The Book of Animal Ignorance Read Free Page A

thing worse than being an anglerfish and that’s being a male anglerfish.

Ant
    Chemical-dependent
    A nts boggle the mind. In the jungles where three-quarters of them live, they teem 800 to the square yard, 2.4 billion to the square mile and collectively weigh four times more than all the neighbouring mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians put together. The 12,000 named ant species come in all shapes and sizes: a colony of the smallest could live happily inside the braincase of the largest. Like bees and termites, their success flows from their social organisation, but there is nothing remotely cuddly about ants: they are the stormtroopers of the insect world, their ruthlessly efficient colonies operating like a single ‘super-organism’.
    EARTHSCRAPER
    Every process within an ant colony is regulated by chemicals. In some species, this can be refreshingly direct: the queen will climb to a high point when she is ready to mate, then stick her backside in the air and release a love-pheromone that inflames the ardour of all males in range. Ant species mate in a variety of different ways: in mid-air, on the ground or in a ‘mating ball’, where the queen is completely surrounded by a swarm of love-addled males.
    As well as love charms, pheromones also act as air-raid sirens.If the colony is threatened, many species emit a pheromone from a gland in their mouths. This causes some workers to grab the larvae and run underground while others prance around with their mandibles open, ready to bite and sting. Brunei ants even have guards that explode their own heads when threatened, leaving a sticky mess which slows down the intruders.
    Harvester ants eat more small seeds than all the mammals and birds put together. Like squirrels, they often forget where they’ve put their stashes, so are accidentally responsible for planting a third of all herbaceous growth .
    Inter-species warfare is common and ant raiders will take hostages back to their own colony, where they become slaves. Other species use this to their advantage: the queen of Bothriomyrmex decapitans allows herself to be dragged to the nest of rival species, where, like a mini-Trojan horse, she bites off the head of the host queen and begins laying her own eggs. Being ants, the host workers switch loyalty without batting an antenna.
    Some ants raise livestock. They collect the honeydew made by aphids and in return protect them from other predators. The ants ‘milk’ the honeydew by gently stroking the aphid’s abdomen with their antennae. Meanwhile, more than 200 species of ant are arable farmers, farming fungi for food. They gather compost for it to grow on, fertilise it with their dung, prune it and even fumigate it with powerful bacteria to keep it parasite-free.
    But for all their awe-inspiring industry and adaptive élan, ants don’t get it all their own way. The South American bullet ant ( Paraponera clavata ) is one of several species that finds out too late that fungi can sometimes farm them. Spores from a Cordyceps fungus work their way inside the ant’s body and release an ‘override’ pheromone which scrambles its orderly world. Confused and reeling, it finds itself climbing to the top of a tall plant stalk and clamping itself there with its jaws. Once in place, the fungus’s fruiting body erupts as a spike from the insect’s brain and sprinkles a dust of spores on the ant’s unsuspecting sisters toiling below.

Armadillo
    The best-endowed of all mammals
    I f the male Nine-banded armadillo ( Dasypus novemcinctus ) were human, its penis would be 4 feet long. When you’re making love to something that resembles an upturned fishing dinghy, size matters.
    Describing armadillos has always been a challenge: the Aztecs called them azotochtli , ‘turtle rabbits’.
    All twenty species live in the Americas. The smallest is the Pink Fairy armadillo ( Chlamyphorus truncatus ), which is no longer than a