Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  Sod the rainforest

  If you want to get the hang of biodiversity – to blow your mind with the impossible dizzying bewildering hallucinatory acid-stoned meaning of the teeming profusion and impossible variety and the endless numbers of species and species and species – don’t go to the rainforest. Not that a good chunk of rainforest is ever anything less than wonderful – it’s just not a very immediate experience. Laconic whistles of piercing clarity from the distant canopy; a brief glimpse of a butterfly the size of a bat; the feeling of being sought out and eaten by an endless variety of tiny things – a rainforest birder will frequently work wearing a bee-veil – and a certain elusive sensation that there is something going on somewhere but you can’t ever quite put your finger on it.

  Sod the rainforest. Let’s go back to the coral reef. You don’t even have to be a sinker. Put a mask over you face and immerse your head for, say, 1.7 seconds. And that’s enough. Swear, blaspheme, pray, according to temperament. And that single swift glimpse will tell you the things that a rainforest never can: nowhere else in the wild world is it possible to understand, in one lightning intuitive Zen I-was-enlightened instant, about the endlessness of the beauty of the endless forms before you. And it all comes from a symbiosis so beautiful and so perfect that it might shake the faith of an atheist.I

  This time, let’s not worry about the coral. Instead, we’ll turn our attention to molluscs, worms, crustaceans, sea urchins and their kind; sponges, tunicates, jellyfish and their kind; seabirds, turtles, and of course, a wild and ludicrous assortment of “fish”: so extravagantly decorated and so impossibly various that they seem not so much like creation by a designer but creation by a designer label. And all made possible by the coral.

  It is a hard conceptual leap to make: it is difficult for us to think of a wall as a kind of animal. But that’s a coral reef for you. Corals are animals in the phylum of Cnidaria, which includes jellyfish, sea anemones and the Portuguese man-of-war. The top layer of any reef is a colony of tiny animals, each of them not unlike sea anemones – except that they secrete an exoskeleton made from calcium carbonate, which supports and protects them. They use feathery tentacles to reach out and capture tiny crustaceans and other small specks of life. They cluster in groups, and build on the bodies of the colony’s dead members, so that the wall grows.

  Many species need light to make their way of life work. It follows, then, that you find most corals in the photic zones of the oceans, the levels where light can penetrate. This is to allow photosynthesis to take place. Not that an animal requires photosynthesis, not personally; rather, this is where the miraculous symbiosis comes in. Corals use the energy of single-celled algae that live within the tissues of their body, which in turn profit from the food taken in by the coral’s polyps. For this reason many species of coral live in warm well-lit waters, not only surviving but creating an entire ecosystem around them. These tiny creatures are world-builders: they make it possible for a community to live where they do, to find shelter and to branch out in so many absurd and glorious ways. It has been estimated that as many as 4,000 different species of fish are associated with coral reefs.

  Corals don’t only make walls. They will also make eccentric shapes that seem whimsically, almost humorously put together: antlers, organ-pipes, giant convoluted brains, cauliflowers, table-tops. Hold your breath and fly down among them: a Dali landscape submerged beneath the ocean; a great feast of unlikeliness. It’s as if you were travelling in the Heart of Gold spaceship in Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with its Infinite Improbable Drive. The whales in custard conjured up by this craft seem no more improbable than the pipes and pillars and hallucinogenic wonders of the coral world.

  There’s not very much of it. Corals cover 0.1 per cent of the ocean floor, but contain 25 per cent of all marine species. There are also deep-water corals, and there are some cold-water species as well, but it’s warm and shallow waters where they thrive, and where they create their worlds of wonder, where they provide this crash course in the endlessness of both form and beauty. Darwin was a great fan of coral reefs. His first scientific monograph, published in 1842, 17 years before he detonated The Origin, was called The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. It was about the formation of coral atolls, and correctly predicted that you would find a base of bedrock beneath each lagoon.

  Coral reefs also demonstrate the extraordinary speed at which evolution can take place, when there is opportunity. The Great Barrier Reef, on the continental shelf of northern Australia, has only been there for 20,000 years and yet it contains ten species of coral found nowhere else in the world. Coral reefs can grow as much as 3 cm horizontally in a year, and up to 25 cm vertically, but they don’t grow above a depth of 150 m.

  Coral reefs provide the planet’s most vivid lesson in diversity. They also preach a powerful sermon about the importance of small things. Lots and lots of small things are just as capable – perhaps even more capable – of altering the world as a few big things. Much of our world is shaped and moulded by creatures whose existence we are scarily unaware of. You’d think this would teach us to be careful about what we destroy.

  * * *

  I. Let me quote David Attenborough: “My response is that when a creationist talks about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds or orchids or sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm [Loa loa, see page 104] that’s boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them]: are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each and every one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy.”

  The half-and-halfers

  I realise now that my dream of achieving some sort of completion in this book is on the line. The fact is that I don’t want to leave the carnivores. I could happily look at carnivores for the rest of the space I’ve allotted to mammals, or the rest of the space I’ve allotted to vertebrates, and maybe steal some space from the invertebrates as well. I have so many peak experiences associated with carnivores, so many stories, so many ways of trying to beguile an audience. You need never be bored when there are carnivores around. It’s easier to fascinate with carnivores than with any other group of non-human animals on earth. Carnivores are sexy. Carnivores are also intimate; it’s carnivores, more than any other order, that we choose to share our lives with. We bring canids and felids into our homes, we take toy ursids to bed with us as children. We fear the great predators, but at the same time, we love them, and above all, we envy them. When I read The Jungle Book, I was never Mowgli. I was Bagheera.I

  And there are so many stories still to be told. I haven’t told you about the otters at my place. I haven’t told you about the stoats and weasels I see regularly from horseback. I haven’t told you about badger-watching, and the glorious moment when that wonderfully improbable striped snout emerges. I haven’t told you about my lightning-swift glimpse of a tayra, a South American giant weasel. I haven’t told you about my encounter with a jaguar in Belize, or the tiger I saw from elephant-back, not about the many times I have watched – it felt more like taking part in – the night hunt of leopards.

  But no, I shall be disciplined, and move on to the animals that lack the charisma that even the meanest and gentlest of carnivores owns. Rodents and bats must not be shouldered out by the possessors of feet that can make no noise; eyes that can see in the dark; ears that can hear the winds in their lairs, and sharp white teeth.II All the same, I can’t let carnivores go without first looking at seals and sea lions. They used to have an order of their own, but now the pinnipeds are considered part of the order of carnivores – and I’m damned if I’m going to leave them out. A fully-grown elephant seal is the heaviest carnivore
on earth, then, and it can only function because it is usually in the sea. There are records of exceptional males measuring 20 feet, more than 6 m, in length and weighing 4 metric tonnes, 4.4 imperial. But all pinnipeds, no matter what their size, are important creatures. They are part of the interface between humans and the rest of the Animal Kingdom: one of the non-human animals with whom we have a special relationship. In the very early days of the conservation movement, the wider public first grew aware of the fragility of the wild world with images of baby seals being clubbed to death. This is a practice that still goes on, incidentally. It just stopped being news. The hooded bully with the club raised over a big-eyed baby seal became a symbol of human power over the natural world, and the vulnerability of non-human life.

  A trip to “see the seals” is one of the great seaside staples of British life. Blakeney in north Norfolk in the high season reminds me of a night spent out in Deep Bay in the old days of Hong Kong, when the sea was crammed with tiny boats, themselves crammed with Chinese refugees, sometime using ping-pong bats as paddles: but here, they are all tourists going out to Blakeney Point to see the seals. I have been there many times with my own family, and it’s always been a treat.

  Seals have a meaning for humans of all ages because they seem such incomplete things. They are uncertain creatures, evolutionary half-and-halfers in a manner that perhaps reminds us a little of ourselves, for we always seem physically inadequate when compared to our fellow mammals: not as fast as a cheetah, nor as strong as a gorilla, incapable of flying and without any miraculous senses. Seals are creatures of the sea, but hearteningly, they are woefully inadequate on land.

  Sea lions,III eared seals, are a good bit more agile, but they aren’t exactly cat-sure on their flippers. The others, the earless seals, must drag themselves about like monstrous maggots. They are creatures of the sea who are still tied to the land because, unlike their fellow mammals, the dolphins and whales, they must give birth on land. They are required to spend a good deal of their lives on land and that makes them vulnerable. They need the undisturbed beaches, they need places where the men with clubs never go. I have heard it suggested that these never-fully-committed creatures of the open sea are “still evolving”, which is a pretty thought, but one that misunderstands the nature of evolution. Evolution is not about seeking perfection: the only goal any creature seeks is survival and becoming an ancestor. So long as seals are doing this, there is no evolutionary pressure on them to change. In other words, this rum set-up actually works, and evolution does not close a show that’s making money.

  Another wonderfully winning thing about seals is the moment of transformation. The waddling slugs hit the sea and in an instant they turn into sub-aquatic bullets, rocketing through the water with ease, grace and languor, or floating vertically as they doze, rocked in the cradle of the deep with only their noses above the surface. The transition from hopeless to glorious in a single splashless dive is something to be envied: something we have always yearned for ourselves, especially when we leave the rocks of adolescence to dive into the stormy oceans of adult life.

  Leopard seals are the most spectacular seals, creatures of amazing ferocity. The males are more than 10 feet, 3 m, long, with a spotted throat that gives them their name: fierce predators of penguins and other lesser seals. There is a record of a leopard seal dragging a snorkelling woman to her death.

  But the Weddell seal is the ultimate member of this group. It is the world’s most southerly mammal, and it lives mostly underneath the pack ice of the Antarctic. It is found all around the continent, including the McMurdo Sound, which is 77 degrees south. It is named for Sir James Weddell, a British sealing captain who also gave his name to the Weddell Sea.

  Weddell seals can be big, too: males and females both reach 3.5 m. All carnivores live by their teeth: it’s by their teeth that you define a carnivore. That’s true of Weddell seals, but not just because teeth are handy things to have when catching fish, squid, crustaceans and the odd penguin. They are essential for the seals’ lifestyle: they use them for biting ice. The breathing holes in the pack ice are the life-support system of the Weddells, and they keep these open by chewing them. It is an expensive business: their teeth wear out faster than those of the seals with other ways of making a living. Weddells don’t live much longer than 20 years; other comparably sized seals live twice as long. But a toothless carnivore is doomed.IV

  Weddells can forage under the ice for extended periods; they can dive for 80 minutes and can get as deep as 700 m, or 2,300 feet. But they are air-breathers like ourselves and must come to their breathing-holes or drown. Antarctic weather is always trying to close them up: Weddells are always working against the climate to keep them open. They will rest in the water – warmer than land – in the classic seal fashion, vertical with their noses above the surface in the manner known as “bottling”. They will also haul out for brief periods. But in the winter, it can reach -70 degrees celsius up top, with winds of up to 120 mph. Come in; the water’s lovely once you’re in. At the coldest times of year, every other mammal in the Antarctic moves north: only the Weddells remain. They can hunt in the dark – below the ice, in the 24-hour night – by using their vibrissae, or sensitive whiskers. They are mammals like us, and land-users like us, but they are capable of living in a place where a temperature of -1.8 degrees celsius is the ultimate luxury.

  * * *

  I. The black panther: “Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”

  II. The Hunting Verse, from the Law of the Jungle, learned by all young wolves in The Jungle Book.

  III. Sea lions or eared seals have small visible external ears, and limbs they can use for active movement on land. They include the nine much-persecuted species of fur seals. The earless seals have to drag themselves about on land, though they can hump along like caterpillars for short distances. They have no visible ears. The walrus is in a third family of seals all on its own.

  IV. I have, in fact, witnessed a toothless lion holding onto his place as alpha male of a very feisty pride by sheer cool means. I watched him steal a kill from a younger, much stronger and properly toothed male using a kind of confidence trick, bluffing him out with a show of authority he had no chance of backing up physically. He then mantled over the kill and proceeded to suck the meat, slurping up what nourishment he could. The point here is that this old male didn’t have to kill for himself – and because of his still-continuing psychological dominance he was able to exploit the teeth of others.

  Walking plants

  Sea anemones also seem like half-and-halfers, but not because they are a little bit like us humans. No: they confuse our sense of what is right and fitting by appearing to be half-plant and half-animal. We have even named the whole group after a plant. They are hard to think of as one of us: they live their lives in one place and do so by wafting their petals about. We humans and the snakelocks anemone have a good deal more in common than we have not – but that’s not something that strikes an intuitive chord. We have something in common with leopards, yes, and perhaps with the octopus, but surely not with these fleshy, flabby pseudo-plants. We define ourselves by movement. We live in a mobile and dynamic way. Our ancestors took the revolutionary leap of walking upright, and having done so they led mobile nomadic lives across the African steppes. Movement is our notion of being alive. We feel the deepest compassion for people deprived of movement; the idea of paralysis terrifies us.I

  When we seek recreation we mostly embark on some sort of movement: going for a nice walk, jogging, swimming, cycling, riding horses, skiing. For us humans, movement defines us: eo ergo sum.

  Sea anemones can move a bit. They can creep about on their basal discs, and they can let go of their rock and swim/drift with bodily contortions and rippling of tentacles. If they find themselves
in a bad place, they can leave it: they are not fully committed to the stationary life in the way that corals are. They have a get-out clause.

  But sitting tight is what they are best at. It is a way of life that works: they have radiated out into more than 1,000 different species. Most are around 3 cm, not much more than an inch, but there are monsters a couple of metres or 6 foot 6 inches in diameter. They live by waiting to see what passes by: when it’s small fish or shrimps they will harpoon them with stinging darts and fill them with toxins. They then draw them down into their single opening, which functions as both mouth and anus.

  Plants that eat flesh are the familiar stuff of horror-stories, but even the real life plants that eat insects only do so as a back-up to the process of photosynthesis. But sea anemones, even though they look like plants, are animals through and through. That means that they cannot survive without taking in nutrients from the outside. In this case, they eat other animals. Some species of sea anemone have a symbiotic relationship with algae, like their fellow cnidarians, the corals, but these fierce flowers of the sea are animals just like you and me.

  It was as animals that I first saw them when I went snorkelling in the rock pools on Rinsey beach in Cornwall: sometimes seeing them as soft little buds, at other times fully open, their tentacles the colour of dried blood. Tough little things: they could survive exposure to the sun as they waited for the tide to turn and bring back the sea. I had never seen them on family holidays to Weston-super-Mare and Southsea: this first trip to Cornwall was wilder and more thrilling than those tame resorts, and like all thrilling things, a little frightening. I had swapped ice cream vans and donkey rides for this: it was a plunge into a wilder world. The sea anemones made that quite clear.