The Moon by Whale Light … and Other Adventures among Bats,Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales by Diane Ackerman. Diane Ackerman, one of my recent favorite authors, paints
herself as a glorious animal-lover and –researcher. Her book The Moon by Whale
Light is an insightful look at some of what I at first thought a most random
selection of animals. Well, actually after reading the book I still think the
animal selection is random but her deep zoological perspectives of the animals
is not random but in fact astute, learned and is a wealth of behavioral
comments gleaned from field research carried out with long-term professionals.
Each of the four chapters dedicated to (1) bats (mammals), (2) crocodilians
(reptiles), (3) whales (cetaceans), (4) penguins (aves) explores the animals’
use to man and man’s relationship with them. She also offers many intriguing
and little known behaviors and knowledgeably creates the animals in their own
highly structured and functional society, a perspective that few humans
consider possible for “the lower species”.
So I have collected just a few thoughts on each of the
animals, but this book is a jewel for animal-lovers. I so very highly recommend it!
On Bats
Merlin Tuttle, the world’s authority on bats, says, “Bats
are among the gentlest of animals. They’re really shy and winsome creatures who
have just had bad press.”
Bats are a natural pesticide. They eat 150 tons of insects
every night. (Bracken Cave, San Antonio, TX) In fact, bats eat so much food in
one evening of foraging that they weigh 50% heavier after one night of dining.
An example of their insect gluttony, little brown bats of a common North
American species catch as many as 600 insects in an hour.
Bats fly with their mouths open so they can echolocate, but
which people mistakenly attribute to a snarling demeanor. They are not
snarling, they are not mean, they’re just trying to not bump into anything.
Bats are extremely tidy, comb themselves thoroughly, and do
not gather a mess of nesting materials for their homes like birds. They provide
excellent tender care of their young as well.
Cave walls are typically around 57F, but bat babies need to
maintain body temperature of around 102F as they are born hairless (these cave
conditions are the equivalent of a human lying naked on a cement floor).
Therefore, caves chambers that have little moisture and shaped to retain heat
become nurseries and babies cling from the ceiling packed with hundreds of
other babies waiting for their mothers to return from their hunts and wrap
their wings around the young. If bat nurseries are disturbed, the bats must
move further back in the cave, where it is likely colder and many babies die.
Only one young is raised per year so bats are at risk of not maintaining colony
numbers if disturbed.
Even a person passing near a bat which is hibernating causes
the bat to raise its body temperature in order to make a retreat if necessary,
but this seemingly harmless elevation costs the bat 10-30 days of stored fat.
Bats are rapidly declining due to people not understanding
them and killing them off. They have been victims of bat shoots, poison,
attacked by flame throwers, napalm-bombed from the air, and dynamited. They have
ultra-sensitive hearing and even the blast of a cherry bomb in a cave could
kill their ultra-sensitive hearing and confuse a whole cavern of bats so that
they can no longer use echolocation, and thus die.
Bats were once as numerous as the passenger pigeon.
Old-timers remember when gray bats filled the night sky and now officially they
are on the endangered list. The free-tailed bat has declined as much as 99.9%
in some places. Its biggest colony went from 30 million to 30 thousand in just
six years!
What people don’t realize is that bats are ESSENTIAL for
maintaining the balance of nature! They fertilize bananas and maintain the wild
strain which is disease-resistant. They plant the rain forest. Of the 3000 or
so strains of peaches, which all started in China, bats were the seed dispensers
and the pollinators. Bats pollinate many fruits, and bats and bees the the
world’s greatest pollinators. Without them, earth would struggle to exist.
On Crocodilians
All crocodilians have a third transparent eyelid (or
nictitating membrane), or goggles of a sort, so they can swim underwater. Their
pupils are football-shaped and stay vertical to the horizon no matter what
angle the head turns. Even if the gator tilts its head straight up, the pupil
floats like a gyroscope, so vision isn’t distorted.
While mammals are extravagant with their energy, reptiles
are extremely energy efficient and don’t expend energy unless they have to as
they take their energy from external sources. Their inferno must be stoked
carefully and kept at a precise temperature. If the temperature is incorrect,
they cannot digest their food, but their efficiency is shown in their need for
only three or four good meals a year.
Alligators have about 80 teeth (and crocodiles 70) and loose teeth throughout
their lifespan. New teeth push up through the socket to replace old ones and an
alligator, whose lifespan parallels a human’s, might have as many as 3,000
teeth. [Fun trivia: colonials used to fill up alligator’s teeth, which are
hollow, with gun powder.]
A large gator, swinging its tail to counterweight the
enormous head, stretches its head out of the water, gulps air then lowers
itself in the water to make a sub-sonic boom when it bellows, making the water
dance high around its body. Researchers note that alligators are responsive to
the pitch of b-flat; when hearing b-flat tones, they go nuts with bellowing.
A mother alligator lays 35 or so porcelain eggs, which are
incubated for about 65 days. Crocodilians do not have sex chromosomes; their
gender is determined by the temperature at which they develop, and 2-3 weeks
after the egg being laid, ambient air temperature determines the gender: 94+F
produces males, 86-F produces females. Most often an entire nest is one gender,
but in some cases, the top 2-3 eggs might be different based on their exposure
to a different air temperature.
The first year is tough for an alligator. Yearlings are
about 2 feet long and three-quarters of them die because they are eaten by
fish, frogs, wading birds, to name a few. As they gain size, this risk is
minimized, but then two- to three-year-olds are chased by adult alligators to
protect territories and families, and a three-year-old which is about three and
a half feet becomes a wanderer. In most reptiles, especially crocodilians,
reproduction depends on size, not age, and some crocodilians might reproduce at
6 years of age while others at 15 for some males or 18 for females who develop
later. By 30, a male alligator in the wild shows signs of senility, loses its
teeth which aren’t replaced, becomes mottled and rough-skinned, and may even go
blind. However, a male in captivity may grow as old as 90.
On Whales
If you ask someone to draw a picture of a whale, he/she will
likely draw a sperm whale with its bulbous head made famous by Melville’s
Moby Dick, but whales come in many shapes, sizes and colors … with 77 species of
whales and dolphins inhabiting earth.
Whales are divided into two groups—toothed whales
(Odontoceti from the Latin for “tooth” and “whale”) and baleen whales (Mysticeti,
from Latinized Greek for “whale”). Toothed whales include sperm whales,
dolphins, and orcas/killer whales. They have a single blowhole, echolocate like
bats, have teeth for holding prey like fish, squid and shrimp but despite
teeth, swallow their food whole. Baleen whales have paired blowholes—nostrils
in fact. They graze with their mouths wide open, and the baleen with smooth
outer edges and bristly inners catches the krill, plankton, and schools of fish
while water passes on through. Other species with baleen have throat pleats and
open their mouths even wider to swallow prey when the water is pressed to the
top of the mouth and wrung out.
The Right whale, a Mysticeti, got its name from the age of
whaling when a whaler would see a whale and ask if it were “the right one”. The
Right whale floated when killed instead of sinking, didn’t struggle in battle,
and was extremely valuable for its baleen. Now the Right whale is one of the
rarest whale species (only 3,500 remaining) due to human greed. Never have
humans caused an animal with widespread distribution across the globe to come
to extinction, but they sure have come close in the case of the Right whale.
The Gray whale of the North Atlantic became extinct by the
end of the 1700s because of Basque whalers, but the Grays in the North Pacific
were “discovered” in the 19th C and called devilfish; they were
furiously hunted and in self-defense killed several men and smashing boats in
the hunt. Now they are known for “the friendly whale phenomenon” which started
in 1977 when a friendly whale near Baja California allowed itself to be patted
by passengers on a whale watching boat. Since then, friendly whales have sought
out boats, and on occasion rammed them and then rolled over to beg for belly
rubs.
Blue whales make loud, low-frequency “songs” that can travel
up to 500 miles in deep sound channels before disappearing into background
noise.
A Humpback has paddle-like flippers and a huge tail with
markings as unique as fingerprints, but its most arresting feature is it sings
complicated, beautiful songs and varies them as it continuously sings.
When a whale exercises in warm equatorial waters, it can die
of overheating. A whale is like a house with a too-large furnace and too few
radiators. If it races too much for its food, it can become hot and can virtually
blow up. Even after a whale is killed in the Antarctic, it must quickly be
hauled aboard and cut up, for if it takes too long to drag the whale back to
the ship for evisceration or is left in the water too long, its bones will be
charred by the heat of its internal decay.
Most sperm whales live close to the equator and so dive to
unimaginable depths to get to freezing water to cool off. They feed on squid
and large fish, sometimes swallowing a whole shark. In the depths of the ocean
and swimming under extreme pressure among luminescent fish, no wonder the sperm
whales seems magical.
A mother whale is virtually 97% water, lives in water,
sounds in water which travel through water and ultimately to her unborn who
hears her, but because there is no air in the womb, the baby cannot speak back
until it is born one year later.
On Penguins, those feathered dinosaurs
Penguins have no land predators, so they do not fear people.
Just the opposite, they are curious and alert and allow their babies to waddle
around and freely explore.
Penguins do NOT live at the South Pole, which is about 800
miles from the closest body of water and an altitude of almost 10,000 feet. Nor
do they live with Eskimos and polar bears in the Arctic.
There are 17 types of penguins on earth, and while all
penguins are essentially black and white, their head markings are what make
them most easily identifiable.
·
Adelie penguins (named after Adelie Land near
the Antarctic coast of Australia that was named after the wife of a 19th
C French explorer) have black heads with chalk-white eye rings—like little men
in tuxedo suits.
·
Rock-hoppers have lively red eyes, long yellow
and black head feathers resembling an outgrown crew cut, and thick yellow
satanic eyebrows that slant upwards.
·
Chinstraps get their name from the thin black
“strap” across their throats; their amber eyes are outlined in thick black and look
Egyptian.
·
Emperors have black heads, a tawny stripe on
their bill, and a bib of egg-yolk yellow around their necks and cheeks.
·
King penguins, the most flamboyant of all,
display a large velvety-orange comma on each cheek, which melts to a radiant
yellow, and on either side of their bills, a comet of apricot or lavender darts
toward their mouth.
·
Fairy penguins are tiny and blue-headed.
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Click to enlarge
Photos taken at Sea World just outside of Honolulu, Hawaii (a horrible place to visit -- the focus is on making money, e.g. $140 to kiss a dolphin and $18 a photo (and you can't take a camera in with you to get your own photo)) |
The black and white of penguins has very specific purposes.
First, for protection—black backs make them less visible from above and white
breasts make them appear like a reflection of water from below. For heat—if the
penguin is cold, they turn the black towards the sun and warm up but turn white
towards the sun if they are hot. An interesting study showed that when penguins
were tagged with silver, they were quickly eaten by leopard seals which were attracted
to the flash of the silver, so black tags were then used and the penguins were
no longer at a disadvantage for becoming a targeted lunch.
Only 4 penguin types live in the Antarctic and only 2 live
there exclusively. Most live in slightly balmier climates—on sub-Antarctic
islands like South Georgia or the Falklands, along the coast of South America,
South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and one species even lives in the
Galapagos near the equator, but penguins do not and have never lived north of
the equator. The ocean currents aren’t favorable for carrying them that far
north.
Penguins come in a broad range of sizes. The Emperor penguin
is the tallest and stands over five feet tall, weighing as much as 100 pounds
while in contrast the smallest penguin, the fairy, weighs only 2 ½ pounds and
stands a mere 12 inches tall.
Penguins waddle around and are believed by many to be
flightless birds, but they do fly—they fly through water, and gracefully too,
at speeds up to 15 miles per hour. They porpoise to breathe in just enough air
to keep the lungs from collapsing and dive to great depths, with their pulse
going from 100 beats per minute to only 20, and because they take only one
shallow breath in their porpoise-move, they don't get the bends.
Penguins don’t have binocular vision like humans do, so they
turn one eye to an object and then the other. Although they see well
underwater, long vision on land isn’t necessary.
