Encouraging ant hills

 Prof Bill Sutherland visited the Bungalow recently and became interested in the ant hills there. So I explained their story to him as part of a video called 'A novel method for creating ant hills'.

Clinging On

As the human world reels under the malign influence of Coronavirus, my thoughts turn to Cretaceous barnacles. 

This sudden interest in extinct cirripedia is prompted by a paper published a month ago by Professor Andy Gale: New thoracican cirripedes (Crustacea) from the Cretaceous of Europe and North Africa.[1] It announces the discovery of new extinct genera and species of barnacle. There are two sorts: the acorn/wart-type (sessile) barnacles familiar from rocky shores and the stalk-type (pedunculate) 'goose barnacles' sometimes found attached to drift wood. 

I have never really thought about these crustacea before. They are easily overlooked - that is until you gash your hands or feet on them at the seaside, or eat them in a Portuguese restaurant. What crystallises my interest in them now is that one of the Zeugmatolepadid family now bears my name: Subsecolepas holtwilsoni. It is a lepadid barnacle - one of the stalked type. My thanks go to Andy for the honour. I think its taxonomic status is:

Phylum - Arthropoda

Clade - Mandibulata

Clade - Pancrustacea

Subphylum - Crustacea

Class - Maxillopoda

Infraclass - Cirripedia

Superorder - Thoracica

Order - Pedunculata

Suborder - Scalpelliformes

Clade - Thoracicalcarea

Family - Zeugmatolepadidae

Subfamily - Martillepadinae

Genus - Subsecolepas

Species - holtwilsoni 

Andy Gale is one of a very small band of palaeontological researchers active in the field of fossil cirripedes. Their most illustrious forebear is Charles Darwin. Thomas Withers was active from 1910 to the 1960s, and catalogued the fossils specimens at the Natural History Museum, London. " There can be no doubt the Wither's 'Catalogues' are to fossil lepadomorph and verrucomorph barnacles what Darwin's 'Monographs' are to Recent barnacles."[2] Andy has been one of the most prolific cirripede researchers in recent decades, focusing on the Cretaceous Chalk and publishing many papers. He says that S.holtwilsoni is common in chalk of the Upper Campanian stage in the UK, and that 400 fossil specimens have been found at various old pits in the Norwich area. He named it after me for helping him dig in these pits and for having been involved in their conservation, including Keswick, Catton, Cringleford and Whitlingham.

Collecting samples at Keswick, 2015

I have not visited any chalk pits lately. Britain today is in emergency 'lock-down', and I feel sorry for city-dwellers cooped up in flats and terraced houses. At least I have an extensive wildlife garden to ramble in, and I also enjoy exploring the meaning of our geological heritage.

Crustaceans of the Campanian seas are a great imaginative diversion - a dépaysement, as the French say. Geology and palaeontology call us out of our own time and down into the profound depths of planetary and biological evolution. I try to imagine the lifeworld of the extinct species that now bears my name.  

Here are photos of the type specimens of S.holtwilsoni, variously sourced from chalk pits at Keswick and Cringleford, and all are now archived in the Natural History Museum. They show elements of the set of hard, calcareous plates which enclose the head of the barnacle. 

Type specimens of Subsecolepas holtwilsoni. Image courtesy Andy Gale [1]

Stalked barnacles from JG Wood: 'The Illustrated Natural History'; Routledge, London, 1863

Darwin's drawing of a Middle Jurassic stalked barnacle Pollicipes concinnus,
as found attached to the shell of an ammonite.[3]

Contemporary stalked barnacles attach themselves to floating objects, particularly driftwood, turtles and ships. According to Andy Gale, S.holtwilsoni and other Zeugmatolepadids probably had a similar lifestyle, attaching to the shells of free-swimming ammonites and seabed-dwelling inoceramid bivalves as well as floating wood.[1, p.245] There must have been a steady rain of their plates falling into the carbonate-rich mud of the sea floor, perhaps 100 to 500 metres down.[4] 

The Campanian stage spans from 83.6 to 72.2 million years ago.[5], and chalk of this age is well-represented in Norfolk and Suffolk. I have visited many quarries of this period in the Gipping valley and Norwich areas. At Keswick and Cringleford I helped clear the chalk exposures so that Andy Gale could record the geological succession and take samples. The samples are treated with glauber's salt and freezing in a repeat process until the miniscule fossil fragments - echinoid spines, bits of coral, fish scale, shell, etc - are freed from their chalky matrix and can be examined under a microscope.  

Fossil residues from the Chalk (40x magnification)

  

The contrast between the physical reality of an old chalk pit, with its crumbly, scrub-infested chaos, and the clarified world of knowledge compiled by over 150 years of scientific research into the Chalk is remarkable. We now know much about the Earth's geography during the Campanian, for example that Europe was an archipelago of islands.[6] We know much about biodiversity and details of climate and chemistry.[7; 8]  

 

The world as it was in the late Cretaceous. Image courtesy Andy Gale [1]

All this is wonderful, radical stuff to explore during COVID-19 lock-down. Like astronomy, geology has the power to frame human life against an almost infinite scale of time and space. Like pedunculate cirripedes, we cling for a few seasons to our floating attachment points and then - like them - our debris will inevitably find its way to the metaphorical sea floor. Perhaps only our names, inscriptions and genetic coding will survive us, for a century or two at most. The history of taxonomic revision makes clear that not even species names backed up with diligent taxonomic description may be proof against time. 

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REFERENCES

[1] - Gale, A.S. New thoracican cirripedes (Crustacea) from the Cretaceous of Europe and North Africa. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie - Abhandlungen Band 295 Heft 3 (2020), pp.243-282. [Link accessed May 2020]
[2] - Southward, AJ. Barnacle Biology. CRC Press, 1987; chapters 2.1 and 2.2.
[3] - Darwin, CR. A monograph on the fossil Lepadidæ, or pedunculated cirripedes of Great Britain. Palæontographical Society, London, 1851 Plate 3, Fig.1. Downloadable here. [Link accessed May 2020]
[4] - Rawson, PF. Cretaceous: Sea Levels peak as the North Atlantic Opens, in: Brenchley, PJ & Rawson, PF (eds). The Geology of England and Wales. The Geological Society, 2006; 2nd Edition. 
[5] - Lee, JR, et al (eds). British Regional Geology. East Anglia. British Geological Survey, Fifth Edition, 2015.
[6] - Csiki-Sava, Z et al. Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago. Zookeys, no.469, January 2015, pp.1-161. [Link accessed May 2020]
[7] - Jarvis, I, et al. Late Cretaceous (Campanian) carbon isotope events, sea-level change and correlation of the Tethyan and Boreal realms. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, no.188, 2002, pp.215-248.
[8] - Skelton, PF et al (eds). The Cretaceous World. The Open University / Cambridge University Press, 2003.

THANKS TO

• Andy Gale, for naming the extinct beastie.
• Gilbert Addison, for suggesting the title of this article.

Hockham Mere

9-12-16

My friend Julia B and I met yesterday at Great Hockham for a wilderness expedition.

Julia is researching a book on Doggerland, the inhabitable land area in the North Sea basin which was drowned as sea levels rose at the end of the last glacial period, the Devensian. Its landscape changed from tundra to forest, then marsh and finally sea, in a process that spanned the transition from the Devensian into our own Flandrian warm period, roughly from 10,000 to 7,000 years ago. This ancestral land is now out of reach of our exploration: we needed somewhere else to experience elements of its vanished wilderness.

Is it possible to talk of 'wilderness' in Norfolk? Other countries have tracts of land we can easily label wilderness - areas defined by the lack of human habitation or disturbance, graced with plant and animal communities and geomorphological processes that operate in ways unshaped by human agency. 'Tis true, we are hardly likely to encounter wolves or frost-shattered peaks in Norfolk - let Ansel Adams picture them for us - but I think the intertidal zone is implicitly wilderness. We have some 90 miles of coastline at the land/sea interface, where the fluxes of wind, waves and tides shape the sand and shingle without reference to humans, and plant and animal lifeworlds may create their biological meshes of meaning undisturbed.

Wind, sand and razor shells on Titchwell beach.

We also have wilderness at the micro-level: life with its processes, unmediated and raw, at the levels of cell and leaf, in every wood, field or garden, under every stone, in every lump of rotting wood. There are beings for whom this spatial level is their life's horizon, and I imagine it is pure wilderness down among the grass roots in my lawn - the selfsame lawn I walk or picnic on. Wilderness is the landscape that belongs to the Germanic vill or wild, the Latinate desierto, selvaggio or sauvage. The word enfolds, in English, a sense of the alien, empty and untamed. At its heart is wildness.

We carry wildness in ourselves, for instance in our blood flow, breathing, dreams and borborygmus which have their own strange, untameable life-logic, even though we know them to be truly and organically ourselves. There is also wildness we experience in others when we realise that they are simply 'not me'; they have their own life-logic which may overlap with our own but it is radically Other and different, perhaps alien. It could be a friend, a neighbour or a bird. We find they are partly 'me' - but mostly not.

Thus, our perception of wilderness may have its roots in the radical Otherness of a landscape: we are forced to meet it on its own terms and not ours. We may be able to find resources and affordances within it, places of identity, attachment and utility, but it remains - at its core - essentially 'other' and wild.

Tyresta forest, Sweden - beavers at work. Photo courtesy Lena Ohre.

Our expedition had prehistoric wilderness in mind - specifically any evocative traces of the lost life-world of Doggerland to be found in the Hockham area. Its task would be both dreamwork and a perceptive attention to the present landscape through which an imaginative experience of the late glacial and early post-glacial landscape might become possible. The result would be writing.

'A text of nature writing is a representational model of the meaning relations that a writer has perceived in the environment under specific conditions, determined by the time, location, and the biological and cultural abilities of the perceiver.' [1]

As a 'representational model', nature writing is a translation from the Otherness of nature, as we experience it, into the selfhood of words. We go outward into Otherness: we return to Ourselves. In the case of Doggerland we are dealing with a world of plants, animals and human life which can no longer be directly experienced. Translation may risk going awry and descending into ungrounded phantasmagoria that have the ring of fantasy but not of vital truth. What we need is eye-opening places where what is experienceable today and what was experienceable 10,000 years ago can come together and bear fruit: the fungi and berries of lifeworld visions.

Suppose we wanted to experience a Devensian environment today we'd need to go north, to the Arctic. The last ice age lingers there, clinging to the circumpolar zone in the face of the planet's encroaching hyper-warmth, along with its refugees the snow buntings and musk oxen, beetles and midges, pingos and permafrost. My studies tell me this part of Norfolk is awash with physical (and even some biological) evidence for life in the Devensian.

If we wanted to experience an early Flandrian environment we'd need to go north-east, to visit the low-lying landscapes around the Baltic, for example Soomaa in Estonia, where bogs and boreal forest go hand in hand; landscapes of birch and pine, beetle and midge, lake and moraine. The marshy, forested land at Frost's Common and Cranberry Rough, Hockham, has a similar aspect, though no longer inhabited by wolf, elk and lynx.

For Doggerland itself, scientific research has begun to lay bare the geography using remote sensing and sampling techniques[2].We are beginning to chart the layout of drowned estuaries and low hills, fens and plains, on the seafloor and beneath it. We know about the kinds of plants and animals present, and the timing of the submergence. We now have details of this lost, low-lying landscape available to us in words and maps. It probably looked rather like parts of Norfolk.

For understanding the people of Doggerland, we could draw on the experience of the hunting & gathering peoples of the northern forests, coasts and tundras. They are the ones who grappled in deed and myth, in actions, words and songs, with the realities of life in this kind of environment. This would complement the traces of local Mesolithic occupation. Perhaps some of the people settled at Hockham were refugees from Doggerland. What language, stories and skills did they bring with them?

A digital terrain map (DTM) of Frost's Common (right), with the eastern margin of Cranberry Rough (left).
A pattern of ditches can clearly be seen, evidence of 20th century drainage work.
Imagery © Forestry Research, courtesy Breaking New Ground data.

Hockham Mere

Our expedition was focused on the western side of Hockham parish. It included Frost's Common, an area pockmarked with a concentration of ponds. As a digital terrain map shows, the land slopes hence gently westward into a broad basin area, a shallow sump for water draining from the glacial sands, gravels and clays which underlie it. This is the area called Cranberry Rough, the site of an ancient lake known as Hockham Mere. Its muds were investigated by researchers in the 1940s, who cored down and recovered samples to a depth of 30 ft (9 m). They were able to show that the Mere holds a sedimentary sequence going back to the end of the last ice age, with a fossil pollen sequence to match[3]. 

The Mere probably existed in some form until Tudor times before being drained with a network of ditches. 19th century maps show this reclaimed land as swamp woodland and rough pasture, with the eastern part set aside as a Poor's Fen allotment; altogether it covered some 190 acres (76 ha). Patches of worked flint near the western end and traces of charcoal in the lake muds are evidence of occupation by Mesolithic hunters & gatherers, more than 7,000 years ago. There is a Roman road, the Peddar's Way, tracking nearby, and the vestiges of a deserted railway line cutting across it. The southern half of the site is managed by the Forestry Commission, and so theoretically it is publicly- accessible. Until recently almost all Cranberry Rough was covered with woodland, but a programme of publicly funded works has now cleared trees and bushes from the southern half of the site, revealing a flat tract of boggy pasture. The oozing, privately-owned core of its northern half is swamp carr, pristine and impenetrable.

Swamp carr at the heart of at Cranberry Rough, May 2015

We parked that car near the entrance to Fire Route 83, and entered the forest. We followed our own trackless path.

Frost's Common

'Maa iidse tiigid'

'The land of ancient ponds'

Deadened by crowding trees, the sounds of traffic on the A1075 are muffled and soon die away. Frost's Common has an extraordinary power of dépaysement, of taking one elsewhere - in this case somewhere boreal and strange. I have been in similarly odd, crumbly forests in Sweden where the delightful and the sinister are woven together equally. An attractive variety of broad-leaved and coniferous trees presides over a complex of brooding ponds; the tracks of deer (and some bigger animals) are woven here and there over the earth; in some places dense mats of dead bracken mask a jumble of rotten trunks. Mosses, lichens and fungi abound. Time passes and - pixie-led - one finds oneself going in green circles, for one cluster of ponds looks much like another. One steers by instinct - or the sun, if its position can be discerned.

A forest glade

Evergreens beside a periglacial pond.

Reflections

Geologically speaking, the land at Frost's Common is a mosaic of sands and chalky clays, and the ponds are probably relict lithalsa or pingo landforms. Fourteen thousand years ago the ground here would have been swollen with permafrost ice. The surface layers would melt in summer then refreeze in winter. Patches of water-bearing sand in the subsoil would swell up and form large blisters of ice, with freezing and thawing happening on a seasonal basis. At the end of the ice age these active frost mounds became permanent ponds. There must be fifty such ponds and wet depressions surviving at the Common. It is a landscape ravaged by periglacial pox.

'Piirneva niiske luht'

'Bordering a damp meadow'

The hummocky terrain of Frost's Common gives way, on its western side, to an open area surrounded by forest. It is less a glade than a rough, tussocky, damp heath. The ground undulates with a few ground-ice depressions, and is sporadically studded with willow, hawthorn and gorse. It seems to be a tract of clear-felled forest that was not replanted. It is not attractive, but does have a very strong sense of place about it. Many years ago, in the Åland Islands of the Baltic, I waited at dusk for elk (Alces alces) to emerge in such a place as this. Stepping into the open here, one is aware that other eyes may be watching.

'Ja tume männimets'

'And a dark forest of pine trees'

The damp meadow gives way to patchy, mixed woodland of oak, pine, poplar and willow. This in turn gives way to regular pine plantation. Passing through it means treading underfoot a spongey carpet of dead needles; one's horizon is reduced to a brown world of spiky and straight-planted bole corridors; one's hearing is hushed and closeted. Vestiges of freedom still remain in the tree tops, however, where occasional titmice twitter and flit, and breezes may ruffle greenery in the topmost twigs. Our attention is mostly on the ground. We stumble over half-buried snags. We find a startling splash of chrome yellow slime, a creeping myxomycete. We notice the landscape's resources, its tracks, trails and signals. Deer droppings; scraps of egg shell; the tang of a fox; tufts of foxglove or fern. Overhead, away above the tree tops, passing pigeons and carrion crows. The trees are mostly young, perhaps 20 years old, but have none of the casual spontaneity of youth: they are already dry, serious characters. It seems a human body could lie here, in the silence at their feet, buried beneath a steady rain of needles for decades before being discovered. But I suspect my imagination is running away with me here: the foxes would soon make it their own and the crows would strip what remained, leaving just wreckage. The place is more populated than it seems, and there are large, fresh-looking animal tracks meandering among the pines, evidence of other-than-human wills contributing to making the place.

Trackway

The myxomycete

Corridors of forestry brash

We navigate westwards through the forest, until the pines loosen as the ground becomes wetter. Birches and willows step in once more. They mark the eastern margin of the former Mere. We reach a gate from which, 1000 years ago, we might have surveyed wild water and fen.  

Cranberry Rough

'Siin on sissepääs suur raba'

'Then the entry to a large swamp'

We are walking across the old lake ground and its soggy, partly-drained successor. Dark, peat-rich soil has been mechanically stripped of encroaching trees to reveal a wetland in the remaking. Cattle have poached the ground into a black chaos of wet potholes which we step through to reach a balk of higher ground which runs westward across the site. This will be our only access route.

Like hunters, our senses take in the layout of woodland and water bodies, the direction of the wind, the evidence of bird and animal life. At each step we evaluate threats and resources, check our orientation, adjust our thoughts to the terrain and to each other. We find we are not alone.

This marsh is alive with living things that shy in our presence - the birds. They are signs in our wilderness, and we in theirs. Geese, ponderous and clamouring as they rise. Herons, craking. An explosion of teal in a whirr of wings that peels off the marsh, swings round then refocuses farther off, each bird dropping back with a white splash to water. And distant, about 800 yards away, the eye discerns what look like aurochsen - ochreous cattle, hairy and over-horned - pasturing on what the swamp has to offer by way of December's dying herbage. If we want to reach cross the Mere and find the place where the Mesolithic flints were found we shall have to pass them.

Courage fails me. I am unnerved by the aurochsen and the birds. We are standing exposed in a chilly emptiness. Is it wilderness or nature reserve; public or private space? It's only two o'clock but daylight seems already to be fading.

I notice that I have lost or misplaced my mobile 'phone. I want to retrace my steps - our steps - to look for it before the light fails, and Julia agrees. 

We turn back.


The return

'Suur raba,

Piirneb tume männimets,

Siis niiske luht,

Ja maa iidse tiigid'.

'A large swamp,
Bordered by dark pine forest, 
Then a damp meadow
And a land of ancient ponds'.

Walking back, our attention is on the ground, on little details, as we walk; they become the thread back through the labyrinth of our expedition: back across the great swamp - through the forest of pines - across the damp meadow - between the ancient ponds. We revisit our walk's geography in reverse, following my memory's representation (such as it is). I recognise my boot-prints. I remember where I stood to watch a pair of carrion crows. We cross the same beast paths; navigate between the same boles (or just about). I notice a patch of yellow slime. Here is the place among the damp pine needles where we picnicked on green olives, boiled eggs and black chocolate. I recall the crossing of a clearing or the skirting of a pond; the place where we doubled certain bushes, or stepped over a fallen trunk; a pile of droppings or a feather. It is extraordinary how vivid some memories are: I find myself able to retrace tracks and relocate localities we were at two hours earlier. The hunter/gatherer in me is impressed: I am an asset to the tribe.

Back at the car park I find my mobile phone buried safely in a bag, so all is well there. This story poses some awkward questions about the quality of my memory. Perhaps I'm not such an asset after all. However Julia has been discovering the landscape and taking notes about it, and I am pleased to have been her guide.

I have since learned that the yellow myxomycete is Fuligo septica, a species with a strange Fenno-Scandinavian mythology: said to be the vomit of troll cats or, in Estonia, the leavings of the demon Kratt. Each society in each age interprets natural phenomena in its own way. Today, in 2016, the texts books can tell me a lot about the biology of slime moulds, and I find the idea that troll cats may roam the Hockham Woods an appealing one. However, the most important thing seems to me that Julia and I encountered this strange organism together here – out in the heart of a Norfolk wilderness – much as our ancestors, some 9,000 years and perhaps 500 generations ago, might have found it on a pine forest floor in old Doggerland – a landscape now submerged by more than time.

‘Seal on heita pilku kulla kõnnumaal'.

'There is a glimpse of gold in the wilderness'.

How would our ancestors have named this thing?

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[1] - Maran, Timo & Tüür, Kadri (2016): From birds and trees to texts: An ecosemiotic look at Estonian nature writing. In: Parham, John & Westling, Louise (Eds): A Global History of Literature and the Environment; Cambridge University Press.

[2] - Gaffney, V, Fitch, S, and Smith, D (2009): Europe's Lost World - The rediscovery of Doggerland; Council for British Archaeology.
[3] - Godwin, H & Tallentire, PA (1951): Hockham Mere, Norfolk; Journal of Ecology 39.

With acknowledgements to Google for Estonian translation, and apologies for the inevitable faults of grammar and meaning ...

A Pliocene big cat in Suffolk

Dreams are strange things - such spontaneous flights of invention which I could hardly conceive in my daytime life.

This morning, just before waking, I got up and pulled back the curtains. Instead of the usual startled muntjac or rabbit dodging away into the laurel  bushes I saw something much larger and more disturbing. About the size of a spotted hyaena; its neck and legs quite long; its tail short; a glowing pelage of yellowish fur speckled all over with small brown marks; its head like a panther or lion, but profile more elongated and somewhat thicker or bearded under the chin - I couldn't quite see, as it was moving away from me. It had a smooth and fluid pace.

I wanted to bang on the window to get it to look round, in order to see the head; however. I awoke before that was possible. It was gone.

Astonished, I ruminated on what I had just seen. A large felid of some sort, seen padding into a patch of Neogene laurel forest. It was very similar to the extinct big cats of Pliocene / early Pleistocene age. How about the scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium or the dirk-toothed cat Megantereon?

Its head was similar to a Megantereon cultridens illustrated here, although I couldn't see the canine teeth. Its body shape was also similar (see here) but the tail was shorter and the canines not clearly visible. Its size was similar to M. cultridens pictured here, but not as large as Homotherium here.
.
My verdict? A dream representation of an extict felid species, closest to the genus Megantereon which became extinct in Europe about 900,000 years ago. The representations of M. cultridens by artists such as Mauricio Anton diverge from mine in having fur with much bolder spotting; the canine teeth more prominent; the tail slightly longer.

Early Middle Pleistocene fossils of Homotherium have been found in Suffolk (Pakefield) and West Runton and possibly Sidestrand (Norfolk), but no Megantereon - the closest finds are from France.

Mandible of Homotherium sp. from Pakefield / Kessingland cliffs, Suffolk.
Figured in Backhouse, J: 'On a mandible of Machaerodus from the Forest Bed'; Quarterly Journal
of the Geological Society of London, no. 42.  Scale: 10 cm. Note the wide fossa between canine and premolar, where the elongated upper canine tooth descended.

My friend Matt Salusbury (Mystery Animals Suffolk) collects information about big cat sightings in East Anglia. I doubt he will add my unique 'sighting' to his database, although he could add this new information to the body of mythopoeic knowledge that has lately grown up around big cats. Perhaps he can start a new database for 'Dream Sightings', and thus add the Bungalow garden to the oniric mythic geography of East Anglia.

"A myth is a public dream, a dream is a private myth", said Joseph Campbell. [1]

While dreams appear as highly subjective phenomena, Carl Jung argued for their potential for revealing elements of the transpersonal, ancestral, unconscious 'objective psyche' present in archetypal patterns. The symbols appearing in dreams may have their roots in the archaic human mind. "Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought".[2] Not just 'mode of thought' but perhaps the dream-thought itself may be archaic. It is likely that big, powerful predators left their mark in the ancestral psyche, and the numinous power which my dream cat possessed argues for its archetypal associations. It is up to me to meditate upon the many meanings that radiate from this symbolic animal and its dream setting.

One further thought: I don't think that paleontologists and reconstruction artists should dismiss the idea that Megantereon may have had an evenly brown-spotted pelage; it is normally represented as having a variety of leopard-like botches and mottlings or tiger-like stripes.Who's to say that some mysterious ancestral memory may not have visited me in the half-light of a winter dawn? A notable and archetypal dream image certainly did.

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[1] - Cited in: 'Private Myths - Dreams and Dreaming', by Anthony Stevens; Hamish Hamilton, 1995.                
[2] - 'General Aspects of Dream Psychology', in: Jung, CG: 'Dreams'; Ark Paperbacks, 1982

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Out on the heath

Out on the heath, low September sunlight and a warm, southerly wind over close-cropped turf and bristly gorse bushes. There are paths worn by dog walkers.

The heath is a place I read nature's stories: of rabbits and heather, sand wasps and moths, reindeer lichen and sundry, tough grasses.

The sands and flints below ground have their stories too; so does the ancient river terrace they belong to. One could imagine the life story of each and every stone. Of course, stones are not living things, but how else to describe their individual histories?

A spaniel is running over the heath, as though driven – tongue lolling, galloping, ranging to and fro, panting over hummocks and hollows. Driven by its own hyperactive, doggish lifeworld of smells and impulses.

Rabbits are burrowing here, unearthing reams of sandy soil. They nibble clumps of heather and turn them into green pads. They scent-mark anthills with small marbles of brown dung. This is their lifeworld too.





















.
.
I stray into some woodland. A goldfich sings from the top of a birch tree, a brief twitter from a sunlit summit, hidden from sight.

Then for a fleeting moment I perceive the world as it shines in the eyes of six year-old boy. He has been given a collection of old cigarette cards called ‘British Birds’; he studies them intently, trying to spell out their names. The pictures are icons; the words are puzzles - both holding a key to the world. Taking both in his imagination, he ranges out into the garden and woodland beyond it looking for birds, driven by joyous curiosity. This is his boyish, hunter's lifeworld.

The man who gave him the cards had no idea quite how far this gift would run, how far the joy would travel down the years.

Mice and men

Today I found a nest of wool and leaves containing six baby mice; they fell out of a box when I was emptying out my shed. If I were a dog or cat I would have eaten them straightaway. If I were the mouse-mother I would carefully have gathered them up and stashed them somewhere safe. Being myself, I studied them for a while; I felt pity for them; I found them attractive in a soft, velvety way; I dealt with them with a stick because I do not want more mice wrecking my storage boxes.

This episode has prompted some clear thinking about morality. What follows is an attempt to consider this subject in a fresh way, taking inspiration from Husserl's concept of intersubjectivity and Lifeworld, Bateson's systems theory, Von Uexkull's Umwelt theory and Schopenhauer's philosophy of will.

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1) All human actions have moral value because they are enacted in a transpersonal (transsubjective) dimension. All actions impact on the world, including the lifeworlds of other beings.There is no such thing as a purely private action.

2) Whether the actions are considered to be morally 'good' or 'bad' depends on the outcome, not the motive. Motive is determined by personal character, which is a given. Morality is thus about outcomes and not motives.

3) The driver of all action is the organic Will to Life of the individual. The expression or enaction of this Will is determined by the participation of this individual in their transpersonal (social / ecological) context, which supplies information feedback. Other individuals (human or non-human) are maximising the expression of their respective Wills, either competing with or collaborating with their neighbours. The result is contested or participatory trophic action-space, with feedback loops tending to facilitate or to limit/sanction behavioural expression.

4) Moral value (meaning) is assigned by participants to incidental actions producing outcomes in their lifeworlds. All actions are interpreted by and signify to some person or some living thing; they have causal impact on lifeworlds.

5) All outcomes are in-themselves morally 'good' as well as 'bad'. Absolute good or bad is an idea, but nothing more. Assignment of moral value (i.e. place on the moral spectrum) relates to the context in which the outcome happens. Context is an open, layered system. A morally 'good' outcome at one systemic level may have a morally 'bad' outcome at another level or on the same level. Moral value is assigned to the outcome by fellow participants in the transpersonal dimension. The individual is not in a position to say whether their actions are morally 'good' or 'bad' except through a) direct feedback from contextual participants, or b) introjected feedback.

6) We pay attention to the various implications of our actions (ends as well as means) on as many levels as possible. That is morality in action. We provide feedback about the outcomes of the actions of others as they impact on our lifeworld. That is also morality in action.

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My introjected feedback tells me I lack compassion. I suppose my fellow humans might tell me the same. The mouse-mother is not in a position to give me feedback about her reaction. Tonight a scavenging animal will probably find their bodies in the hedge where I chucked them; it will make them its own. A morally 'bad' outcome may have a morally 'good' outcome. This is the dance of creation and destruction, destruction and creation...

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Some interesting reading
* Simpson, B, Willer, R, and Harrell, A, 2017: The Enforcement of Moral Boundaries Promotes Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior in Groups; Nature Scientific Reparts 7, Online Article 42844.

Pholcus

Spider life continues at the Bungalow, and so does my ongoing campaign to keep it under control. I first realised I had problem in August 2013, returning from a French holiday and shocked to find the house had become a havishambling cat's cradle of  webbery. I'm talking about Pholcus phalangioides - the daddy-longlegs spider, spindly and twizzling when touched - not the trad house spiders Tegenaria atrica - large, brown, leggy gallopers. When the cat's away, the pholcids will play. Webs were everywhere, and a shocked awareness that my fortnight's absence had provided them with a wonderful opportunity to make jamboree. The work began: removal with plastic cup & postcard or - at my most ruthless - vacuum suction.

Today, June 4th 2016, I have removed three more specimens: a hen with egg sac from the bathroom, a small male from the spare room and a large male from the lobby (see photo). They were not there yesterday. I have learned pholcid habits. They lurk about unseen among the furniture - "in undisturbed, low light locations", as one website puts it [1] - until something (pheromones?) prompts them to rise: they climb up the wall then begin optimistically to spin next to the ceiling. That is when they become visible and removal become practical. The vacant space is likely to become filled again within a week, as natural territorial recruitment proceeds. Small spiders are so diaphanous that they are almost invisible in the shadows. It is best for me to wait until they rise - then cup them. It has become a form of domestic sport. All of them are taken out into the garden and released. Presumably the new environment is a bit of a shock to their system, as pholcids are a family preferring warmer climes, only holding on in Britain thanks to hospitable caves and anthropogenic living spaces. "Pholcus inhabits houses where the average temperature throughout the year exceeds 50ºF (10ºC)." [2]

Yesterday I removed another hen with eggs and two small males. The day before that, one specimen; the previous day, three. The removal process has been proceeding smoothly, even through the winter when one might expect them to be a bit less active. The temperate atmosphere in the Bungalow seems to suit them in all seasons. Last year I reckoned I had been removing anything from between one and as many as six spiders per day. Given a rough average of three per day, that made a sporting total of 365 x 3, an estimated 1095 individuals. Removals have proceeded at the same rate this year. Going back to 2013, I am looking at a running total of over 3,000.

Although pholcids have their place in the ecology of the Bungalow (for one thing, they are efficient predators of house spiders, which I don't like), my sporting campaign will continue. Even if I move house I dare say one or two of them will follow me somehow, and begin again their attempt to spin wispy chaos in my domestic world.


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References
1 - Animal Diversity Web
2 - British Arachnological Society

Shrews in my roof

18th August 2014

Today I took the opportunity to do some desk work out of doors, sitting on the terrace by the front door and proof-reading a book for a friend. Leaves were brushing the back of my neck from time to time as the wind stirred the vine there. It is a feature of the Bungalow garden: climbing up to the eaves and muffling the front of the house with a bright green jungle of stalks and questing tendrils.

The roof comes down to head height beside the front door. Twenty years ago we had a nest of hornets there. They were no bother - we saw them coming and going: they saw us doing the same; one of them was always on guard by the door to greet returning nest-mates and keep a weather eye open on the world; low-frequency murmurings heard at night, like Spitfires warming up on a distant aerodrome. I heard something different up there last week: a conversational twittering, scratchy and sporadic, like the sound of bats  - or pixies. I could not quite locate the source: was it coming from a chimney stack or a hole in the tiles? I had a vision of furry faces swivelling about in the semi-darkness of the roofspace, discussing something important.

My reading was disturbed by rustling among the leaf litter under the vine. Nothing to be seen. A few minutes later the rustling came from higher up among the thicket of leaves. A quick movement, and there - silhouetted by sunlight crossing a branch in the heart of the leafage - unmistakably a shrew, climbing about, hunting and exploring; perhaps nervously taking its first foray out of the nest, its nose twitching about in frenetic hyper-mobility. The identity of my nattering neighbours became clear.

The locals call a shrew a 'ranny'. I'd like to think that the Latin name for a Common Shrew, Sorex araneus, owed something to the East Anglian dialect, or some obscure Viking root of it revived by Linnaeus who named them. Its name has another dimension for me: odour. It reminds me of the word 'rancid', and shrews have a reputation for smelling bad.

Shrews in my roof.... The twittering is apparently a 'low amplitude, broadband, multi-harmonic and frequency modulated' sound used as a form of echolocation [1]. Coupled with a rosette of stiff but sensitive whiskers around their snout and a good sense of smell, that must be how they they find their way around in the roof. Their eyesight is said to be poor. Judging by size, I think mine are most likely to be the Common Shrew rather than the Pygmy Shrew.

I have always thought of shrews as being members of the Order Insectivora, along with hedgehogs. However recent genetic studies have shown they are part of an Order Soricomorpha (''shrew-forms') which they share with moles and a rare family from the West Indies called the solenodons. The latter are living fossils, with relatives dating back to Cretaceous times, over 65 million years ago, and teeth which can deliver a poisonous bite like a snake. Other shrews, including the Common Shrew, are said to have a poisonous bite, but this is due to a toxin present in the saliva [2, 3, 4]. 'It is a ravening beast, feigning itself gentle and tame, but being touched it biteth deep, and poysoneth deadly', says Topsell [5]. I have not yet tested the truth of this.

There is something primaeval about this animal. How old is the species Sorex araneus? Scientists have traced shrew origins back to the Heterosoricidae, a family living in North America in Middle Eocene times, about 45 million years ago; behind them must lie some ranny-like Cretaceous mammal, as yet unknown. Later, the Soricinae family evolved, to which my Sorex shrews belong, and the earliest fossils of the genus are found in Germany, in the Middle Miocene, c.11 million years ago [6]. The earliest likely British record for S.araneus is from Hoxne, Suffolk, dated 400,000 BP [7]. The site is no more than two miles away from my house as the crow flies, and only yesterday in geological time. The species itself is not quite as ancient as I had imagined.

Strange to tell, shrews are one of the most studied animals on the planet. S.araneus is one of the few species whose genome has been completely mapped, and as a result we are able to carry out detailed studies of its subspecies and their distribution in time and space. Some surprising results have emerged. 30 years ago we thought it was just one species, but it now turns out to be five cryptic species, each with distinctive genetic signatures which directly contradict their apparent similarities in size, skeleton and bodily appearance [8]. Externally the look the same, but internally S.araneus is 'characterised by spectacular chromosomal variation' [8], and shows 'one of the most spectacular chromosomal evolutions ever recorded in mammals' [10]; it has evolved an extraordinary wealth of chromosomal races (karyotypes).

Since 1987 S.araneus has been the subject of a specialist research group called the International Sorex Araneus Cytogenetics Committee. Through the work of Jeremy Searle and others, it has been possible to divide the British population into six racial types and plot their geographies; from this we can work out the story of how the Common Shrew recolonised Britain after the last Ice Age, having spent it sheltering in a refugium area on the Continent, most likely in central Europe [8]. Some of the genetic diversity within the species seems to have adaptive value, as slightly different karyotypes are found in different habitats, for example shrews in bogs are different from those in dry grasslands [11]. Apparently shrews are a rapidly evolving species, and this helps adapt them to changing ecological niches and ultimately leads to the evolution of subspecies and - on a much longer time scale - species. I have no idea which race my shrews belong to, but quite possibly they are of the Oxford race discovered by Searle which is typical of Eastern England [12]. It now seems likely the fossil S.araneus from Hoxne is one of the cryptic subspecies. David Polly's research holds out the hope that we may eventually be able to tell them apart by the details of their molar teeth [8]. There is a lot more to shrews than meets the eye.

Tonight I saw one climb straight up a brick wall and disappear under the eaves. They are evidently bold and enterprising animals. They are also fevered and vulnerable beings, who live with death as a constant companion. Shrews have an incredibly fast metabolism, and when frightened their heart rate can shoot up to over 1200 beats per minute [13]; their digestion lives on a two-hour turnaround, so if they go without food for more than a few hours they will starve and quickly die [14]. I imagine they suffer greatly, passing their short and passionate lives in a ferment of hunger and competition for food and living space. I have often heard them shrieking at each other, hidden deep in the undergrowth of some grassy forest - 'a rapid succession of shrill cries, which pierce the ears like needles of sound'  [15]. Gladiatorial screams of defiance, triumph and submission! If I wanted to tame one I would have to bring it offerings of woodlice, beetles and spiders, and promise to keep it in solitude. 'They love the rotten flesh of ravens', says Topsell, but I think I'd have to draw the line there.

From Topsell, 1658.

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References

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soricidae#Echolocation.
2 - Buczacki, S. 2002: Fauna Britannica; Hamlyn.
3 - Poisonous Shrews, at: Shrew Culture, Myths, Stories and Poisonous Facts; The Shrew (ist's) Site aka 'The Shrew Shrine' - online at: http://members.vienna.at/shrew/cult-poison.html [accessed Aug 2014].
4 - The poison is a paralysing organic peptide called Soricidin - see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soricidin  [accessed Aug 2014].
5 - Topsell, E. 1658: History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents; London; p.406. Online at: https://archive.org/details/historyoffourfoo00tops [accessed Sept 2014]. 
6 - Rzebik-Kowalska, B. 1998. Fossil history of shrews in Europe. In: J. Wojcik, J. & Wolsan, M. (eds.): Evolution of shrews; Mammal Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Białowieza, Poland. 
7 - Schreve, D.C. 2000: The Vertebrate Assemblage from Hoxne, Suffolk. In: Lewis, S.G. et al (eds) 2000: The Quaternary of Norfolk and Suffolk Field Guide; Quaternary Research Association.
8 - Polly, D.P. 2003 - Paleophylogeography of Sorex araneus (Insectivora, Soricidae): molar shape as a morphological marker for fossil shrews; Mammalia 68.2.
9 - Borodin, P.M. et al 2008: Recombination Map of the Common Shrew, Sorex araneus (Eulipotyphla, Mammalia); Genetics 178.2 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2248351/ [accessed August 2014]
10 -Taberlet, P. et al 1994: Chromosomal versus mitochondrial DNA evolution: tracking the evolutionary history of the southwestern European populations of the Sorex araneus group (Mammalia, Insectivora); Evolution, 48.3
11 - Wojcik, J.M. 1991: Chromosomal polymorphism in the common shrew Sorex araneus and its adaptive significance; Mémoires de la Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, no.19.
12 - Searle, J.B. & Wilkinson, P.J. 1987: Karyotypic variation in the common shrew (Sorex araneus) in Britain – a 'Celtic Fringe'; Heredity, no.59.
13 - Crowcroft, P. 1963: Shrews; Animals of Britain Series  no.17, Sunday Times Publications, London.
14 - Churchfield, S. 1988: Shrews of the British Isles; Shire Natural History, Princes Risborough.
15 - Wood, J.G. 1865: The Illustrated Natural History. Mammalia; George Routledge & Sons, London; p.434.
16 - Topsell, E. 1607: The History of Four-footed Beasts.