"paghat" wrote in message
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In article , Salty Thumb
wrote:

(paghat) wrote in
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Also field studies have shown these animals can become befuddled by
changes in landscape. Salamanders can become confused and never find
their way back to their traditional breeding ponds if they have to
cross farmland that was for years plowed south to north, but then one
year is plowed east to west, implying some visual & landmark
recognition for these local migrations. Snakes too, finding their

This sounds kind of hokey. I wouldn't think amphibians would have keen
eyesight at all.

It IS remarkable, but that's the prevailing theory. I know from my own
animals that eyesight is not a problem for amphibians. For my tiger
salamanders & european fire salamanders, when I look at them, they turn
their faces to my face & look me eye to eye. When I hold up a worm or a
cricket, they rush to the front of their terrarium to take it from me,
even when seen outside he glass. They're clearly responding by site.
Whether their pond-homing instinct which can extend for several miles is
judged by sighting landmarks is unprovable, but the prevailing hypothesis,
since changes in the landscape confuse them on their journeys. And a
salamander's idea of (or response to) a landmark might be wildly different
from yours or mine.

If anything I would guess they are myopic to suit their
amphibious nature. I would guess it's more likely they're following a
narrow chemical trail that if heading N-S would be not be much affected
by
plowing N-S (same chemicals but on different places on the trail), but
would be dispersed willy-nilly by E-W ploughing.

Well that at least is an alternative hypothesis beyond the idea of
landmarks. I'm not sure how it would be observably proven wrong or right,
so it's an interesting optional possibility at least, not one I've seen
expressed in any of the literature, but that a hormonal Thaang is also
going on to trigger these newt, salamander, & toad "marches" en masse to
their breeding pools is likely (though the breeding responses are
triggered by temperature & degree of wetness, & can be triggered out of
season artificially by manipulating temperature & apparent rainfall).

singly or in small clusters. There is no reason they MUST den en
masse, & the only thing that makes their situation difficult to adapt

Actually, being cold-blooded, they would freeze to death if alone. But
like any living animals, are at least 80% water and have good heat
retention. Underground in in sheltered area, on ground with high
thermal
resistivity, with friends to share heat loss, give them a good chance of
making it to the spring.

Since their bodies generate no heat (pythons excepted -- they do have a
little-understood body-warming mechanism & have even been observed
regulating egg temperatures with their bodies, rather like broody hens),
snakes certainly wouldn't warm each other up. The possibility of masses of
snakes cooling down more slowly might explain why old dens do become
increasingly populated until some include thousands upon thousands of
snakes. They do also shelter singly or in small numbers, however, very
effectively. Some garter snakes can even be frozen solid & thaw out in
spring perfectly all right, yet they cluster in dens by the thousands --
so their ability to survive freezing seems to have little to do with
mass-denning behavior practiced by snakes of many species that share few
other behaviors in common.

too familiar to frighten us as they should. Yet if a totally harmless
& even beneficial garter snake wiggles out in front of us, it's
instantly "omigod what the hell is that get me a sledge hammer!"

I dunno paghat, there is something aboriginally evil about snakes. What
is
the essence of a snake? Primally, a snake is just a mouth connected to
a
body, well adapted to a life of consumption and seemingly ill suited
towards any act of creation. You may recognize that some politicians
(or
even ordinary people) bear a striking resemblance.

For some people, that response is to cats, though to me a fear of kitties
is absurd. For others, its to rats, which are so much like small puppies
in their intelligence & loving behavior, that too seems irrational to me.
I happen to have that response spiders, even knowing that in my region at
least, none of them can kill me -- logically knowing they're largely safe,
I've still never gotten over the jerk-away response when surprised by a
big spider, & dislike picking them up even on reflection. This is true for
me only of "running" brown spiders -- I find nothign at all scary about an
orb spider, which get in my hair when I accidentally walk through their
webs & give me none of the fear response I get from a hand-like spider
running out from a dark place. So fear of one style of spider makes sense
to me because I "feel" it & I suppose fear of cats makes sense to people
who feel that. I have never found snakes anything but beautiful & easy to
handle, though I've never wanted to handle rattlesnakes, & on a herp
society outing to eastern washington to investigate rattlesnake dens,
passed on the chance to handle them though they seemed calm enough, safely
manipulated, & no great danger. I didn't even have the sinking feeling of
fear I get from a big running spider, but I just felt no particular reward
in taking a chance with the rattlers either. If there is a survival value
to these seemingly random fears -- that in some people can become a
cripping phobic response to such things as shirt buttons or feet -- then
it's a value that has gone all haywire in the process of evolution & is
not because there's any real reason to fear little kitties or shirt
buttons OR snakes.

Yet there is very little snake-mythology that is entirely devoid of an
element of fear -- even Chinese serpent mythology which assumes a profound
nobility is also edged with powerful authority -- so though it makes
little sense to me, it's clear that it is indeed much more common to be
scared to death of snakes than of shirt buttons.

That said, I'd sooner whack a politician than a harmless snake.

Add to that the pure destructive meanness of omnivores for which
anything that exists, whether it can move or can't move, is fair game
for destruction, & the only reason we don't stuff it all in our mouths
after it's mashed is because the microwave oven is more than fifteen
steps away & we're already stuffed with McGreasy Burgers & pizzas,
just like that well-fed pitbull won't stick around & eat the child it
just mauled to death.

I don't think there is anything intrinsicly 'mean' about omnivores.

When you see vegetarian gorillas delicately handling & admiring small
animals in the wild with curiosity & affection but never harming them (as
captured on nature shows), then compare that to omniverous chimps wacking
the same beasties & fighting over the pieces, our own omniverous behavior
in wrecking everything we encounter in nature seems indeed an omniverous
trait. That some of us have the same delicate adoring responses to
wildlife that gorillas have, while others can't imagine going on a walk in
the woods without a rifle to kill something, suggests that it is a range
of behaviors, & in more primitive times this range likely resulted in
specialized behaviors within an extended social order, just as is true in
our more "civilized" social order that requires specific skills &
specialization to make a living.

Most animals are attentive mainly of what they can eat, or what can eat
them, & ignore everything else. As omnivores there's not much that fails
to capture our attention, whether a little mushroom that doesn't move or
an antelope that runs like hell -- even a bear that might try to eat us we
have to eat it first. Grab it, mash it, shove it in your mouth before
someone else shoves it in theirs, no matter what it is. Bugs! Yum!

However, people, if you subscribe to evolutionary theory or psychology,
operate on different levels. Brutes. fearfuls and children who don't
know
any better will always attempt to fight or flee. Technology, giving man
superior power, emboldens him to fight, while population pressures
removes
most options to flee.

Territorial restrictions for many human populations occurred even in low
population areas, wherever it was not necessary to travel distances to
find food or to follow wild herds or feed domestic herds. People stay put
if they can; "specialists" transport goods between the settled
communities. Here in the coastal Northwest & along the Columbia river,
tribes were often restricted in their wanderings with very well defined
territories, food being so plentiful nothing encouraged nomadism or a need
to cross territories of other tribes (with a very few special exceptions
of the Klikitat inland festival of all tribes, or the "casino" tribe at
the mouth of the Columbia that invited all other tribes to visit duruing
the salmon runs (& did not themselves capture salmon because they ran the
gambling concessions instead, so that some of the visiting fishermen went
home with none of the fish they'd caught).

Technology is an explanitory advantage only if one regards the cleverness
in chasing buffalos off a cliff a "technological," or digging a hole too
big for a mammoth to get out of, the shovel being the extent of that
technology. But as toolmaking or tool using has turned out not to be
exclusive to humans, I'm not sure technology is the overriding factor.
That we've taken it vastly farther than other species of tool-users seems
to be to our DISadvantage, unless supplanting all of nature with concrete
really does have some long-term advantage for our species as we warm up
the planet, melt the polar caps, toxify our immediate environment, drive
all other species to extinction, eradicate all forests, & by means of
rapid travel introduce new terrible diseases into our populations with
increasing regularity. I've a sneaking suspicion that when technology has
run its course, we'll have killed ourselves.

-paggers

Otherwise, there is the third option, clearly not
popular, and not even clearly better, so it stands; make the bed you
sleep
in.

- ST

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

I personally am not afraid of any animal, reptile, insect, or whatever with
the exception of the two legged kind. I do have a healthy respect for
anything which might bite me and do damage or make me ill, so I watch what I
pick up or walk through.

Shell