Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You (28 page)

1.
 For a detailed description of the human botfly’s biology, complete with grotesque photos, visit the University of Florida Entomology and Nematology Department’s “Featured Creatures” page:
http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/flies/human_bot_fly.htm
.

1.
 Lions do not kill zebras at random (Mills and Shenk 1992).

2.
 Biologists call this a distinction between
inter
specific competition (worrying about members of other species, like predators for example) and
intra
specific competition (worrying about members of your own species).

3.
 The selfish sheep study was by King et al. (2012).

4.
 Penguin huddle temperatures are from Gilbert et al. (2006).

5.
 This strategy is called asynchronous hatching. The snowy owl story is summarized by Murie (1929) and Parmelee (1992). Similar stories exist for blue-footed boobies (
Sula nebouxii
) and cattle egrets (
Bubulcus ibis
). There’s a great review of “avian siblicide” by Mock et al. (1990).

6.
 The Verreaux’s eagle (
Aquila verreauxii
) is also sometimes called a black eagle (Mock et al. 1990). The incident of 1,569 pecks was observed by Gargett (1978).

7.
 A thorough description of the sand tiger shark’s “intrauterine cannibalism” can be found in Gilmore et al. (1983).

8.
 The whole story of the mice of Gough Island is told nicely by Cuthbert and Hilton (2004) and by Wanless et al. (2007).

9.
 The phrase “most important seabird island in the world” is used by a lot of people to describe Gough Island. I’m quoting Cuthbert and Hilton (2004).

10.
 The idea that mice can drive seabird extinctions is discussed by Wanless et al. (2007).

11.
 This event is called the Australian Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. For details about the species that disappeared, and a nice picture showing their sizes, see Flannery (1990).

12.
 The relative importance of hunting and wildfires to the Australian Pleistocene megafaunal extinction is discussed by Miller et al. (2005).

13.
 You guessed it: it’s called the North American Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. To get an idea of the animals that lived in North America when humans first got there but that are now missing, see Janzen and Martin (1982).

14.
 The South Pacific extinction events happened in the Holocene, after the Pleistocene extinctions of Australia and North America, with two-thirds of extinctions happening between first human
settlement and European colonization of an island (Duncan et al. 2013).

15.
 The nautical disasters were analyzed by Elinder and Erixson (2012).

1.
 The lives of
Antechinus
are reviewed by Naylor et al. (2008).

2.
 The researchers who chased the spiders around with paintbrushes are Li et al. (2012).

3.
 The Korean eunuch data are from Min et al. (2012).

4.
 These statistics about female survival of pregnancy come from the World Health Organization (2012).

5.
 Information about hyenas comes from Watts et al. (2009) and Glickman et al. (2006).

6.
 The social structure of spotted hyenas is nicely laid out by Watts et al. (2009).

7.
 You can watch Todd Akin make his political-career-ending statements at
http://fox2now.com/2012/08/19/the-jaco-report-august-19-2012/
.

8.
 Information about the mating habits of the northern pintail are from Sorenson and Derrickson (1994). Penis length data are from Brennan et al. (2007).

9.
 These comparisons across species have been made by Brennan et al. (2007).

10.
 This information about garter snakes comes from a paper by Shine et al. (2003).

11.
 The biology of bedbugs, from feeding to mating, is summarized by Reinhardt and Siva-Jothy (2007).

12.
 What it is specifically that female túngara frogs like to hear is described by Akre et al. (2011).

13.
 Unisexual reproduction among vertebrates is discussed by Neaves and Baumann (2011).

14.
 You can read all about penis fencing in a paper by Michiels and Newman (1998).

15.
 That estimate of 1 billion years is based on a paper by Butterfield (2000).

1.
 Global obesity data are from Swinburn et al. (2011).

2.
 Parasites influence how energy flows through ecosystems, how well the animals in ecosystems can compete, and, ultimately, how many different species an ecosystem can hold. Therefore, the more parasites you can find in an ecosystem, the healthier that ecosystem can be (Hudson et al. 2006).

3.
 Details about vampire bat saliva are available in Tellgren-Roth et al. (2009). The details about hunting come Greenhall and Schmidt (1988).

4.
 The common vampire bat jumps with a peak force equivalent to roughly 9.5 times its own body weight in around thirty milliseconds, sending its body upward at a speed of 7.8 feet per second (Schutt et al. 1997).

5.
 Biologists have been excited about blood sharing by vampire bats ever since it was first described by Wilkinson (1984). Gerry Carter has done some great follow-up work since then on the rules by which the bats decide for whom they will puke up food (Carter and Wilkinson 2013).

6.
 For details about the stretching stomach of the common vampire bat, complete with X-rays of bats that have fed on barium-laden blood, see Mitchell and Tigner (1970).

7.
 Squirrels have roundworms (Crompton 2001), birds have feather mites (Proctor 2003), giant pandas have at least six kinds of parasitic worms (Zhang et al. 2011), and emperor penguins are infected with tapeworms, lice, and the bacterial disease chlamydia (Barbosa and Palacios 2009).

8.
 Almost 50 percent of all
known
animal species are parasites, and Poulin and Morand (2000) make some great logical arguments about why the majority of the species we
don’t
yet know are probably parasites. (In a nutshell, it’s because they’re harder to find.)

9.
 For more details about the lives of mosquitoes, see Christophers (1960).

10.
 The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a very informative website with data about parasite life cycles and their effects on humans. The page about malaria is at
http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/
.

11.
 The CDC webpage about elephantiasis is at
http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lymphaticfilariasis/
.

12.
 The raccoon roundworm that can burrow through your body, eat your organs, and kill you is
Baylisascaris procyonis
. The eyeball-eating amoeba (which wasn’t a human parasite at all until contact lenses were invented, by the way) is
Acanthamoeba keratitis
. The pinworm I’m talking about is
Enterobius vermicularis
, though there are several other kinds of pinworms you can get infected with as well.

13.
 Leeches pick an animal they want to feed on, then move toward it in bursts, continually getting updates about the animal’s location (Harley et al. 2013).

14.
 These examples of facial ripping, including a very graphic image of a woman’s face after a dog bit her cheek off, are from Koch et al. (2012).

15.
 Getting DNA of endangered animals out of leeches in their habitats is brilliant. Details of the procedure can be found in Schnell et al. (2012).

16.
 For more about bioluminescence by marine animals, and the relationships animals set up with light-producing bacteria, see Haddock et al. (2010).

17.
 To be honest, I don’t know for sure that it was a Krøyer’s deep sea
anglerfish that attacked them in that movie, but it was definitely an anglerfish of some kind.

18.
 This business of tiny males acting like parasites of females isn’t restricted to the Krøyer’s deep sea anglerfish. It’s found in a bunch of different anglerfishes (Herring 2007).

19.
 The argument that male anglerfish don’t really count as parasites, despite their lazy lifestyles, is made nicely by Vollrath (1998).

20.
 The CDC webpage for schistosomiasis is at
http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/schistosomiasis/
.

21.
 Whether the schistosome sets up shop in the blood vessels near the bladder or the intestines depends on the species.
Schistosoma haematobium
eggs come out in your urine, but the eggs of
S. mansoni
and
S. japonicum
exit in your feces.

22.
 For more about swimmer’s itch, see Verbrugge et al. (2004).

23.
 The “dog on a leash” analogy comes straight from the scientific paper that describes all this (Gal and Libersat 2008).

24.
 The paper about the larvae spitting antimicrobial chemicals all over the place is by Herzner et al. (2013).

25.
 These numbers, about how common parasitoid species are, come from Eggleton and Belshaw (1992) and Feener and Brown (1997).

26.
 The biomechanics of poop launching by the skipper caterpillar are described in mouthwatering detail by Caveney et al. (1998).

27.
 Here’s how I “put that in human terms”: The insect is around 2 inches long and launches its poop 30 inches. That’s 15 body lengths. If you multiply the body length of a 5-foot-tall woman 15 times, you get 75 feet.

28.
 Carl Zimmer has done a wonderful job of exploring these themes in his book
Parasite Rex
(2000).

29.
 Details about the effects of the
Toxoplasma
parasite on the behavior of
rats can be found in some outstanding papers from Robert Sopolsky’s lab at Stanford (Vyas et al. 2007; House et al. 2011).

30.
 The estimates of the number of people infected with the
Toxoplasma
parasite come from Havlíček et al. (2001) and Montoya and Liesenfeld (2004).

31.
 The later during pregnancy the infection of the mother happens, the more dangerous it is for the baby. The threats posed by infection with the
Toxoplasma
parasite during pregnancy are reviewed by Wong and Remington (1994).

32.
 The reaction time data come from Havlíček et al. (2001); the traffic accidents data come from Flegr et al. (2002). The overall effects of
Toxoplasma
on humans are reviewed by Flegr (2013).

33.
 The potential influence of
Toxoplasma
on human cultures was explored by Lafferty (2006).

34.
 The ears of moths evolved as a direct response to echolocation by bats and work only for hearing the high-pitched calls of bats (Windmill et al. 2007). As a counterstrategy, one bat, called the spotted bat, has lowered its voice to frequencies that moths can’t hear, but as a result the bat has become audible to humans (Fullard and Dawson 1997).

35.
 This whole mites-on-the-ears-of-moths system is described by Treat (1957).

36.
 The link between the mother’s immune system and the sexual preferences of her sons was studied by Blanchard (2001).

1.
 There’s a nice discussion about why some plants and animals were domesticated while others were not by Diamond (2002). If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t farm zebras and water buffalo, when their close cousins, horses and cows, are so easy to get along with, I recommend giving that paper a read.

2.
 Dr. Shah’s case summary from the 2003 study is available for download at
http://www.sudhirneuro.org/files/mataji_case_study.pdf
.

3.
 The PDF of Dr. Shah’s hypothesis, explaining how a human might be able to live without food, is available for download at
http://www.sudhirneuro.org/files/fast_the_hypothesis.pdf.

4.
 For nonobese adults, the body is roughly 60 percent water (Ellis 2000).

5.
 Astronaut water consumption was modeled by Hager et al. (2010).

6.
 That’s 30 lb. of batteries! Here’s where I get that number: A person’s resting metabolic rate is roughly 1,250 kcal/day (Tranah et al. 2011), which in different units is around 1,450 watt-hours. An alkaline AA battery gives you about 2.5 watt-hours, so 580 batteries would do the trick.

7.
 All oxygen-producing photosynthetic organisms come from a common single-celled ancestor that lived around then (Falkowski 2011).

8.
 This acacia-ant relationship is described by González-Teuber et al. (2012).

9.
 Elephants run into another species of acacia, which also uses ants, called the whistling-thorn tree. Elephants will eat those trees if there are no ants in them but avoid the trees when ants are present (Goheen and Palmer 2010).

10.
 The number 200,000 comes from Mithöfer and Boland (2012).

11.
 Cyanide lethality data come from Way (1984).

12.
 That number comes from Vetter (2000).

13.
 The “bombs” in this analogy are molecules of acetone cyanohydrin. The “detonator” is an enzyme called hydroxynitrile lyase. Bombs are kept in vacuoles and detonators in the tissues. When a vacuole gets broken open by a chewing animal, the enzyme breaks apart the acetone cyanohydrin to produce acetone and hydrogen cyanide (Vetter 2000).