The truffles are a type of mycorrhizal fungus, and they have a symbiotic relationship with trees. A truffle draws on a tree's roots for sugar and minerals, but it gives back to the tree a super-growing boost. In a study completed in mainland Australia, trees paired with truffle symbionts grew as much as ten times faster than trees that were deprived of their truffle partners. Truffles are like forest fertilizer. And potoroos are inadvertently like forest farmers, spreading the spores of truffles when they eat and excrete them. It's a delicate balance—a classic ecosystem, with one hand washing another and another in a nearly invisible chain.
So if the foxes eat up all the potoroos, it's not only going to have an impact on the animals; it will change Tasmania's entire ecosystem as well. Interestingly, there is one other Tasmanian animal that eats even more fungus than the long-nosed potoroo—the Tasmanian bettong. Already extinct on the mainland, this little creature is fox bait, too.
Potoroos, in general, are adept at hiding, even creating small tunnels through the grass that they travel through surreptitiously. But it is unlikely they would be able to hide from a large population of foxes.
“Those potoroos don't have a burrow to hide in or anything. There's nowhere they can go to get away from the fox,” said John. They couldn't climb trees like the possum.
Even though our encounter with the potoroos was brief, we found them delightful. Like many of Tasmania's native mammals, they were eccentric and had an Alice in Wonderland quality. The thought of an intentionally introduced predator shredding through their numbers was maddening.
Ken and John decided to call it quits on the farm. Like all the other fox hunts on the island so far, ours had been unsuccessful. Ken drove us back to Launceston. On the way, we continued to scan the road and surrounding fields for quadrupeds, striped, red, fluffy, and otherwise. But we saw nothing on four legs. Ken told us his night was just beginning. He would be checking out another reputed fox haunt and then, in the early hours of the morning, go whistling for foxes. From the outskirts of town, we watched as Ken's vehicle disappeared into the Tasmanian night.
“These guys are my heroes,” said Alexis, staring down the dark road. “They're on the front lines of the war to protect biodiversity.”
And they were fighting an invisible enemy. We hoped the Red Fog didn't win.
18. SUNBATHING IN HELL
“Oh, there seem to be naked people with us today.” Two elderly women were pointing at Alexis, who lay on a lawn with his shirt off and his shorts hiked up.
We had been invited to the Field Day at the Launceston Field Naturalists Club. It was a combination picnic and flora-and-fauna hunt on the club's grounds in Myrtle Bank, about twenty-five miles northeast of Launceston. The drive over had been hellacious. The outdoor temperature gauge in the Pajero read 30 degrees Centigrade—which in Fahrenheit translated as “insanely hot.” If we had cracked the egg of a Tasmanian native hen, we could have cooked it on the blacktop. To make things worse, Tasmania was being hit by wildfires—and the air was tinged with the smell of smoke. Several of the club's members were skipping the day's activities in order to protect their homes from the licking flames.
We found the man who had invited us to the event under the shade of a big spreading eucalyptus tree. His name was Jim Nelson, and he was an expatriate American who had been living in Tasmania for the past three decades. Todd Walsh, our escort into the watery world of the giant lobster, had suggested we get in touch with him.
“What's his specialty?” we had asked Todd.
“Ahh … everything. He knows every blade of grass in the bloody bush.”
Jim was tall, sunburned, and rangy. For the last couple of years, he had been doing research on burrowing crayfish. “Todd may study the largest crayfish,” he said in a deep booming voice that sounded remarkably like William Hurt. “But I study one of the world's most highly evolved ones.”
Jim opened the trunk of his car. It held a small library of files containing scientific papers, natural history books, and specimens. He removed a vial containing a crayfish embalmed in alcohol, and we noticed Jim had huge hands. If a crayfish latched its claws on to one of his mitts, he probably wouldn't even feel it.
“This crayfish is actually the one that's on the club's land here and it's an endangered species. It's called Engaeus orramakunna, the Mount Arthur burrowing crayfish. It makes its living from burrowing down to the water table rather than living in free water. Consequently, it's changed its morphology to accommodate that sort of burrowing. So when you look at it, it's quite absurdly proportioned. It's got this tiny little tail and this great big bulldozer front end. Its carapace is laterally compressed and its claws are held vertically, so it can squeeze through really tight spaces. It's quite amazing for a water animal to make all these adaptations to live in soil.”
Jim was wearing a black T-shirt with illustrations showing E. orramakunna in three different poses. Alexis asked if he could photograph Jim and his crayfish—and an odd sort of fashion shoot unfolded. Jim removed the crayfish from the vial, and they discussed whether the crayfish's tail should be tucked under its body or stretched out. They settled on tucked under, and Jim modeled with the crayfish in his palm.
“Faaaahbulous,” Alexis said. Click. “So where are you from originally, Jim?”
“The Midwest. I was born in Nebraska, but I did most of my growing up in Illinois on the Fox River, not far from Chicago.”
“Why did you move to Tasmania?” Click. “For the crayfish?”
“Um, well I was escaping Richard Nixon.”
“Post-Watergate depression?” Click.
“Well, Watergate really blew up after I came here. Richard Nixon was a real, you know …I was pretty discouraged with America. Most of my friends that went to Vietnam came back in body bags … so I was looking for something else. I had done a degree in psychology and biology and decided that there really wasn't any future for me there. I got involved in ceramics, and I came to Australia to study with a master potter. When I visited Tasmania, I found the lush green more agreeable than the dry mainland. Then I set up my own pottery in 1973, so I've been doing that ever since.”
Click. “So how did you start studying crayfish?”
“Well, originally with that giant one that Todd is interested in. Growing up, I was always interested in crayfish. There was something about them that fascinated me. Not so much from a scientific point of view but from an aesthetic one—”
“They're gorgeous.” Click.
Jim pointed at the specimen in his palm. “Engaeus is the genus of course and orramakunna is the aboriginal word for the name of the area. Tasmania's really a hot spot for burrowing crayfish. There's fifteen species of the Engaeus and fourteen species of another genus of burrowing crayfish that occur in our buttongrass plains.”
Alexis wrapped up his shoot. We told Jim we had spent the night in a buttongrass plain and had been surprised not to see any animals—not even a crayfish.
“Well, it can be really variable by the night. Was it a full moon? Most animals—little mammals in particular—don't much like moonlit nights. They're too visible to owls. They like at least a half-moon.”
Jim invited us into the club's study center. It was built out of mud bricks and wood. There were bunks, a kitchen, and a small, well-thumbed library. Many of the books, Jim informed us, had been written by members of the Field Naturalists Club. In fact, as a collective the club had published a book, A Guide to Flowers and Plants of Tasmania, now in its third edition, and it was the bible to the island's flora. They had used the proceeds to build this clubhouse.
The club's official emblem was an illustration of a Tasmanian tiger perched on a rock overlooking a valley. The emblem was pictured on name tags pinned to club members' shirts and burned into the wood of a long table in the middle of the clubhouse. It was a regal-looking thylacine. With its head lifted nobly, it was the kind of heroic figure that inspired optimism. We wondered if any of these naturalists thought the tiger was still ali
ve.
We asked Jim what he thought about the thylacine.
“I don't think it's out there anymore.” Our hopes sank again. Jim thought the thylacine's large size and the fact that there hadn't been a body found or a photograph taken in nearly seventy years made its survival highly unlikely. “The kind of sightings that people make …well, people see something and they want to see something else. So I don't trust all the sightings. Having said that, there have been a couple of really good ones. And there's a zoologist, who's long retired by now—Bob Green—he's still of the opinion that they're out there somewhere.”
While the field naturalists ate lunch and chatted, we wandered around eavesdropping, hoping to overhear some sagacious conversation about the tiger. There were experts on everything else: orchids (“there are more than 190 orchid species in Tasmania, including 50 that are endemic”), eucalyptus trees (“twenty-nine species in Tasmania, seventeen of which are endemic”). There were people who had millipedes and worms named after them. When a brown spider the size of a baseball peeped out from behind the clubhouse's rafters, it was welcomed like an old friend dropping by for tea. “That's a huntsman,” a club member informed us.
We met a chipper woman wearing a crisp red-and-white-striped Oxford shirt, with short gray hair. Her name was Alison Green (no relation to Bob), and she had been the curator of invertebrates at the Tasmanian Museum for twenty-three years.
“What's your specialty?” we asked.
“Slaters.”
“Oh …” We weren't quite sure what those were.
“Native slaters, not the ones that are introduced.”
“Hmmm … how many species are there?”
“I think we're up to about sixty-odd species for Tasmania, about half of those have been described and named and the other half are still new and waiting to be described and named.”
“Where can you find them?”
“They occur in all sorts of territories—in rain forest, in eucalypt forests, on beaches, and in caves. We've got three species introduced from Europe which are in everybody's gardens.”
“What are those called?”
She supplied us with three obscure scientific names.
“Do you have a favorite?”
“Not really. I've got one which I named after my professor. It lives in the rain forest. It's quite an attractive little beast. It rolls up.”
We motioned for Alexis to come over. “Alexis, meet Alison, she's a slater expert.”
“That's amazing. Do you think we'll see any slaters today?”
“I certainly hope so.” She excused herself and said she would see us on the nature trail.
“Alexis, what are slaters?” we whispered.
“I have no fucking clue.”
Next we met a young man named Danny Soccol. He was about thirty, a recent graduate of the biology program at the University of Tasmania in Launceston.
Danny had special interests in botany and bush tucker, and he sometimes volunteered to collect invertebrates—spiders, worms—for scientific projects. He actually had a worm named after him, Diporochaete soccoli. “I was one of the people who helped with the research. I was digging them out all over Tassie, in rain forests, dry sclerophyll. But it's just a small native worm.” He laughed self-effacingly.
“Don't be embarrassed,” said Alexis. “We're jealous.”
The field naturalists were going exploring on the land surrounding their clubhouse, 150 acres of rain forest, wet and dry eucalypt forest, and open grassland. We followed them down a path of trees neatly labeled with signs. Alison pointed out a Eucalyptus regnans. We strained our necks looking up the gray-and-brown trunk and halfway up were hit with vertigo. Eucalyptus regnans—more commonly known as a swamp gum— is the largest species of tree in the Southern Hemisphere.
Danny and Jim stopped in front of another specimen, a green bushy shrub with long, leathery, bladelike leaves.
“This is a Tasmanian sugar bush,” Jim said.
“Is that an endemic?”
“Yes, it only grows here.”
He and Danny tore off a few leaves.
“If you chew them, they taste sweet. It's excellent bush tucker.”
We put the leaves in our mouths and gave them a chew. At first, they didn't taste like anything.
“You have to work on it a little bit. It takes a while for the sugar to come out.”
We continued chewing. After a moment, the leaves transmitted a slight tingling sensation.
“Mmmm,” Alexis said tentatively. The club members looked at us expectantly.
Slowly, we perceived a fiery wave breaking over the soft parts of our mouths. Our gums and cheeks began to burn. Our tongues went numb.
As the green wildfire engulfed our lips, we spit out the leaves and looked at the “sugar bush.” There had been a little label in front of the plant all the time. It said “Tasmanian mountain pepper.”
“It really has a nice bite,” Jim said, laughing.
“And it's very good on pepper steak,” Danny added.
We'd been punked! And by a bunch of botanizers. Who knew flower lovers engaged in hazing?
Danny stopped in front of another plant. We looked at it warily.
“Is this another type of bush tucker?”
“No, it's stinkwood …I'm giving this one away.”
He crushed a few leaves. We took the tiniest of whiffs and were slammed with a wave of nausea.
We had just become honorary members of the club.
We walked down through eucalyptus forest and into a damp, muddy gully with a small stream running through it. In this lush environment, prehistoric tree ferns grew like vertical gardens, their trunks covered in flowering plants, mosses, liverworts, and smaller species of ferns. John Simmons, the club's president, pointed up at a tree fern whose base was growing from the branch of a sassafras tree about thirty feet up. He explained that the sassafras tree might have originally grown on the tree fern, but over the years, the tree put down roots and lifted the fern into the air.
Some of the tree ferns' moss-covered trunks had bizarrely contorted shapes. One was bent like a snake poised to strike; half of its trunk lay on the ground before it swooped upward. “They'll fall or be knocked over and start growing again. You can even chop a man fern off in the middle and it will reroot or sprout,” John told us, “which is why some of them are so twisty.”
Tree ferns, commonly called man ferns in Tasmania, are long-lived and very slow to develop, growing only two inches in height each year. John believed that several of the tree ferns in the gully were upwards of six hundred years old.
These tree ferns, Dicksonia antarctica, were ancient, possibly existing as a species for as long as 90 million years. And they were all over Tasmania. Yet, in the last ten years, their future had become less secure. Overseas, the tree ferns had become popular garden plants—worth $400 per yard, a height not achieved until a tree fern was thirty or forty years old— and there was an astonishing amount of poaching, with many of the stolen ferns ending up in English gardens.
Danny turned to show us a filmy fern, a nearly translucent green frond, growing off the trunk of a tree fern. Just as he was telling us that the filmy fern was only one cell thick, a land leech dropped onto his hand. We crowded around to look. It moved like a villainous black inchworm across his skin.
Ahhh, we thought, finally we meet our nemesis.
Without going through a true metamorphosis, the leech exhibited disturbing shape-shifting properties. Perched on Danny's hand, it looked like a little periscope, twisting back and forth, its head curled in an upsidedown U, searching the high seas for blood and a soft place to start chewing. It elongated its body like a living rubber band and morphed its head into a needle-sharp probe.
“Is it feeding on you?” we asked Danny hopefully.
“No, he's looking for a spot. They take quite a while to latch on— a couple of minutes.”
“That's Philaemon pungens, the smaller of Tasmania's two land
leech species,” Alison interjected. Both land leech species had two jaws that worked like rasps with which they chewed through the skin and made a V-shaped incision.
In wet forests like this one, leeches could survive for months, possibly even years, without a meal, living through dry spells and all-out desiccation, until they sensed blood and dropped down on an unsuspecting donor. After a thorough blood meal, they could expand to several times their size.
“Once it attaches, it also has an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing,” said Danny.
“How do you get it off, if it does attach?”
“You can put salt on them or you can burn them off.” Danny tossed his leech back into the forest—before it had a chance to start feeding. We remembered the famous, cringe-inducing leech scene from the 1951 movie The African Queen. The bloodsuckers cover Humphrey Bogart's body, and he and Katharine Hepburn, their hands quavering in primal fear, have to burn them off with a lit cigarette. “Filthy little devils,” Bogart curses.
The field naturalists returned to their pursuits and flipped over a rotting log. Underneath it was a riot of life. Eight-legged creatures, forty-two-legged creatures, and many with no legs at all. Alison found a millipede, but wasn't sure of the genus. Jim picked up a fast-moving centipede. It was greenish gray with a red head, legs, and tail. “It's got jaws,” he said.
They heaved over a second log. Alison found a harvestman. “This is an arachnid, but it's different from a spider in that it doesn't have a waist.” It was a little beige daddy longlegs.
“Harvestmen don't dissolve their prey like spiders,” Jim added. “They have to rip it apart.” (Spiders inject their prey with venom, wait for its insides to liquefy, and then suck the insides out like a vanilla milkshake.)
Each of these small creatures had its own story—a fact not often appreciated by laypeople. One thing invertebrate lovers have in common is their dismay that so much attention is given to animals with spines. Vertebrates are wonderful, they would tell you, but limited. For example, how many kinds of humans are there? Just one. Homo sapiens. That makes human beings very special, but not at all diverse. If you want to see a different type of human, good luck. But take leeches. There are five hundred different kinds around the world. Or take harvestmen—there are five thousand different kinds and probably many more waiting to be discovered. Ninety-nine percent of all animals are invertebrates.
Carnivorous Nights Page 21