The Hunt for the Golden Mole
Page 27
But, of course, this is not the most important mandible of the day. The moment has come. Leaning on his stick, the professor leads us up the ancient stone staircase, past the public rooms and into Paolo Agnelli’s office, where we are ushered to a table in an ante-room. There are glass cases filled with animal skulls, and another boxful on the table. Rhino and goat heads, one dated 1897, are mounted high up on the wall; and there is another ante-room beyond the first, darkened and smelling of insecticide. Groping my way through the gloom, I find the room is packed with stuffed marine mammals in glass cases. Back in the light I return to the table, on which stands a microscope and an empty Petri dish. No trumpet sounds. No drums roll. There is no swelling of strings or cathedral choirs. The only soundtrack to the climactic event, the end of the quest, is my own voice droning on the recording machine.
Paolo puts down a tiny glass phial, about the size of a baby aspirin container. It is packed with cotton wool. Under the cotton wool is an even tinier container, thinner than a thimble. Paolo opens it. And there it is! Calcochloris tytonis!
Two other voices now intrude. The professor’s: ‘This is all!’ And Caroline’s, a confidential whisper: ‘You’re a bit sweaty!’ Excitement is dripping off the end of my nose. It is a moment I have been anticipating for months, and yet I find myself strangely unprepared. Of course it was going to be small! I knew that. It was in an owl pellet. But it is so extremely, utterly minuscule, so completely without consequence, that I can’t believe even a keen young zoologist would have given it a second glance. ‘It’s a question of practice,’ says the professor when I ask him how he knew it was something special. When he found it, the fragment – mandible and part of the ear assembly – was still intact. Over time, and in handling, it has disassembled into three separate tiny pieces. With the naked eye – with my naked eye – they make no sense. Paolo puts them in the Petri dish and places them under the microscope, which he has set to a magnification of six. I ask him if anyone else has ever asked to see them.
Golden discovery. The jawbone, teeth and middle ear bones of the Somali golden mole. The animal was eaten by an owl in 1964
‘No one for the last twenty years,’ he says. And who was the last? Was it the professor himself? ‘Probably.’ We all laugh, the tiny mole’s entire circle of friends. Through the microscope, it looks enormous – like the jawbone of a whale, my commentary says, though it’s nothing like a whale at all. But it’s a predator’s jaw, and these are predator’s teeth, once eager for insect and worm. All the same, when I try to flesh out the animal in my head the picture has no definition. For months I have carried the mole as an idea, but this physical reality, these earthly remains, are too cryptic for my unschooled mind. The professor hands me a pair of thin pointed tweezers so that I can turn the pieces and see them from every angle. This is an extraordinary privilege, a compliment to a competency I do not have. At the Natural History Museum in London, quite reasonably I was allowed to touch nothing. Yet now, at the oldest scientific museum in Europe, this unique and fragile relic is at the mercy of my probing. The largest fragment, the mandible, is a fraction over a centimetre long. The smallest, the malleus, is about the size of a grain of rice. Incredibly, when the professor sifted all the detritus from the Giohar oven, it was this negligible speck that told him it was something unique.
Informed by his earlier experience in South Africa, he had realised at once that it was a golden mole. ‘It is very easy to recognise a golden mole fragment,’ he says. ‘From the teeth, from the shape of the mandible, from the ear. The shape of the ear is very diagnostic.’ But there was an anomaly, a peculiarity of latitude. No one had ever seen a golden mole north of the equator before. The professor took photographs, recorded measurements, made drawings and compared his fragments with the equivalent parts of other moles. The suspicion hardened into a certainty. It was typically a golden mole, but different from all others. The professor initially placed his new species, tytonis, in the genus Amblysomus, in kinship with the fynbos, hottentot, Marley’s, robust and highveld golden moles, but – as evolution itself evolved – it was later reassigned to the Chrysochloridae, with the Congo and yellow species. It may stay for ever in the bosom of its new family, or it may move on again. With no evidence beyond the Petri dish, the IUCN Red List has no option but to classify the Somali golden mole as data deficient and incertae sedis – of uncertain placement in the taxonomic tree.
Does it matter? Not really. Nomenclature is an academic diversion, a kind of hobby science that keeps zoologists amused and imposes a pretended order on the chaos of evolution. It gives us a way of knowing what we have, and what we stand to lose, but it has no currency in forest or field, where animals evolve with no reference to their man-given identities. Calcochloris tytonis may be ‘related’ to Calcochloris leucorhinus and to Calcochloris obtusirostris, but the relationship is immaterial, an academic construct that shines no light beneath the soils of Africa. In nature, horizontal relationships between similar but disconnected species are of small importance compared to the vertical relationships of disparate species that share the same territory – the interdependent creatures, from invertebrates to carnivores, that keep an ecosystem in balance. That truly is why Calcochloris tytonis matters. I had been thinking of it symbolically, as if its value were totemic, its tiny phial like the Tomb of the Unknown Mammal, dedicated to the memory of all lost and dying species. And of course it is that. But it’s more. The mole is a tiny part of an incomprehensibly complex, infinitely mysterious mechanism that will not work as well without it. I am reminded of something the professor said yesterday: ‘Species exist only in our mind. Any sort of living being depends on other living beings, so the evolving unit is never one species. It is always complex.’
Paolo Agnelli, who seems to understand the workings of my camera better than I do, takes a photograph of the Petri dish, then one of me with the professor. I take one of the two scientists standing together in the curator’s office. I have one last question. The Giohar Irregulars failed to find any living examples of the mole in 1964, and no one has recorded any since. Does the professor believe they could still be there, undisturbed by the human turmoil in the world above, silently going about their business? He answers without doubt or hesitation. ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t they be?’ If they were there before the owl pellet, then why shouldn’t they be there afterwards? The Petri dish might contain all the known evidence for the mole’s existence, but that shouldn’t be confused with the species itself. I think again what I have been made to think so often during this brief ascent from ignorance. There is more to the world than the eye can see, or than the imagination can embrace. All we can do is go on looking and listing. The book has been a quest; so has our journey through the museum. From the very bedrock of the planet we have travelled through every kind of articulate life: insects, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, and onwards deep into our own corporeal entities. Every scrap of it in its own way is a miracle that confounds the laws of chance. Every scrap of it should be clung to with a tenacity that confounds the self-absorption of our greedy and destructive selves. Humans have the power of gods; now they need the wisdom to go with it.
It is late morning, and the professor is glancing at his watch. We invite him to join us for lunch, to share a toast to the man and his mammal, but he declines. His housekeeper will be waiting, he says. Slowly, for he is tired now, we walk with him to the bus stop, while he talks about the novels he plans to write. Looking back after we have said goodbye, I see him raise his stick to the approaching bus, and I wish there could be some new species to be named after him: something of high intelligence, grace and stamina, able to thrive in a range of habitats.
Anything but a mole.
Afterword
Researching a book is like pond-dipping in a river. You can dip and sift all you like, but you can’t keep up with the flow. Facts, figures, names and dates churn past in unrecordable quantities, and take no account of your last full-stop. Hence the popularity, among authors at
least, of the ‘afterword’ – a few last, frenzied thoughts dashed down before going into print.
In my own case, the remorselessness of flowing water makes an exact metaphor. The bad news floods down day after day in an undammable surge of despair. Numbers of elephants killed. Numbers of rhinos. Numbers of park rangers. Numbers of species shuffling towards the brink. To get the measure of it, here is the tally of seizures at just one port, Hong Kong, in the first eight months of 2013: in January, $1.4m-worth of Kenyan elephant ivory; in July, another 2.2 tonnes, the biggest haul there for a decade; in August, 1,120 tusks, 13 rhino horns and five leopard skins, all hidden in a single consignment of Nigerian timber. One port, three snapshots of a dolorous torrent. Great apes were also being swept away. The UN Environment Programme estimated that some 3,000 were being killed or captured illegally every year.
In Europe there was some better news. The value of targeted conservation was brilliantly illuminated in September 2013 when a coalition of conservation groups, including the Zoological Society of London, published their report Wildlife Comeback in Europe. This showed that a number of once hard-pressed species, including the Eurasian elk, grey wolf, Alpine and Iberian ibex, southern chamois and golden jackal, had made strong recoveries, and that the European bison, once extinct in the wild, had been successfully reintroduced in Poland and Belarus.
For lovers of zoological oddities there were moments of sheer delight. An orange-haired member of an obscure family of raccoon-like mammals called olingos turned out to be an even more obscure ‘new’ species, the olinguito, native to the cloud forests of the Ecuadorian Andes. Delightfully, it resembles a teddy-bear mated with a domestic cat. Even more delightful for me was the discovery at the Museo Civico di Zoologia in Rome of the preserved skin of a previously undescribed species of mole rat. Its origins were uncertain but it was most likely collected at Mogadishu in 1915 (the year it arrived at the museum) or earlier. In glorious addition to the Somali golden mole, therefore, we have the equally rare and even more mysterious Somali mole rat.
Encouraged by the mole, this book has been written in the cause of the small, the obscure and the humble. If you have stayed with me this far, then I hope you might be tempted to go just a little bit further. Good work costs money. Governments, corporations, charitable foundations and individuals are all respectfully invited to dig as deep as they can. Visit the EDGE website, www.edgeofexistence.org, to see how far a pound or a dollar can go. As I write, £10 ($16.16) is enough to keep a camera trap running for a night – the ideal way to survey shy nocturnal animals. A thousand pounds will train a conservation leader.
It could serve as the motto for the furry underworld itself. Every little helps.
List of Illustrations
Abraham Dee Bartlett with pickled gorilla (Zoological Society of London)
Statue of Frederick Selous (Oliver McGhie, by kind permission of the Natural History Museum)
Hoisted elephant
Hagenbeck camel train
Human zoo exhibits
Frank Buck
Quagga (ZSL)
Thylacine (ZSL)
Elephant at Ol Pejeta
Lioness at Ol Pejeta
Rhinoceros rescue at Ol Pejeta
De-horned white rhinos
Schoolgirl at N’hambita (Benedicte Kurzen)
Garden moles (Oliver Riviere)
Okapi at London Zoo
Jonathan Baillie (ZSL)
First glimpse of a new species (ZSL)
Richard Girling and Alberto Simonetta at La Specola (Paolo Agnelli)
The Somali golden mole (Paolo Agnelli)
Unless otherwise stated, all pictures are the author’s own.
Every effort has been made to trace and contact all holders of copyright in illustrations. If there are any inadvertent omissions, the publishers will be pleased to correct these at the earliest opportunity.
Further Reading
The following titles were among the works consulted during the preparation of this book. A few of the earlier ones are available in later editions or in facsimile, but some will be found only in specialist libraries.
Baratay, Eric, and Hardouin-Fugier, Elisabeth: Zoo: a History of Zoological Gardens in the West (2002)
Barrington-Johnson, J.: The Zoo: the Story of London Zoo (2005)
Bartlett, Abraham Dee: Bartlett’s Life among Wild Beasts at the Zoo (1900)
Buck, Frank, and Anthony, Edward: Bring ’em Back Alive (1930); Wild Cargo (1932)
Buckland, Frank: Curiosities of Natural History (1891)
Fitter, Richard, and Scott, Peter (illust): The Penitent Butchers – 75 years of Wildlife Conservation (1978)
Flannery, Tim, and Schouten, Peter: A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals (2001)
Gordon-Cumming, Roualeyn: Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa (1850)
Hagenbeck, Carl: Beasts and Men (1909)
Hinton, M. A. C: A Guide to Rats and Mice as Enemies of Mankind (1918)
Holdgate, Martin: The Green Web – a Union for World Conservation (1999)
Huxley, Julian: UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy (1947)
Marsh, George Perkins: Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864)
McCormick, John: The Global Environmental Movement: Reclaiming Paradise (1989)
Osborn, Fairfield: Our Plundered Planet (1948)
Quicke, D. L. J.: Principles and Techniques of Contemporary Taxonomy (1993)
Rice, A. L.: Voyages of Discovery: three centuries of natural history exploration (1999)
Schwarzenbach, Alexis: Saving the World’s Wildlife: WWF – the First 50 Years (2002)
Simonetta, A. M.: ‘A new golden mole from Somalia with an appendix on the taxonomy of the family Chrysochloridae’ Monitore Zoologico italiano (1968)
Stearn, W. T.: The Natural History Museum at South Kensington: a history of the Museum, 1753-1980 (1998)
Thackray, John, and Press, Bob: The Natural History Museum: Nature’s Treasurehouse (2001)
Turvey, Samuel: Witness to Extinction: how we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin (2008)
Wallace, Alfred Russel: Tropical Nature and Other Essays (1878)
Wilson, D. E. & Reeder, D. M. (Eds): Mammal Species of the World: a taxonomic and geographic reference (2005)
Acknowledgements
Wherever possible throughout the text I have acknowledged those whose wisdom, knowledge or example has helped me to write this book. But there are one or two who need special mention, not all of whom will be aware of how much I relied on them. Chief among these is the team at the University of Queensland, led by Diana O. Fisher, whose paper on the survival of supposedly extinct species first piqued my interest. The idea was fanned into flame by Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the IUCN species programme at Cambridge, and Paula Jenkins, curator of mammals, who showed me type-specimens of Lazarus species at the Natural History Museum. I need also to remember some old colleagues – Philip Clarke and Brian Jackman in particular – whose enthusiasm for the physical world rubbed off on me over the years, and editors (Robin Morgan, Sarah Baxter) who enabled me to broaden my experience.
The visit to Ol Pejeta could not have been accomplished without Mark Rose, Ally Catterick and Richard Lamprey at Fauna & Flora International, Richard Vigne and the staff at Ol Pejeta, Andy and Sonja Webb at Kicheche Camp, and my guide Andrew Odhiambo. I am indebted also to Rainbow Tours, who expertly dealt with the logistics and generously picked up the bill.
Without help from the staff at the University of Florence and La Specola, I would never have tracked down the two real heroes of my story, the extraordinary Professor Simonetta and the vanishingly rare creature that gives the book its title. The entire book stands as acknowledgement to the professor himself.
My understanding of the zoological small-print was greatly helped by the London Zoological Society’s EDGE project, and I thank its programme director, Jonathan Baillie, for helping me crystalli
se my thoughts.
The idea for this book – to locate a minuscule bone fragment found inside an owl pellet – cannot have been the most enticing proposal a publisher has ever received. For this reason I am more than usually grateful to my agent Karolina Sutton for selling the idea, and to Poppy Hampson at Chatto for actually buying it. Text editors – the painstaking individuals who go through a text line by line, combing out the fleas – are the unsung heroes of the publishing trade, and in Alison Tulett I had a classically hawk-eyed specimen of the breed. My thanks to her, and to my patient friend Oliver Riviere for his technical help with the pictures.
My wife Caroline was there at the beginning – without her, the idea would have been stillborn – there as a guiding hand through the writing, and there at the end when, in Florence, the golden mole finally became a golden moment. What I owe her is far beyond the scope of the printed page.
Index
aardvark (Orycteropus afer) 10, 21, 42, 106, 176, 213, 214, 244, 245, 250, 262
aardwolf (Proteles cristata) 10, 21, 106
Aberdare Mountains, Kenya 157
Aesop’s fables 68
Afghanistan 68, 252, 271
Africa 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 14, 17, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 42, 51, 52, 56, 75, 77, 86, 90, 91, 92, 98, 101, 105, 106, 107–8, 109, 111, 119, 128–30, 132, 135, 137, 138–73, 174, 177, 178, 182, 184, 193–4, 197, 199, 200, 214, 216, 225, 263, 265, 288, 290 see also under individual nation name
African Elephant Coalition 148
African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) 128
Afrosoricida 216
Afrotheria 212, 213, 214, 216
Agnelli, Paolo 280, 286, 287, 288, 290–1
Algeria 117, 261
Allsop, Kenneth 111