Winds ease through the day, along the Shoalhaven, and the evening is cool. By 10 pm the night is as still as a singing bowl that’s finally stopped singing. The sky is perfectly clear; the stars are the only weather to report; the low has moved offshore, and New Zealand is in for it next. Here in the Shoalhaven, I sit under the edges of the slow-moving high that covers the continent. Lows are moving west in the Southern Ocean, fiercely, like a pod of whales in a hurry, but none of them looks likely to make landfall here. Weather too good to write in is coming along. But that, too, will pass. Weather always does.
The weather of who we are
We are a sclerophyll people, adapted in our speech and manners, in our worldview, to the manifold variations on a theme of dryness that are the prevailing weather of the continent.
We are a conforming, decent people, good at getting things done – on the battlefield, the playing field, the farm, the mine site, the mall. At home. We’re good at civility and embarrassed by ceremony, though good at putting on a do; we’re not much given to introspection, to political histrionics, revolutions, bills of rights, that sort of thing; we’re rhetorically awkward, suspicious of large gestures, unless they’re commercial; we’re dedicated, it is said, to a fair go, in particular for ourselves; we’re suspicious of the foreign and the new, but we tend to come around. We don’t like to look far into the future. As if it were the weather – another cyclone on the horizon, another flood coming downstream, another fire running up the ridge. Perhaps the difficulty of many of our landscapes and the temperate recalcitrance of much of our weather have taught us to be pragmatic to a fault.
But most of our history happens between disasters, not in them; most of who we are lies between the droughts and fires and flooding rains. We are a stable people on a stable continent, whose weather is not, in fact, uncommonly wild, and perhaps we tell ourselves stories of military and meteorological disaster (narrowly and bravely survived) to reassure ourselves we’re real – that we have ticker and pluck; that we’re tough.
This is to overlook, of course, the long savage dispossession of the first peoples by the settlers – but this has been a part of our history that, until recently, the nation has chosen to ignore. A history of surviving savage weather is a nobler sort of history to own up to.
In the sunburnt country, firestorms and flooding rains and ten-year droughts and cyclones are our myths of identity. Which is not to say we get no grief from nature. It’s just to note how much of ourselves we find, and how much of our natural and national history we tell, in calamities – and the doggedness of our spirit in the face of them.
But we are not more prone to natural disasters than the international average. There are hotter places, stormier – though there are none, it has to be admitted, drier. It doesn’t get dangerously cold; there are no ice storms or heavy-duty blizzards (not unless we include our territories on that driest continent on earth, the Antarctic.) We get dust storms, and we get more than enough cyclones, but we don’t get many tornadoes (the most destructive force on the planet); we have no equivalent of America’s tornado alley. We do fire as well as anyone, and we’ll do it bigger and more often as the atmosphere warms. Drought is our great affliction; and in the years ahead, water – the scarcity of rivers in the places where most of us live and farm, our profligacy with it, the drying of the climate – is our area of national vulnerability.
Between downpours and conflagrations, though, we get about the greater part of who we are. We make history, most of it quiet, in mild weather. But we tell ourselves in fires and floods; we find ourselves in drought. We think of ourselves as a people who know how to pick up the pieces when the floodwaters ease and the fires are dowsed, when the cyclone has petered out. And so we are, and so the national memory is crowded with images of the damage the weather often enough wreaks, and how bravely we bear it and get on. And it looks like we’re going to get plenty of opportunities to keep proving it in the years ahead.
The weather: an intimate essay
When I walked to the river at dusk yesterday, there was no wind anywhere in the valley. Walking across the paddock was like swimming in the shallows – warm air pooled here and there. Nothing much stirred anywhere. At the river, a pair of masked lapwings, probably nesting, circled me and looped out over the river where it bends, kek-kek-kekking, warding me off. Then some weather started up, as if the cyclonic circling of the birds had conjured it. The eucalypts on the scarp across the water began to weave and sway and roar in a wind that was happening nowhere else along the river. They kept at it, howling down the lapwings. The trees seemed to be articulating some kind of a downdraft – a narrowly adapted katabatic breeze, perhaps, rushing off the ridge as the valley cooled. But why here? And why only here? I don’t understand what I witnessed, but this was weather. Which is sometimes very small – shaped by and native to a place. Later, sitting at my desk, I heard the wind racing down off the ridge in the dark and then I heard the rain clattering the roof – the larger weather, perhaps, the smaller weather had foretold. Coming to tell me who I am.
Living under the influence of the sky
Weather joins us to everyone and everywhere else, but in its local adaptations, it also shapes, changes and defines us. We are who we are, indirectly and directly, because of the weather we lead our lives in. How we behave, even how we speak, is how we adapt to the weather. Australian weather makes us Australian; Pilbara weather, Pilbaran; Tasmanian weather, Tasmanian. It’s a large part of it, anyway. But weather is regional and global, too. We share our cold fronts with New Zealand and Asia shares her monsoons with us. El Niño and La Niña link us to the fates of South Americans. And we all share global warming, unevenly though its effects may be distributed.
More personally, life lived under the influence of weather, mindful of it, as long as one survives that weather, is a life more fully lived. The days in which I am aware of what’s going on in the sky, which way the wind blows, what species of clouds came by, are days that feel more lived in. In which my life feels more ample. It helps if the weather is bright, or, on the other hand, wild; it helps if your hat will stay on your head – or your hair, for that matter. But it’s the observance, not the value you put on what you observe, that counts. It’s a way of dying, as the Buddhists say, to one’s self – one’s mere self – and opening to the world. It’s a bigger kind of life. Humbler. Older, longer. Who you are is so much bigger than what your body encloses, and how your society wants to define you. You’re no longer a taxpayer, a consumer, a New South Welshman. You’re a citizen of the real world again. A part of a place. You’re a-piece with the weather. A piece of the weather, even.
Turbulence
Masters of the universe
It’s time to become gonads
Becky Crew
Deep-sea anglerfish (Ceratiidae family)
Being an anglerfish male would be the absolute worst. As proud as most males in the animal kingdom tend to be of their genitals, the idea of actually becoming genitals by fusing yourself to your mate is a bit much. Unless you’re an anglerfish male, in which case it’s just something that has to be done. Some people have to be garbage collectors, others have to be genitals. The bizarre reproductive habits of deep-sea anglerfish were first described in 1922 by Icelandic fisheries biologist Bjarni Saemundsson, who discovered a large female Krøyer’s deep-sea anglerfish (Ceratias holboelli) with two smaller fish attached to her stomach by their snouts. What Saemundsson didn’t realise was that these tiny fish weren’t young offspring taking nutrients from their mother, but sexually mature males. ‘I can form no idea of how, or when, the larvae, or young, become attached to the mother; I cannot believe that the male fastens the egg to the female. This remains a puzzle for some future researcher to solve,’ he wrote in the journal Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk Naturhistorisk Forening. Three years later, British ichthyologist, ecology and evolution expert Charles Tate Regan found a similar situation. This time a single small fish was fused to a female, and Tate rec
ognised it not as a mother–offspring relationship, but a parasitic male–female relationship, reporting in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B:
[The male fish is] merely an appendage of the female, and entirely dependent on her for nutrition … so perfect and complete is the union of husband and wife that one may almost be sure that their genital glands ripen simultaneously, and it is perhaps not too fanciful to think that the female may possibly be able to control the seminal discharge of the male and to ensure that it takes place at the right time for fertilisation of her eggs.
Anglerfish belong to an order Lophiiformes, which is a highly diverse group of fish boasting an array of shapes, including elongated, spherical and flattened bodies, living 300 metres below the surface. There are around 200 species of anglerfish spread around the world’s oceans. Anglerfish in the family Ceratiidae, also known as sea devils, live at depths of 1000–4000 metres in the bathypelagic zone where not a speck of sunlight exists. They are famous for the reproductive process that sees free-swimming adolescent males attach themselves to a female and morph into a living, parasitic set of gonads.
Members of the Ceratiidae family are generally top-heavy, with relatively large heads and jaws filled with many tiny teeth set into an extreme underbite position. The females of each species are adorned with a bioluminescent lure that extends from their foreheads in myriad shapes, sizes and lengths. Characteristic of the Ceratioidea is their extreme sexual dimorphism, which describes a genetically determined difference between males and females of the same species expressed by their morphology, behaviour or ornamentation. In birds, sexual dimorphism is the difference between the stunningly beautiful male peacock and its drab female counterpart, and in the Ceratioidea’s case, this means large females and significantly dwarfed males. So dwarfed are the deep-sea anglerfish males, measuring an average of just 6–10 millimetres in their free-swimming, adolescent stage, that they are one of the world’s smallest vertebrates. In the most extreme cases, such as the Krøyer’s deep-sea anglerfish, the females can be up to 60 times larger than the males, at more than a metre in length, and half a million times heavier.
While Ceratioidea males lack the female’s bioluminescent luring apparatus, which is formed by the foremost three spines on her first dorsal, or back, fin, they do have large, well-developed eyes and gigantic nostrils in their adolescence. Researchers have suggested that these are used for homing in on a special hormone emitted by the females. When a male finds a female, it will start to metamorphose, its eyes and nostrils degenerating while its teeth are replaced with large pincers. These are used to grip on to a prospective mate, which begins the fusing process of the male’s mouth to the female’s body. Some species see just one male attaching itself to a single female, while in other species a female can host up to eight dependent males. Although it may seem like an unnecessarily complicated process to get the males and females to reproduce, researchers suggest that it is the only way, because without fusing with the females, the males will never reach sexual maturity. And likewise, the females will never become gravid, meaning capable of carrying eggs internally, unless they have a male attached. According to American systematist and evolutionary biologist Theodore Wells Pietsch III, one of the world’s experts on anglerfish, ‘That sexual maturity is determined not by size or age in these fishes, but by parasitic sexual association, may well be unique among animals.’
Publishing a study in Ichthyological Research in 2005, Pietsch said that in some species of Ceratioidea, the fusing of flesh involves the combination of circulatory systems, which means the males depend entirely on the females for their continued survival, ‘while the host female becomes a kind of self-fertilising hermaphrodite’. Pietsch adds that the males increase:
considerably in size once fused, their volume becoming much greater than free-living males of the same species, and being otherwise completely unable to acquire nutrients on their own, the males are considered to be parasites. They apparently remain alive and reproductively functional so long as the female lives, participating in repeated spawning events.
Pietsch, who is currently the curator of fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, has been studying anglerfish for over 20 years. In early 2012, he went in to bat for them when a group of scientists, led by Louisiana State University graduate student Eric Rittmeyer, declared a newly discovered species of frog to be the world’s tiniest vertebrate. Publishing in PLoS One, Rittmeyer and his team described Paedophryne amauensis, a copper and black frog from New Guinea averaging just 7.7 millimetres in length. Pietsch challenged the new frog’s inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records promptly after the paper had been published, arguing that the free-swimming adolescent male of an anglerfish he described in his 2005 paper stretched just 6.2 millimetres, making it 11 per cent smaller than Paedophryne amauensis. But due to the fact that females of the same species are up to six times bigger than the frog, Rittmeyer’s team were not convinced. For now, it looks as though the title of World’s Smallest Vertebrate is subject to opinion.
* * * * *
Journal Notes: Deep-Sea Anglerfish
3 June
I never knew my father. Mother told me as soon as I was old enough to understand that he was gone before I was born. My friends all say the same about their fathers, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less that he didn’t want to stick around to see what I’d look like, what I’d act like, which uni I’d end up going to. So that’s why I’m going to learn everything I can about him, discover what clues he left behind so that I might come to understand who I am and who I will become. Ate lunch, got indigestion like always. Note to self: eat slower.
5 June
Questioned Mother while she was making dinner. Got mostly cagey responses, but she put chillies in our meal, which she never does, so suspect chilli is some kind of clue. Suspect Mother is trying to tell me something. Called The Chilli Palace, man on phone didn’t seem to want to talk about anything but chilli dogs. Suspect he and Mother are in karhoots cahoots. Watched Downton Abbey. Hated it.
6 June
Googled Dad. Discovered that he was a tailor and had a shop in town that’s now a comic bookstore that I can’t go into anymore because I’m in love with the girl who works there. Found photo of my English teacher wearing one of Dad’s Prince of Wales suits while attending a production of Uncle Vanya: The Musical on a Sydney Morning Herald society site. Googled Uncle Vanya: The Musical, universally panned, but there’s a good chance Chekhov liked chilli, so ordered a dog from The Chilli Palace. Indigestion.
9 June
Just realised something. Got The Chilli Palace receipt out of my bin: $4.44. Which corresponds to all ‘D’s in the alphabet. ‘D’s for ‘Dad’. I’m really onto something here. Showed Mother to see if her reaction would give anything away and she said not to use her credit card again.
10 June
Learnt about the whole morphing-into-genitals thing in sex ed class today. Contemplating becoming a warlock whatever the male version of a nun is.
Nuns
Hormonal frogs
End of a hook
The last laughing death
Jo Chandler
It’s 50 years since Michael Alpers, a 28-year-old medical graduate from Adelaide with a restless spirit and an urge ‘to do health in a different kind of way’, hiked into the Papua New Guinea highlands looking for the crucible of a devastating disease epidemic – and stumbled into the crater of an uncharted volcano.
While he smartly sidestepped the sulphuric grumblings of Mount Yelia, young Dr Alpers never really made it back from that trek, succumbing en route to a mystery, a mission, and a culture. The now-venerable professor’s long expedition has finally reached its conclusion. In November 2012, the last of the corps of local foot-soldiers he trained over decades to track down and document cases of kuru – the name the afflicted Fore people gave to the tremors signalling inevitable and terrible death – completed their final routine surveilla
nce patrols through the villages where the disease once raged.
They emerged from their final trek through the mountains and negotiated the rough track north to the provincial capital of Goroka where they submitted their final reports to the PNG Institute of Medical Research and collected their last pay cheques. The file was closed on an epic continuous surveillance effort which began when the first documented reports of the disease emerged in 1957. Along the way, its investigators have navigated some of the most arduous geographical, cultural and humanitarian landscapes imaginable.
Several of the last surveyors were second-generation kuru sleuths and bush medics, heirs to the stories and skills their fathers acquired in the 1960s when they accompanied Alpers and other pioneering investigators during the height of the kuru scourge. Then the mysterious disease was killing up to 200 people a year – mostly women and children – in the Purosa Valley, in the remote Eastern Highlands. It very nearly wiped out the Fore. Locals blamed powerful ritual sorcery for the curse; intrigued medical scientists postulated a genetic cause, or maybe an environmental factor; and patrol officers installed by the Australian administration suspected the Fore tradition of eating their dead – an outlawed practice that had largely ended by 1960. They would all, to varying degrees, turn out to have part of the story.
Fore people recruited to ‘The Kuru Project’ worked as translators, guides, cultural advisors, nurses, autopsy assistants, couriers, cooks, security guards, drivers, carriers and custodians of precious human tissue destined for research laboratories in Melbourne, Washington and London. They were instrumental in what is recognised as one of the greatest discoveries in biomedical sciences of the 20th century.
Their involvement was critical to the collection of field data from villages scattered through rugged, remote terrain; the coordinated efforts of field workers and scientists ultimately garnered two Nobel prizes (and contributed indirectly to a third). Their continuing surveys have informed and shaped the publichealth response to Europe’s ‘mad cow’ disease, particularly at its British epicentre, providing warning that a substantial second wave of deaths is inevitable, and that dormant carriers of the infection will long pose a threat to safe blood, organ and tissue supplies. Their legacy also endures in the footnotes of emerging insights into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 Page 3