Finding beauty in the beasts

Originally published 12 March 2002

EXUMA, Bahamas — The trop­ics are a won­der­ful place to con­sid­er our rela­tion­ship with oth­er species. I mean, you can hard­ly help it. Things that creep, slith­er, fly, or crawl invari­ably show up where you least expect them.

Geck­os on the bed­room wall. Ants in the sug­ar bowl. Fruit flies in the trash can. Cen­tipedes in your shoes. Giant hairy ground spi­ders (yikes!) in the flower beds. Hand-sized moths brush­ing your cheeks at night with their dusty wings.

As I write, my wife pops in to show me a scor­pi­on she found cling­ing to a bath tow­el. “Here’s some­thing to add to your list,” she says help­ful­ly, where­upon she shakes the scor­pi­on onto the floor and squash­es it with her shoe.

Yes­ter­day, we saw a 6‑foot boa con­stric­tor mak­ing its lan­guorous way across the driveway.

You can’t be squea­mish and live in the trop­ics, unless you are will­ing to share your space with a host of unlov­able beast­ies. Which is why we swat, spray, stomp, hack, and slap our way to crea­ture­ly soli­tude. Mouse traps, ant traps, roach bait, shoe leather, machete: inter­species mur­der is the name of the game. It’s them or us.

And yet, and yet…

The old­er I get, the less inclined I am to kill. It’s not that I’m get­ting sen­ti­men­tal. The ratio­nal part of me knows that inter­species mur­der is built into the very fab­ric of cre­ation; with­out it, nat­ur­al selec­tion would grind very slow indeed.

Of course, from where I sit at the top of the food chain I don’t wor­ry much about the strug­gle for sur­vival. The scor­pi­on on the bath tow­el might have giv­en me a minor sting, at worst. On the oth­er hand, a shark passed with­in 20 feet of me the oth­er day while I was snor­kel­ing. You can be sure I did­n’t waste any time think­ing about rev­er­ence for life. I got the heck out of the water.

No, it’s not sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. Nor is it eco­log­i­cal wisdom.

I’ve stud­ied enough ecol­o­gy to know that humans can’t sur­vive on this plan­et alone. We depend on oth­er crea­tures to main­tain the fer­til­i­ty of the soil, the com­po­si­tion of the atmos­phere, the sta­bil­i­ty of cli­mate, among oth­er things too numer­ous to men­tion. But killing a sin­gle scor­pi­on or boa isn’t going to throw the plan­et out of balance.

Nor is my unwill­ing­ness to kill reli­gious. I remem­ber Deuteron­o­my, of course (“I have set before you life and death, bless­ing and curs­ing: there­fore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”), which may be pret­ty good eco­log­i­cal advice, but it does­n’t mean much to me as a moral pre­cept. I cer­tain­ly don’t believe a supreme being will take dis­ap­prov­ing note if I swat that bed­room gecko with a broom.

Then why don’t I do it? Well, for one thing, the gecko isn’t doing me any harm. In fact, I rather like hav­ing such beau­ti­ful crea­tures around. I like the boa too, and the frogs, and the brown rac­er snakes, although I pre­fer them to remain out­side. I can’t say that I liked the shark, but there was noth­ing I could have done about it anyway.

The answer, I think, is this: My reluc­tance to kill has grown in direct pro­por­tion to what biol­o­gists have learned about the nature of life, and it has been my good for­tune to live in a time when our under­stand­ing of bio­chem­istry has expand­ed a thousandfold.

One of the nas­ti­est crea­tures around here is the female sand­fly, a no-see-um insect that swarms when the wind dies down and attacks your ankles with blood-suck­ing feroc­i­ty. Any­one who can resist slap­ping sand­flies has a greater rev­er­ence for life than I, but even as I slap I wince, just a little.

The sand­fly is small­er than a pep­per grain, but under the micro­scope it has every­thing you’d expect of a bug: six legs, wings, eyes, anten­nae, bris­tles. At a deep­er lev­el of mag­ni­fi­ca­tion one might see the vast and beau­ti­ful mol­e­c­u­lar music that plays unceas­ing­ly, the chem­istry of life. Some­where among my books and papers I have a wall-sized chart show­ing the chem­i­cal path­ways and cycles of human metab­o­lism; it is as daz­zling­ly com­plex as the plan for a vast petro­chem­i­cal fac­to­ry, and as sat­is­fy­ing­ly beau­ti­ful as Michelan­gelo’s Pietà. The sand­fly­’s metab­o­lism is hard­ly less com­plex or less beautiful.

Slap­ping a sand­fly is like throw­ing paint on the Pietà or smash­ing a Rolex watch with a ham­mer. All that elab­o­rate mol­e­c­u­lar machin­ery, the count­less cells, each with its spin­ning DNA, the tril­lions of atoms flow­ing in sym­phon­ic per­fec­tion: Smush!

“If you study life deeply,” wrote Albert Schweitzer,” its pro­fun­di­ty will seize you sud­den­ly with dizzi­ness.” And that’s why I’m more inclined to share my space with ants, cen­tipedes, snakes, and spi­ders: a dizzy unwill­ing­ness to destroy a thing that in its own way is more exquis­ite­ly con­trived than any object of human artifice.