The reason the spineless get such scant attention is that they're so little. It's size that put the giant squid—the world's largest invertebrate— on the map and at the top of everyone's research agenda. And that's why Tasmania's own giant freshwater lobster is slowly gaining notoriety. If each of the creatures under the log were the size of an echidna or a pademelon or a person, then we might all show a bit more respect. In fact, we'd all be running screaming out of the woods, shit-scared for our lives.
John produced a snail from under the log and held it in the flat of his palm. Everyone gathered around. “We haven't seen one of these for years,” he said excitedly. It was a Northeast forest snail (Anoglypta launcestonensis), one of Tasmania's 116 species of land snails. Like so many Tasmanian animals, this slow-moving creature lived nowhere else in the world—and it occupied its own island within an island, a forty-two-mile by thirty-mile area surrounding the Field Naturalists clubhouse. Its habitat is the underside of rotting logs where it is believed to eat detritus and fungi.
Although the snail was keeping its body hidden, we got a good look at its curious shell, which had a sideways look to it as if the snail was wearing a beret. The shell's outer side was brown, rough, and grainy. John turned it over, exposing a smooth, swirling black underside with a bright lime-colored stripe following the contour of the spiral.
Like the thylacine, this little animal had once been a missing species. In 1970, “they sent parties up into the Northeast to find one, because it hadn't been seen for eighty years,” John said. The snail was located, oozing about its old haunts, but this rediscovery eventually launched a controversy.
In an issue of the Tentacle, the newsletter of the mollusk division of the IUCN—The World Conservation Union, Tasmanian zoologist and snail expert Kevin Bonham wrote that the Northeast forest snail “arouses strong emotions even among scientists because of its beauty and taxonomic distinctiveness.”
In 1995, the snail was listed as a vulnerable species under the Threatened Species Protection Act. Tasmanian conservationists began using the snail's protected status as a shield against the clear-cutting of old-growth forests in the Northeast and held numerous “Save the Snail” rallies. However, in 1996, Bonham determined that the snail's population was secure (much larger than previously thought) and two years later advocated that it be delisted. Conservationists were livid, and an ugly battle, with namecalling, ensued. As the delisting seemed to coincide with new logging proposals, Bonham was accused of being a collaborator with the forestry department—this despite the fact that he was simultaneously advocating that three other snail species be added to the threatened species list.
Alexis snapped a photo of A. launcestonensis. “It's an honor to meet such a celebrity,” he said.
When we emerged from the shelter of the fern gully, Danny led us over to a big sandy lump on the ground. “Have you heard of jack jumpers?” he asked. “They're very aggressive ants. Very common in Tasmania.”
When a jack jumper nest is disturbed, the ants race up from the ground and jump about in an attack frenzy. In their rage to defend their nest, they can leap as far as four inches, eight times their body length. To demonstrate, Danny poked a stick into the ant nest and then kicked it several times. The result was volcanic. Ants with bright orange jaws came hurtling out like chunks of hot lava.
We weren't sure what a respectful distance was. “They hurt, but they're not poisonous, right?”
“Oh, yes, if you're allergic,” Alison informed us. “The allergic reaction is almost cumulative.”
“They've got big nippers on the front end,” said Jim, “and everybody thinks they're getting bitten, but they're actually holding on with those nippers, and doing the actual damage with the other end, stinging like a bee. It's quite an ancient group of ants. Most of the ancient ants sting. The modern ants bite.” Over the last twenty years, at least three Tasmanians had died of anaphylaxis after being stung by jack jumpers.
After our walk while cooling off in the shade of a wooden gazebo, we started to question the field naturalists about thylacines. Had anyone ever seen one? Alison mentioned that her father had spotted a tiger when he was a schoolboy in the 1920s near a golf course in Tasmania's Northwest. “But that was a long time ago,” she said, “before they died out.”
Then Danny—hassler of ants and leading club prankster—took us aside. “I want to tell you a story,” he said. He didn't seem keen on anyone overhearing. About eight years before, he said, he had gone for a hike near Golconda, north of Mount Arthur … “It was dawn and we were coming along a track that had been put in by a bulldozer, and we went down to a clearing. I saw a Bennett's wallaby running through the bush and it looked pretty frightened. Then I saw this other animal come past and it stood there and yawned. It was front-on and quite large, dog-sized with a big jaw and a woolly front. When it walked off, it didn't move like a dog. It was much more …athletic. Because of the time of the day and the shadows, I didn't get to see the stripes. But it had an arrogant look in its eye, like it was telling me, ‘I'm king of the castle.’ Slim chance it was a dog. I was a bit freaked out. The hackles went up on my neck.”
In Australia and Tasmania, “taking the piss” is a national pastime. It means “taking the piss out of someone,” knocking them down a peg, joking, making fun of people. After the sugar bush incident, we were feeling particularly leery.
Danny seemed distressed when we asked if he was kidding. “This is not a joke. I don't tease about biology.” Besides, he added, why would he? “People who report seeing tigers—people think they're crazy.”
He said he hadn't had a camera with him, but he did return later to see if he could find any evidence. “I found a scat, but I never got it tested. There were no tracks. The area was quite hard. I've gone back since then, but haven't seen one. The problem is that houses have been going up in that area. So I reckon that thylacines wouldn't be there anymore.”
“How sure would you say you were that what you saw was a thylacine?”
“Ninety, ninety-five percent. I'd want to see it one more time to be sure. I do think thylacines are out there, small populations of them.”
We told him we had spent a night listening for the thylacine in the Milkshakes—but hadn't seen or heard anything, except for some mysterious flashing lights.
“Ahhhh …min min lights,” he said.
“What are those?”
“They're like spirit lights. The aboriginal people won't even talk about them.”
As he reached the end of his explanation, we realized the skies were getting darker. There had been a shift in the wind and the smoke from the wildfires was blowing in our direction.
“Maybe the fires are headed our way,” Jim said. The botanizing party started to break up, and we drove off through the eucalyptus-perfumed haze, pondering Danny's strange report.
Back at the low-budget motor lodge where we were ensconced in Launceston, Alexis convinced us to join him in a “bowl.” We decided to take a puff each—and instantly regretted it. This was not the pot from our high school days. The effect was immediate, like getting whacked with a shovel. Over the years, Cannabis sativa had been crossbred to get stronger and stronger. The geniuses that made this weed should be hired to clone the thylacine. They could probably get the job done in weeks.
Alexis seemed to be filled with bliss after breathing in the potent smoke, but we were flooded with dread. Our tongues became dry and swollen. Swallowing became a frightening act. Paranoid ideas floated through our heads.
“Do you think the people we've met are taking a piss on us?”
“That's taking the piss,” said Alexis.
“You think they're taking our piss? Maybe they're all in cahoots.”
In our pot-induced stupor, we imagined the Tasmanians we had met were organized in a vast, interconnected cabal to …to what?
“Don't you get it?” we insisted. “The thylacine exists, but they're hiding it from us. When we get home, they'll reveal to the world th
e last surviving Tasmanian tigers.”
“Okay,” said Alexis. Having smoked this stuff every day, he was immune to its disorienting effects.
“Everywhere we've gone was their suggestion. We're like pawns on a chessboard. It's all a game. And while we're sent off on wild-goose chases, they're moving the tigers around from safe house to safe house. Bob Green has something to do with it.”
“Who's Bob Green?” asked Alexis.
“The zoologist guy Jim said still believed.”
“Yeah right. We'll go to his house and he'll answer the door in his bathrobe with a thylacine on a leash.”
“Exactly.” We started rooting around for a phone book to find Bob Green's address. Maybe we would just go over there and check for ourselves. “Remember that guy Carl at the Backpacker's Barn? He's probably hiding an entire population of tigers in the Tarkine. That's where they're breeding them up … Geoff King's in on it. Do you think Geoff King's in on it, Alexis?”
“Definitely.”
“Yeah, he played footie with Todd Walsh.”
The next day we were feeling like ourselves again. But Alexis insisted that we drive by Bob Green's house. Neither the zoologist nor his pet thylacine were home.
19. WAY DOWN UNDER
While driving west, we dissected Danny Soccol's sighting. Danny was a trained biologist and able to identify a host of obscure invertebrates. A five-foot-long quadruped should have been a piece of cake, but because he had not seen the animal in good light—and could not check for stripes—even he was not 100 percent sure.
“No stripes, no tiger,” Alexis said dismissively.
Still, when we looked out at the green forests and jagged hills, the landscape was infused with an extra charge. Danny's tale had added an element of uncertainty.
We were driving up into the foothills of the Great Western Tiers. This region was another of Tasmania's tiger hot spots—rife with sightings and not far from where James Malley had found his tiger tracks in 1971. Jim Nelson from the Field Naturalists Club had told us that the area harbored some other elusive creatures. There was no doubt they existed, but we would have to go underground to see them. We decided to take a detour from our tiger search.
Mole Creek Karst National Park encompassed 5.2 above-ground square miles. Below its surface were more than two hundred caves, hundreds of miles of passageways, plus subterranean rivers, sinkholes, and blind valleys.
As we got nearer to the caves, we entered a lush forest cut by a stream and filled with spreading tree ferns. The invisible world below us was carved out of 400-million-year-old limestone. Much of the erosion had been caused by meltwaters from the last Ice Age infiltrating the bedrock. The caves were still in the process of being formed. Rainwater from the terrestrial realm leached through the plants on the surface, turned acidic, and drop by drop melted and molded the soft limestone beneath our feet.
Our destination was Marakoopa Cave. There, a ranger named Brooke Cohn would serve as our ambassador to the creatures from below. We met her at the ranger station and observed that she was tall and wiry, with short, curly blond hair. For someone who spent so much time underground, she was remarkably tan and attractive.
Walking toward Marakoopa, Brooke explained there were different zones of life in the cave. Subterranean species were adapted to live at different depths and some lurked right outside the entrance. The cave's entryway was blocked with a steel door to control the flow of people in and out. In front of it, Brooke pointed to one of the creatures inhabiting the cave's outermost zone. “She's all legs.”
The creature was a female spider the size of Brooke's hand. From an inch-long body, her legs stuck out three inches on each side. And she was closely guarding her egg sac, a white round ball dangling from a short silk thread in a rocky crevice. “That's a Tasmanian cave spider, an ancient species.” Her closest relatives were spiders that lived in South America, dating from the time of Gondwanaland millions of years ago, when all the southern continents were connected.
As we explored the moist folds in the wall of limestone, we realized we were looking at some sort of nursery, as there were at least three egg balls, each guarded by a giant spider. The egg balls were an inch in diameter and dotted with brown tidbits—the mother spiders decorated them with tiny pieces of rotting wood for camouflage. They would guard the egg balls for eight months before their spiderlings hatched.
The male cave spiders, Brooke explained, had significantly smaller bodies. And on their second pair of legs, the males had special hooks that they used to hold the female spider's fangs open during mating. Without the hooks, the males might be eaten before mating successfully occurred— and they often were eaten right after. During the act of mating, a female's fangs dripped with venom.
To find their way in the dark, cave invertebrates are endowed with inordinately long legs and antennae. (The male cave spider's legs can reach seven inches in length.) They can also go a long time without eating— since it's often tough to get a meal in a dark cave where nothing grows except fungus—and as a result they live a long time. Scientists believe the Tasmanian cave spider may live for decades.
Brooke unlocked the door to the cave and a stream of cold air hit us. Because the temperature in the cave is always between 48 and 52 degrees Fahrenheit, a differential builds up on hot days and high-pressure cool air rushes out the cave entrance. The day we visited it was nearly 90 degrees out, and the cave's exhalation was so strong it was hard to pull the door closed. It felt like being run over by an invisible train.
Once we were inside, Brooke flicked on a light that illuminated a cave chamber. It was enormous—the size of a ballroom—with rust brown stalactites hanging down from the rocky ceiling and flowstones creating the illusion of frozen waterfalls. The chamber's far wall was smooth, forming a half-dome-shaped amphitheater, and we heard the roiling sound of an unseen, underground stream beneath us. This chamber, Brooke said, was in the transition zone. Under natural conditions, no light penetrated, though it was slightly influenced by outside temperature and humidity.
“Ready?” she asked.
Brooke switched off the light and we were enveloped in darkness. The sound of the rushing subterranean stream and the wind howling through distant, unseen cave passages grew louder.
“Give yourselves some time,” Brooke said from the dark. “Your eyes will adjust.”
Overhead, pinpoints of burning blue light began to appear. It was as if, instead of being underground, we were watching stars appearing one by one in the night sky. Or back at the Hayden Planetarium, watching the space show.
“Glowworms,” said Alexis.
“Hundreds,” Brooke confirmed. “Thousands maybe.”
The glowworms were congregating on the rocky ceiling of the natural amphitheater that curved over the underground stream. They were actually not worms, Brooke explained, but the larvae of a tiny fly.
“We've got one species of glowworm in Tassie—they're endemic. They only live in wet caves or terrestrial wet environments—and they're just above us here.” The species was Arachnocampa tasmaniensis, which means Tasmanian spider grub.
Although not related to spiders any more than they were related to worms, A. tasmaniensis had a spider's ability to make sticky silk strands. “They suspend themselves from the undersurface of the cave's ceiling by threads, and it's like they're in a little sleeping bag”—a hollow tube made of silk and mucus—“and from there they drop down multiple threads of silk—very sticky, mucousy fishing lines to catch their prey. That nice dark blue glow—it's them burning their waste products, but it also attracts prey. The brighter the glow, the hungrier they are.”
The glowworms' prey is flying insects. The larvae of mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies are aquatic and sometimes get swept from terrestrial rivers into underground streams. When these insects emerge from their larval stage and turn into flying adults, they find themselves stuck in the dark. Then, when they see the glowworms' lights, they head right up— and get caught in the
sticky fishing lines. The glowworms simply reel them on up.
The glowworms themselves stay in their larval incarnation for up to eighteen months. When they finally turn into flying adults, they have only three or four days left to live. “They don't eat—they don't even have mouthparts. All they do is go out and reproduce,” Brooke said. “And they do it carefully, because every one of those glowworms has thirty to fifty threads of silk. And often they get caught in their own fishing lines.”
With each passing second—as our pupils dilated—more and more glowworms became visible. There was something creepy about the illusion—these grubs and their sticky little threads so effectively posing as a starry night. The lights were beautiful, intoxicating, and we wondered if people ever became mesmerized by the glowworms—thinking they were sleeping under a starry sky, falling into a cave dream, and never waking up.
Certainly, some animals came in and never came out. “As you can hear, we've got a stream going underneath. That brings other cave fauna in, accidentals,” said Brooke. “Often in floods, we get platypus and trout that have been pushed through from about a thousand meters up, from the Great Western Tiers. It's very rare, but they end up down here. And we also get wallabies and wombats that fall through sinkholes. They die. They fall into the water and eventually they decompose—and encourage more insect life in the cave.”
After the wind pushed us out the cave door and back into the world of the living, Brooke decided she wanted to show us something else— a wilder cave in a different part of the karst system. As we drove on a narrow, winding road through more wet eucalypt forest, Brooke told us a little more about herself. She was a teacher during the school year—she educated autistic children—and worked as a ranger with the Parks and Wildlife Service during the summer. She lived in a small commune called Platypus Bend. They didn't have electricity and grew their own food. She preferred to live off the grid.
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