Nature Notes: A Thing of Beauty
It’s that time of year again. Greens turn to yellows, reds, and oranges. Colorful birds flit from treetop to treetop, feeder to feeder. Gray squirrels and blue jays gather and sequester bronzy acorns. Azure skies sail overhead and morph into carmine-purple sunsets, then 7-to-7 uninterrupted black. Better to appreciate the harlequin days against a backdrop of lightless nights. Yes, it’s fall, and isn’t that grand?
One could say that we were given dominion over the Earth because we see colors. What about the thousands of mammalian species that see only black and white and shades of gray? They are left to appreciate the change of the season using their noses and ears instead of their eyes. Even lowly insects, which, as members of the animal kingdom, rule the world in numbers, see colors. Birds and fish see colors as we do, and as a result are as colorful as what they perceive with their eyes.
We know why some insects are colorful. Take the monarch butterfly and the milkweed beetle; they use their orange and black colors to ward off would-be predators because they are bitter-tasting and poisonous. Other insects take on the same hues and patterns as the distasteful ones and escape predation.
The western newt of California, Oregon, and Washington is a beautiful orange. You can pick it up and admire it, but having one slip into your campground coffee when you’re not looking could spell curtains. The reef-dwelling lionfish could not be prettier, but if it pierces you with its spines, you will have to go to the emergency room. The so-called femme fatale is hardly repugnant; watch out or you could be smitten, then bitten.
Butterflies are perhaps the most beautiful creatures on Earth. They are only active during the day when their colors and patterns can be fully appreciated. Their nocturnal counterparts, the moths, on the other hand, are mostly gray, and if not gray, at least drably and dully colored. But a handful of moths are as beautiful as butterflies. They tend to be active diurnally, that is, in the day. The moth that showed up on the door of the East Hampton Library the other day was almost too beautiful to behold. If a Star photographer hadn’t come by to snap its picture, we might never know about it, as it is not from this country but from Asia.
Why is this creature, possibly the only one of its kind on Long Island, in the State of New York, or, even, in the United States, so damn beautiful? Its vernacular name, oleander hawk-moth, provides a partial answer. Oleander leaves are quite toxic to humans and other leaf-eating mammals. The oleander hawk-moth larva that feeds on them is equally toxic, as is the adult into which it metamorphoses. That is one reason.
But it must be more than just a warning coloration that is at work here. This moth is one of the sphingid, or hawk-moths, the ones that are easily confused with hummingbirds that hover over flowers sucking up nectar in the faint light of near dusk. Sphingid moths have siphons that act like the long curved beaks of hummers, and they are equally adept at removing nectar from a flower’s center.
Hummingbirds, especially those in the tropics, are beautifully arrayed, as are the so-called neotropical warblers — prothonotary, blue-winged, yellow, etc. Almost all tropical birds are outright colorful. However, as in humans, invariably one sex is more beautiful than the other. In birds, except for a few very funky forms like phalaropes, the male is the spectacular one. In humans, it’s the female!
Yes, there are lots of so-called hunks — the Cary Grants, as it were — among us. But taken as a whole throughout the continents, women are the most esthetically pleasing. Men may be trying to catch up, but the secondary sex characteristics of the two spell the difference. Let’s face it, penises are ugly, bosoms are pretty. We are the only mammalian species where the female is decidedly different in appearance from the male.
To return to the oleander moth, the autumn leaves, the flowers of spring, summer, and fall, coral reef fishes, jellyfish, and myriad other parts and forms of nature — why are they so damn beautiful? Is it because of evolution? Some biologists have tried to marry function and beauty as hand-in-hand attributes undergoing natural selection over time. We say the cheetah is a beautiful cat because it is so streamlined, yet that trait allows the cheetah to achieve speeds of 60 miles per hour or more in order to catch prey for subsistence. Form and function can be inseparable and usually are.
Does the female oleander moth find the male oleander moth beautiful? Certainly, we know by their picks and choices that the rather drab female bower birds find the males overwhelmingly attractive, but the males cannot just look equally beautiful, they have to outperform each other to win over the hearts of their would-be mates.
Such canoodling brings us to one of the oldest questions since the advent of prostitution. Are beauty and aesthetics absolute qualities, or are they inventions of Homo sapiens? We can only ask ourselves this question. Perhaps that is why we are so set on finding life in outer space, especially humanoid life. We can go around and around asking ourselves this question, but our answers will never be definitive. They will always be biased by our dual roles as questioner and answerer.
On the other hand, if there is such a quality as beauty and such a quality is important to the progression of life forms, then we can anticipate that animate objects having come this far in four billion years will continue to become more beautiful over future generations. Perhaps even so beautiful that we will all be mesmerized into becoming at once both paralyzed and inanimate, at which moment all life will be transfixed and our universe as we perceive it will end in a flash.
We are left to catch as catch can. Enjoy the fall!
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].