The Red Hourglass

by Gordon Grice

  The next day, his hands trembling, his arm broken out in a knobby rash, his breath stinking, his features distorted by swelling, Blair was still in pain, but he knew he was getting better. In the evening, as he sat guzzling orange juice, sweat pouring from his body, his worst symptom was pain in the legs.

  By the third day, Blair was able to sleep and eat a little. His boardlike abdomen had finally relaxed. He was beginning to look like himself again as his swollen face returned to its normal proportions. He went home that day. It took about a week for all the serious symptoms to vanish. After that, his body itched for two more weeks, and the skin on his hands and feet peeled as if burned.

  Blair later returned to his native Saskatchewan, where he had an illustrious career in cancer treatment and research. When he died of heart trouble at age forty-seven, prime ministers and other public figures eulogized him. The story of his black widow experiment, which the wire service had named one of the top ten human interest stories of 1933, was retold in the papers at his death, and one more accretion of myth was added to the story when his heart trouble was falsely attributed to the bite of the black widow sixteen years before.

  Blair’s ordeal convinced the skeptics the widow’s bite is toxic and potentially deadly. Thousands of cases of latrodectism, as widow poisoning is called, have been documented since then. The variation in symptoms from one person to the next is remarkable, making some cases hard to diagnose. The constant is pain, usually all over the body but concentrated in the belly, legs, and lower back. Often the soles of the feet hurt—one woman said she felt as if someone were ripping off her toenails or taking an iron to her feet.

  Some doctors trying to diagnose an uncertain case ask, “Is this the worst pain you’ve ever felt?” A “yes” suggests a diagnosis of black widow bite. Several doctors have made remarks similar to Forney’s, about the widow causing the worst human suffering they ever witnessed (though one ranked the widow’s bite second to tetanus, which is sometimes a complication of widow bite). One of the questions Blair had in mind when he began his experiment was whether people acquire immunity over successive bites. He never answered this question because, as he frankly admitted, he was afraid of having another experience like his first.

  Besides pain, several other symptoms appear regularly in widow victims, and Blair’s suffering provided examples of most of them: a rigid abdomen, the “mask of latrodectism” (a distorted face caused by pain and involuntary contraction of muscles), intense sweating (the body’s attempt to purge the toxin), nausea, vomiting, swelling. A multitude of other symptoms have occurred in widow bite cases, including convulsions, fainting, paralysis, and amnesia. Baerg and a number of other victims reported nightmares and sleep disturbances after the life-threatening phase of their reactions had passed.

  Blair’s fear for his sanity was not unusual either. Other patients have expressed similar fears, and some, like Baerg, have lapsed into delirium. Some have tried to kill themselves to stop the pain. (A few people have intentionally tried to get bitten as a method of suicide. It would be hard to imagine a method at once so uncertain and so painful.)

  The venom contains a neurotoxin that accounts for the pain and the system-wide effects like roller-coaster blood pressure. But this chemical explanation only opens the door to deeper mysteries. A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high molecular weight—in fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen under an ordinary microscope. How do these few molecules manage to affect the entire body of an animal weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds? No one has explained the specific mechanism. It seems to involve a neural cascade, a series of reactions initiated by the toxin, but with the toxin not directly involved in any but the first steps of the process. The toxin somehow flips a switch that activates a self-torture mechanism.

  People sometimes die from widow bites. Thorpe and Woodson report the case of a two-year-old boy who was walking in the garden with his grandfather when he said his big toe hurt. He soon fell unconscious. Within an hour he lay dead. The grandfather went to the spot in the garden where the boy had felt the pain. He turned over a rock. A black widow, suddenly exposed, wobbled away over the flagstones.

  Widow bites kill old people with greater-than-average frequency, apparently because they’re especially susceptible to some of the secondary effects. The high blood pressure, for example, kills some victims via stroke or heart attack. That’s what happened to Harry Carey, an actor best known for his character roles in John Wayne Westerns. A black widow bit him while he was working on Red River; he died of a heart attack.

  Many of the symptoms reported for widow bites are actually symptoms of such complications. Anybody who already has a serious medical problem runs a big risk when bitten by a widow. One man with a chronic kidney problem died from a bite, the toxin overtaxing his diseased kidneys as they tried to clean his blood. Another common complication, and a proven killer in widow bite cases, is infection. The widow’s habit of dwelling in outhouses and piles of trash can make her bite septic. Besides tetanus, encephalitis and gruesome staph infections of the skin have also killed bite victims.

  Some early researchers hypothesized that the virulence of the venom was necessary for killing scarab beetles. The scarab family contains thousands of species, including the June beetle and the famous dung beetle the Egyptians thought immortal. All the scarabs have thick, strong bodies and tough exoskeletons, and many of them are common prey for the widow. The tough hide was supposed to require a particularly nasty venom. I have seen widows take dozens of thumb-thick American-style dung beetles. These broad-shouldered creatures, smaller but still massive replicas of their African cousins, are armed with digging claws like ornate hair combs on their front legs. They come wobbling along the gutters and sidewalks around my house in the summer. I remember hitching a toy wagon to one when I was a child: he was equal to towing a load several times his weight. When I tired of him and threw him into a widow’s web, he struggled in his windup toy way and threw a defensive flurry of tarry feces. The patient widow hung just out of range and threw silk onto him for more than an hour before moving to his front end to deliver the killing bite. Big as the dung beetle was, her bite, once delivered, killed him in minutes.

  As it turns out, the widow’s venom is thousands of times more virulent than necessary for killing scarabs. The whole idea is full of the widow’s glamour: an emblem of eternal life killed by a creature whose most distinctive blood-colored markings people invariably describe as an hourglass.

  No one has ever offered a sufficient explanation for the dangerous venom. It provides no clear evolutionary advantage: all of the widow’s prey items would find lesser toxins fatal, and there is no unambiguous benefit in killing or harming larger animals. A widow that bites a human being or other large animal is likely to be killed. Evolution does sometimes produce such flowers of natural evil—traits that are neither functional nor vestigial, but utterly pointless. Natural selection favors the inheritance of useful characteristics that arise from random mutation and tends to extinguish disadvantageous traits. All other characteristics, the ones that neither help nor hinder survival, are preserved or extinguished at random as mutation links them with useful or harmful traits. Many people—even many scientists— assume that every animal is elegantly engineered for its ecological niche, that every bit of an animal’s anatomy and behavior has a functional explanation. However, nothing in evolutionary theory sanctions this assumption. Close observation of the lives around us rules out any view so systematic.

  We want the world to be an ordered room, but in a corner of that room there hangs an untidy web. Here the analytical mind finds an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in nature; and the scientist’s vision of evil comes to match the vision of a God-fearing country woman with a ten-foot pole. No idea of the cosmos as elegant design accounts for the widow. No idea of a benevolent God can be completely comfortable in a widow’s world. She hangs in her web, that marvel of design, and
defies teleology.

  MANTID

  From my second-floor apartment I could see across the parking lot to the creek, and I used to step out on the landing at dusk to watch the fireflies lighting up against the backdrop of the darkening pines and maples and Osage orange trees. One night the miller moths were especially thick around the light fixture on the landing, and I was about to go inside because the furry, knuckle-sized creatures kept bumping me, leaving iridescent streaks of dusty scales on my sweating skin. That’s when I noticed one of them jerk from the arc of its flight and buzz like a disgruntled bee.

  There was a beige-painted wood banister along the landing, and a piece of it had grabbed the moth and was chewing its head off. As I looked closer, the carnivorous piece of banister adjusted its grip slightly, and I recognized it as a praying mantis, or mantid, as the entomologists prefer. She held the moth, wings down, before her face and turned to stare at me. She looked like a person wiping her face with a napkin.

  The mantid was two and a half inches long and exactly the color of the banister. Her triangular head came to a point in mandibles like two tiny pairs of pruning shears; they were surrounded by four fingerlike palps. She walked on four legs. The front pair of legs, the ones she didn’t use for walking, were covered with spikes and ended in boat hooks, and she held these up before herself. The odd position of mantid forelegs has suggested contemplation or wisdom to many people in different parts of the world. The Greek root of mantid means “prophet.” In Africa and the Middle East, legends of religious and prophetic significance adhere to the mantid. In the United States, its common names include soothsayer. And, of course, it is accused of “praying.”

  I trapped the mantid in a gallon pickle jar and brought her inside, adding a few twigs and leaves for her to climb on. By morning she had turned green to match the leaves.

  I caught a few miller moths and tossed them in. The mantid climbed halfway up a thick twig and clung there with her middle and hind legs, her big forelegs folded close to her chest. A moth flew near. Her head swiveled to watch its erratic, glass-bumping flight.

  She snatched it from the air. I didn’t see it happen; her strike was too fast to see, even as a blur. Scientists say an entire strike lasts one twentieth of a second. I only sensed some startling occurrence, and then the moth was trapped in her spiky arms. She was already biting it in the furry scales just behind its bald head. Mantids generally bite in just this spot, severing the prey’s major nerve, the equivalent of a spinal cord. This surgical technique, which mantids somehow instinctively apply to a wide range of prey, breaks the connection between an insect’s limbs and brain. It’s not necessarily a fatal wound, but it leaves the insect powerless to defend itself.

  The moth flapped its wings into a buzzing blur every few seconds while the mantid unhurriedly ate it, starting from the head. The pruning-shear mouthparts worked away, biting out chunks of moth and lapping the juices. The moth’s scales, which had broken into particles of dust when they smeared my hand, looked like little brown feathers when they were whole, and they drifted down in a steady snow.

  I kept the mantid for a week or so, frequently feeding it moths. The twig it perched on was unsteady. Sometimes it spun out of place when the mantid struck at a moth. The mantid’s strike, missing its target as the mantid lost her footing, would hang in the air for an instant, giving me a rare look at the process—the arms unfurled, reaching, like a model showing evening gloves.

  I had read that mantids eat almost anything, from hornets (they leave the stinger uneaten) to hummingbirds to frogs. One mantid seized a mouse and ate it alive, starting from the nose. (That mantid was five inches long.) I myself had seen them eating black widow spiders; as the mantid devours what passes for the spider’s brain, one spider leg moves up and down as if keeping time to music. I fed this mantid whatever crawled across the landing: a spotted white caterpillar, which held to the grass stem from which the mantid plucked it, bending the stem almost double on its way to death. House flies—she ate only the larger ones. Field crickets that walked up to her boldly like paunchy men in tuxedos. A huge orb-weaving spider with legs striped in silver and gold. She would eat anything she could see moving; I watched her watch the movement before she made the kill.

  The mantid is a visual animal, far more so than almost any other arthropod. Her two huge eyes form a human-style face: gaze at her and she seems to be gazing back, as cats and monkeys do. Try the same trick with most insects and, if you can even discover any eyes, you’ll find they don’t give the same impression.

  The mantid’s two big eyes, arranged so that both can see forward, give her stereoscopic vision. That means she can see two images of the same thing and, by combining the two, judge depth. That’s the same trick we humans use. The mantid can also see a little bit of color. But her specialty is seeing motion: in order to eat, she has to detect animal motion among wind-stirred leaves. When she sees prey moving, she freezes until it comes close; then she launches her invisibly fast strike. She can see in light or near-dark, but, like many predominantly visual animals, she prefers to hunt by day.

  The mantid has a feature unique among insects: the ability to turn her head. A mantid can actually look over her own “shoulder.” This combination of traits— swiveling head, stereoscopic vision, depth perception, and motion detection—causes mantid behavior to resemble that of cats and people more than it does typical insect behavior, at least in matters of food and self-defense. For example, what happens if you thrust your hand toward a person’s face, stopping just short of contact? The first reaction is a flinch. What happens if you try the same thing with a cockroach, a close cousin of the mantid? It runs, changing directions frequently to confuse you. And what if you try the same thing with a mantid? She flinches. Mantids react like people because they see the world in basically the same way.

  Visual talents of this sort usually go with a predatory lifestyle. We’re not pure predators like the mantid, but we have the equipment to be. We also have grasping appendages, another frequent predator trait, just as cats have grasping claws and mantids have what scientists call raptorial arms. “Raptorial” is biologese for “grasping.” Few insects can hold prey items as the mantid can.

  All of our similarities to the mantid result from convergent evolution, which means that unrelated animals develop similar features because they’ve adapted to similar environmental challenges. The killer whale, a warm-blooded animal built on a frame of bones, is shaped like the white shark, a cold-blooded animal with a cartilaginous skeleton. That’s because they both live in the ocean and eat seals: convergent evolution. Our similarities to the mantid are subtler.

  To start with, we both have weak senses except for sight. If you want an illustration of the weakness of your ears and nose, follow a dog around outdoors and try to figure out what he’s alerting to every time he cocks his head or stops to stare. You’ll soon believe yourself deaf and blunt-nosed. If you tried the same thing with a mantid, you would understand her better, even though the dog is, relatively speaking, your first cousin and the mantid a stranger.

  The metaphors reveal our visual nature. When we English-speaking humans want to show that we understand something, we say “I see.” But “I hear” is the language of rumor; it means something is possible but unproved. I’m told many languages have analogous sensory metaphors. They reflect the epistemology our bodies teach us.

  The mantid is pretty useless when it comes to hearing. Of the approximately two thousand mantid species in the world, many lack ears altogether. In only a few species are both genders equipped with ears. The remaining species—over half the total—exhibit sexual dimorphism. The male has an ear, and the female doesn’t. The mantid ear is unique; each male has only one, which is in the center of his chest. Most animals can tell the direction of a sound because of subtle differences in reception between their two ears, but the mantid lacks this talent. He cannot use his ear to locate food or mates. His vision is, of course, all he needs to hunt prey. He finds
receptive females by scent: the females emit pheremones.

  To follow this scent, the male flies by night. This fact accounts for his longer wings. The females of most mantid species don’t fly at all. This is where the male mantid’s ear reveals its function. It detects only high frequencies, so it is useless for most defensive purposes, but it does pick up the echo-locating screams of bats. Insectivorous bats eat mantids on the wing. A mantid that hears a bat’s call power-dives to avoid being taken. Since this tactic doesn’t require the mantid to know where the bat is, the single ear suffices. Scientists believe the mantid’s ear, for which no other function has yet been discovered, evolved in response to predation by bats.

  The mantid as meal: that brings us to another important trait we share. We’re both predatory animals in the middle of the food chain. The mantid is built to kill, but she can also be killed, and often is.

  We sat talking on the porch, and out in the grass at the edge of the light the black cat continually pulled himself into a tight ball and then sprang at some insect floating by. We saw him miss a few moths, and we saw him leap at things we couldn’t see. After a while he came trotting up to the porch with something in his mouth. The something was thrashing its legs in the fur of the cat’s cheeks.

  The cat crouched to play with his captive, dropping it on the sidewalk and pinning it with one paw. It was a big green mantid. When the cat raised the paw and looked, the mantid rose on his hind legs, throwing his formidable front limbs into the air to show their red and yellow undersides, and staggered toward the cat, as if to intimidate the feline with its size. Scientists call that a threat display. The cat clapped his paws together on the mantid.

  A second later the mantid slipped free and burst into buzzing flight, making a swift, clumsy arc before the cat’s face. The cat sprang to catch the mantid in midair. And when he had his captive wrestled to the cement, he was through playing. He bit and pulled his head back, breaking the mantid in half. The fight went on for another five minutes or so, the black cat eating, the green mantid still waving his limbs in protest. The cat left the spiny forelimbs and a tangle of winged thorax.