Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  Lampshells are marine animals with twin hard shells. “Who isn’t?” the vongole ask. And now for something completely the same. Ah, but they’re not the same, because the shells – valves, to be more technical, etymologically doors – are on the upper and lower surfaces of the animal, while those of a bivalve (two-doored) mollusc are on the left and right. I know: you could hold up either shell and swivel it though 90 degrees to get the same effect, or so you’d have thought – but that’s not what the taxonomists mean. It’s a fundamentally different arrangement that doesn’t depend on which way up the creature happens to be: it’s all in the organisation of the organs of the body.

  Lampshells come in two main types, and I’m afraid this is a little on the silly side as well. Like professional athletes, they are divided into the articulate and inarticulate. Articulate lampshells have toothed hinges to the shells and simple musculature for opening and closing them; while the inarticulate ones (“All I had to do was tap it and the ball was in the back of the net”) are untoothed and complex. So it’s all pretty straightforward, really. Lampshells differ dramatically (well, fairly dramatically) from bivalve molluscs in one way, though: they feed with tentacles, which is a radical departure.

  They look less molluscan when standing up; many of them can do so on a stalk called a pedicle, looking faintly plant-like. They are an ancient group, with fossils found as far back as the early Cambrian: these are creatures that go right back to the dawn of multicellular life. There are over 12,000 species of fossil lampshells described, divided into 5,000 genera. The largest fossils measure up to 20 cm, 8 inches; modern ones are around half that at the largest, with most much smaller. Modern lampshells are down to a mere 100 species: survivors of a group that once filled the seas – but they still have their existence and their meaning and their relevance. Life is not silly so far as a lampshell is concerned: and the fittestI still survive.

  * * *

  I. Fittest doesn’t mean strongest. The word “fit” means “suitable”, as in a meal fit for a king. It’s not the strongest animal that survives; it’s the one most suited to the conditions. Being small and weak and good at running away can be a very suitable adaptation, making the animal that possesses these skills much fitter than one that is larger, stronger and fiercer. A human “gets fit” in order to become suitable for, say, running a marathon. This confusion of “fitness” with “strength” is responsible for an awful lot of the misunderstanding of Darwin that takes place among English-speaking people. Mind you, non-English-speaking people have always found plenty of other ways to misunderstand Darwin. The fact is that the truths he revealed are uncomfortable to deal with, no matter what culture you come from: that’s why Darwin’s revelations about life are so often twisted into some kind of attractive mythology.

  Song of the sea

  As the humpback whales of British Columbia leave the cold, food-rich waters to travel south, so they give themselves up to song. They will sing on their feeding grounds and they will sing on migration, but it’s down in the warm waters off the Pacific coast of Colombia that the humpbacks sing in real earnest, as they sport and flirt and those that find favour mate. Not much eating goes on in these balmy waters: they give their all to the pursuit of each other. Perhaps that’s as it should be: at certain stages of your year (or life) you give all your thoughts to work and the issues of making a living; at others you give yourself entirely up to love. You spend half your time working in the cold, the other half seeking love in a warm climate. I have been told that there is one excellent reason for this colossal feat of migration, one not unfamiliar to male humans: male whales can’t get an erection in freezing-cold water, so they move south to bask in the hot sexy waters around the equator. Alas, this deeply attractive theory doesn’t, as it were, stand up.

  But what is certain is that in the warm waters they lift their voices in song. Birdsong has been part of human experience since our ancestors first walked upright on the savannahs of Africa; whalesong has been known for not much more than half a century. It was discovered by an American listening out for Russian submarines off Bermuda; the first recordings of whalesong were made in 1952. The humpbacks were always the champions, though the blue whales of the Indian Ocean are also fine singers. The song of the humpbacks has been described by Philip Clapham, a leading cetacean scientist, as the most complicated song in the entire Animal Kingdom, with, I assumed, the exception of humans. I asked him for clarification; he responded to this impertinence: “Well, since to date humpback whales have not been observed to produce operas, write choral works or even sing a cappella, they don’t rival humans in musical ability. The major features of humpback whalesong are its complexity relative to other [non-human] animals, the fact that it changes constantly, and that somehow all the males in a particular population sing the same song and yet keep up with those changes.”

  The songs have been much analysed and broken down. Four to six units constitute a subphrase which lasts around ten seconds; two of these make a phrase, which is repeated for two to four minutes to become a theme. Themes are put together to become a song, which lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour. A whale will repeat this song note for note, sometimes for hours, or even days. All whales in any one community or area will sing the same song at any one point in time, though the song will continually change and develop. Each year brings a changed song, significantly developed from the previous year’s; analysis over 19 years has shown that the same song is never repeated from season to season. The precise function of the song is not entirely clear, though it is a male thing. It seems to have competitive elements to it, males trying to outsing each other; it seems also to be used to attract females. A group of males has been found singing simultaneously (though not in unison) to a single female. There may also be a territorial function. Is the principal function to repel males or to attract females? Interesting point, though I am inclined to question the actual question here. All love songs celebrate the lover every bit as much as the beloved.

  The whales start to sing before they leave Knight Inlet and Janie Ray. The males get increasingly interested in the notion of dominance hierarchy as spring approaches and, with ever-fuller bellies, they can start thinking about migration, warm weather and erections. They will posture to each other – rituals of showing off, or if you prefer, a kind of non-contact combat. And the singing will begin. The steep sides of the inlet and the continental shelf offer something rather special to a humpback: an echo. The song bounces back at them. They seem to be singing to their own echo: Janie puts this down as practice, as honing the voice ready for the meaningful encounters of the warm water. But perhaps it’s a kind of duetting, like John Lennon with his love for double-tracked vocals. Perhaps whales simply get lost in the song, enthralled by their own musicality; though the cold water of science must also point out that they may ignore the echo entirely.

  There is a continuing mystery in the songs of the whales: but with the mystery a kind of understanding, a feeling of closeness. These great rolling unending love songs sound impossibly remote from us: and yet they are also something we can empathise with: vast echoing symphony-length love songs, changing with the insistent march of culture. There is nothing fanciful in this assessment. It has been demonstrated that the songs of humpback whales from the Pacific Ocean on the eastern coast of Australia completely displaced the songs of the west coast population from the Indian Ocean: “A revolutionary change unprecedented in the animal cultural vocal traditions,” the scientists concluded, calling it nothing less than a cultural revolution. A new song, Clapham said, will “spread like a wave across the South Pacific”. We humans used to think that culture was unique to us, was what defined us, was what separated us from the rest of the Animal Kingdom. Whalesong tells us otherwise. Humpbacks are our colleagues in breathing: they are also our colleagues in song and our colleagues in the cultural transmission of song.

  Dirty beasts

  We have celebrated invertebrate taxonomy as a silly joke:
now it is time to celebrate it as a dirty joke. We come now to the phylum of priapulids, or penis worms. One look at some of these species is enough to tell you that the people who named them didn’t have particularly dirty minds. These worms, gentlemen, really do look like your dick.

  And – well, that’s about it, really. Once we’ve got the dirty joke out of the way, there’s not much more to say. There are only 16 known species in the entire phylum, though there are fossil priapulids from the middle of the Cambrian era; like the bryozoans, they go right back to the start of multicellular life. Back then, it seems, they were a great deal more numerous. They are not vastly relevant to modern ecosystems, but we have to give them credit for hanging on. They mostly like marine sediment, and some of them can live several kilometres deep. They range from (readers are invited to make their own size-matters joke at this point) from 0.5 to 20 cm, 0.2 to 8 inches, in length. The small ones feed on bacteria, the larger on small slow-moving invertebrates.

  Some species have an extensible spiny proboscis which gives the surreal dick-like effect. They come in male and female forms and they mate in the male-female manner we can relate to. And various characteristics make it abundantly clear that they are not closely connected with any other form of life on earth. They aren’t afterthoughts; if anything, they are beforethoughts: a phylum of not-quite-obsolete animals that still make a living in the silt of obscurity, remote from human consciousness.

  Gnomes of the river

  Perhaps cetaceans represent the most extreme form of mammal: the land animal that went back to the sea, and in doing so, produced the blue whale, the largest animal ever to make a living on planet earth. You’d have thought that this was enough, somehow. But the forces of evolution came up with an extreme form of the extreme form: and what’s more, they did it not once but six times.

  Here’s an important thing to learn if you go chasing wildlife: if you base a trip around a search for one particular species, you will often be disappointed – but you might see something even more marvellous while you’re looking. And anyway, if you go to wild places there’s always something. I tried, then, not to be too disappointed when I failed to see tigers in Nepal. These things happen, and anyway, the forest was pretty wonderful. I then moved on to Koshi Tappu for the waterbirds. One afternoon we made a trip to the Koshi Barrage:I a vast water management device strung across the Koshi River, which eventually joins the Ganges. And there I encountered one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.

  Well, three of them, to be precise. An unearthly pallor about them. A ridiculous shape: like dolphins drawn by a small child. A long beak and round forehead. Each one about 6 feet long. And leaping from the water, as if it were suddenly boiling. They were Ganges river dolphins, dolphins who have abandoned the oceans to live in the murk and silt at the bottom of rivers in the Ganges system; there is a subspecies that does the same thing in the Indus. They are almost blind; they seek out fish by echolocation, and with the dextrous use of that beak, which is four times longer than the beaks of any of the species of marine dolphins. River dolphins are supposed to be much less active than the marine ones, but the Ganges dolphins like a bit of a leap every now and then. “In turbulent water, when disturbed by a boat, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all, Ganges river dolphin leap,” says the frankly baffled Lyall WatsonII in Whales of the World.III And here before me were three of them, leaping for no apparent reason at all. They reminded me of a dolphin version of the gnomes that live deep beneath the ground in CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair: “All carried three-pronged spears in their hands and all were dreadfully pale. Apart from that, they were very different; some had tails and others not, some wore great beards and others had very round, smooth faces, big as pumpkins.” The parallel isn’t precise, I know, but they are all pale and they all look bizarre and they all live in deep dark depths, leading a life that we surface-dwellers find dark, dismaying and unwelcoming.

  There are six species of river dolphins, or rather there were. There’s the Ganges and Indus dolphins, which make up one good species between them, sometimes called the South Asian river dolphin. There is the Amazon river dolphin or boto, and the River Plate dolphin that inhabits salty estuaries at the southern tip of South America, the Araguaian river dolphin and the Bolivian river dolphin. There was also, until very recently, the Yangtze river dolphin. These species are not closely related: rather, the same basic idea has evolved four times over.

  The Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, was declared functionally extinct in 2006 after a 45-day expedition found no trace of a living specimen. Since then, an individual has been videoed, but alas, any surviving baiji belongs to a class known informally among scientists and conservationists as the Living Dead: members of a species that has no future. Overfishing and damming of the Yangtze has helped to do for the baiji, along with sound pollution. Any one has been swimming when there is a motorboat in the water will understand: water carries sound unnervingly well, and the noise of an engine fills your ears even when it’s a couple of hundred yards away. The busy highway of the modern Yangtze is forever filled with the sound of engines: how can a dolphin echolocate in such circumstances? How can it even think? Douglas Adams, hunting for the baiji in Last Chance to See in the 1980s, pondered the life of the dolphin in the modern Yangtze and suggested that it was like a blind man trying to live in a disco. “Since man invented the engine the baiji’s river world must have become a complete nightmare.”

  * * *

  I. The man-made embankment by the Koshi Barrage gave way in 2008, causing disastrous flooding which made a million people homeless and affected 2.3 million in Bihar in India.

  II. The same Lyall Watson that gave us Supernature, an attempted scientific study of the paranormal, a major hit of the 1970s. Watson also did television commentary on sumo wrestling.

  III. When I first looked at the pictures of Ganges river dolphins in this book, I assumed that the illustration was the work of an incompetent draughtsman; obviously no living dolphin could look like that. It is, of course, accurate in every way, just as the pictures of the aardvark were.

  Us alone

  It is in our nature to set humans apart from the rest of the Animal Kingdom. In an ideal taxonomy, if we could ignore such irritating things as facts, we would classify ourselves as a single genus, family, order, class. Better still, a single phylum: we ourselves us: us alone; sinn fein, which means we ourselves in Gaelic: we happy few, proudly and eternally alone. But we are cousins in apehood with chimpanzees and bonobos, we are colleagues in singing and breathing with the great whales, and we have an unbreakable bone-deep relationship with snakes and frogs and with everything that we loosely refer to as fish. There are, to our eternal dismay, thousands of us.

  If we want a single species that is also its own phylum, we must forget our proud selves and meet Trichoplax adhaerans: undisputed master of a phylum which includes no other. The placazoans are gloriously and disturbingly singular: one is one and all alone. This is the phylum that doesn’t do diversity. Almost uniquely, the lone placazoan has its being in uniqueness.

  Well, you can argue a second species if you like. Treptoplax repians was described in 1896, but nobody has seen it since, so it is probably kinder to forget it as a brief hallucination rather than explain it as a creature good to go. T. adhaerans rules the placazoans: a ruler without rival.

  The name means flat animal, which is fair enough; flat is what they are. Blobs, really. Flat blobs, up to 3 mm across. They have never been seen in their native habitat, no one knows that they eat in the wild, and it’s not even clear if they have sex. Or to put it another way, we don’t know much, do we? But they are something to do with the shores of warm oceans. They were discovered on the glass walls of an aquarium in a laboratory.

  They are wonderfully simple, with only four different kinds of cells. Even sponges have at least ten, some as many as 20. We mammals – all of us, not just humans – have more than 200. Placazoans are good creatures to argue about: it has be
en suggested that they could be the oldest branch of multicellular life. There is another theory that they are descended from more complex animals but have simplified and prospered, in their quiet way, as a result. That goes against the conventional myth of evolution: that it is a process of working towards ever-greater complexity, ever closer to perfection. But if simplicity works, evolution, not being bothered by any goal save that of survival, is perfectly prepared to drop both its dignity and it complexity and live.

  We humans like to think that we are loners, but we’re really not. We share our houses and our lives with dogs and cats and goldfish. We have meaningful relationships with horses:I that happens in cultures right across the world. We respond to birds because like birds, we are creatures of sight and sound: we share musicality with birds as well as with humpback whales. Before we had records and hi-fis and iPods, we had caged songbirds to brighten our homes and our days with music. Our sense of continuity with our fellow vertebrates makes the world more meaningful and more comfortable. We are, when we think about it, not only one of many, but happy to be so. It is not us but the placazoan who is always and implacably alone.

  * * *

  I. Many books have been written about a relationship between a human and a horse; I’ve written one myself: The Horsey Life, same publisher.

  Disgustingly upside down

  Mammals can exist deep in the ocean and sing their hearts out, so it’s hardly a big deal to find them taking to the air and navigating by radar as well. A quarter of all mammal species are bats. They range from whoppers with a wingspan as wide as a man is tall to ridiculous little things you could slip into your waistcoat pocket.