by Gordon Grice
The human animal, too, is in the middle of a predatory chain. This idea ticks off a lot of people who, generally because of some religious or cultural bias, think we ought to be the bosses of the animal kingdom. (“Kingdom”: even that bit of taxonomic apparatus shows a human bias toward thinking in hierarchies.)
A skeptical reader may point out that, as he sits in the comfort of his den in the middle of his town reading this book, he’s in virtually no danger of being eaten by anybody. Good for you, sir; you rank with the termite. We humans are safe in our own shelters and towns, just as termites are safe in their mounds.
Another reader remarks that her shotgun elevates her to the status of top predator. You’re right, ma’am; our talent with projectile weapons is a powerful one, and puts us on a par with the rock-chunking baboons. If, however, you encountered any of the predators that really see us as food—not your flimsy North American predators like the coyote or the cougar (though each of those has killed a human or two), but, say, a saltwater crocodile or a white shark—your gun would stand only a slim chance of winning the day for you.
But, a third reader murmurs sullenly, we can kill anything if we team up on it. True, and we often use this trick to eradicate troublesome tigers. They become troublesome by eating a few people—in some cases, a few hundred people. Similarly, baboons pack-hunt leopards, but this doesn’t change the fact that leopards are serious baboon-eaters.
The leopard is adept at shaking the anthropocentrist in all of us, at making us rethink our preconceptions of hierarchies in the natural world and especially our sense of sitting at the top of the heap. The fossil skull of an early man shows the puncture wound characteristic of death by leopard. This cat is far smaller than the lion or the tiger, but he kills far more people. He’s been with us, in Asia and Africa, since before we wrote histories; he was there before we came out of the jungle to walk the savannas, and he’s never shared our conceit that we’re fundamentally different from other apes and monkeys. Today he eats our close relatives, chimpanzees and baboons, just as he ate our ancestors. He still eats us—hundreds of us every year. Some single leopards have killed hundreds of humans. The Panar leopard of northern India, for example, took more than four hundred people. That’s the Indian government’s official death toll, which strictly excludes uncertain cases. Leopards share our enjoyment of sport killing. One in Tanzania killed twenty-six people without eating any of them.
There’s a theory that lions and tigers eat people only after they learn to like the taste of human flesh by scavenging battlefields and plague-ridden villages. Whether that’s true of lions and tigers or not, it certainly doesn’t apply to the leopard, which needs no prompting to add some protein-rich primate to its diet. It’s also claimed that the big cats resort to human-eating when they are too old and feeble to catch their “natural” prey. But among human-eating leopards, healthy, exceptionally large males are common.
The lion and tiger kill by seizing the throat or nose and closing down the flow of air with a patient vise of a bite. This strategy is well suited to hoofed animals, which, once brought down, have little defense. The leopard rarely suffocates his prey. He is used to hunting animals that can scratch and grab at his eyes—baboons, chimps, humans. He has no patience for a caught animal. He bites through the skull for a quick kill.
Like the mantid’s, his strategy aims to break the nervous system. He is built to kill us.
Our mythic prototype of a creature from another planet has round luminous eyes on a face whose other features seem atrophied. That’s the face of a mantid.
Things that are really alien don’t look alien. Look at diatoms under a microscope and you don’t have the feeling of looking at once-living things; the creatures more nearly resemble wallpaper. Do you empathize with a trout, a sparrow, or a lobster? Forms of life that are relatively different from us cause us little or no visceral response. Animals that resemble us more closely— cats and dogs, for example—make some of us feel sympathy, friendship, even love. We understand some of these animals’ motives, because we share them—the visceral pleasure of eating, games based on instinctive hunting and fighting habits, and so on.
The things that scare or repulse us are those that are sympathetically human in some respects, but markedly alien in others. For example, apes appear in a disproportionately large number of horror fantasies, from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to King Kong. Apes disturb us with their imperfect humanity. So do dolls. In talking with people about their childhood fears, I have heard many mentions of dolls and mannequins, and the fear seems to center on the eyes: the rest is passably human, but the dead eyes make the thing terrible, at least in the dark. Of course, the human body itself becomes an object of terror as soon as it dies, because it is still human, but not in the way we want it to be.
That archetypal image of the extraterrestrial—bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal, visual—is an unlikely choice if you want to imagine what might really live on other planets. After all, what are the chances of an alien looking almost exactly like any earth animal, and us in particular? But the image makes sense psychologically, for it is us touched up with a few strokes of strangeness.
The mantid spends most of her time looking like a reasonable enough, if slightly sinister, character. She walks along poised to grab something; she reacts visibly to prey; she will try to avoid anyone who offers to step on her. If you persist in threatening her, she will throw her arms in the air and wave them, as if to say, “See how big I am? You’d better think twice about dogging me, buddy.” But sometimes the mantid will show you that, however understandable most of her actions may be, she also has a side alien to us.
The female is the color of jade, her abdomen thick and fleshy. She is mostly still, her feet hooked into the texture of the elm tree’s bark. When I first glimpsed her, I mistook her abdomen and wings for the chrysalis of a monarch butterfly. But as my eyes picked her shape out of the relief map of bark and beetle-chewed leaves, I saw the long stretch of her thorax ending in a plowshare head, at the upper corners of which her amber eyes bulge like beaded water, each of them punctuated with a black period in the middle that resembles a pupil but is not.
The male approaches, angling away from her face to avoid being too easy a target. He is more slender, and holds his hind wings slightly ruffled beneath his green forewings; his angular looks could help him pass for a twig. His eyes are different too, duller, more ascetic. He lacks her mass but is almost as long, perhaps two inches. He walks down the trunk toward her, his body held away from the bark by his four hind legs, which jut out to the sides of his body from his thorax, then turn right angles to meet the bark. His head swivels as he comes, keeping her in view. She watches him, and her mouth-parts work idly.
When he is perhaps an inch away, he stops and begins to sway on his bent legs like a sumo wrestler in warm-up. Her forelegs unfurl slightly, then stop in midair, one slightly ahead of the other. She, too, begins to sway. He walks from side to side before her, sometimes stopping to sway, his wings unfolding slightly and trembling. She watches him walk. Her own movements stop, or perhaps continue too subtly for me to see. He edges around to her side.
Suddenly he runs a good six inches and lunges into the air, his blunt forewings flicking forward to let the transparent hind wings fan out into buzzing flight. She turns her head to follow him with her full-yellow-moon eyes. He lands in the grass, then flaps back to repeat his flying leap. This time he returns and begins to slap the female with his antennae. His head moves from side to side like that of a playful dog fighting his master for a toy. The slender antennae lash her like the proverbial wet noodle, failing to even ruffle her antennae.
She strikes.
Now she is standing still, her blur of motion over so quickly it might seem unreal, except that she is slowly eating the right half of his head.
He stands swaying, his actions only slightly interrupted by the amputation of half his head.
Then, while she is still eating, he crawls o
nto her back. He seems in this semiheadless state to have found a renewed vigor and sense of purpose. There will be no more showy stunts. His pale penis emerges from the rear of his body, extruded between the plates of his exoskeleton. His abdomen snakes around beside hers and forms a painful-looking curve. They begin to copulate.
Turning her face almost 180 degrees, she regards him for a moment, as if his attentions were a distasteful surprise. Then, twisting with some difficulty, she brings her raptorial forelimbs into position and strikes again. This time she retrieves the remainder of his head and a scrap of his thorax, from which one foreleg dangles.
He doesn’t seem to mind. He stays on her back like some undersized Headless Horseman. I recall my grandfather once showing me a big female mantid and calling it a “devil-horse.”
The copulation continues. It lacks the aerobics of a mammalian encounter. After the insertion it involves, besides the cannibalism, merely clinging and a slight pulsing in the male’s soft abdomen. It may go on for a long time; some couplings have outlasted my patience for watching. The genitals fit so tightly that, if you try to separate the pair, their bodies will tear apart before they disengage.
The female hasn’t finished her meal. She strikes again, removing everything forward of his middle pair of legs. She eats rapidly. His raptorial forelimbs lie on the bark like discarded hand tools. She walks out from under what’s left of his body and stands a few inches away, cleaning her forelimbs with her mouth. The male’s remains crabwalk a few steps. The abdomen pulses faintly. The female picks her steps on the rough bark as she goes away. He stays there, wiggling his abdomen obscenely, staggering in sideways arcs. He will do so until something else comes along to eat him.
Males die a few days after copulation, even if the female hasn’t harmed them. The female will lay eggs in a day or two. She lays them in a gluey substance she squeezes out of her abdomen, all the while moving herself in a spiral like a cake decorator’s bag of icing. Special appendages at her rear end whip the substance into a froth. One egg case takes her a whole morning, and by afternoon the gluey stuff has set like cement. She usually gets at least three cases built before she dies, each containing up to two hundred eggs. Each one looks like a little army barracks. A case is impervious to just about everything except the teeth of rodents and the mandibles of parasitic wasps.
The hardwiring for the entire mating ritual lies in a cluster of nerves in the floor of the thorax. The brain is not involved, except to inhibit the mantid from constantly going through the mating motions. That’s why the male not only can finish without a head, but even performs with more gusto once he’s decapitated. The female can mate headless as well, though that’s rarely necessary. The female can even lay her eggs after she loses her head. The cockroach, a cousin to the mantid, has the same peculiar wiring. It has long been known that roaches are capable of learning; they can run mazes and can even be conditioned to flee darkness and love light. This latter exercise has been replicated with headless cockroaches. They first learn the experiment after their heads have already been removed, and they repeatedly show that the learning has taken. Their learning ability is not in the head.
Perhaps you wonder how the roach can survive without a head. Well, it does need its head for eating. After a few weeks, a headless roach starves to death.
The mantid, which depends on her eyes and specializes in severing a prey animal’s brain from the rest of its nervous system, can survive the devastation of her nervous system and the amputation of her eyes.
Alien, indeed, from the human perspective. Yet, some of the control mechanisms for human lovemaking are low in the spine, not in the brain.
In France, folklore has the mantid pointing lost children toward home. Zulu legend depicts the mantid as a stealer of children. Those two opposite characterizations show how readily we attach motives to the creature whose moves so often resemble our own.
Of course, those two legends also show how silly our anthropomorphic explanations can be. Early entomologists often described the mantid as a hypocrite because she acts as if she’s praying while she’s really plotting the murder of some hapless bug. This is exactly the sort of foolishness contemporary scientists hope to forestall when they advise us not to anthropomorphize at all. Other animals may or may not have mental processes like thought and emotion, the biologists say; it’s best not to assume, and of course we can’t observe such phenomena directly. This position too often gets oversimplified, so that a lot of people recite the “fact” that animals have nothing like human emotion. This idea, common as it is among educated people, is a misreading of the attempt at scientific objectivity, which merely asks that we suspend judgment on the question until we have proof.
We may not have proof, but we do have good evidence of emotional lives in mammals. Apes trained to use sign language sometimes overflow with emotion, saying things along the lines of “You are an unpleasant excrement-head.” Of course, any lover of cats or dogs takes an emotional empathy with these mammals for granted. The theory among some scientists these days is that the emotions of unity—love and the like—developed with the mammal brain, and that the more primitive reptile brain is limited to aggression and other simple feelings.
But what about animals even more alien to us—more “primitive,” as our egos would have it—than reptiles? Do they feel? Science tends to treat these creatures as electrochemical machines. I have had a hint or two of something deeper in my dealings with arthropods. One particular incident made me wonder all over again where the lines are drawn. It also reminded me of a certain overworked quotation—Hamlet to Horatio, about the things in heaven and earth.
It was the rain that drove them up into the daylight world.
In the semiarid region where I live, these beasts must be plentiful underground, but I rarely see them, even when I’m looking under rocks and boards for interesting creatures. The beast’s shape marks it a relative of the cricket, but its back is humped, its forelegs are thicker. There are many such creatures—camel crickets, mole crickets, Jerusalem crickets, all burrowing, seldom-seen inhabitants of the soil. The Jerusalem cricket has a bulbous, disturbingly humanoid head that accounts for the common name child-of-the-earth. But the beast I’m talking about doesn’t completely match the looks and behavior of any of these well-documented insects. Doubtless some entomologist has cataloged it, but I have never found it in a book.
The beast is a gleaming red-brown—it looks as if it might be made of the kind of plastic used for tortoise-shell combs and brushes. I had seen them at the bottom of water meter wells three or four feet underground, and I had seen small specimens above ground a few times, always in wet weather. But I had never seen anything like this.
It was late summer in the wettest year I could recall. Much of the country was under flood. We weren’t flooded in our semidesert, but the black earth had grown a leprous infection of white mushrooms, and every outdoor thing seemed transformed by the wetness into a refractor of rainbows. The world stank with rot and rebirth—a smell delirious and nauseous.
As I pulled my car into the wet driveway one afternoon, I saw the beast crossing the cement. While I was still in the car twenty feet away, I recognized it as the species I’d seen a few times before, but I hardly believed it. The thing was larger than some adult mice I’ve seen. It was the third one I had seen during that wet spell, but the other two had been much smaller. It moved slowly, walking like some deliberate beetle, not jumping as a true cricket would. The proximity of my car disturbed it not at all. I had been hunting rattlesnakes and had several jars in the car for collecting the snakes’ heads and tails. I used one of these to catch the cricket-beast, which walked agreeably into the jar with no urging from me.
I had no special plan for the cricket-beast. I didn’t even know what it was. After checking a reference book, I tentatively decided it must be a type of camel cricket that eats rotting vegetation.
I transferred the thing to a gallon jar half-filled with dirt. I threw in some
wet leaves for food. It moved its slow body, heavy as a brass bullet, through the leaves. My family came to the consensus that it was one of the most disgusting things I had ever brought in. Having nothing better to do with it, I figured I would keep it around to look at for a day or two, then feed it to one of the tarantulas that occupied terraria on my utility room counter.
That evening, the rain was at it again, and a mantid squeezed in the back door. He was about two inches long, and gray. I decided to see whether this thin, perfect predator could handle something as large as the cricket-beast. I dropped the mantid into the gallon jar.
The mantid did something I had never seen before. He looked at the cricket-beast and began to run away sideways, keeping his face toward the beast at all times. He seemed scared. Of course, even as I thought this, I accused myself of anthropomorphizing. I still thought the cricket-beast was an eater of plant rot. I recalled dangerous situations in which I had seen mantids— tangled in a black widow’s web, battered by a cat, swarmed by ants, shoved into a jar by yours truly. In none of these situations had I seen a mantid use this body language of apparent fear.
I made chicken noises at the mantid.
The cricket-beast, waving its long antennae, turned toward the mantid. The mantid froze. The beast held its position in the center of the round jar. This is the top-predator position—a tarantula placed in a similar environment will, after a little exploration, take up this same spot in the middle of a container. I said as much to my wife, her sister, and her sister’s husband, explaining that the cricket-beast must be an idiot not to realize what danger it was in.