Bill Sladen (1920-2017): Penguins and Salt Glands

A number obituaries of William Joseph Lambart Sladen who died on 29 May aged 96 have been published in recent weeks. While they all record his pioneering studies on penguins in the Antarctic, his later involvement with migration and conservation projects in the northern hemisphere and his detection of DDT in penguins in the 1960s, they do not mention his involvement with a major scientific discovery of the 1950s which explained how penguins and other birds survive at sea.

Obituary in The Times

This year, marks the 60th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of salt glands by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and the publication of an abstract describing the work in Federation Proceedings. A full paper appeared in the American Journal of Physiology in March 1958. A month later a paper in Nature appeared entitled, Nasal salt secretion in the Humboldt Penguin by Schmidt-Nielsen and Sladen, which suggests that the work was done only a short time after that reported in the first paper on the Double-crested Cormorant Phalacrocorax auritus.

Schmidt-Nielsen and Sladen wrote:

In order to establish whether extra-renal salt excretion is of importance in the salt balance of other marine birds, we took advantage of the colony of Humboldt’s penguins (Spheniscus humboldti) in the laboratory of one of us (W.S.). These birds had been caught in the wild six months before, they were doing well in captivity, and were considered to be free of disease. Trial experiments in April 1957 showed that nasal secretion did occur, so the following experiments were performed.

The rest, as they say, is history.

How Schmidt-Nielsen and Sladen got together to do the study I do not know. Since the penguins were kept in Sladen’s lab at Johns Hopkins, I assume the male penguin used was given its salt-loaded fish in Baltimore.

I found this photograph of an Emperor Penguin skull which shows the
supra-orbital position of the nasal salt glands

Sladen by this time had already made his name from studying penguins in the Antarctic. British-born, medically-qualified and working as medical officer as well as biologist for the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey—FIDS—now the British Antarctic Survey, he was sole witness to the horrendous hut fire at Hope Bay in November 1948 that resulted in the death of two members of the survey team. After the fire he spent the next sixteen days alone and out of radio contact, sleeping in a tent, until the main survey party returned. He continued his work on penguins during this time, writing his Oxford doctoral thesis in Charles Elton’s Bureau of Animal Population.

Sladen moved to the U.S.A. in 1956, initially on a research fellowship, and became a U.S. citizen in 1962. He remained based at Johns Hopkins while commuting to the Antarctic and Arctic for his research.

Adélie Penguin - adult and chick
Sladen's early work was on this species at Hope Bay, 9 miles along the
coast from Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula where I took these
photographs on 26 January 2005.
Salt-gland secretion in this species was described by Donald S Douglas
in the 1960s.

I am taking video of the tens of thousands of Adélie
Penguins at Brown Bluff

Schmidt-Nielsen K, Jörgensen CB, Osaki H. 1957. Secretion of hypertonic solutions in salt glands. Federation Proceedings 16, 113-114

Schmidt-Nielsen K, Jörgensen CB, Osaki H. 1958. Extrarenal salt excretion in birds. American Journal of Physiology 193, 101-107

Schmidt-Nielsen K, Sladen WJL. 1958. Nasal salt secretion in the Humboldt penguin. Nature 181, 1217-1218

Charles Eliot: languages, embassies, universities and nudibranch molluscs

It is difficult to believe that Sir Charles Eliot (1862-1931) who achieved great distinction in languages, culture and comparative religion and who served as a British diplomat and as vice-chancellor of two new universities developed as a hobby the study of nudibranch molluscs and published a number of authoritative papers on their taxonomy and phylogeny.

Knowledge stuck to him ‘like fly-paper’ and he came to have twenty-seven languages at his command, often acquired at amazing speed. He published a first grammar in English of Finnish. From Oxford, he joined the diplomatic service and served in Russia, Morocco, Turkey and the USA. He also served as British Commissioner in Samoa.

While Commissioner, Commander-in-Chief and Consul-General for the East Africa Protectorate Eliot had a strong disagreement with the Foreign Secretary over who should be allowed to buy land. He resigned by means of an open telegram. After that dramatic resignation from the diplomatic service he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the new University of Sheffield in 1905. In effect he was the first vice-chancellor but W.M. Hicks who was Principal of the university college that was to be a constituent of the new university did not want to become vice-chancellor but to continue as Professor of Physics. Hicks, because he had done all the work to establish the university, was persuaded to be named as Vice-Chancellor in the Charter but then to hand over to Eliot immediately afterwards. It is clear that to many observers, Eliot was not the ideal Vice-Chancellor. Shy and withdrawn other than with personal friends—and ‘given to formidable silences’—he left the administrative work to the Registrar and throughout each vacation travelled widely in the East. However, it is clear that his hands-off approach worked because the new university thrived.

In 1912, he took on another new university—this time Hong Hong and it had hardly reached the embryonic stage by the time of his arrival. There were only three full-time members of staff. Eliot’s diplomatic skills soon brought in money from the wealthy Chinese in Hong Kong and Malaya. He was noted as being completely ignorant of finances and had an aversion to mechanical devices; he refused to use the telephone. In Hong Kong, he had daily lessons in Mandarin. Again, such was his devotion to acquiring a language, he later translated into English three large volumes of Chinese Buddhist scriptures. Although he had no need to do so, he lectured and held tutorials such that he was popular with the students. A student hall of residence was named to commemorate his vice-chancellorship in 1914. The Hall lost its name after the landslide in 1966 when the three halls, built one above the other were combined into one. However, more recently it was retained when one of the halls was demolished and is now back as Eliot Hall.

He was recalled by the Foreign Office to the temporary job of High Commissioner in Siberia in 1918. He did not return to Hong Kong because he was appointed British Ambassador in Tokyo.

Throughout his life Eliot was a prolific writer on his observations during travel and on eastern religions. After his retirement from the embassy in Tokyo, he remained in Japan for five years. Suffering from heart disease he was returning to Britain by sea when his condition deteriorated. Advised to stay ashore when the ship reached Singapore from Kobe, he opted to continue. on 17 March 1931 he died on board the Japanese ship Hakone Maru approximately midway between Penang and Colombo. The captain of the ship conducted a burial at sea with, since there was no one on board to do otherwise, Buddhist rites. The ceremony was described in The Times of 7 April. Appropriately, it would seem, Eliot’s book Japanese Buddhism was published posthumously, in 1935.

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The story of Eliot’s interest in nudibranchs is that while in Samoa in 1899 he became fascinated by their beauty and behaviour. He quickly acquired sufficient knowledge to publish a paper on the Samoan nudibranchs. After that he worked on the local nudibranch fauna wherever he was posted as a diplomat and on collections from a number of expeditions, including the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition of 1902-1904. What does not seem to have been picked up by his biographers is that Eliot appointed a key member of that expedition—Robert Rudmose Brown (1879-1957)—as lecturer in geography in Sheffield. In Sheffield, Eliot had his own laboratory to which he retired when not busy as vice-chancellor. I have already explained how Eliot resigned from the diplomatic service on a point of principle, He was no ‘yes’ man and his comment in a letter to another vice-chancellor shows his disgust for an early manifestation of the imposition of pseudo-accountability. He complained that the Board of Education:

…want to know how many hours the Professors lecture. Nothing so ungentlemanly has been done by the Government since they actually insisted on knowing at what time Foreign Office clerks arrive in Whitehall.

I have Eliot down as one of the good guys.

From Eliot's paper, On some nudibranchs from east Africa and Zanzibar.
Part VI. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London
1905 2, 268-298, plates 16-17

Blunden E. 1962. Sir Charles Eliot. In, University of Hong Kong. The First 50 Years, 1911-1961. edited by Brian Harrison. Hong Kong University Press.

Chapman AW. 1955. The Story of a Modern University. A History of the University of Sheffield. Oxford University Press

Mellor B. 1980. The University of Hong Kong. An Informal History. Volume 1. Hong Kong University Press

R.W. Obituary: Sir Charles Eliot, 1862–1931. Journal of Molluscan Studies 19, Issue 5, 224–226

A list of Eliot’s papers on nudibranchs can be found here.

Komodo Dragons: The Moyne Zoo Quest Expedition of 1934-5 and Lady Broughton’s photographs

One way to get animals from faraway places in the early decades of the 20th Century was to get the super-rich of the day to collect them. One such expedition, which brought Komodo Dragons to London Zoo (not the first as is often claimed but the third and fourth to be received there) was that of Lord Moyne, Walter Edward Guinness (1880-1944). The clue to his wealth is the surname. 

In 1933 Guinness bought a cross-channel ferry from Southern Railways, had it converted to diesel power and renamed it Rosaura. In December 1934 the yacht set off for the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans; Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston, was one of the guests; she joined at Messina. Moyne flew to Rangoon and joined the yacht there. His observations on the varied cultures were published in his book, Walkabout: A Journey in Lands Between the Pacific and Indian Oceans (Heinemann, 1936).

Photographs on the expedition cruise were taken by Lady Broughton, who also joined at Rangoon  with Moyne, and who is variously described as ‘companion’, ‘friend’ and ‘mistress’ according to the source and era of publication; she wrote an article for National Geographic Magazine describing how they captured the dragons.

Lady Vera Edyth Broughton (1894-1968) at the time was married to Sir Jock Delves Broughton. They were divorced in 1940 and he achieved notoriety as a member of the Happy Valley set in Kenya after the lover of his second wife was shot dead; Delves Broughton was acquitted of the murder but killed himself at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool in December 1942. The film White Mischief covers the story with varying degrees of historical accuracy.

Throughout the 1930s Lady Broughton was known as an explorer, as a big game hunter, as a pursuer of large fish with rod and line and as a photographer of the natural history and anthropological worlds. Quite a gal.

She and Moyne were involved in fishing for what were known in Britain as tunny fish at Scarborough during the 1930s. It is difficult to imagine now that Scarborough was a resort of the super rich of the 1930s but it was the fishing for very large individuals of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) that took them to the town where they sere seen bringing their catches to be weighed by the holidaymakers from the industrial midlands and north. My father recalled seeing the huge fish (some weighing over 300 kg) being brought ashore. In 1949 although I saw no tuna but I do recall photographs on display that showed the giants being weighed. The tuna, incidentally, disappeared as the North Sea was overfished and shoals of their prey species became depleted.

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Captioned: August 1933: Amongst the tunny fishers at Dogger Bank are Lord Moyne and Ladt Broughton

Lord Moyne, a friend and political supporter of Churchill in the 1930s, is now remembered in Britain more for his demise—assassinated in 1944 while in Egypt by members of the Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang—than his achievements in life. He was serving as Resident Minister in the wartime coalition government.

In her article in National Geographic on the Komodo Dragon, Lady Broughton wrote:

One of the most prized inhabitants of the London Zoo had died—a dragon lizard from the island of Komodo.     As the zoo was eager to replace this interesting creature, rare in captivity, Lord Moyne, who had visited Komodo some years previously agreed to revisit the island last year with the object of securing specimens. I had the good fortune to be one of Lord Moyne’s guests on his yacht Rosaura and to have opportunity to take the accompanying photographs…
     The Netherlands Resident of Timor, responsible for the government of these islands, kindly came to Komodo in his yacht with several of his officials while we were there, and our success in capturing the “dragons” was mainly due to the help of our obliging friends…
     We spent about ten days on Komodo in our effort to catch the largest possible specimens. We secured seven, but, as we had permission to bring back only three, we released the smaller captives whenever we could replace them by larger ones.
     …I was able to spend my time procuring a series of pictures. Neat the rock where the trap had previously stood, we tied up a dead goat and prepared a cover of green canvas and branches, from behind which I could watch and photograph the reptiles without being seen by them…
     In their wild state they are said to be dangerous, but I cannot support this statement. I spent days watching, at close range, dragons of all sizes up to about twelve feet in length. I had no protection other than the small hedge of cut branches and leaves. At no time did the creatures show any signs of attacking me…

Lady Broughton in her hide (blind in USA) from
National Geographic article. The camera appears
to be a Dainty Soho Reflex taking 2 ½" x 3 ½"
 plates held in double dark-slides.

She concluded:

     When the yacht was some days out on the homeward journey, one of the dragons burst its way through the netting, and, as no trace of it was ever found on the ship, presumably it jumped overboard. The other two were safely delivered to the zoo and, in addition, our cameras had captured numerous others that are still free to partake of their odoriferous banquets on the hills and beaches of Komodo.

Komodo Dragons were not the only animals brought back. There is an appendix to the book (which I have not seen) which lists them. Clementine Churchill brought back a dove from Bali.

Photographs of the two dragons at London Zoo by Wolf Suschitzky are shown in Animal and Zoo Magazine April 1941. In the description of the Reptile House, David Seth-Smith wrote: In the end cases of the house are to be found the Komodo dragons…Were the enclosure he described those at the raised end of the house latterly used to house crocodilians? Previously, Geoffrey Vevers had reported in the same magazine (April 1939 issue): …the two seven-foot long komodo dragons have been moved to larger quarters as they have outgrown their former home. They were presented by Lord Moyne in 1935, and have been growing steadily ever since at the rate of half a foot a year.

Wolf Suschitzky's photographs of the two dragons at London Zoo
from Animal and Zoo Magazine

Hampton Wildman Parker’s (1897-1968) article in the third issue (Autumn 1946) of Zoo Life, the postwar magazine launched by the Zoological Society, takes up the story: Additional specimens, which died only recently, were collected and presented to the Zoo in 1936[1935 - there are a number of errors with dates in this article] by the late Lord Moyne, but these also, after nine years in captivity, gave no indication that they were likely to grow to a length greater than about ten feet.

Lady Broughton mentioned in her National Geographic article that cine film was taken during the expedition. I have found an entry on Lord Clement-Jones’s website:

Recently Project Walkabout held a reception in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association room next to Westminster Hall to celebrate the expeditions to the South Pacific undertaken by Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne and by my great Aunt Vera Delves Broughton. 

Project Walkabout is a charity set up by the grandchildren of Walter and Vera, Diana Moores and Lavinia Verney respectively, with the objective of preserving the film taken at that time by Arthur, Viscount Elvedon, another member of the Guinness family.This is their website. http://projectwalkaboutdotorg.wordpress.com/lady-broughton/ The reception featured photographs taken by Vera and clips of some of the restored footage courtesy of Susanne Hammacher of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

I have no further information on what has happened to the project but it would be rather nice to see the BBC broadcasting digitised versions of these historically important films rather than throwing huge amounts of licence-payers’ money at inane celebrity presenters.

Broughton. 1936. A modern dragon hunt on Komodo. National Geographic Magazine 70 (3, September 1936), 321-331

Soames M. 2002. Clementine Churchill, London: Doubleday

Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster. A second biography of the MI5 officer, amateur naturalist and broadcaster

Like London buses, you wait for ages and then two come along. Well, not quite because there is a gap of 33 years between these two but the subject and the subject matter are identical: Maxwell Knight.

The publication in 1984 of the book by Anthony Masters (1940-2003) The Man Who Was M came as a shock to those of use of a certain age who knew Maxwell Knight as a populist amateur naturalist and animal keeper who was a regular on BBC radio and, sometimes, television and who instilled an interest in young listeners and readers that helped start them in careers as professional biological scientists. The shock came from knowing what Knight did earlier in life because he had been a highly successful agent runner for the government security service MI5 and had achieved notable successes in infiltrating himself and, later, his agents into fascist organisations with links to nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s and into communist organisations with links to and control from the Soviet Union.

Since 1984, additional information has emerged, several books have been published and a number of websites contain information. One book had material from it available to Masters. That one was a sensationalist and, it has been claimed, a rather fanciful account by Joan Miller, an associate of Knight in MI5. Another deals with a particular case, The Kent-Wolkoff Affair. The new material, some from recently declassified MI5 files, has been incorporated in the new book, Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster by Henry Hemming.

In many respects, therefore, the new book is like a second edition of the old. It kills a few canards and presents a more balanced view than was possible with material available to Masters in the early 1980s.

Maxwell Knight though remains an enigma: a chameleon by trade, from adopting the persona of a fascist activist in the 1930s to the avucular broadcaster in the 1960s; an inhabitant of a secret world who courted publicity (a castaway on Desert Island Discs for example); an impotent thrice-married womaniser; a gentleman burglar; a naturalist with an amateur interest in the occult.

Maxwell Knight retired early—at the age of 55—from MI5 on the grounds of ill health in 1961. By then though he was already well known by BBC audiences. Hemming writes:

Max—he was no longer ‘M’—was by 1961 one of the BBC’s most prolific broadcasters. In the 1950s alone, he featured in at least 306 original radio broadcasts, he had no fewer than 20 books published in this one decade, he appeared on television more than 40 times, excluding repeats, he gave lectures throughout the country and he wrote numerous magazine articles, all on the subject of natural history. His rich, reassuring voice was synonymous by 1960 with radio programmes such as The Naturalist, Country Questions, Nature Parliament and Naturalists’ Notebook. Max also popped up on Woman’s Hour, did schools programming and featured on television programmes such as Look and the panel show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. When children became junior members of the London Zoo in 1965, one of the advertised benefits was the chance to attend “film shows and lectures given during the school holidays, when you can meet famous animal experts such as David Attenborough, Maxwell Knight, and Peter Scott”.

His secret and public lives overlapped.

Hemming does make the connexion between Knight’s two lines of work. John Le Carré (who worked under Knight in MI5) illustrated two of his books. But it is links with the Zoological Society of London that are intriguing. Hemming notes that Knight was a member of council at the same time as Ivor Montagu (1904-1984; zoologist, film-maker and table tennis enthusiast) ‘a Soviet agent who had been followed around London thirty-none years earlier by Eric Roberts, acting on Max’s instructions’. There were other former security and secret service officers around the Zoo in the later decades of the last century. One was Gwynne Vevers† but there were others. However, the mix is even more interesting. Gwynne’s father, Geoffrey Marr Vevers (1890-1970), Superintendent of the Zoo until 1948 was a strong supporter of the Soviet Union and its political system, before and during the Second World War (he edited Anglo Soviet Journal) as was his boss, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1864-1945), Secretary of the Society from 1903 until 1935. There were also links to Ivor Montagu through the distribution of Soviet propaganda films. Many of the individuals involved must have been of interest to MI5, however innocent or humanitarian the motives of those involved since a number of the network of organisations were covertly controlled either directly or indirectly from Moscow, and as we now know some individuals were active Soviet agents. The biographies of Knight stress how he argued strongly within MI5 that the threat of Soviet espionage within the British government was real. He expressed his views in an internal memorandum, ‘The Comintern Is Not Dead’ and history showed with Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt et et al. that he was right. I cannot help but think that at the Zoo, Maxwell Knight was  initially mixing business with pleasure.

Closer to home on the other side of the fence was the sister of the photographer who illustrated another of his books. The great photographer and cinematographer, Wolfgang Suschitzky, (1912-2016) who had set out in life determined to be a zoologist, worked a great deal at London and Whipsnade zoos, his photographs there illustrating many articles and books. His sister, Edith Tudor-Hart (1908-1973), was most certainly of interest to MI5 since she was a major talent spotter and recruiter of the Cambridge spy ring as well as acting as a courier and supplier of photographic equipment to Soviet spies. She also worked as a photographer and one of her photographs, of children exploring a rock pool, appeared in the August 1939 issue of Animal and Zoo Magazine.

Both Masters and Hemming posed the question of what drove Maxwell Knight to pursue (some said in a pushing manner) his second career as a broadcaster and writer. Money seemed to be the answer. He retired early from MI5 on medical grounds. I do not know what the pension arrangements were then but my estimate is that with his thirty years service he would have been on something like three-quarters of half his final salary. Given that he was not in the top echelons of MI5 and had an expensive lifestyle in rented property it is easy to see why a second stream of income was needed.

Although this is not a book review there are a few statements of a zoological nature in Hemming that range from dubious to an outright howler. In drawing a parallel with his handling of animals and his brilliant handling of his agents, his ability to get a wild-caught toad to feed from the hand is mentioned: ‘Few wild-born toads will feed from a human hand. Fewer still are happy to do this after so little time in captivity’. In my experience this is not true. A hungry toad fresh from the wild will readily accept an earthworm dangled in front of its nose.

Then there is a photograph showing ‘Knight with his favourite pet. Goo the cuckoo’ with quite clearly a young Greater-spotted Woodpecker on his shoulder. The correct photograph for that caption is plate 27 of Masters. Finally, surely every schoolboy knows the plural of mongoose is not ‘mongeese’.

Now we have had two biographies of Maxwell Knight (the latter produced with little reference to the former) how long until we get a third? Will we eventually know what service he performed for the King which led to his receiving in 1931 a gold cigarette case inscribed with the royal cipher and his name?

*Charles Henry Maxwell Knight, 1900-1968. See also the website M: Maxwell Knight and the Frightened Face of Nature

†A BBC producer, Winwood Reade, responsible for many of Maxwell Knight’s broadcasts was the third wife (out of four) of Gwynne Vevers; she was interviewed by Masters,

Hemming H. 2017. Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster. London: Preface

Masters A. 1984. The Man Who Was M. The Life of Maxwell Knight. Oxford: Blackwell

Clough B. 2005. State Secrets. The Kent-Wolkoff Affair. Hove: Hideaway

Miller J. 1986. One Girl’s War. Dingle: Brandon

Komodo Dragons in the 1930s: a zoo quest before ‘Zoo Quest’ with links to Adolf Hitler, nazi spy scares, the FBI, a cuckolded husband and John F Kennedy

I was mystified when I came across an article in the June 1939 edition of Animal and Zoo Magazine. I have read a fair bit both scientific and popular on the natural history and history of the Komodo Dragon. Some of the popular books and articles I found to contain misprints, incorrect references and misinterpretations and none that I had found covered the story in that article from 1939.

Reading the article, entitled ‘Island of Dragons’ was the start of a search for more information but one which seemed at first attempt to lead nowhere. The article was written by Dr Paul Fejas (note the spelling ‘Fejas') and describes his attempts to capture Komodo Dragons and, under licence from the Dutch colonial government, to ship one to Stockholm Zoo and another to Copenhagen. He caught nineteen, chose two of moderate size that he thought would withstand the long journey, and released the rest. He noted that the two reached their destinations.

But who was the writer? Google searches revealed nothing but came back suggesting I meant ‘Fejos’ not ‘Fejas’. Eventually I realised that the magazine article was by Dr Paul Fejos (1897-1963). A typographical error had led me on a wild goose chase. I should not have been surprised because in the same article ‘Paranus’ instead of ‘Varanus’ is used a couple of times.

from Dodds (1973)

It was Dr Paul Fejos who collected the dragons while on Komodo to film them, thereby predating the BBC’s Zoo Quest and its same objectives by nearly twenty years. His own remarkable history is exceeded by that of Inga Arvad (1913-1973) his then wife—the subject of a recent book—a Scandinavian beauty queen, journalist and actress who interviewed Adolf Hitler and other leading nazis, who was suspected of being a German spy by the paranoid but thorough F.B.I., who became, while married to Fejos and being bugged by the F.B.I., the yet-to-be President John F. Kennedy’s lover and who, later, became a leading British politician’s short-term fiancée. 

Paul Fejos rewrote his own history so there are a number of alt-facts, i.e. lies, myths and legends, out there. His version appears in a biography that verges on a hagiography published shortly after his death; even the author of that—a friend of Fejos—did not not know what was truth and what was self-made myth. The truth seems more prosaic but nonetheless remarkable. 

Paul Fejos was born in Hungary in 1897. According to a Wikipedia biography which seems to sort the myths from reality in his early life, he served as a medical orderly in the Austrian Army on the Italian Front in the First Word War while a medical student. He graduated from the Royal Hungarian Medical University in Budapest (now Semmelweis University) in 1921 but developed a fascination for cinema and theatre, directing films, plays and operas. He never practised medicine. He left Hungary in 1923 and reached the U.S.A. via Vienna, Paris and Berlin. After manual work in a piano factory he found a job as technician at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York working for Jacques Jacob Bronfenbrenner (1883-1953) on bacteriophages. He left there for California and the hope of getting to Hollywood. The story of how he got started as a director there involves being picked up while hitchhiking by a rich man who wanted to be a film producer.

The cinema buffs’ websites describe Fejos’s successful career as a Hollywood director. But he tired of the place and returned to Europe to make early sound films. By 1934 he was in Denmark working for Nordisk (now making some of the Scandi series shown on BBC4 on Saturday nights).. It was during this time that he married, as his third wife, Inga Arvad, whom he recruited to star in one of his films. But he was tiring of fiction and while trying to get out of his contract with Nordisk persuaded them to send him to Madagascar with a cameraman but without Inga to make a documentary. Although unsuitable for a full-length feature film, the footage was used to make a series of documentaries which, by being factual rather than staged stories, earned the respect of anthropologists.

Fejos was hooked by his new interest in anthropology. He was commissioned by the Swedish Svensk Filmindistri to make a whole series of ethnographic films in Asia. In 1937 and 1938 he and Inga travelled in much of the Far East and made films in Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Ceylon and Thailand during 1937 and 1938, including the 13-minute The Komodo Dragon (Draken på Komodo). Although Inga was supposed to be radio operator and ‘script girl’ she was left at the Helena May Institute in Hong Kong when the film crew set off for Komodo. But the first landing on Komodo was a disaster—allegedly. Fejos’s motor boat lowered from a freighter into a strong current hit a reef and split in two. The three men (Fejos, camera and radio operators) swam ashore and managed only to retrieve rope and torches. They could find no water and felt doomed. But the ship that that dropped them appeared on the horizon during the night. It had gone round the island because of the state of the tide rather than sail away through the strait between Komodo and Sumbawa. Using a torch from the top of the tree they managed to signal SOS and the ship’s boat picked them up the next day. Another—this time successful—landing was made a few weeks later, with Inga being left on the neighbouring island of Sumbawa. I will return to the filming and capture of the dragons later.

Whilst in Singapore, the film party was invited on board the yacht Southern Cross by her owners, Axel and Marguerite Wenner-Gren. According to Inga’s biography, the meeting was engineered by Fejos’s sound recordist who contacted the Wenner-Grens to say that fellow Scandinavians were in Singapore making films about the East. That meeting set Fejos off in a completely new direction.

Axel Wenner-Gren was said to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. He owned Electrolux, early manufacturers of washing machines and refrigerators, and was one of the founders of Saab. Fejos and Wenner-Gren became great friends and the latter decided to finance a filming expedition to Peru in 1939. It started in Maldonado (yup, been there, tick) in the Peruvian amazon and went badly. Peruvian soldiers accompanying part of the large expedition were inveigled into helping one tribe involved in a tribal war. At least one death resulted. But while in Cusco Fejos heard reports of buried cities and obtained further funding from Wenner-Gren to explore the area along the trail to Machu Picchua and beyond. Here the expedition uncovered, mapped and photographed large and small Incan cities and roads. He also continued, between phases of the main expedition, his ethnographic filming.

While all this was going on Inga had been left in the U.S.A. Her links as a budding journalist with Hitler and other leading nazis and Wenner-Gren’s suspected support for nazi Germany (including using his vast South American holdings to advance German infiltration in South America) created the perfect storm. The F.B.I. kept a close and paranoid eye on both of them as well as on Fejos’s expedition.

It was while Fejos was in South America that Inga began her affair with John F. Kennedy. He was serving in the Office of Naval Intelligence. The F.B.I. bugged there every action and it is thought the head of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, used the material to remind the then President Kennedy that he had it and that he wished to remain in post; he did.

Fejos and Inga Arvad were divorced in 1942. In the meantime, Wenner-Gren in dispute with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, set up the Viking Fund in New York to support anthropology. He endowed the fund with $2.5 million worth of shares in Electrolux and Servel (fridges and air conditioners) and appointed Paul Fejos to run it.

Eventually it was realised that neither Inga Arvad and Wenner-Gren (who had his assets frozen by the U.S. and British governments) were nazi sympathisers. The Viking Fund was re-named the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1951, Fejos remained as its head until his death in 1963. The Foundation continues to support research in anthropology.

I do not know how history has treated Paul Fejos’s reputation in his final career in ethnology and anthropology. The fact that he supported the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and his crazy notions on human evolution I could not fail to hold against him.

But back to Komodo. The article in Animal and Zoo Magazine describes how he caught the dragons and in notes published in his biography, Fejos wrote of his second landing:

     A little later I went back to the blasted island, because I decided that I wouldn't allow it to lick me. But I went back with two native sailboats and many fresh coconuts. We drank coconut water during the whole time and were able to work. Also, I brought some extra coolies with me, and we trapped the dragons in traps which we constructed on the island. They were box, gravity-fall traps; a skeleton of a box was made with wood, and then chicken wire nailed on it all around. We put a dead goat inside, and about three days later when the goat smelled to high heaven, then the dragons came down, one after the other.
     The Komodo dragon was even then a protected animal; nobody was allowed to catch or shoot one. But when I told the Java officials what we had seen, they asked me please to try to catch one for the zoo in Java, if I went back. They gave me permission to capture or kill two animals for myself and to capture one for them, which I did. When I came back, they asked me how many were on the island, and I said, “I haven't the slightest idea, but from what I saw and the frequency of the encounter, maybe three or four hundred, maybe more.

'Having slipped a noose around your dragon's neck your difficulties
are only just starting, as the picture below shows'
Animal and Zoo Magazine

'Though equipped with formidable teeth the dragon's most powerful weapon
is his scaly tail'

'The wire trap is set with its inviting bait of goat or deer, and when caught,
the dragon still needs careful watching, for it is very cunning.

     Of the two we captured and kept, one went to the Zoological Gardens in Stockholm, and one went to the Zoological Gardens in Copenhagen, where in due course they died, not from illness or climate, but from visitors. Some stupid visitor threw beer caps into the place and they ate them. One of them had a perforated intestine; we performed an autopsy on him later. The one which went to Stockholm was 14½ feet long, the Copenhagen one 13 feet.

There is a photograph of the one sent to Copenhagen but by this time stuffed and on display in the museum. 

from Dodds (1973)

Fejos’s collecting activities are not mentioned in The Living Dragon by Dick and Marie Lutz. The authors suggest that the Stockholm and Copenhagen specimens were obtained by de Jong in 1937 who collected on Flores and possibly Komodo and who supplied a number of zoos with specimens. Clearly we now know the ones in Stockholm and Copenhagen came from Fejos.

Readers in Britain of a certain age will be puzzled to learn which well-known politician was Inga briefly affianced. It was Robert Boothby, later Lord Boothby, the ambisexual ‘bounder but not a cad’ who was the long-term lover of the Prime Minister’s wife, Dorothy Macmillan, and acquaintance—at least—of the notorious Kray twins.

So having had a celebrity magazine tour of the 1930s and 40s, I found that having searched fruitlessly for the misprinted name above the main article, Animal and Zoo Magazine had go it right, as Fejos, in the list of contents on the first page!

Paul Fejos in 1962
by Robert Fuchs (in oils)
(reproduced in Dodds, 1963)

Dodds JW. 1973. The Several Lives of Paul Fejos. Wnnner-Gren Foundation. (John Wendell Dodds 1902-1989, Stanford University)*

Dodds JW. 1963. Eulogy for Paul Fejos. Current Anthropology 4, 405-406*

Farris, S. Inga. Kennedy’s Great Love, Hitler’s Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Prime Suspect. Guilford, Connecticut: LP

Fejas [sic] P. 1939. Island of Dragons. Animal and Zoo Magazine 4 (1, June 1939) 4-6

Lutz D, Lutz JM. 1997. The Living Dragon. 2nd edition. Salem, Oregon: DIMI Press

*When I bought the biography for a song from a bookseller, the eulogy was found folded inside together with a letter which began:

The Wenner-Gren Foundation is pleased to send you with its compliments this copy of The Several Lives of Paul Fejos. This limited edition is being distributed to many of the Foundation’s past and current grantees, to those who have helped the Foundation over the years in the design and execution of its programs, and to others who will want to gain insight into the traditions of the Foundation’s philosophy, style and approach.

Unfortunately, the book bears no signature or plate so I do not know who the recipient was.

How did he come to write that?

My eye, in speed reading a review of a biography of Sir Hans Sloane in The Times (Saturday 27 May), came to a sudden halt:

Sloane was no Darwinist; the flora and fauna, animals and artefacts he was to acquire articulated a vision of providential order.

Not only was there an obvious tautology describing the collection but Sloane could hardly have been a Darwinist. Sloane, whose collection formed the basis of the British Museum was born in 1660 and died in 1753. The Origin of Species was published in 1859.

I do hope the Victoria and Albert Museum has a copy of Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought for the author of the review is its new director, the former Labour MP, Tristram Hunt.

Komodo Dragon: extending the saliva story

The previous post generated a number of emails on the use of biologically-active substances in saliva by the Komodo Dragon to help kill its prey, ranging from ‘unnecessary and highly speculative’ to ‘generally supportive but needs more work’. I was also told that the post seemed somewhat harsh. It was not meant that way but I think my style in writing it reflects the sort of debate that has arisen and the tone adopted by some authors and commentators. The comments/replies on a paper* are as robust as any I have seen in print for a long time.

Much of the controversy centres on use of the terms ‘venom’, ‘venomous’ and ‘venom glands’. I will not go into the arguments further here but there is a long-standing problem in naming structures or molecules for presumed or first-discovered function, potential function or partial function. The names of hormones and growth factors are well-known nightmares in this regard. There are actually two hypotheses, one an evolutionary question on the stage at which reptiles acquired the capacity to produce venom—the Toxicoferon Hypothesis—and the related but distinct question of how the Komodo Dragon (and possibly other extant and extinct monitor lizards) kills its prey. This latter question is susceptible to morphological, chemical, physiological and pharmacological observation and experiment as demonstrated by Bryan Fry and his international team in their original paper. I will restrict myself to expanding the dragon story.

Typical Komodo Dragon habitat on the island of Rinca, part of the Komodo
National Park, with gullies and open areas of grassland

My own view is that there is a chain of events by which biologically active substances in saliva could be used to decrease the time between initial attack and death of the large mammal prey. At present, though, I see a gap in knowledge between a scenario which describes what could happen and one that describes what does happen. I also see it as a gap that could be filled and which, if filled, would subdue further objections and a great deal of speculation on alternative roles for biologically active substances in the Dragon’s saliva.

There is strong evidence in favour of saliva doing something—and something deleterious to the life of the prey. The presence of a relatively large lumen in the mandibular gland where secretion can be stored is highly suggestive of the use of a ready store of saliva when a dragon attacks prey, and a store that can be delivered to the base of the teeth. The authors of the original papers also showed by direct biological assays that dragon saliva has components that act to cause vasodilatation and decrease blood pressure and to contain substances that are potent anticoagulants.

Therefore, a good case has been made for local effects of biologically-active substances on the wound inflicted by the dragon—parallel deep slashes inflicted by pulling after the initial bite. Diffusion into the tissues surrounding the wound would increase the rate of blood loss and keep the severed ends of large and small arteries open and the blood flowing from all severed vessels. That’s where the relatively low bite strength of the Dragon which was demonstrated by Fry and his collaborators would be of selective advantage. If the Dragon bites, pulls what have been described as its steak-knife teeth across blood vessels (‘grip-and-rip’), and holds that grip, the last thing it needs is a strong bite. Compression by a strong bite would compress the wound and slow the rate of blood loss. Moreover, it would decrease the rate of movement of substances from the saliva away from the wound into surrounding tissues and into the circulation through venous or lymphatic drainage.

So, as far as local actions of saliva are concerned, they must be present and I can think of experiments that would test how far diffusion would take them into surrounding tissues. 

Central effects, for example, in decreasing blood pressure, would be harder but not impossible to demonstrate, as would establishing the concentrations of substances from saliva in the peripheral circulation of the prey in order to determine whether they reach the levels required to exert the effect that can be demonstrated with particular concentrations in biological assay systems. The latter is not a trivial question with substances that would be appearing in the circulation relatively slowly from a wound and which may be relatively quickly broken down into inactive compounds.

The presence of several compounds known to be part of the arsenal of toxins deployed by classic venomous reptiles adds weight to the suggestion of some systemic role for Dragon saliva in the bitten animal. Others have suggested that may may fulfil other roles in the mouth or in digestion of the prey before ingestion and the action of stomach enzymes; I do not find the latter argument compelling although it could be tested experimentally.

So, while demonstration of central toxic events has not yet been attempted, there must be a local effect of saliva, at least, on the gripped-and-ripped prey. The question that remains on this local action is whether the effect is biologically significant in shortening the life or ability to resist of the animal that has been ambushed, or is so in a sufficiently large number of attacks as to confer a selective advantage.

Both local and systemic actions rely on getting saliva into the wound. Different durations of bites could have different effects. The mandibular gland implicated in storage seems to work in a similar way to that of back-fanged snakes in that the pressure exerted by chewing forces the secretion out. If that is so then a ‘grip-and-rip’ feeding attack could have an entirely different outcome from a quick offensive or defensive nip.

Some commentators have suggested testing the components of Dragon saliva on their natural prey. However, what is their natural prey? Water Buffalo were introduced relatively recently, Timor Deer in antiquity while domestic goats are, well, domestic. The Komodo Dragon and its extinct relatives appear to have been around the Indonesian islands, where they spread from Australia, even before the now extinct dwarf elephant appeared in their habitat so that fundamental mismatch between the bulk and apparent adaptations for killing large animals of Komodo Dragons and the size of potential prey species seems to be unexplained.

Other questions arise like are there differences between the sexes in the size of prey and feeding strategies, adult females being lighter than males? Do juvenile Dragons attack prey that is larger than that attempted by, say, Water Monitors (Varanus salvator) of similar size and, if so, would that make the use of saliva as a chemical weapon to help in subduing prey more likely? In other words, the advantage may come more to juveniles tackling large prey than to adults. Indeed, if other species such as the Lace Monitor or Goanna (Varanus varius) from Australia have a similar array of potential biological agents, which seems to be the case, and in quantitatively equivalent amounts, might the whole arrangement be an adaptation to extend in size the range of prey that can be killed and eaten by some or all monitor lizards?

So, after arguing with myself several times and learning lots about venomous and non-venomous reptiles, that’s may take on the Komodo Dragon’s feeding method in the light of present evidence. In essence, I argue that the available evidence points to a local chemical role for saliva in helping to subdue/kill large prey (while recognising that sheer physical force may often or sometimes be sufficient). As for toxins in saliva having a systemic effect on the prey, I argue that the gap between the prima facie potential effect and actual effect has not yet been filled by experimental data. And as to whether we should call Dragons ‘venomous’ or the gland the ‘venom’ gland…

...I will leave to others.

Whatever the final outcome on these fascinating and enigmatic lizards, the authors of the 2009 paper have done a signal service in examining how it and other extinct and extant monitor lizards kill their prey and have not shied from erecting hypotheses on possible mechanisms and their wider importance in the evolution of reptiles. 


*Fry BG, Casewell NR, Wüster W, Vidal N, Young B, Jackson TNW. 2012. The structural and functional diversification of the Toxicofera reptile venom system. Toxicon 60, 434-448. Weinstein SA, Keyler DE, White J. 2012. Replies to Fry et al. (Toxicon 2012, 60/4 434-448). Part A. Analyses of squamate reptile oral glands and their products: A call for caution in formal assignment of terminology designating biological function, Toxicon 60, 954-963. Kardong KV. 2013. Replies to Fry et al. (Toxicon 2012 60/4 434-448). Part B. Properties and biological roles of squamate oral products: The “venomous lifestyle” and preadaptation, Toxicon 63, 113-115. Jackson TNW, Casewell NR, Fry BG. 2013. Response to “Replies to Fry et al. (Toxicon 2012, 60/4, 434–448). Part A. Analyses of squamate reptile oral glands and their products: A call for caution in formal assignment of terminology designating biological function”, Toxicon 64, 106-112. Weinstein SA, White J, Keyler DE, Kardong KV. 2013. Response to Jackson et al. (2012), Toxicon 64, 116-127.