dxt dxt

King Solomons Ring

It is one of the best and most penetrating non-technicalbooks about animals and animal nature that has ever beenwritten ... every sensitive reader will agree that the bookis a work of humanity, wisdom and balance as well as ofdelightful humour.

W. H. Thorpe

For great interest, amusement and relaxationin short, forunalloyed pleasurelet nothing stop you from getting holdof a copy.

Liverpool Post

Rich entertainment ... the reader will hardly know whichis most astonishing: the creatures so originally observedor the naturalist who observes them.

V. S. Pritchett

Konrad Lorenz writes of animals in a way which wouldmake anyone of the impressionable age decide to be a nat-uralist and nothing else. ... This book is delightful andinformative to the ordinary reader, but its real message isto the philosopher. There is a mine of information here forthe study of that inexplicable organ, the mind. We canlearn about animals: we may also learn much from them.

Dame C. V. Wedgwood

Konrad

LorenzKing Solomons Ring

New light on animal ways

With a foreword by Julian Huxley

Illustrated by the author

Translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson

London and New York

Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vgeln und den Fischenrst published 1949by Verlag Dr. Borotha-Schoeler, Vienna

English edition rst published 1952by Methuen & Co. Ltd

First published in Routledge Classics 2002by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1983 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KGTranslation 1999 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Gmbh & Co. KGThis edition 2002 Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataA catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0415267471 (pbk)ISBN 0415267463 (hbk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-16596-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26059-7 (Adobe eReader Format)

ToMr and Mrs J. B. Priestley

without whose timely helpjackdaws

would notin all probabilitybe ying round Altenberg any more

CONTENTS

Foreword by Julian Huxley ixPreface xv

Animals as a Nuisance 11Something that Does No Damage: the Aquarium 92Robbery in the Aquarium 163Poor Fish 214Laughing at Animals 385Pitying Animals 486Buying Animals 567The Language of Animals 738The Taming of the Shrew 889The Covenant 10810The Perennial Retainers 12211Morals and Weapons 17012

Index 189

FOREWORD

by Julian Huxley

Konrad Lorenz is one of the outstanding naturalists of our day. Ihave heard him referred to as the modern Fabre, but with birdsand shes instead of insects and spiders as his subject-matter.However, he is more than that, for he is not only, like Fabre, aprovider of an enormous volume of new facts and penetratingobservations, with a style of distinction and charm, but in addi-tion has contributed in no small degree to the basic principlesand theories of animal mind and behaviour. For instance, it is tohim more than any other single man that we owe our knowledgeof the existence of the strange biological phenomena ofreleaser and imprinting mechanisms.

The reader of this book who has followed the account of howLorenz himself became imprinted on his baby goslings astheir parent, or how his jackdaws regarded him as their generalleader and companion, but chose other corvine birds (so long asthey were on the wing), as ight companions, and xed on hismaid-servant as a love-object; or how certain attitudes or ges-tures on the part of a ghting-sh or a wolf will act as releasers

to promote or inhibit combat reactions in another individual ofthe species, will realize not only the strangeness of the facts butthe fundamental nature of the principles that underly them.

Of course, Other naturalists too have worked along similarlines. I think of the pioneering studies of Lloyd Morgan inBritain, of Whitman in America, of the Heinroths in Germany;of the remarkable researches of the late Kingsley Noble of NewYork on the behaviour of lizards, and of Tinbergen of Hollandand Oxford on releasers in sticklebacks and herring-gulls; and ofthe detailed illustration of the principles involved by a host ofobservers and students, most of them ornithologists, in westernEurope and North America. But it remains true that Lorenz hasdone more than any single man to establish the principles and toformulate the essential ideas behind them. And then Lorenz hasgiven himself over, body and soul, to his self-appointed task ofreally understanding animals, more thoroughly than any otherbiologist-naturalist that I can think of. This has involved keepinghis objects of study in what amounts to the wild state, with fullfreedom of movement. His readers will discover all that this hasmeant in the way of hard work and inconveniencesometimesamusing in retrospect, but usually awkward enough or evenserious at the time.

But the labour and the inconvenience have been abundantlyjustied by the results. Indeed they were necessary, for thanks tosuch work by Lorenz (and by other devoted lovers and studentsof animals) it has become clear that animals do not reveal thehigher possibilities of their nature and behaviour, nor the fullrange of their individual diversity, except in such conditions offreedom. Captivity cages minds as well as bodies, and rigidexperimental procedure limits the range of performance; whilefreedom liberates the creatures capacities and permits theobserver to study their fullest developments.

The value of Lorenzs methods is strikingly exemplied in hislong chapter on his jackdawsone of the most illuminating

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accounts ever given of the life of a social organism. The strangeblend of automatic reaction, intelligence, and insight shown bythese birds; the curious mechanisms of their social behaviour,which on the whole make for law and order and the safeguard-ing of weaker members of the colony (though none of thebehaviour is undertaken with any such purpose in view); thedierence between avian communication and human language;the presence of what, if it were to be exhibited by men, wouldbe called chivalrous behaviour (but its total absence in non-socialspecies like the turtle-dove, which in spite of its gentle reputa-tion can be guilty of the most brutal cruelty to a defeated rivalwhich cannot escape) the extraordinary and I believe the onlyestablished case of the social transmission of the knowledge thatcertain creatures are to be treated as enemiesall this and muchelse is set forth by Lorenz in such a way that his readers willnever again be guilty of anthropomorphising a bird, nor of theequal intellectual misdemeanour of mechanomorphizing itand reducing it to the false over-simplication of a mere systemof reexes.

However, it is not only with birds that Lorenz is at home.His account of the reproductive life of ghting-sh andsticklebacksthe combats and displays of the males; thereactions of the females, the males parental care of their youngis equally brilliant and penetrating. If the behaviour of sh doesnot rise quite to the same height as that of birds, it is certainlymuch more extraordinary than most people have any idea of.And the description of how a certain male ghting-sh resolveda conict is an admirable scientic account of a very unusualphenomenonan animal making up its mind when it possessesonly a rather poorly developed mind to make up.

All this new and important scientic description is not merelypresented with the most lucid simplicity, but enlivened withsome extremely entertaining embellishments. Poor Lorenz beingforced to spend hours crouched on his knees or crawling on

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hands and feet, and quacking loudly at frequent intervals, ifhe was to full his role as imprinted parent of a brood ofducklings; his assistant suddenly realizing he was talking gooseinstead of duck to the same ducklings, and cutting short hisgoose-talk with no, I mean quah, quah, quah; Lorenzs old fatherwalking back to the house from his outdoor siesta, indignantlyholding up his trousers because Lorenzs tame cockatoo hadbitten all the buttons o all his clothescoat buttons, waistcoatbuttons, braces buttons and y buttonsand laid them out inorder on the ground; Lorenz calling down the same cockatoofrom high up in the air by emitting repeated cockatoo-screams(visitors to the parrot house at the Zoo will remember what thatmeans!) on a crowded railway platformthese and variousother incidents that he records I shall long chuckle over.

But I do not wish to stand between Lorenz and his readers. Iwill conclude by expressing my fullest agreement with himwhen he repudiates the unimaginative and blinkered outlook ofthose who think that it is scientic to pretend that somethingrich and complex is merely its jejune and simple elements, andin particular that the brains of higher organisms, such as birds,those complex body-minds with their elaborate emotionalbehaviour, are really nothing but reex machines, like a bit ofspecial cord magnied and supplied with special sense-organs;and equally so when he repudiates the uncritical and often wish-ful thinking of the sentimental anthropomorphizers, who notmerely refuse to take the trouble to understand the radicallydierent nature of animals minds and behaviour from our own,but in fact are satisfying some repressed urge of their ownunconscious by projecting human attributes into bird and beast.

As he rightly says, the truth is more extraordinary and moreinteresting than any such futile imaginings. He might haveadded that the truth is also necessary. Only if we know and facethe truth about the world, whether the world of physics andchemistry, or of geology and biology, or of mind and behaviour

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shall we be able to see what is our own true place in that world.Only as we discover and assimilate the truth about nature shallwe be able to undertake the apparently contradictory butessential task of re-establishing our unity with nature while atthe same time maintaining our transcendence over nature.The work of men like Lorenz is a very real contribution to ourunderstanding of our relations with that important part ofnature constituted by the higher animals.

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PREFACE

There was never a king like SolomonNot since the world beganYet Solomon talked to a butteryAs a man would talk to a man.

Rudyard Kipling

As Holy Scripture tells us, the wise King Solomon, the son ofDavid spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things,and of shes (I Kings . 33). A slight misreading of this text,which very probably is the oldest record of a biological lecture,has given rise to the charming legend that the king was able totalk the language of animals, which was hidden from all othermen. Although this venerable tale that he spake to the animalsand not of them certainly originated from a misunderstanding, Ifeel inclined to accept it as a truth; I am quite ready to believethat Solomon really could do so, even without the help of themagic ring which is attributed to him by the legend in question,and I have very good reason for crediting it; I can do it myself,and without the aid of magic, black or otherwise. I do not think

it is very sporting to use magic rings in dealing with animals.Without supernatural assistance, our fellow creatures can tell usthe most beautiful stories, and that means true stories, becausethe truth about nature is always far more beautiful even thanwhat our great poets sing of it, and they are the only realmagicians that exist.

I am not joking by any means. In so far as the signal code ofa species of social animal can be called a language at all, it can beunderstood by a man who has got to know its vocabulary, asubject to which a whole chapter in this book is devoted. Ofcourse lower and non-social animals do not have anything thatcould, even in a very wide sense, be compared with a language,for the very simple reason that they do not have anything to say.For the same reason, it is impossible to say anything to them; itwould indeed be exceedingly dicult to say anything that wouldinterest some of the lower creeping things. But, by knowingthe vocabulary of some highly social species of beast or bird itis often possible to attain to an astonishing intimacy and mutualunderstanding. In the days work of a scientist investigatinganimal behaviour this becomes a matter of course and ceases tobe a source of wonder, but I still retain the clear-cut memoryof a very funny episode, which, with all the suddenness ofphilosophical realization brought to my full consciousness whatan astounding and unique thing the close social relationbetween a human and a wild animal really is.

Before I begin, I must rst of all describe the setting whichforms the background for most of this book. The beautiful coun-try anking the Danube on either side in the district of Altenbergis a real naturalists paradise. Protected against civilization andagriculture by the yearly inundations of Mother Danube, densewillow forests, impenetrable scrub, reed-grown marshes anddrowsy backwaters stretch over many square miles; an island ofutter wildness in the middle of Lower Austria; an oasis of virginnature, in which red and roe deer, herons and cormorants have

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survived the vicissitudes even of the last terrible war. Here, as inWordsworths beloved lakeland,

The duck dabbles mid the rustling sedgeAnd feeding pike starts from the waters edgeAnd heron, as resounds the trodden shore,Shoots upward, darting his long neck before.

The virgin wildness of this stretch of country is somethingrarely found in the very heart of old Europe. There is a strangecontrast between the character of the landscape and its geo-graphical situation and, to the naturalists eye, this contrast isemphasized by the presence of a number of American plants andanimals which have been introduced. The American golden rod(Solidago virgoaurea) dominates the landscape above water as doesElodea canadensis below the surface: American sun perch (Eupomotisgibbosus) and catsh (Amiurus nebulosus) are common in somebackwaters; and something heavy and ponderous in the gure ofour stags betrays, to the initiated, that Francis Joseph I, in theheyday of his hunting life, introduced a few hundred head ofwapiti to Austria. Muskrats are abundant, having made their waydown from Bohemia, where they were rst released in Europe,and the loud splash of their tails, when they smack the surface ofthe water as a warning signal, mingles with the sweet notesof the European oriole.

To all this, you must add the picture of Mother Danube who islittle sister to the Mississippi and imagine the River itself with its

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broad, shallow, winding bed, its narrow navigable channel thatchanges its course continuously, unlike all other Europeanrivers, and its mighty expanse of turbulent waters that alter theircolours with the season, from turbid greyish yellow in springand summer to clear blue-green in late autumn and winter. TheBlue Danube, made famous by our popular songs, exists onlyin the cold season.

Now imagine this queerly mixed strip of river landscape asbeing bordered by vine-covered hills, brothers to those ankingthe Rhine, from whose crests the two early mediaeval castles ofGreifenstein and Kreuzenstein look down with serious mienover the vast expanse of wild forest and water. Then you havebefore you the landscape which is the setting of this story-book,the landscape which I consider the most beautiful on earth, asevery man should consider his own home country.

One hot day in early summer,when my friend and assistant DrSeitz and I were working on our greylag goose lm, a veryqueer procession slowly made its way through this beauti-ful landscape, a procession as wildly mixed as the landscapeitself. First came a big red dog, looking like an Alaskanhusky, but actually a cross between an Alsatian and a Chow,then two men in bathing trunks carrying a canoe, then tenhalf-grown greylag goslings, walking with all the dignitycharacteristic of their kind, then a long row of thirteen tinycheeping mallard ducklings, scurrying in pursuit, foreverafraid of being lost and anxiously striving to keep up withthe larger animals. At the end of the procession marched aqueer piebald ugly duckling,looking like nothing on earth,but in reality a hybrid of ruddysheldrake and Egyptian goose.But for the bathing trunks andthe moving picture camera slung across the shoulders of one of

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the men, you might have thought you were watching a sceneout of the garden of Eden.

We progressed very slowly, as our pace was set by the weakestamong our little mallards, and it took us some considerable timeto get to our destination, a particularly picturesque backwater,framed by blossoming snowballs and chosen by Seitz to shootcertain scenes of our greylag lm. When we arrived, we atonce got down to business. The title of the lm says, Scienticdirection: Dr Konrad Lorenz. Camera: Dr Alfred Seitz. ThereforeI at once proceeded to direct scientically, this for the momentconsisting in lying down on the soft grass bordering the waterand sunning myself. The green water-frogs were croaking inthe lazy way they have on summer days, big dragon ies camewhirling past and a black-cap warbled its sweetly jubilant songin a bush not three yards from where I lay. Farther o, I couldhear Alfred winding up his camera and grumbling at the littlemallards who forever kept swimming into the picture, while forthe moment he did not want anything in it but greylags. In thehigher centres of my brain, I was still aware that I ought to getup and help my friend by luring away the mallards and theRuddy-Egyptian, but although the spirit was willing the eshwas weak, for exactly the same reason as was that of the disciplesin Gethsemane: I was falling asleep. Then suddenly, through thedrowsy dimness of my senses, I heard Alfred say, in an irritatedtone: Rangangangang, rangangangangoh, sorry, I meanquahg, gegegegeg, Quahg, gegegegeg! I woke laughing: he hadwanted to call away the mallards and had, by mistake, addressedthem in greylag language.

It was at that very moment that the thought of writing a bookrst crossed my mind. There was nobody to appreciate the joke,Alfred being far too preoccupied with his work. I wanted to tellit to somebody and so it occurred to me to tell it to everybody.

And why not? Why should not the comparative ethologistwho makes it his business to know animals more thoroughly

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than anybody else, tell stories about their private lives? Everyscientist should, after all, regard it as his duty to tell the public,in a generally intelligible way, about what he is doing.

There are already many books about animals, both good andbad, true and false, so one more book of true stories cannot domuch harm. I am not contending, though, that a good bookmust unconditionally be a true one. The mental development ofmy own early childhood was, without any doubt, inuenced ina most benecial way by two books of animal stories whichcannot, even in a very loose sense, be regarded as true. NeitherSelma Lagerlof s Nils Holgersson, nor Rudyard Kiplings Jungle Bookscontain anything like scientic truth about animals. But poetssuch as the authors of these books may well avail themselves ofpoetic licence to present the animal in a way far divergent fromscientic truth. They may daringly let the animal speak like ahuman being, they may even ascribe human motives to itsactions, and yet succeed in retaining the general style of the wildcreature. Surprisingly enough, they convey a true impression ofwhat a wild animal is like, although they are telling fairy tales. Inreading those books, one feels that if an experienced old wildgoose or a wise black panther could talk, they would say exactlythe things which Selma Lagerlofs Akka or Rudyard KiplingsBagheera say.

The creative writer, in depicting an animals behaviour, isunder no greater obligation to keep within the bounds of exacttruth than is the painter or the sculptor in shaping an animalslikeness. But all three artists must regard it as their most sacredduty to be properly instructed regarding those particulars inwhich they deviate from the actual facts. They must indeed beeven better informed on these details than on others which theyrender in a manner true to nature. There is no greater sin againstthe spirit of true art, no more contemptible dilettantism than touse artistic licence as a specious cover for ignorance of fact.

I am a scientist and not a poet and I shall not aspire, in this

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little book, to improve on nature by taking any artistic liberties.Any such attempt would certainly have the opposite eect, andmy only chance of writing something not entirely devoidof charm lies in strict adherence to scientic fact. Thus, bymodestly keeping to the methods of my own craft, I may hopeto convey, to my kindly reader, at least a slight inkling of theinnite beauty of our fellow creatures and their life.

Altenberg, January 1950 .

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1ANIMALS AS A NUISANCE

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,Made nests inside mens Sunday hats,And even spoiled the womens chats,

By drowning their speakingWith shrieking and squeaking

In fty different sharps and ats.Robert Browning

Why should I tell rst of the darker side of life with animals?Because the degree of ones willingness to bear with this darkerside is the measure of ones love for animals. I owe undyinggratitude to my patient parents who only shook their heads orsighed resignedly when, as a schoolboy or young student, I onceagain brought home a new and probably yet more destructivepet. And what has my wife put up with, in the course of theyears? For who else would dare ask his wife to allow a tame rat torun free around the house, gnawing neat little circular pieces out

of the sheets to furnish her nests, which she built in even moreawkward places than mens Sunday hats?

Or what other wife would tolerate a cockatoo who bit o allthe buttons from the washing hung up to dry in the garden, orallow a greylag goose to spend the night in the bedroom andleave in the morning by the window? (Greylag geese cannot behouse-trained.) And what would she say when she found outthat the nice little blue spots with which song birds, after arepast of elderberries, decorate all the furniture and curtains, justwill not come out in the wash? What would she say, if ... Icould go on asking for twenty pages!

Is all this absolutely necessary? Yes, quite denitely yes! Ofcourse one can keep animals in cages t for the drawingroom, but one can only get to know the higher and mentallyactive animals by letting them move about freely. How sadand mentally stunted is a caged monkey or parrot, and howincredibly alert, amusing and interesting is the same animalin complete freedom. Though one must be prepared for thedamage and annoyance which is the price one has to pay forsuch house-mates, one obtains a mentally healthy subject forones observations and experiments. This is the reason why thekeeping of higher animals in a state of unrestricted freedom hasalways been my speciality.

In Altenberg the wire of the cage always played a paradoxicalrole: it had to prevent the animals entering the house or frontgarden. They were also strictly forbidden to go within the wirenetting that fenced in our ower beds; but forbidden things havea magnetic attraction for intelligent animals, as for little children.Besides, the delightfully aectionate greylag geese long forhuman society. So it was always happening that, before we hadnoticed it, twenty or thirty geese were grazing on the owerbeds, or, worse still, with loud honking cries of greeting, hadinvaded the closed-in veranda. Now it is uncommonly dicultto repel a bird which can y, and has no fear of man. The loudest

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shouts, the wildest waving ofarms have no eect whatever.Our only really eective scare-crow was an enormous scarletgarden umbrella. Like a knightwith lance at rest, my wifewould tuck the folded umbrellaunder her arm and spring at the geese who were again grazing onher freshly planted beds; she would let out a frantic war-cry andunfold the umbrella with a sudden jerk; that was too much evenfor our geese who, with a thundering of wings, took to the air.

Unfortunately, my father largely undid all my wifes eorts ingoose education. The old gentleman was very fond of the geeseand he particularly liked the ganders for their courageous chiv-alry; so nothing could prevent him from inviting them, each day,to tea in his study adjoining the glass veranda. As, at this time,his sight was already failing, he only noticed the material resultof such a visit when he trod right into it. One day, as I went intothe garden, towards the evening, I found, to my astonishment,that nearly all the grey geese were missing. Fearing the worst, Iran to my fathers study and what did I see? On the beautifulPersian carpet stood twenty-four geese, crowded round the oldgentleman who was drinking tea at his desk, quietly readingthe newspaper and holding out to the geese one piece of breadafter another. The birds were somewhat nervous in theirunaccustomed surroundings and this, unfortunately, had anadverse eect on their intestinal movements, for, like all animalsthat have to digest much grass, the goose has a caecum or blindappendage of the large intestine in which vegetable bre is madeassimilable for the body by the action of cellulose-splitting bac-teria. As a rule, to about six or seven normal evacuations of theintestine there occurs one of the caecum and this has a peculiarpungent smell and a very bright dark green colour. If a goose isnervous, one caecum evacuation follows after another. Since this

animals as a nuisance 3

goose tea-party more than eleven years have elapsed; the darkgreen stains on the carpet have meanwhile become pale yellow.

So the animals lived in complete freedom and yet in greatfamiliarity with our house. They always strove towards usinstead of away from us. In other households, people might call:The bird has escaped from its cage, quick, shut the window!But, with us, the cry was: For goodness sake, shut the window,the cockatoo (raven, monkey, etc.) is trying to get in! The mostparadoxical use of the inverse cage principle was invented by

my wife when our eldest son was very small.At that time, we kept several large and poten-tially dangerous animalssome ravens, twogreater yellow crested cockatoos, two Mon-goz Lemurs, and two capuchin monkeys,none of which could safely be left alonewith the child. So my wife improvised, inthe garden, a large cage and inside it sheput ... the pram.

In the higher animals the ability and inclination to do damageis, unfortunately, in direct proportion to the degree of theirintelligence. For this reason, it is impossible to leave certain ani-mals, particularly monkeys, permanently loose and withoutsupervision. With lemurs, however, this is possible, since theylack that searching curiosity which all true monkeys display inrespect of household implements. True monkeys, on the otherhand, even the genealogically lower-standing new world mon-keys (Platyrrhinae), have an insatiable curiosity for every objectthat is new to them and they proceed to experiment with it.Interesting though that may be from the standpoint of the ani-mal psychologist, for the household it soon becomes a nan-cially unbearable state of aairs. I can illustrate this with anexample.

As a young student, I kept, in my parents at in Vienna, amagnicent specimen of a female capuchin monkey named

king solomons ring4

Gloria. She occupied a large, roomy cage in my study. When Iwas at home and able to look after her, she was allowed to runfreely about the room. When I went out, I shut her in the cage,where she became exceedingly bored and exerted all her talentsto escape as quickly as possible. One evening, when I returnedhome after a longer absence and turned the knob of the lightswitch, all remained dark as before. But Glorias giggle, issuingnot from the cage but from the curtain rod, left no doubt as tothe cause and origin of the light defect. When I returned with alighted candle, I encountered the following scene: Gloria hadremoved the heavy bronze bedside lamp from its stand, draggedit straight across the room (unhappily without pulling the plugout of the wall), heaved it up on to the highest of my aquaria,and, as with a battering ram, bashed in the glass lid so that thelamp sank in the water. Hence the short circuit! Next, or perhapsearlier, Gloria had unlocked my bookcasean amazingachievement considering the minute size of the keyremovedvolumes 2 and 4 of Strumpels textbook of medicine and carriedthem to the aquarium stand where she tore them to shredsand stued them into the tank. On the oor lay the emptybook covers, but not one piece of paper. In the tank sat sadsea-anemones, their tentacles full of paper. ...

The interesting part of these proceedings was the strictattention to detail with which the whole business had beenperformed: Gloria must have dedicated considerable time toher experiments: physically alone, this accomplishment was,for such a small animal, worthy of recognition: only ratherexpensive.

But what are the positive values that redeem all this endlessannoyance and expense? We have already mentioned that it isnecessary, for certain observations, to have an animal that is nota prisoner. Apart from this, the animal that could escape and yetremains with me aords me undenable pleasure, especiallywhen it is aection for myself that has prompted it to stay.

animals as a nuisance 5

On one occasion, while walking near the banks of theDanube, I heard the sonorous call of a raven, and when, inresponse to my answering cry, the great bird, far up in the sky,folded its wings, came whizzing down at breathless speed, andwith a rush of air checked his fall on outstretched pinions, toland on my shoulder with weightless ease, I felt compensated forall the torn-up books and all the plundered duck nests that thisraven of mine had on his conscience. The magic of such anexperience is not blunted by repetition; the wonder of itremains, even when it is an everyday occurrence and Odins birdhas become, for me, as natural a pet as, to anyone else, a dog orcat. Real friendship with wild animals is to me so much a matterof course that it takes special situations to make me realize itsuniqueness. One misty spring morning I went down to theDanube. The river was still shrunk to its winter proportions,and migrating goldeneyes, mergansers, smews and here andthere a ock of bean- or white-fronted geese came yingalong its dark and narrowed surface. Among these migrants,

quite as if they belonged to them,a ock of greylag geese wingedits way. I could see that the gooseying second on the left of thetriangular phalanx had lost a

primary. And in this moment there ashed across my inward eyevivid reminiscences of this goose with its missing primary andof all that had happened when it was broken. For, of course,these were my greylag geese; there are indeed no others on theDanube even at migration time. The second bird on the left wingof the triangle was the gander Martin. He had just got engaged tomy pet goose Martina and was therefore christened after her(formerly he was just a number, because only the geese rearedby myself received names, while those that were brought up bytheir parents were numbered). In greylag geese, the youngbridegroom follows literally in the footsteps of his bride, but

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Martina wandered free and fearless through all the rooms ofour house, without stopping to ask the advice of her bride-groom who had grown up in the garden; so he was forced toventure into realms unknown to him. If one considers that agreylag goose, naturally a bird of open country, must overcomestrong instinctive aversions in order to venture even betweenbushes or under trees, one is forced to regard Martin as a littlehero as, with upstretched neck he followed his bride throughthe front door into the hall and then upstairs into the bedroom.I see him now standing in the room, his feathers attenedagainst his body with fear, shivering with tension, but proudlyerect and challenging the great unknown by loud hisses. Thensuddenly the door behind him shut with a bang. To remainsteadfast now was too much to ask even of a greylag goose hero.He spread his wings and ew, straight as a die, into thechandelier. The latter lost a few appendages, but Martin losta primary.

So that is how I know about the missing feather of the gooseying second in the left wing of the triangle; but I know, too,something that is truly comforting: when I come home from mywalk, these grey geese, now ying in company with wildmigrants, will be standing on the steps in front of the verandaand they will come to greet me, their necks outstretched in thatgesture which, in geese, means the same as tail-wagging in adog. And, as my eyes follow the geese which, ying low over thewater, disappear round the next bend of the river, I am all at oncegripped by amazement as, with that wonderment which is thebirth-act of philosophy, I suddenly start to query the familiar.We have all experienced that deeply moving sensation inwhich the most everyday things suddenly stare us in the facewith altered mien as though we were seeing them for therst time. Wordsworth became conscious of this one day whilecontemplating the Lesser Celandine:

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I have seen thee, high and lowThirty years or more, and yetTwas a face I did not know;Thou hast now, go where I may,Fifty greetings in a day.

As I watched the geese, it appeared to me as little short of amiracle that a hard, matter-of-fact scientist should have beenable to establish a real friendship with wild, free-living animals,and the realization of this fact made me strangely happy. It mademe feel as though mans expulsion from the Garden of Eden hadthereby lost some of its bitterness.

To-day the ravens are gone, the greylag geese were scatteredby the war. Of all my free-ying birds, only the jackdaws remain;they were the rst of all the birds that I installed in Altenberg.These perennial retainers still circle round the high gables, andtheir shrill cries whose meaning I understand in every detail, stillecho through the shafts of the central heating into my study.And every year they stop up the chimneys with their nests andinfuriate the neighbours by eating their cherries.

Can you understand that it is not only scientic results that arethe recompense for all this trouble and annoyance, but more,much, much more?

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2SOMETHING THAT DOES NO

DAMAGE: THE AQUARIUM

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webtEins in dem anderen wirkt und lebt.

Goethe, Faust

It costs almost nothing and is indeed wonderful: cover thebottom of a glass tank with clean sand, and insert in thisfoundation a few stalks of ordinary water plants. Pour incarefully a few pints of tap water and stand the whole thing ona sunny window-sill. As soon as the water has cleared and theplants have begun to grow, put in some little shes, or, betterstill, go with a jam jar and a small net to the nearest ponddrawthe net a few times through the depth of the pool, and you willhave a myriad interesting organisms.

The whole charm of childhood still lingers, for me, in sucha shing net. This should preferably not be a complicatedcontraption with brass rim and gauze bag, but, according toAltenbergian tradition, should rather be home-made in a matterof ten minutes: the rim an ordinary bent wire, the net a stocking,a piece of curtain or a babys napkin. With such an instrument, Icaught, at the age of nine, the rst Daphnia for my shes, therebydiscovering the wonder-world of the freshwater pond whichimmediately drew me under its spell. In the train of the shingnet came the magnifying glass; after this again a modest littlemicroscope, and therewith my fate was sealed; for he who hasonce seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself awayfrom it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and,if his eyes are good and his powers of observation sharp enough,he may well become both.

So you skim with your net through the water plants in thepond, generally lling your shoes with water and mud in theprocess. If you have chosen the right pond and found a placewhere something is up, the bottom of the net will soon beswarming with glassily transparent, wriggling creatures. Tip upthe base of the net and wash it out in the jam jar which you havealready lled with water. Arrived home, you empty your catchcarefully in the aquarium and contemplate the tiny world nowunfolding its secrets before your eyes and magnifying glass.

The aquarium is a world; for, as in a natural pond or lake,indeed as all over our whole planet, animal and vegetable beingslive together in biological equilibrium. The carbon dioxidewhich the animals breathe out is assimilated by the plantswhich, in their turn exhale oxygen. Nevertheless it is false to saythat plants do not breathe like animals but the other wayround. They breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide,just as animals do, but, apart from this, the growing green plantassimilates carbon dioxide, that is, it uses the carbon for thebuilding up of its body substance: indeed, one might say that,

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independently of its breathing, the plant eats carbon dioxide.During this process it excretes oxygen in excess of its ownbreathing and, from this surplus, man and animals breathe.Finally, plants are able to assimilate the products of dead bodiesdecomposed by bacteria and to make them again available tothe great cycle of life, which thus consists of three interlockinglinks: the constructorsthe green plants, the consumerstheanimals, and the decomposersthe bacteria.

In the restricted space of the aquarium, this natural cycle ofmetabolism is easily disturbed and such a disturbance has cata-strophic results for our little world. Many aquarium keepers,children and adults alike, are unable to resist the temptation ofslipping just one more sh into the container, the capacity ofwhose green plants is already overburdened with animals. Andjust this one more sh may be the nal straw that breaks thecamels back. With too many animals in the aquarium, a lack ofoxygen ensues. Sooner or later someorganism will succumb to this and itsdeath may easily pass unnoticed. Thedecomposing corpse causes an enor-mous multiplication of bacteria in theaquarium, the water becomes turbid,the oxygen content decreases rapidly, then further animals dieand, through this vicious circle, the whole of our carefullytended little world is doomed. Soon even the vegetation beginsto decomposeand what some days ago was a beautiful, clearpool with healthy growing plants and lively animals becomes ahorrid, stinking brew.

The advanced aquarium keeper counteracts such dangers byaerating the water articially. Such technical aids, however,detract from the intrinsic value of the aquarium, whose deepermeaning lies in the fact that this little water-world is self-supporting and, apart from the feeding of the animals and thecleaning of the front pane of the container (the algae on all other

something that does no damage: the aquarium 11

panes are carefully left alone as valuable suppliers of oxygen!),needs no biological care. As long as the right equilibrium ismaintained, the aquarium itself needs no cleaning. If onedenies oneself the larger shes, particularly those that stir up thebottom, it does not matter if a layer of mud is gradually formedfrom the excreta of animals and from dying plant tissues. Thisis even to be desired, since it suuses and fertilizes the sandybottom which was originally sterile. In spite of the mud, thewater itself remains as crystal clear and odourless as any of ouralpine lakes.

From a biological, as also from a decorative point of view, it isbest to arrange the aquarium in spring time and to set it onlywith a few sprouting plants. Only plants that have grown in theaquarium itself are able to adapt themselves to the special condi-tions of the particular container and thrive, while all plantswhich one puts full-grown into an aquarium lose much of theiroriginal beauty.

Two aquaria, separated from each other by only a few inches,have individual characters just as sharply dened as two lakesmany miles apart. That is the attractive part about a new aquar-ium. When one is setting it up, one never knows how it will

develop and what it will look like by the timeit has reached its own particular stage of equi-librium. Suppose that one establishes, at thesame time, and with the same inorganicmaterial, three containers which one placesclose together on the same stand and plantsall three with water thyme (Elodea canadensis)and water milfoil (Myriophyllum verticillatum):in the rst, a dense jungle of Elodea may soonbe ourishing which more or less eliminatesthe Myriophyllum, in the second the oppositemay take place and, in the third, the plants

may harmonize, and apparently from nothing there may spring a

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delightful vegetation of Nitella exilis, a decorativegreen alga, branched like a chandelier. Thus thethree containers can each produce an entirely dif-ferent landscape. They would also have completelydierent biological properties, and be propitiousfor dierent types of animals. In short, althoughprepared under the same conditions, each aquar-ium develops its own little individual world. Acertain amount of restraint and self-control isnecessary to prevent oneself from interfering withthe natural development of an aquarium. Evenwell-meant adjustments on the part of the ownermay cause much damage. It is, of course, possibleto set up a pretty aquarium with articial foundations andcarefully distributed plants; a lter would prevent any mudformation and articial aeration permit the keeping of manymore sh than would otherwise be possible. In this case theplants are merely ornamental, the animals do not require themsince they derive from the articial aeration enough oxygen fortheir maintenance. It is purely a matter of taste, but I personallythink of an aquarium as of a living community that regulates itsown equilibrium. The other kind is a cage, an articiallycleaned container which is not an end in itself, but purely ameans of keeping certain animals.

It is a real art to determine in advance the type of animal andplant community which one wants to develop in an aquarium,and to do this requires much experience and biological tact inchoosing the right materials for the bottom, the situation of thetank, the heat and light conditions, and nally the plant andanimal inmates themselves. A past master of this art was mytragically deceased friend Bernhard Hellman who was able tocopy, at will, any given type of pond or lake, brook or river. Oneof his masterpieces was a large aquarium which was a perfectmodel of an Alpine lake. The tank was very deep and cool, and

something that does no damage: the aquarium 13

was placed not too near thelight, the vegetation in thecrystal-clear water consisted ofglassily transparent, pale greenpond weed (Potamogeton), thestony bottom was coveredwith dark green Fontinalis anddecorative stonewort (Chara). Ofthe non-microscopic animalsthe only representatives weresome minute trout and min-nows, a few freshwater shrimpsand a little craysh. Thus, theanimal inhabitants were so fewthat they hardly required feed-

ing, since they were able to subsist on the natural microfauna ofthe aquarium.

If one wishes to breed some of the more delicate wateranimals, it is essential, in the construction of an aquarium, toreproduce the whole of the natural habitat with its entirecommunity of living macro- and micro-organisms. Even thecommonest of tropical aquarium shes are dependent on thiscondition, but their natural habitat is that of a small and not tooclean pond which harbours exactly the sort of life communitywhich automatically develops in the average aquarium. Theconditions of our European waters, exposed to the variations ofour climate, are much more dicult to reproduce indoors, andthat is the reason why the majority of our native shes are harderto keep and to breed than tropical species. You will now under-stand why I advised you to fetch your rst water organisms outof the nearest pond with the traditional homemade shing net. Ihave kept hundreds of aquaria of the most varied types, but thecheapest and most ordinary pond aquarium has always appealedto me particularly since its walls enclose the most natural and

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perfect life community that can be attained under articialconditions.

A man can sit for hours before an aquarium and stare into it asinto the ames of an open re or the rushing waters of a torrent.All conscious thought is happily lost in this state of apparentvacancy, and yet, in these hours of idleness, one learns essentialtruths about the macrocosm and the microcosm. If I cast intoone side of the balance all that I have learned from the books ofthe library and into the other everything that I have gleanedfrom the books in the running brooks, how surely would thelatter turn the scales.

something that does no damage: the aquarium 15

3ROBBERY IN THE AQUARIUM

How cheerfully he seems to grin,How neatly spreads his claws,And welcomes little shes inWith gently smiling jaws!

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

There are some terrible robbers in the pond world, and, in ouraquarium, we may witness all the cruelties of an embitteredstruggle for existence enacted before our very eyes. If you haveintroduced to your aquarium a mixed catch, you will soon beable to see an example of these conicts, for, amongst the newarrivals, there will probably be a larva of the water-beetle Dytiscus.Considering their relative size, the voracity and cunning withwhich these animals destroy their prey eclipse the methods ofeven such notorious robbers as tigers, lions, wolves, or killerwhales. These are all as lambs compared with the Dytiscus larva.

It is a slim, streamlined insect, rather more than two incheslong. Its six legs are equipped with stout fringes of bristleswhich form broad oar-like blades that propel the animal with

quick and sure movements through the water. The wide, athead bears an enormous, pincer-shaped pair of jaws which arehollow and serve not only as syringes for injecting poison, butalso as orices of ingestion. The animal lies in ambush on somewaterplant; suddenly it shoots at lightning speed towards itsprey, darts underneath it, then quickly jerks up its head andgrabs the victim in its jaws. Prey, for these creatures, is all thatmoves or that smells of animal in any way. It has oftenhappened to me that, while standing quietly in the water of apond, I have been eaten by a Dytiscus larva. Even for man, aninjection of the poisonous digestive juice of this insect isextremely painful.

These beetle larvae are among the fewanimals which digest out of doors. Theglandular secretion that they inject, throughtheir hollow forceps, into their prey, dis-solves the entire inside of the latter into aliquid soup which is then sucked in throughthe same channel by the attacker. Even largevictims, such as fat tadpoles or dragon-ylarvae, which have been bitten by a Dytiscuslarva, stien after a few defensive move-ments, and their inside, which, as in mostwater animals, is more or less transparent,becomes opaque as though xed by for-malin. The animal swells up rst, then grad-ually shrinks to a limp bundle of skin whichhangs from the deadly jaws, and is nallyallowed to drop. In the conned spaces of anaquarium, a few large Dytiscus larvae will,within a few days, eat all living things overabout a quarter of an inch long. What hap-pens then? They will eat each other, if theyhave not already done so; this depends less

robbery in the aquarium 17

on who is bigger and stronger than upon who succeeds inseizing the other rst. I have often seen two nearly equal-sizedDytiscus larvae each seize the other simultaneously and both diea quick death by inner dissolution. There are very few animalswhich, even when threatened with starvation, will attack anequal sized animal of their own species with the intention ofdevouring it. I only know this to be denitely true of rats and afew related rodents; that wolves do the same thing, I am muchinclined to doubt, on the strength of some observations ofwhich I shall speak later. But Dytiscus larvae devour animalsof their own breed and size, even when other nourishment is athand, and that is done, as far as I know, by no other animal.

A somewhat less brutal but more elegant beast of prey is thelarva of the great dragon y Aeschna. The mature insect is a trueking of the air, a veritable falcon among insects, for it catches itsprey when on the wing. If you shake your pond catch into awash basin, in order to remove the worst miscreants, you willpossibly nd, besides Dytiscus larvae, some other streamlinedinsects whose remarkable method of locomotion at once attractsthe attention. These slender torpedoes which are usually markedwith a decorative pattern of yellow and green, shoot forward inrapid jerks, their legs pressed close to their sides. It is at rstsomething of an enigma how they move at all. But if you observethem separately, in a shallow dish, you will see that these larvaeare jet propelled. From the tip of their abdomen there squirtsforth a powerful little column of water which drives the animalspeedily forward. The end portion of their intestine forms ahollow bladder which is richly lined with tracheal gills andserves at the same time the purposes of respiration and oflocomotion.

Aeschna larvae do not hunt swimming but lie in ambush:when an object of prey comes within eye range they x it withtheir gaze, turn their head and body very slowly in its directionand follow all its movements attentively. This marking down of

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the prey can only be observed in a very few other non-vertebrateanimals. In contrast to the larvae of Dytiscus, those of Aeschnacan see even very slow movements, such as the crawling of snailswhich therefore very often fall a prey to them. Slowly, veryslowly, step by step, the Aeschna larva stalks its prey: it is still aninch or two away when suddenlywhat was that?the victimis struggling between the cruel jaws. Without taking a slow-motion picture of this procedure, one could only see thatsomething tongue-like ew out from the head of the larva to itsprey and drew the latter instantly within reach of the attackersjaws. Anyone who had ever seen a chameleoneating would at once be reminded of the ick-ing back and forth of its sticky tongue. Theboomerang of the Aeschna is, however, notongue but the metamorphosed underlipwhich consists of two movable joints with apincer at their end.

The optical xation of its prey alone makes the dragon-ylarva appear strangely intelligent andthis impression will be strengthenedshould some other peculiarities of itsbehaviour be observed. In contrast tothe Dytiscus larva which will snap blindly at anything, thedragon-y larva leaves animals above a certain size severelyalone, even if it has been starving for weeks. I have kept Aeschnalarvae for months in a basin with sh, and have never seen themattack or damage one larger than themselves. It is a remarkablefact that the larvae will never grab at a prey which has beencaught by a member of their own species and which is nowmoving slowly backwards and forwards between the masticatingjaws; on the other hand they will at once take a piece of freshmeat moved in a like manner on the end of a glass feeding rod infront of their eyes. In my large American sun-porch aquarium Ialways had a few Aeschna larvae growing up: their development

robbery in the aquarium 19

takes long, more than a year. Then, on a beautiful summers day,comes the great moment; the larva climbs slowly up the stem ofa plant and out of the water. There it sits for a long time andthen, as in every moulting process, the outer skin on the backpart of the thoracic segments bursts open and the beautiful,perfect insect unwinds itself slowly from the larval skin. Afterthis, several hours expire before the wings have reached their fullsize and consistency, and this is attained by a wonderful processwhereby a rapidly solidifying liquid is pumped, under highpressure, into the ne branches of the wing veins. Then youopen the window wide and wish your aquarium guest goodluck and bon voyage in its insect life.

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4POOR FISH

Weed in the wave, gleam in the mudThe dark re leaps along his blood;Dateless and deathless, blind and still,The intricate impulse works its will.

Rupert Brooke, The Fish

Strange what blind faith is placed in proverbs, even when whatthey say is false or misleading. The fox is not more cunning thanother beasts of prey and is much more stupid than wolf or dog,the dove is certainly not peaceful, and of the sh, rumourspreads only untruth: it is neither so cold-blooded as one says ofdull people, nor is the sh in water nearly so happily situatedas the converse saying would imply. In reality there is no othergroup of animals that, even in nature, is so plagued with infec-tious diseases as the sh. I have never yet known a newly caughtbird, reptile or mammal bring an infectious disease into my

animal population; but every newly acquired sh must, as aroutine measure, go into the quarantine aquarium, otherwiseyou may bet a hundred to one that within a very short time thedreaded minute white spots, the sign of infection with the para-site Ichthyophtirius multiliis, will appear on the ns of the previouslyinstalled aquarium dwellers.

And regarding the alleged cold-bloodedness of shes; I amfamiliar with many animals and with their behaviour in the mostintimate situations of their life, in the wild ecstasies of the ghtand of love, but, with the exception of the wild canary, I know ofno animal that can excel in hot-bloodedness a male stickleback,a Siamese ghting-sh or a cichlid. No animal becomes socompletely transformed by love, none glows, in such a literalsense, with passion as a stickleback or ghting-sh. Who couldreproduce in words, what artist in colour, that glowing red thatmakes the sides of the male stickleback glassy and transparent,the iridescent blue-green of its back whose colour and brilliancecan only be compared with the illuminating power of neonlighting, or nally, the brilliant emerald green of its eyes?According to the rules of artistic taste, these colours should clashhorribly, and yet what a symphony they produce, composed bythe hand of nature.

In the ghting-sh, this marvel of colour is not continuallypresent. For the little brown-grey sh that lies with folded nsin one corner of the aquarium reveals nothing of it for themoment. It is only when another sh, equally inconspicuous atrst, approaches him and each sights the other, that they begingradually to light up in all their incandescent glory. The glowpervades their bodies almost as quickly as the wire of an electricheater grows red. The ns unfold themselves like ornamentalfans, so suddenly that one almost expects to hear the sound of anumbrella being opened quickly. And now follows a dance ofburning passion, a dance which is not play but real earnest, adance of life or death, of be-all or end-all. To begin with,

king solomons ring22

strangely enough, it is uncertain whether it will lead to loveovertures and mating, or whether it will develop, by an equallyowing transition, into a bloody battle. Fighting-sh recognizethe sex of a member of their own species not simply byseeing it but by watching the way in which it responds tothe severely ritualized, inherited, instinctive movements of thedancer.

The meeting of two previously unacquainted ghting-shbegins with a mutual showing-o, a swaggering act ofself-display in which every luminous colour-spot and everyiridescent ray of the wonderful ns is brought into maximumplay. Before the glorious male, the modestly garbed femalelowers the agby folding her nsand, if she is unwilling tomate, ees immediately. Should she be willing to mate, sheapproaches the male with shy insinuating movements, that is tosay, in an attitude directly opposed to that of the swaggeringmale. And now begins a love ceremonial which, if it cannotcompare in grandeur with the male war-dance, can emulate it ingrace of movement.

When two males meet face to face, veritable orgies of mutualself-glorication take place. There is a striking similaritybetween the war-dance of these sh and the correspondingceremonial dances of Javanese and other Indonesian peoples. Inboth man and sh the minutest detail of every movement is laiddown by immutable and ancient laws, the slightest gesture hasits own deeply symbolic meaning. There is a close resemblancebetween man and sh in the style and exotic grace of theirmovements of restrained passion.

The beautifully rened form of the movements betrays thefact that they have a long historical development behind themand that they owe their elaborateness to an ancient ritual. Itis, however, not so obvious that though in man this ritual isa ceremony which has been handed down from generationto generation by a thousand-year-old tradition, in the sh it

poor fish 23

represents the result of an evolutional development of innateinstinctive activities, at least a hundred times older. Genealogicalresearch into the origin of such ritual expression, and the com-parison of such ceremonies in related species are exceedinglyilluminating. We know more of the evolutionary history of thesemovements than of all other instincts.

After this digression, let us return to the war-dance of themale ghting-sh. This has exactly the same meaning as the duelof words of the Homeric heroes, or of our Alpine farmerswhich, even to-day, often precedes the traditional Sunday brawlin the village inn. The idea is to intimidate ones opponent and atthe same time to stimulate oneself to a state of fearlessness. Inthe sh, the long duration of these preliminaries, their ritualcharacter and above all their great show of colour nery and ndevelopment which at rst only serve to subdue the opponent,mask, for the uninitiated, the seriousness of the situation. Onaccount of their beauty, the ghters appear less malevolentthan they really are and one is just as loth to ascribe to themembittered courage and contempt of death as one is to associatehead-hunting with the almost eeminately beautiful Indonesianwarriors. Nevertheless both are capable of ghting to the death.The battles of the ghting-sh often end in the death of one ofthe adversaries. When they are stimulated to the point of inict-ing the rst sword-thrust, it is only a matter of minutes till wideslits are gaping in their ns, which in a few more minutes arereduced to tatters. The method of attack of a ghting-sh, as ofnearly all sh that ght, is literally the sword-thrust and not thebite. The sh opens its jaws so wide that all its teeth are directedforwards and, in this attitude, it rams them, with all the force ofits muscular body, into the side of its adversary. The ramming ofa ghting-sh is so strong and hard that its impact is clearlyaudible if, in the confusion of the ght, one of the antagonistshappens to hit the glass side of the tank. The self-display-dancecan last for hours but, should it develop into action, it is often

king solomons ring24

only a matter of minutes before one of the combatants liesmortally wounded on the bottom.

The ghts of our Europeansticklebacks are very dierentfrom those of the Siameseghting-sh. In contrast to thelatter, the stickleback, at matingtime, glows not only when it seesan opponent or a female, but doesso as long as it is in the vicinity of its nest, in its own chosenterritory. The basic principle of his ghting is, my home is mycastle. Take his nest from a stickleback or remove him from thetank where he built it and put him with another male andhe will not dream of ghting but, on the contrary, willmake himself small and ugly. It would be impossible to usesticklebacks for exhibition battles as the Siamese have done, forhundreds of years, with ghting-sh. It is only when he hasfounded his home that the stickleback becomes physicallycapable of reaching a state of full sexual excitement; therefore, areal stickleback ght can only be seen when two males are kepttogether in a large tank where they are both building their nests.The ghting inclinations of a stickleback, at any given moment,are in direct proportion to his proximity to his nest. At the nestitself, he is a raging fury and with a ne contempt of death willrecklessly ram the strongest opponent, or even the human hand.The further he strays from his headquarters in the course of hisswimming, the more his courage wanes. When two sticklebacksmeet in battle, it is possible to predict with a high degree ofcertainty how the ght will end: the one which is further fromhis nest will lose the match. In the immediate neighbourhood ofhis nest, even the smallest male will defeat the largest one, andthe relative ghting potential of the individual is shown by thesize of the territory which he can keep clear of rivals. The van-quished sh invariably ees homeward and the victor, carried

poor fish 25

away by his successes, chases the other furiously, far into itsdomain. The further the victor goes from home, the more hiscourage ebbs, while that of the vanquished rises in proportion.Arrived in the precincts of his nest, the fugitive gains newstrength, turns right about and dashes with gathering fury athis pursuer. A new battle begins, which ends with absolutecertainty in the defeat of the former victor, and o goes thechase again in the opposite direction. The pursuit is repeated afew times in alternating directions, swinging to and fro like apendulum which at last reaches a state of equilibrium at a certainpoint. The line at which the ghting potentials of the individualsare thus equally balanced marks the border of their territories.This same principle is of great importance in the biology ofmany animals, particularly that of birds. Every bird lover has seentwo male redstarts chasing each other in exactly the samemanner.

Once on this borderline, both sticklebacks hesitate to attack.Taking on a peculiar threatening attitude, they incessantly standon their heads and, like Father William, they do it again andagain. At the same time they turn broadside on towards eachother and each erects threateningly the ventral spine on the sidenearer his opponent. All the while they seem to be pecking atthe bottom for food. In reality, however, they are executing a

ritualized version of the activitynormally used in nest-digging. Ifan animal nds the outlet for someinstinctive action blocked by aconicting drive, it often ndsrelief by discharging an entirelydierent instinctive movement.In this case, the stickleback, notquite daring to attack, nds an

outlet in nest digging. This type of phenomenon, which isof great theoretical interest both from the physiological and

king solomons ring26

psychological point of view, is termed in comparative ethology adisplacement activity.

Unlike the ghting-sh, the sticklebacks do not waste time bythreatening before starting to ght, but will do so after orbetween battles. This, in itself, implies that they never ght to anish, although from their method of ghting, the contrarymight be expected. Thrust and counter-thrust follow each otherso quickly that the eye of the observer can scarcely follow them.The large ventral spine, that appears so ominous, plays in realityquite a subordinate role. In older aquarium literature, it is oftenstated that these spines are used so eectively that one of theghters may sink down dead, perforated by the spine of hisopponent. Apparently the writers of these works have never triedto perforate a stickleback; for even a dead stickleback will slipfrom under the sharpest scalpel before one is able to penetrate itstough skin, even in places where it is not reinforced by bonyarmour. Place a dead stickleback on a soft surfacewhichcertainly oers a much better resistance than waterand try torun it through with a sharp needle. You will be surprised at theforce required to do so. Owing to the extreme toughness of thesticklebacks skin, no serious wounds can be inicted in theirnatural battles which, as compared with those of the ghting-sh, are absurdly harmless. Of course, in the conned space of asmall tank, a stronger male stickleback may harry a weaker oneto death, but rabbits and turtle doves, in analogous conditions,will do the same thing to each other.

The stickleback and theghting-sh are as dierent inlove as they are in ght, yet, asparents, they have much incommon. In both species, it isthe male and not the femalethat undertakes the building ofthe nest and the care of the

poor fish 27

young, and the future father only thenbegins to think of love when the cradle forthe expected children is ready. But here thesimilarities end and the dierences begin.The cradle of the stickleback lies, in a man-ner of speaking, under the oor, that of theghting-sh above the ceiling: that is tosay, the former digs a little hollow in thebottom and the latter builds his nest on thesurface of the water; the one uses, for nestconstruction, plant strands and a specialsticky kidney secretion, the other uses airand spittle. The castle-in-the-air of theghting-sh, as also that of his nearerrelations, consists of a little pile of airbubbles, stuck closely together, which pro-trudes somewhat over the water surface;the bubbles are coated with a tough layer ofspittle and are very resistant. Already whilebuilding, the male radiates the most gor-geous colours, which gain in depth andiridescence when a female approaches.Like lightning, he shoots towards her andglowing, halts. If the female is prepared toaccept him, she demonstrates it by invest-ing herself with a characteristic, if modest,colouring consisting of light grey verticalstripes on a brown background. With nsclosely folded, she swims towards the malewho, trembling with excitement, expandsall his ns to breaking point and holdshimself in such a position that the dazzlingbrilliance of his full broadside is presented

to his bride. Next moment he swims o with a sweeping,

king solomons ring28

gracefully sinuous movement, in the direction of the nest. Thebeckoning nature of this gesture is at once apparent even whenseen for the rst time. The essentially ritual nature of this swim-ming movement is easily understood: everything that enhancesits optical eect, as the sinuous movements of the body or thewaving of the tail n, is exaggerated in mimic, whereas all themeans of making it mechanically eective are decreased. Themovement says: I am swimming away from you, hurry up andfollow me! At the same time, the sh swims neither fast nor farand turns back immediately to the female who is following buttimidly and shyly in his wake.

In this way the female is enticed under the bubble nest andnow follows the wonderful love-play which resembles, in deli-cate grace, a minuet, but in general style, the trance dance of aBalinese temple dancer. In this love dance, by age-old law, themale must always exhibit his magnicent broadside to his part-ner, but the female must remain constantly at right angles tohim. The male must never obtain so much as a glimpse of heranks, otherwise he will immediately become angry andunchivalrous; for standing broadsides means, in these shes as inmany others, aggressive masculinity and elicits instantaneouslyin every male a complete change of mood: hottest love is trans-formed to wildest hate. Since the male will not now leave thenest, he moves in circles round the female and she follows hisevery movement by keeping her head always turned towardshim; the love-dance is thus executed in a small circle, exactlyunder the middle of the nest. Now the colours become moreglowing, more frantic the movements, ever smaller the circles,until the bodies touch. Then, suddenly, the male slings his bodytightly round the female, gently turns her on her back and,quivering, both full the great act of reproduction. Ova andsemen are discharged simultaneously.

The female remains, for a few seconds, as though benumbed,but the male has important things to attend to at once. The

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minute, glass-clear eggs are considerably heavier than water andsink at once to the ground. Now the posture of the bodies inspawning is such that the sinking eggs are bound to drift pastthe downward directed head of the male and thus catch hisattention. He gently releases the female, glides downwards inpursuit of the eggs and gathers them up, one after the other, inhis mouth. Turning upwards again, he blows the eggs into thenest. They now miraculously oat instead of sinking. Thissudden and amazing change of density is caused by a coating ofbuoyant spittle in which the male has enveloped every eggwhile carrying it in his mouth. He has to hurry in this work, fornot only would he soon be unable to nd the tiny, transparentglobules in the mud, but, if he should delay a second longer,the female would wake from her trance and, also swimmingafter the eggs, would likewise proceed to engulf them. Fromthese actions, it would appear, at rst sight, that the female hasthe same intentions as her mate. But if we wait to see herpacking the eggs in the nest, we will wait in vain, for these eggswill disappear, irrevocably swallowed. So the male knows verywell why he is hurrying, and he knows too, why he no longerallows the female near the nest when, after ten to twentymatings, all her eggs have been safely stored between the airbubbles.

The family life of the beautiful and courageous shes of thecichlid group is much more highly developed than that of theghting-sh. Here both male and female care for their young,which follow their parents as chickens the hen. For the rst timein the ascending ranks of the scale of living creatures, we see inthese cichlids a type of behaviour which human beings considerhighly moral: male and female remain in close connubial part-nership even after reproduction is completed. And not only dothey remain so, as long as the care of the brood necessitates it,butand this is what countsstill longer. It is usually describedas marriage when both partners together fend for the brood,

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though, for this purpose, no really personal ties need existbetween male and female; but in cichlids they do exist.

In order to ascertain objectively whether an animal recognizesits mate personally, the latter must be substituted, in experiment,by another of the same sex and in exactly the same phase of thereproductive cycle. If, for instance, in a pair of birds just begin-ning to nest, we replace the female by one that is already in thepsycho-physiological phase of feeding its young, its instinctivebehaviour will naturally fail to harmonize with that of the male.If the male then reacts inimically, it is impossible to say whetherhe really notices that the substituted female is not his wife orwhether it merely annoys him that she behaves wrongly. I wasgreatly interested to nd out how cichlids, the only sh that livein a life-time marriage, behave in this respect. The rst thingnecessary for the elucidation of this question was the possessionof two pairs in exactly the same stages of their reproductivecycles. I was lucky enough, in the year 1941, to have two pairs ofthe magnicent, South-American cichlid Herichthys cyanoguttatus,which fullled this condition. The Latin name which, translatedinto English, means Blue-spotted Hero-Fish, is apposite: on avelvet-black background, deep turquoise-blue iridescent spotsform an intricate mosaic, and a breeding pair of these shesdisplays, even to the largest adversary, a heroism which justiesthe second part of their name. When I rst got them, my veyoung shes of this species were neither bluespotted nor heroic.After some weeks of concentrated feeding in a large sunnyaquarium they grew and ourished and, one day, one of the twobiggest shes showed his nuptial colours. He took possession ofthe left-hand lower front corner of the container, hollowed out adeep nesting cavity, and began to prepare a large smooth stonefor spawning by carefully freeing it from algae and otherdeposits. The other four sh stood, huddled in an anxious groupin the right upper rear corner. But by the next morning oneof them, a smaller one, had also put on its gala dress; the

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velvet-black breast, devoid of blue spots, proved it to be a female.The male proceeded straightway to fetch his lady home, by aceremony very similar to that described in the ghting-sh.

The pair now stood over the nesting place and defended itsarea valorously. This was no laughing matter for the threeremaining sh, who were allowed no rest, being chased to andfro all the time, and it says much for the name-giving heroism ofthe species that, after some days, the second largest male pluckedup enough courage to make conquest of the opposite corner.The two males now sat facing each other like two hostile knightsin their castles. The border lay nearer the castle of the secondone, a fact which will be appreciated after what I have said aboutterritorial ghting: the ghting potential of the single male wassmaller than the combined forces of the pair, and his territorywas correspondingly smaller. The solitary male, which we willsimply call number two, sallied forth again and again from hiscastle with the intention of abducting his neighbours wife. Hisattempts, however, were fruitless and brought him nothing butdiscomture. Every time he tried to pay court to her by display-ing his magnicent broadside, she repaid his eorts by a ram-ming thrust in his unprotected ank. This situation remainedunaltered for several days; then a second female donned herbridal dress and a happy end seemed imminent. But nothing ofthe kind occurred. On the contrary, the newly matured femalepaid as little attention to male number two as he to her and eachignored the other completely. Female number two tried againand again to approach male number one. Every time he swamtowards his home, she followed, in the attitude of a female beingled to the nest. She considered herself as being enticednestwards whenever male number one, after a sally, swamback in that direction. His wife seemed to grasp the situationthoroughly, judging by the ferocity with which she attacked theintruder every time she approached; in this her husband onlymildly participated. Male and female number two just did not

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exist for each other and each of them had eyes only for theopposite sex in the happily married pair which showed so littleinterest in them.

This situation would have lasted long if I had not intervenedand put the number twos in another, identical aquarium. Separ-ated from the objects of their unrequited love, the two quicklyfound solace in each other and became a pair. After a few daysthe two pairs spawned in the same hour. Now I had exactly whatI had wanted, namely, two cichlid pairs of the same species inthe identical phase of reproduction. As the breeding of thesesh, at that time rare, meant much to me, I waited with myexperiment till the young of both couples were big enough toexist independently even in the event of a complete maritalrupture of their parents.

Then I exchanged the females. The result was ambiguous andgave no denite answer to the question as to whether the shknows his own mate personally. My interpretation of what nowfollowed will be considered by many as daring, and it certainlyneeds further experimental corroboration. Male number twoaccepted female number one as soon as she was placed withhim. But it did not appear to me as though he was unaware ofthe dierence, indeed his movements at the changing-of-the-guard ceremony and whenever he met his new wife, seemed tohave increased in re and vigour. The female immediately acqui-esced in the ceremonies of the male and adapted herself withoutdemur to her role. This, however, did not mean much, because,in this phase, the female is only occupied with the young andhas little interest in the male.

The proceedings in the other aquarium, in which I had intro-duced female number two to male number one and his o-spring, took an entirely dierent turn. Here, too, the female wasonly interested in the children, swam immediately to the shoal,and, herself upset by the change, began anxiously to gather theyoung ones about her. This is just what female number one had

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done in the other aquarium. But the contrast lay in the behaviourof the males; while male two had received the substitution of thenew female with friendly glowing ceremonies, male oneremained suspiciously guarding his ock, refused to let thefemale relieve him of his charge and, in the next moment,

attacked her with a furious ram-thrust. At once, some silveryscales danced like sunbeams tothe bottom of the tank and I hadto interfere with alacrity in

order to rescue the female who otherwise would certainly havebeen gored to death.

What had happened? The sh which had received the pret-tier female, the one to whom he had previously paid court, wasquite content with the exchange, but the other, who had beenlanded with the formerly rejected female in place of his wife,was, not unjustiably, furious and now attacked her much morerelentlessly than he had done at rst, in the presence of his wife. Iam convinced that male number two, who had received animprovement on his wife, noticed the dierence too.

Almost more interesting and, for the observer, more fascinat-ing than the sexual behaviour of these shes is their method ofcaring for their brood. Anyone who has watched theirbehaviour, as they fan a continuous stream of fresh watertowards their eggs or small babies lying in the nest, or as, withmilitary exactitude, they relieve each other of duty, or as later,when the brood has learned to swim, they lead them carefullythrough the water, will never forget these scenes. The prettiestsight of all is when the children which can already swim are putto bed in the evening. For, every evening, until they reach the ageof several weeks, the young are brought, as dusk falls, back to thenesting hollow where they spent their earliest childhood. Themother stands above the nest and gathers the young about her.This she does by certain signal movements of her ns.

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These details of behaviour are particularly clearly developed inthe gorgeous jewel sh (Hemichromis bimaculatus), one of the mostbeautiful of all cichlids. I think Rupert Brooke must have beenthinking 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 betweenDarkness and darkness!

The iridescent, brilliant blue spots in the red darkness of thedorsal n play a special role when the female jewel sh is puttingher babies to bed. She jerks her n rapidly up and down, makingthe jewels ash like a heliograph. At this, the young congregateunder the mother and obediently descend into the nestinghole. The father, in the meantime, searches the whole tank forstragglers. He does not coax them along but simply inhales theminto his roomy mouth, swims to the nest, and blows them intothe hollow. The baby sinks at once heavily to the bottom andremains lying there. By an ingenious arrangement of reexes,the swim-bladders of young sleeping cichlids contract sostrongly that the tiny shes become much heavier than waterand remain, like little stones, lying in the hollow, just as they didin their earliest childhood before their swim-bladder was lledwith gas. The same reaction of becoming heavy is also elicitedwhen a parent sh takes a young one in its mouth. Without thisreex mechanism it would be impossible for the father, when hegathers up his children in the evening, to keep them together.

I once saw a jewel sh, during such an evening transport ofstrayed children, perform a deed which absolutely astonishedme. I came, late one evening, into the laboratory. It was already

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dusk and I wished hurriedly to feed a few shes which had notreceived anything to eat that day; amongst them was a pair ofjewel shes who were tending their young. As I approached thecontainer, I saw that most of the young were already in thenesting hollow over which the mother was hovering. She refusedto come for the food when I threw pieces of earthworm into thetank. The father, however, who, in great excitement, was dashing

backwards and forwards searching for tru-ants, allowed himself to be diverted from hisduty by a nice hind-end of earth-worm (forsome unknown reason this end is preferredby all worm-eaters to the front one). Heswam up and seized the worm, but, owing to

its size, was unable to swallow it. As he was in the act of chewingthis mouthful, he saw a baby sh swimming by itself across thetank; he started as though stung, raced after the baby and took itinto his already lled mouth. It was a thrilling moment. The shhad in its mouth two dierent things of which one must go intothe stomach and the other into the nest. What would he do? Imust confess that, at that moment, I would not have given two-pence for the life of that tiny jewel sh. But wonderful whatreally happened! The sh stood stock still with full cheeks, butdid not chew. If ever I have seen a sh think, it was in thatmoment! What a truly remarkable thing that a sh can nd itselfin a genuine conicting situation and, in this case, behaveexactly as a human being would; that is to say, it stops, blockedin all directions, and can go neither forward nor backward. Formany seconds the father jewel sh stood riveted and one couldalmost see how his feelings were working. Then he solved theconict in a way for which one was bound to feel admiration: hespat out the whole contents of his mouth: the worm fell to thebottom, and the little jewel sh, becoming heavy in the waydescribed above, did the same. Then the father turned resolutelyto the worm and ate it up, without haste but all the time with

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one eye on the child which obediently lay on the bottombeneath him. When he had nished, he inhaled the baby andcarried it home to its mother.

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

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5LAUGHING AT ANIMALS

It is seldom that I laugh at an animal, and when I do, I usuallynd out afterwards that it was at myself, at the human beingwhom the animal has portrayed in a more or less pitiless carica-ture, that I have laughed. We stand before the monkey house andlaugh, 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 soincredibly funny, it is only because our human youth behaves ina 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 atan animal that, in the course of its evolutionary adaptation, hasdeveloped a body form which now deviates from the usual. Thepublic is then deriding things which, to me, are holy: the riddlesof the Genesis, the Creation and the Creator. The grotesque

forms of a chameleon, a puer or an anteater awake in mefeelings of awed wonder, but not of amusement.

Of course I have laughed at unexpected drollness, althoughsuch amusement is in itself not less stupid than that of the publicthat annoys me. When the queer, land-climbing sh Periophthalmus was rstsent to me and I saw how one of thesecreatures leaped, not out of the waterbasin, but on to its edge and, raising itshead with its pug-like face towards me, satthere perched, staring at me with its gog-gling, piercing eyes, then I laughed heart-ily. Can you imagine what it is like when ash, a real and unmistakable vertebratesh, rst of all sits on a perch, like a canary, then turns itshead towards you like a higher terrestrial animal, like anythingbut a sh, and then, to crown all, xes you with a binocularstare? This same stare gives the owl its characteristic and pro-verbially wise expression, because, even in a bird, the two-eyedgaze is unexpected. But here, too, the humour lies more in thecaricature of the human, than in the actual drollness ofthe animal.

In the study of the behaviour of the higher animals, veryfunny situations are apt to arise, but it is inevitably the observer,and not the animal, that plays the comical part. The comparativeethologists method in dealing with the most intelligent birdsand mammals often necessitates a complete neglect of the dig-nity usually to be expected in a scientist. Indeed, the uninitiated,watching the student of behaviour in operation, often cannotbe blamed for thinking that there is madness in his method. Itis only my reputation for harmlessness, shared with the othervillage idiot, which has saved me from the mental home. But indefence of the villagers of Altenberg I must recount a few littlestories.

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I was experimenting at one time with young mallards to ndout why articially incubated and freshly hatched ducklings ofthis species, in contrast to similarly treated greylag goslings, areunapproachable and shy. Greylag goslings unquestioninglyaccept the rst living being whom they meet as their mother,and run condently after him. Mallards, on the contrary, alwaysrefused to do this. If I took from the incubator freshly hatchedmallards, they invariably ran away from me and pressed them-selves in the nearest dark corner. Why? I remembered that I hadonce let a muscovy duck hatch a clutch of mallard eggs and thatthe tiny mallards had also failed to accept this foster-mother. Assoon as they were dry, they had simply run away from her and Ihad trouble enough to catch these crying, erring children. Onthe other hand, I once let a fat white farmyard duck hatch outmallards and the little wild things ran just as happily after her asif she had been their real mother. The secret must have lain in hercall note, for, in external appearance, the domestic duck wasquite as dierent from a mallard as was the muscovy; but whatshe had in common with the mallard (which, of course, is thewild progenitor of our farmyard duck) were her vocal expres-sions. Though, in the process of domestication, the duck hasaltered considerably in colour pattern and body form, its voicehas remained practically the same. The inference was clear:I must quack like a mother mallard in order to make thelittle ducks run after me. No sooner said than done. When, oneWhit-Saturday, a brood of pure-bred young mallards was due tohatch, I put the eggs in the incubator, took the babies, as soon asthey were dry, under my personal care, and quacked for themthe mothers call-note in my best Mallardese. For hours on end Ikept it up, for half the day. The quacking was successful. Thelittle ducks lifted their gaze condently towards me, obviouslyhad no fear of me this time, and as, still quacking, I drew slowly,away from them, they also set themselves obediently in motionand scuttled after me in a tightly huddled group, just as

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ducklings follow their mother. My theory was indisputablyproved. The freshly hatched ducklings have an inborn reaction tothe call-note, but not to the optical picture of the mother. Any-thing that emits the right quack note will be considered asmother, whether it is a fat white Pekin duck or a still fatter man.However, the substituted object must not exceed a certainheight. At the beginning of these experiments, I had sat myselfdown in the grass amongst the ducklings and, in order to makethem fol