by Simon Barnes
A couple of days later, up in the Andes around Medellín, I had a much better look. A full two seconds, perhaps even longer. And it was unmistakably an insect this time, a butterfly, of course, a blue morpho, to be precise: and perhaps the loveliest thing I had ever set eyes on, the lovelier for the tantalising brevity of the experience. Its upper wings are a fierce sunstruck metallic blue: but the underwings are dull and drab and cryptic. As it closes its wings or changes the angle of its flight it vanishes from sight.
That’s beauty: what about danger? MosquitoesI kill more people than lions and elephants and hippos combined; the tsetse fly, which gives a human a bite of piercing pain that lasts about half a second, has devastated communities because of the cattle disease it can carry, and also the sleeping sickness it can impart to humans. “God bless the tsetse fly,” old Norman Carr, the founding father of Zambian conservation, used to say. “Without them we’d all be cattle-ranchers.” The tsetses make the valley a no-go area for domestic cattle, so the place has stayed wild: a story true of many of Africa’s great national parks. Insects have caused more devastation to humans than any other class of animals on the planet. The Colorado beetle has destroyed potato crops, and for every crop that humans have ever grown there are insects trying to get in the way. The rat flea has carried the plagues that shaped history. On the other hand, the pollinating services of insects make life on earth possible for humans. Let’s return to the concept of “ecoservices”, a notion that has emerged in recent years, according to which people put a cash price on the ways in which the wild world materially benefits humankind. It has been calculated that annual sales that depend on pollination by animals add up to US$1 trillion; that annual services provided to farms by animal pollinators are worth US$190 billion; that two-thirds of major crops grown by humans rely on animal pollinators.II
The word insect means cut up. Insects are divided into three: head, thorax and abdomen. Each (mature) insect has six legs, and a chitinous exoskeleton, one pair of antennae and compound eyes. It’s a body plan that seems almost infinitely adaptable: around one million species of insects have already been described, and as for the number still awaiting description, you can pick your own order of magnitude, because it’s as good a guess as anybody else’s. Insects exist in vast abundance and in impossible diversity. In every way, insects are many. More than any other group of living organisms on the planet, they are the driving force of the earth and the creatures that live on it.
And so we call them bugs. I hate that. Not because it’s an unnecessary Americanism, but because it’s an expression of dislike and contempt, and it alienates us yet further from the planet we live on. A bug is something that bugs you and is best kept out by a bug screen or demolished with bug spray. A bug in your computer programme is by definition a bad thing. A bug is everything bad: and its catch-all name is given to all small invertebrates. The (quite excellent) British conservation charity for invertebrates is called Buglife: perhaps even its executives and trustees wince a little at the name, for all that they know that a conservation charity for invertebrates has got to punch way above its weight if it wants to be heard, so a catchy name matters. But all the same, it offends me on a bug’s behalf that all insects are by definition bad. Is the blue morpho a bug?
Insects are the only class of animals that have created an entire industry aimed at trying to kill them. It is an industry that, in the 1960s, came close to destroying the wild world, as documented in Rachel Carson’s world-changing book Silent Spring. The human response to that book was a clear indication of the fact that we have a great desire for the wild world to survive – for its own sake, not just because we depend on it for our existence. Insects can change an ecosystem: the ways in which humans seek to control them has changed the world, to the extent that the falling number of insects is beginning to be a serious concern. I was taught, and so were most of us, that the Age of Amphibians was followed by the Age of Reptiles, which was itself followed by the Age of Mammals, which became the Age of Man.III But ever since flowering plants spread across the surface of the earth, it’s been the Age of Insects. They’ll outlast us.
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I. The interior decoration on Lamma Island was based around the repeating motif of a flip-flop outline with a splatter of blood in the middle.
II. From Tony Juniper’s splendidly readable What Has Nature Ever Done For Us?
III. The Age of Woman was for some reason never mentioned.
Death by frog
The golden poison frog is probably the most poisonous creature on earth. Chickens and dogs have died from contact with a paper towel on which this frog has walked. It’s found only in Colombia, and it’s tiny: a little scrap of charming, elegant, yellow death. Its skin is drenched in batrachotoxins, alkaloid poisons that prevent nerves from transmitting impulses. Come into contact with the stuff and you die of heart failure. Not that the frog is particularly anxious to come into contact with you: the poison is entirely for self-defence. The frogs are a decent size for poison arrow frogs, reaching 55 mm or a couple of inches in length, and they carry a single milligram of poison. This is enough to kill 10,000 mice, 20 humans or two African bull elephants. Death comes within minutes.
Inevitably, these fearsome creatures play a significant role in human cultures. The Choco Emberà Indians use them to poison the darts they use for hunting. Gently brush the tip of your dart or arrow on the back of a living frog; you can and should do this without harming the frog. You then have a weapon that will be deadly with a mere scratch, and will remain so for two years. Word of advice: handle these weapons carefully.
Because of all this history, this danger, this charisma, these frogs have become much desired by frog collectors. It’s dangerous for an animal to be greatly hated by humans, but it can be just as dangerous to be greatly loved. The best survival strategy is to be ignored. The golden poison frog has suffered because its loving collectors have taken it from the wild without any thought for how the it will survive. Many populations have died out as a result. The frogs lives in primary rainforest in Colombia, and so inevitably, they are also suffering from the destruction of their habitat. They have a rather patchy distribution across an area of less than 250 square kilometres of rainforest on the Pacific coastal plain: it’s a lot less than it sounds and it doesn’t sound much to start with.
This frog has also suffered from one of the great contradictions of wildlife: peace is a bad thing. The area in which the frogs live is a great deal more secure than it has been in recent years; as a result, people are moving about more freely. Gold-miners are moving in, illicit coca cultivation is on the rise and timber companies are likely to arrive at any second. All this is the worst of news for golden poison frogs: you can’t, alas, poison a bulldozer, not even with a paper towel. We have reached a state in which the animal that has developed the most effective method of protection in the entire history of the earth is now dismayingly vulnerable. It is completely unprotected by law.
In 2010 the Colombian conservation organisation ProAves launched a series of expeditions in search of remaining populations of the frog. They found to their dismay that it was no longer on any of its known traditional sites; it took extraordinary exertions before five tiny populations were identified. ProAves is now in the process of identifying the right areas to create the first protected zones for the golden poison frog. It is doing this with the support of the World Land Trust, a partner organisation in Britain that has agreed to fund the land purchase.
Astonishing: we are on the edge of wiping out one of the most extraordinary and thrilling creatures on the planet. No matter how well an animal is protected by nature and by evolution, it is always vulnerable to us humans. There’s nothing we can’t do when we put our minds to it. Still, at least we are now beginning to put our minds to saving the golden poison frog: we’d be much poorer without such a creature to give us nightmares.
The poison dart frogs, or to be more technical, the Dendrobatidae, are a bewildering bunch: biza
rre, beautiful, deadly. Most could sit comfortably on your thumbnail, though such an arrangement might not be so comfortable for you. They come in a glorious range of colours and patterns because they need to be seen. Their lives depend on their ability to stand out from their surroundings. No point in being lethally unappetising unless you tell people: after all, if they discover it for themselves it’s too late for you.I This is called aposematic colouration, and no creature adopts this tactic more stylishly. Each shining frog looks as if it has just been painted in Airfix paints and has yet to dry. It’s not clear what makes them so poisonous, though it’s probably something to do with diet – at any rate, they lose their toxicity in captivity. There are 175 species, and they’re all toxic in different degrees. It is one of the great paradoxes that the wild world occasionally goes in for: let’s not bother hiding. Let’s tell the whole world we’re here, let’s shout our identity as loud as we can: and then we’ll be safe. These fragile little specks of colour are so powerful only a bulldozer can hurt them.
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I. Natural selection works at the level of the individual, not of the species. There’s no evolutionary point in doing something “for the good of the species”. It’s your own genes you need to propagate: not those of some conspecific stranger.
Les demoiselles du Waveney
I have a canoe. I keep it on the River Waveney, which flows with Norfolk on one side and Suffolk on the other. Not a kayak, a Canadian: a rather portly craft not entirely unlike Gerald Durrell’s Bootle-Bumtrinket. You use a single-bladed paddle, preferably in a J-stroke to keep the damn thing straight. You don’t do the Eskimo roll, at least not on purpose. And it’s the finest possible way of getting close to the wildlife of the river. It’s best in spring, when the warblers (seven species heard regularly) are in full song and the stinkboats mostly aren’t. The river is navigable as far as the excellent Locks Inn; beyond that the canoes have it to themselves. After Bungay the river gets narrow and in places is closed over by a canopy. At others it flows, with the gentle courtesy the river rather specialises in, through broad floodplain water meadows with lush vegetation along the edges. And at times the river is alive with banded demoiselles.
They are pretty insects one at a time, but in hundreds they are devastating. Each of the four wings of the male is picked out with a blue-black inkblot, and it’s a mark that adds great drama to these massed dances as the males compete for the attention of the females. You try hard not to think of it as the fairies’ ballroom because that would be soppy: this is a great wet swarming sexy river, flowing gently and yet fizzing with the urgency of copulation. If they’re fairies they’re more like the sex-mad sinister creatures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Tinkerbell. In a long, quiet paddle you can feel the earth teeming all about you: a great urgent need for each dancer to seize the opportunity of a lifetime: to dance in the sunlight and find a partner. It’s a paddle to the very heart of life.
These are damselflies, related to dragonflies. They’re all part of the order of Odonata, marked by long bodies, large multifaceted eyes and wings in quadruplicate: a double pair. They are formidable aerial predators, and are reckoned to be among the fastest insect fliers: there are claims for bursts close to 60 mph, 100 kph, though more usual reckonings suggest a flat-out speed of around 34 mph, 55 kph for the fastest species, and a cruising speed on 10 mph, 16 kph. They prey on mosquitoes, flies, bees and the occasional butterfly: anyone who has ever tried to catch a fly by hand must be impressed at the skills every dragonfly possesses. But they spend most of their lives as nymphs. Dragonfly larvae are as ferocious underwater predators as the adults are in the air. They use an extending jaw to snag their prey; the bigger species are perfectly capable of feeding on vertebrates like tadpoles and small fish.
Some dragonfly species are pretty big: the biggest of all is a damselfly, Megaloprepus caerulatus, found in South American forests, which can have a wingspan of 7.5 inches, 19 cm. But these are nothing compared to some of the extinct dragonfly relatives. The Meganeura of the Carboniferous era reached phenomenal sizes: a wingspan of 25.5 inches, 65 cm. It’s as if the Carboniferous sky was a-fizz with Sopwith Camels and Tiger Moths. So why are there no insects as big now? Why don’t the giant insects of horror films exist to terrify human communities? The usually accepted answer is oxygen. The insect breathing apparatus, the tracheal breathing system, soaks oxygen out of the atmosphere without need for lungs. That’s wonderfully economical and efficient but it places a limit on overall size: oxygen can’t travel too deep into an animal by this system. The Meganeura prospered because the Carboniferous world had a much higher percentage of oxygen than the modern world, which has a mere 20 per cent.
Adult dragonflies are defined as much by their eyes as by their crisp and efficient wings. The pair of compound eyes more or less cover the head: the animals seem to be all eye when viewed head on. Apart from bees, dragonflies have the best vision in the class of insects. Each eye has several thousand elements, in a system radically different from the one we vertebrates use. The system gives them spherical vision, and an ability to see beyond the human range in the ultra-violet wavelengths. It’s suspected that dragonflies see the sky as a far more intense blue, the better to pick out flying prey, and for that matter, flying predators like hobbies, which are falcons with a taste for dragonflies.
The evolution of the eye has been a hot topic for scientists and creationists ever since Darwin published his big book, as we have already seen. The eye of the dragonfly is so clearly and profoundly different from a human eye that it poses a very obvious question: if your Great Designer designed an eye, why did he bother to design so many different kinds? Not a very economical process: not one of those parsimonious explanations that science and logic demand. The fact is that vision is so useful that the eye has evolved 50, maybe as many as 100 times over. There are many different ways of seeing the world: the dragonfly, with its compound eye, is a particularly vivid example of one of them.
The distant mountains
reflected in the eye
of the dragonfly
From the Japanese haiku poet Issa. The Bird’s Nest Stadium at the heart of the Beijing Olympic Games – China, not Japan obviously – was always full of dragonflies during the Games. Not much wildlife seemed capable of making a living in that city, but there were dragonflies everywhere in the Olympic Complex: and as a result on two occasions I saw a hobby – a Eurasian hobby, not an oriental, since you ask – flying over the stadium. So that was another dragonfly epiphany. Dragonflies are good at that. They have always been popular with writers of haiku, so let’s finish with one of Basho’s.I
Red pepper
put wings on it
red dragonfly
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I. Translated by Patricia Donegan.
A miraculous draught of newts
I lived for a while in what might have been the most northerly house within the M25. It was built over a railway tunnel. The trains thundered below while the motorway thrummed in our sleep and cast an orange stole along the horizon at night. Barnet and Enfield were just down the road. Nevertheless, there was a sheep-field out the front and a small copse at the back. It was all right. And so naturally, we dug a pond in the garden. It was tiny: you could step over it. It was still a nice thing to have: blackbirds bathed in it and we planted flags and marsh marigolds. And one day there were newts. Just like that. There are three species of newts found in Britain – these were common newts. Their appearance was a small miracle. I knew of no other pond within walking distance: yet the newts undauntedly walked from it to reach my place. They travelled some considerable distance to seek out this delightful but tiny puddle of water. Who told them it was there? What drove them across the wastes of suburbia to find it? One day they weren’t there: the following day the pond was jumping with them. They had made a long and extremely dangerous pilgrimage through the cat-thronged avenues of Hadley Wood, presumably sticking as far as possible to the dew-soaked grass, in order to find it.
It was then that I learned what it is to be an amphibian. They could leave the water at will, but only to find more water. Without moisture they don’t exist, but on a cool, damp night they can be intrepid travellers, covering impressive distances on their short but efficient legs. I have been on a night newt hunt in a deeply surreal place outside Peterborough with the charity Froglife: an extensive area that was once mined for brick clay. The resulting pits filled up with water and then with crested newts, the rarest of Britain’s newt trinity. The place has been put together without any logic that might help a human walker. It has a nightmarish sodium light from the main roads that surround it, and yet shine a torch onto the water and there beneath its surface I could see what seemed like a dance of the dragons: miniature submerged monsters that looked as if they might surface at any moment and start breathing tiny gouts of flame. I rather saw the point of newts that evening, even though an interest in newts is generally considered to be an admission of failure in life, the last word in wetness. Gussie Fink-Nottle is a disastrous character in PG Wodehouse. He is both a teetotaller and a newt-fancier: as if one were as bad as the other. “Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror… many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.”
Newts and salamanders make up the order Caudata: a group of 580 or so species that look superficially lizard-like: low-slung, four-limbed and long-tailed. They live only in the northern hemisphere and the tropics. Most are pretty small, measuring 4–6 inches, 10–15 cm, but there are one or two biggies: the largest is the Chinese giant salamander which can reach 1.8 m, nearly 6 feet. Some are wholly aquatic, others make a living in moist earth. There are some picturesque individuals among them: a group called mudpuppies and olms, and another called hellbenders, which are found in the Ohio river system: there is a subspecies named the Ozark hellbender, fine name for a country band. The family of sirens has done away with hind limbs and retains only rudimentarily forelimbs. Salamanders have a rather more exciting tradition than newts in human culture. They are mentioned in both Aristotle and Harry Potter. The myth is that they are born out of fire, which always seems a sad thing to believe about a creature that loves cold, moist things. The belief is usually put down to the fact that salamanders like to lurk in hollow logs: put a log containing a salamander on the fire and it will come out pretty sharpish.