Part 1 (1/2)

Invisible Beasts.

Tales of the animals that go unseen among us.

Sharona_Muir.

Introducing Invisible Beasts.

I come from a long line of naturalists and scientists going back many generations, and in each generation we have had the gift of discovering hard-to-see phenomena, from a sh.e.l.led amoeba lurking between two sand grains, to the misfolded limb of a protein pointing to a genetic flaw. This book also follows a venerable family tradition, but one never exposed to public view. Perhaps ”trait” would be a better word than ”tradition.” Every so often, that is, every second or third generation, someone is born in our family who sees invisible animals. Our clan accepts the odd-sighted person without quibbles or qualms, in the spirit of generous tolerance and fun that animates the scientific community. In the late twentieth century, the odd-sighted arrival was myself. My induction into the family's att.i.tude was typical. As a small child, I complained to my granduncle Erasmus-my predecessor, the elder spotter of invisible beasts-that since no one liked to go with me to catch invisible beetles, I wanted to see only what the other kids saw. From a height beclouded with cigar smoke, Granduncle rumbled, not unsympathetically: ”And what if Leeuwenhoek had wanted to see only what other people saw?” I retorted that Leeuwenhoek had had his microscope, but I couldn't make the other kids see what I saw. They didn't look hard enough. They didn't try, they didn't care, they laughed at me, and so forth. I must have sounded quite upset, because-like a monstrous barrier reef looming through brownish waters-the grand-avuncular mustache approached my face and stopped within a few inches, smelling of ashes and leather; I observed Granduncle's nostril hairs in the defile above his mustache, flying on his breath like pinfeathers.

”It's not how hard you look, Sophie. It's the way you see.” A tusky yellow smile nailed these words to my mind. Decades later, they have led to this book.

Why have I written a book that could expose me, and my family, to ridicule and imputations of lunacy?

If the animals I saw weren't invisible, this book would not be unusual; it would be merely another in the current trend of wildlife catalogs. With the rate of species extinction at some four per hour, one hundred per day (according to Richard Leakey), how could we not create such projects as the online ARKive, where you may see and learn about the most imperiled animals? Ma.s.s extinction influenced me to write, especially because, for the first time, the family gift of seeing invisible beasts has not skipped a generation, but has descended directly to my nephew. I should have been Granduncle's age before meeting my replacement; and I suspect that this acceleration is linked, somehow, to the urgency of biological crisis.

But-you may ask-if these are my concerns, why strain credibility by writing about phantoms? Why not join with other eco-minded citizens and write about saving the animals that we agree exist, because we can all see them?

To this reasonable question, I respond with my granduncle's words: it's in the way you see. I believe the time has come to share the way I see. That is, expressed in a nutsh.e.l.l: Human beings are the most invisible beasts, because we do not see ourselves as beasts. If we did, we would think and act differently. Instead of believing ourselves to be above animals, or separate from them, we would understand how every aspect of our lives-spiritual, psychological, social, political-is, also, an aspect of our being animals. As it is, our understanding is superficial: everyone ”knows” that he or she is a beast, yet how many of us ponder our animality, our condition of a creature among creatures, as we do our economy? We don't even have the proper words. Look at how animal and beast are used. Do you think you're a beast? Not really. Not you. I, however, seeing animals where no one else does, am that much more aware of our human blindness-a blind spot in our collective mind, roughly the size of the planet, that's turned on every creature including ourselves. Our distorted vision of life will only be corrected when we see the beasts that we don't see. How can we? For starters, read on.

Some decisions should be explained. I have selected a limited number of invisible beasts out of the many that I have observed, as well as scores of others recorded by my granduncle and the beast spotters before him. A principle of selection was needed, but was hard to find. Entertainment? Any beast is as good as a circus-better, if you loathe circuses. Beauty? Not if the reader can't expect to see them. Oddity? Show me the animal that isn't surprising, and I'll show you a Disney film. Usefulness as pets? Not the Kraken. Finally, I decided to select those animals that taught me things I don't forget. Broadly put, the beasts you'll meet here are those who teach a memorable lesson in the meaning of their particular company to the human animal.

Another decision was to include more personal details than usual in a catalog of natural wonders. Without anecdotal touches, I would not be able to explain, for instance, why it's a misfortune when your Truth Bats desert you, or how I solved the riddle of invisible dogs. My family enters the picture as well. My younger sister, Evie, is a biologist specializing in soil science. Without her expert a.s.sistance, I couldn't begin to describe the lives of invisible creatures. Evie's enthusiasm is as helpful as her knowledge; she truly enjoys treating invisible beasts as biological thought experiments. She is a natural part of the book, especially since her son, Leif, is this century's successor to Granduncle Erasmus and me.

The hardest decisions involved organization. How should the animals be named? Greco-Latin taxonomies were out, because those require generations of systematics by people who see what you see. So all names are informal, and I've cla.s.sified the creatures according to my best guesses about the kins.h.i.+ps between visible and invisible life. The same goes for the categories: common, rare, and imperiled. These are provisional, drawn from long-range observations by me and my predecessors, like population estimates made by a few researchers working in a remote jungle or desert. As with all my conclusions, the categories await scientific verification. I wish to present invisible beasts to the reader without making unwarranted claims; I merely claim my practice to be that of a naturalist, and hope that my descriptions may someday a.s.sist in a more scientific approach to this fascinating subject.

How, then, is the book organized?

My inspiration comes from sunflowers, whose seeds grow in a spiral progression called the Fibonacci series. This book's chapters take the form of a diminis.h.i.+ng Fibonacci series: 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1, like the spiral of a sunflower disk (a very young one!) traced inward, taking the reader from a periphery of common invisible beasts, through shrinking circles of imperiled, rare, and others types of beasts, to the central mysteries pondered in the epilogue. Now, the Fibonacci series is one of those mathematical doohickeys, like constants and ratios, that nature seems to carry in her overall pockets and keep handy for routine work. Both scientists and artists use it on occasion, and in its small domain of tasks, the series is not a bad symbol of modest, all-around utility. So let the order of the chapters before you represent my chief wish for this book, modeled after a growing sunflower or paper nautilus: that it be found useful.

Common Invisible Beasts.

1.

We can solve many problems in life by imitating the ways of fellow creatures: this is called ”biomimicry.” Engineers are biomimics when they study animals, learning from scorpions how to make erosion-proof surfaces, or, from octopi, how to design superior camouflage. Biomimicry is not limited to science, however; we can be biomimics with our imaginations and feelings, too. The Couch Conch teaches as much about love and marriage as it does about durable materials.

The Couch Conch.

A NIGHT OF Pa.s.sION is a hard thing to remember (no pun intended.) The moments blur into a warm blush on your brain, from which it's hard to extract the details later, if you want to brood over them and confirm just how he did what. So it's lovely to find a Couch Conch in your bedroom the morning after.

You know when a Couch Conch is spending the night from the atmosphere it diffuses. Your limbs loosen; you have the most marvelous sense of relaxing on some sandy bottom among beds of warm sea gra.s.s in tropical waters. Your lover tastes like fresh oysters and tart wine; his kisses are iridescent, plentiful, while your toes fan apart and wave hungrily. Gravity is suspended for the night as you spiral deeper into spellbound synchrony, warm and wet. His looks are swimming with love, his hand tangles in your hair, his navel is adorable, like a blister pearl, and swells toward your smiling face with each deep breath sounding like the sea, which is the sound of ”pink noise” . . . as it's well-named, since the pink lips of conches waft that same noise to our eardrums.

But, as I said, you find your Couch Conch in the morning after all the delights are past, perched beside the clock radio. And unlike the souvenir sh.e.l.l held to your head in an airport gift shop, the Couch Conch isn't empty. It is bowing on its foot. You might say h.e.l.lo, or something.

Like its visible kin, a Couch Conch seems the symbol of a perfect union. Its feminine, rosy lip is borne along in eager leaps by its foot, which my dictionary describes as ”pointed and h.o.r.n.y,” and this hot foot obtrudes from an operculum, which is Latin for ”lid.” Gazing at your Couch Conch, you hear Nature saying in her peremptory way that every pot has its lid, so get busy and find yours! As if that weren't enough of a hint, most conches unfurl their gorgeous, pouting lips-so reminiscent of our bodies at s.e.xual maturity-at their s.e.xual maturity.

That's when a Couch Conch pays its visit to your boudoir. As you gently lift the Couch Conch from your night-stand, careful not to jar its squirming foot-which probes your wrist for plankton, pathetically-you see what makes this creature unique. Its gleaming lip sports ornate and delicate carvings; in the film of pale sh.e.l.l that overlays its radiant pink, there's an ecstatic face with tousled locks, framed by a pair of hands. In a rondure of magenta, standing nudes, white with pa.s.sion, dig fingers into each other's rumps. Two lovers are glued in a leggy X, staring at each other. They look like naughty Victorian cameos. In fact the Couch Conch's cameos, which it acquires at p.u.b.erty, are a natural enhancement to attract mates, much as body piercings or tattoos mark our own debuts. But there's another surprise in store. Slipping on your gla.s.ses, the better to scrutinize, you bend closer to your kelp-smelling visitor and gasp. You've just seen what you look like upside down, in the buff.

Fortunately for your dignity, the Couch Conch is not a camera. The cameos are made by another process, requiring heat rather than light (see below) and possess a personal aura, the je ne sais quoi of a genuine artwork. A camera shows naked bodies that you see: the Couch Conch shows naked moments that you recognize. There's the moment, stunning, when his finger traced your tense lower lip, which unfairly makes you look thin-lipped because it holds back an avalanche of worries about how you aren't young enough, thin enough, rich enough, smart enough, and just plain not enough. Your lover saw, laughed, touched, and your poor mouth relaxed. You thought you had been smiling, but only at his magic touch did a smile unfold that you could feel. What a full lip is silhouetted here, in your smile! Now you can put your finger on the memory.

It's wonderful that mollusks, who don't care about us, can show us what our bodies express. But mollusks are full of lessons. They know all about the balance of hard and soft, rigidity and acceptance, firmness and flexibility, from the way in which they compose their nacre, the iridescent glaze that makes pearls precious and conches beautiful. We don't think of beauty in terms of incredible toughness, but it so happens that nacre, that angelic gloss, is d.a.m.n near unbreakable. It's made of hard crystals and gooey, soft protein. If a crack starts running through the rigid crystals, it stops dead in the yielding goo. Isn't that worth studying if you're a human couple?

We humans make an inferior commercial copy of nacre, by sintering. I'm guessing you don't sinter much. It requires temperatures of around 2000 Celsius. Conches make the real article, which we can't imitate, while lolling in beds of sea gra.s.s with no more heat than p.u.b.erty calls for, and with no more wasted effort than the lilies whose folded white genitals trumped Solomon in all his glory.

Now, as for the naughty cameos, nothing could be simpler. The Couch Conch's protein goo is heat sensitive, like infrared film. Our body heat impresses itself on this protein, and as the Couch Conch completes its sh.e.l.l lip, the goo ”develops” the heat-images of our ecstasies three-dimensionally by contracting and expanding various layers of crystals. This isn't hard to grasp. It's exactly as if a 3-D digital modeling program were a marine life-form with a slimy foot that hung out in people's bedrooms while they canoodled, then mysteriously vanished around nine in the morning, leaving a fishy whiff and a smear of sand, on its way to find a bodacious Strombus gigas and sp.a.w.n some glutinous egg strands.

2.

Can nonhumans be artists? I suppose ”art” is a human concept, yet anyone who has heard a mockingbird singing under a spring moon has heard an animal out-riff Bird; it's hard to believe they do it without some aesthetic sense. Like ours, the works of nonhumans have individuality. I've seen many competent webs made by arrow-shaped micrathena spiders, but only one that was perfectly round, with strands spun as evenly as the grooves in an LP, and not by accident-for it was remade many times-but by the mastery of a single spider. The Feral Parfumier Bees show how animals can make a thing of beauty following a procedure well known to human artists.

Feral Parfumier Bees.

ON A COLD SPRING NIGHT in the Pleistocene, in the midst of forests rubbing like bear pelts against the flinty stars, a bolt of lightning locked onto heaven and earth and staggered in its violent light that froze an entire horizon of shadows. Minutes later, a banner of fire unfurled, smoked, and sank under rainy gusts. In its place lay the ruins of a pitch pine, still hissing, alive with crawling sparks. Some chunks of pine had exploded off the burning boughs, showering hot ash, and smacked into the undergrowth like arboreal meteorites. One had rolled into the mouth of a dire-wolf den whose occupants were out hunting. b.u.mping downward, s.m.u.tched with wolf hairs, jiggling from residual steam in its pitch that jetted it first one way, then the other, it sped over claw-marked dirt and fell ten feet, whoosh, down a crack leading from the wolves' den into the true pores of the earth. It landed in a pocket of rock as a pinball lands in its hole, and there, with ma.s.s subsiding and heat sighing away, it rested for twenty-five millennia.

At first, the thread of steamy incense unraveling at the back of the den caused anxious sniffing from the mother of four dire puppies, who all grew up safely but never experienced, in hundreds of miles of travels, a fragrance anything like their home den's. Eventually, the den lost the incense smell and, forever, the scent of dire wolves. Gray wolves, red wolves, and timber wolves took their place for a span of time equal to the lives of empires; then coyotes, foxes, groundhogs, and skunks (thanks to the spread of a human empire) overran the burrows of the wolves. By this time the innumerable pines that had bristled in the cold spring lightning were mostly flattened into rivers of asphalt. But the ancient, charred chunk-a great artwork waiting for its audience-stayed intact through the eons, slowly hardening. I should say a word about it.

It was unique. Before being coated in molten pitch, it had clung to a pine branch onto which it exuded a s.h.i.+ny ooze meant to repel weaver ants, though there were no weaver ants anywhere around. It didn't know that. It clung to its spot: a rough sphere that from a short distance gave the impression of fruitlike translucence, varying with the sunbeams from rosy-peach to yellow amber. Up closer-from the perspective of a giant ground sloth-it got strange. The sloth had no concept of ”beehive,” much less ”hexagon,” though a golden ball composed of Tiffany-like translucent grids gave him as much pause as could be sustained by a hungry, incurious guy with claws like personal forklifts. One thing the sloth knew: it smelled good. The next thing he knew, he was galloping about on his ma.s.sive knuckles, making the sound (whatever it was) of Eremotherium hara.s.sed by wasps. He felt wasps, he heard wasps, wasps stung his ears, drilled up his snout, stabbed at his bony little eyes-but he didn't see any wasps. He left in a hurry anyway. And a defensive swarm of invisible honeybees returned to crawl over their comb in four-bee-thick cosiness, though they had no business to be (or bee) in North America. But they didn't know that.

These bees were naive newcomers. Their comb, scarcely secreted into place, came there by sheer accident. Natural selection can magnify an accident into a new variation on the theme of life, or let it dwindle into extinction. For all our bees' sloth-banis.h.i.+ng activity, they had little defense against dangers like bears-those Pleistocene bears tall enough to have ambled into your house and scratched their chins on top of your Christmas tree. And they had no defense against a North American winter. They were running out of time.

Invisible, or Parfumier, Bees are natives of Asia, where they likely sprang from the oldest lineage of honeybees, the red-bellied dwarf honeybee, Mic.r.a.pis florea. Though n.o.ble in their antiquity, Mic.r.a.pis have never been the brightest bees on the planet-they never learned to waggle-dance, for example. Our invisible Mic.r.a.pis, marooned on a cold, alien continent, never considered sheltering in a cave or hollow tree. Dim aristocrats that they were, they built on a pitch-pine limb the same fragile pavilion that suited their queen in the home lat.i.tudes of cinnamon, vetiver, and pepper. They danced their same, waggle-less, straitlaced beeline, pointing to nectar sources of which they knew absolutely nothing. Out and back they flew, and one can only imagine the discomfort of this genteel sisterhood on finding their honeys and jellies altered beyond repair. Everyone performed her duty: the foragers danced, the cleaners swept and garnished, the porters ported, the nurses nursed, and the queen's attendants licked her constantly and sped her commands to the colony. Yet nothing smelled right. Their beautiful comb, that sweet home epitomizing the best of vigorous feminine care, reeked of poor levulose levels and unpleasant ratios of copper to manganese. Social insects all agree that life bows to a well-executed plan, so the Parfumiers, confronted with seeping evil, continued to do what they did best, with emphasis. They ranged farther; gathered more data; memorized new landmarks. They pioneered! Veteran foragers-bees of experience, whose antennae alerted to the slightest trace of sugar, who could sniff the very hour at which a flower had unfolded-these exquisitely discriminating Parfumiers got their tongues trapped in heavy-duty, spring-loaded sepals meant for the oversize jabs of hummingbirds. They hauled the icy-tasting pollens of the temperate zone. They scaled saber-toothed roses, mandibular violets, gra.s.ses that could saw through a glacier's toes. They were as brave as brides.

Yet despite exceptional industry, the honey of the stranded Parfumiers smelled more and more odd. It nourished them, roughly, but somewhere in its aromatic heart lurked an indigestible dissonance, where the chemistries of received wisdom wrestled with the nectars of circ.u.mstance. And their time was running out, though they didn't know that.

They knew the supreme truth of bees: honey is collaboration. The taste of honey is the taste of sisterhood. Everybody involved in making honey has to agree about such technical matters as the quality standard, when to stop regurgitating the refined product, how long to fan off the excess water, and so on, with many other decisions we're not aware of as we pour the stuff all over our granola. Unlike us, bees have a sound ma.s.s mind, so good at collective decisions that they don't even need to be conscious of them. It is also a mind capable of abstract thought. Bees know the concepts of sameness and difference, and the Parfumiers, in their rude spring of exile, had brought home a string of unknown ingredients, one after another, trying to make their honey the same as it used to be. Their approximations tasted like approximations, but each was slightly different from the one before. Then something extraordinary happened, simply because it had to. A point came when the Parfumiers' honey wasn't a failed version of the same one they used to make, but a whole new thing. I couldn't say if the Parfumiers' ma.s.s mind consciously read out a royal proclamation to the effect of ”Our honey is not the same-then let it be different.” But anyone, even a social insect, who tries to realize a plan through successive approximations is eventually bound to realize not the plan itself, but the sum of the differences between plan and reality. That is the procedure of artists, and the invisible bees, working with unknown materials, had produced a great artwork of the olfactory senses. No one could have identified its resemblances to a flower, or even a potpourri of several flowers. Nothing in nature had smelled like it before. Imagine, however, some unlucky person who would die without ever having encountered a flower, a person whose footfalls regularly met cement, whose raised eyes b.u.mped off a dead layer of clouds, whose hopes consisted of daily crusts, and whose fears were so familiar they couldn't be bothered to wear faces. Smelling the Parfumiers' honey, that sad soul would know precisely what a flower was and what it meant-the heart of change that makes hope possible. Our bees had become like the invisible sisterhood of the Muses: their honey was pure poetry.

BEWARE GREATNESS! Like all art of the highest order, the Parfumiers' unmasked, gently but implacably, our human imperfection. It happened this way: Twenty-five millennia after a pitch-coated honeycomb fell into a hole under a dire-wolf den, I was enjoying a bright spring morning. I was b.u.t.tering toast. Patches of sunlight danced on the kitchen counter, where a smudge of raspberry jam drew a bee through the open window-she flew past my ear, grazing it with her hot hum. My other ear pressed to the cell phone, I listened to my sister Evie. Most people's voices saw up and down when they're excited, but Evie's voice separates into identically-sized syllables all simmering at the same high, maximally efficient pitch, like water heated in a warm pan until convection bubbles, those exactly hexagonal bubbles, cover the surface and simmer according to the same laws of physics that command hexagonal cells in a beehive. I think it's nice for a biologist's voice to exhibit one of nature's fundamental patterns. My sister was telling me about a honeycomb, miraculously preserved from the Pleistocene, complete with the bodies of an unknown, primitive species of Mic.r.a.pis.

”aMy c.r.a.p is'?”

”Apis, bee, micro, small, Sophie! Anyway, my graduate student has been running this mummified honeycomb through batteries of tests,” Evie continued, her tone implying that I was intellectually limp though still good enough for her news. She and her student had built models of the dead bees through digital simulation, and, finally, had synthesized a replica of the ancient honey, based on melissopalynological and paleobiochemical a.n.a.lysis. Typically, Evie p.r.o.nounced these terms without lessening the rate and pitch of her speech. She invited me to visit her lab.

”It's super-incredible. Wait till you smell it.”

”Smell what?”

”You won't believe your nose.”