The Eye of the Sandpiper: Stories from the Living World

THE EYE OF THE SANDPIPER

STORIES FROM THE LIVING WORLD

BRANDON KEIM

Comstock Publishing Associates

A division of

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

TO MOM AND DAD

… by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and—to return to my first instance—toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable….

— George Orwell

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Trees of Life

Part I. Dynamics

Organized Chaos Makes the Beauty of a Butterfly

Chickadees, Mutations, and the Thermodynamics of Life

The Photosynthetic Salamander

Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase

Parallel Universe of Life Described Far beneath the Bottom of the Sea

At the Edge of Invasion, Possible New Rules for Evolution

A Mud-Loving, Iron-Lunged, Jelly-Eating Ecosystem Savior

Redeeming the Lamprey

Decoding Nature’s Soundtrack

Part II. Inner Lives

Being a Sandpiper

Monogamy Helps Geese Reduce Stress

What Pigeons Teach Us about Love

Chimps and the Zen of Falling Water

How City Living Is Reshaping the Brains and Behavior of Urban Animals

Reconsider the Rat: The New Science of a Reviled Rodent

Monkeys See Selves in Mirror, Open a Barrel of Questions

The New Anthropomorphism

Honeybees Might Have Emotions

Part III. Intersections

A Day in the Life of NYC’s Hospital for Wild Birds

New Yorkers in Uproar over Planned Mass Killing of Swans

An Eel Swims in the Bronx

On Waldman’s Pond

The Return of the River

A Chimp’s Day in Court: Inside the Historic Demand for Nonhuman Rights

Chimpanzee Rights Get a Day in Court

Medical Experimentation on Chimps Is Nearing an End. But What about Monkeys?

I, Cockroach

Part IV. Ethics

The Improbable Bee

The Ethics of Urban Beekeeping

The Wild, Secret Life of New York City

Earth Is Not a Garden

Add a Few Species. Pull Down the Fences. Step Back.

Feral Cats vs. Conservation: A Truce

Should Animals Have a Right to Privacy?

When Climate Change Blinds Us

To Bring Back Extinct Species, We’ll Need to Change Our Own

September 11, Fall Migration, and Occupy Wall Street

Making Sense of 7 Billion People

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to many more people than this space allows, but I would especially like to thank Betsy Mason, previously my editor at WIRED, for encouraging me to follow my curiosities and convictions; Kevin Berger and Amos Zeeberg at Nautilus; Brigid Hains at Aeon; Kitty Liu at Cornell University Press, without whom this book would not have been possible; and my readers, whose support and appreciation makes it all worthwhile.

Any writer, and especially a journalist, is a conduit for the knowledge of others. Last but most certainly not least, I am indebted to all those people who have so generously shared their expertise and experience.

First publication of each article was as follows: Organized Chaos Makes the Beauty of a Butterfly, Nautilus (June 2013); Chickadees, Mutations, and the Thermodynamics of Life as Evolution’s Contrarian Capacity for Creativity, Nautilus (July 2014); The Photosynthetic Salamander as The Salamander That Has Photo-synthesis Happening Inside It, Nautilus (March 2014); Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase, WIRED (November 2012); ‘Parallel Universe’ of Life Described Far Beneath the Bottom of the Sea, WIRED (March 2013); At the Edge of Invasion, Possible New Rules for Evolution, WIRED (March 2011); A Mud-Loving, Iron-Lunged, Jelly-Eating Ecosystem Savior, WIRED (March 2011); Redeeming the Lamprey as The Hated, Invasive Parasite That’s Actually a Key Part of Its Ecosystem, Nautilus (April 2015); Decoding Nature’s Soundtrack, Nautilus (April 2014); Being a Sandpiper, Aeon (July 2013); Monogamy Helps Geese Reduce Stress, WIRED (November 2011); What Pigeons Teach Us about Love, Nautilus (February 2016); Chimps and the Zen of Falling Water, Nautilus (July 2015); How City Living Is Reshaping the Brains and Behavior of Urban Animals, WIRED (August 2013); Reconsider the Rat: The New Science of a Reviled Rodent as The Intriguing New Science That Could Change Your Mind about Rats, WIRED (January 2015); Monkeys See Selves in Mirror, Open a Barrel of Questions, WIRED (September 2010); The New Anthropomorphism, Chronicle of Higher Education (October 2016); Honeybees Might Have Emotions, WIRED (June 2011); A Day in the Life of NYC’s Hospital for Wild Birds, WIRED (August 2014); New Yorkers in Uproar Over Planned Mass-Killing of Swans, WIRED (February 2014); An Eel Swims in the Bronx, Nautilus (July 2014); On Waldman’s Pond, unpublished; The Return of the River as Return of the Ghost Fish, OnEarth (November 2013); A Chimp’s Day in Court: Inside the Historic Demand for Nonhuman Rights, WIRED (December 2013); Chimpanzee Rights Get a Day in Court, WIRED (May 2015); Medical Experimentation on Chimps Is Nearing an End. But What about Monkeys?, WIRED (July 2013); I, Cockroach, Aeon (November 2013); The Improbable Bee, unpublished; The Ethics of Urban Beekeeping as Forget the Ordinary Honeybee; Look at the Beautiful Bees They’re Crowding Out, Nautilus (April 2015); The Wild, Secret Life of New York City, Nautilus (September 2014); Earth Is Not a Garden, Aeon (September 2014); Add a Few Species. Pull Down the Fences. Step Back., Conservation Magazine (October 2014); Feral Cats vs. Conservation: A Truce as The Dingoes Ate My Kitten, WIRED (May 2015); Should Animals Have a Right to Privacy?, Backchannel (January 2016); When Climate Change Blinds Us, Aeon (December 2015); To Bring Back Extinct Species, We’ll Need to Change Our Own, Nautilus (January 2015); September 11, Fall Migration, and Occupy Wall Street, unpublished; Making Sense of 7 Billion People, WIRED (October 2011).

INTRODUCTION

TREES OF LIFE

What makes us human? It’s a favorite question in the recent history of our species, asked by philosophers and scientists, answered in many ways: It’s how smart we are. How social we are. Tools, empathy, language, culture. Our DNA. Our hands. The answers are useful less as explanations than as insights into the zeitgeist. Among the essences of humanity to cross my desk lately are irrationality, gossip, and a digital sketch tablet.

Perhaps more insightful than the answers, though, is how we think about the question. It usually contains a subtle, fundamental assumption: that what makes us human is deeply important to us, and also what makes us exceptional. What sets us apart. To be human is to be different. My own values and experiences, however, and my work as a science journalist reporting on animal intelligence and evolution, tell me that doesn’t make much sense. I suspect that what matters most to me is shared to a significant degree by the average duck.

But to play the game for a moment, there’s one answer to that loaded question of Homo sapiens’ identity that I quite like. It comes from David Abram, a magician and ecologist who locates our uniqueness in a vast capacity for fascination with the world outside ourselves, and especially its nonhuman life. We really display our uniquely human beauty, writes Abram, when we allow our attention to move outward, toward the other shapes of sensitivity and sentience with whom we compose this many-voiced biosphere.

To that I would add: As we cast our attention outward, we return with metaphors and similes to make sense of what we learn. Mother Earth and cosmic symphonies and the mysteries of dark matter. Streams of consciousness contain seeds of ideas. Brains compute. These are, scientists say, manifestations of our powerful—and uniquely human, natch—symbolic thought. Our science also describes a tree of life.

There isn’t just one. A forest grows from our studies, the earliest limited by reliance on anatomy and preconception: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s separate trunks for invertebrates and vertebrates, Theodore Nicolas Gill’s vertebrates as descended from mollusks, Ernst Haeckel taking liberties with Darwin’s famous tree and perching humans at its crown. Later trees benefited from fossil records and then genetics; they’re a fine metaphor, conveying evolution’s fundamental truth of change across time. Yet they often contain their own conceptual biases: left-to-right or top-to-bottom arrangements, as though change is necessarily progress and species evolve in linear fashion.

These are conventions of graphic form rather than ideology, yet the trees still imply hierarchies of value that are interpretations, not biological reality. My own favorite, drawn by a biologist named David Hillis, isn’t even a tree. It’s a circle composed of lines radiating outward from the center, something like fungal mycelium or a star coral, except the lines—each an evolutionary lineage, beginning with a single common ancestor several billion years ago and truncating in a ring of modern species—also recall the golden-spiral geometry of a nautilus shell. It’s evolution as printed by Apollinaire. Displaying it properly requires a gallery-sized wall, and finding H. sapiens in the fine-print ring of species could take hours but for a helpful caption pointing to our name: You are here.

Which isn’t to downplay our achievements: antibiotics and rocket ships and supply chains, Breaking Bad and Chauvet cave art and Polynesian star navigation, Petra’s rock-cut architecture and the Manhattan skyline and the pulsation of 7.5 billion brilliant, emotional, playful beings. And of course the Hillis tree is still a symbol, with its own subtle implications, foremost among them taxonomy’s ordinal perspective. It doesn’t capture the scent of a violet, much less an ecosystem’s energy networks. But encountering it was a powerful moment for me, a lesson in humility and the different levels at which nature is understood.

I first talked to Hillis in 2009 while writing about the possibility of life’s origins in ancestors of amoeba-like creatures called placozoans. A few years later, I covered his research on a species of clam that’s physically hermaphroditic but genetically male, and reproduces entirely by self-cloning—although, every so often, they steal eggs from other clam species and absorb fresh DNA. The headline: Crazy Sex Trick Fuels All-Male Clam Species. This is one way to approach nature: a cornucopia of the beautiful and bizarre, of fantastic forms and behaviors that wouldn’t be imagined if they didn’t already exist.

In my work as a science journalist, I’ve written relatively few of those stories—not because they’re uninteresting but because when I started my career at WIRED, nominally a technology publication, they were topically a tough fit. It was easier to focus on biology’s dynamics: not tech, certainly, but cutting-edge knowledge. These dynamics—how evolution works, and then how life’s systems work—form the first section of this book.

The next section addresses the inner lives of animals, a perspective too often obscured by talk of populations and species. Here I use the term inner lives intentionally rather than animal intelligence or even animal cognition, terms that betray a self-serving tendency to qualify experience in terms of mental calculation. Other species might not be as cognitively adept as Homo sapiens, at least not on the tests we devise, but they too experience life as individuals, just as we do. Of course there are differences, and these are quite interesting: I’d love to experience time’s passage from the perspective of a snapping turtle sleeping through each winter. But the differences are less significant, I think, than what we have in common.

What happens when appreciation of ecology’s wonders and animal consciousness collide with 7.5 billion humans in an era dubbed the Anthropocene, the human age, in which our needs and whims have planetary consequences? As do, for that matter, our ethics and habits of thought, the way we understand other lives and balance their needs against our own? Epochal issues, yet realized in our everyday settings: a vacant lot, a dammed river, a pigeon with a broken wing. These stories make up the third and fourth sections of this book.

The stories map my own thoughts and questions over the last decade, during which time I’ve had the great pleasure and privilege of writing about science. Not all my reporting was about nature; often it involved more immediately utilitarian subjects—public health, genetics, human behavior—and was intended to address injustices and suffering, or simply to help people make better decisions. Yet nature writing was never a fanciful diversion. Always it was intended to enrich readers’ lives, just as working on these stories did my own.

To appreciate more deeply a skipper butterfly’s flight or a mockingbird’s songs, to look at a river and see something that yesterday was invisible, is no small thing. It is a richer experience of being human.

I

DYNAMICS

Like most anyone, I suspect, who pays close attention to the world’s news, there are times when my sense of wonder feels tapped out. The endless procession of suffering and hardship and humankind’s inhumanity becomes overwhelming; the daily firehose of attention-seeking headlines and sales pitches and social self-curation makes me want to stop paying attention altogether, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell.

Then I’ll happen upon some scientific finding—of bacteria living deep beneath the ocean floor, or unappreciated fishes who make their surroundings more verdant—and out pops my head, back into the world.

Of these seemingly esoteric findings, some people might say: What’s the use? What do mutation rates in horned toads have to do with anything? They have do with beauty, the joy of discovery, the sheer richness of a planet on which every leaf and blade of grass is fueled by quantum physical processes—and those forests and fields will, if left unattended, reproduce themselves indefinitely, sustaining life’s din for as long as our sun shines.

What a world! We are born in a very literal sense onto an enormous spaceship, one whose operation we’ve just started to understand. And the more we learn, the more extraordinary it is.

ORGANIZED CHAOS MAKES THE BEAUTY OF A BUTTERFLY

Take a look at a butterfly’s wing and you can learn a lesson about life. Not that it’s beautiful, or fragile, or too easily appreciated only when it’s fading—though all that is true, and evident in a wing.

Look very close, at the edge of a pattern, where one color turns to another. The demarcation isn’t so abrupt as it seems at arm’s length. It’s not a line, but rather a gradient.

This is a lesson about uncertainty.

A butterfly’s colors come from its scales, each a single cell, pigmented a single hue. At pattern boundaries, scales of different colors intermingle. Transitions and shading are achieved by varying the proportions of the mix. It’s beautiful. It is also, in the language of molecular biology, a model for a stochastic mechanism of gene expression.

Each scale’s fate is not preordained. Cells on the surface of a swallowtail’s wings, for example, were not originally specialized to be yellow or blue or black. Instead they contain genes potentially capable of producing each of those pigments.

What determines the color of each butterfly scale is, in a word, chance. A molecule hits a piece of cellular machinery at just the right moment, in just the right place, and a gene produces a certain pigment. There’s no guarantee it will happen. It’s a matter of probability and moment-to-moment randomness. (The same probabilistic mechanism underlies the portions of the wings with solid colors, too. In those parts, molecules that trigger genes for one color are present at such high concentrations that the final color outcome is assured.)

In biology, there’s a tendency to conceive of randomness as noise, an accidental factor, a product of error—random genetic mutations, for example, are mistakes in a chromosome-duplicating system that’s supposed to make perfect copies. Random mutations might be harmful, or insignificant, or beneficial, but they’re fundamentally mistakes, a disorderly deviation from an orderly system.

What makes a butterfly’s wings so remarkable isn’t just that unpredictabilities underlie their colors, but that they’ve harnessed the probabilities. Randomness and uncertainty are translated into the ordered, functional patterns of a monarch or checkerspot. And in this, the butterfly’s wing is not unique, but a manifestation of principles ubiquitous in biology.

Let’s put on our Powers of Ten goggles and increase our magnification to where cell activity occurs, the level of so-called cellular machinery. We’ll have to abandon that metaphor, though: Cells indeed contain complicated, task-performing structures, but the word machine is a product of the macroscopic world. We think of machines as rigidly assembled, with predefined purposes. At the cellular level, the analogy falls apart.

Out at the leading edges of theoretical and computational and experimental biology, where known and unknown meet, cellular machines have been redefined. The proteins of which they’re made don’t fold and unfold and operate according to some stepwise blueprints. Shape and function are exquisitely sensitive to infinitesimal energetic shifts, to the motion of atoms and the forces they exert.

Rather than a cellular factory, then, imagine a restaurant with a kitchen where blenders turn into convection ovens and whisks into knives when someone walks by, raising ambient temperatures by a fractional degree. Imagine that the whole kitchen is like this, that cooks and prep staff, though they move with intent, can’t help but wander around—and still the seven-course meals come rolling through the doors.

Undoubtedly this metaphor has its own problems, but it gets the point across: The cellular world is an ever-fluctuating place. It’s full of randomness and, when things aren’t narrowly random, with uncertainty. Atoms and molecules and gradients change from moment to moment, and proteins with them.

Here one might ask where uncertainty comes from: Is it truly uncertain? Might every molecular fate be predicted, if only we knew the motions and properties of every particle in a cell? Or does quantum physics enter the equation at some level, with all its spooky uncertainties and strange probabilities shaping biology in some fundamental way?

That we don’t know, and might never. It’s a question too hard to study. Whatever the case, certain molecular activities are, best as we can describe them, random or probabilistic. And we know, up at the cellular level, that a cell’s fate—whether an embryonic stem cell becomes specialized for service in kidney or liver, whether a blood stem cell grows up to carry oxygen or identify pathogens—is to some extent stochastic, determined by a signal that may or may not appear.

What’s extraordinary, again, is that from all this uncertainty, form arises. Two identical twins, after trillions upon trillions of cell divisions, actually look the same to our eyes. Out of disorder, order—though of course having identical genomes is no guarantee of identical outcomes. Indeed, stochasticity’s role in cells became evident when genetically matched yeast colonies, raised in the exact same environments, developed in very different ways.

What seems to explain that, it turns out, is variation in so-called epigenetic responses—processes that alter gene activity according to environment and circumstance, allowing organisms to change their biology in response to life’s unpredictable demands. The different yeast colonies had different epigenetics, they responded to uncertainty differently. That might itself have been the product of chance, some inherited stochastic variation, though the benefits are obvious. It’s evolutionary bet-hedging, a way of increasing the adaptive possibilities for one’s descendants, despite their genetic similarities.

Again we see biology using uncertainty, building on it, making it integral to life. And it’s evident not only in epigenomes, but in genomes: When we look at our own, which for each of us contain some number of apparently random errors produced by copy-making glitches, we find that the errors are not randomly distributed. Mutations occur at different rates in different parts of the genome.

This isn’t the same as saying that certain sequences tend to stick around over evolutionary time because errors there are more likely to cause problems. Instead, the potential for a random error to occur in the first place fluctuates across the genome. At every cellular level, randomness is harnessed.

Life is a study in contrasts between randomness and determinism, wrote the biochemists Arjun Raj and Alexander van Oudenaarden in the article Nature, Nurture, or Chance in Cell. From the chaos of biomolecular interactions to the precise coordination of development, living organisms are able to resolve these two seemingly contradictory aspects of their internal workings.

Do these resolutions occur at even higher levels? Pattern from chance in populations, species, communities, ecologies? In our own lives? We can’t look at societies or lives the way we do cells, but certainly we feel it, at some intuitive level. I think back on the trajectory of my life, and I think: I happened to bump into this person on the train, and it led to this or that, Raj told me. So many things are unpredictable on a long time scale, though it feels like they are predictable in the moment.

I think on my own life: My parents met on a train. My closest friends came from chance encounters in a subway station, a class, a hockey team, a writing assignment. I can’t imagine my life without them, yet each of those meetings was profoundly, unsettlingly improbable. And why stop with friendships? Why not scale up to the level of the universe itself, where order and disorder interpolate in random patterns?

There, perhaps, from the perspective of God or some alien cosmologist or deep time or whatever you use to imagine inconceivable vastness, we might find order yet again. Who knows for certain; we likely never will. But we can look at a butterfly’s wing and wonder.

CHICKADEES, MUTATIONS, AND THE THERMODYNAMICS OF LIFE

One of my favorite pastimes while traveling is watching birds. Not rare birds, mind you, but common ones: local variations on universal themes of sparrow and chickadee, crow and mockingbird.

I enjoy them in the way that other people appreciate new food or architecture or customs, and it can be a strange habit to explain. You’re 3,000 miles from home, and less interested in a famous statue than the pigeon on its head?! Yet there’s something powerfully fascinating about how familiar essences take on slightly unfamiliar forms; an insight, even, into the miraculous essence of life, a force capable of resisting the universe’s otherwise inevitable tendency to come to rest.

Take, for example, a small songbird known as the willow tit, encountered on a recent trip to Finland and closely related—Poecile montanus to Poecile atricapillus—to the black-capped chickadee, the official bird of my home state of Maine. To the naked eye, there’s not much to distinguish between them. Both are small, with black-and-white heads and gray-black wings, seed-cracking bills, and a gregarious manner. For a long time, they were even thought to be the same species. The