https://twitter.com/vet_torill
Torill is a science journalist and dropped in to talk about biology that should inspire sci-fi...
In
1910 a British expedition embarked on a three-year trip to Antarctica. Among
the scientists was a young biologist named George Murray Levick who was
studying the behaviour of the adorable black and white Adélie penguins, named
after the wife of another explorer.
George
was in for a nasty shock, as the penguins turned out to be anything but cute in
real life. He witnessed males having sex with other males and dead females,
including several that had died the previous year. He saw them sexually coerce
females and chicks and occasionally kill them. He even saw them trying to have
sex with rocks that somewhat resembled penguins.
Shaken
by this abhorrent and clearly unnatural behaviour he pondered what to do with
this information. In the name of science he had to share it with other
scientists, but how to do so without risking the descriptions ending up in the
hands of someone without proper education, who would surely misunderstand it?
In the end he wrote down his findings in Greek, a language that only those with
a higher education in Britain spoke, and circulated only a few copies to
selected researches. The knowledge about the darker side of penguins was
clearly too much for society to stomach. The copies were lost, but one of
them was found again in 2012.
It’s
easy to make fun of prude Edwardians, but our view of nature and what nature
should be has changed little since then. We tend to think of nature and animals
as a constant mirror for humanity, either by showing “this is what we truly
are, civilisation has just warped us along the way” or “this is the opposite of
us, this chaos and darkness within us must be avoided at all costs”. Either
way, we only see the things that already exist within ourselves.
The
problem with this view is that we end up living in an impoverished reality,
unable to see and process all of the fantastical, strange, unexpected and
marvelling things that is constantly happening around us. But this is also why
biology is such an excellent source of inspiration for science fiction and
fantasy.
By
tradition, science fiction has been the realm of technology and astronomy and
fantasy has been inspired by history and mythology. None of the fantastical
writing has really tapped into the rich, dark and turbulent waters of biology
for stimulus. (There are, of course, several exceptions. Blindsight by Peter
Watts is an excellent read, as is Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood.)
This
is a shame. There are worlds upon worlds waiting to be discovered in every
backyard pond, and stranger things going on in the litter of the forest-floor
than the most twisted of minds could create. Let me tell you about a
fluke-worm. It is a parasite, with only a few nerve-clusters for a brain, and is
starts it’s life as an egg inside the stomach of a sheep. The egg leaves the
sheep via excrement and is subsequently eaten by a snail. There it starts to
irritate the snail’s mucus-glands until it gets flushed out in a stream of
froth. The point of this is not only to leave the snail, but mainly to get
promptly picked up and eaten by an ant. The ant, it seems, cannot resist this
mousse of slime.
Now,
this is where the interesting things start to happen. The fluke-worm moves up
into the brain of the ant and hijacks it’s circuits, turning it into something
like a zombie-werewolf.
In
daytime the ant acts normally, collecting food and interacting with the other
ants in the nest. But when evening comes and the temperature drops, something
shifts within the animal. It leaves its sisters in the nest and starts climbing
a blade of grass and eventually clings on to the top, dangling there all night.
In the morning, when the temperature rises again, the ant releases its grip on
the grass, climbs down and joins the other ants in their normal ant-life.
This
is repeated every night until the ant eventually gets eaten by a sheep, grazing
at dusk or dawn, and the now mature worm finds a new host. There are many more mind-altering
parasites around; from fungi in the rainforest to toxoplasma that may even have
an effect on us humans.
Another
area where biology could be an inspiration for more interesting literature is
sex and sexes, which are not nearly as permanent or simple as people tend to
believe. Take the hawkfish, a small but beautifully coloured fish that
lives in coral reefs outside Japan. Like several fishes they live in harems, a
large male defends a territory and gets the bonus of fertilising the eggs of the
smaller females in the same area. Occasionally, an even larger male will come
along and try to take over the harem, whereupon the former leader quickly
changes his sex and joins the other females, happily laying fertile eggs.
Should the male disappear, the largest female of the group will change her sex
and take his place, the same will happen if the harem grows too big and splits.
This
gender swapping is not uncommon, although the triggers change. Every northern
prawn you have ever eaten has either done it or was about to. Their sex depends
on their size, male when they are small and female when they are large enough
to take the cost of producing eggs. The genders of crocodiles and a lot
of other reptiles depend on the temperature in the egg while they are
developing. And then, of course, there are all the different variants of
hermaphrodites, attached and parasitic males, virgin births and varying number
of sexes.
I’m
not even going to start on all the strange and complicated sexual behaviours
going on; from functional necrophilia to free-swimming penises and acrobatic
cannibalism. (But check the notes if you are interested J)
The
point of this is not to make you fear the zombie-ants on your lawn, but to show
that the world is a lot stranger than we usually give it credit for. We are all
a bit like George Murray Levick, doing our best to fit reality to our own
perception, making our lives poorer in the process. Think about that the next
time you eat a shrimp.
Notes:
- info about the Antarctic
expedition: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity-penguins-scott-antarctic
- The hawkfish: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21332-zoologger-transgender-fish-perform-reverse-sex-flip/
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