the species retain the same luminous pattern. Male adults have only feeble, yellow lights. The larva are extremely vicious little creatures, predators on white grubs which infest the soil.

_Grasshoppers Like Chameleons_

There is a jet-black grasshopper that turns sky-blue at sunrise. The curious creature is found on the summit of Mount Kosciusco, highest peak in Australia, where snow lingers into late summer and nights are bitter cold.

The insect is of peculiar interest because of a temperature control mechanism otherwise unknown in nature. Several animals, notably chameleons and some fish, can change color, usually to match their environment. The changes are brought about by certain hormones, released by stimulation of the eyes, which activate different color cells in the skin. But in this grasshopper every one of the outer layer of cells of the body is a color cell. On the surface are granules of black pigment, underneath granules of blue. These change places in response to temperature changes. At approximately 25 degrees C. the blue granules rise to the top, displacing the black. At 15 C. the reverse happens. This displacement can be brought about only by temperature change. Australian entomologists have in vain tried every other sort of stimulus, including illumination with various wave lengths of light.

The phenomenon probably is protective. Seemingly because it is very cold at night on the high mountaintop the black pigment absorbs and retains all the heat available. It is as if the grasshopper carried a woolen blanket. With sunrise an abrupt change takes place; and the days often become intensely hot. If the black coat were retained, the grasshopper would become overheated and probably die. The blue reflects much of the heat.

With the first streaks of sunlight grasshoppers which have slept all night at the foot of grass stalks begin creeping slowly upward. There apparently is no nervous control of the color change. Each color cell seems to act independently. The same reaction takes place in dead grasshoppers when the temperature changes, affecting even fragments of their bodies. It is possible to get a grasshopper half black and half blue by heating one end and cooling the other.

_Beetles That Helped an Army_

During the invasion of Normandy in 1944 Army jeep drivers prohibited from using headlights of any sort, were able to follow winding country roads on the blackest nights by rows of millions of flashing green lights which outlined the roadsides.