The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  Hope lurks in stranger places, too. In 1987 a group in South Africa set out to recover a lost animal through selective breeding. This was the quagga, a sub-species of the plains zebra once common in South Africa but rapidly hunted to extinction. It was distinguished by having the characteristic zebra stripes only on head and neck, with plain brown legs and body. The last surviving individual, a mare, died in Amsterdam Zoo on 12 August 1883. Now, by selectively breeding from a herd of southern plains zebras, the Quagga Project aims to rectify that ‘tragic mistake’ by retrieving the genes responsible for the animal’s unique striping pattern. Optimism is the base metal of all conservation projects, and the Quagga Project leaders serve it by the tonne. ‘It is hoped,’ they say, ‘that if this revival is successful, in due course herds showing the phenotype of the original quagga will again roam the plains of the Karoo.’ My desk is made of wood, and I am touching it with both hands.

  By comparison with the Frozen Ark Project, however, the quagga recovery programme looks like a throwback to the age in which the animal died. Frozen Ark is a jaw-dropper that would have stretched the imagination even of the quagga’s far-sighted contemporary H. G. Wells. It was established at Nottingham University in 1996 with the aim of collecting and freezing DNA samples from as many endangered animals as they could get them from – not as an alternative to saving species in the wild, but as extra insurance in case the conservationists failed. Seldom has humankind placed more faith in its own genius. Frozen Ark is now a consortium of twenty-two world-leading zoos, aquaria, museums and research institutions, all united in faith. Progress in molecular biology, they believe, will mean that ‘in the not-distant future’ lost animals could be recreated from these frozen cells. So far they hold 48,000 samples from 5,500 species. Multiple practical, ethical and moral issues stand between them and the day the samples might be used to relaunch species from extinction. If they perished originally through habitat loss, then where would they all live? But never mind. I’m touching wood again. Could it be that one bright morning in a faraway spring, laboratories will fling wide their doors and out will troop all the lost denizens of the desecrated ark? It takes some believing, but hope at least is not extinct.

  One species I know they cannot have sampled is the Somali golden mole. Even now I face difficulty in explaining my fascination with it. The question comes in varying forms, but in essence it is always the same. ‘Why is it so important?’ My answers vary from the flippant – some people study cheese labels; I’m into owl pellets – to the feebly honest. It’s not at all important. That’s the point. In its very obscurity the mole stands as a symbol for the whole unsung, unheard-of majority of mammalian life. Apart from which, the pursuit of such a rare creature is terrific fun. In my pocket are two tickets to Florence, an address and a telephone number.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Mole

  Fifteen minutes from the centre of Florence, at the bottom of a leafy suburban street, the taxi drops us off, Caroline and me, in front of a green wooden gate. On the gate are an entry-phone and two bell-pushes. I do as I have been instructed, and press them both. Already, at ten in the morning, the sun is burning the top of my head and adding to the nervous sweat. I have not slept well, my mind churning with what-ifs. Florence in September is glorious, but it’s a long way for a wild-goose chase. What if he’s not at home? What if the mole really has been lost, as I have been warned? What if . . .? But the entry-phone buzzes, the gate clicks open and we find ourselves in a steep overgrown garden, vigorously unruly, of the kind that seems not so much cultivated as tamed – an amiable contest between man and nature that has resulted in an honourable draw. To our right as we climb the curving stone steps I notice some old cartwheels and a bicycle; ahead of us, glimpsed through the foliage, the outline of a house. At the top of the steps, on a sunny terrace with a greyhound at his feet, stands a small elderly man wearing a khaki bush-shirt, crumpled clay-coloured trousers and a pair of sandals that look as if it they might have walked here from Africa. He holds out his hand and leads us into the curtained interior. As our eyes adjust to the gloom, it becomes apparent that the house is as much a museum as a home. Professor Simonetta had it built in 1966, but I would have been two centuries out if I’d tried to guess its age. Generations of gilt-framed ancestors peer down from the walls on what looks like a film set of historic clutter. English silver, an inkstand with quills, cases of antiquarian books. The steep gradient means that the front door is on the upper floor. When we go downstairs later to look for wine (he knows there is some but can’t remember what) he shows me cabinets full of children’s books and toys – cars, tanks, aeroplanes, several wars’ worth of soldiers, dolls and puppets stretching back to the eighteenth century. He is not, he insists, a collector. Merely an accumulator. This is all stuff handed down through his and his late wife’s families.

  The professor is eighty-two, but retired only in the sense that he no longer teaches. He has four papers awaiting publication and a book on evolution on the way. It amuses him that I have come so far to see so little, but then amusement seems to be his speciality. The taped conversations, spread over two days, are full of sentences dissolving into laughter. He walks with a stick but has a filing-cabinet memory and a mind like a steel trap – nothing escapes him, and careless questions are biffed straight back. ‘WHAT?’ Within moments it becomes clear that my preconceived idea of him has been a hopeless miscalculation. In my imagination he was an obscure researcher whose career peaked serendipitously in 1964 with the accidental discovery of an owl pellet. In reality, Calcochloris tytonis was little more than a briefly amusing footnote in a long and distinguished career that raised him from a seven-year-old bug-hunter to the highly esteemed Professor of Zoology at the University of Florence. So many species have been named after him that even his formidable memory is unequal to the task. ‘Well, I can’t remember all of them,’ he says, ‘but one or two species of grasshoppers. At least one lizard. I have, I think, a snake.’ Back in England, poring over the textbooks, I manage to track down eight. They include a marine worm, three dung beetles, a grasshopper and a praying mantis. I cannot identify the snake, but am amply compensated by the Coastal rock gecko (Pristurus simonettai) and, best of all, Simonetta’s writhing skink (Lygosoma simonettai).

  His curriculum vitae runs to twenty-five pages and lists 280 publications. Some of these, like ‘On the distribution and significance of the Paratympanic organ’, are academic papers on zoological minutiae far beyond the audible range of laymen (the ‘Paratympanic organ’, to save you looking it up, is ‘a small sensory organ in the middle ear of birds’). There is plenty of stuff, too, on the classification of fossils, the mammals of Somalia, the skull of the dik-dik, ‘the myth of objective taxonomy and cladism’, loads of grist for the zoological mill. But there are other things, too, that I would never have suspected (or at least would not have expected until I stepped inside his house). ‘Some hypotheses on the military and political structures of the Indo-Greek Kingdom’. Essays on the coins of the ancient world. Works in preparation include not only ‘The skull morphology of phreatic fish’, but also ‘A guide to the Parthian Coinage (with a description of the author’s collection)’. The width and depth of his focus seem infinite; his interest inexhaustible. And, of course, catalogued as Number 63, there is the paper that has brought me here: ‘A new Golden mole from Somalia with an appendix on the taxonomy of the family Chrysochloridae’.

  Zoology is a peculiar discipline calling for an improbable combination of cerebral, psychological and physical skills. It’s not enough to be an adventurer. It’s not enough to have an enquiring mind. It’s not enough to have mental stamina and an easy command of minutely nuanced detail. You must have them all. And you must have them all in abundance. The professor’s great uncle – his grandmother’s brother – was murdered by shifta during an exploration of the Omo valley in southern Ethiopia, unruly neighbour of the even unrulier Somalia. His own expeditions to Somalia, Afghanistan and Congo-Zaire cann
ot have been without danger; and yet the gung-ho zoological commando needs a steady, counter-balancing alter ego who is as adept at the microscope as he is in digging out a stranded Land Rover. It’s hard to imagine all this in the professor now, yet his stories have more than a distant echo of Gordon-Cumming or Selous. And we don’t have to imagine them. The expeditions are recorded on film. Would we like to see them? he wonders.

  It means moving to the dining room. There is a long cluttered table, a dresser crammed with glass and china, and a cushioned bench on which we have to wedge half a buttock and twist our heads as he loads the cassettes. No film was made of his very first expedition to Somalia in 1959, the last year of the Italian administration, when he was a twenty-nine-year-old junior lecturer at the University of Florence. ‘We thought it was perhaps the last opportunity to collect animals in Somalia before the administration gave way,’ he says. ‘It was just a small expedition that lasted two months, but we were very lucky and collected a lot of good things.’ It was enough to persuade Italy’s National Research Council, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, to fund a second expedition in 1962. This is the subject of the first video we see, which the professor shot originally on Super8 cine film, with his own commentary in Italian. The swashbuckler and the master of detail merge into a single obsessive record-keeper. Nothing is omitted. We see the gear being stowed aboard ship at Genoa. We watch the banks of the Suez Canal slide slowly past, and then the roll and yaw of the Land Rover as it confronts the Somali interior. And then at last we get down to zoology. There is the young professor himself, dark-haired and handsome, cleaning the skull of a mouse; a colleague stripping a snake; the professor again, skinning a Grant’s gazelle. The flayed carcass will be left outside the tent for scavengers to strip before the bones are brought back to Florence. There are some winsome baby genets, and guinea fowl hunted for the pot, which have to be caught alive. The Somali support crew are Muslims and will only eat birds or animals that have been slaughtered by having their throats cut. While we watch shots of a craftsman carving white soapstone, the professor suddenly produces a jug made from the same material, as if the film were transcending time and space and reaching out into the room. Yet the most intriguing shot is so brief that we almost miss it – a swift pan across the facade of a house in Giohar. It is gone so quickly that I have no time to notice, let alone record, any detail beyond a sense of isolation and a shading of trees. This was the house they used as their operational base, the one to which they will return two years later in the crucial year of 1964. It has an outbuilding within which stands a disused oven, and in the oven roosts a family of hungry barn owls. This is the very shrine; the last and only known resting place of Calcochloris tytonis.

  Disappointingly the film of 1964 makes no reference to the golden mole. We are shown turtles, naked mole rats, vipers, Marabou storks, baboons, egrets. We see dik-diks being caught like rabbits in a long-net, and a dead lioness of a Somali sub-species, collected (i.e. shot) for the Natural History Museum in Florence. It is scenes like this, the obvious inhospitality of the terrain, the careful conservation of water from the roof of the tent, that seem somehow to close the circle, to call upon the spirit of Selous and Gordon-Cumming, brother-adventurers joining hands across the centuries. Fifty years ago, however, the emphasis was already shifting from explorations of the infinite to inventories of the vulnerable. The professor agrees with Jonathan Baillie. Before you can decide what to conserve, he says, you have to find out what is there. The films themselves have lain on shelves, filed away not just as memorabilia but as part of a scientific record. He last watched them, he says, in 1982.

  For seekers of small mammals, few things are more propitious than an owl pellet. ‘It is a sort of mine for nocturnal and small animals,’ the professor says. ‘It is always good to collect these, because you have a very complete sample of the fauna.’ He laughs at the memory. ‘When you find pellets from owls, you always collect them.’ Although, sadly for me, he neglected to film himself doing it, he shovelled out the entire contents of the oven and brought them back to Florence. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of it,’ he says, ‘was – what is it called in English? A sort of mole-rat without hair?’ Naked mole-rat, I wonder? ‘Ah yes. And then there was that one!’

  That one! The rarest mammal on earth! But the Somali golden mole, it turns out, is not the only new species he has discovered. He reckons there are at least twenty. Always, the discoveries are serendipitous. For a while, around 1980, he taught zoology at the agricultural university in Somalia. While there he found two specimens of what his colleague Benedetto Lanza would later identify as a new species of lizard. One was discovered among the university’s poorly kept collection of skins; the other, more recently alive, was delivered to him in two pieces. A student had gone to pick up a book she had left in the sun, and found a lizard basking on the open pages. ‘She was afraid,’ says the professor. ‘She closed the book like that [he claps his hands] and cut the lizard in half.’

  The real skill, of course, lies not so much in finding things but in realising that they are new. ‘The important thing is the study of the collections, not the collecting itself,’ he says. ‘Anyone can do the collecting.’ Well, as we shall see, that is true up to a point. In trying to find living examples of the Somali golden mole, the professor enlisted local children, who were promised a Somali shilling for every specimen they found. This is usually a reliable method, though in this case they drew a blank. It was no particular surprise. Golden moles live underground, leave little trace on the surface, and make their nests in burrows under bushes which are very difficult to find. ‘Unless they are locally common,’ says the professor, ‘to meet one on the surface is exceptional.’ It dawns on me that some of these Giohar Irregulars would have been scarcely younger than Alberto Simonetta was himself when he was admitted to university at the precociously early age of sixteen. He was still precocious fourteen years later when, at thirty, he won a scholarship from the National Academy of Sciences and was let loose on one of the world’s most important fossil collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. These were finds from the famous Burgess Shale fossil fields, discovered in 1909 by the American palaeontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott high in the Canadian Rockies. Whole books have been written about the Burgess Shale, whose tens of thousands of 500-million-year-old fossils contain a wider diversity of life than may be found in the oceans of the twenty-first century, many of them unlike any living animals. Not even their discoverer, Walcott, who died in 1927, ever fully understood what they showed. In classifying and describing them in the early 1960s, the professor now admits that he made mistakes. These are seized upon by the pugnacious American biologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, in his book on the Burgess Shale, Wonderful Life, published in 1989. But Gould adds a generous footnote: ‘He alone, after Walcott and before Whittington, attempted a comprehensive program of revision for Burgess arthropods . . . he also provided substantial improvements upon several earlier studies, and through his comprehensive efforts reminded paleontologists about the richness of the Burgess Shale.’ The professor, I realise, is like the tip of an iceberg, the visible manifestation of an unsuspected life. I had known something of the Burgess Shale before I flew out to meet him – indeed, I had read Stephen Jay Gould’s book – but my surfing of the Internet had told me nothing of his contribution to its study. What other surprises might he have in store?

  The first is lunch. Waving away Caroline’s offer of help, he potters off to the kitchen and returns with ear-shaped pasta, orecchiette, floating in a delicate chicken broth. This is followed by a dish of cold beef and chicken served with salsa verde and salad; then sbrisolona, a sweet crunchy tart flavoured with lemon and almonds. He seems surprised when we pat our stomachs and decline fruit and cheese. This courtly old gentleman passing the dishes seems so different, evolutionarily distinct almost, from the young Simonetta of the films, the adventurer who provisioned his colleagues with gun and knife. But he makes a perfect fit with the
distinguished trustee of Italian national parks, the eminent author of papers and books, and the holder of one of his country’s most prestigious chairs in zoology. The physical energy of the young man who believed everything should be collected – ‘Because perhaps no one will ever be there again. Or perhaps people will go there after lots of years and things may have completely changed’ – has ceded to an intellectual energy of daunting speed and voracity. He may not be able to remember how many species have been named for him; otherwise everything else races out on a synaptic super-highway that seems to have infinite capacity for names, dates and numbers.

  He tells of fresh whale skulls washed up on beaches but belonging to a species nobody has ever seen alive. Of the extinct dwarf emu, of which the number in museums exceeds the number of specimens collected in the wild. Of the muddling by Linnaeus of two different kinds of gibbon. Of a bird, the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator), which eats beeswax. It is a story that particularly delights him. Scientists discovered not only that the bacteria in the birds’ gut produce an enzyme that digests the wax – a fact that might otherwise be filed under Just Fancy That – but that the enzyme will also attack the wax covering of tuberculosis bacteria, which exponentially increases their vulnerability to antibiotics. Eureka! you might think. The trouble, says the professor, is that these potentially useful bacteria live only in the gut of the honeyguide, a parasitic species which, cuckoo-like, lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, a fact that seriously complicates the problem of reproducing the enzyme for medical use. Nevertheless, it’s a discovery that points yet again to the existence in nature of substances of immense potential usefulness to humans. The professor tells the story in answer to a question – the same old question that everyone always asks – about the point of species conservation. It is precisely because we don’t understand their value, he says, that we need to preserve them. At the moment, as species slip away, we have no idea what we might be losing. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing,’ he says simply. The fact is, we never have.