Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  It was through sea anemones that I had first-hand experience of the fragility of nature, and of the power we humans have over our fellow animals. In 1967, the oil tanker Torrey Canyon took a fateful short cut, nipping in between the Scilly Isles and Land’s End instead of going the long way round. As a result, the ship hit rock, broke its hull and the cargo of crude oil came flooding out. Rinsey was on the front line. But it wasn’t the oil that killed everything. The detergent they used to get rid of the oil did even more damage. It took about 40 years for the rock pools to regain the vigour they had in my days as a boy snorkeller. It’s only in recent years that you can look into those pools and once again see the gardens of anemones.

  The Torrey Canyon disaster was an event that gave the nascent conservation movement a vividness that no amount of sermonising could match. The images of fouled and oiled seabirds raised both compassion and anger. Everyone agreed that this must never, ever happen again. And it didn’t – until the next time, and the time after that. There’s a moral there, and not a very subtle one: when it comes to a choice between shortcuts and common sense,II humans will always make the same decision.

  It was the sea anemones that told me so. I rejoice to see them back on Rinsey beach. They’ll be there forever now – or at least until the next shortcut.

  * * *

  I. James Joyce writes of paralysis to express his despair at both Dublin and the world in Dubliners, his collection of short stories. Joyce as child narrator writes in the book’s first paragraph: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.”

  II. Common sense is not so common. Voltaire.

  Wimbledon champion

  We have a sneaking tendency to see the wild world as if it were the Wimbledon tennis tournament: to imagine that life is about the emergence of a single champion from many. In both the men’s and the women’s singles, Wimbledon starts with 128 players. Every year, half of them experience the despair of being a first-round loser. Eventually, after six rounds, we have a final, and after that, a champion: and that, of course, is what Wimbledon is all about. Things work differently on Wimbledon Common, and everywhere else in the wild world. The problem is that we humans love a narrative, and it is a love that can bring us confusion. Wimbledon tennis tournament is an annual narrative: from a confused and confusing beginning involving far too many individuals that moves inexorably to a simple and meaningful end. From chaos comes order. From many comes one, but the greatest of them all: that’s a pretty satisfying thought, an archetypal tale that enthrals half the country and much of the world every year. It’s a model we use unconsciously as we try to understand the world we live in; our politicians, for example, are selected after a struggle against many. They may lack the qualifications to govern a country, but they certainly know how to win an election. This model – the seeking of a champion – is staggeringly inappropriate to the natural world. We like to think of the lion as the king of the beasts, the greatest of all the carnivores. We like the idea of the elephant as the champion land mammal. We like above all to think of ourselves: the champion of the apes just as the apes are the champions of the mammals just as the mammals are the champions of the vertebrates just as the vertebrates are the champions of the entire Animal Kingdom.

  We’ve not only got that wrong: we’ve got it upside down. The best model of success in the Animal Kingdom starts off with one ancestor and ends up with 128 champions. Or more. Sometimes many many more. I have already talked about the more-than-1,000 species of sea anemones: when we reach the insects we will see what biodiversity can really do when it starts to get serious. Out of order comes chaos, or in any case a multiplicity that causes chaos in human minds. Mammals can at least give us the idea of biodiversity in a manageable way. Looking at mammals is like beginning to learn about the vastness of space by considering the solar system. That’s why I have put mammals at the beginning – or at least one of the beginnings – of this book.

  Which brings us to horses. The champion herbivore, at least in human eyes. The family of Equidae has seven species in it: three zebras, three asses and the horse. There are wild horses – Przewalski’s horse in Mongolia is a subspecies of the horse we have domesticated, and there are feral populations of horses, most famously in North America, the mustangs, and most numerously in Australia, the brumbies; there are reckoned to be 400,000 of them. All these, plus all modern domestic horses, are the same species. All these horses – from a brumby to Erhaab, a Derby winner I have patted, to Fred and Mary,I the shire horses I once ploughed a field with, to Sophie, the Shetland pony in my field at home, to Przewalski’s horse, to the horse that carries the drums at the Trooping of the Colour, to my old mare Dolly Dolores out there eating grass in the rain – are members of the species Equus caballus. The equids are one family with just a single genus, Equus.

  If that makes the horse the champion of the equids, the bovids can offer 140 champions. In the bovids you can see the great inverted Wimbledon tennis tournament that produces so many champions from a single ancestor – and that is the way the great game of evolution is most effectively played. Evolution isn’t a system for producing one perfect thing: it works best when it produces many things, all with a different method of surviving. The common genes carried in the equid family have only seven different sorts of survival machine, as Richard Dawkins explained it in his reductionist way. The bovids have 140: a dramatic improvement; still, wait till we come to beetles.

  The bovids include all sheep and cattle, both the wild and the domesticated species, and all the antelopes. The vast and imposing gaur, a species of Asian cattle that stands 2.2 m, nearly 7 feet, at the shoulder, is a bovid, and so is Sharpe’s grysbok, an anteloplet you could scoop up and carry under one arm: che cariiiiiino! Probably the smallest is the royal antelope of West Africa; adults can be no more than 10 inches, 25 cm, at the shoulder, and the males carry horns an inch, 2.5 cm, in length. Bovids make up some of the most numerous large mammal aggregations ever seen on our planet. The American bison has long since been shot to buggery, but the herds used to fill horizons. Springboks used to form wandering herds of many millions over hundreds of kilometres in what is now South Africa and Namibia.

  One example of enormous numbers of enormous mammals still exists. It can be found in Africa, with the wildebeest migrations. The most famous of these operates in the Serengeti and the Masai Mara, that is to say, Kenya and Tanzania, for wildebeest pay no mind to international frontiers, though the Liuwa Plains migration in Zambia has the cachet of greater remoteness. I remember sitting for half a day at a waterhole on the Serengeti watching the wildebeest coming and going. It never stopped. It was like staking out Oxford Circus underground station: endless streams going in both directions, so close that all idea of personal space had to be abandoned, but they somehow kept the peace by accepting the necessity of the situation. It was a rush hour that never stopped: rush day, rush existence: these are animals that have their being in crowds and company. I spent the rest of that day on an eminence watching the wildebeest making military manoeuvres across a vast plain. The sound of these herds is both glorious and comic. The onomatopoeic name gnu is almost perfect: they sound like vast frogs, constantly exchanging brief clipped croaking sounds: “Newp!” “Newp!”

  The antelopes are the champions of the bovids, and they make up a subfamily that contains about 90 species in 30 genera. You give them a habitat, they’ll adapt to it. I have seen klipspringer on the rocky outcrops of southern Africa, creatures that work on point, like ballet dancers. They are small, though not grysbok-tiny, 22 inches or 58 cm at the shoulder. They stand on the pointy ends of their hooves, and are said to be able to fit all four hooves on an area you could cover with a two-pound coin. That’s great for mountains and kopjes, not so good for marshland. But there’s another antelope evolved to fill that niche. In the marshes of Africa, you find the sitatunga with its long exaggerated hooves that splay out, spreading the weight and enabling it to walk on soft ground wit
hout sinking. It’s a fairly sizeable animal, and very graceful too, reaching 1.5 m at the shoulder, and built in long slim lines of almost self-conscious elegance.

  Antelopes can produce some monsters as well. I remember a fine day spent in a hide high in a tree above a waterhole: and a long, quiet and beautiful session was brought to a conclusion with an odd clicking sound that carried across the bush. I knew what this was all right: eland, as imposing an antelope as you can find. The males can reach 6 foot or 1.83 m at the shoulder and weigh a metric tonne, 2,200 pounds. The male that came towards me was every bit of that, pausing to drink his fill, staying in sight for 15 minutes or so. The clicking sound is one of the mysteries of eland life, thought to be a snapping of tendons and considered a communication device, like a bird’s contact call, something that allows them to keep in touch in times of poor visibility. They can move in pitch black without losing each other. Reindeer, used to travelling through white-outs, also make a clicking sound. Elands are not every fast, so they have an immense flight distance. They can’t afford to let you come too near. If you get within 400 yards they start drifting off. But, high in my tree, I was invisible that day, and so the eland came closer than he would ever normally dare to. It was as if I was momentarily relieved of the burden of the human condition.

  * * *

  I. Excuse this showing off. Erhaab was trained by the great John Dunlop, with whose wonderfully generous cooperation I wrote a book about a year – 1987 – in a racing stable; I met Fred and Mary as a stunt for The Times and with their help I left a series of genuine if not entirely plumb-straight furrows across the field.

  Infernal agony of gelatinous zooplankton

  “ ‘Brandy! Brandy!’ he gasped, and fell groaning upon the sofa.

  “Half a tumbler of the raw spirit brought about a wondrous change. He pushed himself up on one arm and swung his coat off his shoulders. ‘For God’s sake! Oil, opium, morphia!’ he cried. ‘Anything to ease this infernal agony!’… There, criss-crossed upon the man’s naked shoulder, was the same strange reticulated pattern of red, inflamed lines which had been the death-mark of Fitzroy McPherson.”

  “The lion’s mane!” were the last words of Fitzroy McPherson, who looked, when he died, “as though he had been terribly flogged by a thin wire scourge”.

  Sherlock HolmesI was baffled for a while, but he eventually came up with the murderer, which he then proceeded to kill without remorse. The killer was not the temperamental and jealous Ian Murdoch after all, as many had suspected, but a species of jellyfish: the lion’s mane. The lion’s mane jellyfish is real, the largest of all jellyfish, possibly the longest animal on earth. Its umbrella can measure as much as 6 feet 6 inches, 2 m in diameter, and the tentacles that hang beneath it have been known to reach 120 feet, 37 m, which is longer than the blue whale.II

  It’s not actually a killer, though plenty venomous. Conan Doyle, a doctor of medicine, was careful in the story to establish that the first victim, Fitzroy McPherson, suffered from a weak heart. The lion’s mane jellyfish’s preferred place of living is the Arctic, and it seldom comes below 42 degrees north; Conan Doyle brought in a freak storm to carry his jellyfish to Sussex. It can cause pain in humans: there was an incident in 2010 when 150 people were stung in a single day at Rye in New Hampshire: all thought to have come into contact with the floating bits of the same dead one.

  All jellyfish have a majestically sinister reputation: alien creatures from alien places that lure humans to their doom and sting them to death. The Sherlock Holmes story taps into an ancient tradition of monsters from the deep: fearsome things like the sea serpent, the kraken and Grendel’s mother (slain so courageously by Beowulf). By the 19th century these fantastic monsters were often displaced by real species, monstered up and made many times more deadly for the sake of a great tale: Moby Dick, the sperm whale, the lion’s mane jellyfish here, the giant squid, and in more recent times, the great white shark in Jaws; we’ll be meeting sharks in more detail later on.

  You’d think no one would be able to last for five minutes in the oceans of our world, teeming as they are with all those beasts longing to kill us. These creatures have a primeval fascination for us, one that has grown, rather than diminished. The more the land was conquered and the more the ferocious creatures of the land were pushed towards extinction, the more they began to arouse our compassion rather than our fear and loathing. But the oceans have a mystery that nowhere on land can ever rival, so oceans became year by year better places for rousing our thrilling atavistic fear of the wild world. Jellyfish are fascinating to most of us not because of their complex lifestyle, but because they sting: and because they really can, on occasions, kill.

  Jellyfish is an imprecise term. It is a generalisation rather than a zoological category: loosely speaking, it sweeps up the free-swimming stage of many of the cnidarians. There are, for example, up to 1,500 species of Hydrozoa, a class of cnidarians, but by no means all of them make jellyfish. The medusa stage of the Scyphozoa life cycle is what we mostly think of as jellyfish: the archetypal genus being the moon jellyfish, often seen near the coast, glowing like little submerged full moons, and moving by pulsing themselves through the water. Jellyfish are just one of the many kinds of sea creatures we call fish even though they aren’t fish at all, even in the loosest sense of the term. The Americans sometimes call them jellies, or sea jellies, in an attempt to avoid this confusion; they have also been referred to, with more accuracy than elegance, as gelatinous zooplankton.

  The fact that we love to exaggerate the danger and the toxicity of life beneath the sea doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. There are species of box jellyfish – from the Cubozoa class of cnidarians – that are genuinely lethal. They move better than most jellyfish, able to control both direction and speed to some extent. They have eyes, though not as we humans understand the term, set in the clusters on the side of the transparent bell, and they can move around obstacles and spot prey.

  Three species in particular are seriously venomous: the sea wasp, Chironex fleckeri, and Carukia barnesi (not, alas, named, still less described, by me) and Malo kingi. This last is a mere cubic centimetre in size, with tentacles trailing another 3 feet, a metre, also known as the Irukandji jellyfish. This is said to be 100 times more potent than a cobra, 1,000 times more potent than a tarantula. Having said this, most people who are stung make a reasonably swift recovery, but fatalities certainly occur. So that’s all right, then. The seas still possess an eternal threat: and that remains an important thing for us all.

  * * *

  I. The story “The Lion’s Mane” is in The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  II. In 1824, a specimen of bootlace worm was found on the Scottish shore. It was 180 feet, 55 m, long: pretty impressive, but it probably got to that length by being stretched, rather than by growing.

  Walking with lechwe

  Old buffalos turn evil. They’ll charge at the least provocation. A lone buffalo is the most dangerous animal in the bush. Best thing to do if you meet one is to climb the nearest tree – but make sure it’s a big one. If you leave a leg hanging down, they will lick that leg to the bone… Always one of my favourite campfire stories, this one. None of these tale-tellers has actually met an intrepid old man of the bush walking around with a mere bone for a leg after an encounter with a buffalo, but as a story of the boundless menace of the wild world, it’s a hard one to beat.

  The African buffalo, sometime called the Cape buffalo, is a fine and impressive creature, one that functions best in herds of 500 or so. When at ease they graze close and cosy, with a lowing grunting homeliness, a fall and flop of dung and a rich, pleasant farmyard smell. You can always tell a place where buffalos have been resting up: it looks and smells like a cattle byre. But they are warier than domestic cattle, because even creatures of this size are vulnerable: the lions of the Luangwa Valley specialise in buffalos, making them the most ferocious and intrepid carnivores on the planet.I

  As the ol
d male buffalos get stiffer and slower, they start to fall behind the herd as it moves from one grazing lawn to the next. These old boys form gentlemen’s clubs. They still look majestic enough, but a little less mobile than they once were. If you see a couple of them, making a herd of two, they will tend to run away from you; if there is only one, he is more likely to run towards you. That’s because if you are under threat by a predator, even when there are two of you, you have at the very worst a 50-50 chance of survival. A lone buffalo knows that in some circumstances, the percentages work in favour of a charge. It’s not temper, it’s maths. But we like buffalos to be malevolent creatures rather than merely seeking to survive by playing the percentages, just as we prefer our gelatinous zooplankton to be deadly poisonous.

  Buffalos are just one species in the impressive adaptive radiation of bovids, and it is among the antelopes that this radiation is most compelling. The antelopes’ basically similar body plan has been altered subtly by the forces of evolution, producing a range of remarkably different species with many quite distinct ways of living. They have developed different social structures, from the impalas that love to be in herds to bushbucks that prefer to live as half of a pair. I remember the time I took a lechwe for a walk in Lochinvar National Park in Zambia, when I had the chance to view the uniqueness of the species at close hand: very close indeed, because the lechwe would permit the occasional stroke or scratch around the head and shoulders.

  This was an animal that had been rescued as a fawn and hand-reared, with the result that it responded more to humans than to fellow lechwe. There was something slightly odd, even spooky, about that, because Lochinvar is heaving with lechwe. No one, least of all a lechwe, could miss them: but this one walked around the fringes of the vast herds and stuck close to us humans. There are thousands of lechwe in Lochinvar, making the most of the damp and marshy expanses in the floodplain of the Kafue River; this was one of the four subspecies, the Kafue lechwe.II This individual had acquired the habit of walking out with humans in the manner of a dog, stopping occasionally to graze and browse, waiting patiently while humans watched birds or examined other aspects of the wild world. Tim Dodman inherited the animal from his predecessor when running a project for WWF. As we walked, it was pleasant to see the animal’s athleticism. It was female, and in this species only the males carry the good strong lyre-shaped horns. She was tall enough, a metre, 3 feet 3 inches at the shoulder, and finely built, probably less than 100 kilos, 220 pounds. As you watched her step rather primly across the bush, you could see that her back legs were longer than the front ones, giving her a distinctive gait. You see this sometimes in horses that are not yet fully grown; “a bit on the leg,” horse people will say knowledgeably when such a youngster comes up at auction. But with lechwe, this legginess is an adaptation that helps them to deal with the marshy terrain, and allows them to make spectacular leaps across areas of deep water. It’s the lechwe eyes I remember most vividly: large and soulful, in the antelope way – though that, of course, is because their excellent vision is a survival aid, not a poetic prop for human writers – and covered with a lattice of whiskers. I have never found this commented on in a reference book, but it is presumably there so that the animals can run fast though thick reeds and grasses without getting stalks in their eyes. And on more or less the last moment of my stay in Lochinvar, a herd of several thousand, stirred by some danger, performed a massed charge-past – it took minutes to go by – hammering through the reeds and splashing across the open water to vanish into the reeds again. They have evolved, and that triumphantly, for the wetlands of the Kafue.