by Gregory McNamee
Language is one thing that makes us human. Others are symbolic reasoning, metaphor, and metonym, all things that figure in the mix when a child plays with a doll. Such play was long held to be reserved to humans: dogs play with sticks, kids with Transformers, and never shall the twain meet. Well, perhaps no more.Reports Brandon Keim in Wired, researchers studying chimpanzee behavior in the wild have determined that juvenile chimps carry sticks in the same way that human children carry dolls. Moreover, those researchers remark, “as in children and captive monkeys, this behavior is more common in females than in males.” Stick-carrying, Keim notes, ends with adulthood and parenthood, which makes obvious sense.
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Juvenile behavior of a different sort may have served the woolly mammoth of yore poorly. Concludes Jessica Metcalfe, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario, mammoth infants living in arctic conditions did not begin to eat solid food until they were in their second or third year, far later than modern elephant calves. This behavior may have been conditioned by climatic conditions, the north being a dark, cold place without much soft vegetation suitable for a youngster. Being full of predators such as saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears, though, the place was also quite fraught with peril for small, dependent mammoth calves. The study is an interesting case in the connectedness of things—and, we might say, the enduring, inescapable power of unintended consequences.
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Mother seals and their cubs may not welcome the news, but the lame-duck 111st Congress, meeting last month, passed a law that had been held up for some time—a shark conservation bill that closed loopholes allowing sharks to be killed for their fins. The new law, reports the Washington Post, “requires any vessel to land sharks with their fins attached, and prevents non-fishing vessels from transporting fins without their carcasses.”
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To continue the youngster vein, it would take a heart of stone not to fall a little bit in love with Heidi. Not the Johanna Spyri heroine, good of soul though she is, but instead Heidi the cross-eyed possum, a recent addition to the Leipzig Zoo in Germany. Reports the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, the country has collectively swooned over Heidi, an orphan from North Carolina that the zoo adopted from a wildlife shelter there. One look at Heidi’s face is enough to win me over.
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We do not yet have definitive word on the culprit behind the deaths, at the very beginning of the year, of that flock of red-winged blackbirds in Arkansas, but federal investigators support my initial suspicion that fireworks had something to do with it. Those who sought apocalypse there and in other odd events may not be comforted in that—or in the news that the two million fish that died in the Chesapeake Bay at about the same time did so not because of some supernatural cause, but because the water temperatures were unusually low. Cold water in a time of global warming? Yes, for which read about the odd pull Siberia, erstwhile haunt of woolly mammoths, has on temperatures elsewhere today.