Word: island
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tiny (20 sq. mi.) pleasure island made no secret of its fear. Police reinforcements patrolled the roads day and night. At sundown women bolted their doors, refused to leave without male escort. Even in daylight many housewives joined in groups for protection; others armed themselves with pistols, ammonia guns, bottles of acid and carving knives. Bermuda had good reason to be scared. In the last seven months, three women have been murdered by a particularly vicious sex maniac; a fourth barely escaped. And the killer was still at large...
...breed out serious aberrations like hermaphroditism, but this is not happening in the case of Bothrops insularis. When Dr. Hoge examined pickled specimens collected before World War II, he found a much bigger proportion of normal individuals. Recently, Dr. Hoge went back and collected 68 fresh snakes on the island, plans to coop them up together in pairs in all possible combinations to see whether pairs of hermaphrodites can reproduce without male participation. However they reproduce, the hermaphrodites are comparatively infertile, produce only four to six embryos v. the 20 to 24 of mainland vipers. "In my opinion," says...
...island of Queimada Grande, off the coast of southeastern Brazil, is the kingdom of a snake called Bothrops insularis. Pit vipers related to rattlesnakes but much more poisonous, they swarm in the undergrowth, festoon the trees. They are found nowhere else in all the world, and their control of the mile-long island has not been contested since 1921, when the Brazilian government withdrew its lighthouse keepers after snakes had killed three of them and the wife of a fourth. They seem to live an ideal life, with plenty of sea birds to prey upon and no enemies...
...Hoge collected 164 Bothrops on the island. An assistant dissecting one of them showed him what he thought was a tumor. "That's no tumor," said Hoge. "That's an atrophied embryo." The assistant replied: "It can't be; it came from a male." Both Hoge and the assistant were right; the snake had well-developed male reproductive organs but also female ovaries. Hoge checked his specimens and found that more than half were hermaphrodites. Only 15 were true females, and all of them were sterile. The hermaphrodites are bigger than either true males or females. Most...
...Winter visitors to New York regularly include the bald eagle, who rides the ice floes down the Hudson as far as Dyckman Street. Muskrat houses can be found in the lower end of the Van Cortlandt swamp; the eastern cottontail is common in the fields and thickets of Staten Island; the northern brown snake inhabits Central Park...