The Strangest Things in the World: a Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature

Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus italic.

THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature

THOMAS R. HENRY

Public Affairs Press, Washington, D. C.

Copyright, 1958, by Public Affairs Press 419 New Jersey Avenue, S. E., Washington 3, D. C.

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-10881

INTRODUCTION

The challenges of Nature’s paradoxes have been sharp spurs to man’s search for knowledge since the start of science.

Fortunately the number of these paradoxes is infinite, and so the quests are endless. Man never will know a wonderless world. In the phenomena of life especially we have come only to the zone of morning twilight. The bright day of understanding is ahead. As its hours pass we can expect a constant succession of new paradoxes, new spurs to further advances.

Man would be in a sad situation were it otherwise. For the bright light of noon and afternoon inevitably precedes sunset and darkness and sleep.

This book is a compendium of some of Nature’s curiosities and contradictions in the field of life and as such it well may awaken that wonder which, as somebody has said, is the beginning of knowledge.

The author is one of the world’s best-known and most respected science writers. This book is a personal and unique distillation of the wisdom he has developed in a lifetime of dealing with man’s effort to resolve the paradoxes of nature.

LEONARD CARMICHAEL

Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

PREFACE

Life has invaded nearly every crack and crevasse of the world during the billion years since it left its first traces on this planet. It has adjusted itself to all extremes of living, from nearly airless mountaintops five miles high to lightless floors of oceans five miles deep. It has found abodes in boiling hot springs and in the everlasting ice of Antarctic peaks. It very likely has invaded the cold, red deserts of Mars. Everywhere it has succeeded in altering the garments it wears to meet the stresses it has experienced.

It has achieved semi-infinite variety. There are approximately a quarter million species of plants now known in the world. Most abundant and varied life is that of the insects who may be on their way to displace man and his fellow mammals as lords of the earth. A rough estimate of the number of species identified up to now is 800,000. Several thousand hitherto unknown are described each year. Of mammals, including man, there may be as many as 14,000 distinct species and geographic races extant. About 8,500 species of birds are catalogued. Sub-species and geographic races increase this number to about 30,000. Known fishes number 40,000 species and sub-species.

Still, naturalists say, there are great mansions of life almost unknown to man. The collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington grow at the rate of about a million specimens a year, always including forms hitherto uncatalogued. Much of the material in the following pages is based on Smithsonian information, although other sources and personal observations have been liberally drawn upon.

The Smithsonian specimens, as well as those in other museums and collections throughout the world, are types. Once they were individuals with passions, fears, hungers, perhaps some dim wonderings and questionings. The type is the eternal reality. The individual is the brief-lived example of this reality, the flame of a candle fluttering in a windy moment.

I have brought together in these pages notes about the most extraordinary manifestations of nature that have come to my attention in the course of thirty years as a science reporter. Each example is, of course, based upon a distinctly individual expression of nature, but all are very much interrelated in this truly amazing world of ours.

THOMAS R. HENRY

Washington, D. C.

The Invisible Underground Jungle

There may be as many as twenty-five million invisible plants and animals in a gram of soil about the size of a grain of sand. It would take a thousand such grains to make a marble.

Part 2

The population of this microscopic jungle is composed chiefly of single-celled organisms—bacteria, molds, yeasts and protozoa. Total numbers vary enormously—from time to time and place to place—chiefly because of variations in the food supply. Although thousands of species have been identified, the greater part of soil life still remains unknown.

This jungle is a place of the hunter and the hunted—of an incessant and merciless struggle for survival. Invisible plants eat invisible animals and invisible animals eat invisible plants. Plants devour other plants and animals devour other animals.

Giants of this nether world—largely invisible, although the average size is more than a thousand times that of the bacteria—are thread-like white worms from a hundredth to a fifth of an inch long. Relatively they are not very plentiful—less than six million to a cubic foot of soil in most places. In both size and numbers in the earth population, they are like elephants compared to mice. Still they probably are numerically the most abundant of all animals which consist of more than a single cell. In the entire animal kingdom only the protozoa outnumber them.

These creatures are the nematodes, or eel worms. About ten thousand kinds have been described; there are probably as many more unknown to zoologists. Less than a hundred of these varieties cost American farmers and gardeners more than half a billion dollars a year. The rest of those species living in the soil are, so far as known, harmless or even slightly beneficial. Seas and fresh waters are full of other kinds. Still others, some very much larger than the soil organisms, are among the most dangerous parasites of animals and men. The little soil worms, in the opinion of Dr. Geoffrey LaPage of Cambridge University, “must be considered one of the major menaces of our civilization.”

Although always invisible, the activities of these countless billions of organisms underfoot can be measured in various ways. For example, carbon dioxide is constantly escaping from the surface of the ground. This comes from the breathing of the unseen animals and plants. Measurement of the gas outflow gives a rough estimate of how many are present. It shows that the numbers vary greatly from hour to hour.

The soil organisms are relatively immune to heat and cold, flood and drought. Even when a grain of soil has been made absolutely dry in the laboratory and then crushed to a very fine powder, they still remain. If it is placed in a sterile container filled with some fermentable material, a seething mass of microörganisms will appear in a few hours.

Some day this vast, unseen mass of life may be harnessed to the service of man. Only beginnings have been made to achieve this end. Some of the microscopic life forms are definitely helpful to plant life, while others undoubtedly are destructive. One service, without which plant life would be unable to continue very long, is the fixation in the soil of nitrogen from the air. One group of bacteria, the azotobacteria, do this in the laboratory and long have been supposed to be the effective agents in nature. But actual examination of soil samples, say Department of Agriculture specialists, fail to show more than a few thousands of these organisms per gram of soil anywhere, and sometimes none at all can be found in places where it is known that nitrogen fixation is in progress. Some still unknown form of microscopic life must be doing part of the work.

Another unknown organism is an agent partly responsible for breaking down the cellulose of dead plants in the soil. The mold, Aspergillus fumigatus, world-wide in its distribution, does this in the laboratory. Nowhere, however, is it found in nature in sufficient numbers to accomplish the titanic job attributed to it.

The great, invisible jungle, of course, must eat to live. Some organisms demand fresh food and are responsible for root rot in plants. The majority, however, find their sustenance in the enormous mass of dead and dying roots of annual vegetation. Decomposition of annuals is an explosive process involving the development of countless billions of bacteria.

The Self-Perpetuating Sponge

Close to primaeval chaos is the sponge—lowliest of animals. It is an animal without a brain, nervous system, heart, lungs, stomach, muscles or blood. But it has an I Am.

The sponge is in essence an anarchical horde of numberless cells. When the conglomeration is split up as can be done by a technique of squeezing through fine-meshed silk gauze, the cells continue to live as individuals. They crawl about. They take nourishment. But when a few thousands of them are thrown together into a tank of sea water they will conglomerate again, apparently into the same sponge that existed before the disintegration. If sponge animals of two different species are mixed in the tank they will combine into two sponges, duplications of the conglomerations from which they came. If cells of two sponges of the same species are mixed it may be that they will recombine into the two original individuals—but this experiment never has been tried and would be quite difficult to interpret.

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