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Contents
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS
Endlessness
Demodex mites, humans
Sex and the single slug
Slugs
2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18
Mammals and mammaries
Champagne Lifestyle
New species
Allspice, ant-killer
Taxonomy and systematics
Orang orang
Orang-utan and other primates
My family and other family
Classification
INVERTEBRATE CYCLE
Below the drop-off
Coral
Spineless
Introduction to invertebrates
Architects of human culture
Wasps
Brother sponge
Sponges
Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish
Glass sponge
Sod the rainforest
More coral
Walking plants
Sea anemones
Infernal agony of gelatinous zooplankton
Jellyfish
Life in the round
Starfish
Flatworm, flatworm, burning bright
Flatworm
The holiness of tapeworms
Tapeworm
Unkillable bears
Tardigrades
Cans and cans of worms
Nematodes
Tipping the velvet worm
Velvet worm
Another can of worms
Annelid worms
Trio for piano, bassoon and earthworm
Earthworm
The daughters of Doris
Ribbon worms
Becaue I am many
Bryozoans
Getting silly
Lampshells
Dirty beasts
Penis worms
Us alone
Placazoans
Lacing Venus’s girdle
Comb jellies
Here be mud dragons
Mud dragons
The Hamlet worm
Nematomorphs
Who needs oxygen?
Loricifera
A bit samey
Arrow worms
The peanut trick
Peanut worms
Rotifers
Evolution in reverse?
Thorny-headed worms
****!
Hairy-backs
The crypto-bums
Goblet worms
Lobsterisimus bumakissimus
Symbions
Is-ness
Jaw worms
The Quaker worm
Xenoturbellids
Gutless, brainless
Acoelomorphs
Just one more thing
Phoronids
James Bond and the kraken
Giant squid
Superslug
Octopus
Nautilus but nice
Nautilus
She sells seashells
Shell-wearing molluscs
Fearful the death of the diver must be
Giant clam
Valuing oysters
Oysters
One more twist
Gastropods
Creeping like snail
Giant African land snail
On our last legs
Arthropods
A suit of armour
Japanese spider crab
Beloved barnacles
Barnacles
The silk route
Spiders
The Kalahari Ferrari
Solifugids
Twenty centimetres!
Centipedes
Second innings
Large blue butterfly
Laser epiphany
Blue morpho
Les demoiselles du Waveney
Dragonflies
Cannibal sex
Praying mantis
Unreal city
Termites
True bugs suck
Bugs
Let copulation thrive
Flies
Prostitutes and clients
Bees
The wasp and the devil’s chaplain
Wasps
The best butter
Butterflies and moths
Inordinate fondness and all that
Beetles
Axis of weevil
Weevils
VERTEBRATE CYCLE
Lemurs and archbishops
Primates
Long-jump gold medal
Bushbaby
The lion, the glitch and the glove compartment
Lion
The profile of Winnie-the-Pooh
Bears
Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo
Hyena
The half-and-halfers
Seals
Wimbledon champion
Bovids
Walking with lechwe
Lechwe and genenuk
Do I know you?
Naked mole rat
The elephant in the corridor
Elephant
Plan A for aardvark
Aardvark
Flying flashers
Idiurus
Self-sharpening chisels
Rodents
Dirty rats
Rat
Good old Ratty
Water-vole and dormouse
Night-leaper
Spring-hare
Flashin’ sunshine children
Shrews
That breathtaking breath
Whales
Song of the sea
Whalesong
Gnomes of the river
River dolphins
Disgustingly upside down
Bats
The altruistic vampire
Vampire bats
Pocket dynamo
Marsupials
Death comes for the Elephant’s Child
More elephants
Epiphany
Even more elephants
Time for transition
Platypus
Feather
Kestrel
The nausea of Charles Darwin
Peacock
How many ways of catching a fish?
Toucan, river birds
Look, no stabilisers
Bateleur
Same bat time, same bat hawk
Bat hawk
The dark side
Owls
Crisis relocation
Terns
Swift scramming frenzy
Swifts
Jewels that breathe
Hummingbirds
The wardrobe bird
Flamingos
Instant birder
Lilac-breasted roller
The Clever Club
Crows
Bell-beat of their wings
Swans
22:1
Albatross
No flying, please, we’re birds
Flightless birds
Do I contradict myself?
Penguins
Passerines
Wild thing
Marsh warbler
Blood-chilling
Crocodiles
Snakes, unclad humans and a garden
Snakes
Secret snakes
Adder
Disgusting clumsy lizards
Lizards
Good luck, little metaphor
Turtles
Shape-shifters
Amphibians
When I was a rain god
Frogs
Death by frog
Golden poison frog
A miraculous draught of newts
Newts
Beautiful shirts
Caecilians
“Fish”
Fish
The stillness of salmon
Salmon
The Eden fish
Cleaner fish
That’s no parasite: that’s my husband
Anglerfish
The sinking fish
Sharks
No bones about it
Cartilaginous fish
Ray of Sunshine
Manta ray
EPILOGUE
The beginning
Jawless fish, lobe-finned fish
To the great teachers --
especially
Mr Hendry – “Pete” – late of Emanuel School, who taught me about words and books and Joyce,
Sir David Attenborough, who taught me about the wild world and Darwin,
and CLW who taught me practically everything
Here Comes Everybody
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Endlessness
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Final words of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It is a thought that has had me enthralled all my life. We are not alone in the universe: the idea that launched a million works of science fiction. Fact is we are not alone on our own planet. Far from it. We could hardly be less alone. We are one of a crowd, part of a teeming throng. We are not alone even when we are alone: whether we are counting the great garden of bacteria in our guts – alien life forms that keep us alive – or the tiny arthropods called Demodex mites that live in the follicles of our eyelashes.
Because we are one of many. Life is not about the creation of a single perfect being. An ape is not a failed human: it is a perfectly valid and fully evolved creature in its own right. A monkey is not a failed ape, a lemur is not a failed monkey, a mouse is not a failed primate, a fish is not a failed mammal (and as I shall show you later, there is no such thing as a fish) and insects, nematode worms, corals and priapulids are not failed vertebrates. The meaning of life is life and the purpose of life is to become an ancestor. All forms of life are equally valid: the beautiful, the bizarre, the horrific, the obscure and the glorious.
We humans are different from the rest in some ways, but only in some ways. One of these ways is our need for a myth to get us through the night: a myth to carry us through the vast distances of interstellar space: a myth to transport us through the endless aeons of time in which life has been lived on earth, a myth to reconcile us to our true evolutionary position. Which is a cosmic afterthought.
We used to cherish the myth that we are made of quite different stuff from the animals: there are animals, and then there’s us. Darwin exploded that one, of course. He showed us that we are all animals, but that is too difficult a truth for us to face in its rawness and reality. So we have created another myth. Benjamin Disraeli, speechifying about Darwin’s horrifying truth, said: “The question is this: is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories.”
But evolution is a fact and we humans – let’s dispense with Disraeli’s “man” nonsense; we’re all in it together, men, women and children – needed to come to terms with our apeness, our primateness, our mammalness, our vertebrateness, our animalness. So we came up with perfectibility: the idea that evolution had a goal, that goal was to make a perfect creature, and that perfect creature is lucky old us. The famous image of evolution – monkey, ape, hunched proto-hominid, fully evolved and upright modern man – encapsulates the myth as vividly as a cross, a crescent and a seated Buddha encapsulate the great world religions. The whole process of the Animal Kingdom, starting with unicellular blobs and passing through insects, “fish”, amphibians, reptiles and birds, culminates in mammals, and mammals carry us through primitive egg-layers and marsupials, to creatures of ever-greater magnificence and complexity, to the primates and then the apes, until the ladder finally ascends to wonderful, glorious, magical us.
Which is great. Except of course that it doesn’t.
The mite that lives in the follicles of your eyelashes is as fully, as exquisitely, as perfectly evolved as you are. And on that thought, I shall set out to describe the endless forms of the Animal Kingdom,I to encounter the ten million alien species with which we share our planet. To do so righteously, I must write a book that has no beginning and no end, but like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, simply continues.
Ten million aliens, then. Or is there really only one? Perhaps the only alien species on the planet is us. Certainly we are alienated from the rest of creation: so much so that we have become tourists on our own planet. What all tourists need is a travel guide: so here you are. Look on this book as the Rough Guide to Real Life: the Lonely Planet Guide to the Lonely Planet.
* * *
I. In this book I’m modestly restricting myself to the Animal Kingdom. In Britain four other kingdoms are traditionally recognised: Plantae, Fungi, Protoctista and Prokaryota/Monera. In the United States they prefer six: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria.
Sex and the single slug
This is the ideal point in the book for a quick lesson in basic taxonomy, so let’s talk about sex instead. I may not be able to teach you how to love slugs, but I can certainly teach you how slugs love. Slugs are invertebrates – molluscs, since you ask – and as such, less than the trash beneath a vertebrate’s feet. But they live lives of sensuous and sometimes violent passions and go in for the most bewildering and perhaps even enviable gymnastics.
We are brought up to despise most invertebrates, especially the slimy ones. I quote an exchange in Australia’s federal parliament in 2006. Julia Gillard, a Labour front-bencher: “Mr Speaker, I move that that snivelling grub over there be no further heard.” Speaker: “The manager of the opposition will withdraw that.” Gillard: “If I have offended grubs I withdraw unconditionally.”I
But we should warm to slugs if only for their sex lives: creatures whose antics outdo anything thought up by Messalina, Zeus and all those carved and writhing figures on the Konark Temple. As gardeners wage war on slugs with beer and eggshells, so slugs pursue their exotic and passionate lives. There are about 5,000 species of slugs in the world, and 32 of them in Britain, where the cold limits the things a slug can get up to. Slugs are related to snails, and are not unlike shell-less snails, except that to be confusing – and life and biodiversity are confusing almost by designII – there are three species of shelled slugs in Britain. Being molluscs, slugs are related to giant squids – but we’ll save them for later.
Slugs have two pairs of tentacles; the front ones sense light and the back ones sense smell. These are retractable, and they can be regrown. And yes, they do slime. Two sorts of slime: watery stuff, and thick, sticky stuff. They get about by gliding gracefully along this self-created carpet. It’s hard for humans to get excited about mucus – though it is life and death to slugs – so let’s move on to sex.
• • •
Slugs are hermaphrodites. Both halves of a pair have penises, both halves present sperm to the partner, and both halves go off and lay eggs. Slugs have the best of both worlds. But they are not just wham-bammers. They believe in courtship. Perhaps, being female as well as male, they are devoted, to the point of mania, to the concept of foreplay. It can go on for hours, as they circle, nibble and lunge at each other. Sometimes they will savour each other’s mucus, perhaps to get genetic information, perhaps as a light sustaining snack. Anointed in mucus, they engage in a slimy and sensual ballet. Some species will do this suspended from long ropes of mucus: acrobatic, gravity-defying, and n
o doubt as thrilling as doing it on a trapeze. The pace is slow, the rhythm sensuous, as if each nuance is relished. And some species have the most colossal penises: half as long as their own bodies. Some slugs have copulatory rituals in which the pair dance about each other, each partner waving a giant penis overhead.
The act continues with a mutual entering and a prolonged and slimy embrace. But then, how to break it off? The phrase, I fear, is no metaphor. With some species, a long and corkscrew-shaped penis doesn’t always withdraw too easily. In these circumstances – gentlemen are invited to cross their legs at this point – one slug will chew off the penis of the other. Sometimes both slugs will perform this feat. It is called apophallation. The slug, hermaphrodite no longer, goes away. Alas, he can’t grow another penis. So she carries on as a female forever after.
A backbone isn’t essential to an interesting life.
* * *
I. Extracted from Extracts from the Red Notebooks by my old friend Matthew Engel.
II. Except that there is no design.
2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18
I know we should be getting on with that lesson in taxonomy, but let’s think about women’s breasts instead. Turn to page three of the Sun, have a leaf through Playboy magazine, find pictures of naked women on the internet, look at Le déjeuner sur l’herbe or The Birth of Venus. Lots of breasts. Every two maintaining the most perfect paradox.
What are humans? Whatever else we are, we are a species of mammal, and as such we suckle our young. The female half of our species and the female half of the class of mammals all possess mammary glands – in one form or another. Humans, goats, sheep, horses, elephants and guinea pigs have two teats; dogs have eight or ten, rats have 12, pigs have 18, while the Virginia opossum has 13, one of the few mammals to have an odd number. The primitive egg-laying mammals, the monotremes, have no teats at all but they can still sweat milk. In other words, we’re mammals. All of us. That simple fact was never explained to me in these straightforward and uncompromising terms. I was taught that we “come from” mammals, or “come from” the apes. But we are mammals: so let’s deal with it. Some of the greatest art ever produced celebrates the mammalian defining characteristic of mammary glands, in suckling madonnas and in succulent nudes.
But let us also consider the contradiction. Humans are the only mammal that uses mammary glands for sexual display. There are plenty of theories about this: the most frequent is the notion that when humans started walking upright, the bottom became a lot less obvious. Female baboons signal sexual availability with a red flush to the buttocks: a trait which is noticeable, even spectacular, to passing humans. Non-female readers can guess the effect that rose-red buttocks have on a male baboon with male-to-male empathy. But with the bottom going out of fashion as a sexual signal, humans developed spectacular signal-ling breasts. They didn’t need to flush on and off, because human females were and are always sexually available.