by Simon Barnes
Our mammalian young are at least roughly recognisable as smaller versions of adults. Some of us leap almost at once into something alarmingly like maturity; I once assisted at the birth of a foal and within an hour it was standing upright and suckling. Others take longer, but young animals become old animals in a continuous unpunctuated process. Some birds (the altricial species as mentioned before) start off looking reptilian and fluffy, but they shed their down and grow their flight feathers and do so without abrupt transition. Reptiles mostly hatch out as perfect miniature versions of adults: the same proportions scaled down. Baby crocs are no cuter than the adults on the Grameti River. But now we have reached the amphibians we must get our heads around the idea of metamorphosis. We’ll meet it again in the larval forms of fish, we have come across it many times over in our circle through the invertebrate phyla, and we will encounter it again as we move into the final class of the inverts. It’s a frequent matter-of-fact and quite unextraordinary thing: just one that is light years remote to us as shape-keeping mammals.
That transformation appears to us as one of the greatest miracles of life after life itself. Why does it happen that way? It seems incomprehensible that so complex a system, so Byzantine a route towards adulthood, should have evolved. There is a sneaking feeling in the human mind that evolution should be a process of refinement: here is evolution as willed complexity, as deliberate over-complication. The only justification is that it works, and has worked for endless ages. Amphibians pre-date reptiles, and before reptiles led the way across the land with their water-tight skins and their impermeable eggs, amphibians were the biggest creatures on the planet, with Prionosuchus reaching the astonishing length of 9 m, 30 feet.
Amphibians are all pretty small now, at least in comparison with the extinct monsters. There are about 7,000 species living: the fourth of the traditional classes of vertebrates, squeezed uncomfortably between reptiles and fish. Most of them go in for metamorphosis, though a few species have evolved a less complex and less vulnerable strategy. And they embody a spectacular paradox: their evolutionary triumph was to escape from water but their essential nature compels them to be forever dependent on the ready availability of moisture. When an amphibian gets too dry it dies of desiccation. Its life is dependent on dampness. Amphibians leave the water, but they can’t afford to let the water leave them.
* * *
I. Of the nearly 5,000 or so species of frog that exist around the world, only one, the Pacific tree frog, says ribbit-ribbit. It can be found in California. Frogs have a glorious and expansive range of sounds, and ribbit-ribbit is but one. It has become accepted as the archetypal frog sound because of Hollywood. When early talkies required atmospheric outdoor sounds they stuck a microphone outside the studio to catch the locals, regardless of where the film was actually set. Suddenly, all the frogs in the world had but a single sound. Rather like all humans in the world speaking American.
II. Tadpoles aren’t exclusively vegetarian; in fact, they will happily take to cannibalism when there’s an opportunity – like, for example, a great crowd of them in an aquarium.
III. Tralfamadore is a colossally distant planet that crops up in the writing of Kurt Vonnegut, especially Slaughterhouse 5. Tralfamadorians exist simultaneously across all of time. How does a novel work, then? “Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There are no beginnings, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous movements seen all at one time.” Perhaps what I am attempting with this book is to create a Tralfamadorian novel.
Second innings
“He played that stroke like an old lady poking her umbrella at a wasp’s nest… the umpire signals a bye with the air of a weary stork… that was the stroke of a man knocking a thistle-top with a walking stick… a late cut so late as to be positively posthumous… Nine runs off the over, 28 Boycott, 15 Gower, 69 for two. And after Trevor Bailey it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins.”I
And so, to the soothing rhythms of Test Match Special, BBC Radio’s ball-by-ball commentary on Test match cricket, with the great John Arlott always ready to paint a word-picture of the distant struggle, a beautiful butterfly’s future was safeguarded in the West of England. Jeremy ThomasII did much of the research in the six summers between 1972 and 1977, hour after hour and day after day; TMS helped him to keep going. Thus the mysteries of the large blue butterfly’s life were understood in enough depth to allow an extraordinary conservation operation to be put in place. The butterfly went extinct in this country, but in 1983 it was reintroduced and it has been here ever since. It’s one of the great secret triumphs of conservation, and it all comes down to Thomas’s work in the field.
The large blue needs a lot of understanding. It begins its life as an egg planted on wild thyme. The adults live only for a few days: as many as two years have been spent preparing for the supreme moment: the mating, the egg-laying, the almost immediate death. Mick Travis, the schoolboy rebel in the film If…, gives his full attention to a gorgeous pin-up: “Only one thing you can do to a girl like this. Walk naked into the sea together as the sun sets. Make love once. Then die.” A lot of insect life is exactly like that, though seldom is the creature as gorgeous as a large blue.
The egg hatches: a small caterpillar emerges and begins to feed on the pollen and seeds of the wild thyme. It is also perfectly prepared to feed on other large blue caterpillars: they are cheerfully cannibalistic, and so in the end, each flower head has but a single victorious and hard-munching caterpillar. After two or three weeks, the caterpillar is ready for the next stage. It is not much larger but it has developed the organs that will allow it to move on. Chief among these is a honey-gland that can secrete sweet drops of moisture. At this stage, the caterpillar drops to the ground of an early evening and hides – hides hoping to be found. With luck, the caterpillar is found by red ants from the genus Mymirca. Plan A is to be caught by the species M. sabuleti, which gives the caterpillar the best possible chance.
The ants that find the caterpillar start to tap on it, making it release the dew. Soon, they’re all over it. This is a process that takes four hours. At this stage the caterpillar rears up: now smelling strongly of the ants, and therefore of the ant’s nest. At this, the ants become convinced that the caterpillar is one of their own grubs that has, for some unexplained reason, strayed from the nest. Filled with sudden anxiety, they hustle it underground as fast as possible. There are some larvae of other species that enter an ant’s nest and establish a wholly benign relationship with its hospitable inhabitants. They offer honeydew and get the protection of the colony in return. Not so here. Once underground, the caterpillar behaves rather like a cuckoo, but even more damagingly, if anything. Its first act is to attack and eat a grub. And that’s just the start. It eventually turns into a bloated white maggot that dwarfs both the solicitous ants and their helpless grubs. It hides in the colony and hibernates. When the warm weather comes again, it mostly lies doggo, making occasional binge-feeding raids on the grubs. It might spend as much as two years underground, feeding in this way, during which time it will eat an estimated 1,200 grubs. Not that the billet is as cushy as it sounds: sometimes the ants attack the large blue larvae, in the belief that they are rival queens; sometimes, when there is more than one large blue caterpillar in a nest, they can be out-competed and die of starvation. But a successful caterpillar will then pupate, later to emerge as a butterfly. The only problem is that it is trapped at the bottom of an ant colony.
Ants can make sounds by means of friction, a process called stridulation. The butterfly can mimic this. It can sound like a queen ant, stirring the workers into admiring service. Lovingly, they
escort the intruder to the open world: not to fly forth and establish a new colony of ants, but to try and raise caterpillars that will prey on a colony of ants in their turn. The adult large blue emerges and inflates its wings, and after 45 minutes or so, sets off in a frantic search for sex, reproduction and death.
As a result of Thomas’s work, the crucial importance of M. sabuleti was established, and so were the needs of the ants themselves. For all that they are the aggressors rather than the victims, the butterflies can’t live without the ants: it is the ants that control the numbers of large blues. The grass in the traditional large blue colonies had been allowed to grow much longer than in the past, because of changes in the numbers of grazing animals. That meant conditions had become too cool for the ants to make a living. When a new grazing regimen was established, the ant numbers recovered and they were soon ready to receive their honoured and ungrateful guests.
And so the cycle continues: a bewilderingly complex life to begin our journey through the bewilderingly complex world of the insects. Insects are implausibly complex: often enough in their lifestyles, and more even than that, in the mind-addling madness of their numbers.
* * *
I. Last words of John Arlott’s final broadcast on Test March Special, on September 2, 1980.
II. The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland, by Jeremy Thomas, illustrated by Richard Lewington, is one of the essential wildlife books.
When I was a rain god
“And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.” Rob McKenna is a lorry driver in Douglas Adams’s So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, in the Hitchhiker series. There have been occasions when I wondered if I wasn’t something of a rain god myself. There was the time I went looking for Dupont’s lark in the driest part of the driest part of the Spanish Steppes, which makes it the driest place in Western Europe. And it pissed down and we got quite tremendously stuck. We had been admiring the fragile resilience of the ancient shin-high vegetation: we ended up ripping out great armfuls of the stuff and cramming it under the drive-wheels. And then there was the time I went to the Kalahari, not to look for the Ferrari, but to see the desert in action. As soon as it knew I was coming, the Kalahari had its biggest rainfall for ten years. My desert bird list has five species of duck, two of grebe and one of pelican: not a bad haul for one of the driest places on earth. And also there were plenty of African fish eagles: birds I know well from the Luangwa Valley, where there is a pair for every mile or so of river and for every permanent lagoon. They live by plunging into the water to grasp fish. They are birds of lush, green, wet places. The desert was full of them.
The reason they were there was as great a miracle as any wrought by a rain god. They were paying a visit to exploit a sudden bonanza of frogs. They had become African frog eagles and patrolled the suddenly dampened desert, gorging on frogs. For the Kalahari has regiments of frogs hidden beneath the dry unforgiving soil. They appear during the shatteringly brief wet periods. They hatch from eggs laid in ephemeral pools and puddles, rapidly go through their metamorphosis, become adults, and then, as the desert dries up again, they disappear beneath its surface and wait. They seal themselves off, wrapping themselves up in a kind of Clingfilm, which means they don’t dry up. And there they wait, for years if necessary, until the kiss of the rain turns them into princes, or at least into living frogs again. How awful it is to contemplate the lot of a frog that has waited in his parcel for five torpid years, emerging at last into a briefly green and briefly pleasant land – only for an African frog eagle to seize him before he has made a single hop. But that doesn’t mean the system doesn’t work: enough frogs can survive, take advantage of this brief wet window to mate and lay eggs before they die: eggs which hatch out and become the next generation of prepackaged desert frogs. It’s not a waste: it’s a scheme that works for many species. After all, how many acorns does an oak tree produce?I But sometimes – well, rather often, actually – life operates on an economy that is alien to us humans. It’s not wasteful; it’s weird.
All of which shows the amazing ability of life to fill some of the least likely niches on earth. Desert frog should be as much of a contradiction as flying penguin, but it’s an exact description. It’s just one of the ways in which frogs manage to make a living: around 4,800 species in 33 families, ranging in size from Paedophryne amanauensis of Papua New Guinea, which measures 7.7 mm, 0.3 inches, to the Goliath frog, Conraua goliath, of Cameroon, which can be a foot long, 30 cm, and weigh 3 kg, 8 pounds.
Zoologists make no distinction between frogs and toads:II they’re all categorized as frogs, some of which have the common name of toad. Within the class is the family of Bufonidae, or “true toads”: but that’s confusing too, because they’re not all warty and land-loving. There are warty frogs outside the Bufonidae, and within it, smooth-skinned and highly aquatic animals. It’s just one more example of the fact that wherever you find life you find confusion, just as you find confusion on every page of Finnegans Wake. There are ways of understanding both, along with plenty of moments of dramatic insight and sudden wonder: but you never think you’ve got the problem licked, or even much of it.
Frogs sing, and in the most unexpected ways. They are the night soundtrack of everybody’s adventures, the lullaby after the excesses of the day. When the big rains hit Lamma Island the valley would be roaring with bullfrogs. In Luangwa the nights, so full of threats and dangers from enormous mammals, echo prettily to the sounds of the painted reed frogs, tinkling from the vegetation around the water’s edge like wind-chimes. These days everybody likes frogs: high, protuberant eyes, wide mouths, powerful back legs. But Linnaeus wrote: “These foul and loathsome animals are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale colour, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom.” So perhaps the popularity of frogs is a modern thing, a response to our increasing separation from the non-human part of the Animal Kingdom, and our need to keep hold of it.
David Attenborough’s brilliant television series Life on Earth, of 1979 – I saw it in Hong Kong a year later – changed many people’s understanding of the world we live in. And it was the frogs that turned out to be the stars: the frogs that provided the revelation that life is more wonderful than we are capable of imagining. The programme’s enduring image, the cover-girl,III as it were, was the red-eyed tree frog of Central America; I went looking for them in Belize but failed to get lucky. And the sequence that nailed the impossible wonders of life on earth for all time was Darwin’s frog, which for the first time was filmed giving birth.
Giving birth? Surely, not, you say, for I’ve just been going on for some pages about the way frogs lay eggs and go in for metamorphoses. But one of the problems of laying eggs in a small body of water is that they’re hard to hide and there can be many creatures looking for them. A tasty unmoving morsel won’t survive long. So some frogs have gone in for parental care: and adopted some of the most extraordinary tactics in the Animal Kingdom. The male midwife toad carries eggs in strands around his hind legs; the pouched frog carries tadpoles in pouches on his sides; the tungara frog builds a nest of foam; the Surinam toad raises young in pores on his back.
The male Darwin’s frog takes the tadpoles into his mouth and keeps them safe in his vocal sac as they develop: thus the organ he used for wooing and winning their mother becomes their nursery. And when they have gone through their metamorphosis and are ready to face the world, they leap from his mouth in a strange mock-birth.
* * *
I. That’s been estimated at 13.5 million.
II. In fact, the distinction only really works in England, where in historic times there was one (or some now argue two) species of frog, and two
very similar species of toad – so one name for each was a no-brainer. But it’s not an idea that exports.
III. It was Attenborough himself who took the picture – is there nothing the man can’t do well? He’s also a very decent pianist.
Laser epiphany
What’s the most dangerous animal you’ve ever got close to? That’s easy, it’s an insect. What’s the most beautiful animal you’ve ever seen? That’s a bit harder, but it’s still probably an insect. What animal has caused you most pain? Insects, without a doubt. What animals have brought you closest to despair? Insects again. Insects: there’s no end to them.
So let’s start with a lecture on ecotourism. I’m sympathetic: one of the good things we can do for the wild world is value it, and one of the best ways to value it is to go out and see it. But the lecture was taking place in a lodge that looked out over the Pacific coastal rainforest, for we’re back in Colombia here, and the world beyond the lecturer’s shoulder was full of the most excellent distractions. And all at once, for a period of time that was a little less than a second, I was overwhelmed by beauty. It was a sudden shaft of blue light: bluer than all the kingfishers in the world, colour in the form of pure light mainlined directly into my brain, apparently bypassing my eyes completely. And then gone, completely vanished, not a trace remaining. One of the great traditions of Italian football supporters is to try and blind opposing players, especially the goalkeeper, with a laser pen. I felt as if some hidden member of the tifosi from across the jungle clearing had lasered me. I knew what it had to be – could only be – but I was baffled by its instant disappearance. So perhaps I had imagined it. I stared out slightly to the right of the speaker’s talking head with a deeply interested and concerned expression on my face and after a while – pow, it happened again. But for no longer than before: slightly less, if anything.
