from the ground up

last sunday, the queen of trees, a documentary profiling the ecosystem that has developed around africa's sycomore fig tree, aired on pbs, and naturally i was glued to the set. i've watched it twice since then, and it only gets more enthralling. forest ecology, particularly in tropical or riverbank forests, involves enough staggeringly complex and precise relationships and interdependencies, sometimes directly between the largest and the smallest organisms in the environment, to make even the most diehard pesticide enthusiast question, however fleetingly, the wisdom of raining organophosphates down on his or her vegetable garden. if you are the sort of person who ponders dynamic relationships, or anything at all beyond the mesmeric circumference of your own navel, once someone points out to you how much of the world can hinge on a millimeters-long insect that you likely would have smooshed without a second thought, it becomes difficult to see any living thing as beginning and ending with itself. i've been up to my neck in food chains since i was in the single digits, and my bug love knows no bounds, so this documentary's painstaking exploration of the life cycle of the fig wasp, the sole pollinator of the sycomore, moved me to tears and applause. (youtube has some clips, and the pbs page explains how the filmmakers, victoria stone and mark deeble, obtained some of the within-fig footage.) the sycomore fig feeds more different types of animals than any other tree fruit in africa—and there wouldn't be a single fig on the whole of the continent if it weren't for this thing right here:


how could that not be the most beautiful thing you've ever heard? of course, depending on what else you've heard, it might also be the most terrifying; human beings don't have an impressive record when it comes to preserving the minute and essential fractions of the earth's microcosms. we're a bit short-sighted, aren't we, and prone to the occasionally unforgivable opinion that anything that does not immediately benefit us is an inconvenience which should not have to be tolerated. i was reminded of another pbs program (seriously, guys, send those folks some love) about brazil nut forests, which i commented on a while ago. it explains how another itsy pollinator, the euglossine bee, is carrying the weight of the peruvian jungle on its wee, irridescent back. this is the part that gives me nightmares, though: no one knew how important the bees were until the bees and the trees were separated. fortunately, there were still plenty of bees on the planet; they just had to be reunited with the appropriate flora, and all was as it should have been. but that isn't always the case, and it's likely that as we forge boldly forth into new and thrilling realms of global development and industrialization, it will be the case less and less frequently.

while scavenging the intertubes for more pictures of and research on fig wasps, like the devoutly dweeby entophile i am, i came across a discussion of what are known as "the living dead"—plants that are alive and technically well, on an individual level, but are no longer able to fruit or reproduce because a species, or more than one species, essential to the pollination process has disappeared. the example given was that of the calvaria tree, whose seeds were thought to have to pass through the gizzard of a bird before they were able germinate. theories put forth in the 1970s speculated that the extremely small number of calvaria trees on the island of mauritius—only thirteen were known to be in existence at the time—was the result of the disappearance of the dodo, which was driven to extinction in the late 1600s by extreme overhunting and the introduction of non-native species. there's been a good deal of debate over the validity of this theory since then, and many people now believe that a more probable explanation for the trees' decline is that new plant and animal species brought to the island by settlers damaged seedlings and competed for growing space. but in the book watching, from the edge of extinction, authors beverly and stephen stearns describe close to thirty plant species on mauritius that are similarly poised for slow extinction due to breakdowns in habitats and mutualistic relationships that are the result of changes made by humans. whether you connect a disappearance to a single species or a collection of disturbances, the underlying lesson is that every environment is surpassingly fragile and relies on precise interactions between all of its inhabitants, and we can not afford to disregard any one piece of the puzzle. i am perpetually flummoxed by the fact that this is such a difficult concept for people to absorb. it seems to only be fully embraced by fringe groups at either pole of the worldview spectrum—creationists on one end, who believe only god could have created such intricate structures, and zealous natural scientists on the other, who seem to be shunned by a fair percentage of the scientific community for embracing a creationist talking point and for not believing that mankind can overcome its own stupidity by employing its own brilliance. science is promoted as a means of fixing everything we have broken, but it's a losing game of catch-up if we don't, at some point, stop breaking things, which is all the delicate-web scientists are trying to convince us to do. and if it's all the creationists are trying to get us to do, then i don't really care what their reasoning is; a common goal is a common goal, and i'll be happy to have them on my side.

sometimes preserving a continent means loving a bug. care for selfish reasons, care for altruistic reasons, care because god says so, whatever it takes to get you motivated—just care. care because you don't like getting your ass kicked, maybe, because if anything happens to this bug,


and i find out you're responsible, i'm coming for you.