Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  II. I prefer this plural; mongooses may be strictly correct but it sounds all wrong.

  The daughters of Doris

  The longest of all animals comes from the phylum of ribbon worms, or Nemertea. This is the bootlace worm and the record is 54 m, 177 feet. This is considered unstretched and a good record, unlike the specimen mentioned on page 89. Even Usain Bolt takes five seconds to travel from one end of Lineus longissimus to the other. It’s only a few millimetres wide: this is as close as we can get to an animal that has length without width. Euclid called a line “breadthless length” and that’s the impression given by the ribbon worms: creatures that apparently exist in a single dimension.

  As you will imagine, such a creature is immensely fragile. They’re always breaking up, but snapping in half is the last thing to worry a ribbon worm. It just becomes two ribbon worms: or more than two: fragmentation is a matter of routine. They do sex as well; some of them are hermaphrodites and the rest go in for that old-fangled male-female stuff.

  Most ribbon worms are small as well as thin: the bootlace worm is exceptional. Most species measure less than 20 cm, 8 inches. It’s not a massive phylum: 1,150 species in 41 families, most of them soft, slimy and cylindrical: yet another phylum that shows us how many ways there are of being a worm. Worminess is such a good, straightforward, no-nonsense concept that it has evolved again and again. There are a dozen or so freshwater species of ribbon worm and another dozen that can make a go of it in moist places on land, all of them tropical or subtropical. The rest are marine. Most of these can be found in sediment, or in crevices made by rocks and shells. Some make themselves a semi-permanent burrow lined with mucus. Most creep about, some of them gliding on a trail of slime. A few are free-swimming, moving with an up-and-down motion. They are named Nemertea for the sea nymph Nemertes; she was the daughter of Nereus and, really rather pleasingly, Doris.

  Some of them are lovely things, in their worm-like way, coloured yellow, orange, red or green, some with patterns so they look like gently prehensile old school ties drifting through the waters of the ocean. But they are also remarkable and voracious predators, armed with a hidden weapon that operates in the manner of an interplanetary menace from Doctor Who. This is the proboscis, a device they keep hidden in a sac on their heads, just above the mouth. When it is time for action, they turn the sac inside out and it becomes a lethal weapon. Some of them have spikes for gripping and/or piercing, and some employ venom to immobilise their prey. The proboscis is controlled by a muscle than can stretch 30 times its own length: a thing of fearsome power. Ribbon worms prey on crustaceans, annelid worms and molluscs, even fish; some scavenge dead animals. They can pick on annelid worms their own size. They’re not all fierce, though: a few species filter-feed, and others absorb dissolved nutrients directly from the water through the skin: this is where extreme length becomes a major asset.

  All those worms. All those different sorts of worms. And just part of the kingdom of animals which is just one of the kingdoms of life on earth. I remember on that same trip to Namibia, the one on which I caught the springhare in the spotlight, we camped out in the desert one night. We started setting up camp as the sun began to get serious about coming down. As it did so, we had a beer,I obviously. There was a star in the sky. There were a good few stars in the sky. There were many stars in the sky. We had another Hansa. There was no moon. There was no light on the ground for many miles in any direction. There was no cloud, it being desert. It had been a still day; there was no dust. And because of all these things, stars followed stars which followed stars: more and more and more and more. The white cloud of the Milky Way looked like a solid thing. Eventually, I was lying in my sleeping bag on my back, wondering at that incredible sky. Had Van Gogh just painted it? No: he wouldn’t have dared: portraying a sky like that would have caused him to forfeit all credibility as a painter who worked from life. This was beyond anything he ever painted: there were more white bits in the sky than black bits. And the more you looked the more you saw.

  And that’s what it’s like looking at the Animal Kingdom: more than you ever thought, more than you are capable of thinking of, one after another after another after another. And each in its own way a star.

  * * *

  I. Namibian beer is rather specially good, something to do with the German influence; it was a German colony from 1884 to 1915. Hansa, Windhoek and Tafel: they all slip down a treat.

  Flashin’ sunshine children

  Shrews are not rodents. They were traditionally classified in a catch-all group called insectivores; these days they are found in their own order of Soricomorpha, which contains getting on for 400 species. Like rodents, they look like something the cat brought in, and for the best of reasons. There was a time when shrews were given a hero’s role in the history of the earth. They beat the dinosaurs because of their quick wits and nimble bodies, and so paved the way for the Age of Mammals and the rise of good old glorious us. The little shrew-like nibblers created the new and glorious world we inhabit today. This idea is celebrated in a song of Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, written by Kantner, Grace Slick and Joey Covington on their album Blows Against the Empire. Here’s how the little heroes struck their blows against the empire of the dinosaurs:

  Tyrannosaurus rex was destroyed before

  by a furry little ball that crawled along

  the primeval forest floor

  and he stole the eggs of the dinosaur…

  we are the egg-stealers

  flashin’ sunshine children

  Diamond thieves…

  It’s a great image: an outmoded civilisation being destroyed by nimble little utopians in a song for the new age. Alas, the science doesn’t stack up. The world was changed not by utopian shrews but by a meteor that struck the earth 65 million years ago. The rise of the mammals was nothing to do with their/our intelligence or their/our long-term planning or anything else to their/our credit. It was a matter of dumb luck.

  How to define luck? We are invited to despise the very idea of luck. To say you believe in luck is either a confession of weakness or an elaborate piece of false modesty. But there is a difference between luck and superstition. To believe that you can influence the course of events by crossing your fingers or putting your right cricket pad on before your left cricket pad is pretty silly, even though the process helps some people to cope with uncertainty. But luck can best be defined as the influence on your life of things beyond your control. This taboo subject was explored in a book by Ed Smith with the not inappropriate title of Luck. Ed, a friend of mine, is a former cricketer who played three times for England. He was given out incorrectly when looking good in his last innings for England: that was unlucky. Beyond his control, certainly. It’s also bad luck when your number fails to come up at roulette: but that doesn’t mean it’s not your own bloody silly fault if you’ve staked the mortgage on 17.

  A great deal of the history of life comes down to luck. Mammals, and by extension humans, got to be where they are today not because they are better or smarter, but because of the right meteor at the right time. In the same way, an animal might be perfectly adapted to water. What does it do when the climate changes and the place becomes a desert? What does it do when humans drain it? Smith implied that recognising good luck for what it is – not something you have earned, not something you deserve because of some special talent or quality of personality – is a necessary part of living a balanced life. We might think of taking on this concept at the level of species, or at the level of class or even phylum.

  Because I am many

  And still the stars come out: what can you do but have another beer and gaze in wonder? There are at least 4,000 species of bryozoans out there: a galaxy of them. Most of us don’t know that bryozoans even exist, but there they are, living their lives with a desperate urgency to survive, in ways undreamt of by most of us humans, with a baffling ingenuity and in numbers that make us dizzy. And they’re all animals, just like us.

&nbs
p; Bryozoans are quite ridiculously small, measuring around 0.5 mm, .02 inches. But they don’t operate as individuals. They operate as colonies. Many of them look like corals, but they’re a good deal more complex. A lot of species form mats on hard surfaces and on seaweeds, and they look a little like moss; Bryozoa means moss animal in Greek. Serious taxonomists tend to prefer Ectoprocta, but the more ancient name has stuck for informal use – informal use, that is, among the few people with whom the subject of moss animals crops up.

  They filter-feed by means of a retractable crown of tentacles, beating hairs on them to waft impossibly minute food particles into the mouth, and there’s an anus for getting rid of waste: and that’s the basic form of an individual in a bryozoan colony. These individuals, all unviable alone, are called zooids. Each one is genetically identical; they reproduce by budding off new zooids. They can also reproduce sexually, but inside the colony they are simply capable of becoming more: I becomes we again and again. The feeding individuals are called autozooids. But colonies are capable of producing non-feeding zooids with specialist functions: as hatcheries for fertilised eggs, as defenders of the colony, even as legs, which allow some forms of bryozoan colonies to creep along. Channels between the individuals of the colony allow the non-feeders to be fed by the feeders. In other words, the individuals of the colony cooperate in the same way that organs in a body do. Most of these colonies are around 10 cm, 4 inches, across but there are some monsters that can reach a metre, more than a yard.

  One rum thing about the defensive individuals is that they don’t develop until the colony has been threatened. The colony produces defensive zooids in response to a threat: which implies that most individual threats are sublethal in colony terms. All the same, they have plenty of predators: sea slugs, fish, sea urchins, crustaceans and starfish. There are some freshwater species, which get preyed upon by insects, fish and snails. Most are found in tropical waters, and few go deeper than 100 m, 330 feet. But the wild world always loves to confuse us with exceptions and bewildering experiments, and there are some species of bryozoans that prosper in the deep oceanic trenches. Some species grow a calcified outer skin, much as corals do; others are soft-bodied. The moss-like mats gave them their name, but they are also capable of producing more fanciful shapes: bush-like, or fan-like, with a trunk; some like small corals; others like leaves, tufts, and one like an open head of lettuce.

  I was on the beach at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire with Anthony Hurd of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, and he was showing me the creatures of the intertidal zone. As I walked across a patch of frondy seaweed, he told me that this was horn wrack, and it wasn’t a seaweed at all. It was a bryozoan, or rather a bryozoan colony. He described it as “a faunal lawn”. It was a deeply disturbing piece of information: there seemed to me at once, at a relatively deep level, to be an important moral difference between walking on a plant and walking on an animal.

  That breathtaking breath

  It was so close I could smell it. The breath, I mean. The sound filling the ears. How could such a thing breathe like me and you, be like me and you, have a brain like me and you, and presumably be capable, at least to an extent, of thinking like me and you – and yet live here? Here was Knight Inlet in British Columbia, a place where the mountains hit the sea and just keep on going. Right by the shore, the depth was 800 feet. I felt an odd sort of vertigo sitting on top of so much water, so close to the shore and yet so far above anything solid. I was in an open boat maybe 12 feet, less than 4 metres, long with Janie Ray of Cetacealab and Neekas the dog. Janie knows everybody who lives in these vertiginous waters: her work, her study, her joy. So does Neekas, who greets whales with a whale bark never used at any other time. Janie invited me out with her for a day of whale-surveying, and so, clad in clownish clothing, every ounce of which I needed against the chill (clothing which made having a pee a hilarious business, it being a great deal thicker than a half-frozen penis), I journeyed with her across the sound trying to focus binoculars with hands in things like boxing gloves. There was an occasional cry of ravens from the shore, the background burbling of the engine. And then the breath.

  Huge. Loud. Visible too, hanging over the water, warm from the lungs and condensing in the vicious cold of the air. Maybe 20 feet off. Humpback whale. I could have dived off the boat and touched him. Shallow dome of the head against the bouncing grey water. How long would I survive in there? But it was home itself for him, my brother, my fellow mammal, my colleague in breathing, my colleague also in the warmth of our blood, the live birthing of our females, in the complexities of our brain, in our deeply social instincts, even in our taste for song. The things that united us were far more than the things that divided us.

  The concept of a whale boggles the mind. Life began in the oceans and took its time before colonising the land. These land colonialists eventually produced mammals in an astonishing diversity, as we have seen in these pages: large and small, fierce and peaceful. And then some of them went back to the sea. The seals kept their legs and must give birth on land: they are half-and-halfers, as looked at already. But the whales and dolphins – collectively cetaceans – went all the way. They live in the sea, they give birth in the sea. They only come to the land – sometimes, but quite rarely – to die. A perfectly adapted water beast that can drown: it is a strange and troubling thought. All the same, if you were to examine a skeleton of a blue whale, say, or the comparatively tiny harbour porpoise that you can see off the coast of Britain, you will find a few small useless bits of bone about two-thirds of the way towards the tail. Leg-bones: vestigial fragments; souvenirs of their land-walking past. Their distant ancestors were probably the Raoellidae,I a family of artiodactyls, the group that includes antelopes, sheep and cows. This is all highly counter-intuitive, I know: but the ear is significantly similar – the inner ear, that is, because whales don’t go in for external ears, which aren’t much help in water.

  The whale before our tiny boat – he was maybe as much as four times longer than us – ducked his head and with monumental inevitability the rest of him followed. The oddly small dorsal fin. He slowly poured himself, bit by bit, back into the world below the surface, gathering pace. And that glorious, terrifying moment as the tail flukes drippingly soared clear of the water, a massive white-blotched black Y in the sky that briefly stood twice a man’s height over our boat and then slithered almost soundlessly below the surface. “Bullet!” Janie sang out, making her ID from what looked like, and probably was, a bullet hole in one of the flukes, a contribution to science from the legion of sportsmen that grace this planet. And Janie took notes of the individual, his behaviour, his position via GPS, just a tiny part of the mass of data she has collected about the humpback whales of Knight Inlet. She has perhaps even more data on the orcas, also known as killer whales, which come to the inlet in the spring.

  The variousness of cetaceans is captured in these two species. The humpback is huge, its mouth equipped with great baleen sieves: it ingests a vast multi-gallon mouthful of food, and shoves the seawater back out again through the sieves with the action of its muscular tongue. The orca is smaller – though still big enough in all conscience – and toothed, and is a famous predator. Both species live lives of varying social complexity, which Janie records with detached wonderment, though always with a thoroughly undetached joy behind it. Cetaceans do that to us humans: they lift hearts, they inspire.

  They come in about 90 species: 90-odd mammals that decided to act like fish: though fish with a strong mammalian accent that gives them away at every turn. Ishmael in Moby Dick concludes that whales are fish and in an informal folk taxonomy they are certainly more like fish than they are like dormice or lions. But most fish swim with a side-to-side motion: cetaceans are uppy-downy, beating the water with their horizontal flukes. They breathe through a blowhole in the top of their heads: the spume of the condensing exhalation, the spout, can be used to identify species of whales and dolphins at a distance. Their vast body size makes them spectacu
larly efficient at long dives – 30 minutes at a time is not uncommon. But when not plunging deep for food they will stay nearer the surface. Here’s a hint: if you are looking for humpbacks, survey the sea before you for seven minutes precisely. If a whale hasn’t shown itself in that time, it’s probably not there: seven minutes between breaths is easy and comfortable for a humpback.

  * * *

  I. This is disputed in some quarters, of course, but that’s paleontology for you.

  Getting silly

  “Now I do my best to keep things moving along, but I’m not having things getting silly.” Words spoken by Graham Chapman in Monty Python’s Flying Circus when dressed as a full colonel. In that episode he kept popping up in the middle of a sketch to bring it to a premature close, explaining: “Stop! It’s getting silly!” Which is rather what I feel about the Animal Kingdom now I’ve got as far as lampshells. You can call them brachiopods, if you don’t think that’s silly.

  But it is, isn’t it? Lampshells are very much like the shellfish you get in your spaghetti vongole but with one crucial difference: they’re completely different. Your vongole, like your oysters and scallops and cockles and mussels and for that matter, your escargots as well, are all molluscs. That is their phylum and it contains some of the world’s most spectacular and enormous creatures. We’ll get to them as soon as we have worked our way through all the silly phyla. Your lampshells look much more like vongole than many other molluscs, but they inhabit a quite separate phylum, as different (if we but knew it) from vongole as vongole are from humans. No! Stop this chapter at once! It’s getting silly.