A Further Frog Footnote
Zoologist Lucy Cooke, whose fruit work includes playing a dancing raspberry in the TV series The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, was fascinated by poison frogs from an early age; in particular, the Golden Poison Frog. Appearing on a Monkey Cage about toxins, venom and poison, she told us of her quest to see one. Its poison, an alkaloid poison, is so powerful it will kill you in three minutes, and for the last minute, you’ll be in such a state of petrification you will look, to all purposes, to be quite dead already. You only need to touch it and your fate is sealed. While making a TV documentary, she finally came face to face with one. Heavily gloved and visored, she held one in her hand. The rush from her childhood desires being fulfilled, a tear came to her eye. As the frog departed her hand, she put her hand to her eye to wipe away the tear.
NOOO!’ yelled the crew and she realised that she was millimetres away from joining those who have died for the love of a frog.
Now Lucy lives her life wondering if it is better to live to old age or die young and be memorialised as a zoologist who died due to the overwhelming and potential toxicity of the natural world.
Nick Lane: Without death there wouldn’t be evolution at all. All the magnificent things in this world are as a result of death, and without it they wouldn’t be here. From a non-religious point of view, it’s glorious because of death.
Professor Sue Black: And if death is such a great thing, why are we so scared of it? I think it’s a wonderful thing. It’s the last adventure. No one knows what’s coming. Bring it on!
Series 8, Episode 1 (24 June 2013)
AN INTERLUDE
Darwin’s worm
‘The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!’ wrote Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray.1 He went on to write that this was countered by Asa’s story of the black pigs of the Everglades that had evolved to be able to eat a plant root that made the hooves of all other coloured pigs drop off. It seems that Darwin considered the peacock to be weighed down by excessive evolutionary cost compared to the seeming pragmatism of the black pigs.
Charles Darwin had a mind to envy but a physical constitution that few would aspire to. He was hampered by ill health throughout much of his life after his voyage on the Beagle. Having spent five years travelling across the world, Darwin lived out the rest of his life in England, mainly in his house in Kent where he mulled over what he had seen and started to understand what it meant, breaking up the day by boiling pigeons to the bone and taking walks around his thinking path. Geneticist and snail expert Steve Jones, a regular guest on Monkey Cage, when asked which of Darwin’s books could be avoided by the casual reader said, ‘Don’t read his books about barnacles, he became overly obsessed.’
This still leaves you with books about orchids, emotions, coral reefs and occasional baboon behaviour interludes, as well as, of course, On the Origin of Species. Darwin studied every part of the animal world, including his own children: ‘I repeatedly observed my own infants, from under the age of one week to that of two or three months, and found that when a screaming fit came on gradually, the first sign was the contraction of the corrugators, which produced a slight frown, quickly followed by the contraction of other muscles around the eyes.’ Darwin was most definitely an attentive father, but he may have let his children cry for a little while longer for the purposes of research. By reading Darwin you will find out that blue-eyed cats are deaf, bald dogs invariably have bad teeth and that it is quite pointless to try to train yourself to stop flinching when a Puff Adder attempts to strike (he experimented with this in the safety of the reptile house at London Zoo).
We are now so used to seeing the world and its enormous variety of species on television that it is easy to forget how exotic and strange much of our planet seemed before mass communication. When Darwin was on the Beagle he was experiencing things that had barely been imagined by other humans. On 28 February 1832, he wrote of his day in the rainforest:
‘The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise.’
We may not have ready access to a rainforest, but it is important to remember that however mundane your environment may seem to be, the life you see in it and the lives of the creatures that exist inside it are remarkable examples of a planet that has more ways of assembling atoms into different forms than any other we know of. Stare out of your train window at the hills and think of all the life before you, some visible – trees and grasses, a possible cow, rabbit or alpaca – many others invisible. You don’t need a rainforest for a chaos of delight.
Though many of Darwin’s books explored the exotic, as well as pigeons, his final book was on earthworms, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits. Some may consider that this doesn’t sound like one of his speedier page-turners, and they would be wrong. This is the Monkey Cage’s favourite book about earthworms and we have read three (this is the only one that is non-fiction, though, the others are Superworm by Julia Donaldson and Tim Curran’s novel Worm, about killer worms escaping the sewer and wreaking havoc). We love it for the delight of seeing an elderly man whose curiosity about living things has not dimmed with age.
It contains some of my favourite experiments, each one conceived to understand the earthworm a little more. Darwin saw that, like so many living things, this simple creature performed vital functions. Darwin’s experiments included breathing on worms after chewing on a variety of different things – from tobacco to perfumed cotton wool – to examine their sense of smell, and putting hot pokers near them to see how sensitive to heat they were. It is his experiments on earthworm hearing that I enjoy most, though. He begins with a metal whistle ‘which was repeatedly sounded near them’. Seeing no result, some scientists may have stopped there, but not Darwin. Next up, he brought out the bassoon, which they also took no notice of. ‘They were indifferent to shouts’ and ‘when placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible’ there was similarly no reaction. This series of experiments may well have been how they invented jazz. They were reactive to vibrations; this was discovered by placing them on the piano ‘and the note C in bass clef was struck’,