BEST ANIMAL HALLOWEEN COSTUME – Leafy Sea Dragon

The Leafy Sea Dragon (Phycodurus eques, lit. ‘Oh, you like it?  Thanks, I made it myself’) is a relative of the seahorse and the only member of Genus Phycodurus.  Found at overcrowded clubs with lines down the block in seas around western and southern Australia (though it always waits until the last minute to pick which club to go to), the leafy sea dragon is distinguished – as it clearly wants to be – by the long leaf-like protrusions all over its body.  Designed to resemble seaweed in appearance and motion, these appendages serve no purpose besides camouflage and helping the leafy sea dragon win the $50 Amazon gift card during the Halloween costume contest.

‘I started planning in August.’

You have to hand it to P. eques. While other animals were busy evolving exceptional speed or intelligence, the leafy sea dragon could have cared less about the future, instead focusing on coming up with the most awesome Halloween costume. When it first told everyone that it was going to dress up as seaweed, nobody paid attention or cared.  No, they were too busy studying hydrodynamics and mating rituals. But when the week leading up to Halloween finally arrived and the hammerhead shark was running around trying to figure out how to dress up like a hobo, the leafy sea dragon was busy planning how it would manage to show off its outfit at seven different parties in one night, two of them in the Valley.  (There’s a lot to consider too. Like, the cops are gonna be out in force so cabs are gonna be a good idea, but they’re gonna have to wait forever to get one each time, etc.)

But come Halloween night, the leafy sea dragon figures out all the logistics (Doug will be the designated driver) and wows everyone with its truly eerily-real seaweed costume.

The other interesting thing about the leafy sea dragon is that the male tends to the eggs, which likely has something to do with the female leafy sea dragon spending about half the night gossiping in the bathroom with her friends.

GRADE: A (for effort)

Deep Sea Anglerfish

Light diminishes rapidly as one descends into the ocean — and one’s experience becomes less and less like a bright blue paradise and more and more like a bad part of Atlantic City.  At about 600 feet (100 fathoms), the sunlit euphotic zone ends and the disphotic zone reluctantly begins.  Here, only a tiny fraction of sunlight penetrates, and one finds no plants, no police presence, and paycheck cashing/bail bondsmen services on every corner. If you get out of your submersible in the disphotic zone (NOTE: this is not advised), then you’re on your own.  But if you do, definitely lock it, set the alarm, and put your valuables in the trunk.

Drop down to 3,000 feet (500 fathoms) and you enter the aphotic zone, where even light fears to go. Known as The Void (or V-Town to the locals), the aphotic zone is a dreadful, unforgiving world set in perpetual darkness.  It is here that Nature has hidden her most gruesome creations, which are collectively some of the worst cases of DNA expression one can imagine.  Truly, the aphotic zone is no neighborhood for a Queen Angelfish to find herself at 3 A.M., heels in hand, after taking a wrong turn down a coral alley and suddenly realizing her phone has no bars and there’s not a cab in sight.

‘Oh dear. Not good. This is not good.’

The Deep Sea Anglerfish (Order Lophiiformes, lit. ‘nothing but trouble’) is a prime example.  The Anglerfish is mostly mouth, and the parts of its anatomy that aren’t mouth – tissues, organs, fins, and a couple of eyes just for show – exist only to serve the mouth and move the mouth around.  While polls show that most people consider a floating angry mouth is creepy enough as it is, this one is packed with sharp, horrifying, inward-angled teeth that are specifically designed to prevent the escape of its victims.

‘Plus everyone tells me I have bad breath.’

To say that anglerfish are antisocial is an understatement – they are natural born killers, through and through.  The roughly 200 species of anglerfish bobbing around the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans are all business.  Directly above the mouths of females is a fleshy stalk that protrudes from their dorsal spines. When an anglerfish spots prey, it goes deathly still, wiggles the end of the stalk as bait, and dinner swims right up to those waiting jaws.¹ To understand how disappointing this is for their prey, try to imagine a late night fast food drive-thru that has tempting pictures of yummy double-bacon burgers on the menu, only when you pull around to the first window there are no yummy double-bacon burgers but instead you get punched in the face, dragged from your car and eaten alive.

Thus do we arrive at the name ‘anglerfish.’ They are fish that fish.

Because they live in absolute darkness without even a keychain flashlight, deep sea anglerfish species have developed a lure equipped with a bioluminescent photophore.  That is to say, the organs at the end of their organic fishing poles actually glow in the dark, thanks to light-producing bacteria, most of whom either have no clue what manner of horror they’re intricately involved with or, at the very least, choose to look the other way. Plus, the lure glows in the same wavelengths of blue that the anglerfish’s skin tends to absorb, meaning the light from the lure doesn’t reflect back from the anglerfish and thus the anglerfish remains virtually invisible to its prey. All a victim sees is a shiny blue neon sign that promises good times but delivers the polar opposite (much like the entrance to a casino in Atlantic City).

‘All-you-can-eat shrimp for $3.99 and the loosest slots in town. Also, I’ll comp your drinks. No losers here.  Bada boom, bada bing.’

When it comes to reproduction, many species of Deep Sea Anglerfish have adopted an adorably romantic strategy.  Consider Ceratias holboelli. The male is tiny, black, and about the size of a finger, so if a female floats by when he’s feeling randy, he bites her, holds on, releases an enzyme and waits. Soon his mouth fuses with her flesh and their bloodstreams merge². Then it gets really mushy and sentimental as his eyes and internal organs and skin dissolve away, leaving only his gonads and the keys to his cherry-red Camaro³ for the female to haul around wherever she goes.

Naturally, he regrets this almost immediately, but it’s too late and there’s no pre-nup. What’s more, the female may carry around the remains of up to six males fused to her body. So when she’s ready to settle down and have larvae she has some dudes already lined up. All she has to do is look down and see who’s grafted to her abdomen.

None of this good in any way.

GRADE: F

¹ The jaws of anglerfish are extremely pliable, allowing them to swallow fish twice their size. And, we’d guess, lots of maximum strength Pepcid AC.

² This is why, when you’re heartbroken, you should never listen to people who try to console you with the maxim ‘there are plenty of fish in the sea.’ While this is technically true, you should also be aware that Deep Sea Anglerfish (and, for that matter, barracudas and deadly venomous Stonefish) are among those other fish in the sea.  And as long as we’re on the subject of Deep Sea Anglerfish, you can also now confidently ignore ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark.’  Also, on a completely unrelated note, ‘Lead, follow or get out of the way’ is kind of pointless too.

³ T-tops, low miles, aftermarket tachometer, sheepskin seat covers, 6-disc CD changer. Perfect interior, but needs some body work. $2,000 OBO.

*UPDATE* – Pandas To Go Extinct (Hopefully!)

It is often said that Animal Review leads and science follows.¹ So it was unsurprising that acclaimed British nature host Chris Packham of the BBC has joined Animal Review in suggesting that it may well be past time for panda bears to collectively shuffle off this mortal coil.

Joining the rising tide of voices in the animal commentariat, Packham says, ‘Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac. It’s not a strong species.  Unfortunately it’s big and cute and it’s a symbol of the WWF, and we pour millions of pounds into panda conservation.  I reckon we should pull the plug.  Let them go, with a degree of dignity.’   Animal Review agrees whole-heartedly, and if there is any sense in the communist government of China, they’ll see the wisdom in this policy as well.  Perhaps if it were somehow tied to putting lead in toys they’d get on board faster.   Maybe it could somehow involve suppressing political dissidents.  Diplomats should consider both.

Packham suggests that the piles of money poured into panda protection, panda conservation, panda breeding, panda houses, panda weekend getaways, and panda sailing trips to Bermuda instead be redirected to guarding the world’s biodiversity hot spots.  This is simple common sense, and while Animal Review would first like to get a look at what we’d be protecting in said hot spots before we all start protecting them too hard, letting pandas do what they so clearly desperately wish they could do – die out – is a fine plan indeed.²

So three cheers to Chris Packham for having the courage to say what pandas have been saying (through their refusal to mate) for what seems like forever.

¹ Nobody says this.

² Plus more bamboo for the rest of us. Visit www.bambooshowroom.com for a glorious glimpse of a pandaless future.

*UPDATE* – Animal Review Book

Dear readers:

Against their better judgment, the good people at Bloomsbury USA have offered to make an Animal Review book.

Why they are doing this is anyone’s guess, but somehow they decided to, so there should be a book available sometime next April. The next several months will be eaten up by the process of actually writing said book, so posts will be less frequent for a bit. Just kinda FYI.

Thanks to everyone for reading Animal Review, and a special thanks to Nick Trautwein, formerly of Bloomsbury, for an epic lapse in judgment.

*UPDATE* – Not cool, kangaroos

It was recently reported by the BBC that a man in Australia was forced to wrestle a kangaroo after it broke into his home.  The six-foot marsupial crashed through a window in the middle of the night.

“My initial thought when I was half awake was, ‘it’s a lunatic ninja coming through the window’,” Beat Elltin told reporters.  Sorting out that it was actually not an insane ninja but rather a more common member of Genus Macropus, Mr. Elltin began wrestling the kangaroo, eventually getting it into a headlock and dragging it out the front door.

While this was going on, Mr. Elltin was dressed in his underwear, which were shredded in the brawl, along with much of the skin on his buttocks.

Interestingly enough, there is an old saying among Australia’s aboriginal peoples (for whom kangaroo meat is a mainstay of their diet) that goes: ‘If you find yourself putting a kangaroo in a headlock while wearing only your underpants, there’s a problem.’

Truer words about underwear-clad kangaroo wrestling have rarely been spoken, except, of course, by Mr. Elltin himself, who a long time ago said, ‘I really don’t think I’ll ever have to put a kangaroo in a headlock. But knowing my luck, if it happens, I’ll probably be dressed in only my underpants which will likely be shredded in the process, so maybe I better keep some Bactrin around.’

Porcupine

Science has divided the 27 species of porcupines within the Order Rodentia into two families they call the Old World Porcupines (Family Hystricidae, trans. ‘Hallo, bonjour, ciào, guten tag!’ ) and the New World Porcupines (Family Erethizontidae, trans. ‘USA! USA! USA!’). Other than the geography, the criteria separating the two groups aren’t terribly profound — things like who is arboreal (New World), who has rooted molars (New World) and who wears dirty black-and-white striped shirts and rides bicycles down cobblestone streets with a baguette bouncing around in the basket while somehow still looking fabulous (Old World).

Regardless of taxonomic labels, all porcupines are nocturnal. Most species are strict herbivores, though a few will eat an occasional bug or two (usually after watching an episode of Man vs. Wild). But most important, all of them have adopted a creative, if peculiar, manner of defense.

‘Man, this nocturnal-arboreal thing really takes it out of you.’

The thing is, when you make a species-level decision to go down the herbivore road, you simultaneously choose to broadcast your status as a victim. You are, in essence, putting up a giant billboard in the hunting grounds of carnivorous predators that says in a bold sans-serif font: ‘We eat plants so you don’t have to. Try a herbivore tonight!’ There’s also a 30-second TV spot (with voiceover by Christian Slater) meant to sell you to the omnivore demographic. On top of that, there are endless piles of junk mail touting the health benefits of herbivore meat that flood the post boxes of mammalian carnivores after order Carnivora sold their contact list to a direct marketing firm. And to cap it all off, ecosystem energy levels essentially dictate that only a small number of herbivores can be big and intimidating enough to scare off predators, or at very least, the ecosystem gently nudges them in the direction of smaller, more manageable targets.

‘You don’t want none of this keratin horn.’

So it is that the typical small-ish herbivore finds itself with a big, massive target on its fur. Thus, the first order of business is to hit the old whiteboard and think up a defensive strategy that doesn’t involve trampling. One obvious choice is to hide underground. That works. Another option is armor plating. There’s also flying, speed, camouflage, a baseball bat near your bed, and self-defense classes at the local community college. The problem is that it’s all so done…there are only so many ways to avoid being eaten, and they’re all taken.

Or are they? Just when we thought we’d seen everything from the herbivore’s portfolio, the porcupine comes along with an unexpected defensive sensation¹.

‘I’m just thinking out loud here, but what if we had detachable spikes for hair?’

As people (like this Animal Reviewer) who are fond of running around referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point at every possible opportunity would say, the idea for a coat of quills had ‘stickiness.’ The porcupine’s quills are mostly composed of keratin (a durable protein that, along with chitin, is always showing up in the multiple choice sections of biology tests so check your work). Their quills also have little barbs at the end that make extraction a long, laborious and painful ordeal that requires pliers and lots of whiskey. Once removed, the relief is short lived. Because now it’s blood infection time² – everyone’s least favorite time of the year. Meanwhile, the porcupine gets busy regrowing his missing quills. All of a sudden, the question of who is the hunter – and who is the hunted – just got a whole lot murkier.³

Eventually, the quill concept would be eclipsed by the skunk, but for its time, the idea was revolutionary. It immediately and dramatically reduced the numbers of natural predators a porcupine had to worry about. And it is still powerful today. The vast majority of small animals in order Rodentia scurry around in abject terror most of the time, while the porcupine periodically wonders what all the fuss is about. Quills let the porcupine be the porcupine. Unhindered by thoughts of dismemberment that lead most small animals to distraction, the porcupine is free to pursue its myriad porcupine interests.

These interests mostly involve eating wood and looking for salt. New World Porcupines are crazy for the inner bark of coniferous trees. They also seek out clothes, tools and other objects that are coated with the salt from human sweat. In many parts of North America, porcupines have been known to waddle into campgrounds (without paying) for the sole purpose of munching on used canoe paddles because, nutritionally speaking, used canoe paddles are loaded with wood and fairly high in salt.

‘You know what this wood could use is some salt.’

Occasionally, an ambitious mountain lion or a coyote or a particularly stupid domesticated dog (who could just as easily eat from its bowl, but of course that’s too simple) will interrupt the porcupine’s quest for wood and salt. In response, the porcupine will shoot up its infamous quills⁴, turn its bristling rump in the direction of the predator and ask with a mild inflection of rhetorical sarcasm, ‘So. How hungry are you really?’

Most of the time, the aggressor backs down and the porcupine is off to look for more wood and salt, whistling a Top 40 tune and trying to beat his last high score on his Centipede iPhone app. Then it gets run over by a car.

And thus, the moral of the story is that every defensive strategy has its limits. So heads up out there, herbivores.

GRADE: B+

¹ The porcupine immediately found itself entrenched in a copyright infringement battle with the cactus that lasted six years. Eventually, the case of Porcupine v. Plantae was heard by the Supreme Court of North Dakota. The judges ruled 4-3 in favor of the porcupine after the porcupine’s brilliant attorney (David Boies) sought cover for his client under the established legal principle of the ‘idea-expression divide,’ citing Apple Computer Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation and reading directly from the US Supreme Court decision in Mazer v. Stein: ‘Unlike a patent, a copyright gives no exclusive right to the art disclosed; protection is given only to the expression of the idea—not the idea itself.’ At which point the herbivores in the courtroom erupted in cheer and the cacti poured out into the streets to riot and conserve water. The rest is natural history.

² Surprise! The up-to 30,000 quills of the world’s third-largest rodent are not sterile. Who’da thunk it. Hope you like sepsis.

³ It’s still the same, but that sounds really deep, so just nod in agreement.

⁴ Porcupines cannot fire their quills like missiles. That’s a popular misconception that the porcupine makes little effort to correct.

*UPDATE* – Bullet Ant

In reference to the bullet ant review (see below), a vigilant reader points out that the first example is inaccurate, as all eels are in fact fish, though the electric eel is not actually a true eel, as it’s a member of a different class.

Thank you to Nathan for pointing out such an obvious and careless mistake on the part of Animal Review.

Northern Cardinal

The Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, trans. ‘I’m too tired for this; let’s just throw some letters on the end of it to make it look Latinate, repeat it twice, and go home already.’) is a bird in the Family Cardinalae (lit: ‘Listen, it’s fine – they’re all basically Cardinals, right?  So let’s just get this over with. Please.‘) and can be found in southern Canada, most parts of the eastern half of the United States, parts of California, New Mexico, and Arizona (where it often moves either to retire or to open an auto dealership), as well as Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize (where the Cardinal got its scuba diving certification).

‘Hola. Soy el Cardenal, un pájaro rojo. ¿Te gusta diving de scuba?’

Known for their distinctive black masks and pronounced head crests, Cardinals are most famous for their bright red color, though in fact only the male is red; females are a dull gray-brown-red color.  This type of split in gender appearance is known as sexual dimorphism, and, as with most things male, the male Cardinal’s choices in vibrant coloring – along with the scuba lessons and several other behaviors – ultimately center around trying to meet girls.

For instance, the male Northern Cardinal is fiercely territorial, and will even attack its own reflection in a mirror.¹ Given that Cardinals rarely venture far from where they were born and are non-migratory, this aggressiveness is probably born in large part from personal insecurity (of course, this suspicion is only increased by their habit of donning the bird equivalent of a sports car).

Watcha bench?

Unlike most northern songbirds, the female cardinal also sings, and since Northern Cardinals learn their songs (and as a result the songs vary by region), there is all the more pressure on the male to come up with something impressive. It is not uncommon to hear the ‘cheer, cheer, cheer’ call of a Cardinal mixed in with the opening chords of Stairway to Heaven during a walk in the woods in the first few days of Spring; nor is it uncommon to see a bright red bird violently attacking its reflection in a mirror for no apparent reason.

‘Anyone wanna hear some Journey?’

To improve their chances, males will often sing duets with female Cardinals, all the while stretching their necks and rocking (both physically and musically). During courtship, the male Cardinal often collects food and feeds it to the female on whom he’s set his sights, even feeding her beak-to-beak as a way of wearing down her defenses. He’s also memorized a couple Robert Frost poems so as soon as he sees an opening he can say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my favorite poem’ and recite the one that fits best, trying hard to seem like he wasn’t rehearsing this whole routine in the bird bath right before their date.

‘ “…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made a pretty big difference.”  Sorry, I was just reminded of The Road Less Traveled when you mentioned your new gym membership.’

The male Cardinal will do almost anything to convince the female cardinal to like him, including going to her Pilates class with her, tagging along to museums that he pretends to think are interesting, and encouraging her to work on her children’s book.  And whenever female cardinal comes around, the male cardinal always finds a way to be out in the driveway, working on the house with his shirt off.

‘Oh, hey.  Didn’t see you there. Just cleaning the gutters. Sure is hot out, huh?’

Eventually the female cardinal gives in to his charms and starts liking him.  Of course, the male Cardinal soon regrets everything, though he’s not really sure why.  He starts remembering really important business dinners that he just has to get to.  When the female Cardinal asks him if he has dinner plans, he replies that tonight’s his ‘late day’ at work (regardless of the day) and he probably won’t be leaving the office until midnight.  Then the male Cardinal calls his friend and tells him the whole story.  They hang on the phone for awhile and come to an agreement that this whole thing was a bad idea from the start and that the male Cardinal needs to get out of it somehow.  The two of them will conjure up a plan to that effect, but then the male Cardinal chickens out and agrees to be the female Cardinal’s date to a work party, and soon enough, she thinks they’re dating, and that’s that.

Next thing he knows, the male Cardinal is helping to raise the young and participating in feeding. Since Cardinals are socially monogamous, the male Cardinal will soon find himself buying a minivan and getting a massive mortgage, all the while reminiscing about how great his lost bachelorhood was, even though when he was a bachelor he spent all his free time doing very little of great consequence.  All in all, this is probably just as well, since all of the male Cardinal’s friends are starting families, and he has fewer and fewer buddies with whom to play video games online anyway.

GRADE: B-

¹ This is just sad.

Bullet Ant

Kingdom Animalia is rife with misleading common names. For instance, the electric eel is not an eel but a fish (albeit a high-voltage one). Meanwhile, jellyfish are not fish, nor are they are made of jelly or jam or marmalade or even preserve – sadly, ‘jellyfish’ are mostly tentacles and painful nematocyst stingers, making the majority of species a very poor companion to English muffins. Up on dry land, the lies persist: badgers rarely nag or impose upon the other woodland creatures; the tarantula hawk is neither a predatory bird with eight talons nor a giant flying spider (it’s a wasp); and the Great Dane is, in reality, just pretty good and is actually of German extraction (the accent tends to creep back after it’s had a few too many cocktails).

 

I’m sorry, my napkin ist gefallen. Now vat vere you sayink?

All of this is frustrating, confusing, and enough to make us all want to start smoking again. But what to do? Well all of us could make a collective decision to employ Linnaeus’ clunky Genus-species binomial nomenclature system in everyday conversation. And sure, that would eliminate the problem of misleading animal names. But it almost doubles the number of names to remember. What’s more, the movement would certainly lose steam the first time someone at the beach spotted a large dorsal fin tearing through the water and yelled, ‘Carcharodon carcharias!’ – and then watched in erudite horror as children continued to splash around and their parents avoided eye contact with what they assumed to be a crazy Italian tourist.

 

Then, of course, the killing would begin.

 

I strongly support use of the binomial naming system.

 

So like it or not – for good reason or not – we’re stuck with the oft-perplexing common names.

The bullet ant (Paraponera clavata, lit. ‘Anaphylactic shock and awe’) of Central and South America falls into a very specific category of common names that are at first misleading (‘Hmmm, it doesn’t look like a bullet…I wonder if maybe it’s fast like a bullet?’), but which then makes immediate sense when you realize you’ve been absentmindedly standing on its nest this whole entire time (‘Oh…it hurts like a bullet…okay okay…I think I get it now’).

Sorry for the confusion. I wanted to be called The Wicked Sting Pain Machine.

The bullet ant is so named because the long, retractable syringe on its abdomen injects an incredibly painful neurotoxic peptide, poneratoxin, and it is poneratoxin that makes the bullet ant the stuff of legend among entomologists and myrmecologists.¹ Just how painful is a bullet ant’s poneratoxin? Well, in simple layman’s terms, it hurts like [EXPLETIVE DELETED]. More scientifically stated, it tops the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, coming in at 4.0+ on a scale of 1 to 4, which means that the pain of a bullet ant sting is literally off the charts, and makes one wonder if the Schmidt Sting Pain Index could use some revising.² In its present form, the Schmidt Sting Pain Index is the brainchild of Justin Schmidt, an entomologist who subjected himself to the bites and stings of horrible insects in his very favorite taxonomic order, Hymenoptera (mainly wasps, bees and ants), in an effort to classify the pain numerically and get his picture in Pointless Weekly.³ And though it found overnight success among entomologists, the insect pain scale never found a foothold in popular culture, and the great Muhammad Ali is never described as a pugilist who could ‘float like a butterfly and sting like a 2.54 on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.’

 

Schmidt characterized the sting of a single bullet ant as ‘pure, intense, brilliant pain’ and suggested (from self-imposed experience) that it was about 30 times more painful than the sting of a common wasp. And so, the bullet ant holds the title of both world’s most hurtful insect and the world’s most hurtful invertebrate, while Schmidt himself remains ranked as the coolest entomologist in the cafeteria.

 

‘Did I tell you that I let a bumblebee sting the inside of my nose? Because I did.’

It turns out, however, that long before Schmidt and his pain experiments, the Satere-Mawe tribesman of Brazil were well aware of the kind of pain available from the bullet ants. Sure, they lack the science to isolate the poneratoxin and identify its precise effect on nervous tissue, but they do have the good old common sense to collect the ants, drug them with a natural anesthetic and weave them by the hundreds into thatched gloves for their young aspiring warriors to wear for ten minutes (a process repeated up to twenty times over the course of their initiation) rendering their hands into burning, throbbing useless masses of excruciating torture that lasts for hours and hours. The Satere-Mawe still perform this rite of passage to this day, leading the first Satere-Mawe warriors to witness a cowboy-themed Bar Mitzvah in the San Fernando Valley to wonder if their own rite of passage didn’t leave some room for improvement.

Aside from a mind-bending sting, bullet ants are huge (for an ant), with workers reaching up to one inch in length, making them the largest ant in the world. And opposite their abdominal stinger, these predatory/scavenging insects sport oversized mandibles that offer prey such as termites the choice of death by neurotoxic peptide or a giant pair of organic pliers.  Indignant termites will often ridicule this proposition as an ‘either-or fallacy’ or a ‘false dilemma,’ pointing out that they also have the option to escape, though they rarely complete the thought.

 

Suffice it to say, the bullet ant has had little success with online personals.

Given the bullet ant’s small-animal-big-sting persona, Animal Review is willing to overlook its somewhat misleading common name (along with a stern admonition that it could be clearer; might we suggest a simple prefix like ‘Neurotoxic’ or ‘Excruciating’ – or both?).  The fact is, the bullet ant carries the most painful sting of any insect – so painful that simply wearing a glove filled with hundreds of bullet ants twenty times is apparently enough to make you into a warrior (though more than a few Satere-Mawe initiates are said to realize that getting their hands stung by ants doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with winning wars, anyway, and instead opt for vocational school).  The only real issue holding back Paraponera clavata is that, after all is said and done, it is still an ant, and nobody ever gets too excited about ants⁴.

GRADE: B+

 

¹ Not to mention the occasional cosmetologist who sits down on a tree stump in a Nicaraguan forest to reapply her lipstick.

 

² You first.

 

³ The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is not to be confused with the Schmidt Sting Pain Scale, which Justin Schmidt developed to classify the terrible progression of Gordon Sumner’s complete discography.  Schmidt ranked the October 2006 release ‘Songs from the Labyrinth’ at 3.8, describing it as ‘hot, smoky, searing agony. Even for $6.99.’

⁴ Except myrmecologists.

 

Garden Snail

The garden snail (Helix aspersa, lit. ‘three-dimensional corkscrew-shaped appetizer’) is a terrestrial mollusk that never really figured out how to get positive results from Evolution. In defense of the snail, that’s not an easy task, because Evolution is a manic-depressive genius and famously difficult to work with on anything. Plus the garden snail kept catching Evolution in its ‘experimental’ periods.

When confronted by the same complicated problems, epoch after epoch, Evolution produces a host of different solutions (there are ten unique plans for the eye, each designed when Evolution went off its meds). These tend to range from the breathtaking to the absurd (again, depending on Evolution’s mood at the time). Unfortunately for H. aspersa, Evolution was on what it was certain was a creative (though also quite likely chemically-influenced) high when it decided to make the garden snail’s Big Three – Sensory Organs, Locomotion, and Reproduction – and the result of its three-day all-nighter was somehow all at once both far too much – and yet not nearly enough.

Apparently Evolution just broke up with its girlfriend.

Here’s a tip: when Evolution suddenly gets up, locks itself in the bathroom and turns on the shower so you can’t hear it sobbing in Latin – that’s not the time to get in the Eye Line, at least not if you’re hoping for complex, autofocusing, mammalian eyes with a large dynamic contrast ratio and a nice, roomy, dedicated visual cortex for data processing. However, if you are in the Eye Line at that point, there are at least even odds that you end up with light-sensitive™ eyestalks openly purchased from Wal-Mart as ‘found art’ that Evolution keeps declaring its latest ‘masterpiece.’

‘Say…you didn’t keep the receipt by any chance?’

Complementing its flimsy, cheap, light-sensing ‘eyes’ (assembly required, batteries not included, online .pdf manual impossible to find and poorly translated¹), Evolution then decided to dedicate H. aspersa’s remaining two face-based tentacles to touch and smell, though precisely why is anyone’s guess (just nobody ask). As pleased as Evolution was with this creative choice, the design ended up a case study on the dangers of placing too much faith in one’s genius, as the typical snail just ends up confused as to which of the four tentacles to use in which situation, and it’s not infrequent that these animals stick an eye into a carton of milk to smell if it’s gone bad. To paraphrase the words of Evolution’s former business manager, it’s just too much for no reason at all.

Locomotion in the snail begat another moment of creative turpitude for Evolution. Bored with what it kept lambasting as ‘pedestrian’ modes of transit, such as walking, flying or zipping around via jet propulsion (already ‘played out’ in the snail’s sophisticated mollusc cousin, the squid), Evolution gave snails what seems to be some kind of deeply ironic commentary about some social issue that none of us will ever really understand.² Anyway, whatever Evolution’s bigger point in its work, snails are left to get around town by sliding their single ‘foot’ over a trail of their own mucous, meaning that the garden snail tops out around 23 iph (inches per hour) at full throttle with snot boosters set to max. Suffice it to say, this marked the low-point for Evolution’s career, as even the Arts section of the New York Times offered only measured praise, prompting Evolution to cancel its subscription for two weeks and causing a minor sensation around Manhattan that ended when the newspaper’s ombudsman wrote an apology.

‘Anyone wanna swap for a pair of legs?  Don’t bother answering – I’m also deaf.’

A complete creative nadir was reached with Evolution’s indefensible choices for the garden snail for sexual reproduction. First of all, it made all of them hermaphrodites, but that wasn’t ‘new’ enough, apparently. When two garden snails contemplate reproduction one of them initiates the act by injecting the other with a mystery mucous (of course) using what scientists call a ‘love dart.’ After the unveiling of the ‘love dart’ to a capacity crowd at its gallery, Evolution noticed that most of them were either confusedly staring at said love dart and/or quietly picking at their hors d’œuvres. After a long, uncomfortable pause and some polite clapping, someone had the temerity to ask if the love dart was a metaphor for a collectivized Oedipus Complex. Well, everyone got the answer to that question when Evolution threw its champagne in the questioner’s face and stomped out of the room.

It was a long time before answers could be had, as soon thereafter Evolution stopped giving interviews. But in March of 2006, some researchers at Canada’s famed McGill University in Montreal did an experiment in which they cut off some snails’ love darts³ and proceeded to inject one group with saltwater and the other with the mystery mucous. They found that the mystery mucous delivered by love darts actually doubles a snail’s potential to produce offspring. In short, Evolution wasn’t completely off – just mostly. And in point of fact, it also turns out that snail researchers also double their chances of not mating simply by performing snail research.

‘Darts, huh? You know, this reminds me of my research in snail reproduction. I’ve found that control groups injected with saline sol…Desiree, wait…where are you going?’

Snails are, in short, a mess. They’re tragically underwhelming in their complexity, and they make clear that even the best natural selectors make bad choices. And since nobody else seems willing to say it: Sorry, Evolution – you screwed up on this one.

GRADE: D-

¹ The English version of the garden snail’s online light-sensing eyestalk manual instructs it to ‘Insert Cornea tab A1 into Retina slot B3 and take 16mm screw please include to fassen (sic) to Optic Nerve.’ And then for no clear reason it switches to German. What a mess.

² The DNA blueprints for even the finest snot propulsions systems are so ridiculous that most ribosomes simply refuse to translate them into proteins.

³ It’s cool – they grow back.