Tortoise taboo

Linkhttp://www.wcs.org/, http://www.jerryhaigh.com/book/

Walking in the rain forests of Cameroon was a new experience for me in several ways. It had either just rained, or was about to rain all the time, that is if it wasn’t actually raining. This was 1996 and I was working on a forest elephant project for the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Korup forest on the west side of the country. As I recounted in chapter 10 of my book The Trouble With Lions I learned from our tracker, James Ako, that the hunting and eating of a tortoise was taboo. He did not explain why, and I forgot to ask.

Now I know at least one explanation.

It comes in a 1967 collection of folk tales from Ghana titled Tales of an Ashanti Father that I have just added to my little libray. The author, or maybe she should be called collector, of these tales was Peggy Appiah. In a story called The Hunter and the Tortoise, which I have shortened here, she tells how a hunter went into the forest with his gun and was enchanted by a tortoise playing an accordion. He challenged the animal and gave it the chance of returning to his village with him or being shot. “How can I not agree seeing you have the gun?” replied the tortoise.

As he bent to pick him up the tortoise warned the hunter “I am a creature of the forest and not of the town. If you take me to your home you will have only yourself to blame.”

At home the hunter rushed to the chief to tell of his find, and the skeptical chief told him that if he was lying he would be executed, but if he was telling the truth he would be richly rewarded. As you can guess, the tortoise merely sat and looked stupid when the hunter tried to exhibit him.

As the hunter’s head rolled in the dust the tortoise sang out

"Trouble does not look for man,
It is man who looks for trouble."

The upshot was that the chief decreed that that the tortoise be taken back to the forest where it was happiest. He also stated "From now on the hunting or capturing of tortoises in the forest will be taboo to my people. Anyone who is found interfering with them will be executed."

Of course the happy (sort of) ending was that the hunter, who had spoken the truth, was given a grand funeral and the tortoise was returned to his forest clearing.

Like many written folk tales this one is now in suspended animation for those reading this account, and of course I have cut it by about 70%. The conversations, the efforts of the hunter to get the tortoise to perform and the scene setting are up to the reader to convert back to the oral, but for me, it is nice to get an explanation after fifteen years. It also gives me another tale to tell that is linked to animal work in far-off places.

Zebra stripes and leopard spots

Linkhttp://www.sherborne.org/, http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/, http://www.livescience.com/, http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/

One of my favourite pastimes is storytelling. When we visit my granddaughters one of the first stories they ask for is How The Zebra Got His Stripes and here is a condensed (very condensed) version.

A long time ago, when zebra was pure white, a brave young zebra decide the challenge baboon for access to water, which the latter had claimed for his own. After a long and terrible fight baboon began to get the upper hand and pushed zebra into a fire. The pain was so severe that the zebra jumped up and lashed out, kicking the baboon clear across the river where he landed on some rocks. The upshot, the zebra was scarred for all time, but the baboon ended up with a bare backside after damaging itself upon landing.

It is no surprise that folklore about other animals, particularly leopards and serval cats, tell how they got their markings after ending up involved with fire. Here are a couple of pictures that you might enjoy. The smaller serval cat was a bottle-raised animal that lived in Kenya's Meru National Park around the home of chief Warden Peter Jenkins and his family in the late 1960s. I have stories about Peter in both of my books.

Another fun component of storytelling is trying to find ways of linking these ancient and entertaining interpretations of the things that people saw around them to modern scientific explanations of how things work and for me it has always been a challenge to do that with these “burn” stories.

Like the mythical American cavalry of the old Hollywood Westerns, or the more modern arrival of the marines (satirized so brilliantly by Tom Lehrer) science has come to the rescue.

In a posting of April 7th headlined Study Reveals How Creatures Get Spots vs. Stripes
LiveScience managing editor Jeanna Bryner takes us into recent information about fruit flies and their markings, and links us back to her own older post about leopards and their spots.

“Biologists have long wondered how leopards and other mammals acquired their distinct and uniform coat patterns. In 1952, British mathematician Alan Turing developed an equation to explain how simple chemical reactions produce the spots, stripes, and swirls that decorate a variety of mammals.”

By a strange coincidence I have a weak link with Turing, as he was at the same school as me (although of an earlier generation). He has been dubbed by many in the field "the father of modern computing" and is known to have had a huge influence upon the ENIGMA machine that let the Allies break to German codes of WWII. Here is a photo of Turing that I found on line. I could have chosen any one of hundreds, as a Google search for them got me to 49 pages. A second family link to Turing ties in with the fact that my daughter is heavily involved with computing, artificial intelligence and the world of robots. For the folks in her world Turing is an icon.

Anyway, back to leopards, zebras and the spot/stripe question.

Turing's mathematical model could not account for the evolution of markings as the leopard matures from spotted cub to rosette-dappled adult.

As a Bryner relates a team of scientists from Taiwan’s National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung and England’s Oxford University “modified Turing's model and ran it through computers, concluding that substances called “morphogens”, chemicals secreted by pigment cells in the coat, diffused through the coat and led to the development of the distinctive patterns seen in adults.”

A really positive clue came from more recent work with a species of fruit fly, which are much easier, cheaper and safer to study than big cats. In this case the wing spots, which are the natural pattern, were converted into stripes by means of gene manipulation and understanding of the location of the morphogen-linked gene. "We can make custom flies," said Sean Carroll, a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the senior author of the report published this week in Nature and referred to by Bryner.

Of course none of this explains the weird story of the quagga, an almost mythical beast that actually existed in the most southern regions of South Africa and was exterminated in the late 1800s. The quagga was a form of zebra that only had stripes on the front half of its body, the rear half being self-coloured. The last known one died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883.

When I was in South Africa in the early 90s there were several groups exploring the possibility of doing a sort of Jurassic Park experiment to try and re-create the quagga from DNA in old hides. I later heard that they had abandoned the effort when they discovered that it was just a type of zebra.

In another LiveScience posting titled How A Zebra Lost Its Stripes an analysis by a team of German and US scientists show that the quagga diverged from plains zebra in Africa during the last Ice Age. It then developed the colour markings that made it look as if it might have come from a Dr. Doolittle story.

Or maybe it was another white zebra that got into a fight with a baboon but only got burnt on the front half of its body. It's just a question of what you choose to believe.

Storytelling. A cowardly prince and a rhino.

Have just started to come down off a high after attending a second storytelling conference, followed by a three-day workshop & class run by Jennifer Cayley and Jan Andrews.

The conference, the annual gathering of the Storytellers of Canada-Conteurs du Canada (SC-CC) followed only two weeks after the other storytelling gathering in Saskatoon that I reported on in my blog of June 22nd was organized in Saskatoon by the team led by Kathy Bennett, Judith Benninger and Bonnie Logan, with other members of our local guild helping out in various ways.

There were many high points during the conference, too many to relate here, but Judith’s last-minute filling-in for an absent concert star on the Saturday night was, for me, quite special, because she dipped in to her huge repertoire of African folk tales and told us about a cowardly prince who first rode on the back of a hyaena, then a hung-over lion (believe me, this was important to the story), grunting in terror both times, thus winning the heart of a princess in the next kingdom and the permission of her father for a wedding. The prince ended up routing an invading army as he rode, (the grunt in fright again) on the back of a huge horse. He was followed by his warriors, who copied the noise, assuming it was his war cry, as he pulled up trees in an effort to stop the animal’s mad dash towards the enemy, who collectively took one look at this amazing sight and fled. Of course they all lived happily ever after – it would not have been a folklore tale otherwise. In reducing this story from its original 15 minutes to 4 sentences I have lost the atmosphere, but even writing it out in full would not convey the proper feeling - especially the grunts.

The workshop that followed, also dubbed a master class, had only eight students, so we had lots of chances, over the three days of the sessions to learn techniques of voice pitch control, range, and the visualization of scenarios. The other “students” were all experienced storytellers who used traditional folk tales from a variety of cultures.

I try to tie African animal folk tales into life experiences and I started the story out with my first attempt to capture Black rhino, moving into the story of how rhino used a porcupine quill to repair his skin after being beaten up by elephant, which explains his territorial behaviour and his untidy skin. You can find it here in the form that I used for writing it as a piece for reading. Although it had interesting content the group quietly suggested that it could take a lot more scene-setting and personal involvement. Six hours of writing and re-writing, late at night and early in the morning, gave a whole new structure to the story. When I re-told it at the end of the gathering I had added quite a few elements and Ottawa storyteller Lucie Roy voiced a thought that “The first time you told it, it was an interesting anecdote. While this time you were telling a story.” This time the rhino really did have wrinkly skin. Another thing that soon became obvious was that writing for telling is a different skill than writing for reading. I still have to explore that side of things, as there are so many wonderful traditional tales that I can link to real-life experiences. Among them, why hippos live in water, how the zebra got his stripes, how the leopard got his spots and a favourite, how the tortoise’s shell became criss-crossed.