“Of course we also considered artificial insemination, but we knew far too little about their overall behavior to proceed” (Director Sakuma).
The Committee for Species Preservation hastily assembled by the Environment Agency after its slow start also concluded, “Breeding of the winged mouse must be said to be extraordinarily difficult.” Since they could not rule out “the chance of mutual injury,” the two were moved to separate cages, and when the final attempts, by Kitanodai Veterinary Hospital’s Hiroo Sugiki, failed to bear fruit, the committee itself was functionally dissolved. In hindsight, it appears that insufficient attention was paid to the time of year, with only a series of random trials taking place.
One year later, the Environment Agency released a statement that amounted to a concession of defeat: “It is possible that the two winged mice in captivity are the last of their kind.”
That was how the winged mice had been captured and studied up until the arrival of Dr. Akedera. Although there had not been any results to speak of, the report touted that, in addition to the winged mouse’s taxonomical status, some critical issues had been singled out, as follows:
1. Although it is unclear at what point the numbers of winged mice began to dwindle, on the basis of interview reports, it is believed that local sightings of the winged mouse began to decline within the past thirty to forty years. As there was neither any hunting of the species nor any easily conceivable change to their environment, the cause for their approaching extinction is unclear.
2. There are old tales of winged mice in the region according to which their bodies glow and their eyes shed tears when they palpitate their wings, but the behavior has not been observed in any winged mouse ever seen or captured. Our analysis of the winged mouse’s behavior is all too deficient.
3. Although they are extremely lethargic and predominantly feed on moss, their breeding capabilities do not appear to be very high. Recently they are approaching extinction, but how they managed to protect themselves from natural enemies and to proliferate when nothing in their external appearance indicates any effective defensive measure remains of biological interest.
4. The wings’ function.
In the end it was Dr. Akedera who solved these riddles, but when he came on stage he was by no means expected to produce any glamorous results. In fact, to quote him on the matter, Dr. Akedera said afterwards that he had been summoned “to eat out the remaining innings of a losing game.”
< 2 >
Dr. Akedera graduated from Tokyo University’s College of Medicine in 1977. After obtaining his medical license, he aimed to become a surgeon and underwent a two-year residency. Professor Tetsuichiro Muto, who had been his principal professor during that period, recalls, “He was more of a basic researcher than a surgeon, the type who suffers as a clinical physician precisely due to his gentle personality.” Immediately after completing his residency, he went abroad to study in the United States, and moving from one university to another, he began working on species specificity for viral transmissions. His work in the field earned him recognition, and he was invited back to Japan by an applied biology research center to head one of its departments. Over this period, he practiced little medicine.
In spite of what would appear to be an illustrious career, his academic reputation was not necessarily favorable. In part this owed to his clinical background, something of an oddity at the research center, but it is also true that he was accused of judging people too readily and of behaving too independently. Perhaps as a result, there were fewer people on staff in his lab than its size warranted, and by any prevailing standard, he was given the cold shoulder when it came to funding. Yet, according to the person who was in the best position to understand his predicament, the secretary Mitsuko Tada, “Apart from the financial aspect the interpersonal issues didn’t seem to bother Dr. Akedera all that much.”
The breeding attempts abandoned, the Agency had turned to Dr. Akedera to see if the species might not be preserved at the cellular and genetic level via tissue samples. Dr. Akedera’s own records offer no clue as to why he accepted a project that was not, strictly speaking, academic, but he possibly felt that it might somehow contribute to AIDS research, which he was conducting at the time. Indeed, once the work on the winged mouse, which would not result in any papers, was complete, some unspoken agreement seems to have resulted in a significant amount of funding coming his way for his work on AIDS.
To start off, Dr. Akedera sent some cell culturing equipment, including a small clean bench, an incubator, and burners, on ahead before boarding a flight for Asahikawa. He was met by Dr. Sakakibara at the local airport, which was ever rich with a forest fragrance. As they made their way to Fukagawa on a road bounded on both sides by lush, green rice paddies, they passed through Kamuikotan. Since a long tunnel had already been built by then, they were unable to take the riverside route that Dr. Akedera had been looking forward to.
Fukagawa is a small city that a five-minute drive will take you right through. The Species Preservation Center is located against a mountainside near the highway exit. Surrounded by forests near a marshy patch of land, the white-painted center has a three-story tower that at first glance resembles a warehouse or clock tower. The unique features in its architecture, especially in its crenellation, easily identify it.
Once you pass through the double set of doors, an insulating feature common in Hokkaido, you come upon a glass cage and the rather bizarre sight of the legendary Ezo Pickers, all-blue butterflies, fluttering around trees planted in the floor and reaching to the ceiling. At the rear is a large water basin carved from serpentine in which a few of the last remaining Kamui salamanders lie quiet. In addition, animals that have been in the news lately like the Ishikari striped owl, the Sorachi long-tailed squirrel, the Hokkai bat, whose numbers are finally on the increase, and the Silver Cat, with its unique light-emitting hairs, grace their own spacious cages on a floor without any dividers. Each of the cages approximates natural environments and features an opening at the top, like the sunroof on a car, to admit natural light. Despite being quite a menagerie, there are few vocalizing animals so the floor is as marked by silence as by their feral presences. At that time, the booth for the winged mice was at the very back, surrounded by empty chambers whose nameplates promised a tissue culturing lab, a pathology lab, and a computer room.
(The following paragraph is based on Dr. Sakakibara’s recollections.)
As Dr. Akedera was led around, he stopped in front of the glass of the winged mouse booth. He observed the winged mice for a long time, taking in the skin with so little hair, the feeble wings that looked like its extension, the slow movements, the relatively large ears, and the short tails.
Later, in a magazine interview, Dr. Akedera offered his impressions of the winged mice.
“I found it quite hard to believe that this was a species of mouse. It was almost as if evolution was proceeding backwards with those useless wings, the extremely sparse movements, and the lack of hair despite the extreme colds of the Hokkaido environment. The ears are large, but they don’t seem to react with any sensitivity to sound by shifting direction and would only serve to make the mice more identifiable to predators. For such a small, weak species to be facing extinction was, to my mind, almost a given.”7
Furthermore, in the journal he kept until the day before he died, he made the following entry on that date with regard to ordinary lab mice.
“The conventional wisdom of the scientific community is that animals like mice have no sense of individuality. In particular, for pure strains of mice that are genetically identical, individual specimens are also objectively indistinct. There in that cage, if the marks on their backs were to disappear, or if you shuffled them with your hands, the creatures would be unable to regain the selfhood imposed on them from without. […] Matter, called the flesh, subsists upon death, and to that extent, what is lost in death is the massless entity called the self. If pure-strain mice know no self, then for them, who breed a
t such a frightfully prodigious pace, death does not exist either.”
Dr. Akedera was ready to commence his investigations from the first day, and that diligence would become a source of friction with the Environment Agency. As far as Dr. Sakakibara (and the Agency) was concerned, Dr. Akedera’s role was simply to preserve cellular and genetic information and not to resume the ecological research and breeding attempts that had been undertaken numerous times. It was assumed that one week would suffice for Dr. Akedera to fulfill his duty, so no funds were set aside for any extensions.
From that very afternoon, however, Dr. Akedera’s activity demands included, at that late date, a thorough exploration of Kamuikotan. This would leave Dr. Sakakibara with the mistaken impression that Dr. Akedera was incensed that research personnel were being summoned only to be replaced one after another.
Records of the Research Conducted on Day One, Afternoon
Below are the lists of the locations, dates, and times where winged mice were found and their dates and times of death, as compiled by Dr. Sakakibara and exactly as Dr. Akedera would have seen them. (There are other instances of capture, but they are not included in the table because the time, date, and/or location were unclear.) (Tables 1, 2)
Table 1 No records from before 1930 (excluded: Ponta & Ai)
Dates and Times Locations Numbers Caught
1. night, 5 September 1931
above the cut along National Highway 12 2
2. early morning, 8 May 1935
along the river near the current tunnel’s location, precise location unclear 1
3. around noon, 17 October 1938
in thickets near Onuma pond 2
4. unknown time, 15 April 1945
riverside beneath Kangyo Bridge 1
5. afternoon, 25 June 1955
riverside near Ohakoishi (caught while eating bog moss) 1
6. around 9 PM, 15 November 1971
on rock face near lookout post 2
7. around noon, 5 April 1977
on rock face near lookout post 1
8. afternoon, 7 May 1980
on serpentine below shrine 1
9. late night, 25 October 1981
the so-called Indian Peak 2
Table 2 Records of winged mice deaths (available only for those listed in Table 1 from 1945 on; as of 1940, all those previously caught had died)
Dates and Times Numbers
1. autumn, 1956
2 died
2. 27 December 1971
2 died simultaneously
3. 25 September 1980
30 September 1980
1 died from debility
1 died from unknown causes
4. 7 November 1981
13 November 1981
1 died from debility
1 died from debility
There is a tape recording of a strange conversation that took place as Dr. Akedera sat in the hotel lobby reviewing the above data. Some bits have been omitted for ease of reading. (A: Dr. Akedera, S: Dr. Sakakibara)
A: I haven’t yet heard what preceded my being called up here at this stage.
S: Preceded?
A: In the spring, Dr. Hiroo Sugiki was invited to come here, correct? Why was I chosen this time, and not him?
S: Did Dr. Sugiki say something to you?
A: No, I haven’t heard anything from him. After the breeding attempt, they suddenly grew weak, so he was hurriedly dismissed and I was brought in. May I take it that you decided to preserve genetic material at that point?
S: Is that what you were told?
A: Am I to understand that Dr. Sugiki made some kind of error?
S: No, nothing of the sort.
After this exchange, Dr. Akedera identified certain facts. The winged mice deaths all occurred from September through December, and regardless of when they were caught, the deaths occurred in clusters. For example, the mouse caught in 1945 survived until 1956, for eleven years, remarkably, while the mouse caught in 1955 also died in 1956, after just one year. Interpreting this as an instance of winged mice dying in immediate succession once they were kept in the same cage seemed to explain the roughly simultaneous deaths of the two mice caught together in 1971. What happened in 1980 and 1981 only reinforced the pattern.
Dr. Akedera seems to have wondered, at that point, if some kind of infectious disease was not to blame. Yet, based on the cases that came with observation logs, there was no apparent rapid onset that is normally seen in infectious diseases, so it is likely that he suspected something more specific akin to sexually transmitted diseases among humans.
But Dr. Akedera made another discovery from the same piece of paper. There was a correlation between the time of year and the numbers captured. Two mice were caught together in September, October, and November, whereas when one mouse was caught, it was in April, May, or June. What did those numbers mean? With ordinary mice, mating occurs year-round, and many other organisms experience a spring mating season. It seemed counterintuitive, but Dr. Akedera theorized that perhaps the mating period for winged mice was not springtime but autumn. Until then, researchers had been invited in the spring months, considered the optimal season for breeding, but Dr. Akedera went so far as to postulate that all of the attempts had ended in failure because of this. While the older cases did not come with such records, the recent mating attempts were called off because the animals might hurt each other, and the fact that they were then placed in adjacent but separate wire cages lent a great sense of veracity to Dr. Akedera’s hypothesis. As this point will be important later on, the reader is asked to note that the separated winged mice were still close enough to be aware of each other’s presence.
Right there and then, Dr. Sakakibara expressed surprise at Dr. Akedera’s lucid reasoning. The center director, who had not expected much of the newcomer, must have been happy to admit that this was virtually the first time during the entire breeding program that a clear-cut hypothesis had been proposed. Perhaps he even welcomed Dr. Akedera’s hypothesis as a game changer that could unravel the enigma that was the winged mice’s impending extinction.
Nevertheless, the initial theory of a sexually transmitted disease and the hypothesis of an autumn/winter mating period clearly contradicted each other, and Dr. Akedera’s lab notes suggest that he was puzzled as well.
He undertook an investigation of the cliff-side road by car, working with Katsumi Igarashi, a Kamuikotan photographer, as his guide. With a map in hand, Dr. Akedera proceeded to confirm each site where winged mice had been caught according to Dr. Sakakibara’s list.
“Since all the fuss, there had been slight changes to the ecosystem of Kamuikotan, like fewer salamanders, and it seemed to interest Dr. Akedera greatly. He knew our geography so well it was hard to believe he’d never been here before. He might have walked nearly twenty kilometers on that day alone” (Mr. Igarashi).
Because the area is situated in the upper reaches of the Ishikari River, a hiker trekking through Kamuikotan in the late summer or early autumn will find great boulders scattered here and there. The streams gushing down its gorge and forming white patterns like the back of some snake testify to the fact that nature has remained untouched there. Above the sharply rising cliffs are dense growths of foliage; a little higher up, and a grassy plateau stretches out, a small pond in its midst. This continues on to an even steeper slope from which the mountains rise, covered in trees. Dr. Akedera walked briskly through the virgin woods, comparing Dr. Sakakibara’s list against a map and asking Mr. Igarashi to take photos.
Table 3
Time Location Numbers Caught
4. unknown
riverside beneath Kangyo Bridge 1
2. early morning
along the river near the current tunnel’s location, precise location unclear 1
3. around noon
in the thickets near Onuma pond 2
7. around noon
on rock face near lookout post 1
5. afternoon
riverside near Ohakoishi
(caught while eating bog moss) 1
8. afternoon
on serpentine below shrine 1
6. around 9 PM
on rock face near lookout post 2
1. night
above the cut along National Highway 12 2
9. late night
the so-called Indian Peak 2
When Dr. Akedera returned, his clothes covered in mud, he reordered the original list with a certain idea in mind and entered it into his log (Table 3).
This represented his attempt to reconsider the data in Table 1 according to the time of day. He noticed that with the exception of 4, for which the time is unknown, and 3, the data overwhelmingly indicated that only one winged mouse had been caught when the sun was high in the sky. As for case 3, the grass in that area grew to a significant height, as he had confirmed with his own eyes, and Dr. Akedera believed that the discovery had involved a great amount of luck. Seen in this light, the capture of single winged mice occurred, both in terms of time and location, only when conditions were favorable. From the top of the table on down, those locations (the riverside, the rock face, the serpentine) featured unobstructed views. Meanwhile, when two winged mice were caught, the locations were not suited to searching for small animals in the cases of the thicket, the cut (also in a thicket as it happened), and the peak, and even for the rock face, it was at night, which meant that conditions were quite unfavorable. The testimonies of the elementary school teacher and the shrine reverend supported this.
But what did this collection of facts signify? Dr. Akedera paid heed to Mr. Tamura’s childhood recollections regarding winged mice.
Biogenesis Page 2