Authors: Gerald Durrell
‘Aha!’ he said, his beard bristling and a keen light of interest in his eyes. ‘Um, yes. Very interesting. Elvers.’
What kind of snake was an elver, I inquired, and why were they all travelling in a procession?
‘No, no,’ said Theodore. ‘They are not snakes. They are baby eels and they appear to be, um… you know, making their way down to the lake.’
Fascinated, I crouched over the long column of baby eels, wriggling determinedly through the stone and grass and prickly thistles, their skins dry and dusty. There seemed to be millions of them. Who, in this dry, dusty place, would expect to find eels wriggling about?
‘The whole, um… history of the eel,’ said Theodore, putting his collecting box on the ground and seating himself on a convenient rock, ‘is very curious. You see, at certain times the adult eels leave the ponds or rivers where they have been living and, er… make their way down to the sea. All the European eels do this and so do the North American eels. Where they went to was, for a long time, a mystery. The only thing, um… you know… scientists knew was that they never came
back
, but that eventually these baby eels would return and repopulate the same rivers and streams. It was not until after quite a number of years that people discovered what really happened.’
He paused and scratched his beard thoughtfully.
‘All the eels made their way down to the sea and then swam through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, until they reached the Sargasso Sea, which is, as you know, off the northeastern coast of South America. The… um… North American eels, of course, didn’t have so far to travel, but they made their way to the same place. Here they mated, laid their eggs, and died. The eel larva, when it hatches out, is a very curious, um… you know… leaf-shaped creature and transparent, so unlike the adult eel that for a long time it was classified in a separate genus. Well, these larvae make their way slowly backwards to the place where their parents have come from and by the time they reach the Mediterranean or the North American shore, they look like these.’
Here Theodore paused and rasped his beard again and
delicately inserted the end of his cane into the moving column of elvers so that they writhed indignantly.
‘They seem to have a very um… you know… strong homing instinct,’ said Theodore. ‘We must be some two miles from the sea, I suppose, and yet all these little elvers are making their way across this countryside in order to get back to the same lake that their parents left.’
He paused and glanced about him keenly and then pointed with his stick.
‘It’s quite a hazardous journey,’ he observed, and I saw what he meant, for a kestrel was flying like a little black cross just above the line of baby eels, and as we watched he swooped and flew away with his claws firmly gripping a writhing mass of them.
As we walked on, following the line of eels, since they were going in the same direction, we saw other predators at work. Groups of magpies and jackdaws and a couple of jays flew up at our approach and we caught, out of the corner of our eye, the red glint of a fox disappearing into the myrtle bushes.
When we reached the lake-side, we had a set pattern of behaviour. First we would have a prolonged discussion as to which olive tree would be the best to put some of our equipment and our food under – which one would cast the deepest and the best shade at noon. Having decided on this, we would make a little pile of our possessions under it and then, armed with our nets and collecting boxes, we would approach the lake. Here we would potter happily for the rest of the morning, pacing with the slow concentration of a pair of fishing herons, dipping our nets into the weed-filigreed water. Here Theodore came into his own more than anywhere else. From the depths of the lake, as he stood there with the big scarlet dragon-flies zooming like arrows round him, he would extract magic that Merlin would have envied.
Here in the still, wine-gold waters, lay a pygmy jungle. On the
lake bottom prowled the deadly dragon-fly larvae, as cunning predators as the tiger, inching their way through the debris of a million last year’s leaves. Here the black tadpoles, sleek and shiny as licorice drops, disported in the shallows like plump herds of hippo in some African river. Through green forests of weed the multi-coloured swarms of microscopic creatures twitched and fluttered like flocks of exotic birds, while among the roots of the forests the newts, the leeches uncoiled like great snakes in the gloom, stretching out beseechingly, ever hungry. And here the caddis larvae, in their shaggy coats of twigs and debris, crawled dimly like bears fresh from hibernation across the sun-ringed hills and valleys of soft black mud.
‘Aha, now, this is rather interesting. You see this, um… little maggot-like thing? Now this is the larva of the China-mark moth. I think, as a matter of fact, you have got one in your collection. What? Well, they’re called China-mark moths because of the markings on the wing, which are said to resemble very closely marks that potters put on the base of, er… you know, very
good
china. Spode and so forth. Now the China-mark is interesting because it is one of the few moths that have aquatic larvae. The larvae live under water until they are… um… ready to pupate. The interesting thing about this particular species is that they have, er… um… you know, two forms of female. The male, of course, is fully winged and flies about when it hatches and er… so does one of the females. But the other female when it hatches out has, um… no wings and continues to live under the water, using its legs to swim with.’
Theodore paced a little farther along the bank on the mud that was already dried and jigsawed by the spring sun. A kingfisher exploded like a blue firework from the small willow, and out on the centre of the lake a tern swooped and glided on graceful, sickle-shaped wings. Theodore dipped his net into the weedy water, sweeping it to and fro gently, as though he were stroking a cat. Then the net was lifted and held aloft, while the tiny bottle
that dangled from it would be subjected to a minute scrutiny through a magnifying glass.
‘Um, yes. Some cyclopes. Two mosquito larvae. Aha, that’s interesting. You see this caddis Iarva has made his case entirely out of baby ram’s-horn snail shells. It is… you know… remarkably pretty. Ah now! Here we have, I think, yes, yes, here we have some rotifers.’
In a desperate attempt to keep pace with this flood of knowledge, I asked what rotifers were and peered into the little bottle through the magnifying glass at the twitching, wriggling creatures, as Theodore told me.
‘The early naturalists used to call them wheel-animalcules, because of their curious limbs, you know. They wave them about in a very curious fashion, so that they almost look like, um… you know, um… er… like the
wheels
of a watch. When you next come to see me I’ll put some of these under the microscope for you. They are really extraordinarily beautiful creatures. These are, of course, all females.’
I asked why, of course, they should be females?
‘This is one of the interesting things about the rotifer. The females produce virgin eggs. Um… that is to say, they produce eggs without having come into contact with a male. Um… er… somewhat like a chicken, you know. But the difference is that the
rotifer
eggs hatch out into other females which in turn are capable of laying more eggs which… um… again hatch out into females. But at certain times, the females lay
smaller
eggs, which hatch out into males. Now, as you will see when I put these under the microscope, the female has a – how shall one say? – a quite
complex
body, an alimentary tract, and so on. The male has nothing at all. He is really just, er… um… a swimming bag of sperm.’
I was bereft of speech at the complexities of the private life of the rotifer.
‘Another curious thing about them,’ Theodore continued,
happily piling miracle upon miracle, ‘is that at certain times, er… you know, if it is a hot summer or something like that and the pond is liable to dry up, they go down to the bottom and form a sort of hard shell round themselves. It’s a sort of
suspended animation
, for the pond can dry up for, er… um… let us say seven or eight years, and they will just lie there in the dust. But as soon as the first rain falls and fills the pond, they come to life again.’
Again we moved forward, sweeping our nets through the balloon-like masses of frogs’ spawn and the trailing necklace-like strings of the toad spawn.
‘Here is, er… if you just take the glass a minute and look… an exceptionally fine hydra.’
Through the glass there sprang to life a tiny fragment of weed to which was attached a long slender coffee-coloured column, at the top of which was a writhing mass of elegant tentacles. As I watched, a rotund and earnest cyclops, carrying two large and apparently heavy sacks containing pink eggs, swam in a series of breathless jerks too close to the writhing arms of the hydra. In a moment it was engulfed. It gave a couple of violent twitches before it was stung to death. I knew, if you watched long enough, you could watch the cyclops being slowly and steadily engulfed and passing, in the shape of a bulge, down the column of the hydra.
Presently the height and the heat of the sun would tell us that it was lunch-time, and we would make our way back to our olive trees and sit there eating our food and drinking our ginger beer to the accompaniment of the sleepy zithering of the first-hatched cicadas of the year and the gentle, questioning coos of the collared doves.
‘In Greek,’ Theodore said, munching his sandwich methodically, ‘the name for collared dove is
dekaoctur
– “eighteener,” you know. The story goes that when Christ was… um… carrying the cross to Calvary, a Roman soldier, seeing that He was
exhausted, took pity on Him. By the side of the road there was an old woman selling… um… you know…
milk
, and so the Roman soldier went to her and asked her how much a cupful would cost. She replied that it would cost eighteen coins. But the soldier had only seventeen. He… er… you know… pleaded with the woman to let him have a cupful of milk for Christ for seventeen coins, but the woman avariciously held out for eighteen. So, when Christ was crucified, the old woman was turned into a turtle dove and condemned to go about for the rest of her days repeating
dekaocto
,
dekaocto
– “eighteen, eighteen.” If ever she agrees to say
deka-epta
, seventeen, she will regain her human form. If, out of obstinacy, she says
deka-ennaea
, nineteen, the world will come to an end.’
In the cool olive shade the tiny ants, black and shiny as caviare, would be foraging for our left-overs among last year’s discarded olive leaves that the past summer’s sun had dried and coloured a nut-brown and banana-yellow. They lay there as curled and as crisp as brandy-snaps. On the hillside behind us a herd of goats passed, the leader’s bell clonking mournfully. We could hear the tearing sound of their jaws as they ate, indiscriminately, any foliage that came within their reach. The leader paced up to us and gazed for a minute with baleful, yellow eyes, snorting clouds of thyme-laden breath at us.
‘They should not, er… you know, be left unattended,’ said Theodore, prodding the goat gently with his stick. ‘Goats do more damage to the countryside than practically anything else.’
The leader uttered a short sardonic ‘bah’ and then moved away, with his destructive troop following him.
We would lie for an hour or so, drowsing, and digesting our food, staring up through the tangled olive branches at a sky that was patterned with tiny white clouds like a child’s finger-prints on a blue, frosty, winter window.
‘Well,’ Theodore would say at last, getting to his feet, ‘I think
perhaps we ought to… you know… just see what the
other
side of the lake has to offer.’
So once more we would commence our slow pacing of the rim of the shore. Steadily our test tubes, bottles, and jars would fill with a shimmer of microscopic life, and my boxes and tins and bags would be stuffed with frogs, baby terrapins, and a host of beetles.
‘I suppose,’ Theodore would say at last, reluctantly, glancing up at the sinking sun, ‘I suppose… you know… we ought to be getting along home.’
And so we would laboriously hoist our now extremely heavy collecting boxes onto our shoulders and trudge homeward on weary feet, Roger, his tongue hanging out like a pink flag, trotting soberly ahead of us. Reaching the villa, our catches would be moved to more capacious quarters. Then Theodore and I would relax and discuss the day’s work, drinking gallons of hot, stimulating tea and gorging ourselves on golden scones, bubbling with butter, fresh from Mother’s oven.
It was when I paid a visit to this lake without Theodore that I caught, quite by chance, a creature that I had long wanted to meet. As I drew my net up out of the waters and examined the tangled weed mass it contained, I found crouching there, of all unlikely things, a spider. I was delighted, for I had read about this curious beast, which must be one of the most unusual species of spider in the world, for it lives a very strange aquatic existence. It was about half an inch long and marked in a rather vague sort of way with silver and brown. I put it triumphantly into one of my collecting tins and carried it home tenderly.
Here I set up an aquarium with a sandy floor and decorated it with some small dead branches and fronds of water-weed. Putting the spider on one of the twigs that stuck up above the water-level, I watched to see what it would do. It immediately ran down the twig and plunged into the water, where it turned a bright and beautiful silver, owing to the numerous minute air bubbles
trapped in the hairs on its body. It spent five minutes or so running about below the surface of the water, investigating all the twigs and water-weed before it finally settled on a spot in which to construct its home.
Now the water-spider was the original inventor of the diving-bell, and sitting absorbed in front of the aquarium, I watched how it was done. First the spider attached several lengthy strands of silk from the weeds to the twigs. These were to act as guy ropes. Then, taking up a position roughly in the centre of these guy ropes, it proceeded to spin an irregular oval-shaped flat web of a more or less conventional type, but of a finer mesh, so that it looked more like a cobweb. This occupied the greater part of two hours. Having got the structure of its home built to its satisfaction, it now had to give it an air supply. This it did by making numerous trips to the surface of the water and into the air. When it returned to the water its body would be silvery with air bubbles. It would then run down and take up its position underneath the web and, by stroking itself with its legs, rid itself of the air bubbles, which rose and were immediately trapped underneath the web. After it had done this five or six times, all the tiny bubbles under the web had amalgamated into one big bubble. As the spider added more and more air to this bubble and the bubble grew bigger and bigger, its strength started to push the web up until eventually the spider had achieved success. Firmly anchored by the guy ropes between the weed and the twigs was suspended a bell-shaped structure full of air. This was now the spider’s home in which it could live quite comfortably without even having to pay frequent visits to the surface, for the air in the bell would, I knew, be replenished by the oxygen given up by the weeds, and the carbon monoxide given out by the spider would soak through the silky walls of its house.