Read Online The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Quammen
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animals, askance.
They are perceived as grotesque, menacing, unnatural, horrificâor sometimes just delightfully sinister, in the campy spirit of Vincent Price. Above all, they are seen as aggressive beyond their proper station in life. Their presumptuousness seems Promethean, with us for once on the side of the gods. Nature knows them in 450 different species, and the human imagination has been compelled to invent more. Those imaginary varieties grow to huge elephant-ear sizes and flourish in dense Hollywood jungles, feigning innocence among the other foliage, waiting to clamp closed on a cockatoo or a chimp. Minor-key organ chord while the chimp preens, oblivious, and the big ugly plant drools its caustic juices. Most recently we have Audrey II, the ravenous cabbage of The Little Shop of Horrors. But even Audrey is the epigone of an older model: On the island of Madagascar, according to legend, there lived a man-eating tree.
Some of the genuine botanical realities can be made to seem, on their own modest scale, almost as chilling. The American pitcher plants feed not just on insects but also on small lizards and frogs. A large pitcher plant called Nepenthes, native to Borneo, has been caught in the act of digesting mice. The biggest ofthe sundews, an Australian species named Drosera gigantea, grows into a three-foot-high bush of sticky, grabby paws. Then thereâs the gaping red maw of the Venusâs flytrap, armed along each lip with a row of needle-like spines that were once thought to be capable of impaling victims. My own favorite bit of lore, though, involves the collective accomplishment of a whole field full of common British sundews.
On August 4, 1911, in the county of Norfolk on the east coast of England, a scientist named F. W. Oliver came across a two-acre meadow carpeted solid with sundews. These pretty little plants consist of a rosette of club-shaped leaves radiating from a central stem, each leaf covered with small tentacles at the end of which is a knobby gland, each gland wrapped in a drop of glistening mucilage. In the meadow when Oliver found it, every individual plant had recently captured between four and seven specimens of Pieris rapae, a small white butterfly. Evidently the butterflies were a migrating flock that had flown across from the Continent, settling on this flowery field for a rest and a snack. They had chosen badly, and the flock would be going no farther. The sundews were in the act of digesting them.
By Oliverâs estimate, that field of plants had just eaten six million butterflies.
Now the Pieris rapae butterfly, in its larval stage, is itself a notoriously voracious plant-eater. For six million of them to gobble away two acres of vegetables would be a routine agricultural annoyance. So why should it seem more macabre when the tables are turned?
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
Evolutionary biologists have been intrigued by the varieties of flesh-eating flora ever since Charles Darwin, who wrote an entire book titled Insectivorous Plants. Darwin himself had gotten interested during the summer of 1860, just after publication of The Origin of Species, when (on a heath in Sussex) he stumbled across a large insect-kill like the one later described by Oliver. The perpetratorin Darwinâs case was also the common sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, and because that species was locally plentiful and could be cultivated at his home for use in experiments, D. rotundifolia became the main focus of Darwinâs book. âI care more about Drosera than [about] the origin of all the species in the world,â he confessed intemperately in one letter. He also harbored a special fond fascination for the Venusâs flytrap, which is a purely American species that Darwin had never seen in the wild, and which he called âthe most wonderful plant in the world.â Darwin begged samples of the flytrap from his American colleagues, tried to raise the species in his own
They are perceived as grotesque, menacing, unnatural, horrificâor sometimes just delightfully sinister, in the campy spirit of Vincent Price. Above all, they are seen as aggressive beyond their proper station in life. Their presumptuousness seems Promethean, with us for once on the side of the gods. Nature knows them in 450 different species, and the human imagination has been compelled to invent more. Those imaginary varieties grow to huge elephant-ear sizes and flourish in dense Hollywood jungles, feigning innocence among the other foliage, waiting to clamp closed on a cockatoo or a chimp. Minor-key organ chord while the chimp preens, oblivious, and the big ugly plant drools its caustic juices. Most recently we have Audrey II, the ravenous cabbage of The Little Shop of Horrors. But even Audrey is the epigone of an older model: On the island of Madagascar, according to legend, there lived a man-eating tree.
Some of the genuine botanical realities can be made to seem, on their own modest scale, almost as chilling. The American pitcher plants feed not just on insects but also on small lizards and frogs. A large pitcher plant called Nepenthes, native to Borneo, has been caught in the act of digesting mice. The biggest ofthe sundews, an Australian species named Drosera gigantea, grows into a three-foot-high bush of sticky, grabby paws. Then thereâs the gaping red maw of the Venusâs flytrap, armed along each lip with a row of needle-like spines that were once thought to be capable of impaling victims. My own favorite bit of lore, though, involves the collective accomplishment of a whole field full of common British sundews.
On August 4, 1911, in the county of Norfolk on the east coast of England, a scientist named F. W. Oliver came across a two-acre meadow carpeted solid with sundews. These pretty little plants consist of a rosette of club-shaped leaves radiating from a central stem, each leaf covered with small tentacles at the end of which is a knobby gland, each gland wrapped in a drop of glistening mucilage. In the meadow when Oliver found it, every individual plant had recently captured between four and seven specimens of Pieris rapae, a small white butterfly. Evidently the butterflies were a migrating flock that had flown across from the Continent, settling on this flowery field for a rest and a snack. They had chosen badly, and the flock would be going no farther. The sundews were in the act of digesting them.
By Oliverâs estimate, that field of plants had just eaten six million butterflies.
Now the Pieris rapae butterfly, in its larval stage, is itself a notoriously voracious plant-eater. For six million of them to gobble away two acres of vegetables would be a routine agricultural annoyance. So why should it seem more macabre when the tables are turned?
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
Evolutionary biologists have been intrigued by the varieties of flesh-eating flora ever since Charles Darwin, who wrote an entire book titled Insectivorous Plants. Darwin himself had gotten interested during the summer of 1860, just after publication of The Origin of Species, when (on a heath in Sussex) he stumbled across a large insect-kill like the one later described by Oliver. The perpetratorin Darwinâs case was also the common sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, and because that species was locally plentiful and could be cultivated at his home for use in experiments, D. rotundifolia became the main focus of Darwinâs book. âI care more about Drosera than [about] the origin of all the species in the world,â he confessed intemperately in one letter. He also harbored a special fond fascination for the Venusâs flytrap, which is a purely American species that Darwin had never seen in the wild, and which he called âthe most wonderful plant in the world.â Darwin begged samples of the flytrap from his American colleagues, tried to raise the species in his own
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