Big is beautiful?

Forest and Bird, Issue 282, 1 November 1996, Page 50

Big

is beautiful?

HY DID THE Kaimanawa horse issue excite such a frenzy of passion and a flood of letters to the papers overwhelming reason and common sense?

Perhaps it was because horses have so long been the friends and work animals of humans, perhaps because they are hairy mammals with attractive large \ eyes like our own, perhaps

because for many people they symbolise the wild and the free. All these reasons perhaps but, most importantly, because horses are BIG. If horses were the size of rats far fewer people would care if they were removed from an area. Humans are hooked on

BIG because we are big. Of the 10 to 20 million species of animals estimated to exist in the world, only a few hundred are bigger than us, and, like us, most of those big species are at the top of their respective food chains. Think of the first animals a child learns to recognise in picture books. They are the giants of the animal kingdom — lions and tigers, elephants, hippopotamuses, even the extinct dinosaurs. Why do we admire size? Even in human societies we fondly imagine to be sophisticated, big and male still means strength, and strength means power. It works in animal societies. We watch in awe the TV documentaries showing the enormous male "beach masters" of the elephant seal colonies — raging colossi fighting their mountainous rivals for the rights to the harem. For, although we dress it up a bit in human society, power means females and offspring, and the continuance of

genes — Darwin’s survival of the fittest. Far from the hub of mammalian evolution, New Zealand missed out on lions and tigers, horses and elephants. But like other island ecosystems we had our giants too. The moa family included the tallest birds the world has seen. The New Zealand eagle, Harpagornis, with its three-metre wingspan was the largest bird of prey to ever exist. And some giants still hang on in this country, some overlooked, others marooned for safety on islands free of introduced predators. They are not dinosaurs, but the giants of an even earlier world — animals without backbones. HEN WE THINK of earthworms we think of the worms in our gardens and compost. These are all recent human introductions — about 19 species, But New Zealand also has its own suite of 173 native earthworms. All the native species belong to an ancient and primitive earthworm family called Megascolecidae whose members today are found in India, Australia, South Africa and South America. Ancestral members of this family burrowed their way through the forest soils of ancient New Zealand some 100 to 150 million years ago when this country was joined with these other areas as part of the ancient continent of Gondwana. It is not too difficult to imagine Darwin’s finches, arriving in the Galapagos archipelago and then flying to the various islands of the group, remaining geographically separated and evolving into different ECR or a