Earth Almanac: September/October 2007

Voices From the Deep

From Cape Cod to Texas, Atlantic croakers are spawning in bays, estuaries, and open water. The loud croaking you hear when you lift these fish from the water results from “sonic muscles”—vibrating air-filled swim bladders. Mostly it’s a response to fear, but males also croak to court females. Courtship vocalization has been thought to occur in a series of one to three pulses, while fright vocalization—produced by both sexes—ranged from one to nine pulses and was repeated much more frequently. Now is an especially good time to fish for these ubiquitous bottom feeders using small hooks baited with seaworms or pieces of squid. A large croaker might measure only 20 inches, but what the species lacks in size it makes up for in flavor. If you find it hard to kill a talking fish, you can always let it go. But first take the time to admire it and, of course, hear it out.

Spider Dance

Tarantulas, the world’s largest spiders, rarely venture outside their burrows in daylight and are therefore difficult to find—except now, when males go courting. Your best chance of finding one of these docile creatures is in southwestern deserts, where most of the roughly 40 species inhabiting the United States abide. Our tarantulas are relatively small, usually with leg spans of less than four inches—puny compared with the goliath tarantula that has an 11-inch leg span and provides a lobsterlike meal to South American aborigines who then use its fangs for toothpicks. Should you be seized with the urge to pick up and fondle a tarantula, resist. This way you’ll avoid getting bitten or stuck with the irritating, barbed hairs that a threatened spider will brush onto your skin with its hind legs. These mini quills are best removed with sticky tape. If you are bitten, learned medical authorities have recommended (though not recently) that you dance wildly until exhausted. Such exercise was thought to cure “tarantism,” an imagined firestorm of the nervous system from which tarantulas derived their name. Since tarantula venom is considerably less toxic than that of bees, the cure never seemed to fail.

Newborn Snakes

Now, throughout most of the West, western rattlesnakes are giving birth to pencil-thin, pencil-long young. The babies—there may be as many as 25 to a litter—arrive without rattles. But they collect a ring each time they shed, usually about once a year. The old skin is turned inside out as the snake struggles from it, and the curled remnant lodges against a button at the tip of the tail. Adult rattlesnakes are nonaggressive, often refusing to strike and sometimes withholding their venom when they do. Disturb a newborn, however, and it will strike repeatedly, almost always injecting venom if it makes contact. There are eight highly variable subspecies of western rattlesnakes, but all are small (generally under four feet) and all have triangular heads, vertical pupils, narrow necks, and a deep, heat-sensing pit between their nostrils.