The Animal Dialogues, page 23
The bisymmetrical brain of an insect looks and functions like a miniature version of the hippocampus, the center of a human brain that processes spatial navigation and memory. A human brain contains about a hundred thousand times more cells than an insect brain, but size may not matter. Insect brain cells are designed differently than those of humans, able to compress information in such a way that many more kinds of data can be transferred at once. Researchers looking into the function of these bug brains have recently found indications of higher cognitive functions. Complex neural systems are engaged in massive feedback loops previously unexpected in the class Insecta, the most diverse group of animals on the planet. Upon discovering this, one researcher commented that he has stopped indiscriminately killing insects.
A praying mantis has no such qualms. Denizen of the invertebrate underworld, wearing its skeleton on the outside, the mantis is a purely anatomical killer. It relies on speed, hooks, and rippers rather than poisons or sticky webs to subdue and devour its prey. It consumes mostly insects, but mantids have been known to take down bats or small rodents. In one documented case a garden-variety praying mantis struck from a flower and buried one of its hooks deep in the chest of a hummingbird, instantly killing the animal. It held the hummingbird with one hook as it reached out and disemboweled its victim with scissoring mandibles.
I have never taken a praying mantis’s geometric efficiency for granted, never brushed one aside like a fly or an ant. This one had me locked in a stare. The sheen of its paired eyes said nothing, like a mask. Seeing its barbed forelegs drawn in the air, I felt somehow that I had the under hand, a twinge in an ancient part of my brain telling me to keep absolutely still. I do not know if I was so taken because I was fascinated by its mechanical parts or because somewhere inside I was actually afraid. I simply stared back, spellbound by its pitiless gaze, its air of recognition.
In Greek, “mantes”—from which mantids are named—means “prophet,” or “soothsayer,” which is particularly revealing, considering that a handful of researchers believe that insect brains lie at the root of what we know as consciousness. Its grasping forelegs are generally kept upright and folded as if in prayer, making it a holy mercenary, a predatory oracle. There are more than two thousand different kinds of mantids, all of them slender predators, the largest as long as a human hand, the smallest no longer than an office staple. A Choeradodis mantid is hooded like a cobra, its mantle green, veined, and shiny like a leaf so it will not be distinguishable by those who might prey on it—the mantle also prevents a bird or reptile from being attracted by suspicious movements as this mantid consumes its prey. Central American Acanthops looks like roughened bark and dry leaves, the macelike head sharply pointed, the eyes formed into spikes. They kill whatever they can. Females are well known for twisting around and devouring males in the middle of copulation. A male missing its head and eaten down to the abdomen will continue insemination unfazed, its nerve trunk still delivering the last message sent by its lost speck of a brain. I am reminded of a tenet written in the Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai—“Even if a samurai’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action with certainty. If one becomes like a revengeful ghost and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he should not die.”
Little warrior, green as grass and leaves from head to toe, this mantis tracked my every move. I gave it my hand to crawl on. It did, rapidly, its body poised strategically. It sped across my finger, traversing my palm onto my upheld wrist so it was even nearer to my face. Its motions were as assured as swift chess play, each step precisely weighted. It was so close to my eyes I had to hold my breath, fearing it might suddenly lunge and topple me from my chair with a crash of flatware, my wineglass flying.
My wife, sitting across the table, reached out her hand and asked to see. I passed the mantis across. It raced up her arm, over her shoulder, and into her hair. People sitting beside her recoiled as if she had a rat on her.
She smiled. “It’s just a bug.”
Mantodea
RATTLESNAKE
It could have been any of us bitten by a rattlesnake. We were all likely targets, working as guides and field instructors on the lower Colorado River, a place well populated by rattlesnakes. Wearing river shorts and sandals, we picked up gear boxes and snapped out tarps, constantly exposing our bare flesh. In some ways I wished it had been me, just to get it out of the way and to answer my curiosity.
It was not me, though. Instead it was a friend working a few miles upstream. He stepped on a rattlesnake in the night, when the desert was warm and the only light came from an ambient bluish glow among the stars. He was wearing his river sandals, and for an alarming half second, a snake, some Crotalus species, thrust its knuckle-length fangs and forty milligrams of venom into the arch of his foot. The venom moved quickly into his cells and began at once digesting his foot and leg from the inside out. Within minutes vascular breakdown began as his heartbeat carried poisons through his system. I did not hear from him at the time. All I heard was the sound of a boat passing alone in the night. News was shuttled up to my camp around tents and kitchen gear that a rescue was in progress, my friend being hurried downstream to the takeout. Five hours from the nearest hospital, I stood and listened to the silent, meandering river. I looked across the dome of the night, wondering what was happening on that departing boat.
Like the rest of these guides, I was out all the time. I took my days off in the desert, where I carried water and food left over from the last river trip, and set camps under towering cacti. I had nearly stepped on several rattlesnakes out there, my body literally taking flight at the sound of a sudden buzz beneath my stride. A few I nearly sat on. I urinated on one on a cool morning, noticing too late its camouflaged body coiled in the dust at my feet. None of these snakes even struck the air to ward me off. It seemed Crotalus and I had developed a tenuous truce around each other. I did not smash their heads with a rock and, thus far, they did not bite me from out of nowhere. At times they seemed even courteous, rattling loudly as each slid out of my path and poured its long, mosaic-scaled body into the nearest hole or rock crack. In return, I backed away without following them, without trying to touch their buzzing tails as they departed—though at times it was tempting to dodge in and feel a rattle snapping between my fingers. I never did. It was best to leave them alone.
However respectful I was, I still felt as if I were pacing in the desert’s waiting room, listening for my name to be called. I expected a sudden bolt of an arrow-shaped head from out of a pant leg I was putting on in the morning, a jolt of pain in the skin between thumb and forefinger, or at the back of my knee, or on the side of my neck as I leaned down to drink from a spring without noticing a serpent resting beside me. It is not like the fear of being torn apart by a grizzly or dragged into a tree by a jaguar. This is fear of a sniper, a bullet from nowhere, the sound of a rattle coming too late.
My friend who was bitten did not die. There was not enough venom to stop his heart or plunge him into a coma, so he remained conscious, gritting his teeth as he lay in the bottom of a boat heading for the takeout. Without a precise antivenin on hand, there was little to do but tie a loose strip of cloth above the bite and hope he did not die en route. After being carried off the river, and after a jostling ride across the desert to the town of Yuma, Arizona, he lay in a hospital bed, waiting for the poison to subside. Using antivenin is a dangerous procedure that can be fatal in itself, so the doctors decided just to watch him, making sure his throat did not seize. He had to wait it out.
There is more than death in a rattlesnake’s bite. Its venom is a pharmacological menagerie of highly evolved proteins. These proteins have numerous restorative powers. Rattlesnake venom is known to cure some cancers. Its method of breaking down cell walls—using an atom of zinc to cut through membrane like a sharp tooth—is the same process by which cancers travel through the body. A drug made from such venom reduces blood clotting and has been successfully administered to stroke victims, allowing them to regain physical and mental abilities within a matter of hours. A number of people who have intentionally injected doses of rattlesnake venom like daily vitamins have lived to an old age with few physical complaints, no colds or flus to speak of. But it is not something to trifle with. Dosage is a treacherous balance. Death is always waiting.
When I saw my friend a few days later, of course I wanted to hear every detail. He told me the bite itself had felt like a glowing-hot ice pick stabbed all the way to the bone. He described a burning sensation of poison entering his veins, how layers of pain seemed to unfold his very being. He said I could pull away the sheet covering him, and when I did I saw a foot and leg hideously swollen and black as coal. His skin, which looked like it should have exploded from such swelling, was grotesquely fireworked with burst blood vessels. I saw deflection in his eyes as he hid the constant wince he was feeling.
I smiled at him as I re-covered his disfigured leg. I thought he was a better man for this. I said, in reverence, “Snake medicine.”
Knowing what I meant, knowing that he now had the physical presence of a rattlesnake inside of him, he nodded uncomfortably and repeated, “Snake medicine.”
Over the years we all left the river and took different jobs, but some of us came back to this desert. We returned and met for long reunions in the wilderness. A decade after we had worked together, three of us headed into Sonora, Mexico. We got a ride one night from a herpetologist, forty miles down a sandy two-track into a black and moonless void. The plan was for the herpetologist to drop us off in the desert with enough water to walk our way out, something done purely for recreation. It would take almost two weeks for us to reach a town on the other side.
As we drove, a coiled rattlesnake appeared in the headlights, and the herpetologist slammed on his brakes. He flew out his door, wielding a long pole with a net on the end. I do not know where the net came from. It simply sprang out of his arm. Without pause he swept the net across the ground and, in one fluid motion, dove a single hand inside. He had a cord of muscle writhing in his grip. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he lifted a Colorado Desert sidewinder, Crotalus cerastes laterorepens, into the headlights. His thumb pressed behind the snake’s skull, his forefinger shoveled under its jaw. The snake’s body flipped back and coiled around his arm. It was not a long snake, less than three feet. But it was animated.
I was not ready to see this. I had climbed out of the truck to observe a snake on the ground, to squat down in front of it maybe, watch its tongue snap at the air from a safe distance. But suddenly this man had a rattlesnake in his grasp and was looking into its eyes from a couple of inches away. It was like looking straight into the steely gaze of Shiva, the destroyer god, something you just don’t do. I stepped back, almost stumbling on my own feet.
“Oh,” I said breathlessly, all I could say.
The snake was really pissed now. On the tip of its tail, an amber-colored shaker moved so fast it whined. The rattle appeared to shimmer, a stack of dried, segmented scales vibrating at about sixty flicks a second. It sent a single loud message: Touch Me Not.
As if in a trance, with a fascinated smile on his face, the herpetologist muttered, “Ah, it’s beautiful.”
After a moment of reluctance and disbelief, I stepped closer. I was fixated, my heart thrumming under my shirt.
The herpetologist excitedly turned the snake’s spear-pointed face and pushed it at mine. “Look at it,” he said.
I backed my head into my shoulders.
“No thanks,” I whispered.
“But look at it,” he insisted.
My whole body leaned away from the snake, yet I stared at it just like he said. “It’s okay,” the herpetologist said. “I got it.”
It’s too much to hold, I thought. What does that mean, “I got it”? I slowly lifted my face so that I passed for one second across the sidewinder’s irate gaze. Its eyes burned intensely. They were like glass marbles, their interiors decorated with dusty colors and patterns matching the rest of its body, the entire animal the color and texture of barren country. Its expression was infinite, no ability to blink or to smile with its fixed stare.
The sidewinder wrestled its head an eighth of an inch out of the herpetologist’s grip, enough that it could stretch open its mouth. I was looking into a pink, pillowy, fleshy interior, hardly even a pinprick for a throat, down which it can pass bird eggs, lizards, and rodents. As a reflex, the rattlesnake’s paired fangs hinged outward, both thin and translucent as glass needles. They looked like small surgical weapons. I stared at them, unable to speak or move.
We were about to set off on a long walk in a country of rattlesnakes, and I felt uneasy about what was happening here. A rattlesnake bite in Mexican wilderness would be dire. Helicopters would not come to our rescue. As scientifically minded as I wish to be, I felt as if we were broadcasting ill will to all sidewinders in the vicinity, adding to our risk. I thought to tell the herpetologist to put the snake down, but I could not. I was spellbound. The snake closed its mouth, and I looked as closely as I could into its sand-colored eyes. Its body thrashed, tail buzzing, unable to free itself. After a minute, the herpetologist stepped back from me, finding a clear space between us, where he released the sidewinder onto the ground with a thrust of his hands, not throwing it but setting it down very swiftly. The snake flew away. It barely touched ground as it glided off to my side, its movements elegant and quick. Such locomotion is why the species is called sidewinder, its body sliding broadside across the ground like a rope of water racing away.
Other than having a single lung, rattlesnakes are more or less the same as all vertebrates, including humans, only they are stretched long, the red bead of the heart resting above a cigar-shaped liver, followed by a ravel of intestines and a pair of lengthy kidneys. The snake has a few hundred sets of rib bones compared to a human’s twelve. Ribs are connected to an equal number of vertebrae, which are hinged off of one another with ball-and-socket joints, allowing the snake to freely articulate its entire body.
Drawing across the sand, the snake aimed at one of my compa-n-ions—inadvertently, I was sure. It was simply trying to get away from its holder. My companion, wearing sandals, did not move, though he was aware that such a species smells heat through facial apertures and is not tricked by still animals. A desert traveler, he knew rattlesnakes well enough that he thought better of making a sudden leap out of the way, bare-ankled as he was. He stood like stone, and the snake passed across his foot, brushing his toes with quick scales. With every increment of motion under its control, this sidewinder blew past him, moving out of our white headlights and into the dark desert.
Everyone visibly relaxed, shoulders let down, hands loosened. Someone laughed out of wonder.
Half joking, half not, I said, “I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt us.”
From there the herpetologist left us. We three who remained began navigating by stars as his taillights paled in the distance. No one used a flashlight. Instead we kept our eyes adjusted to the dark. The desert rolled out in front of us as we focused our eyes on the skim of earth and sky in the distance, counting stars as they set.
Black wind-sharpened boulders lay across undulating beds of sand. I trudged ahead, my mind fogging from the weight of water on my back. We each moved into our own heads, shoulders leading us forward, breath riding in and out, eyes moving through stars. A rattle erupted from the ground between us, and suddenly we all woke, bodies snapped into action. We could not see the snake, but we knew exactly where it was as we circled in. It sounded like a small one, a young sidewinder. We looked down at nothing, an emptiness on the ground that was making a buzzing fury.
Someone said to it, “We’re just out walking, nothing to get excited over. We know you’re there.”
The snake’s rattling subsided and then stopped. Maybe it was tired or thirsty, not willing to expend any more energy. Or it simply had done its job and was safe now, having quelled the large, lumbering beasts that had come upon it.
I looked down at the dark place that was now silent, and I thought it indistinguishable from every other dark, quiet place around me. It looked like the entire desert. Who knows how many rattlesnakes are out here? No sense stewing over it, though. We turned and kept walking into the stars.
In the last hour of dawn, I woke from a long nap in the sand. I crawled from my sleeping bag, which I had pulled out when we all dropped our water weight sometime in the night. Our camp looked like abandoned debris in the middle of a rippled, tawny-colored dune field. A void encircled me, occupying every horizon. There was no wind, only a still and pale sky. I got up and stepped barefoot across sand as fine as table salt. Not three feet away, I stopped at a fresh track left by a sidewinder. I followed it with my eyes back toward my gear, finding that while I slept a snake had passed beside my head. It had left a graceful, rhythmic print, something written in script. The sand was so smooth it revealed each slick, broad scale on the snake’s belly. I stepped over the track without scuffing it. I came upon a second sidewinder track, and then a third beyond that, and a fourth crisscrossing a fifth.
At first light, rattlesnakes had sought shelter in holes and hardpans between dunes, where they could wait out the heat of day. It looked as if they had been up all night, painting the world into existence, smoothing the earth into shapes that would soon receive the sun. I thought the tracks beautiful, but was quietly disconcerted, knowing how many sidewinders had been busy in my sleep. I had to be careful.
Well before sunrise, we gathered our things and kept going, each bringing a hundred pounds of water. It was easiest to go barefoot. Without boots we glided better across the dunes, but mostly we did not glide at all, rather we shuffled and dragged under the weight of our packs. Frequently we doubled over to rest, holding ourselves with palms on our knees. Daylight came. The sun broke the horizon.
