My Family and Other Organisms

    (with apologies to Gerald Durrell)

    Richard L. Howey, Wyoming, USA

 

Even when I was very young, I was curious. That could mean that I was rather odd or that I had a strong sense of wonder about the world around me. As it happens both were true and still are for that matter. I was also described as precocious (is anyone ever just cocious?–English is such an odd language.) When people so described me, it was usually a pejorative meaning that I tended to talk too much, blurt out things and interrupt, talk too loudly, and ask far too many questions. My second grade teacher wrote on one of my report cards that I tended to talk too much and interrupt the other students. (That was because they were boring as hell.) My mother kept all those report cards from 75 plus years ago, perhaps because she thought that someday she could use them to discipline me. She didn’t and I didn’t even know she had them until after she died at the age of 97 and my sister found them in an old box and sent them along to me. I have since shredded them–leave no evidence is my rule. You have to remember that handwritten report cards were the rule; there were no computers, not even any electric typewriters, and no portable phones at all that ordinary people had. If you tell this to the young people today, they look at you in amazement and marvel at how you survived such technological deprivation.

However, I interrupted myself. As I said I was curious and, at a very early age, I asked my mother where I came from. Her reply was the standard–well, the stork brought you. This seemed to me quite strange and I went to our large set of encyclopedias (those sources of brief bits of information about all kinds of odds and ends–before Google) and looked up storks. My first thought was that my birth was really a matter of my hatching from an egg, but as I quickly discovered the egg would be much too small to accommodate me. I learned that I was rather large at birth, weighing almost 9 pounds. So, I thought, perhaps they were mistaken and I came from an ostrich egg. As it turned out, that didn’t work either because the average weight of an ostrich egg is only slightly more than 3 pounds and furthermore ostriches don’t fly. Even as a 7 year old, I was outraged when people lied to me. I asked a couple of older acquaintances, 10 and 11 years old, what their parents had told them and they had gotten the old stork story too. When I confronted my parents, I got the “when you’re older and know more, we’ll explain it to you” gambit. At that point, I was beginning to suspect that I was some rather undesirable being that had been foisted upon them. After all, they were gone most of the time working, even my grandmother who lived with us, and so I had a great deal of free time on my hands. I returned to the encyclopedias. They took up the two bottom shelves of a bookcase that otherwise had mostly mysteries which my father read–Nero Wolfe, Erle Stanley Gardner, a big book of Sherlock Holmes, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I began with the first volume and was quite taken with aardvarks and their bizarre appetite for ants (also in Volume 1) and it was, in addition, my first encounter of the word “myrmecology” and thus began my love of words and language. My father never talked much and my mother talked quite a lot and she had a tendency to use a hammer on words that resisted her. My mother could never pronounce “aluminum”; it always came out “alunimum”, “ambliance” was “ambulance”, “simonym” was “cinnamon” and “bizzay” was “bizarre”. I think she may be the reason that, years, later, I became entranced by Mrs. Malaprop. It was in this volume that I also discovered amoebae and was thunderstruck–a creature that reproduced by dividing. Was that the secret that was being withheld from me “until I was older”? They had divided and produced me!? It was beginning to make sense; two years ago, they brought in another baby, this time a female and told me that she was my new sister. So, my father must have divided to produce me and my mother divided to produce my sister. My first scientific theory! However, I kept it a secret; I didn’t want them to know that I was on to them. Perhaps that also explains why I remained a virgin until I was 20. Actually, as I worked on through the letters of the alphabet in the Encyclopedia, I quickly gained a rather varied view of sex; everything from protists with more sexual types than we can track, to abyssal anglerfish in which the male fuses into the sexual region of the female to be encased in her tissue. He provides her with his sperm and she provides nutriments. Then there is parthenogenesis where in certain species of rotifers and copepods, no males have ever been discovered. I also discovered that there are animals which mate for life and others that are incredibly promiscuous and sponges and corals which simply eject sex cells in staggering numbers into the surrounding ocean and hope for the best. In the end, I have come to the conclusion that Mother Nature is unbelievably lustful and raunchy. The basic lesson here is perhaps that we should learn not to be too judgmental.

When I reached the “B” volume of the Encyclopedia, I was initially fascinated by bats–to glide and soar, feeling the air brush through ones fur, find food by echolocation and dive to seize it–glorious! The large fruit bats were especially intriguing. But, then I got to the section on guano in caves. YUCK! After that, I didn’t care what kind of super automobile Batman had, I never wanted to venture into his cave. Guano became a valuable commodity before the production of chemical fertilizers and wars were even fought over it. In the Chincha Islands, deposits over 100 feet thick were found. I quickly decided that another “B”, namely butterflies were much more appealing and, in a significant sense, that became a turning point. For most of the rest of my life, my interests in Natural History centered around invertebrates. There were a few vertebrates that caught my attention, but generally only briefly. I found the huge range of organisms, which were “without a backbone”, as some of my pugilistic schoolboy enemies used to describe me, to be so diverse, so full of mysteries and puzzles, that I knew that a thousand lifetimes could never answer all of my questions. It also allowed me a certain ophism; I permitted myself to regard my “research” activities as less a violation of nature than an assault on vertebrates. I convinced myself that my activities would be more justified in that they were not inflicting pain on sentient beings. This is still a sticky issue for me. I think of Roman Vishniac, who, in addition to photographically documenting the Holocaust, was a polymath who taught at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and he did a large amount of work in the fields of interference microscopy and videomicroscopy. One of his specialities was photographing living insects. He subscribed to the Spinozistic view of a reverence for life which Goethe and Albert Schweitzer also embraced. It is said that after collecting and photographing pond samples he would return the samples to their location. This was an extreme which I could not embrace and as a youth, before I had ever heard of Spinoza, Goethe, Schweitzer, or Vishniac, I committed mass murder on Paramecia and other micro-beasties without a second thought, but never gleefully. In my late teens, however, as I became aware of such views, I sometimes had qualms about my “researches”, although not because I was afraid that there was some vengeful Paramecium God who would exact retribution. I have never been comfortable with the idea of wanton destruction in any form.

In Volume “B”, I also encountered beetles and that was the start of a long fascination. There is a story about the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane the veracity of which cannot be definitively demonstrated, that on being asked by a theologian what his studies of Natural history had revealed to him about the Creator, Haldane is reputed to have replied: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” Of course, this is one of those stories that is too good not to be true. There are about 400,000 described species and there are estimates that the total number of species is likely over 2 million. In habitats which are being destroyed, such as large areas of the Amazon, through logging and misguided agricultural projects, biologists have been attempting to collect species and document them. They are finding significant numbers of previously unknown species. The destruction of such habitats may well mean the extinction of not only beetles but, of course, many other animals and plants.

I’ll provide you here with 2 links to my ventures into the realms of Coleoptera: Tropical Volkswagens: A look at some beetles and A celebration of beetles: A ramble all over the place.

I don’t want to drag you through my volume by volume adventure with the Encyclopedias, but there are some entries that had such an impact that they are worth mentioning. In volume “E”, I came across “Echinoderms” which, of course, includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, crinoids, and brittle stars. Of course, in earlier volumes, I had come across brittle stars and crinoids, but they didn’t really resonate until I got to the volume entry on echinoderms. What a fascinating, bizarre, colorful, mysterious beautiful collection of animals! This was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted over 70 years. My first encounter with a live echinoderm occurred during a family trip to San Diego to visit my mother’s sister. I was still in my mid-teens and bored by relatives and so I wheedled my way into permission to wander down to the ocean to stroll along and see what I could find. As it turned out, I had the beach almost to myself as it was nominally closed due to a mass beaching of large jellyfish, some up to a foot in diameter. Unfortunately, the only tool I had with me besides a net and a 5 gallon bucket, was a trowel. Well, I thought, I can at least cut out some sections and examine those. I learned an important lesson that day; things are not always as they appear. I singled out a promising specimen, but I was afraid that at the touch of my trowel, this extraordinary creature would burst like a water balloon and flow out and be absorbed by the sand. Ten minutes later, exhausted from hacking at it with all the force I could muster, I realized that not only was my trowel useless in this circumstance, but that this jellyfish was like a great blob of gristle and it became clear that this was no delicate organism that I could win any battle with. In exasperation, I went further down to an area where there were rocks and tidepools and there to my delight I found numerous sizeable starfish scattered around the pools. I filled my bucket with sea water and plucked 5 lovely starfish from the rocks and deposited them in my container and returned with my treasure to the house of my aunt and uncle. Everyone was surprised by my haul and asked what I was going to do with them. “Why study them, of course.” Adults could be so obtuse. “I’ll spread them out here on the driveway in the sun and let them dry out so that I can take them back home with me.” Home was 1,560 miles away, but I promised that I would pack them carefully and put them in the back of the car. I returned to the tidepools and spent hours gazing at all the tiny creatures there. I would have collected some, but I had no way to preserve them and they certainly couldn’t be dried for transport. I didn’t realize at the time that if I had put certain kinds of critters in some 70% rubbing alcohol, I could have had a miniature preserved zoo. Nonetheless, that little adventure taught me a great deal including the fact that when starfish are dried for only a few days, they retain a phenomenal amount of the odor of decay. After a few hours on the road, my father pulled the car to the side of the road where there was a trash can and he, my mother, my grandmother, and my sister all ordered me to get rid of my lovely starfish. It was put in no uncertain terms; it was either that or I could take my starfish and hitchhike the next 1,400 miles. I discarded them very quickly and leapt back into the car for fear that I would be left behind. My mother had sprayed some cologne to try to reduce the stench and the car windows were all wide open. An oppressive silence prevailed. And even though I was usually the family chatterbox, I too was silent for the rest of the day and part of the next until we saw a sign for a rock and fossil shop. I eagerly stated that it was imperative for my mental health to return home with at least some specimens. It would be hard to image a frostier reception, and this out in the middle of desert. One could have made ice cubes from the attitude inside the car.

However, when we got into Colorado, there were big signs advertising the Cave of the Winds and my mother and father relented and we did take a tour and they had a small shop where I was allowed to buy a few small crystals and polished rocks. Not the same as starfish however!

I need to return for a moment to San Diego, because on the trip we saw a lot of other animals. I recall visiting the San Diego Zoo with my parents and, at that time, it was regarded as one of the best. I still recall some animals in small wire cages pacing restlessly, trapped and anxious, ostensibly to enlighten and educate us as viewers. The overall emotional impact was such that I developed a strong distaste for zoos, circuses, parades with animals, dog races, horse races, not to mention bullfights, dog fights, etc.–in short, any activity that involves the potential abuse of animals for what amounts to “entertainment’ rather than any genuine education and development of empathy. As some zoos have changed, so has my attitude (to those that have changed). Major modern zoos have made a serious and sustained effort to approximate natural habitats for their animals and have transformed themselves into research institutions to better understand the behavior and needs of their residents and a number of them have undertaken the noble task of trying to preserve and breed endangered species. Nonetheless, there are still many zoos which are grossly inadequate. Keeping animals in captivity is a very expensive and labor-intensive enterprise when done properly. Many people now deplore and are shocked by such things as the 19th Century dancing bears that were a prized entertainment or by the royal courts of Europe that collected deformed, genetically mutant human beings for the entertainment of the aristocrats. However, we need to remind ourselves that even today circus sideshows still exist which exhibit “freaks of nature” (both human and animal) and that farm factories subject animals to appalling conditions. No, I’m not a vegetarian, but I do, nonetheless, think that we humans have an ethical obligation not to mistreat animals.

When we were safely back home, the usual patterns reasserted themselves and I was largely left to entertain myself when I wasn’t working in my dad’s café, peeling potatoes, sweeping floors, and washing dishes. What little money, I earned I had scrupulously been setting aside for something which I knew would somehow involve finding out more about Nature, namely a microscope. I had no idea where I could acquire a microscope, but my mother suggested that I read the classified advertisements in the local newspaper. I did this day after day, week after week, month after month for over a year and I was beginning to suspect a plot on the part of my parents to discourage my interest in microscopy so that I might instead spend the time practicing the piano. But then miraculously, there, in the newspaper, jumping out at me like an advertisement on a billboard was the terse statement: "Used microscope for sale. Reasonable."

This was on a Friday. I always read the ads after I got home from school. I ran to my mother and begged her to call. The microscope was a 1913 Bausch and Lomb with a 10x ocular and a draw tube to increase the magnification, 10x, 43x and 97x objectives, a substage condenser, filter holder, mirror, a blue daylight filter, a darkfield stop and a 5x ocular as well—all in a fitted wooden case with a key for $75! The man who was offering it for sale was a retired dentist. Since the next day was Saturday, I pleaded with my parents to take me to look at it (snap it up, was more like it!). My parents patiently explained to me that just then they really couldn't afford to lend me the money. I patiently explained to my parents that I had been working 15 hours a week for the past two years and although I had spent $65 for books and another $10 to acquire items for my lab, I still had plenty to pay for the instrument and so my mother took me to see it and, of course, the moment I saw it, I knew I had to have it. The microscope was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

For a couple of years, at the end of summer during the harvest period, I would be deposited at the farm of my Aunt Flossie and Uncle Bill to help out a bit. It was rather demanding and extremely boring work and would have seemed intolerable had it not been for the fact that on the farm was a duck pond and some other little pools scattered around. There was one small farm pond which especially caught my attention. There was a distinct scum on its surface and at certain times of the day, it was a rich green color and at other times a bright red color. At first I thought I was just imagining it and that impression was reinforced by the fact that nobody else around the farm seemed to have noticed it. I watched for several days and again and again observed the shift from green to red to green to red. That weekend my parents were coming out to fetch me home and I wheedled some jars out of my great Aunt Flossie and began collecting samples to take back to my lab. I collected in every pond and stream I could find, but especially in what I called my summer Christmas pond that alternated red and green. It was really more of a large extended puddle than a pond, but I knew that it contained something wonderful and mysterious. We arrived home late on Sunday evening and my parents insisted that I go to bed immediately. I prevailed upon them to at least let me set my samples on the lab benches and take off the lids, otherwise they would spoil and smell terrible. That logic won out, but I had to wait until the next morning to examine my catch. And this was my first and only encounter with what, at that time was described as Euglena rubra; however, I think that taxonomists have since been tinkering with it and altered its classification a bit–oh, well. The important fact was that this marvelous organism possesses both red and green chromatophores and when the light is very intense, the red ones move up to the surface to protect the green photosynthetic ones and that’s when the pond surface appears red. When the light’s of a good intensity, then the green ones migrate to the surface and proceed to create sustaining food–a miracle to me then and still a wonderful mystery.

Often the blendings of my failing memory and my fantasy please me far better than the starkness and imperfections of reality. Great Aunt Dean was married to a minister who ran off with another woman. She lived alone in a large old house on the outskirts of the city. The house was cheerful, but always had a slightly dilapidated air about it. There was a large garden with fruit trees and a few vegetables. I was never allowed in the upstairs part of the house and on hot humid Mid-Western Sunday afternoons, I would play alone among the bushes and trees while parents, and Great Aunt gossiped about people I didn’t know and relatives I didn’t like. Great Monarch butterflies, sluggish from the heat, would sit on the tips of twigs and slowly open and close their wings like elegantly painted miniature Oriental fans. The hot air would make me drowsy and I would stretch out under one of the cherry trees, only my head resting against the trunk and try to count the branches. Sometimes, however, when I felt adventurous, I would tackle the overgrown lilac hedge that ran the entire back length of the garden. A formidable, untrimmed hedge 15 feet tall and several feet thick. I would crawl into the middle of this jungle and there with my small bare hands and unprepossessing body, push and bend and twist, until I had hollowed out a hiding place for myself, secure and serene. From my secret hollow, I could quietly watch the wild beasts.

For some reason, there were never any savage natives. People didn’t interest me. The most formidable creature in the area was the neighbor’s large, ferocious, lethargic Persian cat and after much goading, this good-natured beast would sometimes play along and we would take turns stalking each other through the underbrush. One steamy midsummer afternoon, I hacked my way through the hedge out into the overgrown alley behind it. There on a large stalk of wild carrot, I discovered three-to my eyes–large beautiful Swallowtail caterpillars noisily munching away. I raced back to the house to plead for an empty Mason jar so that I might spirit these magnificent creatures home with me and watch them go through their wonderful act of turning into butterflies. A feat more marvelous than any circus act. I detested circuses then and still do.

In the late afternoon, my Great Aunt Dean would come to the back door and call to me to come and have some hot apple pie and a glass of milk. The house always smelled a bit musty and there was only one thing in it that really interested me. Off the living room was a small room that contained an ornately carved reed organ. I would finish the pie and then try to move unnoticed into the room with the organ. It had a wooden stool with a round seat that one could sit on and whirl around to raise or lower it. I would sit very quietly for a few minutes and just look at the organ, then I would reach out and play a massive chord which was perfectly alright with everyone because not a single sound would issue unless one pumped the foot bellows. Then I would pull out all of the stops and without looking, listen to see if the noise of the conversation would be enough to cover a cautious attempt at the bellows. And slowly I would begin to pump and then slowly and carefully push down one key and then another and then another. Very, very soon, it became time for us to leave. Even now I have very little understanding of cause and effect, but as a child I think I had some shrewd guesses in this case.

My unfortunate parents indulged my little passion to an astonishing degree. When the furnace in our house was converted from coal to gas, I wheedled and needled for weeks to be allowed to convert the coal bin into a laboratory. Grudgingly, I was allowed. I swept and cleaned and white-washed the walls, built benches and appropriated a stock of my mother’s canning jars and soon had not only caterpillars, but six white mice, frogs, dozens of tadpoles, spiders, three garter snakes, dozens of dishes of foul-smelling pond water and a 1912 Bausch and Lomb microscope. One day, my activities were swiftly and sharply curtailed when my mother found a jar of spiders in her freezer. Now I have my own house and my own freezer and as a symbol of celebration of that childhood curiosity, I keep a jar of spiders in it. (Well, I would, but my wife won’t let me.)

Not every Sunday was spent that way, for occasionally, and on the basis of no pattern I could ever discover, a Sunday morning would come around when it was suddenly announced that we were driving out to the country to visit my Great Great Aunt Dove. Aunt Dove was a formidable woman in her nineties, thin, stern and possessed of a hawk-like face. She still drove her own car, but she never came to visit us. She would sit behind the wheel grasping it firmly, her eyes fixed straight ahead, and she navigated. Woe to anyone or anything that got in her way. Her house was a rambling, white, three-storied monstrosity isolated and slightly forbidding. She lived alone. Her dead husband, Julian Asche had been Jewish and had been a musician and artist. There was much talk about his having been a musician, but almost never anything was said about his having been Jewish. The house was full of old instruments: two pianos, a violin, a flute, a trumpet, a zither, and a French horn. They all had the appearance of having been long unplayed. The walls were adorned with murals and on the wall going upstairs hung an old-fashioned bicycle with the very large front wheel and a tiny back wheel. In the music room, off to one side there was a round table with an open registry book filled with visitors’ signatures. Protruding from the back of the book was a sheet of paper which was a certificate of acceptance of a donation of thirty-three instruments to the orphanage, Boys Town, in Omaha.

The design of the house was highly eccentric. From the front door a hallway led to the living room which was in the center of the house and there were no windows in that room. Every other room on the first floor opened into the living room. An odd house for an odd old woman. I thought so then, I think so now. The most vivid memory I have of those visits was the ritual moment when my sister and I would be summoned by Great Great Aunt out into the yard where there was a deep stone-faced well. Aunt Dove would hurl the wooden bucket down into the well and we would wait and listen for the satisfying smack and splash against the water and then she would grasp the wooden handle and slowly crank until the bucket, brimming with the freshest, coldest water I have ever tasted would appear at the edge. She would ladle the water into tall glasses and then without fail, she would reach into the deep pocket of her apron and extract a packet of graham crackers. Then she would return to the house, leaving my sister and me to invent ways to idle away those long Sunday afternoons.

Then on to Plattsmouth and as we drove through the countryside, I kept an eye out for ponds and every time I spotted one, I shouted, much to the annoyance of my parents and grandmother, "Algae!" These trips were mostly a kind of family obligation. We would go primarily to visit Aunt Jessie and Uncle Ed. Sometimes, Aunt Jessie would come to Lincoln and stay with us for a few weeks to take care of me and my sister when my parents and grandmother were exceptionally busy. Aunt Jessie was very special to me and my sister and we always looked forward to spending time with her, partly because she did tend to indulge us a bit, lovely person that she was.

On one particular trip to Plattsmouth, there had been some fairly extensive road work and I was riding in the front seat and had been given “map duty”. My grandmother worked for the county and she was able to obtain a rough map of the changes that were being made. We arrived at an unfamiliar spot and a stop sign when my father asked me “Left?” and I replied, “Right.” He looked puzzled and said, “It seems logical to me that we should go left.” I again replied, “Right.” He reached over and snatched the crude map from me and then exasperatedly said, “Look at this. It’s clear that we should go left!” And I said, “Right. That’s what I was saying all along; it’s right that we should go left.” If we had been in ancient Greece, the look of the Gorgon which my father directed at me would have obliterated me instantaneously. I was quiet for the rest of the journey.

That summer I collected another sample that introduced me to an organism that still fascinates me 70 years later. I was observing some paramecia—in those days, my samples taken in southeastern Nebraska seemed always to contain paramecia—when something suddenly extended into the field of view and then retracted. I carefully moved the slide in that direction and came upon a clump of debris from which this something extended and retracted itself like a jack-in-the-box in convulsions. I watched and waited and finally, out from under the debris, glided a Lacrymaria olor-- the "tear of a swan". This remarkable organism can extend its neck up to ten times its body length! Imagine—if you are six feet tall and then by extending your neck, you could be nearly instantaneously 60 feet tall—that gives you some idea of how extraordinary this feat is. Many years later, I spent nearly two years, with the assistance of my friend Mike Shappell, trying to find a reliable procedure for culturing Lacrymaria. I did publish a brief protocol on the culture method, which works a significant amount of the time. Lacrymaria is a whimsical organism, but I thereafter had stable cultures for 12 years.

I had to take a biology course in my senior year of High School, but then I never took another course in the biological sciences and I am convinced that is the reason that I am still interested in biology. The High School course was taught by an odd little woman named Miss Schemel. A dumpy little woman who, when we got to the section on health, would swoop around the room with her arms outstretched simulating a fly spreading disease. The one contribution that she did make to my education was to allow me to devote most of my laboratory time to studying and writing about protozoa.

Since those long ago days, I still maintain my interests in natural history and especially pond life, echinoderms, beetles, butterflies, and tunicates, but tunicates are another whole story for another time.