Eccentric Beasts On The Prowl

Interview with Michael Largo

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1. What was your prime motivation and inspiration in assembling this beast compendium “The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World’s Most Curious Creatures”?

I was inspired by the first bestsellers, which were medieval encyclopedias called “bestiaries” that described strange and fascinating facts and lore about animals, real and imagined. These books had great illustrations to accompany the text, but they were less products of close observation than works of imagination, myth, or the rare traveler’s tales of far-off lands populated with seemingly fanciful creatures. Griffins and unicorns were listed alongside eagles and lions. Beasts were studied to see what lessons they could teach us—about daring and sloth, loyalty and cowardice, good and evil. Although science has made tremendous advances in regard to animal behavior, the early books retained this sense of wonder about the creatures we live with. I attempted to re-kindle that awe in this book.

2. I see there are a lot of creatures in here that are also highly discussed in the paranormal community like the Jersey Devil and others. What are some of the others you can share with us?

I like the Encanado, the legendary Amazonian shape-shifter, which always arrives at exactly 6 pm to seek a human whose body it can inhabit. Another cool creature is the Ibong Adarna. It was a bird, about the size of an eagle, with a long peacock tail, that always sang seven exceedingly melodious songs, all in a row. After each song, the bird’s feather changed into entirely different colors. Anyone who heard the music fell into a sound sleep. To avoid capture, the bird then perched above the sleeping suitor. It would find the right position, aligning itself just so on a branch and then defecate on the person’s face. Its excrement was of a chemical concoction that induced a long-lasting coma.

3. I have a vested interest in Reptilians of the alien variety. What is this story about a reptilian creature held in secret by the US government?

When I began researching Ohio’s Loveland Frog, a 3-foot-long creature that walks upright, has the skin of a frog, and bears facial features similar to a human, I found numerous claims of other half-reptilian/human sightings. World mythology has numerous references to reptilian humanoids. The earliest stories of creation found in Babylonian texts describe a race of ancient aliens that came to colonize the earth. In artwork, these beings are depicted as humans with reptile features. The Chinese have a similar mythology depicting “Dragon Kings,” humans with reptile bodies.

The U.S. government has 131 deep underground military bases (D.U.M.B.S), where all sorts of secret activities take place. When rumor had that an underground base in Dulce, New Mexico was the most likely place where reptilian aliens might be kept, I went out there. But of course, I couldn’t get close to the place, even if a few locals told me there’s an entire platoon of these creatures held there. It hypostasized that these creatures are castaways from the ancient aliens and were abandoned when their race left the planet. They apparently didn’t catch the last flight out and those not captured are hiding in tunnels and sewers scattered around the world.

4. The book is just filled with nifty information that I am enjoying. So what could you tell us about animals and bizarre sexual acts? Also what are some animals that don’t need a companion to give birth?

One fact I found interesting is that we are among the few animals that favor monogamy—or at least in theory. In nature, monogamy is an anomaly rather than a rule. There are some other animals that breed with the same partner for long periods, many for life: Anglerfish, bald eagles, barn owls, beavers, brolga cranes, condors/vultures, coyotes, gibbon apes, ospreys, pigeons, prairie voles, sandhill cranes, swans, and wolves. The black vulture is one creature that takes its “wedding vows” seriously and will even sometimes kill an unfaithful spouse.
As for animals don’t even need a partner: In 2007, one British zoo-bound female Komodo Dragon, which had never been housed with a male, laid eggs that hatched. In what’s called “parthenogenesis,” the mother’s genes fill in the gaps that normally would be supplied by the male in order to complete the full genetic code, allowing for a normal, nonmutant live birth. The hatchlings were not clones of the mother, even if all the newborns were females. Virgin births are not entirely unheard of among animals: scorpions, boa constrictors, bonehead sharks, and some insects do it, though no mammals have reproduced asexually, except perhaps one, as alleged in the Bible.

5. Off the top of your head what would you like to share from the book with our readers regarding some type of species that you find the most fascinating?

You gotta check out the Mongolian Death Worm, and the Bonnacon, a bison-like beast with a farting power strong enough to knock the helmets off an army of men. But in addition to the mythical, paranormal, and cryptic creatures, it’s interesting to know why cats curl around my legs, or why my dog doesn’t recognize me until I’m about 20 feet away. It goes on and on…why do horned lizards squirt blood from their eyes, or how exactly do homing pigeons find their way home.

Since there were so many animals to choose from, those I selected for the book had fascinating aspects to their lives. It’s the small details I find so much fun. Take the woodpecker. It bangs its head against hard tree bark 10,000 times a day. Since that seems like such a punishing number of bangs, I questioned how the devil it does that without having mush for brains. I explain the mechanics of a woodpecker’s anatomical adaptations in the book, but the point of all the animals and beasts included were selected to re-kindle an open-minded wonder for the natural world. I used to love to go out into the woods when I was a kid and turn over rocks. You never knew what subterranean world existed there or what strange insect you might find. I wanted readers of THE BIG BAD BOOK OF BEASTS to feel as if they were hiking along with me, out in the fields, turning over rocks together to see what new creatures we might discover.

6. I live in the Florida panhandle and noticing you live in Florida as well. I am curious as to creature wise, what are some of the unique varieties or stories around our location that you could share with us?

We live in a zoo here in Florida: There’s skunk, weasels, mink, otters, raccoons, deer, bear, cougars, 200 or more different birds, 10 types of stinging caterpillars, black widows, rattlesnakes, and we are nearly surrounded by waters overflowing with everything from countless jellyfish to man-eating sharks. There are also 1.2 million alligators residing in Florida, but the good news is that since 1948 there have been 337 alligator attacks here and only 13 fatalities in the last decade. The downside is that shark attacks in the U.S. reached a decade high in 2012, totally 53; Florida led the country with 26.

7. In honor of upcoming Earth day what are some animals that give back to nature?

Crap. Or more politely, animal feces play a significant role in seed disbursement and fertilization. The African elephant, for example, eats almost 500 pounds of grasses and plants each day, though it deposits more than 80 percent of what it intakes as waste. These piles of manure help more plants to grow and serve as a wide-ranging seed disbursement program. The paths elephants clear by their heavy-footed migrations act as natural firebreaks and create water troughs for other animals.

The beaver is also an Earth Day champion. It’s one of the few animals (besides us) that actively transform an environment to suit its needs. In so doing, beavers create self-sustaining wilderness ecosystems. Without blueprints or surveying equipment, this truly industrious mammal will select a location where a brook or stream is found and begin to construct a dam from logs, twigs, and mud, slowing the water flow until a reservoir is formed. This flooding of land has often conflicted with human plans, though their ponds are a welcomed source of food and water for other animals.

8. One tidbit pulled from your book “urban cockroaches have been known to chew the fingernails and devour the eyelashes of sleeping children’. I find this highly disturbing. What can you tell us about ye ole cockroaches?

Cockroaches have no natural enemies and are practically indestructible, surviving comfortably at temperatures between minus 19 and 120 degrees F. Flushing them down the toilet won’t help because they can remain submerged for 15 minutes without air. A cockroach can live off the glue of one postage stamp for a month and has the ability to lay eggs — 30,000 from one female— two weeks after its head is cut off.

In 1798, a survey of ships found that cockroaches frequently gnawed the eyelashes and fingernails of the men on board. According to entomologists Dr. L. Roth and Dr. W. Willis, one captain solved the problem by having the sailors wear gloves while sleeping “to prevent hordes of the insects from gnawing off their fingernails.”

Keratin. That’s what the cockroach is after. It’s a protein found in our hair, skin, eyelashes, and fingernails. (Eyelashes are made of 97% keratin and fingernails 75%.) The cockroach’s shell or exoskeleton is also made of keratin. It’s a difficult substance to find in foods, especially if your supermarket is grease, crumbles, and garbage bins. For the roach, munching on eyelashes is sort of like a vitamin fortified power shake, and helps to increase its size exponentially.

9. What is the deal with love bugs and they come out at a particular time. Where are they in the meantime? Swarms in Florida of them when the time is right which is right before Fall usually isn’t?

We only see warms of attached lovebugs in the Gulf Coast regions of the United States every May and again in September, during their mating season. They fly as couples in a meandering way, joined at the abdomen. The insects emerge in such numbers that they darken the sky. More than several hundred thousand can fill an air space no larger than a football field, all the way from the ground to more than 1,400 feet up into the sky. They do not bite or sting, though do have an acidic blood that corrodes paints and clogs car radiators, or smears windshields in a mass as thick as glue. The lovebug is so odd, most think this natural phenomenon is a result of a bioexperiment gone bad, but the insect is actually a member of the march fly family, which contains about seven hundred species. Lovebugs, when not seen about forcing us to become insect voyeurs, spend most of their early stage of development undetected, living inconspicuously in grasses and among marsh reeds.

10. What would you like to share with us about Dragons and Sea Monsters and I found the Hydra information fascinating. Ran into a hydra once.. long story.. ha.. Its been a pleasure Michael. Any upcoming projects or links you’d like to share. Please do here. Thanks.

World literature is rich with eyewitness stories and anecdotes about dragons. Since dragon sightings span the centuries and are noted by varying cultures that had no contact with each other, it raises the question—what were these creatures that so many have claimed to see? In the mid-1800s, French workers were digging a tunnel. When they split open a boulder, a large birdlike beast emerged, spread its wings, groaned once, and then died. A local university identified it as a pterosaur, and a photo appeared in the 1856 edition of Illustrated London News. It is now known that a number of animals can “turn off” and enter various degrees of hibernation. Is it possible that dragons were/are dinosaurs? Although many would say it is extremely unlikely that any living thing could hibernate for sixty-five million years, nature and its rules are anything but constant.

My next project is a “bestiary” on plants, a companion to THE BIG BAD BOOK OF BEASTS. Yawn, you might say, but image for a moment if you were a tree. To begin the process of this new book I dug a two-foot deep hole in my backyard and planted my feet in it. I had planned to stay upright in that position for 24 hours to see what a stationary existence would be like, literally rooted to one spot. Even if my kids said they would have me involuntarily committed if I did such a thing, I only lasted an hour anyway, until my cell phone rang. But that ringing was an epiphany of sorts. Do plants communicate? There’s been studies to show that plants might employ a form of telepathy—they had to figure out a way to survive disadvantaged as plants are stuck to one spot. To answer that and a hundred other questions about the ancient plant kingdom are my goals for the next book.

www.michaellargo.com

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