David Attenborough's life lessons
What wisdom springs to mind when you think of the natural world?
From the basics of never saying boo to a goose right through to reconstructing
prehistoric giants, one man has been guiding TV audiences through nature's
biological maze for 60 years. During this time Sir David Attenborough has dedicated
himself to bringing science to the small screen, introducing us to parts of the natural
world that had never been seen before.
Along the way, he has learned a great deal and here we share a few of the lessons
from his incredible career so far. In the 1990s scientists believed the pitcher plant
Nepenthes rajah, found in the rainforests of Borneo, gained nitrogen by consuming
the bodies of rodents after a tree shrew was found inside the plant's pitcher-like
cavity. Experts believed the rodent had been tempted there by the carnivorous
plant's nectar before falling to its watery grave.
Sir David shared this information with fascinated audiences in The Private Life of
Plants series. But skip ahead 15 years and new evidence suggested a very different
explanation. Researchers from Monash University, Australia, found that the tree
shrews were indeed tempted to the plants by nectar, but were not the plant's prey.
Instead, the mammals were filmed using the pitcher plants as toilets, leaving their
nitrogen-rich droppings in the plant's fluid-filled orifice.
One of Sir David's most memorable early encounters was with a komodo dragon on
the series Zoo Quest for a Dragon. He was lucky to find one on the mission for
London Zoo, broadcast in 1956. But at the time the plucky crew had no idea just
how dangerous the dragons were. It was more than 50 years later that scientists
revealed the reptiles had a deadly secret weapon: venomous saliva.
Previously, biologists had thought that the dragons killed large prey with "dirty"
mouths. Water buffalo were thought to succumb due to the harmful bacteria present
in the reptiles' mouths, flooding wounds inflicted by the lizards with microbes and
eventually causing blood poisoning. But venom expert Dr Bryan Fry from the
University of Melbourne in Australia suspected something else after identifying that
lace monitors, close relatives of Indonesia's infamous dragons, had venomous
saliva.
Sir David shared the secret of the world's largest venomous reptile in the series Life
and since then Dr Fry has continued to analyse their fearsome feeding method in
detail. "The role of the venom is to exaggerate the blood loss and shock-inducing
mechanical damage caused by the bite," said Dr Fry who described the reptiles as
possessing an "arsenal of weapons" to use when hunting feral pigs, deer and water
buffalo on the island. He has since found that the dragons wound their prey with a
devastating "grip and rip" technique and is now investigating the reptiles'
environment to understand where the initial bacteria theory came from. "The
sampling of komodo mouths that purported to show them harbouring pathogenic
bacteria neglected to sample the real source of any infection to the water buffalo -
the faeces-filled watering hole the dragons recently drank from," he explained. "We
are hot on the heels of what kind of bacteria in the water actually cause the infection
of the buffalo when it does occur."
In the 2008 series Life in Cold Blood Sir David and colleagues set out to lift the lid
on the world of reptiles and amphibians. The team visited New York State and filmed
a memorable sequence of an unsuspecting mouse being bitten by a timber
rattlesnake in the dead of night. The footage captured has since been painstakingly
analysed by researchers, frame-by-frame, to explain striking behaviour in wild
snakes.
This summer, assistant Prof Rulon Clark and colleagues from San Diego State
University, California, US published their results which suggest that rattlesnakes only
strike at prey once it has passed them. "In laboratory experiments, snakes rarely
miss their prey. But in the wild, interaction between snakes and their prey is much
more complicated," explained Prof Clark. He told BBC Nature that in the wild, if the
snake was too far away from its target, its prey would perform evasive dodges to
stay safe."For this reason, snakes seem to time their strikes so that they are striking
at prey when it is very close, but also when it is moving away," he said.
The team's observations explain why snake bites are found on the flank of prey.
"Without recording the snakes in the wild, we would have no real idea of how difficult
it is for them to actually land a strike on a free-ranging prey item, subject to all the
vagaries of the natural environment."
One thing is common to all of these lessons; learning is an ongoing process. What
we know now could be considered ridiculous, old-fashioned or basic in another 60
years but as long as discoveries are shared in rich detail they inspire further
investigation by others.
By Ella Davies, Reporter, BBC Nature
(Text adapted from BBC NEWS)
