Four Fifths a Grizzly: A New Perspective on Nature that Just Might Save Us All - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Douglas H. Chadwick is a wildlife biologist who carried out research on mountain goat ecology and social behavior atop the Rockies for years and has assisted other scientists studying harlequin ducks, wolverines, grizzly bears, and whales. He is also a natural history journalist who has produced 14 popular books and hundreds of magazine stories. Many of his articles have been for the National Geographic Society on subjects from snow leopards high in the Himalayas to lowland rainforests and the underwater kingdoms of coral. A founding Board member of the Vital Ground Foundation, a conservation land trust (www.vitalground.org), Chadwick serves as well on the Board of the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation, which supports wildlife research and community-based conservation programs throughout the world (www.LCAOF.org.). He lives in Whitefish, Montana.

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Prologue

Everything in a natural system is connected. This isn’t a platitude. It is the principle that explains how a mineral orb wheeling through the vacuum of space became wrapped in creatures―became a biosphere with mushrooms that glow in the dark, kaleidoscopic dancing spiders, puppies and kittens, six-foot-long salamanders that both bark and mewl, naturally cloned komodo dragons, jellyfish capable of reversing the aging process and existing forever, chimpanzees with 98 percent of the same genes we own making tools in an African woodland, and so many microbes that they outnumber the stars in the known universe. That’s life.

Microbes (short for micro-organisms, most of which consist of a single cell) produce a critical share of the Earth’s oxygen. They permeate the planet’s seas. They make weather: wafting through the skies overhead in unseen hordes that seed the formation of clouds. Billions pulse in each handful of the soil under your feet, manufacturing fertility. Trillions flourish in your gut and mouth and on your skin. You host trillions more in the form of ancient bacteria that evolved to become permanent residents inside each of your cells (and those of all other animals and plants), where they generate the chemical energy that powers everything we do―grow, move, feel, learn. • • •

On the top floor of his three-story family home, a boy sits at a desk in the light from a dormer window. As the eldest child, he was moved upstairs when younger children filled the second-floor bedrooms nearest their parents. At nine years of age―maybe ten now―he is old enough to have kissed a girl’s mouth on a dare, yet not so old that, alone in his loft on a windy, creaky night, he can completely ignore the possibility of monsters in the crawl spaces of the eaves.

The boy pitches for the local Little League baseball team. He mows neighborhood lawns and shovels sidewalks for pocket money. He hangs out with buddies in a garage loft clubhouse, joins them in exploring the steep bluffs on the edge of town, loves to blow stuff up with firecrackers, and gets into the occasional bloody-nosed scrap. For the most part, he’s a regular, rowdy kid. Yet, as he is doing now, he also spends hours by himself peering through a microscope. It is not from a Junior Scientist kit. This is an old, professional K&E (Kueffel & Esser) model with precisely calibrated lenses encased in finely machined brass. His father, a mining geologist, had used the instrument to examine mineral structures and passed it along as a gift. Each time the boy takes the microscope from its wooden carrying case and sets it out on the dormer desk, where the metal gives off a glow of reflected light, he feels a connection to scientists past and present, the Big League of curiosity experts.

There are three eyepieces of different magnifying power to choose from for placing atop the viewing tube. On a revolving turret at the tube’s base are four objective lenses of different strength that multiply the power of the eyepieces. The boy had peered through strong hand-held magnifying glasses before, marveling at the oddity of familiar objects like newsprint or the whorls of grooves and ridges on his own fingertips. But he had no inkling of what something would look like enlarged to 40, 100, or even 400 times normal size. He does now. • • •

At the start, he rummaged through the house and yard for anything that would fit under the lenses: salt crystals, cat fur, cereal, dirt, a leaf, a scab picked off his knee, beetle antennae … . Every familiar material he managed to bring into clear focus proved full of stunning details and promised to reveal more secrets under stronger magnification. When he tried that, though, even thin and fragile-looking objects merely turned into great dark lumps. So the boy crowded reading lamps around the platform, where the glass slide holding a specimen was placed. That helped―up to a point.

Soon, his father was driving him to a scientific supply house to get strong directional microscope lights and stains that brought out certain features of tissues and cells. The boy also brought home slides with a shallow bowl carved out in the center to hold liquids. At last, he could drop pond water on a slide and tour a globule of creation populated by miniscule squirmers and swimmers without them draining away when he moved the glass around.

Almost every day that he put his modest advances in microscope techniques to use, he encountered something entirely new, some form, process, or setting unlike anything he ever saw or could imagine before. This was mind-bending territory to be in. MoldLand: blotches of rot on bread, cheese, or fruit transformed into storybook forests; lollipop trees that seemed built from beads in one sample, a tangled filament jungle in the next. PollenLand: a smear of powder resolved into a galaxy of fertile sun-colored spheres, each with a perfect geometric pattern of golf ball-like dimples or urchin-like spikes―or both. BloodLand: the dab from a pricked finger became a flotilla of little round corpuscles―scarlet cells that looked like life rafts sliding past one another inside a slowly congealing swirl of organic magma. Often, the boy found himself holding watch over multitudes of different life forms at once within a fresh sample of water as they lashed, spun, squiggled, throbbed, and sometimes budded or pinched off spores or pumped out tiny eggs.

In particular, I―sure, I was this kid―remember my first success at keeping the semi-transparent wanderings of an amoeba in view at high power for a while. That single-celled organism brushed up against a smaller one and slowly, relentlessly enveloped it. I watched the captive swimming through the protoplasm of its captor until the amoeba dissolved the creature’s outer membrane and absorbed the streaming broth inside, turning everything that had been a separate existence into more oozing amoeba. Not long afterward, this predator twinned by slowly dividing itself into two roughly equal blobs. AmoebaLand: where it couldn’t be more clear that you are what you eat.

After pulling my eye away from the K&E, I puzzled over whether amoebas today might be descended unchanged from the very first one on the planet or possibly were that first one, which had been feeding and splitting through the ages. Many replicates must have died, but many lived to divide and copy themselves again and again. Could an amoeba be sort of immortal this way? What were the amoebocytes that our household encyclopedia described roaming the bodies of a variety of larger animals? The encyclopedia said they distributed food or got rid of wastes in some species, changed into different types of cells to build structures in other organisms, and protected many more by attacking harmful microbes. And what gave rise to the amoeba-like type of white blood cells that defend the human body by engulfing and devouring infectious “germs”?

Like the creatures I observed, my questions grew and took on different forms and proliferated. Although I was pretty sure that real scientists had worked out answers, I didn’t know how to look them up in professional journals and couldn’t make a whole lot of sense of the few technical explanations I did manage to find. But I liked trying. My usual concerns still ranged from trading comic books to raiding leftover dessert from the fridge before my brothers got to it, yet when the brass K&E stood lamp-lit and ready, I would travel again to unexpected realms and uncover more “lands” and more questions.

In retrospect, the best thing about those boyhood hours at the microscope is that they were powered purely by fascination. I never felt obligated to do what I was doing. I never had a purpose. And, as a pre-pre-teen, I was too young to care whether anybody thought spending so much time staring at mega-magnified stuff was geeky. My notions of what actually existed around, underfoot, and inside me...