Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [108]
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*28 Islands, whether surrounded by water or grass, are wonderful places to observe evolution in action. It’s probably no coincidence that Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace independently developed the concept of natural selection—the long-sought mechanism for evolutionary change—after working on island chains.
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†29 There is no evidence that this protovampire was Notonycteris.
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*30 According to some researchers, macroscopic blood feeders, like those discussed in this book, are more accurately defined as predators than as parasites. Dr. Stephen Spotte summed up the distinction between the two. “The modern definition of a parasite is an organism that is in intimate physiological contact with its host. The malarial parasite, Plasmodium, for example, living in the salivary glands of a mosquito and then able to camouflage itself once it gets into the human bloodstream—now that’s a parasitic arrangement of a very high order. The mosquito, sucking blood from another animal for a minute or two, that’s a blood predator.” Ultimately, though, to keep from confusing the issue when using terms like ectoparasite or when quoting from interviews, both parasite/host and predator/prey will appear throughout this book, with the latter referring to specific instances where one party is killed during an initial transient encounter.
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*31 Living fossils aren’t confined to the animal kingdom. The dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, was rediscovered in China in the 1940s.
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*32 A lumen is the space inside a tubular structure like the stomach, intestines, or blood vessels.
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†33 According to a 1962 paper by legendary bat biologist William Wimsatt and his technician-colleague, Anthony Guerriere, a single vampire bat consumed 7.3 liters (fifteen pints) of blood per year, which worked out to about 25 gallons over a thirteen-year life span. George Goodwin and Art Greenhall took into consideration the fact that vampire bites continue to bleed long after the bat has finished feeding. They estimated the annual blood loss from each vampire bat to be 5.75 gallons—considerably more than the bat consumed.
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*34 This restriction would appear to select against the previously discussed wound-feeding hypothesis.
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*35 In addition to the captive bolt stunner, slaughterhouse personnel also use tools like “brain suckers” and “bung ring expanders.” The former has a rather self-explanatory function, while the Jarvis BRE-1 “mechanically seals the bung with a ring.” According to the Jarvis Web site, this “reduces human error during bunging” (a big problem for most of us, especially after a few drinks). Not to be outdone, poultry slaughterhouse personnel wield their own line of rude-sounding gear. These folks systematically turn chickens into chicken parts with instruments like “picking finger cutters,”“lung guns,” and “vent cutters” (which also comes in the larger turkey model, a popular gift around Thanksgiving time).
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*36 Recently some slaughterhouses have moved away from penetrating captive bolt stunners, preferring nonpenetrating stunners because of concerns about bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE (also known as mad cow disease). In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy’s angel of death, Anton Chigurh, showed no such concerns, using an air-powered version of Bob’s bolt stunner to dispatch his victims.
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*37In mammals, vitamin K is essential for the process of blood clotting, while a deficiency in vitamin B 12 impairs red blood cell formation.
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*38This is what’s known in the trade as an anecdotal observation, and clearly specified as such, it allows scientists to report information (usually among themselves) without submitting the material to the peer-review process. The understanding among researchers (although unfortunately