The Last Word On Nothing

You know what I have a problem with? Every creature but us. With their membranes and slotted eyeballs, they make almost no sense. I couldn’t know a speck of what a chicken knows, or how to see through the eyes of a millipede as it clatters over fallen leaves. I can write as many times as I want that I lay my loving ear against the bark of a big old cottonwood in winter and imagine a grandmother dreaming, but that’s me imagining a tree asleep.

You see a spider crawling up your leg. You think you see what a spider sees? With all eight or twelve or ten-thousand eyes, pore-hairs sticking out of its legs transferring more neural information than humans get through their retinas, do you have any sense of this animal? You flail to get the thing off, no thought but, eeeew!

I hate how they put us in our place.

Deer stare at us as if we’d smeared feces all over ourselves and we’re parading around naked. You can see it in their eyes. They are disgusted.

Late at night, after the campers at Puddingstone Lake RV park in Los Angeles County have gone to bed, Ted Stankowich and his graduate students set up infrared cameras and speakers around an open field. They open cans of cat food and fling chunks of it all over the grass. Then they wait.

The skunks come in droves. Some wear metal ear cuffs and RFID tags. Others are streaked with pink and purple dye, tagged in a previous run-in with the researchers. As the skunks nibble on cat food, Stankowich and his team cue up the sound of a coyote howling, or a great horned owl hooting. Then they watch to see if the skunks stand their ground, or scatter.

Stankowich studies how skunks respond to different predators, and how predators respond to them. Although skunks can easily fend off attacks at ground-level, they are much more vulnerable to predators that swoop from above, like great horned owls. The skunks seem more alarmed by the owl hoots, suggesting they know who they can and can’t tangle with, Stankowich says. His next step is to roll out more realistic models, including an owl glider that attacks from above and a robot named Obi Wan Coyote, he says.

Surprisingly little is known about skunk behavior for a simple reason: “People don’t want to get near them,” Stankowich says. Yet, “skunks are my favorite animal, and the most misunderstood.”

Among the many misconceptions Stankowich would like to clear up about skunks is that they stink. The oil skunks shoot from their anal glands does stink, he acknowledges. But skunks are so good at aiming their spray, using highly manueverable nipples, that they almost never get it on their own fur. Dr. Jerry Dragoo, head of the Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations, concurs. Although the nipples do occasionally dribble, “the animal itself doesn’t smell worse” than any other furry mammal, he says. (Dragoo, it should be noted, has no sense of smell. He was born without one.)

We here at LWON aren’t opposed to a little snark now and then. In our annual homage to SHARK WEEK, we give the gentlest creatures daggers for teeth or in some other way flip them on their funny little heads. We embrace the stinky and dis the adorable. We make stuff up without apology. We hope readers enjoy our silliness, but, if nothing else, we entertain ourselves. And, damn it, that might have to be enough.

(For last year’s snark attack, go here to start. There are links there to other years, too. We think they’re pretty funny.)