The Book of Animal Ignorance

by Ted Dewan

  In India it is common to call a foolish person ‘an owl’ – owls are considered bad omens, messengers of ill luck, or servants of the dead.

  For a long time owls were grouped with falcons, but they now have their own order, Strigiformes, from strix, the Greek for ‘owl’ and the root of the word ‘strident’. The name mimics the owl’s sound, as does ‘owl’ itself – which comes from the Latin ululatio, ‘a cry of lamentation’. The owl’s cry and nocturnal habits associate it with omens of death and ill-fortune in almost every culture.

  Pangolin

  Sacred pine cone

  The relatively recent advances in molecular analysis which allow us to trace the family tree encoded in an animal’s genes have thrown up numerous surprises, and nowhere more so than with the pangolin or ‘scaly anteater’, a strangely beguiling mammal that looks like a pine cone with legs. For a long time it was classified with the anteaters and armadillos, because it looks and acts like them. Yet its genes tell a different story: it is actually a carnivore, brother under its scales to cats, dogs and bears.

  There are seven pangolin species, four in Africa, three in Asia, in their own order, the Pholidota, or ‘horny-skinned ones’. All but two have prehensile (grasping) tails that enable them to climb trees. They are mostly nocturnal, emerging from their burrows at night to feed on ants and termites. Like the aardvark – to which they are not related – they operate mainly by smell, tearing open the nests with powerful claws and ‘drinking’ the residents in large gulps. The Giant pangolin (Manis gigantea) of Africa can extend its tongue 16 inches. When not in use it is rolled up in a sheath deep in the chest cavity, its powerful muscles anchored at the pelvis. The tongue is covered with incredibly sticky mucus, supplied by a large gland in the chest. They have no teeth but instead grind their food in their stomachs, swallowing small stones and sand, just as birds fill their gizzards.

  In China pangolin are known as ‘hill carp’ and their flesh is a delicacy fetching more than £20 a pound. The animals are killed to order in restaurants, the warm blood drunk as a tonic.

  Pangolins have a curious walk, slowly ambling on all fours by resting their front knuckles on the ground and curving the claws underneath. When they want to speed up they walk on their hind legs, rolling forwards, balanced by their tail. A hungry pangolin can wipe out an insect colony in thirty minutes. They are highly intelligent predators; if a termite nest proves too big to finish off in one go, they will seal it up and return the following day.

  ANT TRAP

  ‘Pangolin’ comes from the Malay peng-goling, meaning ‘something that rolls up’. All species can roll into a ball to defend themselves. Even a mother carrying her baby on her tail will, when faced with danger, simply roll the young one up inside her. They can erect their overlapping scales, made from keratin (like human hair and nails) and shut them like powerful scissors, chopping off anything that pokes between them, including fingers. The scales are, inevitably, a challenge when mating. Pangolins lie side by side, entwining their tails and forelimbs, so the male can slide in to one side of the tail. As for giving birth, happily the scales don’t harden until several days later

  There is something mysterious about pangolins, beyond their surprising genetic provenance. Among the Lele people of northern Democratic Republic of the Congo, they are the inspiration for a fertility cult: scaly like a fish but able to climb trees; shaped like a lizard but suckling their young; and giving birth, like humans (usually) but few other animals, to just one offspring at a time. Ironically, it is this very strangeness that most threatens their survival, since across Africa and Asia they are eaten as ritual food, and their scales and body parts are used for adornment and traditional medicine.

  Parrot

  Vivid conversationalist

  Parrots are probably the best-known birds in the world. After cats, dogs and rabbits, budgerigars (which are a kind of parrot) are the world’s most popular pets. Almost all parrots are brightly coloured and they have names to match: Rainbow lorikeet, Purple-crowned lorikeet, Red-rumped parrot, Blue-crowned hanging-parrot, Sulphur-crested cockatoo, Peach-faced lovebird, Blue-and-yellow macaw. The colours in their feathers result from completely different molecules from those of any other colours in nature. Most parrots are green and males and females are almost identical in colour, but whereas male Eclectus parrots are bright green with scarlet underwings, the females are bright red with violet-blue breasts. For many years they were thought to be different species. Eclectus parrots are also the only species where the female is more colourful than the male.

  Parrots are an ancient group, which split off from the other bird families very early on. The oldest parrot fossil is 55 million years old, found in Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex, England.

  Other unique parrots include two New Zealand varieties: the Kea (Nestor notabilis), or Mountain parrot, which is large and strong enough to mount the back of a sheep and tear out the fat round its kidneys while it’s still alive, and the nocturnal Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus, or ‘sensitive-eyed owl’) the world’s heaviest parrot and the only one that cannot fly. The world’s smallest parrot, the Buff-faced pygmy parrot (Micropsitta pusio), is just over 3 inches long and the largest, the Hyacinth macaw (Anodo-rhynchus hyacinthinus), stands more than 3 feet tall. Most birds can move only one half of their beaks but parrots can move both. Their beaks are incredibly strong and close with a force of 350 lb per square inch but they have just 400 taste buds. This is a tiny number compared to people (who have 10,000) or cows, which, for some unknown reason, have about 25,000, but it’s a lot for a bird. Parrots are among the very few birds that show any interest in sweet things. (Hummingbirds also like sweetness, but have only a tenth as many taste buds – between forty and sixty).

  Parrots make loud, discordant shrieks, squawks and screams: very few have anything that could reasonably be described as a ‘song’, but the ancient Romans discovered they could speak and taught them to say ‘Hail Caesar’. At first, talking parrots (imported from India) cost more than human slaves but eventually they became so common that the Romans got bored with listening to them and took to eating them instead.

  THE LOVE BOOM

  No one knows how parrots get their remarkable ability to talk. No parrot in the wild has ever been observed to mimic the call of another bird or animal. In captivity, however, they readily copy any commonly heard sound (such as doors slamming or car horns) as well as speech. Women and children are better at teaching them to talk than men, and African Greys, the least colourful of parrots, are the best pupils, able to mimic human speech perfectly. With the help of Dr Irene Pepperberg, Alex, an African Grey (Psittacus erithacus) bought in a Chicago pet shop in 1977, now speaks 200 words and fifty sentences. African Greys go on adding vocabulary throughout their lives and can live to be eighty years old. In 1800, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt encountered an elderly Amazon parrot in South America that could speak forty words of Ature, a language whose human speakers had long since died out.

  Pearl Oyster

  Nature’s jeweller

  You are very unlikely to find a pearl in your plate of restaurant oysters. Despite the confusing use of the name, edible oysters are about as closely related to pearl oysters as humans are to marmosets. Both are bivalves, anchoring themselves to rock in shallow seas and filtering algae from the current, but they are from entirely different orders and only one produces pearls of commercial size and value. Pearl oysters, close cousins to the scallop, live in tropical seas and can grow to the size of a dinner plate.

  Another widespread misconception is that pearls are formed when a grain of sand or grit becomes trapped inside the oyster’s shell. If that were true, pearls would be commonplace rather than highly valued rarities. The oysters’ world is full of grit; they inhabit a universe of sand, and they spend their lives constantly ingesting and expelling it, with no trouble. Pearls are triggered by more serious intruders. These might be small bits of debris – pieces of bone, shell or coral, for instance –
but in most cases it is something more purposeful. Oysters are troubled by various parasites, including species of worms, sponges and mussels, which drill through the mollusc’s shell. This is the kind of major irritation which triggers pearl formation.

  Jeweller Pierre Cartier acquired his Fifth Avenue flagship store in 1917 for $100 plus a natural pearl necklace valued at $1 million ($15 million in today’s money).

  Having been invaded, the oyster acts to isolate the parasite inside a ‘pearll sac’. The whole of the inside of its shell is covered by an organ called the mantle, which secretes mother-of-pearl. Also known as nacre, this is a wonder substance, strong yet flexible and lustrous, made by sandwiching calcium carbonate crystals between layers of an organic secretion similar to keratin. It entombs the enemy alien in successive coatings and the end result is a pearl. Pearl oysters can manage up to four layers per day but to create a layer of nacre a twentieth of an inch deep takes two years; a finished pearl, fifteen to twenty. That’s why a ton of oysters might yield as few as three pearls, and the chances of them being perfectly spherical are, literally, one in a million. A single oyster might get several goes; in the wild they can live for eighty years.

  MORE LIKE US THAN MOST PEOPLE THINK

  The rarity and beauty of pearls led to many theories about their origin: that they were the result of dewdrops falling into the oyster while it sunned itself at dawn; or they were gallstones or crystallised angels’ tears; or came from bolts of lightning. The ‘grain of sand’ idea was first posited in seventeenth-century Italy, while in the nineteenth century marine scientists proposed dead oyster eggs. It wasn’t until the first decade of the twentieth century that French and Japanese researchers identified the pearl sac theory, leading to the first artificially cultured pearls.

  Most modern pearls are farmed; it is a big global business with an annual turnover of over £300 million. It is a slow process. Each animal is opened and has a bead of mussel shell and a piece of mantle (cut from a ‘donor’ oyster) carefully inserted into its gonad. As the mantle fuses with the surrounding tissue, it is stimulated into producing a pearl sac, coating the bead with nacre. Two years later you get something that is indistinguishable from a natural pearl – just don’t scratch it too hard.

  Penguin

  Black-and-white belly

  Two-thirds of all the birds in Antarctica are penguins. The largest is the Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri, meaning ‘wingless diver’), which can grow to a height of 3’ 11", dive 1,700 feet deep and hold its breath for fifteen minutes. Forty million years ago there was a much larger Antarctic species, Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, which was 5’ 7" tall – the same height as Eddie Izzard or Michelle Pfeiffer. Emperor penguins are famous for their dogged dedication as parents. They take it in turns to look after their egg in bitter subzero weather, making epic trips to find food and losing 40 per cent of their body-weight in the process. Despite this, only 19 per cent of Emperor penguin chicks survive their first year. This must put a strain on the relationship.

  It’s often said that Emperor penguins mate for life, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. While faithful for the breeding season and when the chick is being reared, at other times Emperor penguins have much lower rates of fidelity than smaller species. At least 85 per cent of Emperor penguins cheat on their partners. They’re mostly straight, though, unlike Roy and Silo, two Chinstrap penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo, who hit the news when they built a nest together, rejected any advances from females and raised an egg. Silo eventually left Roy to pair up with a female named Scrappy and may well be the first documented case of an ex-gay or bisexual penguin.

  Penguins have much denser feathers than most birds, more than seventy per square inch, to keep them waterproof. Their black-and-white colouring is designed (like fish) to blend in with the sea when looked at from either above or below.

  By no means all penguins live on icebergs. Fiordland crested penguins from New Zealand nest in coastal rain forests; Galapagos penguins in tropical volcanic caves; Fairy penguins in burrows; and the Humboldt penguins of Chile in guano, piles of ancient bird droppings. Many penguins spend 75 per cent of their lives at sea. Only Emperor and Adélie penguins live exclusively in the Antarctic. Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) are named after a French explorer, Jules Sébastien César Dumont D’Urville (1790–1842). In 1840, his ship reached an island off the Antarctic ice shelf, which his men named D’Urville Island in his honour. Later, they came across a little, fat penguin with a black coat and a white apron and named it after his wife, Adélie. The Adélie penguin lives in vast communities of up to 750,000 birds. Like other penguins, they have a manoeuvre called a ‘slender walk’, in which they pin their flippers back when squeezing through crowds. Female Adélie penguins build their nests with stones, a rare commodity in Antarctica and one for which they are willing to pay. When their partner’s back is turned, they trade ‘intimate favours’ with other single males in return for bigger, better stones – the only known example of bird prostitution. ‘Client’ males are sometimes so satisfied with the service that females can come back for more stones without offering sex, merely a little light courtship. One particularly flirtatious female managed to acquire sixty-two rocks in this way. The males clearly believe the loss of stones is worth it for the opportunity to father more chicks. Zoologists speculate that the female may be trying to improve the genetic variability of her offspring.

  Or she could just be having fun.

  Pig

  More equal than others

  There are about a billion pigs in the world and more than half of them live in China. The Chinese relationship with the pig is a long one: it was one of the places where the wild boar (Sus scrofa) was first domesticated, over 9,000 years ago, and to the Chinese ‘meat’ still means ‘pork’. Pork is now the world’s most popular meat: 85 billion tons are consumed annually, a third more than beef or chicken. Traditionally, its popularity has been related to the thick protective coating of fat that made it ideal for curing (the process of salting, drying or smoking which preserves the meat by preventing the fat from oxidising). In the last decade, health concerns have led to a halving of the fat content, the extra weight mostly being replaced by water. As well as food, dead pigs are a rich source of medical products such as insulin, their skin makes high-quality leather and their bristles are used in paintbrushes.

  Throughout this long history of usefulness, humans have had an ambiguous relationship with the pig. To be a ‘pig’ implies gluttony, stubbornness and a lack of attention to personal hygiene. At the same time, we admire them for their intelligence and pluck. They are gregarious, playful animals and, as a result, are harder to herd than sheep or cattle: if a pig can escape, it will. Pigs eat both plants and meat, which makes them invaluable as recyclers of human food waste. But pigs don’t eat ‘like pigs’. They have a third more taste buds than we do (they don’t like lemon rind or raw onions) and unlike sheep, horses (or humans) rarely overeat.

  Pig stem cells are being used to research human diseases. In order to track them once injected, Chinese geneticists have crossed a pig with a jellyfish to produce piglets whose tongues and trotters glow fluorescent green in ultraviolet light.

  However, their ‘dustbin’ status, which made them the backyard animal of choice for Asian and European peasants, also cemented their reputation as an ‘unclean’ animal, forbidden for Jews, Muslims and Seventh Day Adventists.

  In terms of cleanliness, pigs are actually very particular. They are the only farm animals that make a separate sleeping den (which they keep spotless) and use a latrine area. They just don’t look clean. They turn the ground more efficiently than any plough, ‘rooting’ incessantly with their snouts. This, combined with rain, quickly leads to mud. But pigs don’t ‘sweat like pigs’. Because they have no sweat glands, suffer from sunburn and carry a thick insulating layer of fat, they need a mud wallow to keep them cool and protected.

  Pigs are highly intelligent. Like dogs
they can be easily housebroken, taught to fetch, and come to heel. Pigs can learn to dance, race, pull carts and sniff out land-mines. They can even be taught to play video games, pushing the joystick with their snouts, something that even chimps struggle to master. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘learned pigs’, dressed in natty waistcoats, amazed audiences with tricks. Pigs have even put on trial and hanged for murder. Maybe it’s this intelligence that some people find unsettling. When a pig fixes you with its long-lashed, forward-facing eyes, and sniffs you with its snout (which is 2,000 times more sensitive than a human nose), a connection is made that goes well beyond the food chain.

  THE PIG ORGAN

  Pigeon

  Undervalued visionary

  Before we dismiss pigeons as ‘rats with wings’, consider why the rock dove, Columba livia, which originally appeared in Australasia twenty-five million years ago and which still lives happily on some sea cliffs, made such a complete transition to city life. Why are there so many? Cities are full of artificial cliffs (we call them ‘tall buildings’) and people throwing out stale bread and dropping half-eaten kebabs. Unfortunately, food stimulates breeding, with the result that we now have non-stop breeding pigeons, with some females laying six times a year, and raising as many as twelve squabs each.

  Rock doves were first domesticated by the ancient Egyptians for food and message-carrying. Urban populations were established by escaped domestic birds and they’ve never looked back. The estimate for the damage caused by pigeon droppings in the US alone is $1.1 billion. But we shouldn’t overreact: there is little evidence to suggest that pigeons pose a serious health risk to humans. The worst disease associated with them is psittacosis, or parrot fever. New York City, home to 100,000 pigeons, records one case per year and pigeons have proved particularly resistant to the H5N1 avian flu virus.