There were so many things I believed about nature when I was young that science has shown just aren't so.
When I was a kid I heard about the lifelong mating of Canada geese, surely something we should all emulate. Like the geese, we should find mates and be faithful to them. Then came the advent of DNA testing and scientists found that that yes, the geese did mate for life. They shared nesting duties, took care of the goslings until they ready to fly off their own. Then the parents migrate to the next nesting site. The problem is, the goslings are almost never the offspring of the male goose. There is a lot of hanky panky going on in the goose world, it seems. This is a good thing because the gene pool is kept healthy.
This afternoon I was chatting with a loon as I walked along the lake. He followed me as I hiked, me on the path, him in the lake. I've loved loons all my life. Their calls are part of the wild. They gracefully float through our northern lakes every summer. They are great parents, helping the fluffy youngsters on their backs to help them learn to swim.
Loons are lovely, but they are also baby killers. They don't like any competition on their lakes so if they spot the goose family floating past, they do what they do best. They dive and come up under the goslings, spearing them, breaking their necks or just pulling them underwater and drowning them. Not nice, but that is nature for you. It is about survival of the fittest.
My short story "Aesop's Fable" at Black Coffee Fiction was about the grasshopper and the ant fable. http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com/2013/05/aesops-fable.html
Aesop was no scientist. The reality of worker ants is that instead of spending the winter enjoying the harvest as Aesop said, they die after three months. It is the grasshopper that does the best, living for an average of eleven months.
It gets worse. An ant colony is a matriarchal society with a queen at the top. It is a feminist group because most of them are female with the males used for impregnating the queen. After that, the drones are expendable and not fed. It is a socialist organization with the many working for the good of all -- provided they are female.
Nature tells us that every species does what works the best for them. It isn't always pretty, it doesn't conform to what we think of as morality. But then as I often tell people, critters are not Christians.
When I was a kid I heard about the lifelong mating of Canada geese, surely something we should all emulate. Like the geese, we should find mates and be faithful to them. Then came the advent of DNA testing and scientists found that that yes, the geese did mate for life. They shared nesting duties, took care of the goslings until they ready to fly off their own. Then the parents migrate to the next nesting site. The problem is, the goslings are almost never the offspring of the male goose. There is a lot of hanky panky going on in the goose world, it seems. This is a good thing because the gene pool is kept healthy.
This afternoon I was chatting with a loon as I walked along the lake. He followed me as I hiked, me on the path, him in the lake. I've loved loons all my life. Their calls are part of the wild. They gracefully float through our northern lakes every summer. They are great parents, helping the fluffy youngsters on their backs to help them learn to swim.
Loons are lovely, but they are also baby killers. They don't like any competition on their lakes so if they spot the goose family floating past, they do what they do best. They dive and come up under the goslings, spearing them, breaking their necks or just pulling them underwater and drowning them. Not nice, but that is nature for you. It is about survival of the fittest.
My short story "Aesop's Fable" at Black Coffee Fiction was about the grasshopper and the ant fable. http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com/2013/05/aesops-fable.html
Aesop was no scientist. The reality of worker ants is that instead of spending the winter enjoying the harvest as Aesop said, they die after three months. It is the grasshopper that does the best, living for an average of eleven months.
It gets worse. An ant colony is a matriarchal society with a queen at the top. It is a feminist group because most of them are female with the males used for impregnating the queen. After that, the drones are expendable and not fed. It is a socialist organization with the many working for the good of all -- provided they are female.
Nature tells us that every species does what works the best for them. It isn't always pretty, it doesn't conform to what we think of as morality. But then as I often tell people, critters are not Christians.
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