When Erdman found the coelacanth he had already discovered 14 new species of mantis shrimp. Was this a different feeling?
“There is a unique euphoria in finding a new species and realizing that you are the first human to recognize this life form as something separate from all others – as if you’ve been privileged to a first showing of a new exhibit in the gallery of life.”
Alfred Russel Wallace, a mid-19th century naturalist and beetle collector who roamed Southeast Asia for eight years, broke through Victorian emotional reticence to write about the passion of finding new species.
Wallace “trembled with excitement” at finding a new butterfly in Sulawesi, and almost swooned when he found a new bird-winged butterfly in Bacan, in the Moluccas, writing: “…none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.”
He got downright poetic with yet another butterfly in Dobbo, on the island of Aru: “It is true I had seen similar insects in cabinets, at home, but it is quite another thing to capture such one’s self – to feel it struggling between one’s fingers, and to gaze upon its fresh and living beauty, a bright gem shining out amid the silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest.”
I find this curious, and thoroughly refreshing. Passion is an emotion, and therefore seemingly outside the realm of science. But enough scientists experience this state to give us pause. (And others seek it vicariously. Hugh Hefner, of Playboy fame, is reputed to have unsuccessfully offered a very large sum to name a newly discovered rabbit hefneri.)
When Charles Darwin discovered a new beetle he wrote that “no poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his poem published than he had upon first seeing, in Illustrations of British Insects, “the magic words, ‘captured by C. Darwin, Esq.’”
Henry Walter Bates, who first introduced young Alfred Russel Wallace to the myriad joys of collecting insects, and who traveled with Wallace to the Amazon in the 1840s (where Bates developed the theory of mimicry), discovered a new Callithea butterfly.
Bates was ecstatic when a now-forgotten entymologist in the British Museum (Natural History) named the creature Callithea Batesii (taxonomic etiquette specifies that the person who first describes a new species should not name the creature after him or herself). Arnold Brackman, a Wallace biographer, wrote “Bates had achieved a place in the sun, albeit a modest place, yet a place, the torque that turns all pathfinders, whether in jungle or on ice flow… Ego? Ambition? The pursuit of immortality? An irrepressible thirst for the meaning of meaning? A combination of these? Whatever it was, this was the motivating force that drove Bates back into the horrors of the rain forest.”
That seems to be part of the key. Part of the satisfaction of discovering a new species seems to come almost as a reward for enduring discomfort and loneliness.
I got a small taste of that pain before pleasure principle while searching for a bowerbird in the Arfak Mountains of Irian Jaya.
I was chilled by a steady, cold rain, hungry after several hours of muddy trekking. I hauled myself up a steep, slippery hill, grabbing exposed roots for a handhold, in search of a glimpse of how another species gets the girl.
Unlike the brightly coloured males of most species of birds, the male of the Vogelkop gardener bowerbird, a species found only east of the Wallace line, and only in the sharp-edged Arfak mountains, is an unexciting brown with little sex appeal of his own. He needs to advertise.
Specifically, he bulds a bower, a display area in which he can show the female he is courting that he is a worthy mate. His bower becomes the avian equivalent of a Porsche or a ski chalet in Vail or an Armani suit – it does not show his inner beauty but it does get the message across pretty quickly – “I’m cool, I’m hot, come visit.”
I stoically followed my guide, Hangei Ullo, a stoic fellow who wore a Duran Duran T-shirt and a safety pin in his left ear (useful for removing thorns from his feet).
Near the top of a ridge, at about 1,400 meters, we found the bower of the Vogelkop gardener bowerbird, Amblyornis inornatus (Schlegel), a dramatic three foot-tall “maypole” construction of sticks and twigs. In front of the bower, on two flattened areas like the terraces of a California split-level condo, the bird had placed some 50 candy apple-colored seeds, a pile of iridescent black beetle exoskeletons, a blue and white ABC battery case and some yellow wool thread. Some observers have seen bowers displaying carefully laid-out film containers, bottle tops and a baseball cap.
The first European to see the extraordinary bower of this bird was Odoardo Beccari in 1872; so obviously neither Hangei nor I could take credit for this find. Nevertheless, I sensed a bit of the thrill of discovery that no doubt infects people far from home who find something new.
I wondered whether the coelacanth/beetle/butterfly/bowerbird buzz holds for plants.
I accompanied Max van Balgooy, one of the finest field botanists in the world, on a collecting trip to isolated Aru island in eastern Indonesia.
Max is a rather short, rather round, always-smiling man who has an encyclopedic knowledge of flora ranging from the plants of Tahiti to the flora of the Indian sub-continent, and has had his fair share of discoveries.
One afternoon he returned to our base camp beaming.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“New species.”
This gave me a start. “What is it?”
Max unpacked his collecting pack, showed me a plant he had pressed which was already beginning to shrivel in the heat, and opened his notebook.
“No. 6511. Strongylodon? liana, infl. caulifloris and on young twigs, small flowers and pods, flower orange, pods inflated, ripe dehiscent red/black. slide”
His shorthand-like notes didn’t betray much emotion and I asked him how he felt at the moment of discovery.
“It was pure luck that I found the Strongylodon – the genus was never recorded from here. I was very excited, I recognized it immediately and it almost made me jump up and down.”
His feelings in one word?
“Ecstasy. I know exactly how Wallace felt. I don’t think you can explain this kind of feeling to someone who is unfamiliar with biological exploration. It’s something more than just satisfaction or just pleasure.”
“Max, is it as good as sex?”
He thought a moment.
“I’d say it was comparable to very good sex…and there’s no disease.”
Chapter 19
LIFE AND DEATH ON SHIVA’S BEACH
Is a turtle worth risking your life?
PULAU ENU, Aru Islands, Indonesia
A newly hatched green turtle wandered into my tent this evening, attracted, perhaps, by a lantern that the reptile thought was the reflection of the moon on the sea.
A few hours later I wander the beach on the windward side of this small island, closer to Australia than the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, blown sand gritting my contact lenses, looking for the tractor-like tracks that indicate an adult meter-long turtle has visited the low dunes to lay her eggs.
It is a night with stars like I’ve rarely seen, and I half expect Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian naturalist/explorer/philosopher to appear out of the shadows, gaunt and curious and quietly eager to join me. I’ve been on his 150-year-old trail for some time now, and I feel his presence as I examine small piles of sand that mark where one of these green turtles has laid her eggs. But, perhaps in too much of a hurry, she has deposited eggs below the high-water line, where they are certain to become water-logged and spoiled. I finally unearth her 60 fresh eggs, still slimy with turtle juices, and transplant them into another hole I dig a few meters beyond the reach of the high tide.
Yet amidst this exuberance of life
I smell death. I wander the beach and, like a dung beetle, am drawn to the rotting carcasses and bleached skulls of turtles which had been slit open by fishermen desirous of the 200 or so eggs in the reptile’s egg cavity, fishermen either too impatient or too greedy to be satisfied with catching 50 or so eggs as they plop out during the normal cycle. The tasty turtle flesh has been left uneaten to rot; the only part used was the stomach, which makes a fine bait.
It had been an eventful day.
Earlier the research group I was with had been cruising a few hundred meters offshore and through binoculars noticed a pile of upside-down turtles on the beach. Perhaps half a kilometer away, and about a hundred meters off shore, we also saw the boat that was used by the turtle poachers. We could see that their fishing boat was full of live turtles, all upside down so they wouldn’t move, perhaps a hundred of the animals, all destined for the meat market in Bali.
“Poachers,” muttered Fata, an Indonesian game warden. Quickly the situation became like a cowboy movie. “You go chase the boat,” Fata instructed. “I’ll rescue the turtles,” he said as he jumped into the warm water and swam to shore.
Another western conservationist and I urged the Indonesian captain to give chase. We made a half-hearted attempt, but the captain’s heart wasn’t in it. “Those men are armed and dangerous,” said a frustrated Ating Sumantri, who is in charge of the Indonesian government’s efforts to conserve sea turtles. “We don’t have any soldiers, no weapons.”
We then turned to shore to pick up Fata, who was nowhere to be seen.
Minutes later Fata appeared from the bush and told his story.
He had turned over eight of the 100-kilogram animals and watched them escape into the sea before three poachers, who had been resting some distance away, saw what he was doing and gave chase. The three poachers were armed with machete-like parangs. Fata was alone and had no weapons. He took shelter in the woods until the fishing boat we had chased came close to the island to pick up their crew members.
I admired Fata’s bravery. And was angered by the timid reaction of the Indonesian boat captain, and the government’s inability to provide adequate manpower and resources.
So that night, watching a newly hatched turtle poke his head out of the sand, I wondered. What is a turtle worth? Worth getting stabbed for? Worth shooting someone for?
I’ve been thinking about many things on this trip. How is it, I asked the memory of Alfred Russel Wallace, that we human beings will travel halfway around the world and suffer physical discomfort in order to reach a beach where green turtles come ashore to lay their eggs? Why would we watch another creature’s life cycle – laying and hatching – with such emotional intensity and intellectual curiosity? Why would it disturb us that others of our race – the Balinese in this case – enjoy eating this ancient reptile? Why do we have such protective thoughts about another species?
Later, in Bali, I wanted to know just how important turtle meat is in that island’s Shivaistic Hindu culture. This was not merely being environmentally-politically correct. It’s also good conservation to understand what emotional and spiritual values lie behind what seems to outsiders to be senseless consumption – some 18,000 turtles a year, according to one estimate.
“Turtle meat adds something to our ceremonies,” explained I.B. Pangdjaja, head of public relations at the Bali Governor’s office.
“But it’s not essential to the religious ceremony?” I asked.
“Like you eating turkey at Thanksgiving. Except it makes you strong.”
Odd, isn’t it. Transported to Bali for satay, or worse, slit open for their eggs, and left to die on the beach. And then, against all odds, life goes on – more turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. Because we happen to be on Pulau Enu on this particular night the bad guys stay away, and just maybe tonight’s crop of eggs will hatch. I call this contradictory place Shiva’s beach. A beach of destruction and creation.
Shiva dances on a beach of skulls
Ecstatic
Life breathes below.
I awake before dawn the following morning and watch a bunch of just-hatched turtles, shorter than my thumb, scamper like reptilian puppies to the sea. After they all reach the sea safely I strip so I can wash off the sand and bathe in the limpid sea which has been baptised by just-born turtles. After my swim I walk back to the nest site and see a straggler turtle emerging from the quickly heating sand, half an hour behind his nest-mates. I follow his clumsy but determined flipper steps into the sea, and swim with him for maybe 30 meters. He paddles aggressively, sticking his little head out of the water every four seconds. The water is clear and warm, free of hungry fish or crabs, the sky blue and free of birds of prey. The little fellow swims towards a group of seven fishing boats far offshore. “Stay away from people”, I shout, but he doesn’t listen. The sea is big, though, and perhaps he will pass his life free of hassle. Soon he finds his own course and paddles out of sight. A boy. He isn’t going to listen to me. He doesn’t really know where he is going, but he knows he has a journey to make. I wish him well, as much for my sake as for his.
SABAH, Malaysia.
BJ, a rehabilitant orangutan in Sepilok, is one of man’s closest relatives. A former governor-general of colonial Malaya and Borneo remarked that orangutans “look at you with melancholy eyes…painfully aware of being your poor relations who have not done so well in life.” Attempts to get BJ to show that he is smarter than a two-year-old child failed miserably.
Photo: Paul Sochaczewski
V.
AN INORDINATE FONDNESS FOR BEETLES
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE IN ASIA
Chapter 1
SHOOTING ORANGUTANS AND PONDERING THE UNIVERSE
Alfred Russel Wallace spent 18 lonely months in Sarawak, writing the precursor to his theory of evolution.
SANTUBONG, Sarawak, Malaysia
Different people react to solitude in different ways.
Some people converse with demons and angels. Some folks become truly, giggling-at-midnight mad. Some find enlightenment. And once in a while a guy who spends too many rainy nights in a leaky hut will change the course of history.
One hundred and fifty years ago, on a quiet beach on the west coast of Borneo, a young British naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace made an intellectual breakthrough that would lead two years later to his developing the theory of natural selection, the basis for the theory of evolution.
Wallace, with the benefit of a grant from the Royal Geographic Society, was just beginning his epic eight-year (1854–1862), 22,400 kilometer journey through Southeast Asia. This voyage, which he wrote about in his classic book The Malay Archipelago, netted him 125,660 specimens, including some 900 new species of beetles, 200 new species of ants, 50 new species of butterflies, and 212 new species of birds. Besides his breakthroughs on evolutionary theory, during the journey he developed the concept that later became known as the Wallace Line, explaining how changing sea levels had alternatively isolated and united land masses, resulting in sometimes startling differences between the wildlife of neighboring islands.
Wallace’s benefactor in Sarawak was James Brooke, popularly called the “White Rajah of Borneo”. They met in London in early 1853, and subsequently Brooke wrote to Wallace that he would be very glad to see him in Sarawak. The two men later met up in Singapore in September 1854 during the Commission of Inquiry into Brooke’s handling of piracy. Brooke again offered the young Englishman “every assistance” if he visited Sarawak. Wallace arrived in Sarawak (both the territory and the city now known as Kuching were then referred to as Sarawak; Sarawak itself today is a state of Malaysia) on November 1, 1854.
Wallace spent a productive 14 months in Sarawak, netting and pinning 1,500 species of butterflies and 2,000 species of beetles, over 1,000 of them in less than a single square mile. Within one busy fortnight he averaged 24 new beetle species every day. “During my whole 12 years collecting in the western and eastern tropics, I never enjoyed such advantages,” he wrote.
Wallace was alone much of the time, and used his isolation to ask some of the most basic questions – why are there so many varieties of life on earth, and why are they found where they are? Do creatures evolve? And if so, where do humans fit into the scheme of things?
At the time, Victorian-era intellectuals were hard at work debating these questions, but until 1855 precious few of them had come up with anything more useful than brandy-after-dinner speculation. Then the relatively unknown Wallace came up with a key step. Wallace’s breakthrough came about after weeks of lonely vigils in jungle camps, leaky hilltop retreats, and in the relative luxury of watching the monsoon rain while residing at Rajah Brooke’s beachfront bungalow in Santubong on the Sarawak coast.
Several years ago I went to Santubong to look for the site of the White Rajah’s bungalow. Nobody in the village had any idea where the house might have been located, but, using a bit of admittedly fuzzy logic to find the site I figured that Brooke would have ordered his bungalow built with a fine view and open to sea breezes. Continuing the logic, I imagined that subsequent British governors would have built their bungalows and official rest houses on the same spot as James Brooke’s cottage.
I finally found the place – an abandoned villa, maybe 50 years old, sitting on a small rise and surrounded by housing for government staff. The remains of the old British rest house were more suited for an Asian horror movie than a relaxing seaside vacation. The building’s roof had caved in, the floors had collapsed, and spiders and bats roamed freely.
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 22