The Golden Mole Read online

  So the myths have not saved the lemurs. And when we endow anything or anyone with mystic powers we usually end by killing it. The aye-aye lemur is thought in some areas to be able to prophesy death; they have vast eyes, large, sensitive ears, and a middle finger that’s twice as long as their other digits; when the aye-aye points its middle finger at a person they are taken to be cursed. Another story tells that it uses the long finger to puncture human hearts. As a result they’re unbeloved, and hunted so relentlessly they were thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered in 1961. The word lemur comes from the Latin lemures, meaning ‘ghosts’. It is possible that several subspecies may become exactly that: stories, preserved a hundred years from now only in photographs and stuffed specimens gathering dust.

  Perhaps the most astonishing fact about lemurs is that they survived at all. Madagascar was part of Gondwanaland until 180 million years ago, when the supercontinent began to split and the island began to drift eastwards from Africa. But the first lemur-like fossils date from between 62 and 65 million years ago, and appear in mainland Africa. How, then, did the lemurs reach Madagascar? There are many theories – island-hopping and land bridges among them – but the dominant theory is that the lemurs drifted there on floating rafts of vegetation. The island, too, kept drifting, so when monkeys evolved enough to eradicate lemurs on the mainland with their superior adaptiveness and aggression, somewhere between 17 and 23 million years ago, Madagascar was safely out of reach. I have seen many things that I’ve loved, but I don’t think I’ll live to see anything as fine as a raft of lemurs, sailing across the sea towards what looked, until the arrival of humans, like safety.

  It was, perhaps, a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart. For five nights after Earhart disappeared from the sky in 1937, the US navy picked up distress signals from Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Western Pacific. When a rescue team reached the island a week later – it took time, since planes had to be loaded onto ships – it was deserted. But researchers on the island have since discovered human bones matching Earhart’s size. Another, later team discovered the shattered glass of a woman’s compact mirror, a few flakes of rouge, and a pot of anti-freckle cream – Earhart was known to hate her freckles. The bones were sent to be tested, but were lost on the way, and unless they are found we won’t ever be sure whether they belonged to the valiant, hell-for-leather aviatrix with the face of a lion. But only thirteen bones were found, and the human body has 206: if they were Earhart’s, where were the other 193?

  Crunched, perhaps, to fragments. Nikumaroro is home to a colony of coconut hermit crabs: the world’s largest land crab, so called because of its ability to crack open a coconut, manoeuvring a claw into one of the nut’s three eyeholes and prising it open. The oldest live to more than a hundred, and grow to be up to a metre across: too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare. In 2007, researchers decided to test the Earhart theory. The carcass of a small pig was offered to the crabs on the island, to see what they might have done to Earhart’s dead or dying body. Following their remarkable sense of smell, they found the pig and tore it apart, making off with its bones to their burrows under the roots of the trees. Their strength is monumental; their claw grip can produce up to 3300 newtons of force (the bite force of a tiger is 1500 newtons). Darwin called them ‘monstrous’: he meant it as a compliment.

  Even monsters, though, start small. Some hermit crabs inhabit the land and others the sea, but they all begin microscopic and under water. They’re released as eggs into the ocean, hatch as unprepossessing larvae (though what larvae are prepossessing?) and it’s only after several months that they are large enough to inhabit the smallest empty shell they can find. As they grow, they graduate from one scavenged shell to another, most frequently the delicately whorled shell of a sea snail, grasping its columella with claspers at the tip of their abdomen. They shed their exoskeletons, releasing into the sea a semi-transparent floating crab – a ghost. The coconut crab eventually outgrows all other shells, and begins to live uncovered on the land, but the majority of the 1100-odd species of hermit crabs live in borrowed homes all their lives.

  Hermit crabs are not, in fact, hermitical: they’re sociable, often climbing on top of one another to sleep in great piles, and their group behaviour is so intricately ordered that they make the politics of Renaissance courts look simplistic. When a crab comes across a new shell, it will climb into it and try it on for size. If the shell is of good quality but too big, it waits nearby for another crab to come and inspect it. If that crab also finds it too large, it joins the first crab, holding onto its claw until a queue develops – it can stretch to twenty crabs, arranged in order of size from smallest to largest, each holding onto the next: a hermit crab chorus line. When at last a crab arrives who can fit the vacant shell, the next crab in line claims the new crab’s former shell, and there is a flurry of crabs climbing into their neighbour’s home. The crab’s abdomen is soft and vulnerable to attack while exposed, so the whole process takes place with astonishing rapidity.

  They’re not only foragers for homes: some are renovators. The anemone hermit crab is so called because it lifts anemones from the seabed and sticks them to its shell, where their stinging tentacles offer protection and disguise from predatory octopuses. The anemone, in symbiotic turn, consumes scraps of the hermit’s food as they float by. When the time comes to move to a larger shell, the crab, with some difficulty and great persistence, prises her anemones off the old shell and fixes them to the new.

  Because they are small, and because their eyes-on-stalks, their ommatophores, are curious and gentle, the Caribbean and Ecuadorian hermit crabs are often sold as easy-care pets. Salesmen paint their shells in bright colours, which slowly poisons them. Many, needing dense humidity to breathe, suffocate in their tanks. On the beaches, they are trapped and killed by plastic. Nor are they safe in the sea: some live at depths of more than two thousand metres, and our pollution reaches them even there. The coconut crab risks extinction in large part because its flesh is believed to be an aphrodisiac. In this faith, as with tiger claws and rhino horn, there is evidence of great human vulnerability, and enough stupidity to destroy entire ecosystems. (In fact, the sum total of natural aphrodisiacs – non-medical sexual stimulants – is zero. Historically, we’ve chosen to believe there are aphrodisiacal powers in a) that which is rare, exotic, new or expensive or b) food laden with spice, which speeds the metabolism and sparks heat within the body, or c) food which looks like a penis or a vagina or d) food which actually is a penis or vagina, or eggs or similar. Oysters, for instance, are made up largely of water, protein, salt, zinc, iron and tiny amounts of calcium and potassium: they’re no more an aphrodisiac than a vitamin pill drowned in salt water, but they look suggestive. We have in the past given sexual potency, haphazardly, to chocolate, asparagus, carrots, honey, nettles, mustard and sparrows. In the thirteenth century the German saint Albertus Magnus posited that you might grind up badger flesh and sprinkle it on food for instant eroticism. For Shakespeare, the potato was rare and exotic, and generally believed to have aphrodisiac qualities: ‘Let the sky rain potatoes,’ Falstaff says in The Merry Wives of Windsor, ‘let it thunder to the tune of Green Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation.’ If we could all go back to that, back to the potato – or indeed to Viagra, which has been a great boon to endangered species – how much would be saved.)

  The majority of hermit crabs are asymmetrical; they have ten legs, but the front left claw is enlarged for defence, and the front right is smaller, for scooping food, about which they aren’t fussy: algae, plant life, other dead crabs. They have, too, under their shells, rear ends that twist in on themselves – helter-skelters. And they’re off-kilter beautiful: the jewelled anemone crab has shocking emerald eyes, on stalks that are striped like a barber’s pole in red and white. They can be sea-grey or royal purple; the giant spotted hermit crab is orange with white dots edged in black; the hairy yellow crab is striped yellow and cream, with opulent hairs on its legs and eyes on blue stalks. Up close, even the coconut crabs are beautiful: some are aquamarine at the hinges, some rich brown with a burnt-orange back. A teeming horrorscape, but make it fashion.

  Hermit crabs can, if they must, make their home almost anywhere. They have been found in tin cans, in coconut halves. The Pylochelidae family evolved to make their homes not in shells but in sea sponges, stones, driftwood, pieces of bamboo. More and more, in these darker days, I admire resourcefulness. I love their tenacity: forging lives from the shells of the dead, making homes from the debris that the world, in its chaos, has left out for them.

  There was a time when a person walking past a specific pond in Maine might be catcalled by a seal: ‘come over here!’ in a thick Maine accent. His name was Hoover, and he had been adopted as an orphaned pup by a lobster fisherman named George Swallow in the 1970s, and he spoke English. ‘What are ya doin?’ and ‘Hello, hello there!’ George spoke to the seal constantly, calling him, cherishing him: Hoover, so christened because he hoovered up fish, would barrel into him in the morning, buffeting his face with ‘kisses’. Eventually, when his fish needs became too expensive for the Swallows, he was given to an aquarium. Swallow told the attendants that Hoover could speak, but, on being met with high eyebrows and sceptical faces, let it drop. Hoover, stunned by the new environment, remained silent for several years; but when he finally spoke again, it was the start of a vocal streak that lasted the rest of his life. He could never be persuaded to talk on command, but there is a recording of him, calling in a guttural voice: hello, hello, get over here. Seals, it transpired, have surprising language-learning capacity – scientists at St Andrews University in Scotland have taught their charges to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’.

  Even those who do not speak can yet sound human when they cry. In Moby-Dick, published in 1851, the ship sails over water from which rises ‘a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly’ that the crew freezes, transfixed. ‘The Christian or civilised part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered … yet the grey Manxman – the oldest mariner of all – declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.’ Only Ahab gives a hollow laugh, ‘and thus explained the wonder’:

  some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of [the men], because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside.

  Ahab tells: ‘In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.’

  Hoover was a harbour seal, one of the most common of the world’s thirty-three species of seal – formally, we should call them pinnipeds, from the Latin pinna, fin, and pes, foot. The majority of these species live in Arctic and Antarctic waters; among them the harp seal, which in adulthood can be grey, or speckled, or silver: not the polite ‘silver’ which is actually the colour of dishwater, but true burnished silver. The pups are born on ice, stained lurid yellow with amniotic fluid, but once cleaned they are snow-white until the first moult. They have round black eyes which, were they human, would slay the whole of Hollywood. Seals are generally impressive mothers, careful and valiant and liable to bite if you get in the way; but the mothering of the harp seals takes place, increasingly, in a race against time. As soon as the pup is born, a countdown begins to get it weaned and ready to swim before the ice melts. To that end, the mother’s milk is fifty per cent fat, the consistency of mayonnaise (the richest ice cream you’re liable to encounter is fifteen per cent; human milk is four per cent), and pups can double their body weight within days. The mother then takes the pup into the water, and uses her belly as a float to help her baby rest. It takes only minutes to learn: to go from flailing and thin panicked piping to swimming. But climate change, disrupting the breath and flow of the ice, has made the pups’ survival harder. For the last thirty years, we have lost more than thirteen per cent of the Arctic’s sea ice each decade. Ice reflects the sun’s heat back upon itself, stabilising the climate, where open water absorbs it. In 2017 on the Gulf of St Lawrence, the ice broke so early that a harp colony’s entire pup population drowned overnight: so much work to produce so much life, dead. As the ice melts, there will be fewer and fewer places for colonies to go: a whittling away of refuge.

  The seal family’s strangeness is as monumental as their beauty: male hooded seals, for instance, have a nasal cavity which allows them to blow up what looks like a red fleshy balloon the size of a football from their noses, in a bid to scare off rivals looking to mate with their partners. The world’s heaviest carnivoran, the elephant seal, weighs up to four thousand kilos, about the same as a flatbed truck, and though on beaches and bays they have all the elegance of a landslide, underwater they move with the confidence and clarity of athletes. Though no seal can breathe underwater, elephant seals can dive more than two kilometres deep, and high levels of myoglobin, aiding the storage of oxygen in the muscles, allow them to hold their breath for up to two hours. Some have a flair which is less Hollywood, more character actor; bearded seals have a copious crop of white whiskers against grey, making both male and female seals look like elder statesmen when wet, or, when the whiskers are dry and curl upwards, like a clan of rakish musketeers. Others would be the envy of the abstractionists; ribbon seals are ringed with thick geometric white circles and strips, ambulant Malevich paintings; Mediterranean monk seals birth pups that are coal black, with painterly sweeps of white across the belly – though for how much longer is in the balance. The global population currently stands at a few hundred individuals.

  With their faces so watchful, so capable of pathos and mischief, it makes sense that Early Nordic sagas showed an ambivalence about what they did and didn’t know, could and couldn’t do. In the thirteenth-century Laxdæla Saga, a warrior, Þóroddr, is sailing to claim new land with an overburdened boat, when ‘they saw a seal, much larger than most, swimming in the water nearby. It swam round and round the ship, its flippers unusually long, and everyone aboard was struck by its eyes, which were like those of a human.’ The warriors attempt to batter it to death, but it evades them. It watches as, moments later, ‘a great storm struck which capsized the ship. Everyone aboard was drowned except one man.’ The seal had either foretold, or caused, their death.

  Most elusive and eldritch of all is the selkie. A shape-shifter between human and seal, it haunts sea-lore. In the most common stories, found from Orkney and Shetland to Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the selkie sheds her seal skin on the shore to walk naked on the land. A man, enamoured of her sleek loveliness, steals the skin and so forces her to become his wife. They have children, but she weeps and longs always for the ocean, and as soon as she can find the skin, she puts it on and escapes to the water, joyfully abandoning her children in favour of the sea. Other selkie stories are the reverse: of Shetland selkie women luring landsmen into the waves, who never again return to solid ground. Male selkies are exquisite in their human form, female selkies staggering in their beauty: they cannot be resisted, for they have in them the power of the sea. The ballad of ‘The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry’ tells the story of a woman who, lamenting she does not know where her baby’s father is, finds him suddenly rising from the sea foam to claim it:

  I am a man upo’ da land;

  I am a selkie i’ da sea.

  An’ when I’m far fa every strand,

  My dwelling is in Shöol Skerry.

  Once, while I was swimming in the North Sea off Stiffkey in Norfolk, a herd of harbour seals rose in the water. They did not retreat – a few advanced. To be in ice-cold water, under steady grey skies with their grey steady beauty: it felt like being churched. It is very easy in their presence to understand why we have cast them as singing, knowing, watchful things.

  The Renaissance poet John Donne had a theory about bears: a bear cub, he believed, is born a solid lump of flesh, until its mother bites and licks it into shape. The idea can be traced to Pliny’s Historia Naturalis:

  … at first, they seem to be a lump of white flesh without all form, little bigger than rattons, without eyes, and wanting hair: only there is some show and appearance of claws that put forth. This rude lump, with licking they fashion by little and little into some shape: and nothing is more rare to be seen in the world, than a she bear bringing forth her young.

  The image appears several times in Donne’s work: most memorably, as a warning – that we must not, in the fever of our love, devour chunks of each other:

  Love’s a bear-whelp born: if we o’er-lick

  Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take,

  We err, and of a lump a monster make.

  He wasn’t alone in loving the image: the playwright George Chapman used it too, to describe a half-formed bad idea: ‘Nay, I think he has not licked his whelp into full shape yet’ – and Shakespeare used the same image of a bear-whelp in Henry VI, Part 3 – Gloucester is ‘like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp’. It was the seventeenth-century polymath killjoy Thomas Browne who debunked the theory, in his Pseudodoxia; ‘that a Bear brings forth her young informous and unshapen, which she fashioneth after by licking them over, is an opinion not only vulgar, and common with us at present: but hath been of old delivered by ancient Writers.’ Browne offered a rational explanation for the myth: