by Riskin, Dan
On average, that strategy lets a blue whale consume roughly 2,500 pounds of krill per day.32 That’s less than 1 percent of its body weight (consistent with the general trend that larger animals consume less food per unit weight than small animals do), but it means more than 500,000 lives are snuffed out each day by a single animal. That’s a lot of death, especially since blue whales are generally portrayed as gentle giants. I suppose, though, that most people don’t worry so much about the suffering of krill the way they do about the slow lorises that orangutans smack around. That’s what makes these kinds of comparisons tricky. How many krill is a slow loris worth? Are intelligent animals more valuable than stupid ones, or does it just depend how cute they appear to us? Is it body size? Is it something else?
I don’t mean those as rhetorical questions. In fact, those kinds of questions led me to be a vegetarian for several years after undergrad. I avoided meat because I felt that it would be hypocritical to say that some animals, like bats or dolphins, for example, should never be harmed, but then eat cattle and salmon as if they grew on trees. Even though the idea of killing some species felt worse to me than the idea of killing other species, that didn’t seem like a good enough reason for me to start separating animals into edible and untouchable groups. I understood that the whole spectrum of animals, from slow lorises to krill, know to move away from things that can hurt them. To me, that seemed to imply that all those animals had some knowledge of pain, suffering, and fear. It just didn’t seem consistent for me to inflict those experiences on some animals but not others. To me, giving up meat altogether seemed like a way to live less hypocritically.
There is a way to eat meat without inflicting suffering on other animals, but that was not a solution I was at all interested in—eating things that died naturally. To humans, nothing’s more repulsive than chowing down on a bloated corpse that’s been ripening for a couple of days. There are plenty of living things out there, though, that enjoy nothing more, and those gluttons are vitally important parts of the living world.
Let’s say a person dies suddenly from a heart attack while they’re on a walk in the woods, and no one finds them for a few days. The instant that person’s body shuts down, the calories inside it are no longer defended. So, less than four minutes after death, creatures start taking that person apart.33 Whole colonies of bacteria that had been living in the gut, helping the human digest their food, suddenly find that the walls of the digestive tract are no longer protected by an immune system. They immediately go to work on the human itself, feeding and reproducing at a feverish pace. The walls of the digestive tract break down, leaking bacteria into other parts of the body, to begin preying on the other internal organs. As they feed, those bacteria release methane and sulfur-rich gases in the process, causing that characteristic dead-mammal smell to emerge from the body. It’s a smell so disgusting to humans it can make them vomit, but that same smell draws in other animals, like foxes, crows, flies, and beetles, that can make a nice little meal from a rotting human corpse. Just how long it takes for a human to be reduced to bones depends on a lot of factors, most notably temperature, but at around 68 degrees Fahrenheit, sixty-five days is a good ballpark estimate.X It takes even less time, though, if the body is in water, if large scavengers have taken the body apart, or if the person died from a large wound that drained blood and allowed microbes easy access to the body.
Other animals, in other places, decompose more quickly. One of my favorite bat caves in the world is Bracken Cave, near San Antonio, Texas. It’s a particularly hot cave, and there are millions of bats in there. Beetles thrive on the floor of the cave, feeding on bat droppings most of the time, but should a baby bat fall to the cave floor before it can fly, its tiny body will be reduced to bones in less than ten minutes. Walking through that cave, you can see that guano (bat droppings) covers the cave floor, but if you look down carefully at it, you’ll see what look like white pine needles everywhere. But there are no pine trees outside Bracken Cave. Those are the wing bones of bats that have been broken down by scavengers. Bracken Cave is one of the best places to see decomposers at work.
In nature, those decomposers are the last in the chain of energy traders. If you could follow a single calorie of energy out of a cave beetle, back through time, you’d get a convoluted but unbroken chain: the beetle stole energy from the baby bat, who got her energy from her mother’s milk, who got her energy by eating a moth, who as a caterpillar got his energy by eating a corn plant, which got its energy from the sun. If you continued playing the sequence out, like a movie going backward in time, it would end with a ray of light going back on its eight-minute-and-eighteen-second trip between the Earth and the sun. That’s a movie I’d love to see.
In fact, you could do the same with any calorie inside any animal, and the movie would always play through to the same beginning.34 You could watch the energy bounce among organisms, through parasites, predators, and prey, but it would always ultimately have come from the sun. If you could play all those movies backward together at the same time, they’d all converge into a broad beam of light. And if you stopped that movie suddenly, then started playing time in the right direction, you’d suddenly see the flow of energy through the living world as it exists around you right now. Every day, rays of light shower down on our planet. A few of them get harnessed by plants and enter the food web. From there they really might go anywhere. It’s all totally predictable, since we know in what direction the energy will flow, but where any particular sunbeam’s energy will end up is anyone’s guess.
My vegetarianism lasted for three years or so, but around the time I went on that botfly trip to Belize, I started eating meat again. It wasn’t the botfly per se, but that was part of it. My relationship with the living world was changing as I learned more about it, and it was starting to dawn on me that I was still inflicting pain on animals. I’d killed the botfly, after all, but it was much more than that. Whenever I drove my car in the summer, insects got splattered on the windshield. Whenever I ate produce grown on farms, I was reaping the benefits of habitat destruction for the animals that had once lived where the farm now stood. Even a lot of the science I was learning came on the backs of animals, harmed or even sacrificed in the experiments that I was reading about in scientific journals. Sure, I wasn’t eating them directly, but my lifestyle was inflicting pain and suffering on animals. If I was going to live up to what being vegetarian was supposed to be about, I had a long way to go. I was going to have to make sweeping changes to my life well beyond what I ate, and frankly it just seemed like a suite of lifestyle changes I simply didn’t want to make.
I realized that my vegetarianism hadn’t made me any less hypocritical than I’d been before, so I just let it fall away. I went back to eating meat, though much less than before, and with a very different feeling about carnivory than I’d had before. The experience wasn’t a waste of time. It was just part of my education.
As I spent more and more time studying nature, chasing bats through tropical rainforests in Belize and Costa Rica, I started thinking of the food I ate as my connection to their world. Like a bat, I am built to get calories by taking them from other living things. I don’t get angry at the frog-eating bat for cutting short the lives of frogs, so it was strange to lament my own need for calories. The idea of sparing animals out of sympathy is such a human idea; that doesn’t make it a bad idea at all, but it’s important to realize it’s not an idea that exists in the nonhuman natural world.
Part of the popular image of Prahlad Jani that has emerged from the YouTube interviews and newspaper articles about him is that he’s connected to the world so deeply that he doesn’t need to eat. That’s ironic. Eating is probably the most concrete way in which we participate in nature.
A few thousand years ago, Shelby and I would have needed to find food in the environment around us to feed ourselves and Sam. Now it’s as simple as picking up some chicken breasts on the way home from work, but we’re still part of that flow of e
nergy, from sun to decomposer. The landscape is changing, though. A lot of people are scared about factory farming and genetically modified foods, but I’m still optimistic about Sam’s nutritional future. In the last few thousand years, humans have domesticated more than two hundred different food crops, from agave to watermelon, making some more nutritious, some more resistant to disease, and some better able to grow in the high densities that you’ll typically see on farms.35
Like the acacia plant that has a better life thanks to the security guard ants it domesticated, we thrive because we have manipulated parts of nature too. Humans have been playing by the same rules as the acacia plant for centuries, and it’s the only reason we’ve succeeded like we have. Until recently, those changes came through selective breeding, and now that process also happens through genetic engineering. That doesn’t scare me. Had Sam been born a hundred years earlier, his life expectancy would have been fifty years, but because he was born in 2011, his life expectancy is closer to eighty, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he made it to one hundred.36 Sam’s access to nutritious food is probably the greatest reason he should expect to live longer than any of his ancestors ever did. (That, plus protection from the kinds of parasites I talked about in the chapter on sloth.)
There’s another reason we need domesticated crops and livestock, though. By the year 2050, Sam’s going to have to share the Earth with 9 billion other people.37 Without advanced techniques for food production and distribution, that would be impossible. You can’t feed 9 billion people if you expect all of them to go out in the woods looking for edible shrubs. Like Mr. Jani, we all have to eat. Developing crops is the only way for Sam, or any of the other 9 billion of us, to do that.
* * *
I. It’s surprisingly hard to find an answer to the question “How long can a healthy person survive if they stop drinking water?” The rate at which people lose water will depend on temperature, humidity, amount of exercise they’re doing, and their overall health. Ellershaw et al. (1995) showed that elderly people with malignant disease who stopped drinking water died within one to five days. A young, healthy person could live longer than that, but likely not much more than a week.
II. Photo means “light,” and synthesis describes the sugars that plants make (i.e., synthesize) with the solar energy they gather.
III. I should note that photosynthesis isn’t the only route for energy to enter our living world. There are some bacteria that can harness energy from the breakdown of chemicals like methane or hydrogen sulfide. But they only live in extreme environments, like hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and the amount of energy they bring into the world is minuscule compared to what comes from the sun. So for simplicity I’m going to focus only on the energy that comes into ecosystems from photosynthesis.
IV. Those fifteen plant species include things like wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, beans, and so on. If you make a list of all the plants humans have ever eaten even a tiny piece of, that number jumps to around one-eighth of all plant species (Pimentel and Wilson 2010).
V. The disease in sheep is called cyclopea or, if you prefer bigger words, synopthalmia (Welch et al. 2009).
VI. Honestly, the emerald sea slug’s feeding strategy has got to be one of the best tricks ever accomplished by an animal. (But wait until the chapter on wrath, when you see what its cousin the blue dragon sea slug can do!)
VII. The technical name for DNA going from species to species is “horizontal gene transfer,” as opposed to “vertical gene transfer,” which is what happens when an animal passes on its DNA to its offspring.
VIII. I have a good botanist friend who delights in pointing to people’s pollen-covered cars in the springtime and telling them that a tree has just pleasured itself all over their hoods.
IX. The fish, called Colossoma macropomum, looks just like its cousin the piranha, but instead of razor-sharp teeth, it has rounded ones for eating fruit (Anderson et al. 2011).
X. Vass (2001) gives a neat equation to determine the number of days it will take a body to skeletonize: just divide the number 1285 by the temperature in Celsius. At 68˚F (20˚C), that gives 64.25 days.
5
ENVY
Of Thieves and Sneaker Males
After two days of labor, Sam still wasn’t born. Shelby was working as hard as anyone could, but it was as though something was physically holding him back. When Shelby pushed, Sam would descend far enough that you could see the top of his head but then immediately bungee right back up. After two hours of pushing, Sam still wasn’t progressing, so our doctor and doula recommended we think about a C-section.I
The choice to have a C-section was a heartbreaking one for Shelby, since she’d always dreamed of having her babies the old-fashioned way. But Shelby’s instincts as a mom kicked in well before Sam was born, and once she could see that Sam needed help, she had no hesitation about the choice to have surgery.
In the room where the surgery happened, there was a curtain across Shelby’s neck, so she wouldn’t be able to see her belly being sliced open. As surgery began, I sat with Shelby on the “head” side of the curtain with an anesthesiologist and our doula, while other doctors went to work outside my view. (Ironically, there was some art on the ceiling of the room which, for hygiene reasons I assume, was laminated. That plastic surface turned the whole art piece into a giant mirror, meaning Shelby, of all people, could watch as much of the surgery as she wanted to.)
It all happened in a matter of minutes, and once Sam was out, the medical team put him on a blanketed table and invited me to come meet him. I stood up and walked over, bracing for what would surely be one of the most important moments in my life.
At first I wasn’t seeing Sam so much as the parts of him. His legs were crooked and bony. His head was cone-shaped, bent and compressed from the hours it had spent wedged in Shelby’s pelvis. I looked at his chin and could immediately see my great-aunt Claire’s mouth on him.II It was clear to me that he was mine, and yet he was still so unfamiliar. I couldn’t comprehend that this person could be my son. The whole thing overtook me, like falling into water and trying to get oriented in the bubbles so you can start swimming upward.
Sam was kind of squirming, with his face all scrunched up. I thought maybe he might be uncomfortable, being held and prodded by all those doctors around him, so I put my hand on his chest. Some friends had once told me that a baby can learn its father’s voice while it’s still inside the womb, and can recognize that voice immediately after birth. So I tried speaking to him.
I spoke in my warmest, calmest voice: “It’s okay, little guy.”
Sam froze immediately, opened his eyes, and listened. That was our first contact. It was wonderful . . . but it only lasted a moment.
One of the doctors gently asked me to remove my hand, and as I did, I realized that the team of doctors and nurses swarming around the room hadn’t slowed at all. I looked back at Shelby and saw her open abdomen on the operating table and the placenta sitting in a metal bowl next to her. Then I looked back down at Sam and realized he was purple! I hadn’t even noticed it, but Sam still wasn’t breathing.
The doctors kept working on him, inserting a tube down his throat to clear mucus, but the suction machine wasn’t operating properly, and the intercom system one of the doctors was using to request a backup tube wasn’t functioning either. Our own doctor calmly covered Sam’s mouth and nose with a mask and pumped air into it with a handheld bulb. With each sequence of pumps, his skin turned less blue for a moment, but then she’d back away to let him take a breath on his own, and he would slowly go purple again. No one looked panicked—not even the doctor struggling with the intercom system—but everyone looked very, very serious. I couldn’t tell from their expressions whether this was all normal or if I should be terrified (the doula was out of my sight), so I just stood there and watched. I was totally helpless. I really didn’t know if my son was going to die. Seconds ago I had been full of joy, and now suddenly fatherhood was totally terri
fying.
It was like that for several minutes, until Sam finally drew in that first breath. When he did, the exhalation that came from all the doctors around him showed me just how scared they too had been. As for me, I could barely stand up. Sam’s first breath came six minutes after he was born. I didn’t know what to feel. I was still disoriented, wanting to swim upward but not yet knowing which way was up.
Apparently, once a baby gets that first breath out of the way, it usually keeps breathing, so once Sam’s lungs had started up, my doctor smiled, put him in my hands, and told me to take him over to meet his mom. I pulled him against my chest, supported his head with two fingers, and carried him back to Shelby. A minute ago I didn’t know if Sam would die and now everyone was acting like everything was normal. I sat down, smiled with Shelby at Sam’s scrunched-up face, and then sobbed uncontrollably, like I can’t remember ever crying before.
Our doctor told us afterward that Sam’s delay taking that first breath was fairly normal. Babies often do that if they’re born via C-section, and research hasn’t shown any long-term consequences from that kind of ordeal. Because she’d been pumping air into his lungs, he’d gotten plenty of oxygen that whole time. Our doctor also told us that when Sam was removed from Shelby’s uterus, they’d seen that the umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his neck. It hadn’t strangled him or anything, but she supposed that could explain why Sam didn’t progress further during labor. I have no way of knowing whether Sam would have survived birth without medical interventions, but the whole experience was about as intense as anything I’ve ever been though in my life. On the one hand, I was overwhelmingly grateful that he was alive, but the helplessness I’d felt before that first breath left me feeling that I might not have the skills I’d need to raise this kid. It was exciting, but the stakes seemed unimaginably high. Fatherhood had turned every single one of my emotional dials to eleven.
