of the Beastly
of the Beastly
From the Introduction to The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life (pp. ix-xiv)
by
Houghton Mifflin, 1995
? 1995 by Natalie Angier. Used with permission.
(Posted September 19, 1997 ? Issue 16; archived October 3, 1997)
Editor's Note: Natalie Angier, science reporter for the New York Times and winner of a 1991 Pulitzer Prize, calls The Beauty of the Beastly "a hymn to the multitudinous." Her book is a collection of eminently readable essays in which she shares her fascination with creatures most of us find skin-crawlingly repulsive, while at the same time blowing the covers of a number of lovable superstars of nature whose private lives are less appealing than their public personae. Here, in introducing the collection, she describes how her childhood fear and loathing of cockroaches (a condition many of us will relate to) changed over time to, if not affection, a delight in the complexity of all life, including the unlovely, and a deep respect for the vigor with which each player in the pageant pursues its role.
When I was a girl, I had a terror of cockroaches that bordered on
pathological. This was a particularly inconvenient phobia for a person
who lived in a proto-slummy apartment in the Bronx, where roaches had
perfected the art of arrogant accommodation among humans who would as
soon squash them as see them. My father would squash them with his bare
hands. My mother would wield a paper towel or a shoe. My younger brother
would stamp them out with whatever tool or appendage was closest to the
oily cruds. Not I. No matter how many hundreds of roaches I saw, no
matter how repeatedly I reminded myself that they lacked stinging or
biting parts and really could not hurt me, I jumped and screeched every
time one skittered into view. I could not be in a room with a visible
roach and feel at peace, nor could I bear getting close enough to one to
kill it. If I opened a cupboard looking for a glass and instead found a
roach, I'd go thirsty. Every evening, before venturing into the dark
bathroom and switching on the light - an act that would be to roaches as
reveille is to sleeping soldiers - I called my brother and begged him to
minesweep the room ahead of time. Judging by the enthusiastic sounds of
stomping and hooting coming from within, my brother's task was
substantial yet not unwelcome. "OK," he'd say, emerging from the room
and rubbing his hands together smartly, "I think I got them all."
This is how profound my terror was. I once woke up in the middle of the night and saw a big roach on the edge of my pillow, heading toward me. Such brashness was unheard of: as bustling as the roach population was, it had never bustled into bed with me. I yelped and leaped to my feet, but what was I going to do now? I couldn't very well wake my brother; my parents had little patience for my squeamishness; above all, I could not kill the cockroach on my own.
I decided to cede my space to the enemy. I curled up at the foot of my bed, lying athwart it rather than lengthwise, knees to my chest, head flat on mattress. Uncomfortable and still scared, I nonetheless managed to fall back to sleep. The next morning, I saw that the roach was nothing more than a piece of crayon, which had rolled back and forth on the pillow's indentation and so given me the midnight sense of something small, dark, and alive.I tell you all this to let you know, in part, why I have named my book The Beauty of the Beastly. I hated roaches then, and I still don't like sharing living quarters with them. But in this book, I give them their moment in the sun - whether the photophobic creatures appreciate it or not. I've learned details about cockroach biology that make me want to salute them. Their behavior, the variety of species in the family, the adaptations they have evolved to live with humans or, in most cases, without them - all are part of the great cockroach saga. It is the story of persistence and resistance, of sensitivity and ceaseless change.
Change is indeed the roach's trademark. In the essay "There
Is Nothing Like a Roach," I mention the miraculous
effectiveness of the pesticide Combat in keeping the urban
roach population at bay. Combat does work better than an
old-fashioned spritz from a can, but as of this writing, in
late 1994, the cockroaches in my Washington, D.C., apartment
are starting to get the better of the little black disks. My
kitchen is polka-dotted with two dozen Combat parlors, yet
some roaches survive. Either the insects have evolved a
mechanism for detoxifying the poison or - my belief - they
have learned to avoid eating it. After all, I have known
house mice clever enough to shun glue traps, leaping like
Olympic hurdlers over a series of them in order to reach a
bag of ramen noodles on the other side. Clearly these mice
had learned something by watching the fate of brethren who'd
stepped on the traps. If mice can improve themselves through
observation rather than just mutation, why not roaches? And
if that elasticity, robustness, and lust for life aren't
beautiful, then not much good can be said for evolution, the
mother of all invention, the one who stands by the side of
the passing bio-marathon and cries, "Looking good! Keep it
up! Stay alive! Stay alive."
The beauty of the natural world lies in the details, and
most of those details are not the stuff of calendar art. I
have made it a kind of hobby, almost a mission, to write
about organisms that many people find repugnant: spiders,
scorpions, parasites, worms, rattlesnakes, dung beetles,
hyenas. I have done so out of a perverse preference for
subjects that other writers generally have ignored, and
because I hope to inspire in readers an appreciation for
diversity; for imagination, for the twisted, webbed,
infinite possibility of the natural world. Every single
story that nature tells is gorgeous. She is the original
Scheherazade, always with one more surprise to shake from
her sleeve. Of course, I can record only a tiny fraction of
those stories, but what l offer represents a larger plea,
for all the stories that can be told, for the preservation
of nature on her own terms, complete with the golems and
creeps and ogres of the world, the roaches, the snakes, the
bloodsuckers, the lowlifes, and the brutes.
Beyond writing about the beauty of many stereotypical beasts, I also offer evidence of the beastliness behind our conventional icons of beauty. Beloved dolphins can behave like sailors at Tailhook; orchids advertise faux merchandise; the legendary workers of the field - the birds, the bees, the beavers - in truth spend more time at leisure than the average European; and every creature cheats on its mate, or tries to.
But even this less than exemplary behavior is beautiful in its subtlety. There is always more to be seen behind the first pass, behind the obvious traits that show up during early observations and initially are used to pigeonhole a species or a social system or a gender. I love learning of new findings that overturn or at least complicate abiding verities, even when I may have written about those verities in the past. For example, I include in this book a story about female choice, a field of research that has exploded over the past decade or so. The idea is that the female of many species is the choosy one when it comes to picking a mate, and that her pickiness serves a central role in the evolution of many of the more exaggerated properties of the male, like bright feathers or booming voices. That assumption is predicated on the comparatively high cost of reproduction to the female. She's the one who invests the most energy bearing and rearing young, so she is the one with the greater incentive to select her mate carefully. The disparate cost of reproduction was thought to extend even down to the sex cells. A female's egg is big and filled with protein, fats, nutrients, molecular signals to start the embryo growing; a male's sperm is small and efficiently packaged, nothing more than a serving of genes wrapped in a slippery protein bullet. As the old scientific truism has it, eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Small wonder males so often seem willing to blow their pocket change at any opportunity.
Yet that split between the sexes turns out to be a bit too
neat. Sperm is not so cheap after all; making it, in fact,
substantially decreases the life span of experimental
animals like flies and worms, and we can only wonder if it
doesn't do the same to a few of our favorite higher
organisms.
This recent insight by no means diminishes the importance of female choice to the evolution of male appearance and behavior. Females give a lot more of themselves to their young than eggs, after all. Mammalian mothers carry their babies around and offer up the breast; they have much incentive to be finicky about who fathers their children. Yet just knowing that sperm output exacts a substantial toll on its masculine maker puts the dynamics of sexual behavior in a new and more refined light. You see things you may have slighted before. You see the female make her choice, and then you see the male make his - embracing her as his newly beloved, or walking away, as though thinking to himself, This really isn't worth shaving a few minutes off my life.
In fact, if there is any lesson I have learned in my years
of following science, it is that nothing is as it seems.
Instead, things are as they seem plus the details you are
just beginning to notice. New truths rarely overturn old
ones; they simply add nuanced brushstrokes to the portrait.
Dolphins may be mean-spirited at times, slashing at each
other's flesh so brutally that they leave behind gouges, but
they also engage in playful and tender behavior, jointly
reaching decisions about when to travel, when to fish, when
to rest. Hyenas sit at the top of the carnivore's pyramid,
with all the ferocity that implies. Unlike lions, they
consume every last body part of their prey - meat, fur,
skull, bones. The moment two sibling hyenas emerge from the
womb, they start mauling each other, usually to the death of
one. Yet when a hyena is in a good mood - and if it knows
and trusts you - it'll plop all two hundred pounds of itself
down on your lap like a pet and beg to be scratched behind
the ears.
The sins of the anointed saints, the Jekylls beneath the
hides - these are the reasons that I find it so much fun to
think of the beasts I write about as protagonists, imperfect
heroes all, playing out the drama of their circumstances and
opportunities. And I anthropomorphize shamelessly. I assume
that nonhuman species have personalities, intentions,
emotions, awareness, even dreams and wishes. I do so for the
sake of storytelling, and because the continuity of life on
a genetic and morphological scale suggests a significant
degree of fraternity among the creatures of the earth.
Recently I saw in a natural history museum an exhibit of the
skeletons of many species: horses, alligators, monkeys,
dogs, mice, birds, dolphins, humans. The display made plain
how often nature recycles her best inventions, how the limb
bones articulate with the shoulders and hips in the same way
whether the animal is a quadruped or biped, hoofer or flyer;
how the ribs arc out from the spinal column in parallel
parabolas; how the thigh is built of one thick bone, the
calf of two slender bones; how we all have finger bones,
even though the fingers may end up subsumed by flippers. We
really are the same under the skin.
Endlinks
Animal Behavior Society - the society's topic areas include education, grants, meetings; a newsletter, and resources elsewhere on the Web.
Animal Behavior Sites - a lengthy list of links to resources on animals and animal behavior. Headings include Artificial Life/Artificial Intelligence; Domestic Animal Behavior (other than pets); Wild and Zoo Animal Behavior; Newsgroups and Discussion Lists; Electronic Journals/Online Magazines/Tables of Contents; Education; Animal Behavior Research Help; and Evolution and Phylogenies.
Biosis Internet Resource Guide for Zoology - Animal Behaviour - a list of links to sites on animal behavior. Topics include Behavior Analysis Resources; the ETHOLOGY mailing list; Movement and Dispersal of Biota; the Pepperberg Page on Talking Birds; the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology.
Amazing Animal Facts - "a collection of totally useless animal information." It contains fun trivia and little-known facts on cats, dogs, farm animals, birds, insects, reptiles, and a miscellaneous "grab bag" of other animals.
See our Favorite Books for a description of Natalie Angier's Natural Obsessions. This book is out of print, but used copies may be found through Amazon.com.
The following articles and book reviews, written by Natalie Angier, can be seen on the New York Times Web site (registration required):
You may purchase this book (276 pp.) directly from: