If it’s easy to spot, it might not be what it seems
By Richard Hoath
I am sure we all have our gripes about autocorrect as we diddle away at our keyboards and send off messages and missives with unthinking abandon. My personal gripe is that it wants to change Hoath to Heath when I sign off — a heath being a stretch of acid-soiled piece of moorland. A Hoath being one of the finer members of the human race. But it reaches new levels of bizarreness and annoyance in natural history.
A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from a good friend, now living in the Eastern United States, who in retirement has taken on bird-watching big time. To my delight, he sends me his photographs of any species he is not sure about, and I get to hit the books and experience vicariously his sightings and try to identify the mystery critters. I think we both get an enormous amount of pleasure from it, and it certainly keeps my hand in with US ornithology. But a recent posting was so cryptic as to be almost beyond comprehension. It was a sighting of a “white breastfed but hatch.”
It was a White-breasted Nuthatch. I was going to write ‘it was of course…’ but desisted as the autocorrect was so ham-fisted that it was only my addiction to Daily Telegraph cryptic crosswords that got me through. Nuthatches are small tree-dwelling birds distinctive in that they forage along branches and trunks, facing head down gleaning insect prey from the crevices and cavities in the bark. The White-breasted Nuthatch is a small bird, 13 centimeters long with a short, slightly upturned bill, grey upperparts, black crown and nape and, yes, a white breast. It is an attractive bird. It does not deserve to be butchered by autocorrect. There are no nuthatches of any species in Egypt save for an unconfirmed record of a Western Rock Nuthatch from Sinai.
But it got worse. I e-mailed back and related how a group of friends — non-naturalists but nevertheless friends — had found much amusement at this in a raucous evening spent at the Horreya on Midan Falaki and then later in that charming old-worldly culinary oasis, the Estoril. Except that is not how it came out. We had spent a raucous evening at “the Horrid and then moved on to Estonia.”
Another friend had just returned from a trip to the Serengeti in northern Tanzania, a region I am familiar with, and he too wanted help with ID. I was sent a full description of one of the mystery birds, including the perhaps unwanted information that it had “blue underpants” — so perhaps it was a brief description. I cerebrally corrected autocorrect to read “blue underparts” and suggested that the bird in question was a species of roller. Many rollers are indeed blue below, but it is their blue, not that of their undergarments.
That said, autocorrect does add a lightheartedness to something I very much enjoy doing — identifying mystery species for friends and colleagues from all over. And it is not just birds. Last month I was sent a photograph taken in Cairo of a caterpillar and a large caterpillar at that, estimated by the sender at around seven centimeters in length and rather substantial. I knew straight away that it was a hawkmoth caterpillar (sphinx moth in the States) as on its rear end was a curved hook. Indeed in the States, the caterpillars of hawkmoths are called hornworms (I dread what autocorrect might do to that). Other than that, it was rather featureless, dull grayish olive with a series of black spots down the flanks. However, just behind the head were two segments bearing large ocelli or eye-like markings.
This was the caterpillar of the Elephant Hawkmoth. When the caterpillar is threatened, it withdraws the slender head segments into the body and expands the segments bearing the ocelli so that the potential predator is faced by huge and intimidating ‘eyes.’ It is pure bluff but evolution has shown the bluff to work. The predator intimidated or startled by the ‘eyes’ is put off, and the caterpillar lives to fight another day. Or perhaps more accurately, to eat another leaf.
The adult moth is spectacular too. Its size alone is impressive with a wingspan of nearly eight centimeters, but it is beautifully colored in bright carmines and crimsons and muted olives, with striking white antennae and legs.
The use of eyespots to delude a predator that it is taking on far more than it should be willing to chew is by no means confined to the insect world. Indeed, it is perhaps at its most developed and refined underwater, especially in the coral reefs, though the strategy is slightly different. The Elephant Hawkmoth caterpillar uses its eyespots to intimidate and fool the attacker into thinking it is taking on something much larger and more fierce than it is. Many coral reef fish use false eyespots to fool the predator into thinking that the back end of the fish is in reality the front end, the head its tail. And this is nowhere clearer than in the butterfly fish.
The butterfly fish of the genus Chaetodon are some of the most distinctive and familiar of the Red Sea reef fishes, almost disc-shaped with a short to long and pointed snout and generally colored and patterned boldly in black and white and yellow. There are exceptions. One of the most common species is the Crown Butterflyfish which substitutes the yellow for red. Almost all, however, have a dark band through or a patch around the eye. The eye is thus lost. And many species such as the Threadfin Butterflyfish and the Exquisite Butterflyfish have a dark spot, a false eye if you like, towards the rear. A predator on seeing the fish calculates its attack on the assumption the dark spot is the real eye. It is not, and the butterflyfish then escapes in the very opposite direction to that which the predator expects.
Another species, the Comet that belongs to the unrelated longfins, takes this to an even higher level. The Comet is an all dark species, 20 centimeters long, slightly elongate and elaborately finned, uniform chocolate brown but spangled throughout with small white spots. The eye is similarly patterned and thus almost invisible. However at the base of the dorsal fin is a bold black spot, ocellus, ringed with electric blue. It is a spectacular false eye. The Comet is nocturnal, feeding at night on small invertebrates. By day it hides in rock and coral cavities. It is thought that the Comet mimics the Whitemouth Moray Eel by day with the head hidden in its coral cavity and with the tail fin eyespot exposed and looking very much like the head, complete with eye, of the predatory eel.
On a different note, normally at this time of year my editors ask me to write a short synopsis of what has happened in Egypt over the year concerning the environment. Whether it was by accident or desire, I do not know, but I was not asked this year. For that I thank them. There is not a lot to celebrate concerning the environment, and when my biggest memory is perhaps my second ever Olive-tree Warbler in the country, well that is difficult to drag out for 1,300 words. I sincerely hope that when the dust settles and the country’s serious problems can be addressed, the environment and Egypt’s incredible natural heritage will be right up there. I am not holding my breath.
In the meantime I will sign off, yours Richard Heath. NO! NO! NO! that is HOATH.
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