The Book of Animal Ignorance Read online

  As soon as a young Wandering albatross gets airborne it won’t land again until it is ready to breed, which can be ten years later. They feed on fish, squid and krill, either diving into the sea or picking it off the surface, and sleep on the wing, with each half of the brain taking it in turns to turn off.

  Everybody commended them and ate heartily of them tho’ there was fresh pork upon the table.

  JOSEPH BANKS

  on board the Endeavour (1769)

  Albatrosses belong to the order Procellariiformes, originally Tubinares, which means ‘tube-nosed’. These tubes run the length of their large, hooked beaks and lead to very well-developed scent organs, allowing them to detect their food and nesting sites from many miles away. In some species the tubes have a dual function, allowing them to breathe from one part, while sneezing excess sea salt from another.

  Young albatrosses spend several years watching their elders to learn the elaborate beak-clacking courtship dances. When they find a partner, they mate for life, developing a unique body language which they use to greet each other after long separations. They raise only one egg every two years, with the parents taking turns to sit on the nest or go off in search of food. An albatross will regularly fly 1,000 miles for a single mouthful for its chick. Solid food is regurgitated, but for longer journeys it can also be broken down into a concentrated protein-rich oil, kept in their stomachs. This can be used in place of water to quench their thirst, or regurgitated as a nutritious fish smoothie for the chick.

  Albatrosses can live for sixty years but breed so slowly that they are at risk of extinction within the next century. The main threat is long-line fishing. Over 100,000 die each year caught in the millions of baited hooks that are used to catch tuna.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) practically invented the myth that killing an albatross brought bad luck. In fact, British sailors regularly killed and ate them, making pipes from their bones and purses from their feet. A more widespread belief was that the albatross was the reincarnated spirit of a drowned sailor. Some Scottish fishermen still don’t like using Swan Vesta matches because the bird on the box looks like an albatross.

  When Portuguese explorers first saw them they called them alcatraz, their name for any large seabird. The word originally came from the Arabic al-gattās, the leather bucket on a waterwheel which resembled a pelican’s bill. So, in Portuguese, the Birdman of Alcatraz literally means the ‘Birdman of the Large Seabird’.

  Anglerfish

  Worse things happen at sea

  Surely a life doesn’t get any bleaker than that of the deep-sea anglerfish? Two miles down in the endless darkness, a gloomy motionless lump of brittle bone, atrophied muscle and paper-thin black skin with only luminous bacteria for company. A life spent doing nothing except waiting, often for months at a time, turning your light on and off in the hope that it will attract some other creature out of the inky gloom long enough for them to stray too close to your cavernous mouth …

  The male Photo-corynus spiniceps is the smallest known vertebrate, a quarter of an inch long, about half a million times smaller than the female.

  The name ‘anglerfish’ is used for about 300 species – including sea toads, frogfish, batfish and monkfish – which attract their prey with a long, flexible appendage like a fishing rod, typically growing out of the middle of their heads. At the end of it, in place of a dangling maggot, there is the esca (Latin for food), which can be wiggled to mimic live bait. In the deep-sea anglers, the esca lights up, thanks to a chemical process controlled by the bacteria that live on it. In return for light, the anglerfish supplies them with food. Different anglerfish have differently shaped escas. It was once thought this was to attract different prey, but it’s now believed that they all have a similar diet. Perhaps having a big, bendy, glowing rod sticking out of your head is a form of sexual display.

  The deep-sea anglers are some of the most ugly and outlandish creatures on the planet. They have an elastic stomach that can swallow prey twice as large as themselves (it even has a light-proof lining in case they swallow luminous fish). To prevent their prey escaping they have backwards-facing teeth in their mouths and another set of teeth in their throats. The female Illuminated netdevil (Linophryne arborifer) looks like a fluorescent root vegetable, with a black bulbous body and two shimmering lures streaming off like psychedelic foliage. Her Latin name means ‘tree-shaped toad that fishes with a net.’ The Hairy seadevil’s (Caulophryne polynema) huge spiny fins have a decayed look, its body is covered in unpleasant pale hairs and its lure looks like a frayed stick of liquorice. It has one of the most sensitive lateral lines of any fish – the tiniest movement triggers the opening and closing of its jaws. Elsman’s whipnose (Gigantactis elsmani) swims along upside down, trailing its lure along the seabed. The Wolftrap seadevil (Lasiognathus saccostoma, or ‘hairy-jawed sack-mouth’) has a lure with three shining hooks on the end that it casts forwards like a fly-fisherman. Prince Axel’s wonderfish (Thaumatichthys axeli) has its lures hanging down from the roof of its mouth like a pair of fluorescent tonsils.

  The male deep-sea anglerfish is much smaller than the female and doesn’t have a lure. He’s interested in mating, not fishing. He uses his giant eyes to look for a suitable female, and his enormous nostrils to sniff out her pheromones. Having found her, he latches on to her with his teeth and then starts to disappear. Scales, bones, blood vessels all merge into those of the female. After a few weeks all that’s left of the male are the testes hanging off the female’s side, supplying her with sperm. Females have been found with eight testes attached to their sides.

  LOVE IN THE DARK

  In some species, if the male fails to find a female, then he will eventually turn into one himself and grow massively in size. As the anglerfish themselves are wont to remark: there’s only one thing worse than being an anglerfish and that’s being a male anglerfish.

  Ant

  Chemical-dependent

  Ants boggle the mind. In the jungles where three-quarters of them live, they teem 800 to the square yard, 2.4 billion to the square mile and collectively weigh four times more than all the neighbouring mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians put together. The 12,000 named ant species come in all shapes and sizes: a colony of the smallest could live happily inside the braincase of the largest. Like bees and termites, their success flows from their social organisation, but there is nothing remotely cuddly about ants: they are the stormtroopers of the insect world, their ruthlessly efficient colonies operating like a single ‘super-organism’.

  EARTHSCRAPER

  Every process within an ant colony is regulated by chemicals. In some species, this can be refreshingly direct: the queen will climb to a high point when she is ready to mate, then stick her backside in the air and release a love-pheromone that inflames the ardour of all males in range. Ant species mate in a variety of different ways: in mid-air, on the ground or in a ‘mating ball’, where the queen is completely surrounded by a swarm of love-addled males.

  As well as love charms, pheromones also act as air-raid sirens. If the colony is threatened, many species emit a pheromone from a gland in their mouths. This causes some workers to grab the larvae and run underground while others prance around with their mandibles open, ready to bite and sting. Brunei ants even have guards that explode their own heads when threatened, leaving a sticky mess which slows down the intruders.

  Harvester ants eat more small seeds than all the mammals and birds put together. Like squirrels, they often forget where they’ve put their stashes, so are accidentally responsible for planting a third of all herbaceous growth.

  Inter-species warfare is common and ant raiders will take hostages back to their own colony, where they become slaves. Other species use this to their advantage: the queen of Bothriomyrmex decapitans allows herself to be dragged to the nest of rival species, where, like a mini-Trojan horse, she bites off the head of the host queen and begins laying her own eggs. Being an
ts, the host workers switch loyalty without batting an antenna.

  Some ants raise livestock. They collect the honeydew made by aphids and in return protect them from other predators. The ants ‘milk’ the honeydew by gently stroking the aphid’s abdomen with their antennae. Meanwhile, more than 200 species of ant are arable farmers, farming fungi for food. They gather compost for it to grow on, fertilise it with their dung, prune it and even fumigate it with powerful bacteria to keep it parasite-free.

  But for all their awe-inspiring industry and adaptive élan, ants don’t get it all their own way. The South American bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) is one of several species that finds out too late that fungi can sometimes farm them. Spores from a Cordyceps fungus work their way inside the ant’s body and release an ‘override’ pheromone which scrambles its orderly world. Confused and reeling, it finds itself climbing to the top of a tall plant stalk and clamping itself there with its jaws. Once in place, the fungus’s fruiting body erupts as a spike from the insect’s brain and sprinkles a dust of spores on the ant’s unsuspecting sisters toiling below.

  Armadillo

  The best-endowed of all mammals

  If the male Nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) were human, its penis would be 4 feet long. When you’re making love to something that resembles an upturned fishing dinghy, size matters.

  Describing armadillos has always been a challenge: the Aztecs called them azotochtli, ‘turtle rabbits’.

  All twenty species live in the Americas. The smallest is the Pink Fairy armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus), which is no longer than a sausage and looks like a furry prawn. The Screaming Hairy (Chaetophractus vellerosus) armadillo squeals like a pig when disturbed, though this seldom happens: it spends seventeen hours a day asleep and often won’t wake even if you pick it up or hit it with a broom.

  During the Great Depression in 1930s America, hungry people resorted to baking armadillos. They were nicknamed ‘Hoover Hogs’ as a dig at President Herbert Hoover.

  The Giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus) weighs up to 135 lb (heavier than most Texan cheerleaders), sports lethal 9-inch claws and has the largest number of teeth of any mammal: a hundred tubular pegs that never stop growing. The Three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes tricinctus) is the only one that can roll into a ball.

  Nine-banded armadillos (despite the handicap of having wedding-tackle big enough to scratch their own chin with) are strong swimmers. They swam the Rio Grande in 1850 and spread to most of the southern United States where there are now between thirty and fifty million of them.

  They have two ways of getting across rivers. Their bony armour means they naturally sink, so they can just stroll along the bottom, holding their breath for up to six minutes. If they need a longer swim, they gulp down air and inflate their stomachs into life-jackets.

  The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept a pair of armadillos as pets in his back garden in Chelsea. One of them burrowed its way into his neighbour’s kitchen – its head appeared from under a hearthstone and convinced the cook that she had been visited by the Devil.

  Males mark their territory with urine and their smell has been likened to that of an elderly blue cheese. To avoid giving birth in the winter, females can hang on to a fertilised egg for up to two years.

  Other than humans and mice, Nine-banded armadillos are the only animals seriously afflicted by leprosy: most armadillos in Louisiana are lepers.

  In next-door Texas, armadillos are one of two state mammals – the other is the Texas longhorn. They’ve also been nicknamed the ‘Texan speed bump’. Their singularly ineffective defence mechanism is to leap several feet in the air when startled: Texan highways are littered with them.

  As a result, armadillos lead the world in research into the function of the mammalian penis. The members of dead armadillos are regularly harvested from road-kill – a job made easier by the fact that they are so gigantic.

  Armadillos have been around for sixty million years: they are almost as old as the dinosaurs. In Bolivia and Peru, their shells are made into mandolins called charangos in imitation of Spanish guitars. They are then fitted with ten strings, generally tuned to A minor – a sad and noble key.

  Badger

  Woodland aristocrats

  The parallels with the British upper classes are striking: badgers are stubborn creatures of habit; some of their setts, and the paths or ‘runs’ that lead to them, are centuries old, handed down from generation to generation like stately homes. The largest sett ever found was a veritable Blenheim Palace with more than 130 entrances, fifty rooms and half a mile of tunnels. Seventy tons of earth had been moved to make it. Most setts house a group of up to twenty adult badgers, known as a ‘clan’, and they will spend half their lives inside it, fast asleep.

  BADGER HALL

  Badgers are members of the Mustelid family, closely related to weasels and otters. ‘Mustelid’ comes from the Latin for weasel, mustela, itself from the word for, mouse, but badgers mostly feed on juicy earthworms, and very rarely need to drink as a result. If pushed, they will eat mice, as well as rats, toads, wasps, beetles, hedgehogs and even cereal crops.

  Their stripe lets other species know that they are strong, fierce and ready to defend themselves. To communicate with their clan they produce a strong ‘musk’ from glands under their tails. This is used for marking territory and establishing family identity. Each badger has its own unique scent and a ‘clan odour’ made by the continual swapping of scent. Any adult that spends too long out of the sett risks rejection if his clan scent wears off. They have also evolved a vocabulary of sixteen different sounds, including churrs, growls, keckers, yelps and wails. Hearing the wail was once taken as an omen of impending death.

  Badgers can mate at any time of year, and sex can last for up to ninety minutes. The sow will mate with several different boars, holding all the fertilised eggs until she gives birth to a multi-fathered litter in the early spring. Only 60 per cent of cubs will survive their first year of life. Most die by the time they are seven: 1 in 6 are killed on British roads each year.

  Britain has the highest concentration of badgers of any country. Since 1985, the population has grown by 70 per cent to over 300,000, despite culling prompted by the belief that they spread tuberculosis to cattle. Paradoxically, culling badgers has the opposite effect. Since culling began in the 1970s, 59,000 badgers have been killed but more than 118,000 infected cattle have been slaughtered. This is because culling causes badger colonies to break up, forcing the infected survivors to move.

  The European (or Eurasian) badger (Meles meles) spread into Europe from China two million years ago. They are still common there today. The hair for shaving-brushes originates on the backs of Chinese badgers, who are culled as an agricultural pest. Despite the myth, they are not shorn like sheep.

  The origin of the word ‘badger’ is uncertain, but the best guess is the French bêcher, meaning ‘to dig’. The French call them blaireau, a word they also use for ‘shaving-brush’ and ‘tourist’ (because of the well-worn tourist ‘badger runs’).

  Victorian gentlemen used the badger’s penis bones as tie-pins.

  Badger meat was once eaten in both Ireland and Britain. Their hind legs were cured as ‘badger hams’ and tasted like well-hung mutton.

  Bat

  Numerous, loud, well-groomed

  There are a lot of bats. They account for a fifth of all mammal species and are more widely distributed, and come in a wider range of shapes and sizes, than any other mammalian order except the rodents.

  Their success isn’t hard to understand. They are the only mammal so far to sprout wings and fly, opening up a whole new world of habitats and food sources. Their order name Chiroptera means ‘hand wing’, and their wings remain recognisable as hands, with a thumb and four fingers. If ours grew to match them, our fingers would be almost 7 feet long and thinner than knitting needles.

  The 900 species of bat are split into two families: the micros and the megas. The megas are th
e tropical fruit bats; the much more numerous micros are the echolocators. An average microbat emits 400,000 calls an evening. These ‘chirps’ have been measured at 110 decibels: louder than the average rock band, but at a frequency too high for us to hear. Bats prevent damage to their own ears by closing them with every wing stroke. They also use the energy from the stroke to force the air through their larynx, so flaps, chirps and ear muffling are perfectly coordinated.

  Each chirp of sound can tell the bat the location, size, direction and even the hardness of an object. It is accurate enough to detect a single thread of spider silk 3 feet away. Once locked on to prey the ultrasound speeds up into attack mode.

  The largest-ever gatherings of ‘happiness’. mammals are the fifty-million-strong roosts of the Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana) whose ‘evening;’ evacuation has to start in the mid-afternoon to allow them all time to exit.

  Inside the ‘nursing’ roosts, there are more than 1,500 babies per square foot, yet the mother bats use sound and smell to feed only their own offspring. The females ‘conceive’ while hibernating, warming up in their sleep as the wandering males caress them. The sperm stays alive inside the female until they wake in the spring and the eggs are finally fertilized