Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  Lilac-breasted rollers like to perch on dead trees, in places of maximum exposure. They are about the size of a small crow. Here’s the description from the magisterial Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa: “Crown light green, back light brown, rump blue, tail blue, forked… breast lilac, belly blue; in flight wings bright blue.” In other words this bird is a great feast of the most extraordinary and vibrant colours. When they are in an extravagant mood, which is often, they fly upwards, croaking rhythmically, and then explode into a series of cackles, diving headlong towards the ground, pulling out in the nick of time to loop the loop before making a low-level pass with a comic side-to-side rocking that shows off the electric blue of the wings. Here is an explosion of colour, of extravagance, of over-the-topness. Here is the bird that makes birders of us all.

  After that, we visit the bee-eater colonies that dot the banks of the Luangwa: soft cliffs stippled with rhythmic holes that seem to have been blasted out by a giant shotgun, in and out of which the most astonishing birds zoom in eye-baffling numbers. When alarmed, they take to the air hundreds at a time. The carmine bee-eater is another confection of almost absurd extravagance, rose red picked out with blue and green: an acid-trip fantasy of a bird that comes at you in hordes.

  But perhaps that’s what you expect of gaudy foreign birds. Perhaps you think that birds of Britain can’t begin to compete with such creatures. Well, walk with me across the marsh behind my house and sit with me at my favourite sitting place, and be still and quiet for a while, Often enough, the moment happens. You know when you wave a sparkler around in the dark? It leaves a burning line hanging in the air after it has gone. A kingfisher seems to do much the same thing: a dead straight line of laser blue smoking low to the water. I’d happily take a quid for everyone who has ever told me “I’d love to see a kingfisher”. They’re there waiting for you, and if you take up the habit of sitting still in wet places, the chances of you seeing one eventually are around 100 per cent.

  Here are three more groups of portal birds, of wardrobe birds, of birds that inspire humans to admiration and wonder and fill us with a lust to know more about the world we live in and the kingdom to which we all belong. And they are closely related: bee-eaters, rollers and kingfishers are all brightly coloured birds that sit and wait for food to come past, often in prominent exposed positions. There is a bookI devoted to them and it lists and illustrates 123 species, each one of them an impossibility, an absurd polychrome extravagance, an almost gratuitous demonstration of nature’s power to do just whatsoever it bloody well likes. Evolution can make a sparrow, it can make a Bohm’s bee-eater, a purple roller and a stork-billed kingfisher.

  There has to be a moment when wow turns to why. Darwin’s nausea at the peacock’s tail was a malaise he eventually conquered: at first sight – though these are birds that seem to demand repeated and prolonged gazing – there seems no reason whatsoever for their 123-times repeated extravagance. It doesn’t work as camouflage: quite the contrary. And it doesn’t work as an aid to sexual selection like the peacock’s tail: in this group, the females are every bit as glamorous as the males. They’re all gorgeous.

  The best answer is intraspecies recognition. We are able to recognise a fellow human from one of our nearest relatives with a nanosecond glance: you don’t often find people saying phwoar – oh no, that’s a chimpanzee, isn’t it? It’s important for all species to know themselves and the community they belong to. Ultimately that’s because copulating with the wrong species is a dead end, but long before you reach such a point, a recognition of your own species – as rivals, as allies, as fellow flock members, as relatives, as potential or actual partners – has to be a crucial aspect of the way any species – certainly a warm-blooded vertebrate – understands the world. A dog knows it’s a dog even when surrounded by humans, and will greet a fellow dog and a human differently. In the Luangwa Valley, white-fronted bee-eaters and little bee-eaters live alongside carmine bee-eaters but they don’t get mixed up. They couldn’t. The explosion of colours has a biological and an evolutionary function.

  But do they really have to be so damn beautiful? Science is silent on that point. We have considered the perfection of tapeworms in this book: we are, then, entitled to pause a moment’s gazing on the lilac-breasted roller. Che bello! Che bellissimo! Perhaps not all things, but certainly some things, really are bright and beautiful.

  * * *

  I. Kingfishers, Bee-eaters and Rollers by C Hilary Fry, Kathie Fry and Alan Harris.

  Superslug

  Tentacles, large eyes that look nearly but creepily not quite human and a considerable intelligence… standard recipe for a science-fiction alien, and a pretty good fit for an octopus. A member of the Ood in Dr Who is more or less an octopus in a suit. Perhaps even more than a giant squid, an octopus is an unlikely relative of the snails that slide across your garden wall and the slugs that slime towards your lettuces (when not engaged in a spectacular bout of sex).

  But octopuses are molluscs all right, even though they have taken a dramatically divergent evolutionary route from snails.I One theory is that the loss of their shell gave them much greater mobility and flexibility of behaviour, and in order to make this strategy work in a changing world, they evolved intelligence. Molluscs and vertebrates spilt off from each other millions of years back: this is intelligence as a piece of convergent evolution. Just as a bat and a bumble-bee can both fly, so a human and an octopus can both think. But just as bats and bumblebees don’t fly the same way or with the same sort of mechanism, presumably humans and octopuses don’t think the same way.

  Plenty of complex and meaningful experimentsII have been done with octopuses in mazes and in other problem-solving situations, but the anecdotal evidence has a vividness that can never be found in the columns of figures required by scientific rigour. Octopuses are the only inverts known to use tools: they have been observed manipulating coconut shells to create a safe hiding place. They are the only invert known to indulge in play: an octopus was left alone in an aquarium with nothing interesting happening, but was supplied with a plastic medicine bottle. It contrived a game in which it fired the bottle across the tank so that it was sent back by the aeration system; it did this 20 times before getting bored. Octopuses are always climbing out of tanks, sometimes to invade neighbouring tanks in search of food or excitement or sex. They hide when they know they are required to take part in onerous experiments. They demonstrate memory, short and long term. In one experiment, two identically dressed people had daily dealings with the same octopus: one gave it food, the other irritated it with a bristly brush. After a few days it hid from the one and flaunted itself before the other. Octopus experimenters are clear, in an informal way, that octopuses have different personalities: some inquisitive, some cautious, some impetuous.

  It’s clear, then, that we have to adjust our minds. We have all looked into the eyes of a dog and wondered just how much of a mind the two of us have in common. But an octopus is a mollusc: a creature dismayingly remote from all of us vertebrates, separated by a great deal more than such trifling taxonomic considerations as order. We are talking phylum-deep differences here: an octopus is kin not to us or our dogs but to a plate of winkles. Here is the slug that encountered krypton: one of the humbler creatures of the earth that apparently got contaminated by some alien substance and came back not only different from its ancestors but disturbingly cleverer. As humans are to other vertebrates, so octopuses are to other invertebrates:III cleverer to a disturbing, to an almost unnatural degree. This is so much the case that octopuses are regarded by law as honorary vertebrates. The laws that govern experimentation on animalsIV allow you a pretty free rein on all invertebrates, apart from cephalopods, the group that includes octopuses.

  There are around 300 species of octopus, and the way they live reflects their intelligence and versatility. They are adept at catching small animals and escaping from large ones. The octopuses that live on the sea floor mostly eat crabs, polychaete wormsV and s
ome of their fellow molluscs like whelks and clams; those that live in the open oceans eat shrimps and fish. Their weapon is a beak hidden within the crown of tentacles, which can impart an injection of poisonous saliva that paralyses. The poison of the blue-ringed octopus is fatal to humans, though outside fiction humans are not the preferred prey of octopuses. The beak is also used for dismembering prey. They have been known to climb on board ships to eat crabs. Octopuses famously eject ink and escape from predators under its cover: the stuff hangs in the water and confuses not only eyesight but scent. They can use speed, by means of jet propulsion, squirting water to shoot off headfirst, tentacles trailing. They are adept at finding and creating hiding places. They can also use camouflage to hide in plain sight. Some species can put up a performance to startle predators,VI sometimes changing colour dramatically, sometimes using mimicry to imitate dangerous creatures like sea-snakes, lionfish or eels. They are unusually short-lived for animals with such intelligence: six years at most. The male lives only a few months after mating; the female dies as soon as her eggs have hatched: she looks after the unhatched eggs without eating, and when that job is done she has nothing left to do.

  Dr Who has two hearts, but that’s not going to impress an octopus, which has three. It has a highly complex nervous system, as you’d expect, and its intelligence is only partly located in its brain. A degree of intelligence lies in the limbs themselves, which, truly disturbingly, have limited autonomy. Most species are fairly small, but here are a few whoppers: the giant Pacific octopus has a leg-span of 4.3 m, 14 feet, and a record weight of 71 kilos, 156 pounds.

  Squids and octopuses make up the class of cephalopods, just as we belong to the class of mammals. They possess two qualities that are very unusual among invertebrates: size and intelligence. It is troubling enough to think of seriously sizable inverts in a form so different from us vertebrates: but it is far more disturbing to think that intelligence is something we share with creatures so distant from us in evolutionary terms. Octopuses comprise 300 species as remote from us as the garden slug, and yet are capable of thinking for themselves, making a hide-out, solving problems, and pursuing their lives in a bright, active and ingenious way. You can’t say that because an animal is intelligent it must be a mammal, and therefore comfortingly close to us humans. Intelligence can exist independent not only of humans, but of our close relations. Real intelligence exists way outside our own kind.

  * * *

  I. Octopuses is by far the best plural, as with platypus. Octopi is plain wrong, because octopus is Greek, not Latin and octopodes is linguistically correct but insufferably pedantic.

  II. The issue of octopus intelligence comes up in Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck’s sequel to Cannery Row, albeit with an unacceptable plural. Doc gets distracted mid-seduction: “ ‘Octopi are timid creatures really,’ said Doc excitedly. ‘Most complicated. I’ll show you when I get them in the aquarium. Of course there can’t be any likeness, but they do have some traits that seem to be almost human. Mostly they hide and avoid trouble but I’ve seen one deliberately murder another. They appear to feel terror too, and rage. They change colour when they’re disturbed and angry, almost like the rage blush of a man.’ ‘Very interesting,’ said the girl and tucked her skirt in around her knees.”

  III. Just a reminder here that invertebrates are not a single coherent group, but many different groups.

  IV. The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act of 1986.

  V. Polychaete worms are sometimes called bristle worms and belong to the phylum of annelid worms already discussed in these pages.

  VI. Technically a deimatic display.

  The Clever Club

  In one of Aesop’s fables a thirsty crow funds a jug of water. But the water lies too deep for him to reach, and the jug is too big for him to push over. So the crow drops pebbles into the jug until the water level rises high enough for him to drink: a tale that extols the virtues of thought over brute strength, a hymn to resourcefulness, persistence and intelligence. The surprising thing about the fable is that it stands up to rigorous scientific verification. Crows really are capable of solving that problem. I’ve seen them at it. And it’s a performance that, if we dare to think about it, will muddle us up horribly and force us to look at the world in a dismayingly different way.

  Night and day. Good and evil. Men and women. We have a deep desire to keep such things separate: in adamantine caskets, the twain never meeting. Sacred and secular. War and peace. Work and play. Tragedy and comedy. Life and death. But life, if you are forced to look at the stuff at all closely, is forever blurring the boundaries and swapping our certainties for questions. Perhaps death does too, in an equally annoying way: a prolonged terminal coma is, after all, not exactly life.

  I made a trip to Cambridge, or to be specific, to Madingley, a village close by, to listen to a series of dancing dizzying concepts that can’t help but dissolve these adamantine caskets. Here at a Cambridge University lab, you can find Nicky Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition. She is by temperament a dweller in the spaces between the hard-and-fast. She had invited me to visit her birds. Her crows. Together, they were working on the shared ground between the human and avian mind. So there she is, plenty blonde and about five foot four in monster heels, calling the jays in a cooing soprano: “Hello, boys! Helloooo!”

  It was cheerful and soppy and slightly embarrassing; I’m just the same when I’m talking to my horses. With these birds, Nicky has compiled a series of elegant (what other kind would she do?) experiments demonstrating that when it comes to intelligence, crows are right up there with the great apes. Broadly speaking, if a chimp can do it, so can a jay. The water-jug fable has been re-enacted in this lab: you don’t make the crow thirsty to the point of desperation, which would be unethical; instead, you float a waxworm, a prized morsel, on the water, and leave the jay wondering how to reach the damn thing. The use of pebbles followed. Give them painted pebbles and identical-looking Styrofoam fakes, and they will ignore the fakes, and use only the proper worm-bringing stones. Nicky talked about “the Clever Club”: animals that have something we humans are forced to recognise as intellectual capacity. Example: an ability to plan for the future in a thought-out rather than instinctive way. The Clever Club includes elephants, dolphins, the great apes and members of the crow family. And us.I

  But there’s a small difference to consider before we move on. The more intelligent the animal, the more guilty we feel about its wanton destruction. People who will eat a fish with great appetite often feel differently about the idea of eating a dolphin, at least in western cultures. We are disturbed by the haphazard killing of elephants, and even more of chimpanzees and gorillas: here killing becomes uncomfortably close to murder. And yet crows, just as clever, are shot as vermin, and old-fashioned types still hang out their corpses as an awful warning to other members of the crow family. Since visiting Nicky’s crows I have taken to watching rooks in a very different way: within any given flock, any one rook is likely to associate closely with one other rook. They believe in a long-lasting pair-bond even though they are a flocking species. Carrion crows, magpies and jays are more usually seen as half of a pair than not: the old magpie adage of one for sorrow, two for joy gets its impetus from the fact that magpies normally come in pairs, which makes them far more likely to be joy-bringers than not.

  At one stage, we believed that humans could think and animals couldn’t, and that was both the difference and the end of the matter.II But it wasn’t. As we have seen, every time philosophers redefine the word “think”, animals and their associated researchers come up with more problems: signing chimpanzees, problem-solving dolphins, elephants with an understanding of death. It’s like an arms race. We have grudgingly accepted a few more mammals into the Clever Club that used only to accept humans. But Nicky’s research has demonstrated beyond all doubt that some birds have a right to membership as well. Big brain relative to body size, long life, extended development period spent with kin, allo
wing social learning: these are things all members of the Clever Club have in common. It’s not a hard thing to grasp: after all, we fit right in.

  I was delighted to learn that one of Nicky’s PhD students is researching the question of whether males know what females want. Jays go in for long-term relationships, and there are many ways in which the bond is nurtured and strengthened throughout its existence. One of these is gift-giving. Do male jays understand female preferences and make gifts of the food they like best, just as I gave my wife a cup of tea rather than a pint of lager this morning? It’s the fuzzying-up of yet another barrier.

  Nicky’s conversation dances thrillingly around all these topics, flip-flopping effortlessly between things that are not supposed to be flip-floppable. But then Nicky is a dancer, and scientific adviser to the Ballet Rambert. Art and science are not separate things for her: just one more opportunity to flip-flop. Recent decades have given us some of the finest science writers in history. Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O Wilson have both written books seeking a union between science and art, and the brilliance of their writing puts that principle into action. No problem, then, with throwing another art form into the mix. Nicky dances 15 hours a week, her preferred form being Argentinian tango, though she flip-flops into salsa. Dance quite clearly informs her life and her thought and her work. Perhaps we should simply regard science and art as one activity: humans seeking to understand the world.

  What do I mean, humans? Jays solve problems and plan for the future, while 50 yards from where I write, I have watched horses express themselves in movement, dance, if you like, and heard song thrushes perform their own intensely individual compositions. Human thought, human achievement, human aspirations: we talk about these things as if there couldn’t possibly be any other kind of thought, achievement, aspiration. It strikes me that we’re all in it together.