All Creatures Great and Small
"All things Bright and Beautiful" was one of the favourite hymns for children to sing when I was at primary school. It had idealistic descriptions of all of the creations of a benevolent God.
- Each little flow’r that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colors,
He made their tiny wings
- The general tenor of it was that nature was wonderful and that all the beautiful parts of it were so because God had made it so and had created all living creatures. But even as an 8-year old, I must have thought "But he also made alligators! And vampire bats! And mosquitos". And as an adult I have to think of all the other living things and bugs and bacteria and viruses and think that maybe making everything in the world isn't so unalloyed a positive.
And there are so many strange, and wonderful, and downright horrible things that creatures do. It has been a delight of mine to collect and pass on the most dramatic animal behaviours to try to culture-jam 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' Evidence, Item 1:
Dolphins get high on puffer-fish toxin
Yep, you read correctly. Puffer fish (very scary looking but actually quite small) release a neurotoxin which is fatal in high doses but which in smaller doses produces dizziness and euphoria and, well, the only way to describe it is a 'high'. And dolphins deliberately irritate the puffer fish to get a little toke of the toxin. They even do it in groups. "Hey guys, wanna go and score some fish?" It all seems a little unbelievable, except that it has been filmed for a BBC nature documentary some years ago. Watch:
There are other stories of animals that seem to like a bit of delirium, although unfortunately one of the longest-lasting and persistent stories is a complete myth. Elephants don't get drunk on fermenting Marula fruit. The 'documentary' that showed them doing this in the 1970s was actually a complete set-up. The makers laced some fruit with alcohol and then the elephants did get drunk, but only that once.
It does seem that some monkeys will deliberately eat fermenting fruit for the alcoholic kick, and there is some recent film of chimpanzees sharing fermented breadfruit which will have a very mild alcoholic kick to it. Here is the link:
But amongst all of the funny behaviour, there are some behaviours that are slightly spookier. One well-known behaviour is that some ants 'farm' aphids because the honeydew that the aphids secrete is a sugar-rich food that the ants love. It seems that the relationship is quite symbiotic though, because the ants will take the aphids to the best food sources, and will bring them inside their nest for shelter when it is cold or stormy. And they don't eat the aphids, so at least they are not as bad as we are with our rare steaks.
But the behaviour that always knocks me back is what happens to the young of various shark species, including the Grey Nurse Shark and the Sand Tiger Shark. Although it is known that they can contain dozens of fertilized eggs in their bodies, they only give birth to one or two young. This is because the embryos cannibalize their womb-mates in utero. Yes, that's right, they eat their siblings before they are born. Of course the evolutionary payoff is that the young shark is born quite large. And it knows how to kill. All things bright and beautiful eh? Here is a video with the info:
Now there is beauty in all of the behaviours above, it just isn't one that calls for morals (and certainly no hymns). Each of these behaviours has an evolutionary payoff, I would assert. Even the high dolphins probably develop stronger bonds with their dopehead mates. And maybe it just helps them to relax and chill. And that in itself is something Bright and Beautiful.
Comments
Post a Comment