by Simon Barnes
Hummingbirds have co-evolved with flowers, the two parties swapping food for pollen delivery. Different species have different bills suited to different sorts of flowers, from thornbills that stab flowers at their base to drain out the nectar, to swordbills with a beak as long as their entire body for inserting into great floral trumpets: a range between 1.3 and 10 cm, half an inch to 4 inches.
Some more numbers: some species can fly at 54 kph, 34 mph; they can flap their wings at a rate of between 12 and 80 times a second; their heart rate can reach 1,260 beats a minute, and can be 250 at rest; they have a body temperature of around 41 degrees Celcius that drops to 21 at night; they can be found at 17,100 feet, 5,200 m in the Andes; their brains are more than 4 per cent of their body weight; they feed half a dozen times every hour and visit 1,000 flowers in a day. Ruby-throated hummingbirds make a biennial crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, covering 500 miles, 800 km, in one go. Before they set off they feed up and double their body weight. They need to be pretty smart (hence the brain weight) in order to establish and carry an ever-updating flower-map in their heads. Most of the colour you see on a hummingbird is not pigment: it’s an effect of refracted light, like a prism or a soap-bubble. That’s why hummingbirds can seem to explode into being in front of you as they catch the sun in just the right way: it also explains why so dramatic a creature can simply vanish.
I hope I have done hummingbirds some kind of justice here. After all, the Loa loa worm got a decent show earlier in this book, so if I am to abide by the doctrine of equal time, hummingbirds need fair representation. In the film Manhattan, Woody Allen’s character says to Tracey, who is played by Mariel Hemingway: “You’re God’s answer to Job. You would have ended all argument between them. He’d have said ‘I do a lot of terrible things but I can also make one of these’. And Job would’ve said: ‘OK, you win.’ ”
* * *
I. Regua is the Reserva Ecologica de Guapiassu, and it’s about 90 minutes’ drive from Rio. It is involved in rainforest and wetland restoration and gets some financial support from World Land Trust.
Just one more thing…
This is the Columbo phylum. We’re very, very nearly into a super-sexy new phylum of invertebrates, and with them perhaps the sexiest single species of invert that exists on the planet, in a chapter that can’t help but involve both Captain Nemo and James Bond (and I’m really not building this up too much) but before we get there, well, just one more thing. Just one more phylum. Just one more obscure and grubby and forgettable phylum, just one more phylum that shows the breadth and wonder and mind-shattering diversity of life on earth.
Columbo, lest we forget, was an American detective series: Columbo himself, the man in the grubby raincoat despised by everybody, always asking the most unpromising people “just one more thing”. And as a result, he invariably solved the case and brought peace and justice to the planet. So here we are, then, just one more phylum… and they’re the phoronids. Filter-feeders, like so many others: all those gatherers of scraps, all those refuse-collectors, all those snappers-up of unconsidered trifles. The phoronids wouldn’t thank you for confusing them with the breathtakingly uncomplicated creatures we have been looking at in recent chapters. Quite apart from anything else, they have a lophophore. This is a crown of tentacles, something that makes them something of the crown of creation in the world of filter-feeders. They live in all oceans except the Antarctic, between the intertidal zones and down to depths of 400 m. They are sometimes found in extraordinary density, tens of thousands of them to a square metre.
They live inside upright tubes made of chitin,I which protect their soft bodies: they can move within the tubes but never leave them. They’re mostly around 2 cm long, less than an inch, though some species can reach 50 cm, not far off two feet. There is a flask-like swelling at the base which anchors the creature and allows it to retract inside the tube. Cilia on the tentacles draw food towards the mouth – and yes, these creatures are so advanced that they possess a bum; essential information, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Their blood contains haemoglobin, which is very unusual in a small animal. It means they can live very effectively in oxygen-poor environments. Their larvae know what it is to be free-swimmers and express that freedom for just 20 days before they settle down and change – in the space of 30 minutes – into adults. Had I been a phoronid, I could have obliged all those teachers who ordered me to grow up, Barnes, by doing so in less time than it takes to conduct a Latin lesson. In that lightning maturation, the larva’s tentacles are replaced by the lophophore and the anus (bums again, sorry) shifts from the base to a point near the tentacles, so the bottom becomes something more like the top.
So before I rush you on to the super-sexy beasts I’ve been talking up so desperately, let’s pause for a moment and consider this great swathe of phyla we have been visiting: filter-feeders, wormy things, many of them not troubling themselves with a bum, still less a brain, not only living full and effective lives, but doing so in ways that are completely different from any other form of life on earth. Phoronids are not acoelomorphs, perish la pensée, and they’re not xenoturbellids. It is not strictly accurate to say that the inventiveness of the Animal Kingdom is limitless and infinite: this book is trying to touch some of those limits. But the creativity and practicality of the kingdom Animalia is way beyond the limits of the human mind.
Have I reached the limit of these forgettable phyla, though? I’m not sure I have. Taxonomists are always rethinking the way we look at life on earth, and if they’re not doing that, they’re discovering new things: sometimes a new species, sometimes a new phylum. Life is in a constant state of flux and movement, and so is the way we understand it. Next week the phoronids may be gathered up into some other phylum and lose their distinct status: or they may be split into two completely distinct phyla. The wonder of looking at all these minor phyla, all these unconsidered ways of making a living, these lives so remote not just from our own lives but from our capacity to understand them, is that we get some kind of grasp of the community we belong to. Phoronids are forever strangers: forever brothers and sisters to us. We are unlike and we are just the same.
* * *
I. The same substance that forms the outside covering (exoskeleton) of insects.
The wardrobe bird
I once thought about doing a book of wildlife epiphanies, deeply deep, naturally, though perhaps not on green oval leaves. I even got as far as taking notes: a nice notebook can have that sort of effect if you’re not careful. I wrote down a few notions and recorded a few epiphanies: a shard of garish blue plastic that some idiot had dumped in a beauty spot on the South Downs – which turned out to be an impossibly blue Adonis blue butterfly. There are notes about a tiny flash of white viewed on horseback, and the pleasure of knowing that it was a bullfinch. And there was a memory of Africa: not Luangwa for once; this was in Tanzania. It was one of the great experiences of the ah-ness of living things.
I was with a sulky, uncooperative driver who had believed that he had wangled himself a morning off because the group of journalists I was travelling with wanted to go shopping. All except one. So the two of us went into Arusha National Park, and he was rather inclined to resent the whole business. No matter, he took me out anyway and left me to work out what I was seeing for myself, which was fine by me. His silence, his refusal to tell me what to look out for, was doubly fine, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had this epiphany. The big moment came when the vehicle reached the top of a huge hill and we looked down over a lake: one of those fine sights of open water that always lifts a human heart. Water, after all, is life, and our delight in such watery views is an atavistic as much as an aesthetic response. All round this lake was a fine pale beach: white sand, but with a warm tone to it. Some freak of geology, no doubt, or perhaps a trick of the light. Down we climbed, hairpinning along the forested track, one grumpy, one joyous. And then joy turned into something far less ordinary as I realised that the beach was no beach at all. It was solid f
lamingos.
Not a beach but a sea of pink: not a pleasing sight but one of the most bewildering things you could wish to see, not something that would attract an artist’s brush because no decent artist would dare to take it on: too big, too many, too obvious, too easy to sentimentalise, too hard not to overdramatise. A painting of this lake of flamingos would show only the limitations of human craft and mind and soul.
We made a circuit of the lake, and it was a world of impossible wonder. In terms of vision, anyway. The beautiful sight came with a cacophony honking and bugling and an unavoidably hideous smell. This was not heaven, though it had seemed like it at a distance. Once I was in the middle of them all it was quite clear that we were still in the kingdom Animalia: and perhaps all the better for that. Flamingos love to be together, and there must have been around half a million in this colony. There are six species of flamingos, two in the old world and four in the Americas, though I have seen a Chilean flamingo on a marsh in Suffolk. It was an escapee rather than an Atlantic-crosser, and it took a liking to a nature reserve on the coast. One of the wardens grumbled: “It’s not a bird, it’s a bloody blancmange. Do you think anyone would notice if I shot it?” The flamingo’s originality comes from its bill, which filters mud and silt from particles of food, shrimps and algae. This is the only beak that is designedI to be used upside down.
Flamingos represent better than any other group the glorious accessibility of birds. For all humans, birds are the easy way into wildlife. Not only do birds provide instant wonder, they also represent biodiversity on a scale appropriate to human understanding. Birds are diverse ma non troppo: there’s just about enough diversity to excite cries of wonder, but not enough to have us giving up. To have seen more than 400 species of birds in Britain is reckoned to be the mark of a high-achieving twitcher: there are more than 2,000 species of moths available to a British mother, and maybe a quarter of a million worldwide. Hummingbirds, with 300-plus, are baffling, but just about dealable-with; the fact that a flamingo comes in six distinct species (this is argued over, naturally) shows that there are more flamingos than most of us dreamed off, but not too many to halt the processes of thought. It is natural for our sense of natural wonder to start with birds: birds are the portal that exists between humans and the wild world. Birds are our wardrobe. As the four children entered NarniaII through the wardrobe and found a world of magic and talking animals, so the rest of us can look at birds and enter a world more meaningful than our own, one that is not restricted to a single species.
Birds give us diversity on a scale we humans find manageable: they also bring us abundance in a way that we can rejoice in. Recent conservation messages have tended to be about biodiversity, and diversity is essential to life. But life can also be about abundance: about teeming numbers, about the sense of the wild world as a population, a vast social organism, a community that goes on and on and on. The flamingo shore was an epiphany of abundance: of the importance of numbers. The passenger pigeon used to exist in flocks that blackened the sky. They were shot to bits just for the hell of it. After the last one died in 1914, it was speculated that these birds had their being in numbers and could only survive in numbers. A small flock of passenger pigeons was an oxymoron: or rather, it was a fly-past of the living dead. Perhaps the same is true of other species that like to be together in large numbers: in Britain rooks, starlings and gannets. It is not enough to conserve token numbers of each species in the belief that this is what diversity is all about. We also need to look after numbers. As we lose abundance the entire wild world is slipping away from us.
* * *
I. When I say designed, I of course mean “designed”.
II. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis.
James Bond and the kraken
“Behind him the water quivered. Something was stirring in the depths, something huge… Bond stared down, half hypnotised, into the wavering pools of eye far below. So this was the giant squid, the mythical kraken that could pull ships beneath the waves, the fifty-foot-long monster that battled with whales, that weighed a ton or more… God, the thing was as big as a railway engine!” This is from James Bond’s encounter with a giant squid in Dr No, in which Bond duels with the great beast armed only with a makeshift spear. I shan’t risk spoiling the ending for you.
There’s another great battle with a giant squid in Jules Verne’s work of 1870, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The squid attacks the Nautilus, the great submarine, and devours a crew member before it’s finally beaten off. Verne’s work is always balanced on a knife-edge, mixing science and fantasy with reckless creativity. The Nautilus visits Atlantis at one stage of its journey: but the giant squid is real. It’s just extremely hard to believe in. Easier to believe in Atlantis.
Not least because it’s an invertebrate. Go to the enchanted temple of the Natural History Museum in London. In the lobby the mighty Diplodocus stands: a dinosaur more than 100 feet, 30 m, in length. In one of the inner halls a blue whale is suspended above your head: as long, but a great deal bulkier, because Diplodocus is mostly tail. The blue whale is the largest animal that ever existed on the planet. They’re both vertebrates: you can count the endless vertebrae in the Diplodocus skeleton if you’ve a mind to.I But the giant squid is a mollusc. Just like the snail in your garden, just like the slugs mating with such disturbing passion earlier in this book. The kraken, the great monster of the deep, is related to cockles and mussels alive, alive-oh.
Small wonder nobody believed in it. The plight of the poor seamen who cried “squid” was worse than that of the boy who cried “wolf”. It was years before anyone believed in the giant squid. In 1848 Peter McQuaheII claimed the sighting of a sea monster near the Cape of Good Hope. Richard Owen, a big man in science, coiner of the word “dinosaur” and the driving force behind the Natural History Museum, took exception and poured scorn and personal vituperation on McQuahe, implying that he was unworthy to command one of Her Majesty’s ships. A few years later a French captain claimed a sighting of the giant squid and even managed to bring a piece back. Scientists laughed and said that it was plant material, though Verne liked it and put a huge squid his book.
Then in 1873 a Newfoundland fisherman named Theophilus Picot didn’t exactly catch one. It was more vice versa, or so he claimed. He said that the thing attacked his boat and tried to drag it down. What’s certain is that Picot managed to hack off both feeding tentacles and bring them back to shore. Moses Harvey, the local rector, realised that this was something momentous: the 19 foot, 5.7 m tentacles made it clear to the world that the giant squid was not a fisherman’s tale. The kraken was real.
Why did it take so long for such a huge animal to make the great shift from mythology to science? It lives in the depths, thousands of feet down; a squid on the surface is dead or dying. Dead squid at those extreme depths get consumed long before their bodies float to the surface. And even if you managed to get hold of a surfaced or beached squid, it is extremely unwieldy and constantly being eaten. It also keeps falling apart, since it lacks a skeleton as we vertebrates understand the term.
The giant squid is now accepted as a fact of oceanic life. It has been suggested that sperm whales eat a couple of giant squid every week. The mantle – the body bit – is about 6 feet long, a couple of metres; the tentacles extend that to 40 feet, 12 m. They live by catching fish with the two longest tentacles, “like a two-tongued toad”, as one scientist put it.
It was believed to be the world’s largest invertebrate. But in the past century odd bits of an even bigger squid started turning up, and in the past decade people have found intact specimens. This is the colossal squid: an animal with a mantle twice the size of a mere giant and with tentacles that, when alive and active, take its total length to something like 60 feet, 18 m.
And still very little is known about it. It has eyes that are about 12 inches, 30 cm across, and it is considered to be more formidable than the giant, and to be an apex predator like the great sharks and the
toothed whales. Some scientists suggest that the animal is also pretty intelligent: though not necessarily in the sense that “intelligent” means “like us humans”. We know little about the colossal squid beyond the fact of its existence. Our own planet remains a place of mystery. “Why aren’t we spending more on our oceans?” asks Clyde Roper, the squid scientist. “We know more about the moon’s backside than we do about the ocean’s bottom.”
* * *
I. People regularly used to steal vertebrae when the skeleton was displayed with the tail dragging along the floor. The exhibit is a plaster cast, and the museum used to keep spare vertebrae for use when needed. These days, with dinosaur revisionism in vogue, Diplodocus is displayed in a far more dynamic pose, with the tail whiplashing high into the air, inaccessible to souvenir-hunters.
II. See Kraken: The Curious, Exciting and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams.
Instant birder
“I’m not really interested in looking at birds,” they say, sometimes apologetically, sometimes almost belligerently. They have come to Africa, come to the Luangwa Valley, to see lions and tigers. They’re not birdwatchers, for God’s sake. Like anyone else who has acted as a guide in such circumstances, I smile pleasantly, make a remark that commends the person’s large-hearted frankness in making such an observation and stresses the total lack of any kind of obligation towards avifauna in general and that of the Luangwa Valley in particular – and bide my time. Then I show them a lilac-breasted roller. Never fails. I have a party of instant birders.