ANIMAL MYSTERIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 May 1939, Page 3

ANIMAL MYSTERIES

SOME UNANSWERED QUERIES. Why, in 1878, did the entire reindeer herds of Hudson’s Bay, tens of thousands in number, drawn from as many square miles, take to 'the sea and swim out and away from the land, until, exhausted they sank and drowned? asks Cappy Ricks in an article in the “Cape Times.” And in what manner was the impulse transmitted to every single member of the many herds in, perhaps, a given moment over the vast area? The same why, and how, applies every now and again, every eleven years it is believed, to the lemmings of the Siberian steppes, but in this case the number and area is a hundred times greater. The world awaits ah answer.

What enables a pigeon, liberated in the middle of the Atlantic, to make straight for its home in Scotland, as happened last year, and travel at an average rate of something approaching sixty miles an hour? Why do all the Andean vultures die off every eleventh year, leaving only the young of the species alive? Why in the years 1914 to 1922 did all the draught buffaloes (Kerbaus) of the twin volcanic islands of Ternate and Tidore in the Arafura Sea go on strike on a day either in February or March (one in April?) And how was the impulse transmitted across the sea for the action to be simultaneous? Also, why did the practice cease in the year last mentioned?

Why do the three-quarter-inch elvers of the Sargasso Sea make their -way to every part of the known world, and then,' eight years later, return to the mud of their nativity to die, sometimes making dry land traverses to get tc the sea to do so?

On a certain day in 1908 in the pools of a river in New South Wales ‘which had dried up for seven miles from the sea there was the usual number of eels—and on the next Hay none. This postulated land-travel of at least seven miles, done in a night. How, also, do the salmon of the Fraser and Columbia Rivers (and perhaps all salmon) after traversing every ocean of the world for seven years, find their way back to the upper waters of the river of their birth there to spawn and die? Leaving ’aside cats and dogs, how did a pig, bought at a farm 170 miles from Melbourne and transported there, in 1912, by dray, train, and lorry, find its way back home in a fortnight reduced to skin and bone?

What agency can make a flight of mutton-birds (Shearwaters) of the Southern Ocean, numbering, perhaps millions, change formation simultaneously? And when I say simultaneously I do not mean with an interval of even a split second. Whatever it is, it must be the same thing that enables a milelong flight of fireflies in Borneo, and perhaps other parts of the tropical Orient, to switch their.lights on and off, simultaneously,, again without the loss of a split second so far as may be observed.