Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  All around us, the elephants were involved in a swishing, crackling, mutual encounter: this was a meeting of some magnitude, with much social interaction going on. We had made ourselves small and insignificant, unthreatening. The elephants were interested in each other, not us. So we waited. We waited until they should be pleased to let us go. We could, I suppose, have broken the circle, blasted our way out of it, Graeme firing his gun to the sky as we did so. It would have been dangerous, but perfectly possible. But instead, a moment of respect. Thus we humans deferred to the elephants.

  That’s why the moment, the long moment – we must have squatted there for 20 minutes – has stayed with me. It was a drastic reordering of the usual priorities. For once, we humans counted second: second to elephants in massiveness, in dignity, in importance, in urgency. Our convenience was secondary to that of the wild world. We were in a somewhat vulnerable position, but instead of making drastic adjustments, the wise thing was to accept this secondary status.

  All around us the bush snapped, crackled and popped, and the elephants, mostly hidden, raised dust that drifted towards us and stung our nostrils like pepper. We could smell the farmyardy smell of elephant dung and hear the excitement in the air as they went through their social obligations. Slowly, they drifted away, as if the wind had caught them, dispersing, some of them aware of us, but giving us a wide berth, wary but unthreatened. And after a long period of silence, we stood again, flexing sore knees, and made our way back to camp. Knowing that something had been shown forth: some important thing about the wild world and our relationship with it. It was a moment of confirmation: one that spelt out for all time the nature of my relationship with the wild world.

  Deeply deep.

  A bit samey

  Everywhere you look in the Animal Kingdom it’s the same story: the more a design gets successful, the more it improvises around a theme. Evolution is the eternal jazz musician, making it up as it goes along, taking an idea and seeing where it will go, and doing so again and again and again, never sated. The radiation of antelopes shows us how a basic plant-eating design can encompass creatures as different as a giraffe and a royal antelope, which is not much bigger than a hare. And we haven’t even got to insects yet: still less to the beetles that contribute so many mind-boggling numbers to insect variety. There are beetles everywhere: and everywhere they diversify, adapt, form new species. In their impossible variety, beetles tell us the basic story of the way life on earth works: making more and more and more different kinds of living things. The chaetognaths tell another tale: perverse, contradictory, perplexing. There are many of them; in some places they are the most numerous life form – and yet they obstinately refuse to do variety. Many individuals, very few species: that’s the upside-down way in which the phylum of chaetognaths runs its affairs.

  They’re sometimes called arrow worms: shaped a bit like darts or torpedoes, which makes them adept at moving through the sea. Most of them are part of the great oceanic soup called plankton, and they make their living by eating other forms of plankton. They are armed with spines, which they can cover with a hood to aid with the streamlining. They sense prey from its vibrations and subdue it with neurotoxins. They are transparent, and pretty small, 2–120 mm, .08–4.5 inches long. And there are only about 120 species of them, even though they are uncountably numerous when it comes to individuals. Most are free-swimming and planktonic, undulating along in the vertical plane in the manner of whales, even though they are somewhat smaller. Others attach to the substrate, or to algae; some drop down to benthic depths. The surface-dwellers tend to go for a daily vertical migration: dropping down during daylight to avoid predators and rising to the surface at night to feed. Their sometimes colossal numbers give them a considerable ecological significance: predators themselves, they are much preyed upon by fish. For all their obscurity, they are an important part of the way the ocean sustains itself, and it seems that they always have been. Fossil chaetognaths have been found as far back as the Cambrian: they were there as multicellular life began, and they’re still hard at it. They are all hermaphrodites, swapping sperm to fertilise each other’s eggs. Their courtship is a cautious business: the aim is to establish intimacy without edibility, a conundrum that exists in many areas of invertebrate life. They are both few and many: a multitudinous contradiction, yet another group that shows that nature doesn’t necessarily keep to its own rules.

  Time for transition

  There is a slightly apologetic tone to The Origin of Species – and behind it, a more than slightly defiant one. It’s obvious that if Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection is true, there must be transitional forms: inbetweenies; missing links. The problem for Darwin was that he didn’t have any to hand. Trust me, Darwin said. I know I’m right. Bear with me and the half-and-halfers will surely make themselves known in the fullness of time. With the air of a man who knows he is trying the patience of his audience, he points out the paucity of the fossil record. Animals are only fossilised in unusual circumstances, so the record is necessarily patchy and incomplete. You can’t expect to find the fossils you want: it’s a miracle that we have any at all. Naturally, this very obvious weakness was seized on by the many opponents of the book. Ha! they said. Anyone can pluck a theory out of the air. He’s just made it up as he went along. It’s all just speculation: and jolly bad speculation at that.

  It looked like the answer to a prayer. It looked like divine intervention: as if God had stepped in on the side of the materialists. Because in 1861, two years after the publication of the Origin, the greatest of all transition fossils turned up in a quarry near Solnhofen in Germany. It was obviously a bird. Equally obviously it was a reptile. It was of course archaeopteryx. It had the bony jaws and tail of a reptile, it had teeth like a reptile and it had claws on its fore-limbs. But it also had feathers: beautifully, unmistakably printed in the joyfully receiving slabs of German lithographic limestone. If it had feathers it had to be a bird: no other possibility existed.I The clawed fore-limbs were wings. But it wasn’t like any bird alive today.II It was a link between one order and another: indisputable demonstration of the truth that birds evolved from reptiles.

  There was another non-missing link, if only Darwin had been sure of it. He knew about the duck-billed platypus; he had even, bizarrely, attended the slaying of one. When the Beagle called in on Australia, Darwin went for a platypus hunt, and his host killed one. “I consider it a great feat to be in at the death of so wonderful an animal,” he wrote. The duck-billed platypus had created a scientific sensation when the first skin came to London in 1798. Many considered it a hoax: “A high frolic practised on the scientific community by some colonial prankster.” If you examine this historical specimen, still kept at the Natural History Museum, you can apparently still see the scissor marks around the bill, where a scientist named George Shaw tried to find the stitches he was certain attached bill to pelt. But the platypus’s bill is by no means the oddest thing about it. The females lay eggs. And, unusually among mammalsIII (but not reptiles) the male platypus is venomous. It carries poisonous spurs on its hind legs: not lethal to humans but capable of causing considerable and lasting pain. The egg-laying business was only known for certain in 1884, too late for the Origin, but a nice incidental piece of confirmation nonetheless. A poisonous, egg-laying mammal breaks all the rulesIV – apart from those that Darwin laid down. It is a perfect transition animal.

  Come. It is time for this book to make a transition. We have dwelt among our fellow mammals for too long: lost in the furry byways and the milky pathways of our own kind. Mammals can trace their ancestry through reptilian lines; a different fork of the same trunk produced birds. Let us now turn to the feather-bearers: the most studied animals on earth. Birds are visible and audible: their main senses are the ones we humans use. Most mammals understand the world through their noses, but birds flaunt themselves before our eyes and our ears. Get ready to sing, get ready to fly, get ready for the birds.

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  I. It has now been established that feathers first developed among dinosaurs and some now argue that archaeopteryx was a feathered dinosaur rather than a true bird. Whatever: it’s still a transition species of the most thrilling kind.

  II. A South American bird, the hoatzin, hatches out youngsters with claws on their wings, and they clamber through the branches much as archaeopteryx must have done. They lose the claws as they reach adulthood and learn to fly.

  III. Some shrews have venomous saliva.

  IV. Platypuses (the plural is problematic: platypi is incorrect because the word comes from Greek rather than Latin, platypodes is correct but rather pedantic) also have a remarkable electrical sense: they are able to find prey by means of electrolocation. Creationists will tell you that this proves Darwin was wrong: you can’t be primitive enough to lay eggs, and yet advanced enough to use electricity. Why on earth not? We humans are advanced enough to build spaceships yet primitive enough to possess vestigial tails. We have already noted the modernity of kangaroos, with their leaping gait and their shifting teeth, despite the ancientness – if you like, the primitiveness – of the marsupial lifestyle. Evolution doesn’t upgrade just for the sake of it. If something works, it works. So stick with it, until there’s a good reason not to.

  The peanut trick

  They may be just another bloody worm to you or me, but the Sipunculids don’t see it that way. What other worm can turn itself into a peanut? What other worm has its arse on its back? These are not negligible considerations for the phylum of Sipuncula, sometimes known as peanut worms. And if anyone gets sniffy and tells you these worms should be considered with the annelid worms like the earthworm, feel free to say: “Oh yeah? What about the complete lack of bristles then? And how do you account for the absence of segmentation?” That’ll fix them.

  A sipunculid does the peanut trick in response to threat: it retracts its body until it resembles a peanut kernel. That’s about as exciting as it gets for a peanut worm: though the odd position of the anus in the anterodorsal region of the trunk is a clear mark of distinction. The phylum is, it has to be accepted, one of the duller ones, so it makes perfect sense that its most famous species is named for the game of golf. The first sipunculid was described in 1827 by Henri Marie Durcrotay de Blainville, and he called it Sipunculus vulgaris. A further peanut worm was later described by E Ray Lankester, who named it for a golfing holiday he had taken in St Andrews, and for the professor who gave him the specimen (or possibly for the garment he played golf in): Golfingia macintoshi. He renamed de Blainville’s worm Golfingia vulgaris (as if golf could ever be considered vulgar) and the phylum became Sipuncula.

  They’re worms, yes. Mostly pretty small, 4 inches, 10 cm is typical, though the range is 2–720 mm, 0.08–28 inches. They are marine, mostly found in shallow water. They have an unsegmented trunk, and a retractable section which is confusingly known as the introvert. The introvert has a mouth surrounded by tentacles. They have a digestive system and a nervous system, and also a cerebral ganglion or nerve ring that acts as a brain. They can reproduce sexually or asexually, doing so by fission. They mostly live by burrowing; some of them can bore into solid rock, while others live in abandoned shells, in the manner of hermit crabs. Estimates of the number of species vary, the top estimate being around the 300 mark.

  A jelly made from sipunculid worms is a considered a delicacy in Xiamen, which is in the province of Fujian in China.

  Feather

  Birds fly.

  I’ve never quite got over it. Let’s start with a kestrel:

  Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

  Rebuffed the big wind.

  The best description of a flying bird ever penned,I and with Gerard Manley Hopkins, my heart in hiding stirred for a bird.

  And it’s all about feathers. The heart and soul of a bird is summed up in a feather: a feather defines what a bird is, and is the essence of what a bird does. Which is fly. A feather is the perfect implement for flight: immensely strong and immensely light, stiff yet perfectly flexible. You couldn’t make or imagine a better device for powered or gliding flight. How amazing that the forces of evolution came up with this wonderful thing: you want flight, here’s a thing called feather.

  But like a disturbing number of things in life – both wild life and your own life – it was a complete accident. Feathers did not evolve for flight at all. Flight was just a lucky bonus. We have 10,000-plus species of birds on this planet, living their own lives and illuminating human ones, and almost all of them doing both by means of their ability to fly – and it all came about as a bi-product of the fact that dinosaurs felt the cold. Some species of dinosaurs evolved feathers for thermoregulation: an example being Dilong paradoxus, related to Tyrannosaurus rex but living 60-odd million years earlier. They weren’t fliers, they weren’t even half-and-halfers attempting to fly. For them, feathers were nothing to do with flight. They were theropod dinosaurs and their experiments in insulation filled the air with birds.

  How did feathers make the transition from overcoats to wings? It’s Just So Story time, and you can take your pick. Either they found feathers increasingly useful when jumping up – getting higher and travelling further as the arrangement of feathers improved – or when gliding down. Either way, feathers led to true flight – as opposed to falling with attitude – and true flight led to the conquest of the air.

  Birds are descended from dinosaurs, then, and some people prefer to say that birds are dinosaurs, feathered reptiles as adept at exploiting the modern world as their ancestors were during their 100-million-year heyday before the meteor strike. But if they are feathered reptiles, they’re not much like reptiles as we normally understand the term. Flight changed everything. As they evolved from the first rudimentary jumpers or gliders, the whole flight business grew increasingly sophisticated. Reptilian arms became wings, the breastbone became a keel, to which the big muscles for flapping are attached. The body is powered by a mighty four-chambered heart. Birds have a breathing system that is far more efficient than the in-out method we mammals use: one in which hollow bones and air sacs are constantly used to flush out stale air. Flight is highly expensive in terms of energy: the birds’ breathing system gives them a constant supply of the freshest possible air. A human marathon runner would kill for such an advantage, and having found it, would be unbeatable. Some birds, most obviously the skylark, use this system to sing for minutes at a time without seeming to take a breath; it can do so because it is taking in new air all the time.

  A warm-blooded, well-fuelled, high-energy body has allowed a bird’s brain to develop far more than that of a reptile: and as a result, birds have adopted a vast series of complex and difficult lifestyles. They invest time and energy into the raising of young: this is at the heart of what both they and mammals do, and what other vertebrates mostly don’t. It is all based on a high level of intelligence: some birds are as smart as the great apes.

  So, as we complete our transition into the world of the birds, let us remember that they are not placed second because they are in any way secondary to us mammals… but then, if you have read so far, you may well be already prepared to abandon the ideas put about by mammal chauvinist pigs. Birds do not belong in the class of mammals, but that’s not because we’re upper class and they’re not. The class of Aves is full of flight: and that is something we humans have always both rejoiced in and envied.

  We dream of flight. When we imagine superior beings, we give them flight: Superman can fly, and so can angels. At the church of the Holy Trinity at Blythburgh in Suffolk, the angels that vault the roof float on the wings of marsh harriers. All the non-confrontational sports are about flight and the defiance of gravit
y: skiing feels like flying, horses give you wings (for every rider, every horse is Pegasus). Gymnastics is the closest a human body can get to flying under its own power. And even golf, contested by people who don’t even break out of a walk, is about flight: every golfer who ever struck as ball will tell you it’s not about winning and it’s not about putting the ball in the hole – it’s about making that ball fly. It’s about bird-envy.

  Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers”.II The Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove.III

  On the first page of Goldfinger: “Yes, it has certainly been time for him to die; but when Bond killed him, less than twenty-four hours before, life had gone out of the body so quickly, so utterly, that Bond had almost seen it come out of his mouth as it does, in the shape of a bird, in Haitian primitives.” Birds carry a colossal weight of human mythologies and human meanings on their lightweight hollow-boned frames. We have always thought ourselves a class above our fellow-mammals: but when we seek to express the notion that we are superior to the brutes and the dumb beasts, we turn our eyes to the sky and find it in the birds: in aspiration, in flight, in hope, and in feathers.