Dry Storeroom No. 1

by Richard Fortey

  However, most scientists would agree that for a “science of record” like systematics it is still desirable to have paper copies stored safely away on library shelves. There are good practical reasons for this, which go beyond just an undeniable feeling of permanence. The trouble with computers is that they deal best with one or two images at a time. When the systematist is plying his or her trade the office tends to get into a state that might be kindly described as creative chaos. This used to irritate a former Keeper of mine, famous for his orderliness, who would declaim “untidy desk, untidy mind” whenever he visited my office. I never had the courage to reply “empty desk, empty…” What he was referring to was piles of books, many of them open at illustrations of trilobite specimens. When we make visual comparisons, we do not do it one image at a time; the human eye and mind are adept at making multiple comparisons, at weighing up similarities and differences. So if there is an unidentified fossil or plant to hand, scanning by eye around maybe ten publications (one or two strewn on the floor) is quite the best way to make comparisons. A good systematist is often described as having a good “eye” for a character—which means recognizing the significant features and filtering out the rest. The heap of books is not likely to go away soon, unless economic factors force “real” publication into extinction.

  There is something about being a botanist that encourages sex. It would be fanciful to suggest that this harks back to Linnaeus (yet again) for his success in classifying plants according to the sexual system—his naming and numbering of the parts of the flower, stamens, stigmas, styles, ovaries and so on. Early objectors to the Linnaean system thought that looking at plants in this fashion might encourage lasciviousness, or else that the system was not proper for the eyes of ladies to contemplate. This does seem strangely consistent with some of the more arcane parts of the Kinsey Report in which a small percentage of the population were reportedly aroused by chrysanthemums. However, the exclusive use of floral parts in classification has long since fallen away. The whole plant is used, leaves, roots and all. On the other hand, the tactile qualities of tendrils and climbers come to mind. The Keeper of Botany in my early days at the Natural History Museum was Robert Ross, who was known universally by the female staff as “octopus Ross.” I mentioned earlier the small lift to the left of the main entrance that takes staff and visitors up to the Herbarium, and the Keeper’s office which was then on the same floor. Women were warned never to go into the lift with Ross, or they would risk an attack of the tendrils. It was regarded as a kind of occupational hazard of working in the Botany Department. The women concerned seem to regard the memory of their encounters with amused resignation. Jenny Bryant recalls going into the lift with Ross while he was holding two large books in each hand; she still doesn’t know how the wandering hand appeared between the first and second floors. For his part, “octopus Ross” never bore a grudge when his advances got nowhere—it seems he rather expected it, but had a go anyway. He was always immaculately besuited when I saw him, a short man and well groomed, the very image of a perfect gent. Of course, his behaviour would never be tolerated today. For some reason, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that his favourite pastime was morris dancing.

  If Robert Ross’ predilection was a common one, the story of Herbert Wernham was a little odder. He was a curator in the Botany Department. In the 1910s he wrote on the suitably named madder family, Rubiacea. Edmund Launert told me that Wernham was always broke. He frequently took his wages in cash. He was soon relieved of his earnings by two women who appeared every Friday on the dot at the back of the Museum. Even so, he always had something at the pawnbrokers. But the most extraordinary part of his story was that after he died a card index was found which contained a series of neat entries filed in alphabetical order. On each card was the name of one of his sexual conquests accompanied by a neatly pinned sprig of pubic hair. They might have been so many delicately coloured ferns. It seems that the instincts of the systematist were so deeply ingrained that he must perforce make an archive, duly arranged. Once a curator, always a curator.

  Robert Ross was an expert on diatoms. Even in old age he could be consulted on matters of their nomenclatural minutiae. Diatoms are minute single-celled plants that are ubiquitous in freshwater and marine environments. They are one of the most important components of the marine phytoplankton—and thus form much of the basis of the whole marine food chain. They are also very important bottom-dwelling organisms in lakes and waterways. Charles Darwin would have called them infusoria, which always reminds me of a tisane more than an organism. In his account of the journey of the Beagle (1839), he recorded the natives of Tierra del Fuego using a diatom-rich “earth” as face paint. The species were identified by that early hero of the microscope, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg of Berlin, author of the mighty Mikrogeologie of 1854. Diatoms have exquisite skeletons formed of the mineral silica—silicon dioxide—that are composed of two valves that fit together like an old-fashioned pillbox. They are fretted and sculpted like the most delicately worked Islamic filigree.

  Nature’s most exquisite constructions: diatoms from Christian Ehrenberg’s Mikrogeologie (1854)

  I have a particular connection with diatoms that goes back to my early childhood in Ealing, the “queen of the suburbs” of London, where I grew up. My mother had a childhood friend, Catherine Morley Jones, whose parents lived in what would now be regarded as a rather grand Victorian house in Ealing. As a nine-year-old I was once taken to visit the Morley Joneses, and I recall a curiously old-fashioned household with ticking grandfather clocks and much dark-brown furniture. Mr. Morley Jones was a tall, distant and erudite figure. Everyone was in awe of him, and he was referred to as “father,” as if he were a priest. But he treated children as if they were grown-ups, which was a novelty to me, and not unwelcome. He took me into his study and allowed me to look down a microscope for the first time in my life. He studied diatoms, and I remember the sense of amazement at the microscopic beauty that could be revealed just by using a strange piece of brass-and-glass equipment. It was no less of a surprise to learn that there was so much hidden in the world and that almost everything in the landscape was alive. It could have been the moment that determined much of my future. Mr. Morley Jones was indeed a serious amateur student of the diatoms. He mounted his specimens—the little silica cases rather than the living diatoms—on microscope slides labelled with his own tidy hand. Half a lifetime later I checked with the then expert on diatoms in the Natural History Museum, Barrie Paddock, and sure enough there was an entry for a substantial Morley Jones collection, donated to the Museum for the use of future students pro bonum publicum. Some of them must have been those same slides that I had looked at when I was still in short trousers, and which made me change my mind about being an engine driver. I experienced a curious frisson when I saw the old slides.

  Diatoms are still an active field for research. They cross over into palaeontology, too, because their glassy skeletons have a good fossil record. David Williams is the current diatom guru, a man who carries the art of lugubrious gloom to humorous extremes. He has been working in Lake Baikal, the huge freshwater body in Russia, and a centre of endemic evolution. This study is in collaboration with University College, London, and the Limnological Institute of Irkutsk, and it is a good outcome of funding by the Darwin Initiative. The museum in London has put a lot of effort into projects under this heading. The Initiative was announced by John Major, then Prime Minister, at the Earth Summit in Rio in June 1992. It provides grants to help towards conservation of biodiversity, particularly if there is an element of sustainable development. It is intended to help developing nations, or areas where British expertise would be useful. Botanists from South-east Asia and South America have been trained up as taxonomists on Darwin money. I am sure the grand old man would have approved of this particular use being made of his name.

  Lake Baikal, where diatoms, among many other organisms, have undergone a separate evolution

&nb
sp; Lake Baikal is the world’s oldest lake; in one form or another it has been around for about thirty million years. This accounts for much of its biological uniqueness, for there has been time enough for evolution to work its creative wonders. It is also the deepest lake anywhere—1,637 metres at most, so there is ample opportunity for organisms to become adapted to different depths. There are probably more than 1,500 species unique to it, nobody is sure yet of the final number. The lake holds 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater, and, since water is likely to be the most important political issue in the twenty-first century, I suspect that the world at large will become much more familiar with Lake Baikal than it is now. David Williams and his colleagues have been scraping diatoms off the stones around the edge of the lake for several years—it gives David an excuse to be gently mocking about how he spent his summer: “scraping stones,” he says mournfully. They have added many species of diatoms to the lake’s biological inventory—there may be more than five hundred species, of which up to half may prove to be endemics. Like so many other organisms, diatoms also evolved in isolation in Baikal. But there are some diatoms, like Eunotia, that have species known elsewhere; these reveal some interesting patterns in biogeography. There proved to be a number of taxa in Baikal that were known widely around the Pacific Rim, even as far away as Vietnam, and the western United States. In some cases, however, these species were known only as fossils. They must have become extinct locally, but persisted in Lake Baikal. It seems probable that the distributions of the species we see today are related to ancient geographical distributions—ones that pertained even before the last ice age. The present species ranges are like a ghost of this former world. But evolution continued its work on the survivors to produce a series of species peculiar to Lake Baikal. The biological world never stands still: sometimes it is the smallest organisms that help to reveal the dynamics of our mutable biosphere. Few people even know that diatoms exist, yet the stories they have to tell may chart shifts of climate that are crucial to understanding how the world came to its present state. That is why it is so important to support experts in small and less showy organisms—they may be less glamorous than orchids, perhaps, but tiny diatoms may yet be informative of great matters.

  I admire the botanists whose work I have described in this chapter. A different selection of people would have been just as admirable—but then, this book is my personal museum, and does not pretend to be comprehensive. I admire the way botanists respect more than two hundred years of taxonomic enterprise; I admire their commitment to improving botanical knowledge in countries less privileged than Europe or the United States. For every scientist I have mentioned there is a curator quietly working away on the herbarium. I think of Arthur Chater, a relentlessly modest man and prolific curator of specimens. As a young man he was coupled with Ted Hughes as one of the young writers published by Faber and Faber. He became an authority on coins, such as those minted in Aberystwyth under Charles I, of which he made the best collection. Some ten thousand of his many photographs of Welsh tombstones and other monuments are safely held in the Archives Network for Wales—and all carefully catalogued by Arthur Chater. It is impossible not to admire such versatility, such unfussy distinction.

  I have to mention Dr. Norman Robson, too, if only to make amends. A few years ago I escorted Bill Bryson on a tour of the Natural History Museum for his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. Like millions of others, I enjoy Bill Bryson’s humour and powers of observation: one of his books helped me to survive during a particularly depressing visit to Kazakhstan. During his visit to the Museum we met Norman Robson, and I explained that he had spent practically his whole working life on Hypericum. When the account appeared in Bryson’s book, it seemed that Norman had spent his whole life studying a single species. In fact, the St. John’s wort genus Hypericum comprises hundreds of species (460 at last count) spread around the world, including some species that are almost trees and others inconspicuous trailing herbs. Most have attractive star-like yellow flowers. Some species are of horticultural interest, others are poisonous to livestock, and others again seem to be as effective as conventional medicine in treating depression. They are currently under investigation by pharmaceutical companies. By any reckoning Hypericum is an important group of plants. Sorting out the many species of Hypericum is, truly, a lifetime’s work. Norman is eighty years old, and has almost finished the task of completely revising the St. John’s worts, down to the last small creeping weed, well after most people are beginning to find pruning the roses rather more than they can manage. He is a Scotsman of unwavering gentlemanliness. I have been feeling guilty about inadvertently giving the wrong impression of his worth ever since that visit, so let me state it clearly: the man is an unsung hero.

  The relationship of the Natural History Museum Botany Department to Kew Gardens has been touched upon, but it should be added that Kew extends the virtues of the museum to embrace living collections, a place where vulnerable species can be coddled into survival. Plants, fortunately, can be rescued from extinction even if only a tiny population remains in the wild. The lust for rare orchids and their consequent over-collection in nature gives places like Kew Gardens an importance that outstrips their modest acres. It requires a marvellous skill on the part of the orchid man at Kew to raise these most difficult plants from their tiny seeds. The idea of a living ark is not one I wholly favour, lest it release the moral pressure on politicos and businessmen and developers to preserve natural habitats. Plants and animals belong under the sky, not in glasshouses and vivaria. But with this reservation: the efforts of these dedicated scientists to slow the extinction process that environmental degradation and climate change have brought upon the world must be applauded. The Millennium Seed Bank Project takes the whole conservation business a step further. By first drying and then storing them under cold conditions, seeds can be preserved for many years. The intention is to keep secure the seeds of something like 42,000 species by 2010. Kew and the Natural History Museum have pooled their taxonomic expertise for the good of the biosphere. Let us say the Project is an insurance policy against the destruction of habitats that a wise stewardship of the planet should never let happen. It is depressing that there probably will be no end to such destruction, for tropical forests and other habitats are still being destroyed despite the efforts of conservationists, sometimes at great personal cost, as in Brazil. It is a sad fact that to many people the loss of a plant species is of less moment than the loss of a football match. I hate the thought that the only record of a beautiful plant might yet be the grave of the herbarium sheet.

  6

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  Multum in parvo

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  Martin Hall is far too modest a man to claim to have saved Africa from disaster. But that is what his knowledge of some of the less salubrious members of the Class Insecta has accomplished. He knows a lot about screw worms. These insects are members of the Order Diptera, which are so called because their wings have been reduced to two—whereas nearly all other insects have four wings arranged in pairs (pteros is Greek for wing, as in pterodactyl, di is two). The hind pair of “wings” has been transformed into specialized peg-like balancing organs called halteres. In common parlance dipterans are flies. Those of us with cats will at some time have had the experience of finding a dead bird in the house, under the bed perhaps, all heaving with maggots. These particular dipterans are nature’s garbage disposal officers. We should, I suppose, be grateful to them for their useful work, but the more usual reaction is a convulsive shudder—maybe this derives from an instinctive response to warn us against eating bad meat. My father had fishing-tackle shops, and sold maggots to fishermen; they were known by the euphemism of “gentles” and came plain or coloured. “Half a pint of gentles—plain” was the commonest order. When I was helping in the shop I had to dig my hands down deep into the struggling mass. They were supplied to the trade by a farmer known simply as Wormy (he bred worms, too). I once went to his run-down farm o
n the western edge of London, in a bleak area that could not decide whether it was still countryside or just biding its time to become a cheap suburb. The worst moment was being shown the place where the gentles came from: a sealed room full of rotting carcasses, dripping profitable maggots. A scene like that would test the nerves of any budding naturalist. But it gets worse.

  Cochliomyia hominivorax—the New World screw worm fly. This adult was reared from a larva that came to the United Kingdom with a woman who had visited Trinidad and Tobago.

  If feeding on decaying flesh is a good option, evolutionarily speaking, because flesh is nutritious stuff, it is only a small step to cut out the middleman—death. Feeding on living flesh is a logical progression in the dipteran way of doing things. Get in early, before the next fly. There are about two hundred species of flesh-eating flies. Martin Hall can identify their maggots within a couple of minutes, or so he tells me: to you or me maggots are just wriggling, pallid little tubes, but to Martin they are almost like old friends. A fly will lay its eggs in a vulnerable area—often a nice, moist place like around the lips, eyes or fundament. Then the larvae can hatch out and get to work. This habit may have come about by way of an intermediate stage whereby maggots consume bad and infected flesh around wounds—nasty but nourishing. These kinds of maggots have enjoyed a new lease of useful life recently, because they eat only rotten flesh and leave good muscle nearby untouched.*16 They even secrete some chemicals that encourage the formation of scar tissue. For those who have developed tolerance or allergies to antibiotics, a treatment by “maggot therapy” is being applied for the first time since the First World War. The maggots are sealed in a box fixed over the wound, and all the patient feels is a tickling sensation as the little hygienists get to work. When all the bad flesh has been consumed, the box is unstrapped and the contents disposed of. However, the next evolutionary stage—the exploitation of living flesh—is much less benign. Consider the Cameroonian tumbu fly (Cordylobia anthropophaga). The species name alone may furnish a clue. This unpleasant creature lays its eggs in places where it can smell the merest hint of urine. The larvae form “warbles” in the flesh of the victim in the most sensitive parts of the body. For some time humans were infected by way of eggs laid on the gussets of knickers hanging out to dry—providing direct delivery to the right kind of protected habitat. When the little beasts got to feeding, the pain and embarrassment can be readily imagined. Modern hot steam irons applied to the garments in the right place have helped to see off this intimate curse.