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"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
--Winston Churchill
The Easter Hare:
A Tale of Confused Zoology
Inquiring minds want to know. What species is the Easter bunny? Germans, who invented the Easter bunny in medieval times, know that it is not a rabbit but a hare.
How do you tell the difference? Hares have relatively long legs and long ears. Jackrabbits and Bugs Bunny are hares. Rabbits have shorter legs and ears like our American cottontail.
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Even though European rabbits are not directly related to the Easter hare, they have their own tale of spring to tell.
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In the 6th century, a group of meat-loving monks in southern France, frustrated at having no ready supply of fish to replace meat at mealtime during Lent, convinced the Pope to declare fetal rabbits – those still in the water-filled birth sac – honorary fish. These tasty morsels could be eaten during Lent without guilt. To make sure that they had a reliable supply of these “fish” for Lent each year, the adult rabbits were kept inside the monastery year-round to breed. From these, come all of today’s domestic rabbits. Your pet bunny – a rabbit not a hare – is their descendant. Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail should be thankful.
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Much of the lore of the Easter bunny comes from confused natural history. Because hares so visibly fight and chase one another near Easter time whereas you rarely see them mate, the ancient Romans thought that hares could reproduce without mating at all and therefore they became associated with the Virgin Mary.
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Some animals can reproduce without mating but the Easter bunny, er hare, is not one of them. See what I mean? Confused zoology.
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I am a scientist and writer. My early research was field-based. I have done field research in several parts of the United States, Venezuela, East Africa, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea. Once I became interested in the biology of aging, my research became more laboratory oriented. Perhaps because of my background in English, I have always been eager to communicate the excitement of science to the public at large. In that capacity I have written popular books, planned museum exhibits, and produced a regular newspaper column on science.
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Methuselah’s Zoo:
What Nature Can
Teach Us about Living
Longer,
Healthier Lives
Living is inherently destructive.
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Biologist Max Kleiber called it The Fire of Life—which is more than a metaphor. Our bodies consist of forty trillion cells, each of which is an energy factory. That energy is provided by chemical reactions identical to those of a highly regulated fire. The chemical bonds in food are torn apart with the help of oxygen to release the energy needed to perform all cellular functions. This is precisely the same chemistry that causes the chemical bonds in wood, paper, or gasoline to be torn apart with the help of oxygen to release energy in the form of fire.
Just as fire produces side effects—sparks, soot, smoke—our cellular energy factories also do, by way of chemical by-products. Some of these by-products are oxygen radicals, which are destructive to the cellular energy factories themselves. To give an idea of the scale of damage, the DNA in each of our cells is estimated to be damaged by internal fire at least ten thousand times per day. Ten thousand bits of DNA damage per day times forty trillion cells and we are talking about numbers more familiar to astronomers than biologists. How do we survive for months, much less decades, in the face of such destruction?
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