Ten Million Aliens
Page 38
Manta rays seem to me creatures with something of the miracle about them – but then that’s true of everything that walks or crawls or swims or flies or wriggles or squirms or anchors itself to the ocean bed and filter-feeds. It’s just that these great lovely flying monsters seem to me to express that touch of the miraculous better than most. Perhaps they are all the more vivid because I have only seen them on a television screen and of course, in my imagination. They are rays, and rays, as we have seen, evolved for the floor of the ocean, but the manta rays – there are reckoned to be two species – left the bottom and took to the open seas once again and did so with grace and magnificence.
They are filter-feeders, feeding on zooplankton, helping the stuff into their gawping mouths with the help of two flappy fins on their heads – cephalic fins, technically. They can measure getting on for 7 m, 23 feet, across, and astonishingly, they sometimes breach, that is to say, jump clear of the water. They have even been seen performing somersaults. Like sharks they need constant movement if they are to stay alive: the passage of water over their gills sustains their lives. They are long-lived – some individuals are reckoned to be at least 50 years old. They sometimes gather in groups of 50 and more, and they form associations with cleaner fish; often other fish come along for the ride to pick up falling food items. They are warm-water specialists, preferring tropical and subtropical latitudes. They often come close to the surface in shallow water, especially in coastal waters. In other words, they are a pretty accessible miracle for those with a taste for diving.
It is their mountainous, seemingly magical presence that piques my imagination so strongly, but there is another point that needs consideration. The ancestors of these great exponents of perpetual movement and undersea flight evolved for the bottom and for stillness, abandoning the life of the constant swimmer. And that really doesn’t make logical sense. It seems like shilly-shallying: a lineage, a set of genes, set off to do one job and then changed its mind and went back to the original idea.
This open-water, sea-bottom, open-water switching back and forth is confusing, but it’s an evolutionary lesson and an important one. Mammals are ultimately descended from backboned creatures that lived in the sea and went onto the land in search of a living. Many mammals have returned to the water: some part-timers, like otters, some most-of-the-timers, like seals, and some all-the-timers, like whales and dolphins. Where is the progress in that? If you’ve got a plan, stick to it: don’t change your mind halfway. But these rules of human planning don’t operate in the wider context of life. Evolution is not a plan, and it’s not about progress. Some cartilaginous fish found bottom-dwelling an effective way of life and specialised: some rays found that moving back into open water worked pretty well. The aim of life is not to live better than your ancestors: it is to do anything that helps you become an ancestor yourself. That is the secret behind every chapter in this book: and in every one of the ten million or so other aliens that I somehow missed out along the way.
Axis of weevil
So, Mr Barnes – Simon – what was your favourite? After all those chapters, all those words and all those creatures, what’s the best animal in the Animal Kingdom? What’s the most effective, the most formidable, the most lovely? What is the champion of champions: the one creature that stands out, not just from the phylum of vertebrates but from all the multiform unrelated phyla of invertebrates as well? Where is it that the Animal Kingdom reaches its peak? What is the masterpiece of Animalia? What is the animal of animals?
I have spent most of this book trying to explain that life’s not like that, that life doesn’t work in this way, that life’s not about champions and linear progression and hierarchies. And it really isn’t. But our human minds don’t accept the world as it is. Our minds don’t have the appropriate functions. We’d much rather have the King of the Jungle, with everything else descending from this summit in an orderly fashion, getting feebler and more insignificant as we get closer to the bottom. Especially when we take the role of King of the Jungle for ourselves.
But this book is a circle, or rather two circles – and above all it’s about diversity. If I’m going to gratify our human urge for a champion I’d better find something that fits the theme of this book. So let’s settle for the weevil. There really is nothing like a weevil. Or rather, there is: there’s an awful lot of things so exactly like a weevil that they’re weevils too. If there is a champion at all, it is to be found not in conventional magnificence or in power to fire the human imagination, but in multiplicity, in diversity, in the ability to boggle, in the ability to make us understand for all time that life on earth really is queerer than we can suppose.
Weevils are beetles. In fact, it’s probably true to say that what insects are to the rest of the Animal Kingdom and what beetles are to insects, so weevils are to beetles. In diversity there is nothing to touch them. Weevils make up one single family. That’s a low-level category of classification: species, genus, family. Let’s not make comparisons with human classification – that will stir up a load of controversies that we’ve already dealt with and which won’t help us here. So let us take cats instead: after all, it’s the natural place to look for favourites and champions and kings of the jungle. Let’s take the family Felidae. It ranges from tigers to next-door’s cat: it includes lynx, puma, ocelot, caracal, serval, snow leopard, jaguarundi, fishing cat, the wildcat of Scotland and elsewhere and the delightfully named flat-headed cat, an elegant beast I once saw in Borneo. A large and diverse family, then: one that contains about 41 species. The family of weevils, the Curculionidae, has 40,000 species. A thousand times greater: greater by three orders of magnitude.
Snout beetles and bark beetles. They have a long nose – technically a rostrum, as we’ve already seen – but it’s not a poker and piercer, in the manner of the true bugs’. The weevil rostrum has tiny chewing parts right at the end of it. As with sheathed wings, it’s tempting to ask what’s so bloody marvellous about that, but it’s the device that has set loose this bewildering adaptive radiation of weevils. They are none of them terribly big: the size range is 1–40 mm, 0.04–1.6 inches. They are mostly vegetarians; in fact, there is scarcely a species of plant on the planet that doesn’t attract weevils. Weevils are capable of exploiting just about every bit of plant that grows: wood, roots, leaves, seeds, fruit, flowers, shoots.
Weevils represent one of the greatest miracles of life on earth: which is to say the twin miracles – Siamese or conjoined twins – of diversity and adaptability. Of course, if you look them up on the internet, you’ll find very little about them except how to kill the ones that get in the way of human life. We ignore weevils apart from when we want to kill them, yet weevils tell us, more clearly and more vividly than any other family of animals on this planet, about life: what life is about, how life works and how extraordinary life is. Should I push this line of thought still further and say that weevils also tell us how beautiful life is? Weevils are not beautiful to human eyes, not like tigers and flat-headed cats: but they are at least beautiful in conception. We should look on weevils as we look on cubist paintings: admiring the thought, the execution, the all-round multidimensional perfection – even if we’d rather have one of the impressionists in the previous room of the gallery hanging on our bedroom wall. The cubists changed the way we see the world: for Braque and Picasso I give you weevils.
The beginning
One last dizzying plunge remains: a swallow-dive down to the very depths of vertebrate life – and then up and back out the other side again. We will meet species incomparably and incomprehensibly ancient as we go. There are two classes of vertebrates left, both formerly lumped together in the group called “fish”, and they include some of the weirdest creatures on the planet – not least because they include, stretching a point just a little, us.
But first the jawless fish. Their lineage stretches back to the Cambrian era, to the time when life first exploded in a great detonation of diversity 530 million years ago. To u
nderstand life on earth you must first understand Time as it really is: not time with its seconds ticking their relentless way around the clock-face, but Time as something deeper than did ever plummet human mind. The only problem with this is that you can’t. It’s impossible for us humans to imagine a thousand years. A single million is as far out of reach as the Horsehead Nebula, and that’s still part of the galaxy we live in. Half a billion years is so far beyond human scope that it might as well be fantasy. Even Finnegans Wake aimed to tell no more than the entire history of human civilisation – but all the same, reading that extraordinary book is perhaps the nearest we can get to grasping the impossible immensities of Time. Deep Time is the essential ingredient for shaping the earth and its creatures into the forms they take today, throughout all the convolutions and convulsions of history, a history that included many extinction episodes, five of them drastic – six if you count the extinction crisis of modern times.
Back in the Cambrian we find the jawless fish, not unrecognisably different from the 100-odd species that survive today, lampreys and hagfish. And no, they really don’t have any jaws: just suckers and a snout and concentric circles of rasping teeth. They have a jawless cranium made of cartilage, a partially formed vertebral column and no scales. They tend to feed parasitically on other – to use the term loosely – fish.
And now to the last class of all: the last class in the phylum of vertebrates: the last class we shall meet in this book: the lobe-finned fishes. The most famous of them is the coelacanth, which was known only from fossils 65 million years old when a living animal was caught in 1938. The group also includes lungfish, those mysterious creatures that can bury themselves in mud and survive for months until the rains come again; creatures found in Africa, South America and Australia.
Lobe-finned fishes are distinctly odd because their front and back fins – their pectoral and pelvic fins – look rather like primitive limbs. They can use these to shuffle along the sea bottom. The class includes the Tetrapodomorpha, sometimes called fishapods. These look really quite a lot like fish with legs: and they can use these almost-legs to leave the water for brief periods. Here, then, represented by the last species of the book, the Tiktaalik, is the four-limbed body plan: here, then, is the basic idea of us. Here, then, is the scheme adopted by frogs and toads and lizards and crocodiles and birds and cats and dogs and mice and rats and you and me.
At some stage across the profundities of Deep Time it became advantageous to leave the water behind. There are various suggestions about what prompted this seismic change. There is the stinking waterhole hypothesis, sometimes called the desert hypothesis: the place where the ancient lobe-fins lived dried out or otherwise failed; those that could scrambled out to look for new water. Then there is the intertidal hypothesis: the twice-daily emergency of the low tides is also an opportunity for underwater creatures that can exploit the exposed areas. The mudskippers – ray-finned fishes and nothing to do with the bunch here – exploit this niche today, often among mangrove swamps, and a very fetching sight they are, too. And then there is the woodland hypothesis, suggesting that the urge to leave the water came from the advantages gained in flooded forests.
Whichever way it was, this most obscure branch of the phylum of vertebrates is the key to all the backboned creatures that live on the surface of the earth or fly above it, and quite a lot of those that live in the water as well. Perhaps we owe our existence, not to some vast eternal plan, but to the stink of a dying waterhole. Counter-factual history: what if this primitive little thing, this fish that is not a fish, this small and undistinguished group, failed to make it? It’s the question I asked earlier, when we contemplated the ancestor shared by humans and xenoturbellids: for the same curious circumstance arises again and again. So: what if one of the early extinction crises caused the lobe-finned fishes to go extinct? It wouldn’t register as a catastrophe when the Martians or the Tralfamadorians arrived to study the history of life on earth – and yet life on earth would have been utterly different, and we tetraprods, we mammals, we apes, we humans would not exist.
And no, life doesn’t divide itself into a series of compartments and boxes. Life is moving and fluid. Its boundaries merge perplexingly one into another like the characters in Finnegans Wake, while the way we try and make sense of it all is changing and changing again, to the bewilderment even of specialists. The separation of humans from the rest of the Animal Kingdom no longer looks like a hard and fast thing: it’s all a matter of definition and degree. And the thrilling thing is that the dissolving of the human–animal boundary does nothing but enrich us. It makes us more at home on our own planet and more capable of understanding who we are and what the hell we are doing. If there is a moral separateness of humans from other animals it is that we have a better idea of the long-term consequences of our actions: not that the Tralfamadorian visitor would deduce that from the way we actually carry on.
We are part of a continuum. We are linked to our fellow animals, linked by our past and our present, linked by evolution and by ecology. We are linked, above all, by the planet that has supported us all for so many years. So far, anyway.
And this sense of continuity is what matters: the continuity of our wild places, the continuity of the species with whom we share the planet, the continuity of the life-support system that is planet earth. We’re all in the same boat: we all come from the same stock, we’re all part of the same continuing cycle of life on earth. How was it Darwin ended his big book? Ah yes. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks to all the following:
John Burton, of the World Land Trust, for reading the manuscript and also for providing many of the experiences that crop up in its pages
Chris Breen of Wildlife Worldwide for many shared adventures
The late Baron Robert Stjernstedt, ornithologist. Knowing him was one of the great adventures of my life
The late Aaron Mushindu of Livingstone Museum
All at Zambian Ornithological Society, especially the late Dylan Aspinwall
All at Norman Carr Safaris, including the late Norman Carr, Adrian and Christina Carr and Abraham Banda
Tim Dodman of WWF and Lochinvar National Park
The British charity Riders for Health
South Luangwa Conservation Society
Wildlife Trust for India, especially Vivek Menon and Sandeep Tiwari
The late Peter O’Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise books
Lee Durrell of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, for permission to quote Gerald Durrell at length
All at Suffolk Wildlife Trust, especially Julian Roughton, Simone Bullion, Alison Looser and Dorothy Casey
All at Save the Rhino, especially Cathy Dean
Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Anthony Hurd
Janie Ray of Cetacealab in British Columbia, and Neekas the whale-dog
Phillip Clapham of Alaska Fisheries Science Center
John and Carol Coppinger of Remote Africa Safaris
Nick Aslin of Zambia Ground Handlers
Diego Calderon-Franco of Colombia Birding
Nicholas and Raquel Locke of Regua, Brazil
Butterfly Conservation, especially Martin Warren
Professor Nicky Clayton of Cambridge University
All at Seawatch Foundation
Carl Chapman of Wildlife Tours and Education
Fergus and Di Flynn of Lechwe Lodge
All at El Almejal, Colombia
Ralph Bousfield of Jack’s Camp, Botswana
Phil Berry, expert on Zambian Wildlife
David Wilson, moth expert
John-Paul Davidson
Stephen Fry
Emma Craigie, for her wise editing
All at Short Books, especially Rebecca Nicolson and Aurea Carpe
nter
Georgina Capel, agent and comforter
My family Cindy, Joseph and Eddie
AUTHOR
SIMON BARNES is a multi-award-winning sports and nature writer who wrote for the London Times for over thirty years. He is also a novelist, horseman and the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher and The Meaning of Sport (Short Books). He lives in Norfolk, England, with his family and other animals.
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Index
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Page references in italics indicate an illustration. ‘n’ indicates a reference to a footnote.
aardvarks 116–18, 318n
aardwolf 69