Invisible Beasts (21 page)

“I know where it is,” she said.

“Well, on my contract, it says ‘
shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo
.'”

“If that's what it says, that's what you're covered for,” said the gal in benefits.

C
ONSIDER, NOW, THE RECENT
subprime mortgage bubble in this context. Defaulting homeowners are blamed for signing contracts that they shouldn't have. Yet when people don't suspect that invisible rotifers have infested their mortgage contracts, how likely are they to question the fine print? Imagine a young couple, not well off, striving to impress a loan officer at a bank. Let's say they look at their contract before signing and try to understand it. Are they really going to mention the foraging route that I call “flock of ducks”? In such circumstances, would
you feel comfortable saying to your banker, “Could you please explain what is meant by ‘
gegg egg wakwak gegg egg wakwak gegg egg wakwak?'
” Wouldn't you rather just sign? Consider, too, the scandal of robo-signing, so-called, which has swept the country in the wake of the housing crisis. Think of the millions of foreclosure cases in court, their files stuffed with mortgage assignments, satisfactions, affidavits, and other printed matter used to evict people from their homes—those potent papers which we have discovered to bear the same relation to reality as dark grimoires, invoking fantastical transactions signed by phantasmal bank officials never born of woman. This is not the work of human beings. This is the work of Fine-Print Rotifers, making themselves fat.

W
HY DO
FPR
S EAT ONLY FINE PRINT
? Tight-packed print affords them easier grazing, of course. But natural selection pressures, in the past, have also influenced their choice.

Long ago, FPRs grazed on many kinds of print and even ink blots. I have seen, in the library of my cousin who collects incunabula, an ancient Greek text emended by the great Renaissance scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who believed that all humans were foolish and therefore should be loved, because even Christ was a fool—a holy one. In this fragile old book, Erasmus's name was inked out, wherever it appeared, by church officials who had
disapproved of him, especially his notorious wedding of philosophy and religion in the prayer
O Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis!
Over and over, Erasmus's name was blotted with a thick black stroke, so that future generations would not consider Socrates to be any kind of saint. But when I saw the book, those strokes had all but vanished, leaving only faint stains around the clear, sharp letters of Erasmus's name. It was wonderful to deduce, from this, the greed with which the Fine-Print Rotifers of the Renaissance had fallen on the censor's rich, thick ink. That they hadn't eaten Erasmus's name under the blots suggests that, by the time it appeared, the rotifers were gorged and glutted to the point where dessert excites only stifled moans. Through the next two centuries, FPRs continued to graze in the pastures of early modern print. Torrents of inked words in unpredictable spellings gave the rotifers an endless variety of specialized foraging routes. One has only to skim sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents to hear, in imagination, the contented burps of rotifers finding treats around every
y
and
e
. I suspect that Fine-Print Rotifers even lent a hand, or cilium, to Shakespeare—
hey nonny nonny
sounds just like them.

But nothing lasts forever, and in the nineteenth century, the standardization of English spelling put a halt to that orgy of nourishment by severely restricting the rotifers' foraging routes. FPRs went through a decimation of all subspecies that had acquired orthographically messy routes as bad spelling was tossed into fireplaces, and hordes
of English-eating rotifers suffered, for the sake of lunch, the fate of heretics. Natural selection favored those that consumed print less likely to draw critical attention—and what draws less critical attention than legal fine print? The Darwinian die was cast: evolution ensured the dominance of our modern FPRs.

They can also be found, though rarely, in books printed with double columns and small fonts. I have in my possession a double-column, Everyman's Library edition of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
that exhibits FPR activity, shown below, in chapter XV.

Such is the constitution of civil society, that, whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honours, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance, and
shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo shnoo

—which spoils Gibbon's eloquence, but unwittingly underscores his somber point.

Cyclically Invisible Beasts

1

I
t's common knowledge that primates have an imitative streak. More surprisingly, so do fireflies. This is the only instance for which I can vouch of cyclical invisibility in the animal world: a case of invisibility proving to be so mixed a blessing that it is eventually abandoned for lesser evils, which, over time, become greater evils than invisibility's drawbacks, and so on. It is a bracing tale to ponder the next time you discover the light within yourself that nature put there to be seen
.

Beacon Bugs

“H
AIL
, H
OLY
L
IGHT
!” sang Milton. Who doesn't welcome light into a darksome world? Beacon Bugs, that's who. This native firefly species exhibits a unique feature: cyclical invisibility. They are invisible over periods of twenty-nine years; like cicadas, their cycle revolves around a prime number, the better to elude predators. (Beacon Bugs have a doozy of a predator to elude.) Then they produce one generation that outshines every other firefly species. For a few weeks, they are a glory, a far-flung, bedazzling beacon, a revelation of radiance, reminding themselves and all creation that an invisible firefly is a contradiction in terms and that if you make light, you should be seen. Humanity becomes aware of them at this point, and suffers the consequences.

All fireflies are creatures of incandescent romance. They cannot be bred in laboratories any more than love can. During courtship, the male offers his mate a gift of something nutritious—this isn't an entomology textbook, so let's call it chocolate. The happy couple deposits their
eggs on the ground (not troubling with nest construction, free spirits that they are) and the larvae burrow, becoming glowworms, carrying the torch of firefly heritage almost from the moment when they were gleams in their parents' abdomens. And nothing, to a human eye, seems as dreamily romantic as the fireflies' mating flight.

The mating flight is a North American custom. Old World firefly courtships are sedate and communal: males fill up a tree and put on a light show, all together, to attract females (for some reason, one recalls the Red Army Chorus). On our shores, however, each male firefly goes for a solo evening cruise, flashing his tail lights over lawns, at dusk. You see glimmer-ribbons of fireflies hovering in a lovely layer, a few feet above the grass; you follow the floating sparks, living love letters scribbled on the dusk, begging, importuning a mate whose body, delicious, burning ripe, is hidden in the dimness. It's dark, you're still looking at the fireflies, you're thinking about how nice romance is and how the fireflies are all getting some, and being—forgive me—oblivious to the nightmare taking place under your nose.

A male firefly wafts over the tips of towering grasses, working his lights, flashing the code signal engrained in him for the sake of the rapturous moment when a female, receptive, eager, illumines herself in response. After a scintillating exchange, he tumbles from the air. He meets his bride. She flips him on his back, pinning him down with six pretty feet—she's bigger than he is—and proceeds
to rip into his soft belly, tugging at his flesh, chewing with the steely mandibles of the predator genus
Photuris
. Her antennae vibrate with voracity; rude smackings echo through the grass roots. Poor lovelorn bug! He hasn't mated, he hasn't reproduced; he dies. She was the wrong kind. To her, he was just a piece of meat.

This scary proceeding is called “aggressive mimicry.” Female
Photuris
fireflies mimic the mating flashes of other species' females, to trap and eat unwary males.
Photuris
is a real horror, a remorseless insecticide, a gothic subfamily curse, and the fatalest of femme fatales. To woo a female of his species, the
Photuris
male must trick her by imitating the flashes of another species' male—then, as the
Photuris
lady is getting out her (figurative) sushi knives, he drops his disguise and starts flashing dirty firefly talk. From a safe distance. If he's even sneakier, he imitates the
female
of another species. This draws the poor suckers of unwary males as well as the greedy
Photuris
girl, whetting her (figurative) kebab skewers. What happens? The
Photuris
male-in-drag ambushes the other males, opportunistically eats them, and then, taking every precaution . . . How tasteless.

Why don't the victimized fireflies change their mating signals? Oh, they do. North American fireflies continuously update their luminous codes, but what can I say—
Photuris
is an aggressive mimic, by definition, by inclination, and by vocation. She probably gets a kick out of cracking codes before dinner. Reader, look at your evening
lawn, how it sparkles, flashes, and glimmers! A lagoon of love crisscrossed by pirates flying false colors, sowing deception, death, and the shipwreck of happiness, and all through the pure medium of light. It's July, but honestly, aren't your bare feet getting cold?

B
EACON
B
UGS ARE THE FIREFLY SPECIES
that has taken the most drastic step in self-defense. In each twenty-nine-year period, all generations of Beacon Bugs, except for one, are invisible. They can't be seen and they don't glow. Lights extinguished, the first invisible generations show a healthy population bulge, saved from the depredations of
Photuris
and her jerky boyfriends, as well as a host of other predators. My statistics heave a sigh of relief. But then they puzzle: instead of leveling off, the Beacon Bug population gradually declines. The last invisible generation is so thin on the ground it's practically decimated. Why should a powerful defensive strategy accompany the decline of the species it protects?

Some hypotheses come to mind. A firefly's flash can discourage predators who don't like a meal that blinds them. With the tactic of lightlessness, Beacon Bugs risk drawing predators that they haven't faced before. Invisible animals can see one another, and in spring, for example, the world is as full of invisible frogs and toads as it is lacking in charming princes. There's no free lunch, especially if you are lunch. Another hypothesis might
better explain the decline's gradualness. Like many fireflies, Beacon Bugs spend some two years in larval form, underground. A lot can change in two years: a meadow can be paved, dug up, flooded. When the larvae emerge—well, have you ever driven around an unfamiliar neighborhood in the dark, without headlights, looking for someone? Perhaps the newly adult Beacon Bugs have trouble meeting up, and become gradually separated into smaller, more vulnerable groups. Since, however, fireflies are flying enigmas whose glow tantalizes the laboratories that can't tame them, let's forget reasonable hypotheses. Just for the argument, let's try love. If you were a Beacon Bug, how would you feel about mating with somebody who groped his way toward you, looking—not to put too fine a point on it—like a cockroach? Maybe the Beacon Bugs fail to multiply because they feel increasingly, pardon the expression,
turned off?

With this in mind, let us ponder the scandalous wreck of the luxury sloop
Folly
, which went aground and burned on Niagara Reef in Lake Erie one cloudy summer night, drowning the magnate Hoagland “Hog” Makemerry and his young wife, Tipple. The family dragged the skipper through a televised trial; long yarn short, he swore under oath that he'd navigated toward the Toledo harbor light. Not the gas buoy in the reef, no, the lighthouse beam, he was certain. The bellies of viewing audiences shook with laughter from Cleveland to Detroit. The prosecutor, vengefully cordial, asked the skipper if he reckoned the
distance between the Toledo light and Niagara Reef? He did know the distance? Was the figure he said he knew in miles, or was it in feet? Oh, miles. Then he couldn't have seen the Toledo light, could he? Harrowed but curt, the defendant stuck to his story about a lighthouse beam, even after the bench's comment, which was, “Glug, glug.”