“Aha!” I said. “Damn, monkfish is good.”

We half-nodded in agreement.

“Pretty damn ugly, though.”

We half-nodded in agreement.

The next day, by chance, I ended up at the New England Aquarium, and was reminded that “pretty damn ugly” is an insult to pretty damn ugly fish.

Come closer, little girl...

The American Monkfish, Lophius americanus, or the “goosefish” as it’s known locally, belongs to the anglerfish family and, in addition to the anglerfish’s lure, shares every bit of its rugged good looks. There are many recipes online that describe how to make monkfish dishes, but let me share with you the basic recipe for a monkfish itself:

1. Buy a pumpkin.
2. Carve the biggest, fangliest mouth on that pumpkin that you can.
3. Allow pumpkin to rot beyond recognition.
4. Drop a refrigerator on pumpkin, out of mercy.
5. Attach tail.

The pancake aspect of the monkfish allows it to ambush prey from the ocean floor, hidden in plain sight. The giant mouth allows it to capture and swallow prey as large as itself; monkfish will eat anything that gets within biting distance, including small sharks, diving ducks, and other monkfish, and there are reports of monkfish eating the wooden buoys of lobster traps. (The name “goosefish” doesn’t come from the flavor of the meat but for their penchant for swimming up to the surface to devour floating seabirds.) For most of their adult lives, they live quietly and patiently, insipid puddles of unkissable maw blending into the debris on the sea floor. But twice a year, the female monkfish balloons up into a half-pumpkin shape that makes her a little more conspicuous: call it a “baby bump.” And what she releases — and what the monkfish I saw that day had released — is anything but ugly.

Monkfish release their eggs as one long veil that floats to the water’s surface for one to three weeks before the salt dissolves the binding mucus and the eggs float apart. Each veil can be sixty feet long (though they are usually around 30 feet), can be two or three feet wide, and contain over a million eggs. Drifting along in the currents off North America and Northern Europe, they appear as lost mermaid scarves, in colors ranging from white to pink to orange.

Perhaps the phenomenon of something so excruciatingly homely creating something of such ethereal beauty is too easy. The question that occurred first to me is: if you were going to lay a million eggs, why would you pack them together into something so conspicuous? Other animals treat fish eggs — caviar, roe and the like — with much the same deference that we do: an expensive and epicurian delight that should always be eaten immediately if you can find it for free. So what possesses the monkfish to lay all its eggs in one basket?

When you look like this, you learn to live all-or-nothing.

Monkfish are hardly the only animals to lay their eggs in such profusion, but they seem almost unique in their confidence that their eggs can survive in plain sight. Most fish will either scatter their eggs, or build a nest and defend them. Like the Easter bunny, most fish will hide their eggs behind pieces of vegetation, or on the ground, usually buried in the rocky or sandy substrate. The Easter bunny does not simply leave a few hundred thousand cartons of eggs tied together for one very lucky child to find.

Jackpot!

Some fish, known as mouthbrooders, will go so far as to hide the eggs in the male fish’s mouth, where they will live even after hatching. There are a few fish that do abandon their eggs to the surface as one mass, but in their case, the eggs are at least disguised as foam. These are the bubble nesters: the gouramis, the sunfishes, the Siamese fighting fish, the electric eel. The males from many of these species will, when approached by a female, begin frantically building a raft-like nest made of bubbles and bits of vegetation, glued together with saliva. But unlike the monkfish’s veil, the bubble nest is vigorously defended by the male while the young fry develop and hatch.

Though, like bubble wrap, male betta fish have trouble not compulsively popping their nest to pass the time.

So why the mysterious veil? One reason is surely dispersal; a traveling veil of eggs ensures that the babies that survive won’t grow up to live in the same immediate habitat as the mother, where they would compete with her for food, be subject to cannibalism, and possibly inbreed with her. I have another theory, as well: given the monkfish’s see-food diet, I imagine that male monkfishes — always smaller than females — would be hesitant to approach her to spawn. The externally-fertilized eggs, floating on the tide as a veil, would not only act as a sort of flag for male monkfishes to spot, but would allow them to spawn without fear of being chomped. The veil’s tremendous length would also allow several males to fertilize the eggs, increasing the odds that the fittest monkfish will be among the fathers. As for predators, the veil may simply be too big to be eaten completely; at least a few strips of fabric must survive and weave the next generation. Or perhaps the eggs are, for some reason, unpalatable. Ugly food is good to eat, and sometimes a delicate meal is just to admire.

And part of me wishes they HAD been Adam & Eve.

Leopard print has never gone out of style — and has probably never not been in style, somewhere on Earth. (Many paleontologists believe that dinosaurs wore leopard-like spots.) Perhaps the reason for its endurance is that its parents are these two very different nostalgias. One is a deep-seeded yearning for the Paleolithic and pre-civilization, a length of time far longer than post-civilization humanity, when we as a species were in a more even conversation with nature and depended more on our physical prowess, our animal senses, and our understanding of the wilderness. To be sure, there are many people on Earth who are not far removed from this lifestyle, but for those of us in the “first world,” nostalgia for the time of spears and shamans exists as a distant cultural memory, perhaps stitched into the threads of our genetic code, like a dream we can’t quite remember yet which tugs on our hearts upon waking. We cannot shake the feeling that something, somehow led us astray from our true identity as the human ape, and adorning ourselves in leopard print reminds us of our species’ connection to wildlife of the world and our once-intimate relationship to it.

The other type of nostalgia, of course, is this:

My perfect world: 80% leopard print, 20% babe.

Without a book on fashion — and maybe some of you can help me out here — it is difficult to pinpoint when leopard print came to America, a land without leopards. (Although I’m sure the native Mayans, Aztecs and other Central American tribes had been rocking jaguar pelts for some time.) If I had to guess based on available photographs, I’d imagine that wearable leopard print — probably in the form of real leopard pelts — arrived in America in the beginning of the 20th Century from England, who had been busy raping Africa for the past century or two. In South Africa, the site of many an English war, tribal chiefs and their families wore leopard fur as a status symbol, a custom which continues today. It was a primarily masculine pattern then, associated with the hunters who killed the beast. Leopard pelts may have adorned the trophy room walls of Teddy Roosevelt and other blue-blooded American safari hunters, but it was women, notably in the 1940′s, who subverted this macho symbol into something both playful and political, fashioning scarves and skirts with the predator’s — and by association, the male hunter’s — primal power. The result was a bold, sexually explicit design that was anything but subtle.

Bad Kitty.

The original, primal symbolic meaning of leopard print met the modern symbol of female sexual empowerment in the 1950′s with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a sort of pin-up Tarzan:

Not a cat person, apparently.

Of course, once subverted, leopard print left itself vulnerable to more subversions. Leopard print became of of the standards of the free love and the hippie movement in the 1960′s. But it was also taken up by rock and rollers, of course, who have always endeavored to rebel with a little cross-dressing and a little hypersexualized androgyny. Little Richard, one of the godfathers of rock and roll, got his start playing in gay nightclubs where dressing in women’s prints wasn’t terribly unusual, and he brought that sense of style with him when he went mainstream, forever imprinting the fabric of rock and roll with fabulous feline rosettes.

Straight rock and rollers looking for a little sexual shock value followed suit:

And Liv Tyler sprung from his forehead, fully formed.

And some people, like Tom Leppard, “The Leopard Man,” have gone so far as to completely immerse themselves in leopard print forever.

But do the carpets match the drapes?

Leopard print is still popular today, perhaps because it never became too popular; not everyone has the prerequisite pomp to pull it off. It requires an unabashed sense of grandiosity and an implied sexual bravado. As a pattern, these little asymmetrical dots have conquered everything from panties to galoshes to sorority girl cowboy hats, swinger lounge lampshades to school backpacks. They may be worn to be cute, or they can be tragic. (Think of the leopard print shawls of older ladies at dive bars, advertising a beauty that is no longer mint.) But one thing leopard print is not is “safe.” You wear it to stand out from the crowd.

Or hide in the treetops, waiting to deal death from above. Either way.

Ironically, this is exactly the opposite of how a leopard wears its spots. The smallest of the four “big cats” in the Panthera genus (the others being the lion, tiger, and jaguar), it hunts mostly by stealth, and its cryptic coloration is key to its survival. It is not as fast as the cheetah, nor strong as the tiger or jaguar, nor a social hunter like the lion. It is not large enough to defend its kill from hyenas or other large predators. But its ability to hunt silently and nearly invisibly is what, until recently devastated by hunting and habitat loss, made the leopard the furthest-ranging large land predator in the world — it once hunted from the tip of South Africa to the islands of Indonesia. That range, combined with its deadly stalking abilities and nocturnal habits, is what has made the leopard perhaps the most feared and hated of the big cats, worldwide. But large predators, considered pests by ranchers and menaces by the rural public, have a way of becoming respected and immortalized after death, and so even with the future of its species hanging in the balance, the leopard still bedecks heraldic crests and presidential sashes. All spotted “animal print” designs, including jaguar, cheetah, and ocelot patterns, are dubbed “leopard print,” and a pantheon of spotted animals have earned the right to be named after the great hunter. It is a remarkably versatile pattern, capable of adapting to hide animals in a wide array of habitats, reflecting the interplay of light and shade in forest understory, desert rocks, and underwater. Let’s take a look at leopard print in the animal kingdom:

The leopard frog is wearing the latest North American designs in fourteen different styles, making a splash from the ponds of Vancouver down to the runways of Mexico City. With a chic simplicity that says “less is more,” the leopard frog’s big, bold spots are obviously influenced more by the cheetah than the leopard, but I love the personal touches it made to the basic pattern, making bold aquatic-themed blotches that pay homage to the frog’s freshwater habitat.

Diving deeper, we take the show to the Left Coast for a stunning display of maritime fashion with the leopard shark, a San Francisco Bay native and a must-know socialite around the local kelp forests. This petite shark has taken the nautical spot theme to extremes; notice how the contours of the shadows from the waves above hug the shark’s body and fit with the large buckle patters on the back. I’m expecting this design to become all the rage from the Gulf of California up to Portland among the elite shark circles in Spring of 2012. Fierce!

This leopard butterfly is doing something very fresh, very risky with the basic theme, and I’m not sure I like it. Substituting a tiger-like orange for tried-and-true leopardine gold, and crowding the spots along the wing edges… this just doesn’t seem like the kind of cryptic coloration the judges are going to go for. It’s a beautiful, even defiant piece of fashion, but does it really live up to the “leopard” brand? I can almost see why they call this the “Common” Leopard Butterfly.

This giant leopard moth, on the other hand, has the right amount of playful joie de vivre and classic composition in its entry. I love the Asian motif here, obviously modeling (mottling?) itself after the snow leopard of Afghanistan, making a bold political statement as well as an American artistic rebel yell. This number is a coup for fashionistas who live practically, making any moth blend right whether he’s at home near a porch light in New England or relaxing in the rocks on a snowy mountainside during a vacation in the Khyber Pass.

This leopard bush fish: No. Just, no. Those spots look like they were fingerpainted by a child. Listen, can we talk? This kind of thing might fly back home in the Congo River, but this won’t do for the international runway. It’s not that it’s not leopard print; it’s just that it’s so leopard print it’s an ugly giraffe.

I love the trend of accentuating the backside, and India’s leopard gecko not only has the leopard on the outside, it’s got a tiger in the tank. Baby got back! That callapygian posterior is a must-have accessory for summering in the Pakistani desert this year, but it’s the fabulous cryptic coloration that gives you that “coy” look when you’re being hunted down by the paparazzi or a pit viper. I think it’s safe to say: polka dots are out, leopard prints are in!

And probably forever, too. As you can see, leopard print has never been just for leopards. It is a universal motif, useful in many environments. Whatever new species arise in the future will stumble upon the luxurious leopard, a beautiful and practical print that obscures the body yet somehow glamorizes it at the same time. Should we time-travel to a far-away Earth, or space-travel to a far-away Earth-like planet, I think we’d find that leopard print will never go out of style on the animals of any planet with a yellow sun. It’s designed to blend in, worn to stand out, and looks good on just about anybody.

Even this guy.

Indiana Jones was for real.

Yesterday morning, I was video-chatting with a friend in Australia, where it was late at night. The other day, I ate plums that were grown in Chile. Lord knows which sea the fish I eat comes from, or what brown hand sews my shirts. As fond as we are of musing about our rapidly shrinking, ever more interconnected globe, it is important to remember that there are still people in the world who exist outside of both our economy and our knowledge. There are villages where no Coca-Cola t-shirts hang on laundry lines, no hunter runs the forest in Reeboks, where no white anthropologist plays with the children between notes in his orange book. These people are neither fighting with oil companies nor being taught how to grow sustainable shade-grown coffee by non-profit do-gooders. As far as we know, these uncontacted tribes have no idea that we, the rest of the world, exist. Civilizations have risen and fallen, monuments and cities have been built, been demolished, and regrown on the rubble; world wars have been fought and revolutions both violent and scientific, artistic, philosophical, and musical have shaken governments and their people; empires have stretched their tentacles into almost every crevice of the Earth. The Eighties happened. Beyonce recently dropped her hot new single. Man landed on the moon. But for a few villages in the Amazon, none of this is true. Their reality does not include us, or what we call “history.” Their world is still the fish at the end of the spear. It is the dragonfly and its god, the rainwater and the fruiting of the blue-flowered tree, and the one and only language.

We also know that we cannot contact these tribes, because of the risk of contagion. When the Matis people of Brazil made first contact with the government after years of avoiding them as an enemy, more than half the tribe died of pneumonia; a modern-world retelling of the story of thousands of European/Indian contacts throughout history. The recently-discovered tribe in the Vale do Javari will remain a mystery to us, and we to them; we may never learn their names or customs or language, nor gain their unique knowledge of their remote corner of the planet. In fact, because we will not attempt to contact them, nor the eight to two dozen other uncontacted species in the Javari, we’ll never be able to see their forest home nor the flora and fauna therein. This got me thinking: If we never make contact with the new tribe, what else will we never contact? Brazil is second only to Indonesia in number of endemic species, and the Amazon rainforest is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. It seems logical that there would be at least a dozen species endemic only to that region. The Unknown People know what they are. Can we, sight unseen?

Beautiful Metropolitan Downtown... Somewhere

The Vale do Javari is named for the Javari River that represents the border between Brazil and Peru, and is part of Brazil’s largest state, Amazonas. There is relatively little available information on the Vale, but regionally, the upper Javari River is Brazil’s center for diversity for mammals (257 species, 11 endemic) and birds (782 species, 17 endemic). The forest is relatively flat here, the trees tall, the air hot and muggy. Caimans drift with the sluggish currents in the streams, and tapirs push aside the broad palm leaves with their snouts. The jaguar lays belly-down on a low tree-branch, waiting to rain death on a passing capybara on her way to the river’s lily pool. In the trees, there are cities of monkeys: squirrel monkeys, woolly monkeys, emperor tamarins and brown capuchins and white-faced sakis. And just across the river from the unknown peoples, in Peru — and possibly within their territory as well — is a sulking monkey with no large city of its own, but secretive tribes that hide in the flooded swampland. For a creature with a head as bright and red as a stoplight, it does a remarkably good job of hiding, for it is one of the rarest monkeys in the world, living in one of the world’s most inaccessible habitats.

It is the Bald Uakari, one of four uakari monkeys in the Amazon, all of which are endangered. What sets this one apart is the brilliant crimson hue of its hairless pate, which is caused not by pigmentation but by a lack of such; the sanguine color is simply an unobstructed view of an abundance of capillaries close to the surface of the skin. Uakaris are continuously blushing. (A cooling mechanism, perhaps, in addition to an indicator of health.) For New World monkeys, which are generally known for their impressive and sometimes prehensile tails, bald uakaris have relatively short tails, which is a perplexity considering their arboreal lifestyle. Their teeth are specially adapted to crush hard nuts that would be inaccessible to other monkeys. In troupes of 5 to 30, they patrol their large territory in search of seeds that have not yet fallen into the swollen rivers below, occasionally whooping to signal their presence to other tribes.

But there are fewer tribes to answer now. Logging has annihilated most of the uakari’s homeland, even with Peru and Brazil’s network of nature preserves in place and stricter laws in place. Even as logging and habitat destruction in Amazonas has declined sharply since the days of lawless slash-and-burn in the 1980′s and 1990′s, so have the uakari’s numbers continued to decline. Deforestation kills swiftly and its impact on a population continues far into the future; even as the forest recovers, the uakari community has not. First contact with the civilized world was too severe, like an outbreak of pneumonia that cannot be put back in Pandora’s box.

Logging, gold mining, oil drilling and farming are four of the threats that constitute one reason the Brazilian government is keeping the location of the latest uncontacted, unnamed tribe a secret. Once the tribe is known, I suppose they reason, they can be exploited, bought or even killed. With most conservation efforts, the reasoning goes, a species, tribe, or place can only be saved once it is known and understood. In this case, the tribe’s complete secrecy is the key to its survival. So long as we remain ignorant of them, and they of us, we can maintain a truce. By agreeing to not make contact, we cannot visit on them the germs, guns, machines or ideas that make up the plagues of the modern world. In turn, tens and thousands of plants and animals that live in the Javari Valley are now dependent on this hunter-gatherer tribe for their existence.

Does the bald uakari, native to the general area, live in the treetops above the unknown tribe’s fishing grounds? We do not know. We also do not know what frogs and beetles perch on the dewdrops, what orchids and snakes drape the tree branches, or what secret birds may fly between corded lianas that tie the forest together. Knowing that we are the bringers of death, the survival of countless — literally, countless — species now hinges on our intentional and peaceful ignorance. We must not learn this tribe’s language, codify its tattoos, or seek its wisdom, or else we will bring with us the pests and armies that inevitably spell destruction. There are still people on Earth, and places on Earth, that dwell outside our maps and encyclopedias; still undiscovered species that stalk unchartered valleys, and exist without our names. What we do not understand is still worth saving. Sometimes what we don’t know won’t kill them.

Exhibit A: Octopus

This is an octopus. It has possesses both short- and long-term memory, can recognize individuals, and practices observational learning. It can solve mazes and basic puzzles, use tools, mimic other animals, and even has a sense of play, which is only observed in higher vertebrates such as birds and mammals. In England, it’s even achieved the status of “honorary vertebrate” under animal testing laws. However, because it is not a true vertebrate, you are no relation to it.

Not even ones that play saxophones, bongos and guitar in a cute hat.

In fact, you are more closely related to this creature:

A kazoo?

It’s a tunicate. Specifically, this tunicate is a sea squirt. It has no sense of play, memory, or observational learning. It is not smarter than a 5th grader. It doesn’t own the intellectual capacity to play Candyland. In fact, it doesn’t even have a brain. (Anymore. It doesn’t have a brain anymore, a curiosity we’ll get to in a minute.) But it does, for a brief moment in its life, possess a notochord, which puts it in the phylum Chordata, which makes it the simplest life form to possess something like a spine. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals all owe a debt to this grand-daddy/grand-mama (it’s hermaphroditic) of all vertebrates. Today we’ll pay homage to the humble sea squirt and the bizarre family of early chordates that predate us, still rocking hard 540 million years after they began the movement.

To think, we are a distant cousin to the mighty purple sea squirt.

Tunicates are sac-like filter feeders shaped much like one-chambered hearts, with a single chamber serviced by one inhalant “in” siphon and one exhalant “out” siphon. Anatomically, the most important thing that separates the tunicate from other filter feeders such as anemones and mussels is its planktonic stage, in which the free-swimming, tadpole-like larva possesses such familiar organs as an ocellus (a primitive eye), a cerebral ganglion (a primitive brain), and the aforementioned notochord (a primitive spinal cord). The superficial similarity to an actual tadpole is brief, however. Within about 24 hours of developing, the planktonic larva has found a flat, rocky surface to which it anchors itself and begins its metamorphosis into its sessile, tube-like adult form. (Childhood is a fleeting pleasure in the tunicate’s life.) Not only does the shape of the animal radically change, but so does its physiology: the cerebral ganglion, being primarily for control of movement, serves no purpose to the immobile adult sea squirt, and so the rapidly maturing larva gets to work digesting it for its protein reserves. The tunicate essentially eats its own brain.

After turning stationary and dissolving its own brain, the tunicate larva completes its metamorphosis into a metaphor for the American adult.

Though all adult tunicates are essentially brainless and spineless, they are not heartless or gutless. (Heart, stomach, intestines and gonads are contained in a second, visceral cavity below the water-siphoning atrial cavity.) Nor are all of them passive filter feeders. Deep in the canyons and trenches of the ocean dwell the predatory tunicates (Megalodicopia hians), hooded monsters that wait like Venus flytraps for zooplankton and small animals to drift into their tiny, yawning maws, which then snap shut to capture and digest the hapless creatures.

'Megalodicopia hians' is Latin for 'Carnivorous Sock Puppet from Hell.'

Most tunicates, however, are benign to the point of hospitable (unless you are plankton). Many sea squirts become homes for fish and shrimp, and animals like the tubesnout fish will lay their eggs in them, which behavior I generally discourage in houseguests.

Emily Post dissuades houseguests from spawning or laying eggs in their hosts' siphons.

Likewise, not all tunicates are stay-at-homes. Salps, for instance, are generally colonial tunicates which form long free-floating daisy chains in the ocean. They are the chordate answer to sea jellies: usually transparent, pumping mindlessly in the current as they feed on phytoplankton with their sieves, the salps can travel as individuals, chains, or even swarms, and have a huge effect on the availability of plankton in the oceanic food chain.

This is what happens when you don't properly dispose of your used condoms, New Jersey.

Most tunicates, like the salps, are also aggregate or colonial animals cemented together at a common base like tenants of an apartment. But unlike the ethereal salps, most tunicates possess an tough, armored sheath known by the dainty name of the tunic. What makes this tunic sturdier than, say, the tunic of a daydreaming Greek shepherd boy is the presence of two fairly unusual materials to be found in an animal: cellulose and metal. Despite being the most common organic compound on Earth, cellulose is produced by no animal besides the tunicate. That’s because cellulose is the substance gives plant cells their structure. In other words, it’s wood. (To be precise, wood is 50% cellulose. Cotton, however, is 90% cellulose.) In pure crystalline form, tunicates have duplicated the cellulose that strengthens tree trunks to strengthen their own trunks.

You'll be receiving a call from my lawyers.

Like fans of Iron Maiden, tunicates bleed heavy metal.

Vanadium (Atomic Number: 23, Atomic Symbol: V) falls between titanium and chromium on the periodic table, and is a soft, silver-grey metal that is never naturally found in its pure elemental state. However, it’s found in over 65 different minerals (primarily vanadinite, bauxite and magnetite), and when combined with iron, steel, or titanium, it significantly strengthens the alloy and can be used to make everything from workman tools to jet engines. (The original Model-T was largely made out of vanadium steel.) In the biological world, vanadium is used almost exclusively by ocean creatures, and few at that. Some algaes require vanadium to produce essential compounds, and some fungi, such as amanita mushrooms, accumulate the metal. But it is otherwise exclusive to the chordate sea squirts and the non-chordate sea cucumbers, bottom dwellers related to sea stars and sea urchins. They use vanabins, proteins which collect the metal to form hemovanadin, the sea squirt and sea cucumber analogue to hemoglobin. In most animals, hemoglobin binds to oxygen and transports it throughout the body. However, there’s no evidence that hemovanadin binds to oxygen at all, and in fact there is already hemocyanin, another oxygen-transporting protein, present in the blood to take care of that business.

Useless for oxygen transport, vanadium does at least taste like bacon.

It turns out that vanabins don’t even do their job very well. Vanabins so loosely bind to vanadium that captured vanadium is often shed by the cells to travel freely and independently through the bloodstream, turning sea squirts into repository junkyards of rare metal. So why collect vanadium at all? It’s a biological mystery. But my favorite theory is that it uses vanadium as a toxin to deter predators and microbes. In humans, vanadium isn’t highly toxic but does make a handy spermicide. I wonder if filter feeders like sea squirts and sea cucumbers aren’t mining vanadium out of the passing algae in order to neuter the enemy. It may not have a backbone, per se, but the little sea squirt has balls. And now that you’ve eaten a bite of its green-blooded, metallic flesh, you don’t.

Tattletale.

The second birds I thought of were the hummingbirds; back in my California days, I would watch Anna’s Hummingbirds performing mating displays over the San Francisco heath, their flared tail feathers vibrating stiffly to produce a distinctive chirp as they divebombed the ground like young show-off stunt pilots.

The third birds I considered were the goddamn grouses. Yes, I grouse about grouses. After all, while most birds simply fly away when they sense something threatening approaching, it is a grouse’s defensive strategy to hide until you almost step on it before exploding into the air like a goddamn land mine, providing the casual hiker with at least a modest helping of severe cardiac arrest.Their wings have a helicopter-like “THUP-THUP-THUP” which ensures maximum surprise by producing maximum ruckus, enough to give any Nam vet a good flashback. But scare tactics aren’t the only use for their percussive wingbeats; males “drum” their wings against the air to create the sound of a slow-starting motorcycle revving up, which drives the lady grouses wild.

Charles Darwin called it “instrumental music,” but less romantically, we now call it “sonation:” sounds made by animals via anything but the syrinx. By this definition, the woodpecker’s drum solo and the cassowary’s unsubtle tap-dancing are considered part of the larger symphony of bird communication and, in fact, an extension of song. But the most extreme examples of bird sonation belong to those bright baubles of a neotropical bird family, the manakins. The golden-crowned manakin can make a series of loud popping sounds with its wings so that it seems to mimic a string of firecrackers going off; indubitably, one of the better attention-getters for young males of any species. Other manakins create whooshing sounds with their wing feathers during mating display dives. But even among the musical manakins, there is one that really excels at instrumentation. It has turned its wings into violins.

The club-winged manakin, as you’ve just seen, can vibrate its specially-shaped wing feathers 100 times a second to produce a high-pitched whine. The males — and only the males — have secondary wing feathers which have a series of ridges which compliment differently shaped feathers on the opposite wings. One is the violin, the other the bow. Since the seven ridges of the violin feather can make fourteen sounds during each shake — once when the bow feather strikes it, and once again when they move past each other — the manakin’s feathers can produce 1,400 individual sounds per second. Even the non-specialized flight feathers on the manakin’s wing play a part; though they do not vibrate when struck, they vibrate sympathetically when the sonating feathers do, both harmonizing with and amplifying the sound.

Male and female club-winged manakin secondary feathers.

The effect is the only avian example of stridulation, or sound produced by rubbing body parts together. The most famous example of stridulation is the chirping of crickets, produced by rubbing wings and finely ridged legs together, but it also happens to be the mechanism of violins and their family of bowstring instruments, not to mention vinyl records. When a DJ scratches an album, what you’re hearing is the human equivalent of a cricket’s love song.

Stridulation: Invented by katydids, perfected by Grandmaster Flash.

My primary question is this: born with a voice, why use an instrument? Unlike woodpeckers, hummingbirds, and grouses, manakins belong to the Passerine, or perching bird, family. It is also known as the songbird family — slightly misleading, as non-passerine birds are capable of singing, and some passerines, like the crow, can’t hold a tune to save their lives, but in the bird world certainly none have more beautiful songs than the passerines. Thrushes, bluebirds, canaries… all of your favorite voices belong to this clan. Passeriformes is a uniquely successful order as well, accounting for half of all bird species. The argument could be made that it’s their perching ability that have made the passerines so successful, but I have a hunch that it’s their songs that have split the passerines into so many diverse sub-orders and classes. Two male wrens with slightly different songs might attract female wrens with different musical tastes. Singing in a different dialect, or improvising a new riff, or even botching a high note might actually win or lose you a mate, which can waterfall into genetic divergence and the origin of an entirely new species. In the high-stakes arena of sexual selection, mere musical preference might divide an entire species in half, thereby setting the stage for adaptive radiation and biodiversity. The birds, in a way, don’t just create the songs; they are created by the songs.

The coexistence of both Punk and Emo music is what will eventually split humanity into the Morlocks and Eloi.

What does this have to do with our fiddling manakins? It would seem that long ago, an ancestor of the manakin developed a unique form of singing that didn’t use his voice. It might have been a simple buzz, or a whinny, created by shivering its wing feathers together during a visual courtship display. However exactly it started, the ladies liked the sound of it. In a tropical paradise full of chattering, whistling, and booming, the airwaves might have become so saturated with birdsong that this new form of communicating stood out starkly against the white noise.

How do you like this macho high-pitched squeak?

We call it sonation now, but in a way, Darwin’s “instrumental noise” is more apt. Imagine, if you will, an anarchist orchestra in which each musician is trying not to complete a harmonious symphony but rather to become top chair. Playing as loudly as possible only makes the chamber hall an unintelligible din in which no one is heard. So the musicians specialize; some take up piccolos to try to raise their voices above the clamor, some take bassoons. Rather than playing continuously, they vary their musical patterns; some play allegro, some adagio. Some in 2/4 time, some in 4/4. Some take major-key melodies; others, finding that niche filled, are better heard by playing minor-key counterpoint. All around the amphitheatre of the pond at night, the bullfrogs pluck their basses, the green frogs twang their banjos, the woodfrogs quack like oboes, and the spring peepers punctuate the concerto with flutes. Upon waking, the mourning doves sing low, the robins twist a melody from the tops of the trees, and the ravens simply talk. Soon, without any conductor, there is music happening, a wild and accidental symphony — part Beethoven, part Mingus, part Cage. It is an opera about war, greed, lust and power, and every singer believes himself to be the prima donna. And it is a masterpiece.

And eventually, there is no way to stand out but to invent new instruments. Perhaps the saturation of the symphony was what led to the percussion of the woodpecker and cockatoo, the reedy chirp of the hummingbird’s tail, and the violin of the manakin. Bills, feet, and feathers joined the orchestra. The body becomes an instrument. So diversity of sound rounds out what has become a global concert, making the harmony grander and more complete, though the symphony is emergent and unwritten and, thankfully, unfinished.

I never was sent on a snipe hunt, but the warning left me with the impression that the snipe was, in fact, mythological. (I believed the same about gypsies until a trip to Europe at age 16.) This was no doubt reinforced by my poor recollection of Lewis Carroll’s jabberwockese poem The Hunting of the Snark, a short farce about a beast that is hunted by diverse characters but found by none. At some point, I misremembered The Hunting of the Snark as The Hunting of the Snipe, which seemed like an equally nonsensical title.

I don't exist. I was never here. Got it?

But there is a genuine animal behind the never-seen cryptid “snipe,” and it is almost as elusive. Snipes are wading shorebirds, most of which are part of the Scolopacidae family with the woodcocks, which they also resemble in so many ways: the cryptic coloration that gives them excellent camouflage against the rushes and pebbles of their home, the high-set eyes, the long bill for probing for worms and crustaceans below the muck. Snipes are animals that are built to disappear. If camouflage fails, the snipe will escape danger with a flight pattern so erratic and zigzagging that hunters find them almost impossible to take down. Only a supremely skilled sharpshooter would be able to both find and finish a crafty snipe with mere bullets; hence, the origin of the “sniper.”

Laugh all you want. These guys could shoot the pecker off a mosquito from 500 yards.

The term “sniper” began among British troops in the 1770′s to glorify an excellent hunter, but it was not until 1824 that it was used to describe a sharpshooter in battle. (Through the Civil War, snipers in American warfare were simply part of the “skirmishers,” the forces at the edges of the battle which picked small fights and harassed the enemy.) But snipers as we know them were born at the turn of the 20th century during the Second Boer War in South Africa. There, a Scottish Highland unit headed by an English lord and answering to an American scoutmaster developed the skills and tactics that would define for the modern sniper unit: not just marksmanship, but stealth, surveillance, caution, patience, and camouflage. They were the first known military unit to wear a ghillie suit, the costume snipers wear to blend in with the immediate vegetation. In other words, cryptic coloration.

There are 15 Navy SEALS in this photograph. Can you find them all?

The snipe’s success as a hunter is due largely to the sensitivity of its bill. It bears more nerve-clustered filaments directly below the surface of the bill than any other sandpiper, giving it the ability to tell a buried crab from a buried pebble almost instantaneously. With a rapid sewing-machine action, the snipe probes the sand, finding tiny animals unseen below the surface.

PebblepebblepebblecigarettebuttpebblepebblepiratetreasurepebbleBUG!

That American scoutmaster that led the first snipers in South Africa was Frederick Russell Burnham, the great adventurer and the inspiration for the fictional Allan Quatermain and, by extension, Indiana Jones. By age 14 he was working as an Indian tracker in the Southwest during the Apache Wars, continued during the Cheyenne Wars, and made his living for his first thirty years as a cowboy, prospector, and buffalo hunter. But by the 1880′s, the consensus in America was that the West had been won, and Burnham was not quite ready to settle down. So he moved to Africa and enlisted with the corporate British forces trying to conquer the region, during which his incredible skills as a tracker earned him a nickname among the Africans: “He-who-sees-in-the-dark.”

Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway both wanted to be this guy.

There is one time during which the snipe makes itself conspicuous, and that is during mating season. Like its cousin the woodcock, the male snipe performs elaborate mating displays which involve flying up in a circle and taking short, sudden dives, during which it makes a curious drumming sound with its tail. To hear it is at first to disbelieve that this oboe-like winnowing is made mechanically and not with a voice, or that it isn’t the laugh of some half-mad woodpecker, but it really is produced with the specialized outer tail feathers which vibrate as the snipe falls. The drumming of a snipe, which has been compared to the bleating of a goat, is distinctive enough to earn it the name “Flying Goat” or “Heather-bleater” in Scotland, and “taivaanvuohi” or “Sky Goat” in Finland.

Click here to hear the snipe’s winnowing or drumming.

The greatest sniper who ever lived, by all accounts, is Simo Häyhä, a Finnish sharpshooter during World War II who was known by the Russians as “White Death.” With over 800 total kills during the war, he boasted 542 kills (505 confirmed, 37 unconfirmed) as a sharpshooter in Finland’s war against the Red Army in a mere 100 days, all of which during the winter of 1939 — the winters in Finland being almost completely dark and with temperatures of -20 to -40 degrees C below 0. An incredibly accurate shot was only one reason he was able to take so many enemy lives; stealth, fortitude and discipline were his main tools. He used iron sights instead of telescopic sights, because telescopic sights require a sniper to raise his head higher, and the glass can reflect light and give away the sniper’s position. He compacted the snow in front of him so that the recoil did not disturb the surface, and kept snow in his mouth so that his breath was not visible as steam. When asked in 1998 how he came to be such a good sniper, he merely answered, “practice.”

The last thing you would ever see. Except you wouldn't.

The snipe’s cryptic coloration and defensive maneuvers are its main defenses; its body and eggs are spotted to match its pebbled habitat, and its zigzag flight pattern gives any predator a run for its money. Its main tools as a predator of insects: the sensitive beak, and the high-set eyes that look down it like a hunter down a rifle barrel. Subterfuge is its salvation, and precision its means of survival. But only its instincts, living in constant danger on the shoreline and nesting on the ground, keep the species alive. Caught between earth, ocean, and sky, the snipe lives mostly by its wits; ever furtive and alert, it must know its terrain and disappear into it until it seems it was hardly ever there, a passing ghost.

You can't be me. You can't even see me.

The drumming could be heard everywhere, echoing across the Matobo Hills of Zimbabwe in 1896 as the Matabele prepared to revolt against the British South Africa Company and their mercenaries. Their spiritual leader was Mlimo, an old shaman who led the resistance. Frederick Russell Burnham and another expert scout infiltrated the hills and crawled on their bellies into the sacred cave where Mlimo practiced his rites, waiting for their quarry. Eventually, Mlimo entered and commenced his Dance of Immunity, at which point Burnham assassinated him in the dark with a pistol and fled, torching the village as he ran to distract the hundreds of warriors pursuing him. When he returned, he found his protege, Robert Baden-Powell at another colonial village, waiting to congratulate him. Baden-Powell learned much about the aspects of “woodcraft” — the term at the time for outdoor survival skills and scouting — from Burnham, and would later make them his template for a new organization: the Boy Scouts. Descended from assassins we are, from sharpshooters. From those who move as ghosts and hunt the disappeared. From those who see in the dark, and disappear into the gloam chasing the distant sounds of drums.

"And I'm not impressed with either half."

The Four-Eyed Fish (Anableps anableps) of Central and South America does not actually have four eyes, but does indeed have four pupils. Each eye’s two pupils are divided by a span of iris. Four-eyed fish prefer to sit at the surface of a still pool in a brackish mangrove swamp, watching for insects to eat both above and below the water surface, and so their eyes are only half-submerged. The two pupils of each eye, therefore, not only watch the surface from both above and below it, but are calibrated to view both air and water differently. The lenses in the eyes change in thickness from top to bottom to account for the different refractive indices of air and water; as anyone who’s tried stealing quarters from a mall fountain knows, water tends to warp and slow down light when viewed from above, making objects underwater seem out-of-place. The optical illusion persists viewing the airy world from underwater. The four-eyed fish can view both sides without a bent image at all. So, two eyes, four different fields of vision, all blended into one seamless image in the four-eyed fish’s brain. Essentially, it has its own bifocals. Or, better yet, you know that look a teacher gives you over her glasses when you’re really in trouble? The four-eyed fish is that teacher.

Does myopia persist in our species due to sexual selection?

Consider for a moment the genius of this adaptation. The four-eyed fish is literally looking into two different worlds at once. Perched at the water’s surface, its eyes half in and half out, it simply splits its vision. Like a medium with half her mind in some spirit realm, it can foresee both fortune and doom, predators and prey from either world with uncanny accuracy.

"You will kill your father and marry your mother. Also, you need to tie your shoes."

Only tranquil water could allow evolution to perform such a balancing act. But not all mangrove forest-dwellers are so lucky. On the other side of the world, in the mangroves pools of Asia, the archerfish shoots insects down by spitting a quick stream of water from its mouth from below. It’s not as simple as it sounds; next time you’re at a family barbecue, try throwing a ninja star at your cousin from below the surface of the pool [Lawyer's note: Do not do this.] and tell me how good your accuracy is. It takes much practice to beat the change in refractive index between air and water, and the archerfish must learn to compensate for it or starve. It is an incredible feat; an archerfish can knock a spider down from two meters away using nothing but the water gun of its mouth. But what the naturalist rarely tell you about archerfish is that they miss. They miss a lot. No matter how skilled an archerfish is, it still has to learn what, for a four-eyed fish, is only natural. It has to see into the other world as if it were part of its own, despite everything its eyes tell it.

But there is another four-eyed fish of sorts, no relative of the Anableps and living nowhere near the water’s surface. And unlike the four-eyed fish, it actually has four eyes. It’s the brownsnout spookfish, a relative of the barreleye spookfish that was the subject of my very first post.

The fact that you can see its organs through its skin is not even the best part of this fish.

All spookfishes live in the dark abyssal zone of the ocean and have enormous, upward-facing eyes that can detect the silhouette of a fish above, backlit by the distant surface. But the brownsnout spookfish has another pair of eyes, and these look downward into the black depths. No sunlight reaches down into the abyss below the spookfish’s cruising zone, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely dark; 90% of the animals there create some sort of bioluminescence. To capture that light, the brownsnout spookfish employs a method that is unique to the animal kingdom: instead of a lens in the downward-facing eyes, it uses mirrors.

The brownsnout spookfish's two types of eyes. "a" is a retina, "b" is the reflective mirror crystals, "c" is the lens.

Lenses refract light, and are bent by our eye muscles to refract light differently depending on how close or distant a viewed object is. But as great as a lens is for focusing light (and therefore focusing on visible objects), it’s remarkably inefficient at capturing it. The spookfish, needing primarily to know if there is any living thing below it at all and only secondarily to know how far away it is, does away with the lens in its downward-facing eyes in favor of plates of reflective guanine crystals that collect light and bounce an image back to retinas on the sides of the eyes. With one set of eyes searching for prey above, and another set of eyes scanning for bioluminescent flashes below, the brownsnout spookfish watches two worlds at once — not of air and water, but of light and darkness. It watches both the sun and the anglerfish at the same time. The spookfish lives in that crepuscular zone of the ocean, the watery dusk where sunlight gives up and the animals make their own. Two eyes bend light from above, and two more simply harvest it from the ocean floor with mirrors. This is the gift of living at a peaceful border between worlds: stay there long enough, and eventually it will reward you with second sight.

Who hasn’t felt a little like a peacock at times, trying their best to be noticed by the object of their affection and falling short no matter what? What am I doing wrong?, I’ve asked myself. What am I missing? What could she possibly be looking for? I find myself sympathizing with the peacock and his unrequited attempts at winning love on the zoo lawn, coldly rebuffed time after time until he’ll display for any toddler in a pair of brown overalls. Because peacocks look more or less equally fantastic to us, we can’t imagine why a female chooses one and not another. Some guys just don’t have it, the biologists tell us, after a peahen takes a pass on a shimmering fountain of male grandeur. Not wanting to guess the mind of a peahen, they throw up their hands and decline to say what “it” is. That certain something that captures the peahen’s heart. That je ne sais quoi.

Ice cold.

Well, to hell with that! Je veux savoir “quoi”! If the peacock can look like that and still get shot down in flames, unless it possesses that je ne sais quoi, I think I speak for males of all species when I say I sure as hell want to know what the “quoi” is.

Instead of a peacock, let’s talk about its simpler, arachnid analogue, the Peacock Spider. I recently discovered this charming little guy via the famous and fabulous Myrmecos blog, the hot place to be for gorgeous insect photos and bug scuttlebutt. Like its namesake, the Australian peacock spider females are dun and its males garish, with an amazing technicolor dream-abdomen that fans out like a peacock’s tail. Like the bird, the peacock spider male does a display dance for the cautious and picky female, though his involves waving his third pair of legs in the air as if to say, “Hey, baby! Hey! Over here!”

A note on spider vision: despite having eight (and occasionally a mere six or four) eyes, most spiders rely on them very little. Among spiders who spin webs, the most important sense is, perhaps unsurprisingly, touch; they sense vibrations extremely well, but their eyes are used primarily to detect differences in light and dark. However, the jumping spiders (Salticidae) such as the peacock spider actively chase their prey. Therefore, they are usually diurnal and all have excellent vision; their depth perception helps them leap twenty times their body length with astounding accuracy, and their color vision extends into the ultraviolet, which is invisible to us. (Many jumping spiders have tetrachromatic color vision; they have four color-detecting cone cells where we only have Red, Blue, and Green.) So the peacock spider’s diurnal lifestyle gave rise to its visual courtship displays, and part of that je ne sais quoi that makes some spiders more attractive than others might have to do with an ultraviolet aura we cannot even perceive.

"Is there a veterinarian in the house?"

Is that the case? We don’t know. But there is someone working on it! Her name is Madeline Girard, a biologist at UC Berkeley, and she is using laser vibrometry, microspectrophotometry, and other things you and I have never heard of and probably cannot hope to understand, just to figure out which component of the peacock spider’s display is the most effective one. Ms. Girard believes that the answer is not one trait, but a combination of traits. I will be checking in with her as her research progresses. Let’s all wish her luck and hope she comes to some helpful conclusions about the origins of male peacock spider panache.

Whatever laser vibrometry is, it looks effing awesome.

The idea that it is not one trait but a combination of traits seems logical to me. After all, a peacock isn’t judged solely on its feathers, though that ultraviolet aura might once again play a part, and the peahen does judge the male based on the number of eyespots on the tail. But technique, duration, and size all play a part. (Amiright, ladies?) She also judges him on the frequency of displays; there is a positive correlation between how often the male shakes a tailfeather and how often he gets some tail. Sexiness, and the precious genes for sexiness that that sexiness implies, isn’t just in the fancy plumage, but in the good physical health to be able to flaunt them often. Just showing you’re willing to work hard to win her goes a long way towards proving your worth. So here’s a note to all the displaying males out there, bird and spider and human alike: Don’t worry if your plumage doesn’t impress the ladies right away. In the end, persistence pays off.

Also, Madonna did not sing.

I bring it up because I was recently discussing both the movie and the movement around the campfire with a co-worker. Later in the evening, another co-worker and I were discussing birds, and he told me an incredible story about chickadees. I knew that chickadee flocks work a little like wolf packs, with a few mated pairs in an alpha-beta hierarchy, plus the occasional floating loner. Usually, the death of an alpha male or female means that the beta male or female moves up the ladder to take his or her place in the alpha marriage. But according to my friend, this is not always so simple. He watched a flock of banded chickadees for a year, and noticed something peculiar: the alpha female lost her mate over the winter, and in the spring, the alpha female was singing male songs. What’s more, she passed over the beta male in favor of a socially less-desirable floater for a mate, and whenever the new husband would try to sing, the alpha female would fly over and knock him off his perch. Clearly, once she had gotten a taste of the male chickadee lifestyle and the power that confers, she was reluctant to part with it.

And he was reluctant to admit he kind of liked it.

Between the discussion of the WWII female factory workforce, A League Of Their Own, and the chickadee story, I got to wondering: what other bird species are there in which the female wears the proverbial pants? I know that in some species, male birds take on traditionally female roles, such as the egg-incubating male ostrich. And in others, the females are showier than the males; when Belted Kingfishers go to prom, it’s the ladies who wear the cummerbund. But to see a true display of gender-bending, you need to travel to the Arctic Circle to see the breeding grounds of the phalaropes.

"Don't worry, I've also never heard of me."

The Red-Necked Phalarope is one of my favorite birds for many reasons, not least because it shares my fondness for beef jerky and demolition derbies. It’s also one of the most charmingly madcap little shorebirds you’ll ever see, a dynamo of whirling and pecking in the water that reminds me of a children’s bath toy gone bananas. Phalaropes hunt tiny insects and crustaceans on the water’s surface, and they often swim in tiny circles which create whirlpools that raise their prey up from below. That’s right; phalaropes hunt by creating miniature vortexes. They also rely on the whirls and eddies created by larger animals, and so can be found following pods of whales, which lift tiny animals with them every time they surface to spout. The phalarope is a tiny wind-up tornado living in the shadows of whales.

Male and female phalaropes also look and behave quite differently from one another. Traditional “masculine” and “feminine” behavioral roles arise primarily from the amount of investment put into the egg. It is expensive both to produce and to care for, both in energy and in time. Because the female carries the zygote, she’s already at a disadvantage in the sexual arms race; the male has billions of sperm to spread around the neighborhood, but she has a limited number of eggs that can be fertile at a time. This makes her distinctly choosy about her mate; the male can afford to sleep with any young thing, but if her offspring are to survive and reproduce, she must make sure that the male she chooses is either the sexiest sperm donor or the most caring father, or hopefully, both. This leads to competitions between males, which often leads to aggressive personality traits. Courtship rituals such as song and dance evolved from this divide, and sexual dimorphism — the physical differences between sexes in some animals, including our own — favors brighter colors, or longer tails, or bigger horns. Meanwhile, in species where brooding duty is left primarily to the females, they protect their investment by literally sitting on it. This imbalance in parental roles tends to select for female birds who are quieter, less aggressive, and more camouflaged. It’s more complicated than that, as you’ll see, but as a rule with the birds, in almost every case in which the male and female play different behavioral roles in raising young, the male is bigger, brighter, and more extravagant, while the female dresses down in earth tones.

Until the male attains a level of fabulousness at which point females are simply unnecessary.

So if you ever see a mated pair of Red-Necked Phalaropes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the brightly-colored one that arrives first to the breeding grounds, chases after the duller brown-colored ones and keeps a harem, fights other birds of its stripe for territory, and leaves its nesting and chick-rearing duties to its mate would be the male. But you’d be wrong. In phalarope culture, females have taken over all the traditional male roles, and vice versa: the males are the “stay-at-home dads” who build the nest, are pursued and defended by females until the egg is laid, and then stay behind to raise the chicks. (The female rather cavalierly abandons her family to migrate South immediately after the eggs are laid. Phalaropes are deadbeat moms.)

Don't even bother calling for child support, Jack.

But why? Out of 10,000 species of birds, why are there only a few in which aggressive, competitive territory building and wooing is in the purview of the female and meek nest-keeping and child-rearing is left to the male? In other words, What is the root of machismo?

Slim Jims?

The question of sexual role reversals vexed no less a mind than that of Charles Darwin. Investigating the bustard-quail, an Indian bird in which the males brood the eggs and the females are so pugnacious with each other that villagers fight the hens instead of the cocks, Darwin concluded it that the answer to the masculine/feminine reversal had to be The Ratio. Ecologists use the more specific term Operational Sex Ratio (OSR), but you probably know it simply as The Ratio: it’s the moment you look around at your dorm hall and realize there are only four girls and about ten guys, and realize you are going to have to start shaving. Maybe a little aftershave, for effect. And before you know it, you are dressing a little nicer, and engaging in power struggles over the territory of the common room when the girls are present, and getting into arm-wrestling contests at parties to impress them, and maybe wearing brightly colored polo shirts that accentuate your biceps, which you start calling a “gun show.” In short, you have become a bro. THAT Ratio.

Sadly for our species, this is not considered a biological dead end.

Darwin postulated that an OSR that kept males in short supply would select for aggressive, attractive, competitive females, and reward males with the luxury of choice. But there are cases of sexual courtship role reversals in bird species where there are plenty of available males, and cases of male choice of mates without competition by females. In the case of the phalarope, I suspect it’s more complicated than simply a gender ratio. For starters, all three species of phalarope share this role reversal with each other, and also with another Arctic-breeding hunt-and-peck shorebird, the Eurasian dotterel. And another, the spotted sandpiper. Of the thirty or so birds that exhibit some type or degree of courtship role reversal, it seems that a surprising number of them are in the sandpiper mold.

It might be that the males started raising the young (and vacuuming, and doing the dishes) when genetically inferior males realized they could control their genetic destiny better by being the best caretaker they could be, setting off a genetic chain reaction. But that doesn’t explain why the females lay and leave. After days of research, I’ve come to precisely no conclusions about why it has to be the male on the eggs. The only thing I can imagine is that the chilly Arctic climate equalized the sexual competition between the male and female — she has to lay the egg, but he must help incubate it if he wants offspring, and thus has less time for philandering — and something swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. Maybe it was a female phalarope somewhere back in history, high on testosterone and feeling bold, who decided to step off the eggs in front of the male just to see what he would do. “Would you mind sitting on these?,” she asked. And quickly, the male jumped on the eggs, and she took off, as if to say, “So long, sucker,” knowing that he could never leave the eggs if he wanted his offspring to hatch and survive. And survive they did, and bore bold daughters of their own, and so forth and so forth until the whole phalarope genus was made of tough chicks with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” outlook on family life and males who are more docile and fussy. I don’t know it for sure, but I’d like to think that the female phalaropes took on their swagger and everything that comes with it when one brash and perhaps foolhardy bird decided to call her husband’s bluff by skipping town and leaving him with the crying babies and a sink full of dishes.

Peace out, yo.

Dads with shotguns?

Without cracking open the scientific Ark of the Covenant that question implies, or the world’s largest can of worms that is human sexuality, let’s just talk about the birds. (And, this time, not the bees.) Can anything be said of that thin sliver of avifauna that is both sexually and socially monogamous? Yes, it seems. Most of the few birds that are both socially and sexually monogamous do it for the same reason many married couples do: for the kids. These are birds that live in such a hostile habitat that it takes every ounce of parental care to nourish their chicks. In other words, the parents would cheat on each other; they just don’t have the time or energy.

Not tonight, honey. I've got a *zzzzzzzz*

Seabirds in rocky, windy, or icy climes — like Emperor Penguins — make up the majority of sexually monogamous pairs, but one type of bird creates a hostile habitat for itself specifically so it cannot engage in extra-marital canoodling. That’s because in this species, the female is literally imprisoned behind a wall. It’s the Monteiro’s Hornbill of Namibia, and it is a master mason on the level of an Edgar Allen Poe antagonist. A mated pair of hornbills will scope out a suitable neighborhood to nest, preferably a stand of old-growth forest with large cavities in the trees. The holes may have been made by a fallen branch, or may have been carved out by a woodpecker. But however it’s made, it should be large enough for the female to enter and sit comfortably. She chooses carefully, because she’s going to be inside for a very long time.

Also, how are the schools?

After a loud and lengthy mating ritual involving glockenspiel-like harmonics between the pair, they prepare themselves for the hard work of raising the coming eggs. I have observed the following behavior in Great Hornbills at the Rio Grande Zoo back in Albuquerque: the female will enter the cavity and, working with the male, will wall herself in using a mortar made from mud, mashed fruit, and her own droppings, using her enormous beak as a trowel. The work takes no more than a few days, and sometimes only a few hours. When finished, there is only an aperture large enough for the tip of the female’s beak to poke through: the only window to the outside world, with its fresh air and the supply of fresh figs and berries the male hornbill will deliver throughout the day. A few days after the mortar is set, the first of five eggs is laid, and the female will undergo a complete molt and construct a crude insulating nest with her own feathers. While the male ferries fruit back and forth to the female, she sits in the dark, stark naked and sitting in a pile of her own feces, breathing stale and fetid air and eyeing her pinhole of sunshine in the wall of her self-made prison for over a month and a half.

Not exactly a model animal to promote monogamy, but there you go.

Male crowned hornbill feeding the family he keeps locked naked in the attic.

Why does the female hornbill cloister herself in the confines of a tree? Protection from predators might play a part, but a canopy-dwelling carnivore would have little trouble prying open the dung-heap wall of the nest. Primarily, the wall seems to exist to protect her from the unwelcome advances of other hornbills. Like the proverbial princess in a tower, she is completely removed from the dating pool. Meanwhile, everything else in the hornbill’s life seems to be made a little more difficult; the male must work tirelessly on the outside to support his mate and no other, and the female’s solitude, not to mention her nudity, makes her particularly unavailable. What is most remarkable is that she must store sperm from the male for a week or more before fertilizing her eggs while the pair chooses and builds their ideal nest, making the Monteiro’s Hornbill a prime candidate for promiscuity; there are many chances during that week or two for her to gain the sperm of a more attractive hornbill. Yet no genetic evidence of tomfoolery has ever been found; in fact, the Monteiro’s hornbill seems to be a rare, and perhaps unfortunate, case of supreme faithfulness. A super-expensive reproductive system, wherein the male has no time for extra families and the female is completely dependent on a loyal mate for food, seems to ensure near-total fidelity in this desert bird.

It puts the lotion in the basket, or else it gets the hose again.

There is, in my view, a more poignant aspect of this marriage, lest I give you the impression that hornbill mating rituals involve some bird equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. The hornbills have established a system of reproductive control which has also forced them physically apart as much as it’s made them co-dependent. Not every bird engages in much physical affection, but here is one species in which the male and female are distanced entirely and unable to perform any bonding rituals besides the transfer of food. For 45 days at least, the most that one will see of the other is the tip of its beak. A fig is a kiss, a klok of the great bill is a hello, and then they are separated again. Though the male has free range of the outside world, he is as distant from his wife and children as a migrant worker sending home money orders to a distant country, or the man working three jobs to feed his family and who can therefore never seem them by daylight. Though the female is safe, she lives to wait, her world projected on her dark wall as a camera obscura. As the saying goes, So close, and yet so far. The battle of the sexes, in which the male and female of a species compete to spread their own genes further, may have found a truce, but the costs are proximity and affection and freedom. Bound together by matrimony, the hornbill finds itself imprisoned and estranged from its spouse. For a bit of security, we suffer the dooms of love.