Posts tagged as:

books

Scientific Names Week: Nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus)

by J.R. Atkins on May 3, 2009

in Theme Weeks, Ungulates

Nilgai (click image to enlarge)

Nilgai (click image to enlarge)


0254

The nilgai is an antelope that lives in India and parts of Nepal and Pakistan. For an antelope, it has a weird scientific name: Boselaphus tragocamelus means ox-deer-goat-camel. Perhaps they just really didn’t know and wanted to hedge their bets. The word nilgai comes from a Hindi word meaning “blue bull.” (The male nilgai’s bluish gray hide reminds me of grulla, my favorite color in Ben K. Green’s The Color of Horses. When I was a kid, my dad and I enjoyed looking at that book at B. Dalton or Waldenbooks while my mom and sister were shopping elsewhere in the mall.)

Some 35,000 feral nilgai roam ranchland in Texas. In the 1930s, the King Ranch decided to experiment with breeding the hardy antelope in tough Texas as an alternative source of meat. That didn’t really take off. Now, the Texas nilgai are handy targets for trophy hunters.

Tagged as: antelope, books, horse, humans, names

{ 2 comments }

Scientific Names Week: Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis)

by J.R. Atkins on April 24, 2009

in Theme Weeks, Ungulates

Click image to enlarge.

Click image to enlarge.

0251

Our current system of naming animals and plants is based on the system that Carl Linnaeus published in 1758. While others, including Aristotle, had previously attempted to organize the world’s living things into various arrangements, Linnaeus gave us an important innovation: the binomial system. Each animal (or plant or whatever) is known by a unique pair of names; no other creature has the same name. We’re the only Homo sapiens; the cotton-top tamarin is the only Saguinus oedipus. (Of course, there can be other members of the genus Homo and the genus Saguinus, but they have to have distinctive second, or species, names.)

The organization that keeps track of and codifies the system of naming animals is the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The rules are quite extensive. My favorite guidelines are those that require namers to make every effort to ensure that their names are euphonious (pleasing to the ear) and that they don’t give offense.

Linnaeus was Swedish, but he wrote in Latin, as did pretty much everyone else writing about scientific matters at the time. The scientific names of animals are often referred to, casually, as their Latin names, and the rules governing naming do require the Latinization of some words. But there’s also a lot of classical Greek in the names, and many names derive from local words for the animals.

Many animals have redundant names (tautonyms, to use the official terminology), like Gorilla gorilla, Dama dama, and Uncia uncia. Usually, this happens when the name of the animal’s genus (the first name in the binomial system) changes, but the species name can’t. I like the black rhinoceros’s name because it’s redundant in two languages: diceros means two horns in Greek and bicornis means two horns in Latin.

The black rhinoceros’s common name is odd, too. The rhino is not black; it’s gray. Apparently, it was named the black rhinoceros to distinguish it from the white rhinoceros, which is also gray, not white. That animal’s common name comes from the Dutch word weit, which means wide, like the rhino’s muzzle. (My source for all this is A.F. Gotch’s book Mammals: Their Latin Names Explained.)

The black rhino is classified as critically endangered, the last step before extinction. It’s so bad, in fact, that the IUCN, which assesses the status of the world’s species, obscures the rhino’s range on its map “for security reasons.” While the black rhino was pretty numerous at the start of the 20th century, poaching caused a 96 percent decrease in the species’ population between 1970 and 1992. Black rhino horns are carved to create decorative handles for weapons and used in traditional medicine. Traditional medicine is going to be the death of a lot of mammal species.

Tagged as: books, endangered, names, taxonomy, threats, traditional medicine, words

{ 2 comments }

Daily Mammal Book Club: MFAOA 3

by J.R. Atkins on March 31, 2009

in Book Club

Hi Mammals! Welcome back to the book club! (The previous meetings are here and here.) Today we have a guest club leader, my husband Ted. (By the way, if anyone is interested in kicking off the discussion with a guest post in this or any other possible future book club series, just let me know!) Here’s Ted on My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell:

I’m rather behind in my reading of our current Book Club offering, My Family and Other Animals. But I wanted to share a little about the character of Spiro, for I believe I may have once met his grandson.

Spiro seems to have adopted them as his own from the moment they set foot on land, as their loyal manservant — limo driver, real estate agent, bodyguard and family counselor. Presumably he’s being paid a salary, or tipped well, for his services, though the book doesn’t go into this. The appearance is that Spiro simply latches onto them like a puppy for the sole purpose of helping them in every way. Is this realistic, or is Gerald Durrell offering us an overly rosy, idealized view of things?

I visited Greece for a couple of months about twenty years ago, with Eudokia, a girlfriend at the time who was Greek, and who was living in an apartment in Athens near family. We’d met in Art School, and she decided to move there for about six months to paint and reconnect with Greece; I cam along for a couple of months to stay with her. So though we did a fair share of sightseeing and touristy things, I lived there as a resident, not a tourist.

The Greek people are extremely warm and inviting to strangers, generous with their time and their hospitality, and do indeed seem to form quick loyalties to those they deem as friends. I remember one young man, a friend of a friend, who took on the task of host for us when we went out to a large, late dinner with a group of Eudokia’s friends, as the Greeks often do. I remember that he was an avowed Communist who nevertheless wanted nothing more than high-status American goods — when he came to visit the States a few months later he spent all his time looking for Timberland shoes and the best VCRs.

Anyway, he was gregarious and energetic, greeted me with a hug and a slap on the back, and from that moment he was my best friend and loyal advocate for the evening. At one point when the group’s conversation had gone back to nearly everyone’s native Greek, he stopped everyone and said, “my friends, we have a guest here! He is from America! We must speak only English tonight!”

His name was Niko, but it might as well have been Spiro. I’ll never forget him.

Tagged as: books, durrell

{ 7 comments }

Daily Mammal Book Club: MFAOA 2

by J.R. Atkins on March 24, 2009

in Book Club

Hi again, mammals! The discussion about My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is going great so far. We’ve probably all read a little further into the book by now, but remember, even if you haven’t read any of it at all, you can still participate in the club meetings. Here are some things I thought about over the past week:

• In a comment on last week’s post, Grace said that she gets impatient with the description in the book, and Clare said that her mother feels the same way. (Grace is my mother, by the way!) Some of the Amazon reviewers said the same thing: they skip the descriptive passages to get to the stories about the family. I often skip long descriptions in books, too, but for some reason, in this book, I don’t do that. I think I’m getting into the pace of it. Plus, Durrell’s descriptions are just so good! If I were teaching creative writing, I think I would use this book as an example of how to write good description.

• The poor mother! I just love the transition from Part 1 to Part 2. Part 1 ends:

“We are not moving to another villa,” said Mother firmly; “I’ve made up my mind about that.”

She straightened her spectacles, gave Larry a defiant glare, and strutted off towards the kitchen, registering determination in every inch.

And then Part 2 begins:

The new villa was enormous…

I suppose it’s a fairly easy comic trick to pull, but it cracked me up nevertheless.

• Man, I want to live in the daffodil-yellow villa. The faded walls, the overgrown gardens, the olive groves and orange trees, the bees, the view of the sea…I just love it. It’s exactly my vision of how a villa in a Mediterranean country should be.

• I was thinking about how charmingly Durrell anthropomorphizes animals. When Madame Cyclops lays her eggs: “She turned round, lowered her hind end over the hole, and sat there with a rapt look on her face while she absentmindedly laid nine white eggs.” The scorpions in the wall: “The scorpion would lie there quite quietly as you examined him, only raising his tail in an almost apologetic gesture of warning if you breathed too hard on him.” One of the male birds: “The other male now became terribly harassed and apparently a prey to the dreadful thought that his babies might starve.” And Roger after the scorpions escaped at lunch: “Since no one had bothered to explain things to him, Roger was under the mistaken impression that the family were being attacked, and that it was his duty to defend them.”

Ordinarily, I’m not a big proponent of anthropomorphization. (Jeez, that’s a difficult word to type.) But I love the way Durrell does it. In a pretty straightforward way, it helps to create a clear picture of an animal, making it sympathetic and a subject of interest. I think that in order to care for and respect animals, we have to understand that they do have their own thoughts and lives. I don’t know if a turtle can be absentminded, a scorpion apologetic, or a bird harassed and a prey to dreadful thoughts, but being able to relate to them on an emotional level is, I think, ultimately good for both the animals and us. In this case, the accuracy of the thoughts and emotions we ascribe to the animals isn’t as important as the fact that we’re taking the time to imagine those thoughts and emotions. What do you think?

Tagged as: books, durrell

{ 1 comment }

Daily Mammal Book Club: MFAOA 1

by J.R. Atkins on March 16, 2009

in Book Club


Welcome to the first book club meeting, mammals!

Let’s start talking about My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell! To keep it really simple, I thought I’d just throw out a few things and then open up for comments, and we’ll see how it works. Also, please don’t think that you can’t contribute to the discussion if you haven’t read the book: you definitely can!

I don’t know how far y’all are in your reading, so I’m going to talk about the beginning of the book, y’know, the first few chapters. Some of my thoughts:

• I love the merciless way he pigeonholes his family members into particular characterizations. Margo with her acne, Leslie with his guns, Larry with…oh, Larry. He’s the funniest of all. If you didn’t know, he’s Lawrence Durrell, who became a pretty well known author. I haven’t read any of his works, though, but it does make Gerry’s descriptions funnier, don’t you think, knowing that? And then there’s the poor put-upon mother.

• How about the very concise way Durrell passes the family through Europe on their way to Corfu? “France rain-washed and sorrowful, Switzerland like a Christmas cake, Italy exuberant, noisy, and smelly, were passed, leaving only confused memories.” Just those few words really do evoke a whole trip, somehow. (Page 6 in my Penguin paperback copy.)

• The very words “The Strawberry-Pink Villa” (the title of chapter 2) create a picture to me. I think Durrell’s combined gifts for humor and description are quite remarkable. I love the way he can almost just list things, like fuchsia hedges, creamy green shutters, white cobbled paths, luxurious bougainvillea, etc., and it creates this lush, exotic (to me), redolent world. (Do you know any other writers who do that? It kind of reminds me of Francesca Lia Block’s Los Angeles in her Weetzie Bat books: all orange trees and hot dog stands and pink stucco and convertibles.)

• What do you think about the narration being from a child’s point of view? It’s interesting how a child would necessarily see things differently from his family. I wonder if other members of the family (Larry, perhaps) have written memoirs of this time. It would be interesting to read their different perspectives.

• Speaking of children, what a paradise Gerry has there. It’s safe to explore endlessly, accompanied by your loyal dog, nature is lush and vibrant, school is minimal (do you like his school setup?), your family is amusing and indulgent, and strange characters are everywhere. What do you think of Durrell’s descriptions of the inhabitants of the island?

That’s enough from me for now. Pipe in and share your thoughts!

Tagged as: books, durrell

{ 13 comments }

Darwin Days: Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis)

by J.R. Atkins on February 14, 2009

in Theme Weeks, Ungulates

click image to enlarge

0240

Tonight, we conclude our celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday with one last look at a mammal he wrote about in The Origin of Species.

Although Darwin’s work is widely available for free online (see The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, and you’re probably all set), I still find it easier and more satisfying to thumb through an actual book. It’s kind of like rewinding a cassette tape versus placing a needle on a record. For me, anyway. So I bought a Penguin edition of Origin. There were three different printings to choose from at my bookstore, and I picked the middle one, price-wise, which seemed to have decent paper. Turns out it’s a reprint of the first edition, and Darwin produced six editions total, each quite different from the previous. All this is to say that in the sixth edition, Darwin added a second chapter dealing with objections to his theory. In that chapter, he discusses the giraffe in great detail, discussing how and why it might be advantageous for a “nascent giraffe” to evolve a long, long neck.

It seems that the giraffe is still throwing people for a loop. When I was researching giraffe photos online for reference, I found one posted on Flickr that had a long, not overly polite discussion in the comments section about whether or not it was possible for a giraffe’s neck to evolve, or whether the very fact of the giraffe’s long neck was proof of the creation of the giraffe as a whole being, immutable and perfect. To me, it seems a textbook example of natural selection: the protogiraffes with the longest necks were able to eat more than the others. They lived longer because they ate longer. They reproduced more because they lived longer. More giraffes were born with long necks. And so on. But people still have problems with it because the giraffe seems unique, because it requires special structural adaptations in order to operate with such a long neck, or maybe because it looks like something someone like Dr. Seuss would have had to think up.

The giraffe reference I particularly like in Origin, though, is in my first-edition reproduction. After discussing the problem of the evolution of organs of seeming perfection (like the eye), Darwin addresses the problem of the evolution of “organs of little apparent importance.” In his charmingly open and self-effacing way, he writes, “I have sometimes felt much difficulty in understanding the origin of simple parts, of which the importance does not seem sufficient to cause the preservation of successively varying individuals.” Darwin goes on to point out that we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to presume we know what’s important and what’s not. And the example he uses is the giraffe’s tail:

“The tail of the giraffe looks like an artificially constructed fly-flapper; and it seems at first incredible that this could have been adapted for its present purpose by successive slight modifications, each better and better, for so trifling an object as driving away flies; yet we should pause before being too positive even in this case, for we know that the distribution and existence of cattle and other animals in South America absolutely depends on their power of resisting the attacks of insects: so that individuals which could by any means defend themselves from these small enemies, would be able to range into new pastures and thus gain a great advantage. It is not that the larger quadrupeds are actually destroyed (except in some rare cases) by the flies, but they are incessantly harassed and their strength reduced, so that they are more subject to disease, or not so well enabled in a coming dearth to search for food, or to escape from beasts of prey.”

First of all, don’t you love that 19th-century sentence structure, with endless commas, colons, semicolons, and then more commas? I love it. What Darwin is saying here* is that a fly-swatter is not as trivial as it seems. Fighting off flies saps a person’s energy, and so it makes sense that the best fly-flighters would have a reproductive advantage. I imagine this is why giraffes have such lovely eyelashes, too.

My husband Ted has a theory that sexual selection could play a part here (see my lion post of a couple days ago). In his theory, female giraffes would be more attracted to those male giraffes who coolly switched their tails, rather than those who itched and jumped because flies were crawling all over them. It makes sense to me.

*I should note that my mammalogy is completely self taught. Two of my worst teachers ever were my two biology teachers (7th grade and 8th grade). What knowledge I have of science is from my dad (a geologist and painter) and my own curiosity and love of animals. So if I’m telling you really, really obvious things about evolution, I apologize. I’m just learning it all myself.

Tagged as: books, darwin, evolution, sexual selection

{ 2 comments }

Darwin Days: American Mink (Neovison vison or Mustela vison)

by J.R. Atkins on February 12, 2009

in Carnivores, Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge

0239

Welcome, readers of the Blog for Darwin blog carnival! (A blog carnival is a collection of posts from different blogs but on the same topic. I’m participating in one that compiles posts related to Darwin today through the 15th. Click the link above to read some of the other bloggers’ posts.) At the Daily Mammal, we’re celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (today! happy birthday!) with a look at some of the mammals that Darwin mentions in his Origin.

Chapter Six of Origin is dedicated to answering some of the problems that Darwin anticipates people finding with his theory. One of these issues is the seemingly amazing perfection of certain natural structures, like the eye, and the incredulity with which people consider that such perfection could arise gradually through natural selection. Another is the apparent lack of transition species: if species are always changing one into another, why don’t we see all kinds of transition species, both now and in the fossil record? And how is it even possible that, for instance, a land animal could evolve into an aquatic one? How would the transitional species in between have lived?

That’s where this fellow, the American mink, comes in. Darwin writes:

“It would be easy to show that within the same group carnivorous animals exist having every intermediate grade between truly aquatic and strictly terrestrial habits; and as each exists by a struggle for life, it is clear that each is well adapted in its habits to its place in nature. Look at the Mustela vison of North America, which has webbed feet and which resembles an otter in its fur, short legs, and form of tail; during summer this animal dives for and preys on fish, but during the long winter it leaves the frozen waters, and preys like other polecats on mice and land animals.”

So, taking this mink as an example, if certain traits that lent themselves to living in the water began to be an advantage in the struggle for survival—say, water levels rose or predators pushed the minks out of their normal territory into one more waterlogged—the minks that were better adapted to aquatic living would be more likely to survive and reproduce their genes. And with successive generations, these characteristics would be strengthened, and as more and more minks were born with these adaptations, they would through greater numbers eventually take over, and perhaps we would have a new species. At least that’s this laywoman’s interpretation of the idea. Another example:

“In North America a black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”

Another thing to ponder is the way humans, through hunting, for instance, are creating unnatural selection. A recent study found that as bighorn sheep are hunted for their gigantic, beautiful, curling horns, those with smaller, less impressive horns are more likely to survive and reproduce. The result seems to be a decrease in horn size across the population. And since it seems that those bighorns with the biggest horns are also the most healthy and strongest, hunters are creating a weakened population. Some are calling it “evolution in reverse.” Perhaps we would have seen something like this in the minks if fur farms hadn’t overtaken the hunting of wild minks, and if trappers and mink hunters could selectively trap and hunt only the minks with the lushest coats.

Mink are fairly solitary and fairly nocturnal. They live in burrows beside rivers and they dine on crayfish and frogs in the summer, as Darwin noted, and small mammals like shrews and rabbits in the winter. Sometimes they use fur from their prey to line their dens. They are good at swiming, diving, and climbing.

Tagged as: books, darwin, evolution

{ 5 comments }

← Previous Entries