Flying Sand Dollars, Left-handed Crabs, Giant Earwigs, and Other Curiosities

FLYING SAND DOLLARS,

LEFT-HANDED CRABS,

GIANT EARWIGS,

AND OTHER CURIOSITIES

Malcolm Telford

For Shelagh Sally, amazingly tolerant wife, best friend and greatest companion, marking the occasion of her eightieth birthday.

"I have just read Muck Raking and Naming the Nameless, two very funny pieces dealing with community gardening and a field study course on the New Brunswick coast, along with a much more sombre article, The Ugly History of Wild Rubber...These essays should be put together in a book...They’re terrific reads. Thanks for sharing them."

Glen C. Filson, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, University of Guelph.

There is nothing so wonderful as the lifetime’s experience of a scientist-observer distilled into deep insights borne of insatiable curiosity and a joy of learning. This book will delight all readers, and should be required reading for anyone considering a career in biology.

Daniel R. Brooks, Senior Research Fellow, University of Nebraska Museum.

Curious animals such as sloths, slugs and sand dollars are interwoven into essays by a scientist in love with natural history but appalled by aspects of human history. These essays range from first-hand, joyful explorations of nature and academic life to researched critiques of scientific fraud and cruel abuse of indigenous peoples by colonial masters.

Amy S. Johnson, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine

Contents

Preface

1. An Immigrant in the Wilderness

2. The Emperor and the Earwig

3. The Marble Scorpion

4. Left-handed Crabs

5. Flying Sand Dollars

6. Naming the Nameless

7. The Ugly History of Wild Rubber

8. The Protean Potato

9. Worst of the Worst

10. Slime

11. Moths and Sloths

12. Muck Raking

13. Samuel Pepys’ Wig

14. AG: A Tribute

15. Your Research Is Crap: Beatrix Potter and Lynn Margulis

16. Truth or Consequences

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Preface

This is a collection of essays stemming from my career as a biologist. Each essay is part biography and part general history, merged with natural history and a smidgin of high-tech science. My style as a teacher was discursive — well, that is how I thought of it, but some students thought it was disorganized and disconnected. Every lecture should have at least one aha moment when the coin drops and the student participates mentally in the discovery of something new. I achieved that by approaching the target points obliquely, setting the context in which a fact or an idea becomes interesting. These essays are not like lectures, they are not didactic, but none the less I approach my subjects indirectly, teasing out connections between disparate things. To give but one example here, Samuel Pepys’ Wig ranges from the life of Pepys through bathing, the unwashed centuries, lice and typhus, leading to molecular clocks and human prehistory. It is a logically consistent thread but not an immediately obvious one.

Several former students and colleagues have freely offered their blunt and sometimes acerbic criticisms. I have been castigated for using particular words which they abhor for technical reasons. These essays were written for general readers, not research scientists. The content is accurate but never complete. When, in Slime, I write about the molecular structure of mucus I know that there are hundreds of additional complex technicalities available, but they don’t make mucus any more slippery or disgusting, and add nothing to the wet slithery grapplings of copulating slugs.

Some colleagues have objected to my use of Darwinian contrivances because, they say, I am sailing perilously close to design. But Darwin used the expression without any hint of design, he liked it and even used it in the title of his book about orchids. I like it too, and as a modest man I feel that if it was good enough for Darwin it is certainly good enough for me. So look to Flying Sand Dollars for a discussion of Darwinian contrivances.

The idea of evolution underpins several of the essays. Your Research Is Crap recounts the history of symbiosis and the brilliant insight into the origin of cell organelles by Lyn Margulis. The title of that essay comes from the disgraceful message scrawled by some opinionated jackass on a Margulis application for a research grant. Scientists often become wedded to particular ideas and theories, so when something radically new comes along they may overreact and make themselves ridiculous. That, of course, is not something peculiar to scientists — check out any new ideas in economics, politics, poetry, music or the visual arts and you will encounter endless stupid reactions. Witness the fact that when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was first performed in 1912, the entire audience rioted and came to fisticuffs. As Dean Inge once remarked, there are two sorts of fool — those that say this is new and therefore good, and those saying this is old and therefore better.

Not all of the essays are about evolution. As a university professor I willingly devoted time and effort to teaching and particularly enjoyed field courses in marine biology, offered on the coast of New Brunswick. Naming the Nameless and AG: A Tribute draw heavily on that experience. Education shapes us all and in An Immigrant in the Wilderness, perhaps my most auto-biographical piece, there is an account of a truly formative educational experience when I participated in a Fisheries Research Board survey of the resources in lakes and rivers of the Northwest Territories. Recent experiences as a gardener have contributed to Muck Raking, a meditation on manure, and The Protean Potato, the diversity and history of spuds.

Some childhood reminiscences will be found in The Marble Scorpion and The Emperor and the Earwig, which starts with Britain under threat of invasion and ends with the dismemberment of Napoleon Bonaparte. Truth or Consequences, the final essay, draws a little on my lying childhood for which I am unrepentant!

So, the essays are diverse and self-contained, independent of each other. Much of the material is new and original. That which is not is set in a fresh context and linked, deviously or directly, to other ideas. I hope the reader will enjoy raking through these fragments of my life, meandering thoughts and scraps of history. Some of them are intended to be amusing, some serious, and all should be informative.

1. An Immigrant in the Wilderness

I have done a few stupid things in my life. Perhaps the most egregious was getting myself tossed out of university on my first attempt at higher education. Stupidity is stupidity, and not necessarily lack of intelligence, I hasten to add. I found myself in the wrong, uncongenial program and, disregarding consequences, passed my time drinking beer and playing billiards until the ax fell. Sometimes, though, through blind luck or improved and more responsible behavior we can recover from our worst follies. Such was my fortune. Redemption is not guaranteed so I am not advocating a youth of stupidity, that is too risky a course of action. Two profoundly important decisions led to my eventual recovery. In 1957, with no prospects and little to recommend me, I persuaded Sally to marry me and six weeks later we were on a flight to Montreal. We never looked back and now, almost sixty years later, Sally still puts up with me and, I admit, my occasional follies.

It was about 5 a.m. one day in mid-June when the BOAC flight touched down at Dorval. We had one small suitcase each and $100 between us; we knew nobody in Canada; we had nowhere to go and no job arranged ahead of time. We were the last people to clear Customs and Immigration and watched as a couple placed their bags in the trunk of the last taxi. Now what? As the driver was getting into the cab his male passenger got out and asked if we would like to share the taxi. With immense relief we accepted the offer. Asked Where are you going? we responded Montreal in chorus. But where in Montreal? That was more difficult. Anywhere, if it is near the city center (downtown wasn’t part of our vocabulary in those days). Our benefactor turned out to be Professor Theo Hills of McGill University. Theo and his wife were astounded to find that we had no destination, no accommodation planned, no jobs to go to, nothing. They took us to the McGill Department of Geography which was then located in a stately house on Pine Avenue. Significantly it was next door to the Arctic Unit of the Fisheries Research Board, but I didn’t register that fact at the time. Once inside they made coffee and raided the community cookie tin for breakfast. Later in the morning they walked us down University Avenue to a tourist house called The Bide-A-Wee. That is perfectly true, I am not making it up. There really was a tourist house in Montreal with that chintzy English name. Talk about luck and landing on one’s feet!

Happenstance had landed us in the very best place for our future. We were on the edge of the student ghetto and beside the university destined to occupy us for years to come. Within a week Sally was gainfully employed typing menus for the Canadian National Railway dining cars. A week later I was selling gentlemen’s clothing in Morgan’s department store, later taken over by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The charming landlady at the Bide-A-Wee suffered from an unusual addiction: she went out every Wednesday evening to the wrestling matches at the Forum. She gave us a discount to stay home and check in visitors on those evenings. It must have been a bad tourist season because not a single visitor arrived on Wednesday evenings. Convinced that we were liars or untrustworthy she threw us out. On the sidewalk again with two suitcases we searched for another rooming house and a month later for yet another. After that we moved into an apartment on Stanley Street, just off Ste. Catherine Street. Luck favored us again, or maybe determined industry was rewarded. Sally found a secretarial job at McGill and I moved to a small, private shoe store where my meagre salary was supplemented by commission and spiffs for unloading old merchandise on customers more concerned with comfort than style.

In Montreal we found a brilliant cultural milieu quite unlike anything we had experienced in Birmingham, our provincial home town. We shared that downtown apartment first with an immigrant from Denmark and later with a student from Edmonton. In an apartment above us were two young men from England who worked in animation at the National Film Board. They introduced us to the NFB film club that screened experimental and avant garde movies twice a month. At the university we took season tickets for concerts by the McGill Chamber Music Orchestra. That introduced us to music ranging from Bach through Bartok to the orchestra’s conductor, Alexander Brott. Plateau Hall was a venue for some great jazz concerts where we heard John Coltrane with Thelonius Monk and, on another occasion, the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The café André, known to students as The Shrine, was a more intimate place where we heard The Modern Jazz Quartet. And, of course, Montreal was the home base of Oscar Peterson. Another Plateau Hall concert introduced us to the awesome voice of folk/blues singer Odetta (Holmes), and at a small coffee shop called The Finjan limping Brownie McGhee led blind Sonny Terry to the microphone. For us those were heady days.

McGill University was no less inspiring when I was accepted into the second year of the Zoology program. It offered an experience totally unlike anything I had found at Birmingham University, a place that the English writer Kingsley Amis once dubbed a white tile university — unfairly, no doubt. At McGill, although few undergraduate students took advantage of it, we were welcome to attend seminars in the Botany and Zoology departments almost every week. Being older than my cohort of undergraduates I mixed more with graduate students working on their doctoral programs. McGill was a center of Arctic research and I attended seminars about imprinting behavior in ducks, landlocked populations of salmon, feeding behavior of walruses, lichens and tundra ecology. Fascinated by the lure of the North, I joined the Franklin Society where we met established scientists from the Arctic Unit of the Fisheries Research Board. Every month there was a talk, with photographic slides or movie footage, about the sociology of Inuit families, the Geology of Ungava, the sex lives of polar bears, or hermaphroditism in sticklebacks of the Belcher Islands. And it was there, at a Franklin Society evening, that I met Gerry Hunter and first heard about the planned Barren Grounds Survey for the summer of 1959. I was determined to join that expedition and may even have been the first to put in an application.

Lady Luck smiled and I was taken on as a field assistant for the summer. After a couple of weeks preparatory work at the offices of the Arctic Unit we flew out to Edmonton. In those days the TCA flight was a bit of a milk run with stops in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Saskatoon. In Edmonton I met Alex Peden who was to be my work partner for the summer and we both met W. B. Scott from the Royal Ontario Museum who was to be our teacher for a month. Unfamiliar as I was with things North American, during that evening in Edmonton Alex thrashed me at table shuffleboard, so I had to pay for beer and peanuts. Next day we flew by Pacific Western to Yellowknife, the jumping off point for any trip to the Barren Grounds. As a community Yellowknife was scarcely twenty-five years old. The first settlers gravitated to the area in the mid 1930s after the discovery of gold. It became a municipality and elected its first mayor in 1953. In 1959 it was very much a frontier town with dirt roads and consisted almost entirely of what is now called the Old Town. That, and the Gold Range Hotel, built in 1958, where we stayed for a week. The Gold Range became known, or perhaps infamous, throughout the North as a rough-and-tumble drinking establishment, complete with small bands, strippers and probably the longest list of lethal cocktails in North America: Zombies, Atom Bomb, Atomic Explosion, Blue Monday, Gold Digger, Paralyzed Prospector, and dozens more. Believe me, this was not the place you would want your daughter to visit. It had 52 rooms and although it was only a year old, there was something shabby and dilapidated about it.

The purpose of the Barren Grounds Survey was to establish what fish resources there were in lakes and rivers. To cover the area as fully as possible we were divided into four teams that would spend two weeks at each of six different field sites. The work was arduous and often difficult. The routine was the same at every location. We would fly in, unload the plane, and immediately deploy the fishing nets, arranged in two gangs of five. That gave us five mesh sizes (1.5 - 5.5) and, with each net being 25 feet long, a total of 250 feet. Nets set, we put up the tent, established our living arrangements and then a work place. We were there to catch fish, lots of fish, and collect data from every single one: body length, weight, sex, stomach contents, parasite load, and either scales or bones for aging back in Montreal. We measured weight with a beam balance that had to be suspended from a tree branch, if there was one, otherwise from a make-shift tripod. Packing cases served as tables and chair for the person writing the record, and also for storage of the all-important data sheets. Next we had to set up a bath of formalin for preserving museum specimens. We needed 15 - 20 different sized individuals of each species. That was a lot of work and required a ton of equipment.

Before heading to the first field location we spent a week in Yellowknife waiting for the ice to clear, sorting, packing and repacking gear. Each team had an 18 foot square stern freight canoe, with life belts, paddles, a twenty-five horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, a rudimentary tool kit and a few spare parts. The paraphernalia of fishing included the gill nets and two spare monofilament nets for emergency use if we got stranded without food. Then there was the tent, sleeping bags, Coleman stove, fuel, cooking utensils and enough food for two or three people for two weeks. To minimize the load for flying, food was always calculated exactly to the scheduled pick up day. And we were more or less completely out of food when that day arrived. In addition we had a change of underwear (fortunately) and other personal items, including camera and fishing pole. Yes! In spite of all that fishing gear we were still eager to land the big one or catch something the nets had missed.

Yellowknife was the center for bush charters and the Fisheries Research Board contracted Wardair Ltd. to fly us. Max Ward was a flight instructor during WW II and set up his own company, Polaris Charter, in 1946 with a deHavilland Fox Moth biplane. Wardair was established in 1953 with a single engine deHavilland Otter. The Otter was the real work-horse of northern flying. By 1959 Wardair had three Otters, a deHavilland Beaver and a Bristol Freighter. Max Ward met us at the seaplane dock and introduced us to Bob Sebara, an outstanding pilot on whom we relied not only for the success of the survey, but for our very lives. 1959 was still in the glory period of bush flying and Max Ward was one of its great entrepreneurs and, I would say, one of its heroes. Some years later he became much more widely known in the international passenger charter business as Wardair International.

Alex Peden, Bev Scott and I flew out of Yellowknife in mid-June loaded with equipment and a canoe lashed to the right side pontoon. We were the second team to fly out but there had been a major snafu with the food supplies: the first team took ours as well as their own. Stuff happens. We chased them to Lac La Martre, the third largest lake in the Northwest Territories, and reclaimed our nosh. Then we continued northward to Hottah, our intended destination at the south end of Great Bear Lake. It was frozen over. Finally, pilot Bob turned south again and put us down on Beaverlodge Lake. That is where I, a city boy from the Midlands of England and a recent immigrant to Canada, got my first sight of wilderness in the vast unpopulated regions of the Northwest Territories. Routine followed, I took the first day’s cooking duty while we had fresh supplies. The cans of Klik (allegedly meat), Klim (dried milk backwards), dried onions, powdered potatoes and pilot biscuits were for later. We checked the nets from the shore and could see that the next day would be busy. While the sky was still luminous, we hit the sack around midnight and the three of us were soon asleep. But not for long. I wakened to the most hideous, terrifying maniacal laughter. Were my companions lunatics? But no, they were peacefully slumbering beside me. I didn’t dare leave the tent, instead I hid in my sleeping bag. Since then the call of the loon has never bothered me, and like other Canadians I have come to love it. But to a boy not long out of Brummagem it was heart-lurchingly scary!

Beaverlodge Lake in the middle of June is a beautiful place. True, the mosquitoes were a nuisance but tolerable in comparison to later work sites, where they were sheer misery. This lake is not in the Barren Grounds, the area is well-treed with spruce, birch, poplars, smaller willows and alders, and an abundance of Labrador tea that gives it a distinctively northern feel. There is very little grass on the rocky ground; instead it is covered with mosses and lichens including tripe-de-roche and the mis-named reindeer moss, which is a sort of spiky lichen. The scary loon and most of the other birds were new to me. I particularly liked the whiskey jacks, a.k.a. gray jays, which frequently gambolled through the campsite, always on the take. There were several species of ducks, one of them nesting right where we had encamped. We knew that species as Old Squaw but now, alas, constrained by political correctness it has been given the prosaic moniker of Long-tailed Duck.

A fish expert par excellence, Bev Scott was our mentor and a better one never existed. We soon mastered all the scientific names of the fish, how to recognize different sorts of parasites, how to prepare bone and scale samples, and at least as important, how to manage the long nets. As a sample of what we achieved the published record shows that for commercially significant species at Beaverlodge Lake, we collected data from 629 lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis), 119 lake trout (Salvelinus namaycus), and 133 Pike (Esox lucius). There were ten or fifteen additional species, mostly smaller fish, including burbot, suckers, minnows, sticklebacks and the little known trout-perch. We preserved collections of those for different museums across the country.

Beaverlodge Lake was the site of an early pitchblende mine. Exploring the surrounding territory we were astonished on rounding a headland to find an airplane parked on the beach. Later we learned that it was a Bristol Freighter used to carry cargo to and from the mine. After landing on the lake in 1956 it broke through the ice as it taxied toward shore and was further damaged in the attempt to extricate it. Eventually it was dragged ashore, straddling the water’s edge, part in the lake, part in the trees. All the parts that could be recycled were stripped from it and then it was left as junk. It is still there to this day. The mine was abandoned and when we saw it in 1959 it already looked as though it had seen no action for at least a decade. The Federal Government of Canada is not known for speedy environmental action, but there is a plan for environmental remediation at the mine and that would include removal of the airplane. Apparently the Alberta Aviation Museum has expressed interest in restoring it and has already located some available replacement parts. Residents in the First Nations community of Gameti, about eighty miles away, would prefer to see it remain where it is, as a curious piece of history, a landmark to which they take hardy, adventurous tourists by snowmobile.

Leaving Beaverlodge we picked up the trail of the first Franklin expedition of 1819–1821, on his outward journey to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. At Red Rock Lake which is an expanded part of the Coppermine River, we camped on a narrow spit of sand almost cutting the lake in half. It could have been Franklin’s stopping place but there was no evidence of an earlier European presence. The sand was criss-crossed by bear tracks, large and small, which made me a bit nervous. The only trace of humans was a nicely formed stone arrow head and a small stone ulu or skin scraping tool (both now in the McCord Museum, Montreal). The promontory was the nesting site for a colony of arctic terns which dive-bombed us whenever we went near. It also supported stunted spruces that had very long, fine roots running through the sand. Possibly indigenous people visited this place to collect roots for making baskets. As for the foot prints, we did see a Barren Grounds grizzly bear which, to my timid immigrant’s eyes, looked about the size of a well-grown dinosaur. After that we kept a loaded shotgun and a box of flash-bangs close by to scare away any unwelcome visitors. That proved unnecessary and we used up the flash-bangs at the end of the summer, the day before we were picked up for the final time. In the vast open space of the Barren Grounds the flash-bangs made a subdued poof that wouldn’t have scared a kitten. Red Rock in 1959 was seldom visited and probably had seen no people in years. Today it is included in a number of very challenging wilderness canoe adventures. Franklin’s expedition had the flimsiest canoes and the hired voyageurs carried massive loads of dried caribou meat and pemmican. They were also supported by Copper Indians who hunted for them. They made painfully