King Solomon's Ring Read online

  This situation would have lasted long if I had not intervened and put the number twos in another, identical aquarium. Separated from the objects of their unrequited love, the two quickly found solace in each other and became a pair. After a few days the two pairs spawned in the same hour. Now I had exactly what I had wanted, namely, two cichlid pairs of the same species in the identical phase of reproduction. As the breeding of these fish, at that time rare, meant much to me, I waited with my experiment till the young of both couples were big enough to exist independently even in the event of a complete marital rupture of their parents.

  Then I exchanged the females. The result was ambiguous and gave no definite answer to the question as to whether the fish knows his own mate personally. My interpretation of what now followed will be considered by many as daring, and it certainly needs further experimental corroboration. Male number two accepted female number one as soon as she was placed with him. But it did not appear to me as though he was unaware of the difference, indeed his movements at the “changing-of-the-guard” ceremony and whenever he met his new wife, seemed to have increased in fire and vigour. The female immediately acquiesced in the ceremonies of the male and adapted herself without demur to her role. This, however, did not mean much, because, in this phase, the female is only occupied with the young and has little interest in the male.

  The proceedings in the other aquarium, in which I had introduced female number two to male number one and his offspring, took an entirely different turn. Here, too, the female was only interested in the children, swam immediately to the shoal, and, herself upset by the change, began anxiously to gather the young ones about her. This is just what female number one had done in the other aquarium. But the contrast lay in the behaviour of the males; while male two had received the substitution of the new female with friendly glowing ceremonies, male one remained suspiciously guarding his flock, refused to let the female relieve him of his charge and, in the next moment, attacked her with a furious ram-thrust. At once, some silvery scales danced like sunbeams to the bottom of the tank and I had to interfere with alacrity in order to rescue the female who otherwise would certainly have been gored to death.

  What had happened? The fish which had received the “prettier” female, the one to whom he had previously paid court, was quite content with the exchange, but the other, who had been landed with the formerly rejected female in place of his wife, was, not unjustifiably, furious and now attacked her much more relentlessly than he had done at first, in the presence of his wife. I am convinced that male number two, who had received an improvement on his wife, noticed the difference too.

  Almost more interesting and, for the observer, more fascinating than the sexual behaviour of these fishes is their method of caring for their brood. Anyone who has watched their behaviour, as they fan a continuous stream of fresh water towards their eggs or small babies lying in the nest, or as, with military exactitude, they relieve each other of duty, or as later, when the brood has learned to swim, they lead them carefully through the water, will never forget these scenes. The prettiest sight of all is when the children which can already swim are put to bed in the evening. For, every evening, until they reach the age of several weeks, the young are brought, as dusk falls, back to the nesting hollow where they spent their earliest childhood. The mother stands above the nest and gathers the young about her. This she does by certain signal movements of her fins.

  These details of behaviour are particularly clearly developed in the gorgeous jewel fish (Hemichromis bimaculatus), one of the most beautiful of all cichlids. I think Rupert Brooke must have been thinking of this species when he wrote the lines:

  Red darkness of the heart of roses,

  Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,

  And gold that lies behind the eyes,

  Lustreless purple, hooded green,

  The myriad hues that lie between

  Darkness and darkness!

  The iridescent, brilliant blue spots in the red darkness of the dorsal fin play a special role when the female jewel fish is putting her babies to bed. She jerks her fin rapidly up and down, making the jewels flash like a heliograph. At this, the young congregate under the mother and obediently descend into the nesting hole. The father, in the meantime, searches the whole tank for stragglers. He does not coax them along but simply inhales them into his roomy mouth, swims to the nest, and blows them into the hollow. The baby sinks at once heavily to the bottom and remains lying there. By an ingenious arrangement of reflexes, the swim-bladders of young “sleeping” cichlids contract so strongly that the tiny fishes become much heavier than water and remain, like little stones, lying in the hollow, just as they did in their earliest childhood before their swim-bladder was filled with gas. The same reaction of “becoming heavy” is also elicited when a parent fish takes a young one in its mouth. Without this reflex mechanism it would be impossible for the father, when he gathers up his children in the evening, to keep them together.

  I once saw a jewel fish, during such an evening transport of strayed children, perform a deed which absolutely astonished me. I came, late one evening, into the laboratory. It was already dusk and I wished hurriedly to feed a few fishes which had not received anything to eat that day; amongst them was a pair of jewel fishes who were tending their young. As I approached the container, I saw that most of the young were already in the nesting hollow over which the mother was hovering. She refused to come for the food when I threw pieces of earthworm into the tank. The father, however, who, in great excitement, was dashing backwards and forwards searching for truants, allowed himself to be diverted from his duty by a nice hind-end of earth-worm (for some unknown reason this end is preferred by all worm-eaters to the front one). He swam up and seized the worm, but, owing to its size, was unable to swallow it. As he was in the act of chewing this mouthful, he saw a baby fish swimming by itself across the tank; he started as though stung, raced after the baby and took it into his already filled mouth. It was a thrilling moment. The fish had in its mouth two different things of which one must go into the stomach and the other into the nest. What would he do? I must confess that, at that moment, I would not have given twopence for the life of that tiny jewel fish. But wonderful what really happened! The fish stood stock still with full cheeks, but did not chew. If ever I have seen a fish think, it was in that moment! What a truly remarkable thing that a fish can find itself in a genuine conflicting situation and, in this case, behave exactly as a human being would; that is to say, it stops, blocked in all directions, and can go neither forward nor backward. For many seconds the father jewel fish stood riveted and one could almost see how his feelings were working. Then he solved the conflict in a way for which one was bound to feel admiration: he spat out the whole contents of his mouth: the worm fell to the bottom, and the little jewel fish, becoming heavy in the way described above, did the same. Then the father turned resolutely to the worm and ate it up, without haste but all the time with one eye on the child which “obediently” lay on the bottom beneath him. When he had finished, he inhaled the baby and carried it home to its mother.

  Some students, who had witnessed the whole scene, started as one man to applaud.

  5

  LAUGHING AT ANIMALS

  It is seldom that I laugh at an animal, and when I do, I usually find out afterwards that it was at myself, at the human being whom the animal has portrayed in a more or less pitiless caricature, that I have laughed. We stand before the monkey house and laugh, but we do not laugh at the sight of a caterpillar or a snail, and when the courtship antics of a lusty greylag gander seem so incredibly funny, it is only because our human youth behaves in a very similar fashion.

  The initiated observer seldom laughs at the bizarre in animals. It often annoys me when visitors at a Zoo or Aquarium laugh at an animal that, in the course of its evolutionary adaptation, has developed a body form which now deviates from the usual. The public is then deriding things which, to me, are holy: the riddles of the
Genesis, the Creation and the Creator. The grotesque forms of a chameleon, a puffer or an anteater awake in me feelings of awed wonder, but not of amusement.

  Of course I have laughed at unexpected drollness, although such amusement is in itself not less stupid than that of the public that annoys me. When the queer, land-climbing fish Periophthalmus was first sent to me and I saw how one of these creatures leaped, not out of the water basin, but on to its edge and, raising its head with its pug-like face towards me, sat there perched, staring at me with its goggling, piercing eyes, then I laughed heartily. Can you imagine what it is like when a fish, a real and unmistakable vertebrate fish, first of all sits on a perch, like a canary, then turns its head towards you like a higher terrestrial animal, like anything but a fish, and then, to crown all, fixes you with a binocular stare? This same stare gives the owl its characteristic and proverbially wise expression, because, even in a bird, the two-eyed gaze is unexpected. But here, too, the humour lies more in the caricature of the human, than in the actual drollness of the animal.

  In the study of the behaviour of the higher animals, very funny situations are apt to arise, but it is inevitably the observer, and not the animal, that plays the comical part. The comparative ethologist’s method in dealing with the most intelligent birds and mammals often necessitates a complete neglect of the dignity usually to be expected in a scientist. Indeed, the uninitiated, watching the student of behaviour in operation, often cannot be blamed for thinking that there is madness in his method. It is only my reputation for harmlessness, shared with the other village idiot, which has saved me from the mental home. But in defence of the villagers of Altenberg I must recount a few little stories.

  I was experimenting at one time with young mallards to find out why artificially incubated and freshly hatched ducklings of this species, in contrast to similarly treated greylag goslings, are unapproachable and shy. Greylag goslings unquestioningly accept the first living being whom they meet as their mother, and run confidently after him. Mallards, on the contrary, always refused to do this. If I took from the incubator freshly hatched mallards, they invariably ran away from me and pressed themselves in the nearest dark corner. Why? I remembered that I had once let a muscovy duck hatch a clutch of mallard eggs and that the tiny mallards had also failed to accept this foster-mother. As soon as they were dry, they had simply run away from her and I had trouble enough to catch these crying, erring children. On the other hand, I once let a fat white farmyard duck hatch out mallards and the little wild things ran just as happily after her as if she had been their real mother. The secret must have lain in her call note, for, in external appearance, the domestic duck was quite as different from a mallard as was the muscovy; but what she had in common with the mallard (which, of course, is the wild progenitor of our farmyard duck) were her vocal expressions. Though, in the process of domestication, the duck has altered considerably in colour pattern and body form, its voice has remained practically the same. The inference was clear: I must quack like a mother mallard in order to make the little ducks run after me. No sooner said than done. When, one Whit-Saturday, a brood of pure-bred young mallards was due to hatch, I put the eggs in the incubator, took the babies, as soon as they were dry, under my personal care, and quacked for them the mother’s call-note in my best Mallardese. For hours on end I kept it up, for half the day. The quacking was successful. The little ducks lifted their gaze confidently towards me, obviously had no fear of me this time, and as, still quacking, I drew slowly, away from them, they also set themselves obediently in motion and scuttled after me in a tightly huddled group, just as ducklings follow their mother. My theory was indisputably proved. The freshly hatched ducklings have an inborn reaction to the call-note, but not to the optical picture of the mother. Anything that emits the right quack note will be considered as mother, whether it is a fat white Pekin duck or a still fatter man. However, the substituted object must not exceed a certain height. At the beginning of these experiments, I had sat myself down in the grass amongst the ducklings and, in order to make them follow me, had dragged myself, sitting, away from them. As soon, however, as I stood up and tried, in a standing posture, to lead them on, they gave up, peered searchingly on all sides, but not upwards towards me and it was not long before they began that penetrating piping of abandoned ducklings that we are accustomed simply to call “crying”. They were unable to adapt themselves to the fact that their foster-mother had become so tall. So I was forced to move along, squatting low, if I wished them to follow me. This was not very comfortable; still less comfortable was the fact that the mallard mother quacks unintermittently. If I ceased for even the space of half a minute from my melodious “Quahg, gegegegeg, Quahg, gegegegeg”, the necks of the ducklings became longer and longer corresponding exactly to “long faces” in human children—and did I then not immediately recommence quacking, the shrill weeping began anew. As soon as I was silent, they seemed to think that I had died, or perhaps that I loved them no more: cause enough for crying! The ducklings, in contrast to the greylag goslings, were most demanding and tiring charges, for, imagine a two-hour walk with such children, all the time squatting low and quacking without interruption! In the interests of science I submitted myself literally for hours on end to this ordeal.

  So it came about, on a certain Whit-Sunday, that, in company with my ducklings, I was wandering about, squatting and quacking, in a May-green meadow at the upper part of our garden. I was congratulating myself on the obedience and exactitude with which my ducklings came waddling after me, when I suddenly looked up and saw the garden fence framed by a row of dead-white faces: a group of tourists was standing at the fence and staring horrified in my direction. Forgivable! For all they could see was a big man with a beard dragging himself, crouching, round the meadow, in figures of eight, glancing constantly over his shoulder and quacking—but the ducklings, the all-revealing and all-explaining ducklings were hidden in the tall spring grass from the view of the astonished crowd.

  As I shall tell in a later chapter, jackdaws long remember someone who has laid hands on them and thereby elicited a “rattling” reaction. Therein lay a considerable impediment to the ringing of the young jackdaws reared in my colony. When I took them out of the nest to mark them with aluminium rings, I could not help the older jackdaws seeing me and at once raising their voices to a wild rattling concert. How was I to stop the birds developing a permanent shyness for me as a result of the ringing procedure, a state of affairs which would have been immeasurably detrimental to my work? The solution was obvious: disguise. But what? Again quite easy. It lay ready to hand in a box in the loft and was very well suited for my purpose, although, normally, it was only brought out every sixth of December to celebrate the old Austrian festival of St Nicholas and the Devil. It was a gorgeous, black, furry devil’s costume with a mask covering the whole head, complete with horns and tongue, and a long devil’s tail which stuck well out from the body.

  I wonder what you would think if, on a beautiful June day, you suddenly heard from the gabled roof of a high house a wild rattling noise and, looking up, you saw Satan himself, equipped with horns, tail and claws, his tongue hanging out with the heat, climbing from chimney to chimney, surrounded by a swarm of black birds making ear-splitting rattling cries. I think this whole alarming impression disguised the fact that the devil was fixing, by means of a forceps, aluminium rings to the legs of young jackdaws, and then replacing the birds carefully in their nests. When I had finished the ringing, I saw for the first time that a large crowd of people had collected in the village street, and were looking up with expressions just as aghast as those of the tourists at the garden fence. As I would have defeated my own object by now disclosing my identity, I just gave a friendly wag of my devil’s tail and disappeared through the trapdoor of the loft.

  The third time that I was in danger of being delivered up to the psychiatric clinic was the fault of my big yellow-crested cockatoo Koka. I had bought this beautiful and very tame bird shortly
before Easter, for a considerable sum of money. It was many weeks before the poor fellow had overcome the mental disturbances caused by his long imprisonment. At first he could not realize that he was no longer fettered and could now move about freely. It was a pitiable sight to see this proud creature sitting on a branch, ever and anon preparing himself for flight, but not daring to take off, because he could not believe that he was no longer on the chain. When at last he had overcome this inward resistance he became a lively and exuberant being and developed a strong attachment for my person. As soon as he was let out of the room in which we still shut him up at night-time, he flew straight off to find me, displaying thereby an astonishing intelligence. In quite a short time he realized where I was probably to be found. At first he flew to my bedroom window, and, if I was not there, down to the duck pond; in short he visited all the sites of my morning inspection at the various animal pens in our research station. This determined quest was not without danger to the cockatoo because, if he failed to find me, he extended his search farther and farther and had several times lost his way on such occasions. Accordingly, my fellow workers had strict instructions not to let the bird out during my absence.

  One Saturday in June, I got off the train from Vienna at Altenberg station, in the midst of a gathering of bathers, such as often flock to our village at fine weekends. I had gone only a few steps along the street and the crowd had not yet dispersed when, high above me in the air, I saw a bird whose species I could not at first determine. It flew with slow, measured wing-beats, varied at set intervals by longer periods of gliding. It seemed too heavy to be a buzzard; for a stork, it was not big enough and, even at that height, neck and feet should have been visible. Then the bird gave a sudden swerve so that the setting sun shone for a second full on the underside of the great wings which lit up like stars in the blue of the skies. The bird was white. By Heaven, it was my cockatoo! The steady movements of his wings clearly indicated that he was setting out on a long-distance flight. What should I do? Should I call to the bird? Well, have you ever heard the flight-call of the greater yellow-crested cockatoo? No? But you have probably heard pig-killing after the old method. Imagine pig squealing at its most voluminous, taken up by a microphone and magnified many times by a good loudspeaker. A man can imitate it quite successfully, though somewhat feebly, by bellowing at the top of his voice “O-ah”. I had already proved that the cockatoo understood this imitation and promptly “came to heel”. But would it work at such a height? A bird always has great difficulty in making the decision to fly downwards at a steep angle. To yell, or not to yell, that was the question. If I yelled and the bird came down, all would be well, but what if it sailed calmly on through the clouds? How would I then explain my song to the crowd of people? Finally, I did yell. The people around me stood still, rooted to the spot. The bird hesitated for a moment on outstretched wings, then, folding them, it descended in one dive and landed upon my outstretched arm. Once again I was master of the situation.