Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  Bilharzia is not the end of the flatworm’s powers of destruction. Liver flukes are also flatworms: they get inside the systems of mammals, including humans, and they too feed on blood. So there you have it: creatures with lives of a beautiful and bewildering complexity; some species go through as many as seven different forms during their lives. The way evolution has worked to bring this about boggles the mind, and if these creatures were even remotely loveable – or at least a little bit non-disgusting – they would surely be used by creationists as infallible proof of the hand of a designer. It is, after all, much easier to accept that some clever mind-beyond-all-minds worked out this septenary life form than to imagine how the forces of blind survival could have produced something so impossibly complex and so improbably effective.

  But these brilliant little parasites have seized on humans as hosts. As a result, instead of being perfect for the creationist cause, they are – from a human-chauvinist point of view – pure evil. We must be wary of such easy moralising, though, unless we are ready to base morality entirely on human convenience: i.e. if humans like it, it is morally good, if humans dislike it, it is evil. Accept that and you must accept that a lot of things on earth are pretty damn evil, from wasps at a picnic to the Loa loa worm. And by the same argument, rabbits are entitled to view humans as beings of pure evil: poisoning them, gassing them and shooting them.

  If flatworms were capable of moral thought, they might look on an uninfected human being as Adam and Eve looked on the Garden of Eden: as a wonderful undeveloped proposition, as a glorious blessing from a benign creator. In the flatworm-centric universe, all that is good for flatworms is morally right: and therefore human suffering is an unambiguously good thing. And if we humans want to see flatworms as evil, then we have to work out what kind of moral choice they have. They have evolved (been created if you wish to work from that argument) to feed not only on but in humans. Here they swim: God help them, they can do no other.

  * * *

  I. Demolishing one of the creationists’ favourite arguments, who ask: “What good is half an eye? An eye must have been created complete or it is no use at all.” Any flatworm will tell you different.

  II. This can be done with a single annual dose of the drug praziquantel. Research into a vaccine continues.

  The elephant in the corridor

  Hear and attend and listen, O Best Beloved, and I will tell you the tale of Baby Elly, and how she got stuck in the mud, and of Mummy Elly, who got stuck as well: both of them stuck fast as lightning in the dried-up dry-season devastation of Kapani Lagoon, and both likely to die: to weaken gradually from exhaustion and heat and dehydration before being picked off by the carnivores. It was Christina Carr from Kapani who sent me a set of pictures, taken by Abraham Banda, both old friends. The elephants got stuck right in front of Kapani Lodge,I and the mud was setting like concrete all around them.

  The pictures make up a lovely comic strip. First they get ropes around Baby Elly and start to free her. But, frightened, she refuses to leave her mother and gets stuck again. They free her again – and there’s Christina shouting and waving and trying to hoosh Baby Elly back to the herd, where they’re all watching from a discreet distance. But Baby Elly gets stuck yet again. So they try a third time and this time they haul Baby away from her mother – and now one of her cousins calls for her and she turns and runs for the herd and the lagoon echoes with screams of encouragement from the elephants. Mummy Elly, close to exhaustion, is doused with water to try and stop her from overheating. The team then tie ropes around her and attach them to a tractor. She is not so exhausted she can’t work out that what is happening is good, not bad, and she starts to cooperate. Eventually she struggles free and staggers back to the hollering herd and her baby. And then all the helpers head for Kapani Lodge and Chetumbe pours Mosi beers all around as he has done for me on many occasions past.

  Of course, the correct thing to do in these circumstances would have been nothing. Let them both die. Part of the natural process. But you can’t actually do that, can you? Certainly the Zambian Wildlife Authority and the South Luangwa Conservation Society (SLCS) agreed, and they did all they could to bring about this happy ending. The standard ethic states that you should only intervene when the problem has a human cause: SLCS routinely use tranquiliser darts to remove snares and treat the horrible wounds they inflict. The case of the ellies stuck in the mud elicited a purely emotional response, and if this was the Sixth Form Debating Society I could argue that it was morally wrong to interfere with the elephants’ slow and unpleasant death, depriving the poor carnivores of a meat bonanza. But I certainly couldn’t make the argument stand up if we were all standing in that dried-out lagoon with the suffering ellies before us. After all, blood is thicker than water.II

  We humans have a powerful affinity for elephants. I wrote about the rescue story in The Times: the following week it went global, with newspaper after newspaper running the story as a classic heartstring-puller. It seems that across the world, we see elephants as special. I have on my desk a small figure of Ganesh, the lord of beginnings, the remover of obstacles, at times the astute placer of necessary obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and letters, the devaIII of intellect and reason: one of the most important gods in the Hindu pantheon. He is also respected in Buddhism and Jainism. Ganesh, of course, bears an elephant’s head: this tiny likeness was given to me by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) when I went there to support their work on elephant corridors. Elephant corridors are like the elephant in the room, only different. The idea is to acquire land between remnant chunks of forest, joining them up again, so that elephants can pass from one part of the forest to another along their traditional routes, widening their gene pool and decreasing their conflicts with local people. The chief exec of the WTI, Vivek Menon, is inclined to stress the genuine intelligence and genuine emotions of elephants, and to refer to them as “near-humans”.

  I’m not entirely at ease with this myself. It seems to me that the idea that the nearer to humans you are, the more rights you have is dangerous, difficult and subjective. (Do bats, being less like humans, have a lesser right to survive? And lizards? And butterflies?) But elephants certainly capture the human imagination: in their gigantic selves we see a part of ourselves: an answering gleam; some sense that the human condition is not a hermetically sealed thing that locks us off from all other creatures. It is said that elephants know what death is: they give physical support to the weak and dying and appear to mourn a death in the clan. One of the most heartrending scenes I have ever seen was the reaction of an elephant mother after her calf had been taken by a crocodile. No one who was there could ever imagine that grief is unique to humans.

  There are two living species of elephants, African and Asian, and they are the two surviving members of the order of Proboscidea; some prefer three species and split the African elephant into two, the savannah elephant and the forest elephant. (Odd to think that England was once home to woolly mammoths, which went extinct here as recently as 10,000 BC.) It is impossible for such huge creatures to live in the modern world without clashes with people. Elephants kill people and damage crops and get in the way of trains and road transport. But elephants still survive, not least because people want them to. Elephants could be portrayed as malign creatures, every bit as evil as schistosomiasis-causing flatworms, but they are both liked and admired by humans, and not only by those who live at a safe distance. Indian trains occasionally strike elephants on one forest lineIV: the drivers involved are invariably traumatised, having to deal with the guilt of killing God. Elephants are hugely inconvenient things to have about: but – to a far greater degree than you would expect – people are prepared to deal with that inconvenience.

  In Kerala I spoke to a community of people who used to live right in the middle of an elephant route. One woman told me what it was like to be inside a house while an elephant was destroying it. “I kept very still and quiet.” The community accepted an offer from WTI to m
ove: WTI purchased rich land suitable for spice growing and built a village there, far from elephants. The villagers took up this offer with delight: they saw it as a no-brainer. I was there for the official opening: I had the honour of cutting the ribbon for the official opening of one of the new houses. I then went back to the old and now abandoned village: the rice paddies had already dried up and the scrub was invading. The process of replanting the place with forest trees had yet to begin, but the elephants were already crossing and recrossing, as you could see from the soup-tureen footprints and the great fat loaves of dung. Vivek was inclined to be boisterous: “Look at this land! This is my land and it is ruined! And I am so happy!”

  Elephants attract attention, elephants stir the emotions. The designation of these places as elephant corridors concentrates the mind most beautifully. But the fact is that if a corridor is wide enough for an elephant or rather, for a herd of elephants, it’s wide enough for everything else as well. The elephants are just the figureheads. But what sounds better: wildlife corridors? Or elephant corridors? We are instinctively on the side of the elephants. We are capable of thinking beyond our own species, not just as an intellectual effort, but with our hearts and guts: from the bottom of our being. We don’t want to be considered apes or monkeys, we don’t want to be called animals, but consistency is for wimps. We are proud to be kin to the elephants.

  * * *

  I. In the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, where else?

  II. The Dutch ethologist and ornithologist, Niko Tinbergen, used that phrase when explaining his passion for gulls.

  III. A Sanskrit word for god, which can be used of any benevolent super-being.

  IV. The line runs between New Jalpaiguri and Assam in eastern Bengal. In 2010, seven elephants were killed in a single accident.

  The holiness of tapeworms

  Jain monks and nuns filter their water so that they don’t accidentally swallow a fly when they drink. They go barefoot and they sweep the ground before them, so they won’t inadvertently extinguish a small life as they walk. They do not wish to kill anything, harm anything or insult any living thing. Tolerance of other views is just one aspect of this. William Blake famously said: “Everything that lives is holy.”I Which brings us back to flatworms.

  How reluctant would you be to extinguish the life of a tapeworm? Are you prepared to concede the holiness of a living tapeworm? Tapeworms make up the Cestoda class of flatworms; in the adult form they spend most of their lives in the digestive tracts of vertebrates. About 1,000 species have been described so far, and they can affect every single species of vertebrates: us and our fellow mammals, all birds, reptiles, amphibians and yes, all “fish” as well. Tapeworms look like a length of tape: they are flat, being flatworms. You can ingest them in undercooked or raw pork, beef and fish, or by means of poor food hygiene. To be more specific, someone who absent-mindedly scratches his arse while making you a cheese sandwich could pass on a tapeworm egg by means of faecal contamination.II I’m sorry, this isn’t a very nice chapter, but at least it’s a short one. If we’re going to take on all living things, we have to look away from elephants and hummingbirds every now and then.

  Beef tapeworms can be 12 m or 40 feet long; others can be even longer, 30 m or 100 feet. Perhaps their length is the truly sinister thing about tapeworms: a tiny fleck of a beast like a liver fluke seems in a way to be fair game: a thing half as long again as a cricket pitch is something quite different. (Sir David Attenborough, in a television interview, talked about his realisation, on return from some trip to the wild world, that he had “a little friend”.)

  Tapeworms work by attaching themselves to the intestine with what one can loosely call the head. It’s called the scolex, and it has sucking grooves or hooks. Once anchored, the tapeworm can spread out and enjoy itself, absorbing food through its flattened surfaces. There are no symptoms associated with possession by tapeworm, certainly no vast and voracious appetite, as in popular banter. A tapeworm’s host might feel some discomfort, and, perversely, a certain loss of appetite. It can survive inside you for as long as 20 years.

  The length of a tapeworm is a slightly confusing issue. Any worm of respectable length is actually a chain of beings called proglottids, each one of which has male and female structures, and can reproduce independently. So it probably makes more sense to regard each worm as a colony. A whole playground of little friends, in fact.

  Life delights in life. That is the less-often quoted part of that line from Blake at the start of the chapter. Where you find life you can generally find more life. Life cannot exist as a monoculture, for all that humans seem to be hell-bent on trying that experiment. Life depends on life. Humans depend on corn and rice and cows: tapeworms (some of them anyway) depend on humans. It is not literally true that every possible way of making a living has some creature exploiting it, but there are far more creatures filling strange niches than the human imagination could ever come up with. Parasitism is just one of them. It works because life delights in life.

  * * *

  I. The line comes from William Blake’s poem America: A Prophecy. Blake was very keen on America as a place where humans could make a new start, free from all the terrible errors that we had made in the old world and in the old society. I wonder what he’d make of the place today. The sunflower that turns its head westward, towards America, following the sun each day, was Blake’s symbol of this yearning for a new place, a new start. It is important to accept that no such place exists in the modern world. That’s as true for human society as it is for the non-human creatures we share the planet with. We can only work with the places we’ve already got.

  II. Experts in food hygiene call the process “turd-to-tongue”.

  Plan A for aardvark

  You only see aardvarks when you’re drunk. You may be told this when you are travelling in Africa, and certainly, I can provide experimental verification. The only time I saw an aardvark was on the way back from a party in the Luangwa Valley. In point of fact, I wasn’t terribly drunk; the party was rather fraught, dominated by a loud American hunter, and I found the occasion unsympathetic. All the same, when we found our aardvark on our merry way home, I instantly doubted such sobriety as I possessed. The most improbable-looking thing you could ever see: there it was, caught in the lights and looking like a bad drawing of itself. Sometimes, at moments of extreme excitement, you feel that it can’t really be you out there in the wild seeing so wonderful a creature. I felt that when seeing my one and only tiger; I felt that when gloriously close to humpback whales. But when I saw my aardvark, I doubted not myself but the thing I was seeing.

  This singularity is not a superficial thing. The singularity of aardvarks goes marrow-deep; no, deeper, twining down into the aardvark DNA. There’s only one aardvark. The species is the only member of its genus, the only member of its family, the only member of its order. We like to push the claims for human uniqueness even though we belong to an order with 300-odd other species of primate. Aardvarks can give us a lesson in uniqueness. Just look at their teeth.

  If you are a mammalogist, you spend most of your time getting excited about teeth. You don’t spend your time looking at mammary glands, not when you’re on duty, anyway, because just about all mammals have them and by their nature, they’re not things that vary very much. Mammary glands unite us: teeth divide us. If you want to know what sort of mammal you are considering, look at the teeth. A good observer will be able to tell you what a mammal eats from the briefest examination of a few teeth or a chunk of jaw.

  Teeth matter very greatly to almost all mammals. We have warm blood, we have a high metabolic rate, we feed our young on milk. In other words, we have a very high output, so obviously, we need a very high input – and teeth are all about input. Teeth are how we prepare our food for digestion, often how we take hold of it, sometimes how we catch it and kill it. For a mammal, teeth are in the front line of the struggle for existence.

  And nothing has teeth like an aardvark. They don’t n
eed to chew their food, so they don’t need incisors or canines. They have continuously growing open-rooted cheek teeth, described as “two upper and two lower premolars and three upper and three lower molars in each half-jaw”.I The teeth are not covered by enamel but by a “thin bonelike tissue known as cementum”. All of which means that aardvark teeth are unique and therefore aardvarks themselves are unique. In the ant and termite world-view, the aardvark is surely the embodiment of all evil: each one will – must – eat more than 50,000 insects a night. That’s 50,000 individual lives required to get an aardvark through 24 hours of life: and we think lions and tigers are ferocious.

  Aardvarks are tremendously good at what they do. When it comes to termites and ants these creatures are pros. They are superb diggers: four digits on the front feet and five on the back, each equipped with a spoon-shaped claw. Long, thin tongue, and sticky saliva to flypaper up the insects. They have a stomach that grinds up food, so they don’t need to chew it; that explains something of their idiosyncratic dentition. They are also immensely strong. One of our post-party group – I shall leave his name out as it’s something he’s not so terribly proud of, and he’s a very solid citizen these days – leapt from the vehicle and set off after the aardvark. As it dived into a hole, he grabbed it by the tail and tried to pull it out. He was a pretty strong guy, built like a Zambian scrum-half, and he knew how to use his strength, too. He planted both feet on either side of the hole and used his weight and leverage action to pull the aardvark free. Slowly, bit by bit, the aardvark, resisting the pull, dug deeper and deeper, until his brandy-and-coke-fuelled tormentor had to give up.