World Wonders
Marvellous, at long last another countryside column from me, prompted by a muffled “What the ????” from beneath the duvet.
This morning I was quietly putting off the inevitable getting out of bed moment, snoozing gently to the dulcet tones of Messers Davis and Stourton on the Today programme. Then came a story about putting an economic value to the global loss of biodiversity and my ears pricked!
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Review has followed on from the, aptly titled, Stern Review of climate change, and looks to put a global financial cost on loss of ecosystems and biodiversity. Good start, I thought, but sadly I think this report may have missed the fundamental point of the issue as all others seemed to have before it. The report claims that if current ecological deterioration continues unchecked, global GDP, global Gross Domestic Product, will reduce by 7% by 2050. Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do, but is totally meaningless to me.
I thoroughly agree with the need to put environmental truths into fiscal language of economists, but nothing drafted really gets to the nub, the fundament; we’re not merely destroying the planet – we’re killing our only means of existence.
The problem is that ecological issues, so frequently trivialised by trotting out a ukulele player at the Haye Literary Festival, I’m not joking, go further than our modern flim-flammery of over-elaborate bean trading we like to call Economics can comprehend. And then there’s the moral argument, which maintains that because we are a species on this planet with the ability to completely remove another, we have a fundamental duty to ensure we do not. However, that discourse leads to some very, very tricky questions…
I prefer to focus on the positive, and the life-enriching, life-affirming reasons why sharing the planet with other life is a good thing. With so much British natural history on telly at the moment with the return of Springwatch, I’m going to go out on a limb here and talk about some of the global facts from the natural world that keep my head shaking in wonderment and my mouth permanently a-gasp in awe! So for the next few hundred words, here are a few of my favourite wildlife facts, about species you may, or may not find in your back garden. Starting with the small, lets work our way up to the big stuff…
The social amoeba Dictyostelium normally lives as single-celled microscopic organisms, however in times of food shortage as many as 100,000 of these cells will fuse together to create a single living entity with differentiated tissues and the capability of self-reproduction.
Hermit crabs recreate our property ladder by congregating in areas where there is a high level of mollusc predation. The dominant crab will get first dibs on a new shell and the second down will move into the shell vacated by the first, and so on down the ladder until even the smallest hermit is accommodated.
Hummingbirds have the capability to shut down kidney function. These tiny birds feed on nectar, which has such a high water content they need to excrete a great deal of water while they fly. If they continued to do this during the night, while they rest, they would dehydrate.
The teeth of sea urchins are self-sharpening and as the tooth wears away through use, it becomes progressively harder.
Worm-like amphibians called caecilians provide their offspring with a hearty meal at birth, of themselves. The female’s skin grows extra thick while brooding and when the eggs hatch, the young feast on this thickened dermis.
Naked mole rats navigate underground by seismic echolocation – in a world of no sight, hearing or smell, these animals have developed the ability to sense echoes in the soil through their feet. The echoes are created by the animal itself, banging its head on the ground.
Marine iguanas of the Galapagos islands are the only species of lizard to regularly shrink and grow again. When storms force the lizards to stop feeding for long periods, they can shrink by as much as 15% of their bodyweight. The lizards will get even bigger than they were the following year when they can feed well again.
For many years, American and Russian navies thought the opposition was attaching listening devices to its fleet of submarines, as they found perfectly round chunks of rubber missing from the sub’s sonar domes. It was then discovered that these missing pieces had been chewed off by the wired cookie-cutter shark, an animal with a mouth adapted for boring into large fish.
Albatrosses are able to pinpoint the exact location of their nests even after foraging trips of many thousands of miles over featureless oceans, often lasting many months. They do not rely on magnetic sensitivity to achieve this feat, and no one knows exactly how they do it!
Female hippopotamuses are officially the greediest animals on the planet, with the stomach contents making up as much as 25% of the animal’s body weight!
The largest animal to have ever lived on earth is the blue whale, with a heart the size of a mini (the old one, not the new massive one) and blood vessels an adult could swim through, this is a true giant, which feeds on some of the smallest animals on earth, zooplankton.