169

The Grand Puzzle

by
Scope Correspondent

A review of The Species Seekers, by Richard Conniff
464 pages, W. W. Norton 2010

Last week brought word of several new discoveries in the animal kingdom: leaf-cutter bees in Texas, transparent fish in Brazil; mouse-like lemurs in Madagascar; spiders in Sri Lanka described (worrisomely, to this reader at least) as “face-sized.” It should hardly come as a surprise that novel forms of life continue to crop up. Scientists identify over 15,000 new species each year, making it highly likely that another fascinating critter will have been uncovered in the time it takes you to finish reading the morning newspaper.

And yet, no matter how many times we hear of such discoveries, each one still carries a thrill, a small feeling of delight. For who doesn’t enjoy it when another exotic member of our teeming menagerie is uncovered? This instinct is an old one; humans have long sought to compile encyclopedic knowledge of all creatures great and small. From Aristotle’s earliest biological sketches, to the richly illustrated bestiaries of the Middle Ages (which included fantastical sea monsters and unicorns drawn from apocryphal stories), to the sixteenth century zoological work of Swiss physician Conrad Gessner, progress was consistent if uneven up until Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published his first rigorous taxonomical classifications in 1735.

But by the middle of the eighteenth century, the ambitious pursuit of life on Earth began to accelerate as veteran science journalist and nature writer Richard Conniff, author of Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time, delightfully recalls in his new book, The Species Seekers. The scientific innovations of the late 1700s touched off a mad scramble that saw a colorful array of explorers, colonists, daredevils, mercenaries, and naturalists fan out to the far corners of the known world. With vivid anecdotes that are by turns hilarious, disturbing, and strange, Conniff ably conveys the frenzy and zeal of these “species men,” giving his tale the brisk pace of an adventure story.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources including firsthand journals and notes, Conniff shows that species work was regarded as one of the great intellectual quests of the day. Nature was a grand puzzle and there was glory to be had in acquiring each piece. Of course, the word “scientist” did not yet exist in that day; species collection was still, by and large, the province of wealthy amateur hobbyists who acquired them compulsively through travel and trade, just as one might stamps or vintage automobiles. But there was pride wrapped up in the matter, too: To be first to find a species was to put a mark on history. As such, species seeking became something of a national pastime among the leisure class.

“It is not enough to discover and prove a useful truth previously unknown,” wrote the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, “but that it is necessary also to be able to propagate it and get it recognized.”

Conniff works from a rich palette of eccentric characters: Stamford Raffles, a merchant in the Far East who discovered the sun bear (ursus malayanus) while governor of Sumatra; Georg Eberhard Rumpf, a blind conchologist who acquired one of the most comprehensive shell collections in the world; Colonel P. Dejean, a French soldier who stopped in the middle of an infantry charge to pick up a rare butterfly and pin it to his hat. Dejean survived the battle and sent in his specimen to the museum to be catalogued, only to find that he was too late—another naturalist had beaten him to it. The history of species collection is chock full of near-misses and also-rans.

Familiar historical players appear as well. When the bones of a mastodon were unearthed in New York during late 1770s, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson all saw fit to weigh in on these Goliaths that they assumed were still likely to be roaming the American West. The notion of extinction crossed nobody’s mind, and while that may seem ridiculous in hindsight, Conniff astutely points out that these questions “could not be answered until they had been asked for the first time.”

Unsung heroes and hissable villains emerge throughout. Conniff highlights the largely forgotten contributions of Thomas Say, an American naturalist who explored the Ohio River and set the gold standard for detailed description of a species. He identified roughly 1,400 new insects during his lifetime, compiling thousands of pages of meticulous field observations. But Say was frequently scooped on his findings by his unscrupulous rival, a “brilliant crackpot” named Constantine Rafinesque. “Rafinesque was a species monger,” Conniff writes, “too drunk on the elixir of discovery to take much care with his work.” The vainglorious French émigré once submitted a paper claiming names for a dozen new “species” of thunder and lightning.

All too often, species collection played out in the shadow of academic grudges and personal vendettas. Take, for example, the case of Paul Du Chaillu, the mustachioed French-American explorer who regaled Victorian England with his tales of frightful West African gorillas only to be branded a fraud by colleagues. The naturalist John Grey made it his mission to tear apart Du Chaillu’s reputation on account of the latter’s penchant for exaggerating facts and stories about simian violence. But Du Chaillu found a defender in Richard Owen, the director of the British Museum, who seized on the gorilla’s alleged savagery to further his anti-Darwinian case for separation between apes and humans. Lost amidst the ugly “gorilla war” was the fact that Du Chaillu’s work contained some fine observations, including the first documentation of the ape’s strictly vegetarian diet.

Species seeking could also be quite hazardous to one’s health and Conniff includes a five-page “necrology” in memoriam of the ill-fated explorers. Some plummeted to their doom from cliffs and trees while straining to acquire rare beetles and birds. A few naturalists venturing abroad were executed as spies. Tropical diseases were frequent killers, as were encounters with natives. One especially cringes in the case of David Douglas, a Scottish botanist who had the misfortune of falling into “a pit trap already occupied by a bull.”

Of course, Conniff’s rogues gallery would add up to little more than an entertaining trifle without the author stopping to acknowledge the thornier issues of the age. The business of species seeking was as ethically problematic as it was scientifically fruitful. After all, what does it mean to “discover” a species that has been known to natives of a region for hundreds if not thousands of years? The explorers were often just colonialists by a different name. However, Conniff eventually decides that the messy age was worth it, if only because “gradually, we stumbled from the security of a world centered on our species, created for our comfort and salvation, to a world in which we are one among many species.”

It is perhaps inevitable that in such a sprawling historical survey, Conniff gives short shrift to some of the stories and characters he introduces. We get mere glimpses rather than full views (one wishes for more on female contributors of this exciting era, too). His section on the ultimate “species man,” Charles Darwin, feels perfunctory, perhaps ceding to more in-depth biographical treatments elsewhere. And Conniff’s enthusiasm for his subject runneth over in a tangential final chapter about early twentieth century malaria research that might be better served as a starting point for a different project altogether. These qualms do not, however, diminish an overall fascinating read.

The species seekers have not gone away. To date, scientists have recorded close to 2 million of them (with insects comprising the vast majority), but there is still a staggering amount of work to be done. No one knows for sure how many times the tree of life branches; best estimates put the total number of species somewhere between 10 and 50 million, depending on who’s counting. Modern technology has aided in the search, but also complicated it (genetic sequencing recently revealed that a single species of giraffe actually contained 22 subtypes, all of which must now be re-classified accordingly).

In other words, never mind those extra-solar worlds; our own planet’s biodiversity is enough to keep scientists busy for generations. It is somehow comforting to know that we are still living in the great age of discovery.

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