The Kindle version of my book Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World is currently on sale for just $4.99. The New York Times Book Review says, “With wit & elegance [Conniff] persuades the queasiest reader to share his fascination with the extravagant variety of invertebrates & their strategies.”
Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion: “Ending Epidemics is an important book, deeply and lovingly researched, written with precision and elegance, a sweeping story of centuries of human battle with infectious disease. Conniff is a brilliant historian with a jeweler’s eye for detail. I think the book is a masterpiece.” Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer
The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earthby Richard Conniff is “a swashbuckling romp” that “brilliantly evokes that just-before Darwin era” (BBC Focus) and “an enduring story bursting at the seams with intriguing, fantastical and disturbing anecdotes” (New Scientist). “This beautifully written book has the verve of an adventure story” (Wall St. Journal)
Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time by Richard Conniff is “Hilariously informative…This book will remind you why you always wanted to be a naturalist.” (Outsidemagazine)“Field naturalist Conniff’s animal adventures … are so amusing and full color that they burst right off the page … a quick and intensely pleasurable read.” (Seedmagazine) “Conniff’s poetic accounts of giraffes drifting past like sail boats, and his feeble attempts to educate Vervet monkeys on the wonders of tissue paper will leave your heart and sides aching. An excellent read.” (BBC Focus magazine)
Richard Conniff writes with and accuracy about the natural world. Please consider becoming a supporter of this work. To learn how, paste this link into your browser: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=24245012
One autumn, many years ago now, my family moved out of our beloved old house into a temporary rental near the beach. All our worldly goods were in storage, and we were bereft of our customary New England amusements—turning the compost heap, cutting the hedge, fixing the loose shutter that flapped in the north wind. Then we discovered a substitute in our new backyard, a festive, umbrella-like icon of Ozzie-and-Harriet days. I mean the clothesline.
It seems strange to admit, but, well into middle age, neither my wife, Karen, nor I had ever used one before. For us, the challenge of drying the laundry had consisted entirely in choosing between the knit cycle or permanent press, and overcoming the demon of all dryers, which is, of course, static cling. It dawned on us in about the third week of using the clothesline, a rotary model, that something new and wholly unexpected was taking place.
“Are you trying to beat me to the laundry?” Karen demanded one sunny morning.
“Don’t be absurd,” I lied.
(Illustration by Jeff Seaver)
The truth was that both of us had discovered the pleasure of hanging clothes on the line. The simple wooden pegs. The radiant morning sun. The way the shirts seemed to lift and dance together in the wind. Every once in a while, when I’d just hung up a sheet, the wind would take it and spin it gently away from me to belly out like a sail, bringing the next empty section of clothesline directly over my laundry basket. It gave me a sense of harmony with the elements to start the day like this, and also to finish the day between sun-smelling sheets.
Moreover, it had occurred to us in our frugal New England souls that sunlight was cheap, and the electric dryer surely was not. The clothesline required no combustion, caused no carbon dioxide emissions, and was guiltless of both climate change and static cling.
Eurasian blackcap eating a rowan berry (Photo: Joan Egert)
BY RICHARD CONNIFF
At dinner last night, I had an avocado and jalapeño salad. (Great salad. Details in the comment section.) I was aware of my debt to nature: The avocado tree needs pollinators to fertilize its flowers. So do the jalapeños. Almost all flowering plants, including three-quarters of our agricultural crops, depend on pollination to produce seed and set fruit. It’s essential to their continued survival, and ours. But pollinators are only part of the story.
Half of all plants also need animals for seed dispersal—that is, to eat their fruits and unwittingly disperse the seeds in their wastes. For avocados, in their original range in the Central American highlands, those animals were multi-ton ground sloths and elephant-like gomphotheres, neither well suited for gathering fruit from treetops.
Happily, avocado trees had evolved fruits that could sustain a fall from 40 feet up, and then ripen on the ground to attract foragers. The ground sloths and gomphotheres gorged themselves, and wandered off, passing along the big, indigestible, almost un-compostable avocado pits in their scattered dung heaps. Rodents, mainly agoutis, scavenged these pits to hide in their underground stashes.
The animals got the obvious benefit of eating delicious avocados (or delicious pits), and the avocado benefited because a few buried and forgotten pits survived to produce new avocado trees at a comfortable distance from the parent. Humans only moved in as substitute seed dispersers for avocados about 5000 years ago, after we had pushed the ground sloths and gomphotheres to extinction.
Seed dispersal has lately become a big topic in conservation circles because it’s not just the ground sloths and gomphotheres that have disappeared. Other animal populations, including birds, mammals, and insects, have experienced catastrophic declines, especially over the past 50 years.
White nose syndrome will soon kill these bats … & us? (Photo: Government of Alberta/Flickr)
BY RICHARD CONNIFF
All of us—by which I mean you and me, too—have an unfortunate tendency to shrug off bad news about the natural world. You know the mental games we play:
Oh, my God! … we’ve lost 70 percent of global bird, mammal, amphibian, and reptile populations just in the past half-century?That’s terrible.
And then:
But … right now I have to think about the kids, my job, getting the car fixed, what we’re going to do for dinner, and …
But wildlife losses add up in all kinds of ways that hit awfully close to home and yet aren’t necessarily easy to count.
That’s where a University of Chicago environmental economist named Eyal Frank comes in. This week in the journal Science, Frank examines the devastating loss of bat populations across the United States from white nose syndrome, a disease caused by an invasive fungus. Because white nose syndrome has spread piecemeal in bats since its arrival in 2006, that’s created conditions for a natural experiment to examine some of the hidden consequences.
By comparing counties affected by white nose syndrome with others where the disease had not yet hit, Frank discovered, among other things, that farmers in affected counties have had to increase their use of pesticides by 31%. That’s because the bats are no longer there to keep down insect pests. The added cost in crop losses and pesticide purchases over the first decade or so of white nose syndrome was $26.9 billion (2017 dollars). That’s just in the 245 affected counties, all in the eastern half of the United States.
What really startling, though, was the cost to the human families in the affected counties. With the bats no longer on the job, infant mortality went up almost 8%. In those same 245 counties, that added up over 10 years to an additional 1334 infant deaths, by Frank’s estimate. The increased pesticide use was the likely culprit, he says.
A neighbor makes a friendly visit at Chitabe Camp (Mediocre Photo: Richard Conniff)
by Richard Conniff
For people lucky enough to afford it, an African safari is the trip of a lifetime. I first experienced it in 1997, on a safari in the original Swahili sense of the word—a no-frills journey into the wilderness. I was headed to a research camp for a story, and my directions were to drive north out of Maun, Botswana, into the Okavango Delta, and turn left after two hours. In the wooded stand where the research camp operated, I pitched my tent on the ground and went to sleep listening to a leopard making a sound like a handsaw cutting through bone. It was a strange twist on a baby’s white noise machine, but I slept soundly.
My work as a writer about wildlife has also given me the chance to observe wildlife at various high-end game lodges in a half-dozen African countries over the quarter century since then. And there is an awful lot to be said for expert guides, comfort, and even luxury. At Chitabe, one such lodge in the Okavango Delta, I slept in a lavish tent with a bathroom better than the one at home, all on a raised platform. Elephants, at eye level with the platform, browsed the trees a few feet away. I woke up on my last morning to a sound like puppies rough-housing. Bones cushioned by skin and fur thumped repeatedly on the deck in front of my tent. I peeked out and found a couple of genets, cat-like carnivores with huge eyes and plush ring-tails, playing there. It was magical. Or rather, it was entirely natural.
Common genet (Photo: Foto-Ardeidas)
These lodges have unfortunately also given me the chance to see people spend massive amounts of money getting the experience of a lifetime wrong. So I’ve come away with a few suggestions, jotted down during slow interludes between game drives:
American white pelicans on the wing (Photo: Claudio Contreras Koob)
by Richard Conniff
I’m watching a red-tailed hawk just now circling above the lower Connecticut River. It’s a placid, sunlit day, not like the mucky, half-drowned day Ted Hughes wrote about in his 1957 poem “The Hawk in the Rain.” But my hawk, like his, “Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet, Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air …
The hawk’s flouting of gravity fills poor humans like Hughes (and me) with wonder, longing, and also envy, at the contrast with our own earthbound lives. So how is it that hawks and other soaring birds do it? How do frigatebirds manage to remain on the wing at sea for months at a time? How do golden eagles stay airborne for hours while hardly ever flapping their wings? How does the peregrine falcon hang patiently in the sky before its high-speed plunge to the kill?
Researchers have long known that soaring birds ride updrafts in the mountains and thermals wherever they can find them. But a new study in the journal Nature details an improbable anatomical adaption that makes soaring easier in almost any conditions. It’s a pneumatic sac, called the subpectoral diverticulum (or SPD), that extends from the lungs, passes out of the body cavity through a narrow opening at the shoulders, and then dives down between the major flight muscles in the chest. When inflated, this sac becomes a sort of cushion, extending support for the outstretched wings a centimeter or two from the body.
Fruitflies doing the business (Illustration: Aya Takahashi)
By Richard Conniff
It looked like a penis, only smaller
Oh, and with claws on the sides.
The carcass, a monkey-like species called the woolly lemur, was laid out on a dissecting table at a research station in Madagascar. A goshawk had killed it the day before and stripped it to the bone from the waist up.
“Here’s the intestine. You can see where it was ripped off,” said the biologist. She had the unsqueamish enthusiasm of a Girl Scout crossed with a dental technician. Then she reached into the fur and delicately drew out the penis. It was almost human in shape, except for the two claws, about a third of the way down from the tip. When she tapped them with her dissecting tool, they made a hard, clicking sound. “Like cat claws,” the biologist remarked, and a shudder passed through the room. One earnest onlooker asked if the claws perhaps helped the male hang onto the female, to keep rival males from taking his place? “But woolly lemurs live in monogamous pairs,” the biologist said. Someone else wondered if woolly lemurs perhaps like it … rough?
It was a weird little moment. But, fair warning, it gets much weirder.
The animal world is full of genitalia which strike even biologists as too bizarre to have evolved solely for the relatively straightforward business of passing sperm from male to female. We’re not just talking about the obvious stuff: Everybody who watches Animal Planet already knows, for instance, that sharks typically come with two penises. Avid naturalists may also know that in hyenas, where females are the dominant gender, the clitoris has evolved to look like a penis, and that one female approaching another will often display a prominent erection.
But that sort of thing seems normal, almost, compared with what biologists find when they look a little closer, particularly at some of the more obscure members of the Wild Kingdom. Under the covers in this strange world are genitalia that give rich new meaning to the concept of kinky.
There are, for instance, hermaphroditic snails which mate as male and female simultaneously and, just to keep things interesting, also jab spears and darts into each other’s genitalia.
There’s a fish which inserts a siphon into the female, then squirts seawater out the tip in a spiral rotary motion. (It’s a contraceptive douche, to dislodge the sperm of other males that have gotten there before him.)
There’s a beetle with a penis like a folded umbrella. Once snugly ensconced within the female, it pops opens. Nobody knows if the idea is to stimulate her, or to irritate her so much she never wants to mate again.
Animals inhabit a giddy world of female parts full of twists, turns, and corkscrew spirals, and male parts studded with bumps, knobs, hooks, ridges, valves, and french ticklers. Vladimir Nabokov, who liked to pin out butterflies when he wasn’t writing novels, once described the genitalia of his study subjects as “sculpturesque.” Biologist Marlene Zuk has likewise celebrated genitalia that “resemble bits of the decorations on Old World cathedrals.” Charles Darwin himself enthused over a barnacle penis lying “coiled up, like a great worm,” which when “fully extended … must equal between eight or nine times the length of the animal.”
But the study of genitalia isn’t merely weird and entertaining. It has become one of the hottest topics in modern biology because it also casts a revealing light on the relationship between male and female. Is the act of sex, as we like to imagine, a moment of extraordinary intimacy and cooperation between the sexes? Or is it just a way of making war by other means, a struggle marked by conflict, manipulation, exploitation, and mayhem?
The great primatologist Frans de Waal died last week, of stomach cancer, to the great sadness of his many admirers, myself among them. His radically different view of primate behavior, and his gift for writing about it gracefully in a series of popular books, have placed him among the leaders of a quiet revolution in our ideas about the animal world and about ourselves. Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson credited de Waal with “moving the great apes closer tothe human level than could have been imagined as recently as two decades ago.” Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, once a skeptic, later came to regard herself as one of de Waal’s “biggest fans” and said his description of the tactics primate societies use to stay together “in spite of their dominance-seeking and even murderous tendencies was terribly important, most especially if we want to understand humans.”
I spent a few days with de Waal in 2003, researching a profile of him for Smithsonian Magazine. (Parts of it later turned up in my book The Ape in the Corner Office.) The first day in the observation tower overlooking his study subjects, I was watching de Waal closely, as any reporter would do in the course of note-taking. “You’re not paying attention to the apes!” he remarked. “I’m paying attention to the main ape,” I replied. He laughed and we got along well thereafter, and of course I did also pay attention to his study subjects. Here’s that profile. I hope it brings back your own memories of an inspired and inspiring observer of the natural world.
By Richard Conniff
As in a good soap opera, chimpanzee life is anything but gentle, and, his interest in peacemaking notwithstanding, that suits de Waal just fine. On this lazy spring afternoon, he sits watching his study animals from a boxy yellow tower beside an open-air compound, part of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, where de Waal is a psychology professor. Below, one chimp strolls past another and deals out a slap that would send a football tackle to the emergency room. A second chimp casually sits on a subordinate. Others hurl debris, charge, bluff and displace one another. One chimp lets out an outraged waa! and others join in till the screaming swirls up into a cacophony, then dies away.
De Waal, now 55, going gray at the temples, in round, wire-rimmed glasses and a “Save the Congo” T-shirt, smiles down on the apparent chaos. “Growing up in a family of six boys, I never looked at aggression and conflict as particularly disturbing,” he says. “That’s maybe a difference I have with people who are always depicting aggression as nasty and negative and bad. I just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, it’s a little fight. As long as they don’t kill each other.’” And killing members of their own troop is something chimpanzees rarely do. Their lives are more like one of those marriages where husband and wife are always squabbling, and always making up.
“Growing up in a family of six boys, I never looked at aggression and conflict as particularly disturbing”
De Waal got his start in biology as a child wandering the polders, or flooded lowlands, in the Netherlands, and bringing home stickleback fish and dragonfly larvae to raise in jars and buckets. His mother indulged this interest, despite her own aversion to seeing animals in captivity. (She was the child of pet shop owner and joked that the gene had skipped a generation.) When her fourth son briefly considered studying physics in college, she nudged him toward biology. De Waal wound up studying jackdaws, members of the crow family,which lived around (and sometimes in) his residence. Jackdaws were among the main study animals for de Waal’s early hero, Konrad Lorenz, whose book On Aggression was one of the most influential biological works of the 1960s.
Like many students then, de Waal wore his hair long, and sported a disreputable-looking fur-fringed jacket, with the result that he flunked a crucial oral exam. The chairman of the panel said, “If you don’t have a tie on, what can you expect?” De Waal was furious, but during the next six months preparing for his makeup exam, he got his first chance to do behavioral work with chimpanzees. This time he passed the exam, then threw himself full-time into captive primate studies. Eventually he obtained three different degrees at three different universities in Holland, including a PhD in primatology. He continued his research with chimps at the Arnhem zoo, then spent ten years studying macaques as a staff member at a primate center in Madison, Wisconsin.
Since 1991, he has divided his time between research at Yerkes and teaching at Emory. At Yerkes, the chimpanzee compound for de Waal’s main study group, FS1, is an area of dirt and grass half again as large as a basketball court, enclosed by steel walls and fencing. The chimps lounge around on plastic drums, sections of culvert pipe and old tires. Dividing walls angle across the open space, giving the chimps a chance to get away from one another. (The walls, says de Waal, “let subordinates copulate without getting caught by the alpha.”) Toys include an old telephone book, which the chimpanzees like to shred as a form of amusement.
It is, de Waal acknowledges, a completely artificial environment. Unlike chimps in the wild, his charges don’t spend seven hours a day foraging across their home range, they face no competition from outside groups, there are no immigrants or emigrants, and because of a worldwide surplus of captive chimps, birth control is mandatory. Captivity also reduces the power difference between males and females; females who live together defend one other against male aggression. “But the basic psychology of the chimpanzee and the basic behavioral repertoire are still there,” he says.
Captive studies also offer one crucial advantage: “You have control and you can see more,” says de Waal. In wild studies, it’s often a matter of luck whether you find the animals in the first place, “and it’s tricky to see when they have a fight, because they tend to run into the underbrush. So to follow what happens after a fight is almost an impossibility.” Students of captives used to say that research in the wild was anecdotal and unscientific; the wild researchers in turn said captive work had nothing to do with how animals really live. But the two sides now often collaborate. “I look at it that we need both,” says de Waal.
In Sierra Leone, where recent public health campaigns are saving children’s (and parents’) lives.
by Richard Conniff
The PBS/Channel 13 show “The Open Mind” has just aired its interview with me about my book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. You can take check out the interview here or if 28 minutes is too big a commitment, take a look at the transcript below
HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind, and I’m delighted to welcome our guest today, Richard Conniff. He’s author of Ending Epidemics, A History of Escape from Contagion. Richard, thank you so much for joining me today.
CONNIFF: Thanks. Good to be here.
HEFFNER: Richard, there’s some dispute about whether three years since COVID-19 struck we’re still in what you could call a pandemic. Where do you come out on that?
CONNIFF: Yeah, I think we’re still in a pandemic in the sense that it’s going to come back again seasonally. It’s going to be global, it’s evolving everywhere, and those who aren’t protected, who haven’t gotten vaccinated will be at risk.
HEFFNER: When you titled your book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion, and specifically you identify epidemic, as opposed to pandemic, that was intentional?
CONNIFF: Yeah, that’s intentional. Epidemics are a lot more common. They occur regionally or in individual nations, and pandemics, where it’s the entire world are relatively rare events.
People, especially in this country take for granted our current state of health and have no conception of the frequency of epidemic disease in our past.
Richard Conniff
HEFFNER: Take us through, in your mind, whether or not the public sufficiently understands that what we encountered in this pandemic was something that for decades and centuries, many strata of society had suffered in what you call epidemics, as opposed to pandemics. Is that fully understood or was that one of the motivations in writing this book?
CONNIFF: Yeah, I don’t think it’s understood at all. It is the reason I wrote the book that is I think people, especially in this country take for granted our current state of health and have no conception of the frequency of epidemic disease in our past and not even in our distant past. So I think I wrote it partly because I’m old. I was born in the middle of the 20th Century, and my father and my uncle both had polio. When I was five, I was in kindergarten. The polio vaccine became available for the first time. And at that point you know, what had been polio season became summer again. And two years before I was born, there was still smallpox in this country. And whooping cough was quite common. It killed 4,000 people a year in the United States. Children. I shouldn’t just say people. It was children under the age of five for the most part. Diphtheria. I live in New England, and there was a massive epidemic of diphtheria in the middle of the 18th century. Okay, I’m going back ways now, but it’s interesting because entire families, 13 children in one family just gone over a period of days. So yeah, there’s a long history of highly infectious diseases. One other example I had measles. People think measles is a trivial disease now. Doctors don’t even see measles anymore, but measles was a brutal experience about 550,000 kids had it the year I had it. 550 died. And so yeah, these are things that people don’t even think about anymore and don’t think about why we are free of these diseases.
Megalodon lived. Past tense. The largest shark ever, and arguably the largest predator, went extinct 2.6 million or more years ago. And it has stayed that way. But Hollywood sequel makers will be pleased to know that megalodon still somehow manages to kill on average two people a year, according to Tim and Emma Flannery. More on that later.
In “Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived,” the Flannerys, a father-and-daughter pair of Australian scientists, provide a more complete and accurate picture of megalodon than you are likely to see on any television or movie screen. The authors tell us, among other things, that megalodon had nurseries in parts of what are now Maryland, South Carolina and Florida; that it was warm-blooded; and that its young were more than 6 feet long at birth. Like some modern sharks, but on a grander scale, megalodon practiced intrauterine cannibalism, and only the strong emerged to see the outside world. The adult megalodon, the Flannerys write, was big enough to be the scourge of the seas and an “emblem of all the unspoken, hidden terrors that haunt our imaginations.”
Just how big? Was it 50 feet long? Or maybe 65? The book is vague on such details for good reason. Not only does megalodon not exist in the modern world; there is also hardly any fossil evidence, apart from its teeth, that it ever existed. Megalodon’s massive body was built on cartilage, not bone, and cartilage does not fossilize well. The Flannerys hold out hope that a “whole-body” megalodon fossil might someday turn up, a result of extraordinary circumstances of preservation. It happened in 2017 for a contemporary, the giant mackerel shark, an extinct ancestor of today’s great white shark. But the lack so far of anything comparable for megalodon means that the Flannerys must often resort to “mights,” “maybes” and “just imagines.”
About megalodon teeth, their account is sharply detailed. Megalodon’s mouth contained about 272 of them, arranged in four rows, rotating forward as the front teeth broke off in heavy use. And heavy use is what they got. Whales were their common prey, according to the Flannerys, and megalodon’s mouth was big enough “to swallow an orca whole.” Biting and shaking its way through such massive prey, a single shark could shed tens of thousands of teeth over its centurylong life. Unlike its cartilaginous skeleton, its arrowhead-shaped teeth were made of unusually hard material and remain scattered abundantly across the planet.
strange behaviors