The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Polar bears and penguins

Near the North Pole, examining a submarine.

When we were getting ready to go to Antarctica, people warned us about polar bears. Polar bears, they pointed out, are fast, big, smart, dangerous. They are more inclined than other bears to view humans as fabulous taste explosions.

No, we said. We're going to the Antarctic, not the Arctic. There are no polar bears in Antarctica.

Oh yeah. Well, polar bears eat people!

During our stay, groups from our station occasionally visited passing cruise ships. The station manager and lab manager gave talks about the U.S. Antarctic Program. Then, Q & A for all of us from the station.

They told you that was a bear costume?

The ship passengers knew they would not be seeing polar bears. But some asked why. Ice and snow everywhere – perfect polar bear country. Why no big white bears?

Here are my responses – after looking it up – to the Big Questions.

Are there polar bears in Antarctica?
You already know: no.

Here's a way you might guess this from personal experience. Have you ever seen a photograph of a polar bear eating a penguin? Probably not. But if polar bears and penguins lived in the same place, there'd be photos. So far, no one's told me they've seen such a photo. Although there are zoos in this world, so who knows.


Why aren't there polar bears in Antarctica?

History! Really ancient history. There's a nice video by Sally Gillies that tells just how ancient. Basically, the bear family evolved in the northern hemisphere. As bears developed exciting new spin-offs (panda! sun bear! sloth bear!), some bears moved south. To this day, there are more bear species in the northern hemisphere than the south. The closest bear to Antarctica is the spectacled bear, which rambled south along the Andes. It gets no further down than northwest Argentina.

(In the Bronx Zoo.) Look at the size of those feet.

What with continents drifting apart and all, Antarctica is too far for a bear to swim. Up north, polar bears, who recently spun off from grizzly bears, had a smooth transition across land from warmer climates to icy ones. From there they could stroll onto sea ice. Or swim feasible distances.


So even if people weren't making life very difficult for bears (ask the extinct Atlas bear of northern Africa), and they were free to explore new niches, it'd be a long time, if ever, before a bear got far enough south to be selected for Antarctic living. And when we talk about people making life difficult for polar bears, the biggest factor is climate change.



Should there be polar bears in Antarctica?

No. You've heard that things are getting bad for polar bears. Because of Arctic warming, they're losing sea ice to hunt from. Habitat is melting out from under those huge furry feet.

Plate tectonics? What does that have to do with me?

You know somebody somewhere is thinking maybe polar bears could be transplanted to Antarctica. Sure, climate chaos is happening there, too, but for now there's still sea ice. Assisted migration! What could be bad?

Ask any penguin what could be bad. They will say “Awwwk! I see no problem! Awwwk!” That is because penguins are stupid about land predators. When early explorers brought sled dogs to Antarctica, penguins would walk up to the tethered dogs. “Awwwk! What's your story, furball?” The dogs would tear them to pieces. More penguins would walk up. “Awwwk! Are you new kids?” The dogs would tear them to pieces. More penguins would walk up. “Awwwk! Can I touch your fur?” And so on.

In the Svalbard Archipelago, eating a walrus. Gulls stand by ready to help.

Polar bears could devastate penguin colonies. In fact, polar bears are already turning to northern bird colonies. They're trying to survive by eating prey so small they previously didn't bother with them. Lots and lots of eggs.


So yeah no. Polar bears are an unpredictable bunch. Antarctic wildlife is also subject to the grievous insults of climate change. They don't need rapacious northerners on top of that.

Carpetbaggers, stay away!

Bears? Sure, bring 'em on. There's plenty of room. What ARE bears, anyway?

 

Mammal contests

Daniel Everett – then a missionary, now a linguist -- had just come to live in a Pirahã village in the Brazilian Amazon, by the bank of the Maici River. In his book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, he writes, “I was startled by the sight of two small gray porpoises jumping in sync out of the river. I had no idea that there were freshwater porpoises.”

Not in the Amazon Basin, there aren't, so let's call them dolphins.

Things got even better. Two canoes came hurtling around a river bend, furiously paddled by local men who were chasing the dolphins, trying to tag them with the canoe paddles. The dolphins could easily evade the canoes, but kept popping up almost within reach so the men would chase them some more. People in the village gathered to watch, laughing uproariously.

The men chased the dolphins until it got too dark to continue. “In all my years watching this contest between mammals, no porpoise has ever been 'tagged,'” Everett writes.

Everett and his family lived among the Pirahã for years. He learned, and wrote a thesis on, their difficult language, and failed to convert a single person. He lost his religious belief and diverged from the teachings of famous linguist Noam Chomsky in making the controversial argument that the Pirahã language doesn't have features of Chomskian “universal grammar,” notably recursion. He also says it doesn't have names for colors or numbers, and that the Pirahã don't have “motherese” (baby talk). They don't have a creation story. My favorite part is the idea that the language has many suffixes indicating the source of information, so that one distinguishes instantly between, say, “Dan caught a fish (I saw him),” “Dan caught a fish (Keren says she saw it)” and “Dan caught a fish (I assume on circumstantial evidence).”

(A related problem with missionary efforts to the Pirahã seems to be a cultural impatience with extended hearsay. If you were Jesus Christ, they would be happy to talk to you. If you had seen Jesus Christ perform a miracle, they'd be willing to hear that. But if your pastor told you that he read in Bible that Timothy heard that Jesus Christ performed miracles, the Pirahã can't be bothered.)

Everett's claims have created great ongoing controversy, and more non-theological interest in studying the Pirahã language. He's been called a charlatan, or simply wrong about one point or another.

About the porpoises – the only freshwater porpoises were in the Yangtze (probably now extinct). I can't figure out if Everett was seeing the freshwater dolphin called Inia geoffrensis or boto, or the one called Sotalia fluviatilis or tucuxi. He had missionary training and linguistic training, not natural history training, so I don't think imprecise cetacean nomenclature reflects on Everett-as-observer.

Here's a picture of a boto in the Duisberg Zoo.


Here's a picture of what I take to be a tucuxi.


If only I were blogging in Pirahã! This entry would be much shorter, since with simple prefixes I could indicate things like “Everett said this,” “Everett said this, but I think he meant something else,” “Wikimedia Commons didn't exactly say this, but this is a picture the search term sent me to,” and “the boto caught a fish (unless that's Photoshop work).”

What immortal hand or eye dare Photoshop thy fearful symmetry?

A tiger's scientific name is Panthera tigris. There are several subspecies, though not so many as there used to be, and one is the South China tiger, Panthera tigris amoyensis. It's said to be the “stem tiger,” the one from which other subspecies diverged. (Which doesn't imply that it has stayed unchanged since then.)

Sadly for the South China tiger, Mao Tse-Tung took against it in 1959, called it an enemy of the people, and instituted eradication programs. He didn't like flies or rats, either, but they resisted eradication better than tigers. “Paper tiger” is an old Chinese phrase for something that only looks scary. (Mao famously used it to describe the US and the Soviet Union.) Actually, real tigers never qualified as enemies of the people of China. The threat posed by real tigers was a paper tiger that Mao used as a propaganda device. They made great posters.

By the time the Chinese government, long after Mao, decided to preserve the magnificent South China tiger, they couldn't find any, except in zoos. It was said that a few survived. China had tiger expert Ron Tilson do a survey to tell them how many were left. The answer: zero.

The government also offered a reward for evidence of a wild South China tiger.

Not giving up, China's State Forestry Administration planned a system of tiger preserves. The idea is to set up protected areas, stock them with suitable tiger prey, and then add captive-born South China tigers from zoo stock. Programs were started to teach captive-born cubs hunting skills, one in Fujian province, one in South Africa. (Perhaps you have been told that there are no tigers in Africa. There aren't, except the ones doing junior year abroad.) The plan includes releasing tigers into preserves as part of the 2008 Olympic Games ballyhoo.

Then, last October, exciting news came that, despite Mao (and poachers), there were still wild tigers in South China. Zhou Zhenglong, a farmer and hunter in Shaanxi province, came forth with photos of a tiger in the woods, and of its footprints.

Wow! Press conference! Cash prize for Zhou!

Experts at the Shaanxi Forest Administration Bureau confirmed the pictures were authentic.  "[T]he tiger has been found again after more than 20 years." It was inspiring news.

But some people in China's internet community weren't so inspired. They pointed out certain discrepancies. Why did the tiger look so shiny? Why was its pose identical in each photo? Shaanxi officials stood by Zhou and their South China tiger. The internet investigators kept clamoring. Why did the tiger not only look exactly the same in each photo, but also, excuse us, why did it look exactly the same as this tiger poster?

Alas, it turns out that Zhou Zhenglong, that simple farmer, had employed his humble computer graphics skills, an old poster, and a fake tiger foot to produce his pictures and claim the prize. The Shaanxi forestry department backed down.

Ugh! New press conference! Jail for Zhou! Bitter references to paper tigers!

The South China tiger continues not to roam Shaanxi province, wild and free. But there are wild tigers in China. Up in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, bordering Russia, a few North China tigers roam. Their subspecies is Panthera tigris altaica, also called the Amur tiger or the Siberian tiger. They are beginning to get protection.

I'd like to see both the North and South China tigers protected. The South China tiger will first have to be reintroduced, a pathbreaking event. Since this zoo-bred population, deriving from few animals, will surely have slightly different bloodlines than the population that used to range South China, I suggest designating it a new subspecies. In honor of its history: Panthera tigris papyrus, the paper tiger.