The Book of Animal Ignorance (5 page)

Bee

Do I know you?

T
he most sophisticated form of communication other than human language is the work not of an ape but an insect. Honeybees can tell one another the quality, distance and precise location of a food source by a complex sequence of movements and vibrations called the ‘waggle dance'. And, unlike most of the dolphin or primate ‘languages', we can actually understand what the bees are saying to each other (each waggle, for example, represents about 150 feet from the hive). The discovery of this in 1945 was enough to earn Karl von Frisch the only Nobel Prize ever awarded for the study of animal behaviour.

More recent research has filled out the picture. Bees have a sense of time; being able to see in the ultraviolet range makes them more attracted to some flower colours and textures than others; they can learn by experience. They can even recognise human faces. Given that many humans struggle with this once they've turned forty, it seems utterly remarkable in creatures whose brain is the size of a pinhead. Yet bees who are rewarded with nectar when shown some photos of faces, and not when shown others, quickly learn to tell the difference. Not that we should read too much into this. Bees don't ‘think' in a meaningful way. There's no small talk; they only ever communicate on two subjects: food and where they should set up the next hive. The ‘faces' in the experiment were clearly functioning as rather odd-looking flowers, not as people they wanted to get to know socially. Equally, a single bee, however smart, is severely limited in its appeal as a pet, when separated from its hive.

It's not hard to see why bees were sacred to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians. Not only is the hive the epitome of a well-ordered society, it is also full of drama. A new queen, as soon as she's murdered all her sisters, takes her ‘nuptial flight', in which she mates in mid-air with up to fifteen drones. All the
drones die (their penises explode with an audible pop, leaving the end inside her as a rather ineffective plug) and the queen returns with enough sperm on board to stock the entire colony on her own. A queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs each day during her three-year lifetime. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees. Very occasionally the chemical balance wobbles and female workers start to lay as well, but rebellions are put down ruthlessly and all the impostors' eggs are immediately eaten by fellow workers.

The species
Apis mellifera
also provides us with the only edible secretion, other than milk, that we can take from an animal without injury. Properly sealed and stored, honey is the one food that does not spoil. Archaeologists have tasted and found edible 3,000-year-old honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Honey is ‘hygroscopic', meaning it can absorb and hold moisture so that any moulds and bacteria that touch it quickly lose their own moisture and die. But honey represents only a fiftieth of the true economic importance of bees. In the US alone, bees pollinate crops worth $19 billion each year. Without them there would be no agriculture: every third mouthful of food we owe to the bee.

AT THE COMBFACE

Beetle

The insect's insect

I
f diversity and adaptability are the measuring stick for success, then beetles are the most successful animals on the planet. There are 350,000 known species, with up to eight million more out there waiting for names: new species are being discovered at an average rate of one an hour. If you lined up all animal and plant species in a row, every fifth species would be a beetle. There are about 750,000,000,000,000,000 individual beetles going about their business right now.

Why are there so many? The simple answer seems to be flowering plants. Not much happened for beetles until the flowering plants began to diversify 120 million years ago. They were the beetles' food of choice and as they crept across the planet, adapting themselves to new environments, the beetles followed. In the process, they far outstripped even the plants; able to burrow, fly and swim, beetles became the universal animal. If something's edible, you can guarantee there will be a beetle out there to eat it. Ham, tobacco, ginger, bonemeal, paper, carpet, stuffed animals, strychnine, wood, all are grist to a particular beetle's mandibles. The ‘short-circuit' beetle chews through lead sheathing on telegraph cables to get to the tasty fibre insulator around the copper wires. A specialist called
Zonocopris gibbicolis
feeds only on the droppings of large land snails, hitching a ride inside the shell.

A BLISTER BEETLE
HONEYTRAP

Their mating strategies are just as varied. Flour beetles have even found a way of reproducing by proxy. When it's not
chewing its way through the nation's stores of grains and cereals, you'll usually find
Tribolium castaneum
copulating. They are very promiscuous, even by insect standards. The male starts by using his spiny penis to sweep out a previous occupant's load, before unleashing his own. Unfortunately, his rival's sperm has a way of clinging to his tackle, so his next conquest stands a 1 in 8 chance of finding herself fertilised by a beetle she's never met.

We have much to learn from beetle. But far from being just a grotesques' gallery, they are a living laboratory, where almost every extreme has been tested, every obstacle overcome. The Bombardier beetles, who fire a boiling chemical spray out of their rears at 300 pulses per second, might help us to re-ignite jet engines that cut out during a flight. Tenebrinoid beetles from the rainless Namib desert, who can channel the morning dew into their mouths using the microscopic bumps and troughs on their backs, are being used to develop new fog harvesting technology; and the Jewel beetle (
Melanophila acuminate
) may hold the clue to early-warning system for forest fires. It has an infra-red sensor under one of its legs that can detect a fire over 50 miles away. Why? So that it can fly
towards
the blaze. It knows the smouldering tree trunks offer a rare predator-free opportunity to mate recklessly and lay its eggs.

Only a beetle …

Binturong

Smell my popcorn

H
igh in the trees of southern Asia's tropical forests there lives the only Old World carnivore that uses its tail for climbing. Commonly called a bearcat, it is neither a bear nor a cat, but a member of the civet family. Civets are related to cats, but are also cousins to the mongoose and the hyena. The bearcat, or binturong (
Arctitis
binturong
), gets its name from a Malaysian language that no longer exists and at first glance it's not hard to understand the confusion: it has the face and whiskers of a seal, the thick shaggy fur and flat feet of a bear, the tail of a monkey and the claws of a mongoose. And it's no tiny, scampering marmoset: it weighs 3 stones and is 6 feet long (imagine a golden retriever that can use its tail to climb trees). So, although binturongs spend almost all their life in the canopy, they tend to move around quite slowly, which sometimes leads people to mistake them for sloths.

DON'T TRY THIS
IF YOU ARE
A BEAR

The binturong tail is a 3-foot long, muscular fifth arm with a bare leathery patch at the end for gripping, just like a monkey's, although they evolved quite separately. Also, just like monkeys, they use their tail to pick and hold food as well as for hanging from branches. The tail is
powerful enough for them to walk down a tree trunk head first, or upside down along a branch to pick hard-to-reach fruit.

Binturongs live mostly on fruit and have a very sweet tooth; in captivity, they show a strong preference for ripe bananas and mangoes but have been known to wolf down marshmallows, muffins, apple pies and milkshakes. This tends to bring on a sugar high, leading to an hour of uncharacteristically manic leaping and running around before they collapse exhausted and sleep it off. Despite this, wild binturongs are genuine carnivores and will occasionally snaffle a bird or catch a fish (they are excellent swimmers).

Like the other civets, the binturong marks its territory with a pungent oil. Civet oil was used for centuries as a valuable additive to perfume, collected from glands of civets and genets with a special spoon. The binturong has a large gland under its tail, and wipes it on branches, posts and other landmarks to leave a calling-card that lists precise details about sex, age and sexual status. Compared with some other civet species, the binturong's scent smells pleasantly of buttered popcorn. It's left by both males and females, although the female binturong wears the trousers: she is much bigger and – although it isn't quite in the hyena league – has a large penis-like clitoris. Both sexes have been hunted for their oil, and the male's penis bone is a valuable ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, promoting virility and the conception of male children.

Unlikely as it sounds, the other reason binturongs are taken from the wild is that they make excellent pets; although presumably not indoor ones, because of their need to climb. They have become popular in the US, where a fertile adult can fetch up to $2,000. Apparently, they are easy to tame and the tail even acts as a built-in leash – they will grip your hand with it when you take them out for a waddle.