Do lions purr? And why are there no green mammals?

National Wildlife, August-Sept, 1995 by Doug Stewart

That a dew-soaked orb weaver's web may strike humans as breathtaking is irrelevant to the spider. "If you're at the hub of a radial structure and you depend on vibrations in that structure to alert you to prey, then radially symmetrical patterns work very well," says Coddington. The sticky spiral that snags prey, meanwhile, is the configuration that intercepts the most bugs while using the least amount of silk.

Even if spiders had a sense of visual beauty, they could barely see what they built: Despite eight eyes, most spiders see quite poorly. For this reason, orb weavers use their legs, not their eyes, to judge where to add new spokes.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?

You mean, if a woodchuck could chuck (discard, eject or otherwise manipulate) wood? A tough question, in that wood seems to play no major role in the life history of Marmota monax. The animal's common name derives not from wood at all, in fact, but from the Ojibwa word "otchig." True, the chisel-like incisors of a woodchuck, also known as a marmot or groundhog, resemble the buck teeth of its larger fellow rodent and celebrated wood-chucker, the beaver. And a woodchuck will gnaw on the occasional log, even a rock, to keep its ever-growing teeth from turning into long curving tusks.

But mostly woodchucks use their teeth for biting into soft vegetation - the tomatoes in your backyard, of course, as well as clover and dandelion heads. Sitting up-right, the animals will grasp a stem delicately in both claws and nibble the blossom like a child eating an ice-cream cone.

Not that woodchucks are totally indolent. Though accused by Witmer Stone and William Everett Cram in their 1904 tome American Animals of being "perhaps the least industrious animal in existence," an adult woodchuck in one day can displace more than 600 pounds of dirt and rock. (The resulting burrow is always a two-room affair: one chamber for the nest, the other for the toilet, woodchucks being fastidious among rodents.) Etymologically speaking, maybe the chubby little excavator should have been called an earthchuck.

Frequent contributor Doug Stewart, a Massachusetts freelancer, recently has written for National Wildlife about ladybugs, Canada geese and opossums. To submit your questions for our future consideration, send them to Questions and Answers, National Wildlife magazine, 8925 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, Virginia 22184. Or use our e-mail address: lhutman@clark. net.