by Simon Barnes
We regard antelopes and other even-toed ungulates as supreme processors of grass: the kangaroo is every bit as good. Australia moved northwards as a result of tectonic action, and as it did so, the thick forests were replaced by more open habitats. To exploit such places you need to be able to process grass and cope with the exposure to predators that comes from being out in the open all the time. Antelopes and other placental grazers have teeth that grow continuously throughout their lives, allowing them to deal with a diet that is very demanding and wearing of teeth. Kangaroos can’t do that, but they operate a different system that works just as well. As their front teeth wear out, so the teeth behind them migrate forward and engage. It’s a method that allows a red kangaroo to live and graze for 15 to 20 years.
Kangaroos are a family, not a species. The superfamily of kangaroos, wallabies and rat-kangaroos comprises 68 living species, and they’re called macropods. The red kangaroo, the giant, the one we think of when we hear the word kangaroo, is the most recent: it’s only been around for the past five to 15 million years. Far from being primitive, it’s the very latest thing, in evolutionary terms. And it hops.
Why did they develop as hoppers rather than gallopers? It looks like a mistake, a fudge, a compromise, but it’s astonishingly efficient. Perhaps it’s the ideal gait for a pouch-bearing animal: better to carry a pouch full of baby vertically than horizontally if you are looking for sheer uninhibited speed. Hopping is pretty ungainly at low speeds, but once they move beyond 15 kph, 9 mph, kangaroos start to stretch out and shift. The hop is much more energy-efficient than a run because with each bound energy is stored in the tendons of the bent hind legs. In hopping you get a certain percentage of your forward motion as a freebie: like riding a pogo-stick. The reds can cruise at a sustained speed of 35 mph, 55 kph, and can touch on 60 mph, nearly 100 kph, in bursts. And they can clear a 3 m or 10 foot fence.
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I. There are still occasional claims of thylacine sightings in Tasmania, where they hung on after they had gone extinct on the mainland. If there are any left, they are surely, like the baiji, functionally extinct in the wild: members of the living dead. But what if humans could intervene and start a captive breeding population and reverse the extinction? This is what happened with the Arabian oryx. They were extinct in the wild; the world population was down to seven animals brought together from zoos across the world to Phoenix Zoo. They are now back out there in the wild as viable, though heavily protected and guarded, animals. There’s a similar story about the European bison. It is a pleasant fantasy to think that this might yet be done for the thylacine: though fantasy is all it is, in all probability.
The Hamlet worm
They’re the suicide worms. Reverse Samaritans. They make their living from the suicide of others: an unusual strategy. They come from the phylum of Nematomorpha, a confusing name that means they look a bit like Nematode worms even though they’re nothing to do with them. The members of this phylum live a four-part life: as an egg, as a pre-parasite, as a fully-baked parasite, and as an adult. The species Spinochordodes tellini parasitises grasshoppers, crickets and locusts. This invasion gives the animal an infection that affects its brain, and thus its behaviour. The unfortunate grasshopper is compelled to seek out water and drown… thereby allowing the parasite to leave its host and return to the water, where it becomes an adult. It can then go wormily squirming off to find another adult and make eggs. This behaviour has been the subject of experiments: the degree to which the infected grasshopper actively seeks water is uncertain, but certainly its behaviour becomes very erratic and it tends to end up drowned. In short, the creature is driven first to madness and then to suicide by drowning. What Hamlet did to Ophelia, this nematomorph does to grasshoppers.
Nematomorphs are sometimes known as horsehair worms. They are often found in water troughs, and it was once thought that falling horsehair somehow turned into worms. They are also referred to as Gordian worms, a much better name, because they are prone to knotting. Some of them measure 50–100 cm, 20–39 inches, and you even get the odd whopper up to 2 m. They are never thicker than 3 mm, 0.12 inches. Most of them are found in streams and puddles, water troughs and cisterns. There are a few species that make a go of it in damp earth and five that have moved out to sea. The adults of these seagoing worms are to be found in plankton; the larvae parasitise crabs. There are about 350 species of nematomorphs described; most of them parasitise beetles as well the grasshopper group, the orthopterans.
Their game plan is to do their eating as parasites and then take to the water to reproduce. They are staggeringly simple: the adults have no excretory, respiratory or circulatory system. But they are adept at survival: they can, for example, survive even after their host has been eaten, wriggling out of the predator to seek another victim. Some species employ an interim host, technically called a paratenic host. They don’t affect this host: they just will it to die. When the host is consumed they will parasitise the consumer.
Death comes for the Elephant’s Child
I was overwhelmed by grief and it was the grief of an elephant. I can see her now: pacing hopelessly backwards and forwards in the long Groucho-Marx stride that elephants adopt for extremes of emotion, and I can hear her, too. For she was howling with grief. Her behaviour was so startling, so odd, it took a while to understand what was going on. It was night. There was a group of elephants around Mfuwe Lagoon in the Luangwa Valley, plainly visible in the spotlight. You must use a spotlight sparingly with elephants: sensitive animals, they find it intrusive and disturbing, so you must point the light away from them and observe them in indirect light: a Rembrandt chiaroscuro of mysterious and compelling shadows. The small herd consisted of half a dozen females and as many young ones. They were all milling around in a dreadfully troubled way: and one of them, distress in every line of her body as she moved desperately up and down, was screaming. It was a sound that terrified; it was a sound that broke my heart even before I understood.
But understanding came and it was terrible. The elephants had been drinking in the lagoon, some of them wading; there were black tidemarks on their grey pillared legs. Elephants, as the world knows, love water. So do crocodiles. And there was disturbance in the lagoon as well as on land: ripples and splashes and an awareness of big things moving about, big things happening. And then I saw it: in the lagoon the pathetic floating body of a drowned elephant. Not much more than a baby: a small child, if you like, a year old, just about. Crocodiles don’t move very much; when they do they strike like lightning from a clear sky. Here was Kipling’s comic story of “The Elephant’s Child” retold as tragedy. The sound of elephantine grief made it clear that no lesser term would do. Kipling’s elephant was saved from the crocodile by the enigmatic Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, but not before its nose had been stretched into a trunk. Not this time.
It is not anthropomorphising to say that the elephant was in grief. It is the plain obvious truth. She had witnessed the death – sudden, cruel and horribly dramatic – of her offspring. Of her son, or her daughter, of her child. And she was in a state of enormous distress. She clearly knew and understood what she had seen, and equally obviously, she didn’t take it lightly. Oddly enough, we often acknowledge the notion that grief is not restricted to humans when talking of some dreadful incident: people will say that “she made an animal groan” or “an inhuman cry escaped his lips”. Equally, when people write of dreadful incidents in the wild world, they sometimes say an animal made “an almost human sound”.
It is clear that grief can be observed in animals other than ourselves. And naturally we would expect to witness it in elephants. Elephants, whales and dolphins and the apes are all remarkable for their intelligence: and intelligence seems to involve recognisable emotion as well as the ability to do things like communicate, make plans and solve problems. Elephants have always been important to humans. If we are embarrassed to have an affinity with monkeys, we are proud to share at least some concerns with elephants.
In Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, Aunt Augusta produces words she had copied years before from the writings of St Frances de Sales,I and asks Henry to read it to her.
“ ‘The elephant,’ I read, ‘is only a huge animal, but he is the most worthy of beasts that live on the earth, and the most intelligent. I will give you an example of his excellence; he…’ The writing ran along a crease and I couldn’t read it, but my aunt chimed gently in. ‘He never changes his mate and he tenderly loves the one of his choice. Go on, dear.’
“ ‘With whom,’ I read, ‘nevertheless he mates but every third year, and then for five days only, and so secretly that he has never been seen to do so… But he is seen again on the sixth day, on which day, before doing anything else, he goes straight to some river wherein he bathes his whole body, for he has no desire to return to the herd until he has purified himself.’ ”
This is not very accurate as field observation, but it is very helpful indeed in telling us about the warm feelings humans have for elephants. I wrote an account of the shooting of an elephant in my novel Rogue Lion Safaris. I didn’t make it up. The incident was accurately – more or less slavishly – based on an incident involving my old friend Chris Breen, who was then working as a guide in the Luangwa Valley. He was so traumatised that he gave up guiding and returned to England. Years later, walking in the bush, he and I came across the bones of that elephant: he was moved beyond speech. Later, he told me the story in immense, second-by-second detail. He had put himself into extreme danger to protect his clients. The shot that killed the elephant almost certainly saved his life. I put every detail into the novel. It’s my words, mostly; it’s Chris’s voice, mostly:
“ ‘Why did you shoot him? Why did you shoot him?’
“Tears rivered unregarded down my face. It was at this point that I was seized by the urge to grab Aubrey’s gun and to batter him senseless with the butt. I could have done easily, so hotly did the adrenaline run. I think Aubrey knew that, for there was fear in his face. But I turned away, dropped into a crouch and sobbed unashamed.”
Grief can work both ways where elephants are concerned.
Cynthia Moss is the great matriarch of ethology, the study of animal behaviour. Her work on elephants, showing the ties of relationship and affection that animate elephantine society, has changed the way we look at elephants, at the wild world. She, too, writes of grief. Here are some lines from her wonderful Elephant Memories, telling of the events that followed the death of an elephant she called Tina at the hands of ivory poachers.
“Teresia and Trista became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but the body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and Tallulah even collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth. Finally Teresia got around behind her again, knelt down and worked her tusks under her shoulder and then straining with all her strength, she began to lift her. When she got to a standing position with the full weight of Tina’s head and front quarters on her tusks, there was a sharp cracking sound and Teresia dropped the carcass as her right tusk fell to the ground. She had broken it a few inches from the lip well into the nerve cavity, and a jagged bit of ivory and the bloody pulp was all that remained.
“They gave up then but did not leave. They stood around Tina’s carcass, touching it gently with their trunks and feet. Because it was rocky ground and the ground was wet, there was no loose dirt: but they tried to dig into it with their feet and trunks and when they managed to get a little earth up they sprinkled it over the body. Trista, Tia, and some of the others went off and broke branches from the surrounding low bushes and brought them back and placed them on the carcass. They remained very alert to the sounds around them and kept smelling to the west, but they would not leave Tina. By nightfall they had nearly buried her with branches and earth. Then they stood vigil over her for most of the night and only as dawn was approaching did they reluctantly walk away, heading back towards the safety of the park. Teresia was the last to leave. The others had crossed to the ridge and stopped and rumbled gently. Teresia stood facing them with her back to her daughter. She reached behind her and gently felt the carcass with her hind foot repeatedly. The others rumbled again and very slowly, touching the tip of her trunk to her broken tusk, Teresia moved off to join them.”
Grief. Loss, mourning and the understanding of death: these things are not unique to us humans. We are not alone in facing the terrible things that happen in the course of a life: nor are we alone in understanding them.
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I. St Frances de Sales, 1567–1622, was bishop of Geneva and had an anachronistically gentle view about divisions in Christianity. He wrote Introduction to the Devout Life, which, again surprisingly for the time, was aimed at laypeople.
Who needs oxygen?
This book would have been shorter if I had written it in 1982, instead of working on a rightly unpublished novel and seeing if I could make beer come out of my ears. It’s not that my stamina has improved: they discovered a new phylum in 1983. That is to say, a group of animals as different from anything else on earth as we humans are from butterflies: and one no one knew about it – which goes to show that there is an awful lot going on on this planet. They are Loricifera and they live in the spaces between gravel. Not big, then: they range from minute to microscopic. Under magnification they look rather like a vase of flowers: a tentacled container. The container is called the lorica, hence the name. They are found in the sea at all depths and latitudes. They have a head, mouth and digestive system, but no circulation. There are about 100 known species, of which about half have been described and named. They are both abundant and ubiquitous, though it took us a long time to find out about them.
They sound a pretty undistinguished lot on the whole – but the group contains creatures that can claim to be the strangest animals on the planet. Three species of loriciferans live at the bottom of the l’Atalante basin in the Mediterranean. Not only is it totally dark down there: there is no oxygen either. The water is so salty that it is near saturated and doesn’t mix with the layers above. That is why there is no oxygen: but the loriciferans thrive down there nonetheless. Some living things from outside the Animal Kingdom – bacteria and viruses – thrive without oxygen, but this is an animal: that is to say, a multicelled being from the same division of nature as ourselves. Loriciferans are the only animals of that degree of complexity that can live without oxygen. Unlike the rest of us, these three loriciferans don’t operate at the cellular level on mitochondria, which require oxygen. Instead, they employ organelles driven by hydrogen.
This is so peculiar that it forces us to change our definition of life, and with it, our idea of the conditions necessary for life to take place. Multicellular animal life can exist without light and without oxygen. That is quite interesting in a philosophical sort of way. It is quite startling when you start thinking about life beyond the earth. Our search for life on other planets is no longer restricted to oxygen-rich environments. Once again, we find that life is weirder than we think: and more varied than we think. And perhaps more widespread than we think.
Epiphany
Charles Darwin and James Joyce are the twin heroes of this book, and it’s high time we had a bit more Joyce. Joyce was very keen on epiphanies. Epiphany is the feast of January 6 or Twelfth Night. It commemorates the Three Wise Men and their visit to the stable in Bethlehem. Epiphany means a showing-forth: in this case, the showing-forth of God. The young Joyce collected epiphanies: significant moments when something was shown forth. Here he is, speaking through his alter ego Stephen Dedalus, in the third chapter of Ulysses: “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them after a few thousand years, a mahmanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very
like a whale. When one reads those strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”
So here is another wildlife epiphany of mine, deeply deep, naturally, and it’s here to mark the moment when the vertebrate cycle of this book makes its first significant shift. We’re at the end of mammals. Apologies to all those who didn’t make the cut; all those untold epiphanies I might have related: the day’s march to find rhino, the African wild dog den, the beaver in Canada, the gathering of 60 hares in Suffolk, the otter in front of my house. Not all of my stories have made the book, and not every mammal either: but never mind. I haven’t even told you about the dolphins of Cardigan Bay and the Moray Firth, ay, very like a whale. But it will soon be time for the birds, for if we tarry much longer with the mammals we will never unravel the riddle of when a fish is not a fish.
“Ladybird, ladybird, what is your wish?
Your wish is not granted unless it’s a fish.”
As the Incredible String Band inimitably expressed it.
I was in Africa; Zimbabwe this time. Walking in the bush is a balancing act: you want to get really quite close to really quite dangerous animals without putting yourself in real danger. So we walked quite close to quite a lot of elephants. As we did so, we found rather a lot more elephants. And in doing so, found even more elephants. In fact, we were completely surrounded. A circle, untidy but unquestionably of 360 degrees, of elephants, the nearest maybe 50 yards off. The bush here was pretty thick, which explains why so many elephants had sneaked up on us; or rather, how we had inadvertently sneaked up on them. Not the remotest idea of how many, couldn’t really see, but well into three figures. There was just me, my wife Cindy and our guide Graeme Lemon. Graeme dropped into a squat: “We’ll just rest up for a moment,” he said. So we also got down on our haunches. And put ourselves at the convenience of elephants.