Originally published 22 March 1999
EXUMA, Bahamas — Every paradise has its snake, as Adam and Eve learned to their chagrin.
The fact that the sweet-talking reptile was there at all means that Eden wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. A paradise with a snake was flawed even before Eve bit the apple by most people’s estimation. Snakes are surely the planet’s least popular creature.
This Bahamian paradise has three reptilian inhabitants: the five-inch worm snake, the mid-sized brown racer, and the gargantuan Antillean boa constrictor.
I’ve been looking for a live boa ever since I started coming to this island. I finally met one last week, sprawled across a woodland path — six feet long and as big around as my arm. We regarded each other with mutual curiosity. I managed to get within spitting distance before he turned tail and ran.
The Bahamians call the boa the fowl snake, presumably because it is purported to take chickens from the yard. I’ve heard it said by islanders that a fowl snake will take a baby from its cradle, but I don’t believe it for a minute. A no less preposterous version is that a fowl snake will steal milk from a baby’s bottle. The creature comes wrapped in demonic myths of every sort, as behooves the largest and creepiest — although non-venomous — wild animal on the island.
The same day that I encountered the boa I also met a giant hairy ground spider — another first. These hand-sized monsters hunt mostly at night, dining on such delicacies as lizards and mice. Their bite is no more dangerous than a bee sting, but the one I met as I tramped though the woods scared me half to death. If that spider had been anywhere closer to home I would have whacked it with a shovel.
The Bahamian ground spider belongs to a family known as the hairy mygalomorphs, an appropriately unattractive moniker for such an unattractive animal, but everyone here calls them “tarantulas,” which technically they aren’t. They call tarantulas “tarantulas” too, which is a source of some confusion. In any case, the hairy mygalomorph, with its eight eyes and eight legs is no more popular than the boa.
I told my neighbor about seeing a fowl snake and a “tarantula.” She said, “I don’t like no creature with more or less limbs than me.”
Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson would say she doesn’t have much choice in her adverse reaction to the boa and spider. It is all part of something he calls biophilia, “love of life” — an innate emotional entanglement of human beings with other living organisms.
Certainly, the human brain evolved during the 99 percent of human history during which our ancestors lived as hunter/gatherers in a biologically diverse environment. A residue of that long experience is hardwired into our emotional circuits, Wilson believes, which is why we like to visit zoos and live in park-like environments similar to the African savannas where our species had its infancy.
Part of biophilia might be more appropriately called biophobia — an aversion to animals or environments that once represented significant threats to human security. These include, of course, snakes and spiders, both of which can be seriously venomous. We have snakes and spiders on the brain, says Wilson, and not only on the brain but also in the genes.
He goes so far as to draw a moral lesson: Other species are our kin, both biologically and — in the biophilia sense — psychologically, and therefore worthy of our affection, respect and conservation. Allowing our violent tendencies to destroy a world in which the brain was assembled over millions of years is a risky step, he says.
He may be right, but I wonder what the warmly biophilic E. O. Wilson would do if he found a hairy mygalomorph in his shoe closet.
Another unpopular creature in these parts is the giant bat moth, dark brown, almost black, delicately mottled, with an eight-inch wingspan. We find them almost every evening plastered to the outside of the window screens, looking wonderfully diabolical.
Cubans call them brujas, “witches”, and believe they are the embodied spirits of the dead. In the Bahamas, too, they are looked upon as unlucky and otherworldly. They are, of course, totally harmless, and if they evoke a strong emotional reaction it is probably because of their resemblance to bats. Whether and why our almost universal fear of bats is biophobic remain to be seen.
Wilson believes we will never work out an appropriate relationship with the other species of this planet until we recognize the degree to which our emotional lives are shaped by human genetic/cultural coevolution in intimate contact with creatures both beneficial and threatening. “Our spirit is woven from it,” he says, “hope rises on its currents.”
And even now, as I write, the bat moth outside my window screen takes wing, rises on currents of air, to fly, perhaps, to my neighbor’s house, where it will meet the emotional history of our species in the form of a fatal splat with a rolled-up copy of yesterday’s Nassau Tribune.
