A Polar Affair

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

  Levick returns to Cape Adare on November 4, a day after Campbell has recorded the appearance of the first penguin egg in the Cape Adare colony. Either Campbell did not make any observations of the quartz stones or he saw nothing of consequence during Levick’s absence, as there is no further record of them.

  While Levick writes occasional references in his notes to the marked pairs in nests 1–6 in Group A and the nest containing the injured bird, the observations start to become less frequent, and by November 20, he laments that “my photography (chiefly in work with Priestley) is taking a great amount of time that I have little left for other work.”

  Presumably this is why Levick never really nails the nest relief patterns of the Adelie penguins. He notes that “Mated couples appear to fast absolutely until the first egg is laid, after which they go off to feed by turns.” But without systematic and, importantly, frequent observations of his marked pairs, he seems not to get that it is the female that departs for sea first after both eggs are laid and that then she is away for about two weeks.

  Ironically, Priestly has been doing this for him to some extent. When Priestley takes his regular meteorological observations, he monitors the nest attendance of a pair nesting near the meteorological station, noting when the sitting bird is relieved by its mate. The only problem with this—apart from its singular sample size—is that the sexes of the birds are unknown and, like Levick (or more likely upon Levick’s advice), Priestley assumes that the bird taking the initial incubation spell is the female.

  Yet, that aside, when I pull out my 1914 battered green-covered copy of Antarctic Penguins in my cabin on the Shokalskiy, there on pages 91–93 are Priestley’s records of the nest attendance. They show the first incubation spell was thirteen days. This would almost certainly have been the male sitting on the egg while the female was away at sea feeding. Then the female returned and took the second incubation spell, which also lasted thirteen days. Once the female was relieved, she went away for four days and, thereafter, coinciding with the hatching of their chick, they alternated nest attendance every day or two. It is about as typical a nest relief pattern as one can get for Adelie penguins. Yet Levick does not seem to grasp its significance.

  Instead, in his book, he falls back to the quaint writing that I had found of such limited value when I had first taken it with me to Cape Bird in 1977. He writes, “the couples took turn and turn about on the nest, one remaining to guard and incubate while the other went off to the water.” But he then gives in to the kind of anthropomorphism that is completely at odds with the scientific version of Levick that I have started to get to know, such as when he describes birds returning from the first feeding trip to sea and stopping to linger with other penguins on the ice-covered beach. While he erroneously assumes that they are males, I haven’t got a problem with that, but I do with the way he expresses himself:

  . . . they were sociable animals, glad to meet one another, and, like many men, pleased with the excuse to forget for a while their duties at home, where their mates were waiting to be relieved for their own spell off the nests.

  Where, oh where, has Levick the scientist gone, the man who marked nests and individual penguins, the man with the means to uncover even more than he did? It seems that during this period, Levick the Photographer has trumped Levick the Scientist, and so he spends a lot of time down at the ice edge, photographing penguins leaping into the water or out of it, as well as penguins porpoising. Even with modern digital cameras with their autofocus systems and autoexposure, such actions are not easy to capture. Given his equipment and inexperience, Levick’s photographs are quite remarkable in that regard. However, they could only have been achieved by spending time doing that at the expense of time spent monitoring his nests.

  A few days later, on November 24, 1911, Levick records that the skuas “are stealing a large number of eggs.” However, six days later, he notes that “a large number of nests in the rookery are now to be seen deserted.” At first, Levick puts this down to the skuas taking the eggs and mostly wonders what has become of the parent birds. Although he goes on to speculate that while the eggs in some nests “may have first been filched by skuas, and the nest then deserted,” some accident to the eggs, which caused them to be exposed, could produce the same result. At any rate, he emphasizes that “the number of deserted nests is now very great indeed.”

  Four more days and on December 4, 1911, he states that “The number of deserted nests continues to increase.” Furthermore, according to him, “A large number of desertions seem to be due to the eggs getting rolled out of the nests accidentally, as many are to be found on the ground, frozen, which have not yet been eaten by skuas.” In reality, he has missed the boat again. The timing of these desertions corresponds to birds left fasting on the nest and being unrelieved by their partners. Eventually they desert and that is why Levick finds the unattended eggs lying within the subcolonies, presumably knocked out of their nests by the movements of the colony’s dwellers rather than fighting between the males, which seems to be Levick’s fallback position every time he suspects aggression.

  I daresay the cocks are the greater offenders in this respect . . .

  Levick had all the right ingredients in his study to have gotten this. He had marked birds in marked nests. He had only to monitor them daily to be able to pick up the pattern, the nest relief pattern, noting which bird was present and for how long. But perhaps he was being my Eivind Astrup rather than my Sherpa? Perhaps he was showing me a means of travel that I could use later rather than his doing the traveling before me?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  COMPETITION

  Roald Amundsen has certainly learned the lessons from Eivind Astrup. Using skis and dogs, his party of five leaves their first depot at 80°S on October 26, with four sledges, each carrying 880 pounds, twice the weight of Scott’s. Although the ice conditions and weather across the barrier are oftentimes difficult; with fog and snow drift making visibility difficult; and gales, crevasses, and sticky ice making progress difficult; they still make excellent time. Amundsen knows the importance of resting both dogs and men in this environment. He sets specific targets for each day that are mostly about fifteen miles and never more than twenty. They cover the distance in five to six hours, with the dogs pulling both the sledges and the men on their skis.

  By contrast, Scott and his men plod through the snow with their ponies, moving at only about half the speed of the Norwegians and sometimes much less. Moreover, their days are long: marching for eight to ten hours to attain distances of ten miles or so, and rarely more than thirteen. By the time they stop each day, the ponies and men are completely exhausted.

  That is not to say that Amundsen has it easy. He is just better prepared for the conditions. They are well equipped with the “eskimo” style of their clothes. In fact, the garments made of reindeer fur, so helpful when laying the depots in the brutal cold before winter, are now too warm. They leave them unworn on the sledges, finally abandoning them altogether to save weight. They have the tools and experience needed for navigating. The men are all expert skiers and dog drivers and, importantly, they are used to these types of conditions from their northern upbringing. Amundsen and his party experience more than twice as many days of gale force winds on their way to the Pole as does Scott’s party, but they still manage to travel on more than half of them. Scott, his men, and their “unpromising lot of ponies” are unable to travel on any of them.

  One thing that distinguishes Amundsen’s journey from that of Scott is that Scott is following a known route: the “road” up the Beardmore Glacier discovered and traversed by Shackleton in 1908, that he knows for certain can take him from the barrier to the Polar Plateau. Amundsen is heading south into uncharted and untraveled lands. His means of getting from barrier to plateau is completely unknown, if one exists at all.

  Amundsen has been heading due south, happy to stay on the barrier ice as long as possible. But on November 17, they have gone as far south as they
can on the barrier and they find themselves at the base of the Transantarctic Mountains, a line of unbroken peaks of twelve thousand feet, fifteen thousand feet, or more that stretches for 2,000 miles from Cape Adare across the whole of the Antarctic continent. Their only option to get to the pole is to somehow find a way to travel up the mountains to the plateau, which consists of ice that is miles thick and is held behind the mountains like a dam, with the ice spilling over between the peaks as heavily crevassed, steep, and dangerous glaciers.

  No obvious way beckons. Setting up camp, Amundsen and his men scout options. Amundsen chooses an especially daunting one: a steep, wide glacier marked by “crevasses and chasms,” which he will eventually name Axel Heiberg Glacier after his patron for both his Gjoa and Fram Expeditions.

  The route is so steep that in places the dogs must crawl on their bellies, struggling to get the purchase they need to pull themselves up, let alone the sledges with them. In the steepest pitches, they double-team the dogs, using two dog teams per sledge and relaying: going back to repeat the climb with the sledges that had been left behind. All the while, the dogs are egged on by their drivers and, particularly Bjaaland, the most brilliant of skiers, who goes ahead to coax the dogs up what Amundsen describes as “pit after pit, crevasse after crevasse, and huge ice blocks scattered helter skelter.”

  It remains one of the greatest of polar feats ever achieved: in four days they manage to negotiate an unknown and deceptively dangerous route, pulling one ton of food and equipment up ten thousand feet over a distance of forty-four miles. Yet, through all the journey so far, Amundsen never loses his connectedness to the world around him. He never thinks of it as an awful place. To the contrary, he is smitten with its beauty as much as he had been with Sigrid Castberg, and he is just as glad to be here.

  Glittering white, shining blue, raven black . . . the land looks like a fairytale. Pinnacle after Pinnacle, peak after peak—crevassed, wild as any land on our globe, it lies, unseen and untrodden. It is a wonderful feeling to travel along it.

  Once on the edge of the Polar Plateau, they set up camp, and as per Amundsen’s original plan, they shoot all but eighteen of the dogs who are then fed the flesh of their valiant but not so lucky comrades. At Amundsen’s insistence, the men eat some of their dogs’ flesh too, in order to ward of scurvy, his lesson from the Belgica and Frederick Cook still etched in his memory.

  Despite Amundsen’s determination to use dogs with the consequence of that being the need to sacrifice the majority of them, it is not something that he relishes.

  . . . there was depression and sadness in the air—we had grown so fond of our dogs. The place was named the “Butcher’s Shop.”

  Levick is at Cape Adare and continuing to make notes about the penguins in his blue-bound book. His own revulsion to what he sees is, unlike Amundsen, not apparent from what he writes but, rather, what he does with what he has written.

  After writing down his initial observations of mate switching, mysteriously, at some time afterward, he goes back and covers up the next sentence with a pasted piece of paper and Greek letters.

  Hove to off Cape Adare, with the penguins in sight of me and the shattered remains of the hut where Levick wrote his Zoological Notes, I sit in my cabin on the Shokalskiy reading once more through his Zoological Notes on my laptop, using the photos I had taken earlier in the book-lined apartment in London.

  No matter how many times I return to them, I am always shocked by the first evidence of his strange behavior: a piece of paper cut out to cover a few lines of text and covered in Greek symbols.

  This was clearly an afterthought: something he decided to do after writing his initial observations. In the first instance, on October 17, the paper is cut so that it covers only the second half of one line before covering up the six subsequent lines of text completely.

  The paper that covers the text is the same paper as the journal itself and presumably has been cut from elsewhere in the journal or one just like it. Indeed, one of the pages in the notebook near the front has been ripped out. At 300 percent magnification, the patched paper and the underlying paper can be seen to share the same embossed details. The covering paper is also the same weight and color as the original.

  The covered-up lines are faintly visible beneath the pasted paper. By boosting the magnification and contrast, I can make out the text below. He had crossed it out by running a squiggly line through it before covering it up. Such extraordinary secretiveness for what are supposed to be just scientific notes.

  The code itself is easy to break: a schoolboy’s code, no doubt learned by the young Murray Levick at St Paul’s School in London, an elite public school for boys, as a way of passing “secrets” to his classmates.

  I decipher the coded section after his initial observation on October 25 about mate switching. It reveals that the mated pairs responded to the mate switch by copulating frequently afterward. It is such a shame that he chose to keep such observations secret because, remarkably, they are eighty years ahead of their time.

  It is October 30, 1993. I am at Cape Bird observing the courtship period of the Adelie penguins. This time I am accompanied by a softly spoken postdoctoral fellow, Fiona Hunter, who has a toughness and ease in this environment that even Amundsen would admire.

  When Adelie penguins switch partners during the courtship period, as I had observed in my earlier research, a potential dilemma for the male penguin arises if his female partner already has sperm inside her reproductive tract from another male. The costs of that are potentially very high.

  Penguin eggs and chicks require a lot of care and investment by both parents. It is impossible for the female to rear the eggs and chicks alone. However, if a male were to spend an entire summer rearing another male’s offspring, his own evolutionary fitness would be markedly reduced while benefitting that of the female’s initial lover.

  Fiona and I discover that male Adelie penguins have developed counterstrategies to use in exactly those situations where their partners have already been doing the wild thing with another male: they bonk like crazy. Like once every three hours. And whereas pairs typically put a halt to conjugal capers once the first egg is laid, as there is plenty of viable sperm remaining in her reproductive tract to fertilize the second egg just before it is laid three days later, males with partners that switch to them from another male continue to copulate right up until the time the second egg is laid.

  These males are engaging in a kind of biological warfare using sperm as their weapons. Their frequent fornication is in an attempt to swamp any sperm from their predecessor that might be remaining in the female’s reproductive tract with their own sperm.

  This sperm competition, where the sperm of two-timed males are in a race to beat the other penguin’s sperm to fertilize the female’s two eggs is, I suppose, not much different to having two parties racing to the South Pole. There can be only one winner and much will depend on the strategies they employ to get to their goal. DNA evidence indicates that this counterstrategy by the two-timed male penguins, whereby they essentially blast the female’s cloaca with sperm, is effective: very few male Adelie penguins end up rearing offspring that are not their own.

  In other species of penguins I have studied, such as Erect-crested penguins, mate-switching is not so common and copulation rates are an order of magnitude lower. Or, put another way, a more manageable, if less enjoyable, once every thirty hours. In fact, as part of their Sperm Wars, Adelie penguins fornicate so often during the courtship period that the males can literally run out of sperm, and, even then, they will continue to bonk their female partner even though they are firing blanks.

  Fiona and I know all this because we collect the semen by swabbing the females’ cloacas after they have been mated, and with the most bizarre piece of methodology I have ever used in my scientific career: by inducing male penguins to copulate with a dead penguin. We had a taxidermist mount a dead penguin in such a way that it resembled the mating position of a female lyin
g in the nest: tail raised, head tilted back. To collect sperm from males we wrap a cellophane covering over the dead bird’s nether regions and simply collect the semen deposited on it by the males. The males need no encouragement at all to mate with the dead female.

  In fact, so little does the “female” need to resemble reality that we discover we can use a fluffy toy penguin instead. Fiona had bought one from the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch just before our flight to Antarctica. When we place the toy penguin prostrate on the ground beside a subcolony of penguins, the males practically line up to mate with it.

  This accords with another of Levick’s coded observations. On November 10, 1911, there is a large passage pasted over. Transcribing the code of Greek letters, it reads:

  This afternoon I saw a most extraordinary site (sic). A Penguin was actually engaged in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its own species. The act occurred a full minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no respect from that of ordinary copulation, and the whole act was gone through down to the final depression of the cloaca . . .

  The dead bird is the carcass of a fledgling from the previous breeding season, one of those Levick had observed the previous February that had been too slow to fledge. As such, it is more an example of necrophilia than it ever was sodomy.

  The pasted text continues, although, perversely, Levick chooses to use English instead of Greek:

  On returning to the hut I told Browning, hardly expecting to be believed, but to my surprise he at once said that he had seen the same thing several times, done to dead bodies . . .