Having just finished the new book by Richard Conniff, Swimming with Piranhas (SWP), I was sufficiently taken with the author’s style that I started reading his earlier collection of essays, Spineless Wonders (SW), which is a similarly delightful stroll through the animal kingdom. In this volume, though, the charismatic megafauna of Africa–the leopard, the cheetah–make no appearance. Instead these essays are devoted to the largest group of animals on the planet, a group that most of us instinctively shy away from–the invertebrates.
Beginning with the humble housefly, and ending with the aptly named slime eel, Conniff examines the uneasy relationships we have with these animals. As he puts it, his interest in these “animals humans commonly deem loathsome, [is] somewhere between the scientific and the sociopathic” (92). Loathsome though we may find them, they are essential to life on our planet. Without humans, the planet would function just fine–better, even. Without invertebrates, Earth would be almost unrecognizable.
Along the way Conniff introduces us to subjects like the giant squid (Architeuthis species), which is apparently extremely abundant but almost unknown to scientists in its own habitat, 1000 meters and more beneath the ocean’s surface. It appears to be one of the favorite foods of the sperm whale; there is hardly a sperm whale carcass to be found that doesn’t contain the enormous beaks of these elusive beasts in its stomach. But no one knows much about their life cycle or, as far as I know, has even seen one. (I recently watched the BBC’s Planet Earth series, and I’m fairly certain if they’d gotten footage of a giant squid, it would have been on the disc!)
Conniff also writes of the imported red fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), whose specific epithet (the second portion of the scientific or taxonomic name, the first being the genus) means “unconquered” because despite half a century of determined efforts with pesticides all we’ve managed to do is make ourselves even more vulnerable to it by killing off its competition! (Anyone who’s spent any time in Florida knows the pain of these invasive and efficient creatures.) This essay also mentions, without naming him, “a welt-covered USDA scientist” who has developed a scale of relative sting pain. This can be none other than Justin Schmidt, originator of the Justin Schmidt Pain Index which Conniff writes about at length in one of the essays in SWP.
One of my favorite essays from SW is “Lions of the Pond.” It tells the story of, among other things, his efforts to net dragonflies. Conniff, like me, is no lifelong naturalist. His interest in the outdoors came to him later in life, after college. So he doesn’t have the reflexes of a Richard D. Bartlett, who honed his skills over countless hours spent in childhood catching herptiles. Which makes Conniff’s description of his attempts to corral these master aerodynamicists all the more appealing: While he can’t quite manage a dragonfly on his first outing, he is able to capture the weaker anisopteran fliers, the damselflies. His success suffuses him with pride:
Me big strong fellow, likeness of God; you little pissant. (78)
He says it with a wink, though, as the next line makes clear: “Yea, truly I was green in the ways of the odonate.” A large group of dragonflies inspires him to keep trying to net them, but
They dipped and banked but kept their distance, and by midafternoon, having aggravated banged-up knees and bad backs with our log climbing and our…lunging, we abandoned the hunt, dreaming of beer and ibuprofen. (81)
These charismatic insects have really come into their own in the thirteen years since this collection appeared, with regional guides appearing for most parts of the country, and several large books for the general public detailing their life cycles and showing off their exquisite anatomies. (The most visually appealing is A Dazzle of Dragonflies by Forrest L. Mitchell, which uses scanned images of live specimens to impressive effect.) In the course of the essay, Conniff reveals the 300-million-year-plus history of these arthropods. Over the course of this long evolutionary history the dragonfly has developed the ability to outmaneuver all but the most skillfully wielded of nets; even experts miss more often than they capture their quarry. And now that we are able to scan live dragonflies in the field (see hundreds of incredible examples at Digital Dragonflies), we no longer need to take sides in the debate over collecting versus “passive” enjoyment through binoculars. We can have almost-better-than-life images of a specimen that we release back into the field, no harm done.
One surprise awaited me in this early collection: his excellent long (18 pages) essay, “A Small Point of Interest,” about the mosquito opens with some arresting prose. Conniff has a fondness for the mosquito: he recalls in a recent interview that when he was in his mid-20s he was asked to write about “the so-called New Jersey state bird,” and that was the catalyst for his career in nature writing. And the essay’s opening paragraphs are truly wonderful writing:
Just now I was reading one of my old journals from a trip somewhere in South America, when I turned the page. There, flattened next to the binding, was a dark smudge of mosquito and, on the opposite page, its Rorschach image in dried blood, presumably my own. In that instant, all the unheralded charms of the rain forest came rushing back to me: the way my clothes were always caked and sodden with mud, the way the howler monkeys roared their jocund welcome and flung sticks at my head, the feeling of sliding down wet clay trails and over a wobbly one-log bridge at midnight, in the endless rain, with a dehydration headache welling up behind my catatonic brow. But above all, I recalled the relief of coming back to camp, to sleep and give sustenance to mosquitoes. (152)
This vivid description of the rain forest bring in many of the elements that one might find in dozens of pages of John Kricher’s fabulous Neotropical Companion, but in prose that Kricher, for all his conversational and accessible writing style writing, simply can’t match. It’s lively, it’s concise, it’s memorable. So memorable that I’m sure I’d notice if I’d read it somewhere else, which in fact I have. “Oneness with Nature,” a brief (3 pages) essay in Conniff’s 2009 Swimming with Piranhas reprises this rain forest scene almost word for word:
It is mosquito season again, time for entertaining unwholesome thoughts about nature. Just now, as it happens, I was reading one of my old journals from a trip somewhere in South America, when I turned the page. There, flattened next to the binding, was the dark smudge of a mosquito and, on the opposite page, its Rohrschach image in dried blood, probably my own.
All the unheralded charms of the rain forest came rushing back: the way my clothes were always caked and sodden with mud, the way the howler monkeys roared their jocund welcome and flung excrement at my head, the feeling of sliding down wet clay trails and shuffling cautiously over a wobbly one-log bridge at midnight in the endless rain, with a dehydration headache welling up behind my dripping brow. But above all, I recalled the relief of finally making it back to camp, to sleep and to give sustenance to mosquitoes. (66)
These collections of essays are by definition reprints, and the 2009 collection only reprises a couple of pages, with minor differences, from the much longer essay in the 1996 collection, so I don’t really mind the repetition. But I was a bit surprised to find it at all. I haven’t found the article in Smithsonian magazine from which it is reprinted (the back-of-book credits in SWP tell us that it is from that magazine; there are no back-of-book credits indicating where the essays in SW are from). The later essay introduces much more characterization of the members of the expedition, and makes for an entertaining slice of expeditionary life; the earlier essay’s opening lines serve as an introduction to a consideration of one of the most dangerous inhabitants of our planet: the malaria-, yellow fever-, dengue-, filariasis-, encephalitis- and 100 other disease-carrying mosquito. (Click the link for a reference to a book-length consideration of the public health threat these little beasts pose.)
Here in south Florida, we respect this little winged pest: we armor our homes with screens against it; we burn citronella candles (old-timers burned smudge pots) to drive it away; we do anything we can to make sure it doesn’t get in. And yet, as I write this, I have at least a half-dozen bites from last night’s gardening…
Two other things about this collection make me actually favor it over the more recent one:
- In SW the running heads (the text at the top of the page next to the page number, or folio) are much more appropriate to a collection of essays: they give the collection titles on the left (verso) pages, and the essay title on the right (recto) pages. In SWP, the author’s name is on the left, and the collection title is on the right. So if you’re thumbing through the book, you can’t tell at a glance which essay you’re in.
- In SW there are illustrations; in SWP there are none. I’m sure most of the original articles feature stunning photography (I’ve seen scanned copies of some of the Smithsonian articles, and it’s true); it would have been nice if W.W. Norton had ponied up the cash to license some of the photos. Henry Holt probably actually hired the artist for SW; kudos to them!
To sum up: Anyone who has ever been annoyed, harassed, or frightened by invertebrates should read this book. Conniff frequently succeeds in his stated goal, that “readers will finish this book somewhat dismayed but more often amazed by the marvels of the invertebrate world” (from the Introduction, teasingly subtitled “The Joy of Formication”, page 7).