Natural Acts

by David Quammen

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  The Megatransect

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  A Passion for Order

  The librarians, archivists, and other officials at the Linnean Society of London—notably Gina Douglas, Lynda Brooks, and the society’s executive secretary, Adrian Thomas—were extremely hospitable to my research for this piece, offering me access to Linnaeus’s personal papers and collections. In Uppsala, Mats Block and Mikael Norrby, as well as Karin Martinsson, Carl-Olof Jacobson, and many other people, welcomed my visits to Linnaeus’s houses and my persistent questions. Peter Raven, in e-mail exchanges, also helped guide my understanding of Linnaeus’s contribution to biology.

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  Citizen Wiley

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  Clone Your Troubles Away

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  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Quammen is the author of four books of fiction and seven acclaimed nonfiction titles, including The Reluctant Mr. Darwin and The Song of the Dodo, which was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. He has been honored with an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award, most recently for a cover story in National Geographic entitled “Was Darwin Wrong?” Quammen currently holds the Wallace Stegner Chair of We
stern American Studies at Montana State University, in Bozeman. He is also a contributing writer for National Geographic.

  * More is known, however, and more biologists seem to care, than when this essay first appeared in 1984. Field studies have indeed been conducted, yielding some interesting results. The herpetologist Harry Greene informs me that four distinct species of anaconda are now identified in South America. They differ in size and geographical distribution, among other ways. Two are widely distributed and somewhat familiar to science: our Eunectes murinus, today commonly called the green anaconda, which lives mainly in the Amazon basin and northern South America; and Eunectes notaeus, the yellow anaconda, which is considerably smaller at its average adult size (a mere 10 feet) and inhabits the swamps and rivers of southern Bolivia, Paraguay, and thereabouts. The other two species (Eunectes deschauenseei and Eunectes beniensis) are more narrowly distributed and still poorly known. Things have changed much in the realms of science and communication, not just since Percy Fawcett explored the Amazon but since I visited with Randy Borman. When further taxonomic and distributional information about anacondas is available, it will probably be posted on Wikipedia within hours.

  * And some things don’t change. The cash prize offered is now up to $30,000, Harry Greene tells me, and it still hasn’t been claimed as of January 2007.

  * Within recent months a female Komodo dragon named Flora, at a zoo in England, produced five hatchlings despite her total lack of breeding contact with any male. Roughly seventy other reptile species besides Varanus komodoensis are now known to be capable of parthenogenesis. Somehow, though for no particular reason, it seems even more amazing in a vertebrate—such as a giant lizard or a bird—than in aphids. Probably that’s because we are vertebrates ourselves, and biased toward believing that sexual reproduction is a “higher” form than asexual.