The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Chomp

One day I saw a giant sea turtle bite my sister. We were snorkeling in Hawaii and were suddenly in the midst of a number of turtles. They were feeding on seaweed. I looked over at my sister, and saw her beaming at a turtle from a respectful distance. Unnoticed by her, another turtle had appeared behind her, much closer. All was well until the swells pushed them together, causing her to bump gently against the turtle. Annoyed, the turtle extended its beak and bit my sister.

Right on the wetsuit.

She didn't notice the nip. When I told her about it later, she was chagrined to have missed this wildlife experience.
 
Another day I was visiting tidepools on the California coast with a friend. We found a small, sullen, pink octopus lurking in some eelgrass. I scooped it out to look at it. It tried to slide away, but I moved my hands so that it just kept oozing into the next hand. Then I arranged for it to ooze into George's hands. After he had admired it, he eased it back into the tidepool where we had found it.

Just as he had lowered it into the water and was taking his hands away he exclaimed, “It bit me!” There was a small red dot near the base of a finger. Instantly a stranger materialized at our backs. “Their bite is venomous,” he remarked and strolled away.

That was a horrid moment. (Meanwhile the octopus had emitted a gratuitous cloud of ink and departed.) I am happy to report that this  species of octopus (which must have been either Octopus rubescens or Octopus bimaculoides) is not very venomous. “Like a bee sting,” George said afterward. He survived to brag of being bitten by an octopus, which is more than I can do.

However, I was once bitten by a snake. It made two little holes in my finger.

This was a long time ago when I was a nature-struck youth. It was a garter snake, and I can't imagine why it bit me unless it was because I had been chasing it across a empty lakebed, and had grabbed it when it took refuge in the bottom of a mud puddle, and was in the process of thrusting it into a bag.

I feel remorseful about this. However, the snake was not too traumatized to eat several small toads that were also in the bag. This while the bag was dangling from the handlebars of a bicycle as I madly pedaled for home. Nor was the snake too weakened to force its way out of the charming fish tank I had furnished for it to live in, the one with a heavy slab of glass on top, which the snake elbowed aside when it departed before a day had passed.

Tough snake.

 

 

When viewing the elephant

This broadside advertises the appearance of, probably, the first elephant brought to the U.S. The unfortunate elephant's child was bought in India and shipped on the vessel America. The captain planned to make money exhibiting it.

   With kind permission of the New-York Historical Society.

The broadside is a nice mix of inaccuracy and loftiness. The Elephant is apparently the one known elsewhere and later as “Old Bet.” Female.

“...[B]y his intelligence, [he] makes as near an approach to man, as matter can approach spirit.” Humans, that spiritual species, enjoyed offering alcohol to The Elephant.

“He... drinks all kinds of spirituous liquors; some days he has drank 30 bottles of porter, drawing the corks with his trunk.” Even when sloshed, the elephant “never attempted to hurt any one.” Yet beware. “The Elephant having destroyed many papers of consequence, it is recommended to visitors not to come near him with such papers.”

Why did The Elephant destroy papers of consequence? (Why would a person going to see an elephant bring papers of consequence along?)

My knowledge of animal behavior does not suggest an answer. My knowledge of cheesy fiction would suggest that the elephant associates papers of consequence with bills of sale and of lading, and its own unchosen journey from India and subsequent exile, and therefore responds with rage to the sight of documents – but that seems too pulpy to be true. A family member with knowledge of correct social behavior suggests that the elephant finds the flourishing of papers rude. That the elephant would react the same way to cell phone use.

“Hi, guess what? I'm looking at The Elephant right now! Yes! It's awesome. Oh, it's huge. Totally respectable. It's uncorking bottles – ooh, now it's looking at me! It's coming over! The trunk is – WHOA--!” (Sound of phone being stepped on.)

This makes sense to me. The respectable elephant knows what is polite and what is not – and, fueled by alcohol, starts enforcing the rules. I suppose that Miss Manners never goes on drunken etiquette rampages, or we would have heard about it.

Dinosaur sins

It was morning. My spouse was dressing for the day. I was reading in bed, working through Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. “This is an interesting bar graph,” I said. “It shows a bunch of major living groups through time, and the only group that doesn't make it into the present is the dinosaurs.”

“Oh?” said my spouse, not really seeming fascinated.

“And I've been reading all these books about religion, and so the idea naturally occurs to me that if the dinosaurs were the only group wiped out, it must be because God punished them. I wonder if anyone has advanced that idea.”

“Uh huh,” my spouse said.

“The dinosaurs must have really sinned to be singled out that way,” I said.

“The dinosaurs were sluts!” my spouse shouted as he rifled through his sock drawer. “Sluts and gonifs!"

I don't know where that came from. I had no idea that he harbored resentment about the moral character of dinosaurs.

 

I don't want anyone to think I take Miller's graph too seriously. He calls it “elementary.” But I've been thinking off and on, when I have something else to do, about the sins of the dinosaurs. Some Biblical literalists say the dinosaurs drowned because they weren't taken onto Noah's ark. Well, why weren't they? Not because they were too big, for there were many small dinosaurs – they weren't saved.

It can't be that they were unclean, because Genesis has Noah loading both clean and unclean animals.

So some dinosaur did something awful? For a second, I thought maybe it was a dinosaur who suggested frugivory to Eve, but then I remembered that Genesis not only fingers the snake, but says the snake is punished by having to crawl on its belly thereafter. All the dinosaurs I know about had legs.

A dinosaur did something even worse than abetting the Fall? Not necessarily. Peoples in holy writ are often obliterated for things that I, personally, might pass over with a glare and a sniff. Maybe something trivial got the dinosaurs killed, whether you believe it was done by barring them from the Ark, or by something mechanistic like having an asteroid flung at them.

Maybe a pteranodon laughed at a prophet's bald head, or a stegosaurus danced naked on an altar, or a velociraptor worshipped a golden calf. Could have been anything, really. Being a slut or gonif might be enough.

But let's think about the biology. What sins are dinosaurs likely to have committed? Let's look at birds, their closest living relatives. What really annoying things do birds do? Often they make a lot of noise. I've heard many complaints about trees full of grackles or starlings shrieking their heads off. A lot of self-proclaimed tree-huggers become enraged when describing a mockingbird singing at night when said nature lovers are trying to sleep, damn it. One dark secret about penguins is how incredibly noisy their colonies are. (The other is how badly those colonies stink.)

Maybe dinosaurs were noisy. There were a lot of them, and some were huge. Imagine a bunch of forty-ton tubas having an argument with a colony of ten thousand furious piccolos. (Maybe a few swooping pterosaurs – imagine angry fiddles with 11-meter wingspans.)

Fans of the Gilgamesh epic will know that the Babylonians also wrote of a Great Flood. It happened because humans, who had become numerous, were noisy and made so much racket that Enlil, greatest of the gods, couldn't sleep. Plagues didn't shut them up. Droughts didn't shut them up. So, flood.

Thus the possibility that the dinosaurs roared and chirped and screamed so incessantly that they were destroyed by divine wrath has theological precedent as well as biological plausibility.

Sluts, gonifs, loudmouths, who knows what got the dinosaurs in trouble? Whatever it was, they clearly threw amazing parties.

You wouldn't find them sitting around reading about reconciling evolution and religion.

Sometimes I really miss the dinosaurs.

I'm bellowing and splashing because you make me sick!

Some scientists (Robert L. Pitman and John W. Durban, to name a few) were cruising Antarctic waters. They were looking for killer whales, a.k.a. orcas.* (Why don't they invite me? I love this stuff.) The researchers wished to document a crafty behavior seen among some seal-eating orcas, in which they team up to knock seals off ice floes. Up to seven orcas swim in a row to make a wave big enough to tip the ice, and wash the seal off. Cool, if you're not a seal.
 

One morning the scientists chugged up to ten orcas and found them in some kind of splashy muddle with a couple much-larger humpback whales. Bellowing like crazy, the humpbacks were whacking the water's surface with flippers and tails. The orcas were milling around. Then they moved on. The researchers guessed the orcas might have been checking to see if the humpbacks could be weak enough to attack. But when they looked at their video, they noticed a Weddell seal in the melee, between the humpbacks, and wondered if the orcas had been after the seal.

The scientists pursued the pod of orcas, who soon spotted a crabeater seal relaxing on an ice floe. Oho! Inconsiderately, the orcas generated a wave which broke the floe into pieces. The seal, “distraught,” was now on a much tinier floe. Before the orcas could make their next move, the same humpbacks appeared. Again with the bellowing and splashing! As Pitman and Durban recount in the November 2009 Natural History the orcas “seemed annoyed,” and took off without harassing the seal further. Hmm, “mobbing behavior,” the researchers concluded. Interesting.

Next week they were spying on a different batch of orcas, attacking a different Weddell seal on a different ice floe, when who should appear but a different pair of humpbacks. The orcas had actually knocked the seal into the water, but before they could grab it, the seal swam toward the humpbacks. When it got to the closest one, the humpback rolled onto its back in such a way that the seal was swept up onto the humpback's chest. The humpback arched its body to lift the seal above the water, nudging it with a flipper so it didn't slide off. “Moments later, the seal scrambled off and swam to the safety of a nearby ice floe.” A bigger one, I presume.

Pitman and Durban changed their speculation from “mobbing behavior” to “maternal behavior.” They refer to “allomaternal care.” They go on say that while this is called instinct when it's seen in a whale, when a human does it “we call it compassion.... But sometimes the distinction isn't all that clear.”

My guess is that yes, there was compassion. The humpbacks felt sorry for terrified seals. But maybe they also disapproved of the orcas' behavior. They sound outraged. Buncha violent creeps terrorizing pipsqueaks. Can't someone relax on some ice without you guys ruining everything? You make me feel like bellowing! Put that pinniped down! Why don't you pick on someone your own size? Bite this!

This suggestion certainly leaves me open to charges of anthropomorphism. But the outrage people feel when they see bullies picking on a weakling doesn't necessarily arise from the most abstractly intellectual workings of our fabulous neocortex. Like compassion, maybe it's more visceral than that. Maybe it comes from the bottom of the heart.

                                                                                                
(Photograph by Jerzy Strzelecki.)

*Orcinus orca (Linnaeus). People have various views on “killer whale” versus “orca.” Is it calumny to call them killers? Is it sentimental PC-ishness to call them orcas? (Are you calling Linnaeus PC?) This article called them killer whales. I use both terms. Mostly orca, because it's shorter.