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  Contents

  INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS

  Endlessness

  Demodex mites, humans

  Sex and the single slug

  Slugs

  2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18

  Mammals and mammaries

  Champagne Lifestyle

  New species

  Allspice, ant-killer

  Taxonomy and systematics

  Orang orang

  Orang-utan and other primates

  My family and other family

  Classification

  INVERTEBRATE CYCLE

  Below the drop-off

  Coral

  Spineless

  Introduction to invertebrates

  Architects of human culture

  Wasps

  Brother sponge

  Sponges

  Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish

  Glass sponge

  Sod the rainforest

  More coral

  Walking plants

  Sea anemones

  Infernal agony of gelatinous zooplankton

  Jellyfish

  Life in the round

  Starfish

  Flatworm, flatworm, burning bright

  Flatworm

  The holiness of tapeworms

  Tapeworm

  Unkillable bears

  Tardigrades

  Cans and cans of worms

  Nematodes

  Tipping the velvet worm

  Velvet worm

  Another can of worms

  Annelid worms

  Trio for piano, bassoon and earthworm

  Earthworm

  The daughters of Doris

  Ribbon worms

  Becaue I am many

  Bryozoans

  Getting silly

  Lampshells

  Dirty beasts

  Penis worms

  Us alone

  Placazoans

  Lacing Venus’s girdle

  Comb jellies

  Here be mud dragons

  Mud dragons

  The Hamlet worm

  Nematomorphs

  Who needs oxygen?

  Loricifera

  A bit samey

  Arrow worms

  The peanut trick

  Peanut worms

  No sex please, we’re bdelloids

  Rotifers

  Evolution in reverse?

  Thorny-headed worms

  ****!

  Hairy-backs

  The crypto-bums

  Goblet worms

  Lobsterisimus bumakissimus

  Symbions

  Is-ness

  Jaw worms

  The Quaker worm

  Xenoturbellids

  Gutless, brainless

  Acoelomorphs

  Just one more thing

  Phoronids

  James Bond and the kraken

  Giant squid

  Superslug

  Octopus

  Nautilus but nice

  Nautilus

  She sells seashells

  Shell-wearing molluscs

  Fearful the death of the diver must be

  Giant clam

  Valuing oysters

  Oysters

  One more twist

  Gastropods

  Creeping like snail

  Giant African land snail

  On our last legs

  Arthropods

  A suit of armour

  Japanese spider crab

  Beloved barnacles

  Barnacles

  The silk route

  Spiders

  The Kalahari Ferrari

  Solifugids

  Twenty centimetres!

  Centipedes

  Second innings

  Large blue butterfly

  Laser epiphany

  Blue morpho

  Les demoiselles du Waveney

  Dragonflies

  Cannibal sex

  Praying mantis

  Unreal city

  Termites

  True bugs suck

  Bugs

  Let copulation thrive

  Flies

  Prostitutes and clients

  Bees

  The wasp and the devil’s chaplain

  Wasps

  The best butter

  Butterflies and moths

  Inordinate fondness and all that

  Beetles

  Axis of weevil

  Weevils

  VERTEBRATE CYCLE

  Lemurs and archbishops

  Primates

  Long-jump gold medal

  Bushbaby

  The lion, the glitch and the glove compartment

  Lion

  The profile of Winnie-the-Pooh

  Bears

  Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo

  Hyena

  The half-and-halfers

  Seals

  Wimbledon champion

  Bovids

  Walking with lechwe

  Lechwe and genenuk

  Do I know you?

  Naked mole rat

  The elephant in the corridor

  Elephant

  Plan A for aardvark

  Aardvark

  Flying flashers

  Idiurus

  Self-sharpening chisels

  Rodents

  Dirty rats

  Rat

  Good old Ratty

  Water-vole and dormouse

  Night-leaper

  Spring-hare

  Flashin’ sunshine children

  Shrews

  That breathtaking breath

  Whales

  Song of the sea

  Whalesong

  Gnomes of the river

  River dolphins

  Disgustingly upside down

  Bats

  The altruistic vampire

  Vampire bats

  Pocket dynamo

  Marsupials

  Death comes for the Elephant’s Child

  More elephants

  Epiphany

  Even more elephants

  Time for transition

  Platypus

  Feather

  Kestrel

  The nausea of Charles Darwin

  Peacock

  How many ways of catching a fish?

  Toucan, river birds

  Look, no stabilisers

  Bateleur

  Same bat time, same bat hawk

  Bat hawk

  The dark side

  Owls

  Crisis relocation

  Terns

  Swift scramming frenzy

  Swifts

  Jewels that breathe

  Hummingbirds

  The wardrobe bird

  Flamingos

  Instant birder

  Lilac-breasted roller

  The Clever Club

  Crows

  Bell-beat of their wings

  Swans

  22:1

  Albatross

  No flying, please, we’re birds

  Flightless birds

  Do I contradict myself?

  Penguins

  Hijoputido

  Passerines

  Wild thing

  Marsh warbler

  Blood-chilling

  Crocodiles

  Snakes, unclad humans and a garden

  Snakes

  Secret snakes

  Adder

  Disgusting clumsy lizards<
br />
  Lizards

  Good luck, little metaphor

  Turtles

  Shape-shifters

  Amphibians

  When I was a rain god

  Frogs

  Death by frog

  Golden poison frog

  A miraculous draught of newts

  Newts

  Beautiful shirts

  Caecilians

  “Fish”

  Fish

  The stillness of salmon

  Salmon

  The Eden fish

  Cleaner fish

  That’s no parasite: that’s my husband

  Anglerfish

  The sinking fish

  Sharks

  No bones about it

  Cartilaginous fish

  Ray of Sunshine

  Manta ray

  EPILOGUE

  The beginning

  Jawless fish, lobe-finned fish

  To the great teachers --

  especially

  Mr Hendry – “Pete” – late of Emanuel School, who taught me about words and books and Joyce,

  Sir David Attenborough, who taught me about the wild world and Darwin,

  and CLW who taught me practically everything

  Here Comes Everybody

  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  Endlessness

  endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Final words of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It is a thought that has had me enthralled all my life. We are not alone in the universe: the idea that launched a million works of science fiction. Fact is we are not alone on our own planet. Far from it. We could hardly be less alone. We are one of a crowd, part of a teeming throng. We are not alone even when we are alone: whether we are counting the great garden of bacteria in our guts – alien life forms that keep us alive – or the tiny arthropods called Demodex mites that live in the follicles of our eyelashes.

  Because we are one of many. Life is not about the creation of a single perfect being. An ape is not a failed human: it is a perfectly valid and fully evolved creature in its own right. A monkey is not a failed ape, a lemur is not a failed monkey, a mouse is not a failed primate, a fish is not a failed mammal (and as I shall show you later, there is no such thing as a fish) and insects, nematode worms, corals and priapulids are not failed vertebrates. The meaning of life is life and the purpose of life is to become an ancestor. All forms of life are equally valid: the beautiful, the bizarre, the horrific, the obscure and the glorious.

  We humans are different from the rest in some ways, but only in some ways. One of these ways is our need for a myth to get us through the night: a myth to carry us through the vast distances of interstellar space: a myth to transport us through the endless aeons of time in which life has been lived on earth, a myth to reconcile us to our true evolutionary position. Which is a cosmic afterthought.

  We used to cherish the myth that we are made of quite different stuff from the animals: there are animals, and then there’s us. Darwin exploded that one, of course. He showed us that we are all animals, but that is too difficult a truth for us to face in its rawness and reality. So we have created another myth. Benjamin Disraeli, speechifying about Darwin’s horrifying truth, said: “The question is this: is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories.”

  But evolution is a fact and we humans – let’s dispense with Disraeli’s “man” nonsense; we’re all in it together, men, women and children – needed to come to terms with our apeness, our primateness, our mammalness, our vertebrateness, our animalness. So we came up with perfectibility: the idea that evolution had a goal, that goal was to make a perfect creature, and that perfect creature is lucky old us. The famous image of evolution – monkey, ape, hunched proto-hominid, fully evolved and upright modern man – encapsulates the myth as vividly as a cross, a crescent and a seated Buddha encapsulate the great world religions. The whole process of the Animal Kingdom, starting with unicellular blobs and passing through insects, “fish”, amphibians, reptiles and birds, culminates in mammals, and mammals carry us through primitive egg-layers and marsupials, to creatures of ever-greater magnificence and complexity, to the primates and then the apes, until the ladder finally ascends to wonderful, glorious, magical us.

  Which is great. Except of course that it doesn’t.

  The mite that lives in the follicles of your eyelashes is as fully, as exquisitely, as perfectly evolved as you are. And on that thought, I shall set out to describe the endless forms of the Animal Kingdom,I to encounter the ten million alien species with which we share our planet. To do so righteously, I must write a book that has no beginning and no end, but like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, simply continues.

  Ten million aliens, then. Or is there really only one? Perhaps the only alien species on the planet is us. Certainly we are alienated from the rest of creation: so much so that we have become tourists on our own planet. What all tourists need is a travel guide: so here you are. Look on this book as the Rough Guide to Real Life: the Lonely Planet Guide to the Lonely Planet.

  * * *

  I. In this book I’m modestly restricting myself to the Animal Kingdom. In Britain four other kingdoms are traditionally recognised: Plantae, Fungi, Protoctista and Prokaryota/Monera. In the United States they prefer six: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria.

  Sex and the single slug

  This is the ideal point in the book for a quick lesson in basic taxonomy, so let’s talk about sex instead. I may not be able to teach you how to love slugs, but I can certainly teach you how slugs love. Slugs are invertebrates – molluscs, since you ask – and as such, less than the trash beneath a vertebrate’s feet. But they live lives of sensuous and sometimes violent passions and go in for the most bewildering and perhaps even enviable gymnastics.

  We are brought up to despise most invertebrates, especially the slimy ones. I quote an exchange in Australia’s federal parliament in 2006. Julia Gillard, a Labour front-bencher: “Mr Speaker, I move that that snivelling grub over there be no further heard.” Speaker: “The manager of the opposition will withdraw that.” Gillard: “If I have offended grubs I withdraw unconditionally.”I

  But we should warm to slugs if only for their sex lives: creatures whose antics outdo anything thought up by Messalina, Zeus and all those carved and writhing figures on the Konark Temple. As gardeners wage war on slugs with beer and eggshells, so slugs pursue their exotic and passionate lives. There are about 5,000 species of slugs in the world, and 32 of them in Britain, where the cold limits the things a slug can get up to. Slugs are related to snails, and are not unlike shell-less snails, except that to be confusing – and life and biodiversity are confusing almost by designII – there are three species of shelled slugs in Britain. Being molluscs, slugs are related to giant squids – but we’ll save them for later.

  Slugs have two pairs of tentacles; the front ones sense light and the back ones sense smell. These are retractable, and they can be regrown. And yes, they do slime. Two sorts of slime: watery stuff, and thick, sticky stuff. They get about by gliding gracefully along this self-created carpet. It’s hard for humans to get excited about mucus – though it is life and death to slugs – so let’s move on to sex.

  • • •

  Slugs are hermaphrodites. Both halves of a pair have penises, both halves present sperm to the partner, and both halves go off and lay eggs. Slugs have the best of both worlds. But they are not just wham-bammers. They believe in courtship. Perhaps, being female as well as male, they are devoted, to the point of mania, to the concept of foreplay. It can go on for hours, as they circle, nibble and lunge at each other. Sometimes they will savour each other’s mucus, perhaps to get genetic information, perhaps as a light sustaining snack. Anointed in mucus, they engage in a slimy and sensual ballet. Some species will do this suspended from long ropes of mucus: acrobatic, gravity-defying, and n
o doubt as thrilling as doing it on a trapeze. The pace is slow, the rhythm sensuous, as if each nuance is relished. And some species have the most colossal penises: half as long as their own bodies. Some slugs have copulatory rituals in which the pair dance about each other, each partner waving a giant penis overhead.

  The act continues with a mutual entering and a prolonged and slimy embrace. But then, how to break it off? The phrase, I fear, is no metaphor. With some species, a long and corkscrew-shaped penis doesn’t always withdraw too easily. In these circumstances – gentlemen are invited to cross their legs at this point – one slug will chew off the penis of the other. Sometimes both slugs will perform this feat. It is called apophallation. The slug, hermaphrodite no longer, goes away. Alas, he can’t grow another penis. So she carries on as a female forever after.

  A backbone isn’t essential to an interesting life.

  * * *

  I. Extracted from Extracts from the Red Notebooks by my old friend Matthew Engel.

  II. Except that there is no design.

  2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18

  I know we should be getting on with that lesson in taxonomy, but let’s think about women’s breasts instead. Turn to page three of the Sun, have a leaf through Playboy magazine, find pictures of naked women on the internet, look at Le déjeuner sur l’herbe or The Birth of Venus. Lots of breasts. Every two maintaining the most perfect paradox.

  What are humans? Whatever else we are, we are a species of mammal, and as such we suckle our young. The female half of our species and the female half of the class of mammals all possess mammary glands – in one form or another. Humans, goats, sheep, horses, elephants and guinea pigs have two teats; dogs have eight or ten, rats have 12, pigs have 18, while the Virginia opossum has 13, one of the few mammals to have an odd number. The primitive egg-laying mammals, the monotremes, have no teats at all but they can still sweat milk. In other words, we’re mammals. All of us. That simple fact was never explained to me in these straightforward and uncompromising terms. I was taught that we “come from” mammals, or “come from” the apes. But we are mammals: so let’s deal with it. Some of the greatest art ever produced celebrates the mammalian defining characteristic of mammary glands, in suckling madonnas and in succulent nudes.

  But let us also consider the contradiction. Humans are the only mammal that uses mammary glands for sexual display. There are plenty of theories about this: the most frequent is the notion that when humans started walking upright, the bottom became a lot less obvious. Female baboons signal sexual availability with a red flush to the buttocks: a trait which is noticeable, even spectacular, to passing humans. Non-female readers can guess the effect that rose-red buttocks have on a male baboon with male-to-male empathy. But with the bottom going out of fashion as a sexual signal, humans developed spectacular signal-ling breasts. They didn’t need to flush on and off, because human females were and are always sexually available.