Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  They are not easy creatures to empathise with. So much so that they were at one time allotted an entire subkingdom to themselves. These days they are considered a phylum, Porifera, part of the Animal Kingdom just like us chordates. Their great gift in life is to do with the circulation of water: it is by shifting water that their food – bacteria and tiny particles – comes to them, and by the same means their waste matter is washed away. Their various shapes – vase-like, tree-like, fan-like – are designedI to maximise both the natural movement of the water and their own ability to shift it about with tiny whips.

  They are mostly marine animals, though there are a few found in fresh water. There are species that can deal with the rigours of the intertidal zones, others that can cope with depths of 8,000 m. They have a body of unliving jelly, sandwiched between two layers of cells. They can be no bigger than a few centimetres; they can be 6 foot tall, a couple of metres, or the same measure in diameter. They reproduce sexually – simply shooting the stuff into the water rather than indulging in any gymnastics – and are hermaphrodites, like the slugs we considered a few pages back. There are sponges that look like loofahs but loofahs are not sponges. They are plants, specifically the fibrous structure inside the gourd-like fruit of Luffa aegyptiaca.

  * * *

  I. But not by a designer. I could, I suppose, adopt a more accurate, not to say pedantic locution here: “Their various shapes have evolved in such a manner that the circulation of water is maximised.” The trouble is that human language evolved – developed if you prefer – before the facts of evolution were understood. So we don’t have good words for it: we don’t have robust language for this shatteringly robust concept. If you write about evolution, you have a choice: to use words that imply a designer or a purpose, but trust that they will be understood figuratively, or to clutter things up by sticking to strictly scientific terminology. So it’s a question of which is less wrong. This is not a doctoral thesis, so I have taken the figurative option. That means that some stuff you don’t take literally. Metaphors are the way we understand the world: we are not literal creatures. It takes a special effort to see things literally: outside of rigorous scientific literature it is not helpful or useful to try and do so.

  The profile of Winnie-the-Pooh

  A bear has two faces. You find that out if you get close enough to feel vulnerable. I saw the first face as the bear advanced along the river. I was in British Columbia, in Canada, on a platform that gave a good view of the river but did little to conceal the observers. I was on Gill Island, in Knight Inlet. It was autumn: the salmon were running, so this was the time when the bears were briefly and annually visible. As the salmon come to spawn, so the bears become fishermen for a few short weeks of gourmandising. I had been waiting for a couple of hours, absorbing the quiet forest, hearing the occasional call of ravens. A pine marten, the first I had ever seen – the American species is different from the European – crossed the river by means of a fallen tree, as nice a little – well, fairly little – carnivore as you could hope to see. But it was the nice big carnivore I was looking for.

  Waiting for wildlife. If you acquire a taste for the wild, you do a lot of waiting. Convinced you’ll be unlucky, convinced that the day will be blank, trying to convince yourself that pine martens are enough to make anyone’s day. And certainly they are on most occasions, but perhaps not when you’re in a forest with bears in it. And if I hadn’t known there were bears there, the walk to the platform would have told me: well, you know what bears do in the woods.

  But the bear came. He arrived as if now was his moment – any other moment would have been absurd – walking onstage with the immaculate timing of a great actor who knows that the more modest and unassuming his entry the greater the storm of applause that will greet him. This was a black bear. What must it be like, I wondered, to live in a country with three species of bear?I Huge and beautiful and imposing and quite tremendously black. He was so all-consumingly bear-like, so unutterably and completely ursine that I could scarcely believe it. Nothing has ever looked more like a bear than this bear. He approached, with his almost comic rolling gait; a bear moves very much like a pantomime horse. And there he was face on: round, kind-eyed, with semi-circular ears stuck on as an afterthought. He looked like a child’s drawing of a bear; he also looked quite tremendously like a teddy bear. What could be lovelier, safer, more cuddlesome than the creature half-waddling towards me?

  But then he turned his head sideways and showed me his profile. Showed me his other face. The face with a step in it, the big square muzzle sticking out rudely and incongruously. You thought I was your friend, you thought I was your brother, you thought I was the comforter from your childhood: I am nothing of the kind. I’m a bear. A real one. Deal with that, if you can. A modern teddy bear has no muzzle. Older teddies were less compromised, but with the teddies of today the face is flattened, humanised, turned into a furry person: like a human only cuddlier. Real bears look exactly the same, but only face on. A guide told me that he once had a client who wanted to be taken into the forest “so that a bear can lick honey off my nose”. Possibly more likely to eat the nose off the face and take the rest of the head for pudding. The most fleeting glance of a bear in profile tells you all that and more, and you don’t need a degree in comparative anatomy to understand what you see. With carnivores, our human responses frequently come from our wild past.

  This is no lovely furry honorary human: a bear of little brain bothered by long words, a bear from darkest Peru brought up by his great aunt Lucy, a bear that calls out “yubba-dubba-doo”. This is a carnivore. Look at the teeth inside that muzzle. Not just their bigness and their sharpness, though these are not irrelevant matters. Look at the way they overlap. The way they create a pair of scissors on either side. This is the carnassial shear: the scissor-bite that defines a carnivore. Next time you are patting a dog or stroking a cat, run a finger – carefully – along the side of the mouth and feel the way the teeth work. Run your tongue round your own molars and premolars. They are designed as grinders, not slicers. The fact that most humans eat meat doesn’t make us carnivores, or to be more precise, doesn’t make us carnivorans, or members of the order Carnivora. Watch a lion eat, or, perhaps easier, watch a dog with a bone. They use the side of their mouths, like a movie gangster with a cheap cigar.

  There are around 260 species of carnivores. The smallest is the weasel, sometimes called the least weasel, found in Europe, Asia, North America and North Africa; it can be as small as 120 mm in body length, less than 5 inches without the tail, and weigh no more than 30 grams, not much more than an ounce. At the opposite end of the scale, polar bears, the largest land-based carnivores, can weigh up to 680 kilos, 1,500 pounds or two-thirds of a ton (twice the weight of a Siberian tiger), and be 3 m or nearly 10 feet long. Some sea-going carnivores are even bigger; we’ll meet them in a chapter or two. Feared, beloved, hated, admired, persecuted, prized, mythologised: emblems of kings and football teams:II the great carnivores are the most talked-about and sought-after creatures on earth. Our childhoods are full of bears and wolves, and we are taken to zoos to admire lions and tigers. No group arouses such passions: and it is a fact in any discussion of wildlife issues, when carnivores come in at the door, common sense jumps out of the window forgetting its trousers.

  * * *

  I. Canada has black bear, brown or grizzly bear and polar bear.

  II. Five of the 32 teams in American National Football League are named for carnivores: Lions, Panthers, Bears, Jaguars and Bengals (which are tigers).

  Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish

  I listened to Captain Beefheart a good deal in my youth, and it’s good stuff. Mad and disturbing, but certainly good. Perhaps something of an acquired taste, though. Certainly, the Captain came into his own when we wanted people to leave the flat and allow us to go to bed, He never failed us. His greatest album, the ultimate flat-clearer, the one so many of my guests found too heavy to bear, is “Trout Mask Replica”, an
d it includes tracks called “Hair Pie (Bake 1)”, “China Pig”, “Ant Man Bee” and “Wild Life”. The title of this chapter is also the title of another song on the album. I think a track called “Glass Sponge” would have added completion here.

  But it’s not an oxymoronic mind-twister, or even a joke. Glass sponges are animals, and perhaps the most long-lived of all of us. They are also among the most beautiful. You find them at the bottom of the ocean, in places where the water is cold and the level of dissolved silica is high. In these circumstances they can, over great swathes of time, construct their fantastical selves: a body based around a structure of silica; a creature that is effectively made of glass.

  They start as free-swimming larvae before settling down – some of them after as little as 12 hours – to construct themselves as cylinders or vases, and create a thin, gorgeous and delicate skeleton: a fantasy of architectural sculpture; six-rayed star-like silica spicules that fuse together into an intricate lattice, one that often remains standing there in its austerity and beauty long after the death of the animal. They all have a large central chamber. The most renowned of all the glass sponges is Venus’s flower-basket, a fanciful name that shows how these obscure creatures can fire the imagination. They are filter feeders, like the other sponges: some place them in the same phylum; others prefer to separate them.

  They outlive us humans so comprehensively that it is impossible to get accurate data about the length of their lives. There have been mathematical estimates based on their rate of growth: these give the head-spinning answer of up to 23,000 years, which is the right answer from the data collected, but thought to be impossible in practical terms. However, as we stand, an estimate of 15,000 to 23,000 years has been tentatively accepted. If it’s correct, there are glass sponges older than Niagara Falls, older than agriculture, older than writing.

  There are also reef-forming glass sponges. These have been found 30 miles off the Pacific coast of Canada and Washington State; they were thought to be extinct but have been rediscovered. They can form colonies hundreds of feet long and up to 15 feet, 4.5 m, high: quite substantial things to go missing but the ocean is a big place and not overfull of humans.

  Creatures made of glass, building undersea walls, some of them older than recorded human history… perhaps you thought I was exaggerating, merely showing off when I claimed that the Animal Kingdom is weirder than we are capable of imagining. If so, I trust you have changed your mind. If not, don’t worry. I’ve only just started.

  Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo

  Che brutto! There were a lot of Italian clients passing through the bush camp I was living in, and for them it was essential to find the right adjective. The marvels we put before them each day could only be assimilated with the aid of the perfectly appropriate Italian word. A lion: che bello! An antelope fawn: che carino, how sweeeeet! And a hyena was always: che brutto! How ugly!

  Nobody likes hyenas much. Evil-looking things, the more restrained Brits would tell us. Hyenas are cheats, scavenging the leftovers of the noble lions, stealing the kill from the beautiful leopards and giving everyone the willies when they were caught in the spotlight with their grinning Halloween-mask faces. The bare skin of the face gives them a particularly malevolent appearance; it doesn’t help when you explain that this is an adaptation that helps them to keep clean, a useful thing for a beast that spends so much of its time with its head stuck in corpses. I have witnessed a hyena stealing a dead pregnant impala from a leopard and then, when it was faced with a threat itself, it salvaged something from the situation by ripping the foetus from the belly of the impala and running off into the bush to consume it. You can view this as a remarkably intelligent bit of improvisation or the footage from a nightmare, and be right on both counts.

  Hyenas are carnivores. They look quite a lot like dogs, but are not all that closely related. There are four species, including the curious aardwolf which eats termites.I The spotted hyena is the one we are most familiar with, from wildlife documentaries if not from experience on safari. Their glorious whooping calls – they are animals who like to keep in contact with each other – are one of the great sounds of the African night: a spine-tingler for the first-timer, and providing a sense of homecoming for those of us who keep going back – giving us the chance to sit the newcomers around the fire and regale them with improbable tales of the bush: hyenas will fearlessly enter a tent and bite the face off a sleeping man…

  A hyena always has an air of being up to no good, of being caught in the middle of some episode which even he must admit is rather shaming… but he’s going to do it anyway, so off he goes into the bush, grinning hard. These animals never show themselves to great advantage, moving away at an awkward-looking canter, the sloping back and elevated front legs transforming them in an instant from a creature half familiar to one almost horrifyingly undoggy, the enormous penis whipping about unmentionably between those low-slung hindquarters. And if it’s a really good-sized animal with a particularly impressive penis, it’s almost certainly a female.

  Hyenas have one of the most extraordinary social systems that we mammals have devised. They are dominated by females, but as a badge of their authority, the females have adopted vast false penises. This is in fact a radically developed clitoris, and it comes with fused labia that form a false scrotum. They are impregnated via this organ, and they give birth though it, for it encloses the birth canal. This isn’t always a straightforward process; ten per cent of first-time mothers die while giving birth.

  Their social life is rigidly hierarchic and they have big and complex brains which make their complex society possible. They live by the clan, and everything they do is tied up with the female dominance hierarchy that underpins it. This contrasts with the social life of lions, which always seems to operate in a haphazard and rough-and-ready way. Lions seem to be making it up as they go along, and are perfectly capable of breaking all their own rules. Round a kill, the male does what he wants and everybody else scraps and snarls for the next bite, rather than waiting for a preordained turn… though the alpha male lion will often tolerate a cub – but no one else – eating alongside him. Lions are madly social but not really on top of their own social lives, in a manner that reminds me of modern humans.

  But hyenas have it all worked out. The boss female is in charge: her close relations all gain status from her, and so get more food. It has been estimated that the top female is 2.5 times more likely to raise successful young than any other female in the hierarchy. The most dominant male in the clan ranks below the lowest-ranked female. A hyena den is, against all expectations, a lovely sight: always busy and doggy and playful, and the pups themselves, all black, look as if they would be perfectly at home on your own hearthrug. Che carino!

  The human habit of making up morality tales based on the non-human creatures all around is probably as old as speech. It is natural to assume that all these things exist to teach us rudimentary lessons about the good, the bad and the ugly. I know a worldly and witty man who has given up shooting – apart from at hooded crows, because they are “such evil bloody things”. In Ian Fleming’s short story “The Hildebrand Rarity”, we learn that James Bond “rarely killed fish except to eat, but there were exceptions – big moray eels and the members of the scorpion-fish family. Now he proposed to kill the sting-ray because it looked so extraordinarily evil”. We tend to make such nursery judgments because we all learned animal morality tales in the nursery, and subsequently we have seldom been encouraged to think about animals in a grown-up fashion.

  But there is beauty to be found in the hyena. They are possibly the all-mammal smelling champions, with a sense of smell that some say is over a thousand times more acute than our own: not so much an improvement as a complete new sense and with it, a totally alien world-view. Their skulls are remarkable: powerfully muscled jaws and bone-crushing premolars that give them one of the most effective bites in the world. Bone is nothing to them; hyena droppings turn white, because they take i
n so much calcium.

  They exist by the rules and traditions of the clan. In some circumstances hyenas are hunters, capable of running down prey in open country because they can pace each other and take turns at the front as they make their endless, tireless runs across the bush; in thicker country they are more likely to forage and scavenge alone. But even alone, a hyena is part of a clan: that is the core of a hyena’s being. You could make a fable about the good hyena with her acute sense of social obligation, contrasting her with the nasty anarchic lions who scavenge the kill from a pack of noble hyenas… but that would be just as misleading, even if more accurate from a naturalistic and a natural-history point of view. As so often, the truth and the beauty of the creatures we live with are obscured by human traditions. We are raised on untrue assumptions. We are not encouraged to look closely or think clearly about non-human animals – because, after all, we know everything already. Don’t we?

  * * *

  I. Evolution doesn’t run along straight wide roads: it is a mysterious and often elusive business. The aardwolf is not the only carnivore that doesn’t eat meat: the giant panda has gone still further and become a vegetarian carnivore. It is not doctrinaire about this, and will take animal matter in an opportunistic way, but its basic diet is plants. Genetic evidence demonstrates that pandas share a common ancestor with bears, as you would expect from the look of them, but they have taken a markedly individual fork in the road. Pandas don’t hibernate, they subsist on bamboo, and they have acquired a spur on the wrist bone that acts in the manner of a thumb and is used for feeding: a rather brilliantly jury-rigged version of the primate’s opposable thumb that you wear on your own hand.