Just Curious About Animals and Nature, Jeeves

Erin Barrett & Jack Mingo

With Illustrations by Marcos Sorensen and Spence Snyder

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Copyright © 2002 by Ask Jeeves, Inc.

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ISBN: 0-7434-2710-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-2710-4

eISBN-13: 978-0-7434-5445-2

First Pocket Books trade paperback printing August 2002

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Printed in the U.S.A.

Special thanks to:

Amanda Ayers Barnett

Paolo Pepe

Donna O’Neill

Kathlyn McGreevy

Marcos Sorensen

Spencer Snyder

Penny Finnie

Jacquie Harrison

Steve Berkowitz

John Dollison

Anne Kinney

Jerry & Lynn Barrett

Elana Mingo

Eric Childs

Georgia Hamner

Jackson Hamner

Contents

FROM THE AUTHORS

HEY, HEY, WE’RE THE MONKEYS

SLITHERY SNAKES AND SLIMY TOADS

LIFE’S ROUGHAGE

CUTE LITTLE FURRY THINGS

DON’T BUG ME, MAN

UNDER THE SEA

KOALAS & KANGAROOS, WOMBATS & WALLABIES

BEASTS OF BURDEN

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND TALL

HERE, KITTY KITTY!

MAN’S BEST FRIEND

FINE FEATHERED FRIENDS

GOING BIPOLAR

THE PETTING ZOO

THE VAST MENAGERIE

From THE

Authors

Here we are again, thrilled to be asked to put together another book for Ask Jeeves. This is the third in the series, after Just Curious, Jeeves and Just Curious About History, Jeeves, both available at bookstores everywhere.

As with the other two books, we went to our river of inspiration, the secret backstage peek box, where we watched questions rush in from all over the world like a waterfall of curiosity. As you probably know, Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) is one of the most popular websites on the Internet, receiving an average of 5 million questions every single day of the year. True, most of them are pretty straightforward (Where can I buy an ant farm? Where can I find the lyrics to World War I songs? What is the weather in Antarctica like?), and the computerized butler handles them with his usual finesse.

However, we occasionally see a rare one that hits us where it counts, in the heart and mind. Clearly it has come from a kindred soul, a curious spirit. Sometimes the questions come from people just thinking about stuff in the middle of the night. Sometimes they’re the result of the final mind-numbing round of a favorite trivia game, or a group of friends arguing facts at a party, or a kid trying to refute a bossy older sibling. These are the questions we try to pick out and answer in these books.

Thanks to all who have gone to Ask Jeeves to pose your intriguing, unexpected, and sometimes just plain weird questions. Because of you, we now know how big an alligator’s brain is (about the size of your thumb); how many mosquito bites it would take to completely drain your blood (if you’re of average height, 1.12 million); whether lemmings are suicidal (they aren’t)—and so many more fascinating facts that our larger-than-thumb-size brains hurt just thinking about it.

One thing we found interesting while working on Just Curious About Animals and Nature, Jeeves is how much other species resemble human beings in some very important ways. But what’s even more interesting is how completely unlike us they are in other ways. It’s humbling. Sure, we could teach other life-forms a thing or two (e.g., fetching, rolling over, shaking hands, conjugating verbs, splitting the atom). On the other hand, humans should also acknowledge how much we could learn from them as well. Who wouldn’t want the patience of a redwood tree or the winter-proofing of the woolly bear caterpillar? Who wouldn’t want to be able to fly like a seagull, swim like a dolphin, see like a hawk, swing through the trees like a gibbon, navigate like a salmon, or smell like a lion? (Better than smelling like a skunk, that’s for sure.)

What about our role in society? Would we be better off with the single-mindedness of bees, the individualism of tigers, or the aggressiveness of chimps? Would matriarchs be any less oppressive than patriarchs?

While researching answers for this book, we were disturbed to find that many of the world’s animals have rapidly declining populations and that this is almost always the result of human activity. Even when we’re not hunting them to extinction for meat or sport, we’re destroying huge chunks of their habitat. Enjoy them while you’ve got ’em, folks, because if we don’t figure out a way to save them, they’re going away forever.

So stay curious, don’t feed the bears, and be kind to your web-footed (and all other!) friends. We’ll see you around the Internet.

Just Curious about Animals

and Nature,

Hey, Hey,

We’re THE

Monkeys

Here we come … Tree-swinging, knuckle-dragging, and tool-using, some of us overdressed, others of us just oversexed. Our primate family tree has a whole barrel of monkeys swinging from it. No wonder we get the funniest looks from everyone we meet.

The Family’s Tree

Are gorillas a type of ape, or are apes gorillas?

Are monkeys and apes the same thing? Are humans considered apes? Are simians different from primates?

Help, Jeeves, I’m so confused!

You’re not alone, my anthropoid friend. Let’s lay it out with a minimum of screeching, howling, and chest-beating:

Primates are human beings and all of the other animals that resemble us most closely. Primates have two main groups: anthropoids and prosimians.

Anthropoids include:

Monkeys.   New World monkeys live in South and Central America and include marmosets, tamarins, capuchins, howlers, spider monkeys, squirrel monkeys, woolly monkeys, and even woolly spider monkeys. Old World monkeys live in Asia and Africa and include baboons, colobus monkeys, guenons, langurs, and macaques.

Apes.   There are four major ape groupings—chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, and orangutans. Apes have no tails and are smarter than monkeys. Apes walk in an upright position instead of on four feet like monkeys. Apes actually climb trees; monkeys take a leap into them.

Humans.   It’s pretty much just custom, religious dogma, and species egotism that keep people from proudly classifying themselves as apes. Most scientists don’t make that distinction.

By the way, if you exclude the humans from the above group, the apes and monkeys you have left are known as simians.

Prosimians include a number of lesser-known animals like aye-ayes, galagos, lemurs, lorises, pottos, and tarsiers. Prosimii means premonkey—in other words, they closely resemble the primitive primates that lived tens of millions of years ago before monkeys, apes, and humans began to evolve. Physically, prosimians have long, constantly wet noses like foxes instead of the flatter, drier noses of the anthropoids. Smell is more crucial to the prosimians, while anthropoids depend more on vision. Finally, the prosimians are not as strong or smart as the anthropoids.

Not counting the lemurs, which are lucky enough to be isolated on the island of Madagascar, most of the prosimians have to directly compete for food with better-equipped monkeys and apes. In order to survive, prosimians became nocturnal hunters that scrounge for food while their larger, smarter cousins sleep.

Not So Smart Smart

What does Homo sapiens mean?

Wise human. That’s already a fairly ironic joke, considering. However, it gets better: because anthropologists have identified other ancient subspecies of Homo sapiens (for example, Homo sapiens neandertalensis), modern humans are now known as Homo sapiens sapiens. That, of course, means wise wise human, which seems to be really overstating the matter.

What was the Neanderthal man named after?

The first fossils of our long-dead relative were discovered in 1856 in the Neander Thal (Neander Valley) in Germany, so he became known as Neanderthal Man. The Neander Thal was named in honor of a minister and hymn writer, Joachim Neumann, who used to frequent the valley on nature walks in the late 17th century. So why didn’t they call the valley Neumann Thal? Deciding to use a pseudonym for his hymns, Neumann (whose name means new man in German) translated his name into Greek and got Neander, which is the name by which he became well known. It became a strange coincidence that New Man Valley was named long before a new subspecies of man was discovered there.

Primate Colors

Do apes and monkeys see the same colors as humans?

Pretty much. Many of the New World monkeys are an exception to the rule—they don’t see red that well, giving their world a blue, green, and gold hue.

Are they called orangutans because of their color?

No, it means person of the forest in the Malay language.

Gorilla Warfare

Are any apes as evil as some humans? Do they kill each other? Do they commit crimes against members of their own species?

In this regard, we’d have to confer with some of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Thanks to the work of researchers like Jane Goodall, we know a lot about chimpanzee behavior—both the best and the worst sort. And we do mean the very worst. Chimps have been known to murder other males while trying to gain dominance in a specific group. Lower-status males will sometimes steal food, sex, and other comforts while the dominant male isn’t looking. And chimps commit rape. Of course, rape is a matter of definition, since normal chimp behavior often looks as if it’s not that far removed from it. Dominant male chimps—twice as large as the females—often hold the power in sexual matters, regardless of what seem to be the females’ preferences. Finally, chimps are very human in their capacity for war. They clash with other chimpanzee groups and will brutalize and kill their enemies.

On the other hand, under normal circumstances, chimpanzees have a great capacity for nurturing and being nurtured—with each other and with humans. Chimp mothers often adopt orphaned chimp babies and raise them as their own.

With such a complex range of behavior, chimpanzees are indeed very close cousins to humans. Alas.

Apes of Wrath

Do other primates besides people ever cannibalize each other?

Although the practice is uncommon, chimpanzees have been known to eat other chimps. To be fair, this only occurs under unusually dire circumstances like starvation—similar to times when humans have engaged in the practice. However like some human groups, some chimps ritualistically eat the flesh of their dead opponents after a war. Biologists call this practice anthropophagy to reduce the emotional sting of the word cannibalism. We wouldn’t want to stigmatize the dear little primates, after all.

Simian Meat Market

How many primates are major meat eaters?

Two: humans and chimps. You already know what people eat. A study of chimpanzee populations found that about 75 percent of the meat that chimps consumed consisted of red colobus monkey babies taken from their mothers. But researchers found that a chimp’s main motivation for hunting is often sex—if members of a hunting party offer fresh meat to a female in heat, most or all are likely to get lucky.

The Other Side of the Family

If our closest relatives, the chimps, are naturally warlike, male-dominated, and violent, how can humanity have any hope of transcending its own worst traits?

Don’t give up the ship, mate. Even if you believe that our natural selves cannot be completely transcended, we have another, gentler side of the family to look to for comfort.

Bonobos are a subspecies closely related to the chimps (in fact, they’re sometimes called pygmy chimpanzees). Even though bonobos and chimps are our closest relatives, sharing 98.4 percent of our genes, the bonobos are not as familiar to us as the chimps, in part because they weren’t even discovered by Westerners until 1929. Coincidentally, local natives along the Zaire River, where the bonobos live, have many myths about how humankind and bonobos were once brothers. (How close are bonobos to humans? That 98.4 percent genetic similarity makes them as close to us as a fox is to a dog.)

Bonobos and chimps are both believed to have split off from the same ancestors as humans not that long ago in evolutionary history—perhaps only 6.5 million years ago. Interestingly, unlike chimps and most other primates, the bonobos usually walk on two feet like humans, still affecting a hunched-over posture that closely resembles what scientists believe was the walking stance of our early human ancestors.

The bonobos give us hope by demonstrating that not all of our closest primate relatives are violent, warlike, cannibalistic, and exploitative. Instead, the bonobos are most interested in making love, not war. We can take comfort in the fact that some of them are lewd, obscene, and downright oversexed. In fact, they go at it like monkeys, as it were. Actually, much more often than monkeys—they’ve developed a female-led, cooperative, and fairly egalitarian society in which continuous and promiscuous sex has become a powerful substitute for aggression.

Compare what happens in a society of bonobos and in one composed of chimpanzees. If a group of chimps come upon food, the dominant male claims it as his own, using a display of aggression that ensures he gets a chance to eat his fill before allowing others to eat. On the other hand, a group of bonobos coming upon food will immediately get aroused and begin having sex—male and female, male and male, and (most common of all) female and female, all of them rubbing their genitals against those of another while grinning and making cooing sounds. After about five minutes, when all are feeling the magnanimous glow of orgasm, the bonobos go forward to feed as a community without regard to rank. Unlike chimps, bonobos don’t hunt baby monkeys, or much of anything else, presumably since the guy bonobos don’t have to do so to impress the gals. Except for an occasional small mammal, the bonobo diet contains very little animal protein.

A similar orgiastic thing happens when the bonobos come across anything that might be appealing enough to start conflicts. For example, when researchers in a zoo dropped a cardboard box into the compounds where chimps and bonobos lived, the dominant chimp used threats and violence to be the first to explore it. In contrast, the bonobos engaged in a brief orgy, and then all members of the group approached the box to explore it together.

Sometimes conflict happens anyway, despite the best-laid plans of the best-laid monkeys. For example, a bonobo adult might snap or hit at another peevishly. In that case, the matter is usually brought to a climax later by conciliatory activity that takes kissing and making up to whole new heights.

Perhaps corporate team-builders can find a lesson here somewhere.

Love Monkeys

Do any other apes except humans have monogamous and equal mating relationships?

Yes. Gibbons bond together as male and female and defend their territory from intruders, forsaking all others. All other apes, however, engage in some form of polygamy, wild sexual abandon, or both.

Do any primates other than humans have face-to-face sex?

Bonobos copulate face-to-face, looking deeply into each other’s eyes. This occurs about a third of the time during sexual encounters. Humans once thought that they were unique in engaging in this especially intimate activity. In fact, Western scientists once believed that face-to-face sex was not even a natural position for humans but was a more advanced cultural innovation that had to be taught to primitive peoples (hence the term missionary position). Those clueless Western scientists were wrong on both counts.

Simian Says: Make a Rhyme!

Who was the gorilla from the Tom and Jerry cartoons?

Grape Ape.

Who was that cartoon gorilla with the hat, bow tie, and suspenders?

Magilla Gorilla.

What is the Latin name for the western lowland gorilla?

Gorilla gorilla gorilla.

Relative Humility

Who is more closely related: humans and gorillas, or gorillas and monkeys?

Humans and gorillas are closer relatives than gorillas and monkeys.

In The Blood of Rhesus

What does the Rh in Rh factor stand for?

Rhesus, as in the monkey that was once widely used in medical research. When Dr. Karl Landsteiner discovered some of the esoteric properties of blood in 1940, he decided to honor the rhesus monkeys that, in the process of making this discovery, were deprived of their freedom, blood, and lives.

Beware of Gorillas Making Hand Gestures

Does Koko the signing gorilla watch television?

She does. At some point, she went positively ape over Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Eventually Mr. Rogers came to visit Koko. Her response to seeing him in the flesh was interesting indeed, boys and girls: she wrapped her powerful arms around him, and then—as she had seen him do hundreds of times on TV—she reached down and took off his shoes.

Do signing gorillas use slang?

Well maybe. Koko, the most adept signing gorilla ever, started using the sign for nipple for people, perhaps because of the rhyme. She also started using stink for flower. Another linguistic oddity she initiated is referring to any woman as lips and any man as foot.

Can only gorillas use sign language, or have other apes been taught that too?

Chimps and, to a lesser extent, orangutans so far have also learned to sign. Washoe, the most accomplished chimpanzee, has a vocabulary of at least 240 words. He and his fellow chimps have so incorporated signing into their lives that they converse with each other by signing, and even talk to themselves when alone While this chimp’s vocabulary numbers are impressive, they’re nowhere near the ones for Koko—her handlers say she can understand 2,000 spoken words and respond with a vocabulary of up to 1,000 signs. On the other hand, some of Koko’s answers are so esoteric and random that sometimes you have to wonder how much of what she says is her intentional communication and how much is the interpretation of her trainers. For example, a transcript of an on-line chat revealed these questions and answers between Koko and her trainer, Dr. Penny Patterson:

Q: Are you going to have a baby in the future?

K: [signs] Inattention.

P: Oh, poor sweetheart, she said inattention. She covered her face with her hands, which means it’s not happening, basically, or I don’t see it.

Q: What do you want for your birthday?

K: Food smokes.

P: You have to understand that Smoky is the name of her kitten.

Q: Do you feel love from the humans who have raised you?

K: Lips apple give me.

P: People give her her favorite foods.

Specs and Spans

How long are gorilla arms?

Gorilla arms are longer than their legs.