by Simon Barnes
Mosquitoes are part of the same group. We tend, as I say, to be highly selective about the things we admire in an animal: which of us, on being bitten by a mosquito, pauses for a moment to consider the perfection of the mouthparts of our tormentor? Yet these creatures are put together so exquisitely that they can suck out your blood at the same time as they inject you with an anti-coagulant. Mosquitoes are famous for acting as vectors for malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus, yellow fever and encephalitis: we don’t tend to cry: “How perfect!” when a mosquito strikes.
Perhaps we should. But on the whole, flies inspire in us nothing but impatience and occasional disgust. They land on our mozzarella ciabatta in the pub garden, arriving fresh from their investigation of a dog-turd or a dead rat. They attempt to feed on our food by first liquefying it with their own fluids, saliva or vomit. Flies are contemptible, disposable: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport,” said King Lear. Flies also have a reputation for unapologetic sexuality: “The golden fly doth lecher in my sight,” Lear said again. “Therefore let copulation thrive!” The fly is a traditional symbol of bodily corruption: and it’s true that nothing arouses more disgust than a maggot. I recall a three-days-dead hippo, half eaten by lions, alive with maggots and surrounded by hyenas and vultures ready to step in as soon as the lions had finished. It’s only comfortably off humans who can afford to be finicky, and we’d soon stop that nonsense if we were to experience real hunger.
The beauty and glory and wonder of flies tend to pass us by. But that’s true of so many species. There are ten million and more out there: how many of them do we really know, how many of them do we take delight in? And yet, far from any widespread human understanding, or even awareness, there are creatures as wonderful as any of the superstars, living out their lives without need of human endorsement. The fly on my window is just as brilliant – in some ways just as beautiful – as the nesting swan I can see on the other side of the glass as I write these words.
The Eden fish
Nature is benign. How could anybody deny it? All you have to do is find a nice crowded bit of coral and go looking for cleaner fish. It is so striking an example of kindness, sharing and generosity that you feel infinitely capable of taking the next logical step and believing in fairies. It is the favourite fish of the creationists, who say that so wonderful a system simply couldn’t have come about by a natural process – or “by accident” as they prefer to say. The whole set-up is so striking that there are moments when even a grown-up person could almost believe them.
Cleaner fish make their living by tending other fish. A fish, often a much larger animal altogether, will submit to the attentions of a cleaner fish, lying still while the fish grazes over its body, nibbling away dead skin and external parasites. The cleaner fish gets a good meal, the big fish gets cleaned up and swims away happily. It does so without helping itself to its helper as a post-spa snack. Cleaning behaviour has evolved separately in a number of unrelated groups: wrasse, cichlids, catfish and gobies; there are also some shrimps who have taken on the job. Most of them have come to resemble each other: blue with a pronounced longitudinal stripe and an attenuated shape. Many will perform a small dance to advertise their services. A large predatory fish, the sort that would make a meal of a fish the size of a cleaner without a second’s thought, will rest motionless while the cleaner does its work: a celebration of mutual trust as well as mutual advantage. The cleaner will touch and soothe a big fish before and during the cleaning process: a predatory fish will be touched about three times more frequently than less dangerous fish.
The presence of a cleaning station makes the surrounding waters a safe haven for other species. The suspension of normal life in such a place makes it ideal for the sudden entrance of a major predator, but that doesn’t happen. Here is a corner of the wild world, a corner of fierce and unforgiving nature, a place that is supposed to be red in tooth and fin, giving itself over to the pursuit of peace, to everybody’s mutual advantage. This is the myth of Eden acted out for us beneath the waves like an octopus’s garden in the shade.I The idea of Eden goes very deep in most cultures: the place where the wild world leaves off its ferocity and the lion lies down with the lambII and humans can wander naked without fear or shame.
The beguiling and complex life of the cleaner fish tells us that all this can be so: that peace can break out at any moment, just as Hathi the elephant called the truce during the drought in The Second Jungle Book, in the story “How Fear Came”. Under the truce, predators and prey animals agree to share the riverbank to drink and rest without eating each other or running away, so that life for all might continue until the rains come again at last.
It’s a wonderful story and like all wonderful stories, it contains a great human truth that goes very deep. So let me introduce the sabre-toothed blenny. This is a fish that looks exactly like a cleaner fish and even does the same advertising dance as a cleaner fish. But when the bigger fish stretches itself out to be groomed, the sabre-toothed blenny darts in and grabs a mouthful of healthy fish and shoots off at high speed – thereby creating as big a problem for moralists and creationists as it does for the big fish.
So let me briefly assume the role of moralist. The first moral is that there is no moral. The second moral is that anyone who seeks moral lessons for human life in the wild world needs to be somewhat selective, or better still, blind. The third moral I will leave to James Bond. Here is an extract from the fifth chapter of Goldfinger: “A second reason why Bond enjoyed the long vacuum of night duty was that it gave him time to get on with a project he had been toying with for more than a year – a handbook of all secret methods of unarmed combat. It was to be called Stay Alive!” And that, in two words, is the only real moral lesson taught by the wild world. Stay alive, so that you might breed and become an ancestor. Only once you have done so is it suitable to die like salmon in the upper reaches of the rivers they were spawned in, their biological destiny fulfilled.
As humans we need a moral code to live by. We will spend the rest of our existence as a species arguing what that code should be and where our moral duties lie – but we won’t argue nearly so much about whether or not a moral code is necessary. Unless you are a philosopher or a sociopath, you accept without needing to be told that we, as individuals and as a society, need a moral code.III
The wild world does not tell us that humans can, if they wish, abandon all moral codes, nor does the wild world teach us what that moral code should be. Human wives do not eat the heads of their husbands as a matter of course; nor is there any compelling reason for humans to model their society on a termites’ nest, on an underwater cleaning station, or for that matter, on the sabre-toothed blenny. In this book I have constantly stressed the human continuity with our fellow species: and if there is a moral to be drawn from that continuity, it is to do with respect, compassion and generosity, and even love, not untinged by a certain self-interest. But this continuity does not require us to use selective animal behaviours as handy moral fables to stress certain ideas of what humans should be and how we should live our lives. That simply doesn’t work.
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I. There is no such thing as perfection in nature, nor should there be. Every Beatles album has its Ringo track: and is the richer for it.
II. The beatific image of life’s peaceful perfection is as vulnerable as a fish that has given itself over to the attention of a cleaner. DH Lawrence said: “No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb unless the lamb is inside,” while Woody Allen said: “The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”
III. Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov states that if you don’t believe in God, all is permitted. But in an increasingly non-religious society, the concept of morality is as strong as ever, even if moral standards have changed. As a sportswriter, my job is to write about morality as much as the decline of the 4–4–2 formation.
Prostitutes and clients
/> Monty wears a radish in his button-hole, grows vegetables in exquisite pots in his exquisite flat and happens to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose. He’s the mad uncle in Withnail and I, a film full of quotes that can be hurled like javelins. Withnail (mendaciously) tells Monty that he and his friend grow geraniums. “You little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees…”
The point could hardly be made better. Tarting is a flower’s job, just as being a flower’s client is a bee’s job. Joyce nailed this relationship for all time in a single word: fleurting. Bees and flowers and flowers and bees: they’ve become more or less inextricable, the evolution and spread of one dependent on that of the other. Flowering plants existed before bees, but bees abandoned the traditional carnivorous diet of the order Hymenoptera and took on flowers as a specialised job: accepting lavish bribes of nectar and making off with weighty loads of pollen to feed the hordes back at the hive – and at the same time performing the essential cross-fertilisation on which flowering plants depend. Sex: we’d be extinct without it. Perhaps more than any other group of animals on the planet, bees make the world we live in. They make it possible, and they make possible its continuation. That’s as true for humans as it is for anything else that lives on land, as we have seen with the bank-busting estimates of the commercial value of the pollination services of wild animals. (Here’s a couple more: the value of UK pollination services is £510 million a year; to do the job of commercial pollination without them would cost £1.8 billion a year.) When it comes to pollination, bees dominate the market. There are about 20,000 species of bees, and they belong in the same order as wasps and ants. Their basic flower-foraging lifestyle is well known and found again and again, but there are plenty of exceptions; vulture bees specialise in carrion and are a rare example of non-vegetarian bees.
Bees brought me close to murder on one occasion and on another, to an encounter with potentially lethal consequences. Both occasions obviously involved Bob, my companion of the Definite Male Lion episode. In the first of these I was doing the cooking at our camp in the Northwestern province of Zambia, where we were looking for a Small Brown Bird. I was frying potatoes in an air temperature fractionally lower than that of the oil. It was a bad idea. A cloud of large bees made a threatening and bothersome circle around my head, and a dense swarm of mopane bees – little black bastards the size of pinheads that gather round your eyes and nostrils to sup your liquids – adhered to my face. Bob then made the mistake of uttering a critical remark about my cooking method. I suggested that he went and looked for the Small Brown Bird, now, and on his own. Either that or face a faceful of boiling oil. On another occasion, investigating a hollow baobab, we were set on by the famously deadly African bees. I was stung twice as we sprinted to the vehicle. The experience itself was not all that deadly, I have to confess, since it’s generally accepted that a minimum of 500 stings are required to kill a human, but it was jolly painful and of course entirely Bob’s fault.
The renowned “killer bees” of the Americas are an experimental hybrid of African and European honeybees. They got loose from the lab and went feral; they are more soberly referred to as Africanised bees. They are no more venomous than European bees, and for that matter, nor are the Africans who caused me such discomfort. But both African and Africanised bees are more inclined to defensive measures when disturbed: they will send out four times as many defenders and pursue for much greater distances.I
An African bird, the greater honeyguide, will perch in front of a human strolling the bush and utter a very particular prolonged chattering call. I’ve had the song sung to me many times, but have never followed it up. It is an invitation to follow. If you do, he will lead you to a bees’ nest. The deal is that you can feast on honey while the bird gorges on the larvae and also on the wax, being one of the few animals capable of digesting the stuff. The story is that if you take the lot and leave nothing for the honeyguide, the next time it sees you it will lead you to a lion.
Many bees form eusocial colonies, though there are plenty of exceptions. Some bees take on arcane trades; there are mason bees, solitary bees that construct nests from clay, and carpenter bees, which bore into wood to make nests. The carpenters are not entirely solitary: often a female will live with daughters or sisters in a rough and ready social system.
The extremely organised nature of the eusocial bees has led to some extraordinary developments, and the most remarkable is the famous waggle dance (so famous that the brewers Wells named one of their beers Waggle Dance simply because it is produced from honey). The dance is about communication: successful foragers convey information to the rest of the hive about the direction and distance of a source of nectar and/or pollen, or water, and also on occasions the possible location for a new hive. This dance poses deep questions about the definition of language and the nature of human uniqueness.
The more urgent questions to do with bees relate to their catastrophic decline in recent years. There are many causes: in the United States a combination of a virus and a fungal infection has proved fatal. There are problems connected with the use of pesticides and with the decline of flower-rich habitats. Two species of bumblebee have gone extinct in Britain over the past 75 years. In Britain, two-thirds of all pollinating species are in decline and 250 of them are in danger of extinction. Britain now has a Bumblebee Conservation Trust:II an organisation devoted to looking after creatures we once took for granted. And that is at the heart of the problem: that as humans, we still think with minds that evolved on the savannah. We know that bees and flowers have always been here and always will be here. Our brains can’t deal with any other possibility: it is too absurd. The fact is that if we lose bees we not only lose the world we know, we also lose the world that supports our existence.
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I. The greatest bee story in fiction is “Red Dog” from The Second Jungle Book, which tells how Mowgli, who likes to “pull the whiskers of death”, uses the wrath of the bees to defeat a vast troop of invaders.
II. I’m honorary vice-president.
That’s no parasite: that’s my husband
There is nothing that seems quite so much like the life of another planet – another solar system – another galaxy – than the deeply deep depths of the oceans. For humans anyway. For some creatures these places are as homely as the African savannahs, or to update the notion of the human comfort zone, Welwyn Garden City. But the deepest depths boggle the human imagination: the limitless three-dimensional environment of black emptiness, where most light fails to penetrate, where the pressure of the water would crush a human like a nut, where the only external nutrients come down in a gentle rain from the sunlit levels. Here dwell some of the strangest creatures on the planet: the most alien of all the aliens and in the most alien environment.
The natural human response to this environment is baffled rejection: how could any creature bear to live there? How could any of us vertebrates contemplate the fantastic possibilities of this place? How could we dream of facing the vast problems of life in so lifeless an environment? But these are human questions: they don’t make sense for anything except human intuition. The fact is that evolution doesn’t always seek some human idea of the good life: life exists because there is an opportunity for something to live. Stay alive! When such an opportunity can be found, you will generally find that some creature has evolved to take it up: often doing so in ways that scramble the human mind and confound the human imagination. We humans are creatures of light and warmth: naturally, we fail to understand those for whom cold and darkness has the same life-giving properties. What we see as a world of endless black horror is to the anglerfish the very breath of life. I am reminded again of the gnomes in The Silver Chair, who constantly recite the formula: “Many sink down to the underworld: and few return to the sunlit lands.” The underworld is a fantasy from the mind of CS Lewis: but it actually exist
s at the bottom of the sea: in the aphotic zone where less than one per cent of the sun’s light penetrates. Here you find the giant squid, already met in these pages, and also the anglerfish.
Anglerfish comprise 16 to 18 families. They are characterised by a lure that hangs over a wide mouth, not unlike the lure a human fisher uses from the riverbank. The lure attracts fish, which think it is something worth eating: when the lure is touched the mouth shuts in an automatic reflex. The anglerfish, which live at the deepest levels add a light to their lure: a cold light produced biologically by bacteria that have struck up a symbiotic relationship with the fish. The core group at such depths is the Ceratiidae or sea devils: a group full of picturesque names that go well with their outlandish appearance. Or should that be outoceanish appearance? The subgroups include prickly sea devil, and also black, wolftrap, needlebeard and whipnose sea devils; if ever I write a sequel to The Silver Chair I shall use these names for a group of wicked gnomes. These fish tend to have huge heads, vast crescent-shaped mouths with long fang-like teeth that are angled backwards. When they take hold of something they are not inclined to let it go.