Secret Lives of Animals

In Africa, a species of termite builds columns of mud and spit, sometimes up to 18 feet tall. Paper wasps with brains the size of two grains of sand can recognize the faces of their fellow wasps. On the seafloor, dozens of unique marine bacteria, worms and crustaceans make their homes within rotting bones of dead whales.

Why do animals do such strange things? In this issue, scientists offer answers to this question. They also reveal surprising discoveries about how animals think and feel. And they explain how some of the oddest creatures ever to roam the earth came by their weird traits.

The animal behaviors that seem peculiar to us humans actually make a lot of sense for survival. Take, for instance, those termites. It turns out that their mud house is climate-controlled—the CO2 from the bugs' respiration rises out of the top of the mound, whereas at night the outer chambers of the column let in oxygen to keep the critters from suffocating. Other insects have crueler survival tactics. The female jewel wasp injects venom directly into a cockroach's brain to paralyze it, preserve it and feed it to her unborn spawn.

Humans tend to think that we are unique in our intelligence, social skill and depth of emotion. Yet we think too much of ourselves. The humble chicken, for example, is strikingly clever. Males secretly subvert the pecking order—going behind the back of their more dominant rivals to court females. In the horse world, mares seem to provide the social glue to the herd—a job once attributed to stallions. Some wild animals even show what could be construed as grief: dolphins will carry the body of their dead calves with them, and elephants will revisit the bones of lost herd members for years after they die.

And then there are animals that are simply jaw dropping. The prehistoric bird Pelagornis sandersi, with its 24-foot wingspan—more than twice the wingspan of the albatross—was an unparalleled ocean soarer. And deep in the tunnels of wetlands, a tiny mole with a fleshy, pink nose the shape of a star devours up to five items of prey a second.

Enjoy this tour of the secret lives of animals. My guess is that you will feel somewhat at home, even among the strangest creatures. After all, we are animals, too.

How Animals and Plants Weather Hurricanes

Studies suggest not all critters fare well in extreme weather, though some thrive.

Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico. With sustained winds of 155 miles per hour, much of the US territory has been without power for weeks. Many residents lack running water, hospitals have been limping along on backup generators, and the island’s agriculture has been essentially flattened. The toll on local wildlife remains far from appreciated, but it’s clear from Maria and other hurricanes that some animal populations suffer from big storms—while others thrive.

Endangered animals are of paramount concern to conservation biologists. When a few key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) were spotted on Big Pine Key in Florida after Hurricane Irma swept through, it prompted a sigh of relief. Likewise in Puerto Rico, one native islander, the endangered Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata), seems to have fared “surprisingly well” after Maria, Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) spokesman Mark Davis tells The Scientist.

Vibrant and vocal, these birds are rare in the wild. A. vittata were first listed as critically endangered in 1968, with their numbers dipping to 13 in less than a decade. Since then, conservationists have been working tirelessly, breeding the birds in captivity and releasing them into the wild, to boost their numbers. In 1989, 47 individuals flitted about the island, with at least 12 forming breeding pairs.

Then, Hurricane Hugo hit that year, ravaging the island and the birds. The population fell to just 22. It rebounded and then again, devastating storms in 2015 stripped the forest of food and the birds’ numbers plummeted. Now, Hurricane Maria has marked the island, but the birds’ numbers, at least those in captivity, seem to be stable. Damage to the aviaries caused the death of a few birds, probably from heat or the stress of being moved to different cages, Michelle Eversen, a biologist and program coordinator for FWS in the southeast U.S. and Caribbean, wrote to Davis. In the wild, “we don’t know how many survived or if they are having difficulty finding food after the storm,” Eversen reported. But researchers working with the captive birds have seen wild Puerto Rican parrots near two of the aviaries on the island—a hopeful sign.

Strategies to survive
Not all birds have been so lucky. A masked booby, probably blown off course as Hurricane Jose worked its way up from the tropics in September, landed on the shores of Massachusetts recently. Workers at Wild Care Cape Cod, a wildlife rehabilitation facility in Eastham, tried to take care of the bird, but it was reported dead October 3.

Birds, like us and other animals, take a few different strategies in the face of storms. Some leave before it hits. They can sense drops in barometric pressure, so they know when to go. Others fly straight into a storm, though tracking birds with satellite tags has shown that the success of that strategy is mixed. Still other birds, such as the Puerto Rican parrots, shelter in place. What researchers don’t yet know is how well these tactics work.

“There aren’t a huge number of studies about what animals do in hurricanes,” says biologist Helen Bailey of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The studies don’t exist because they are hard to do; surveying animals in extreme weather isn’t really realistic.