The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Turtles in the soup, part 1: Mystic dawn rites

It seemed like a grave ceremony at a turtle temple. A silent line of identically-dressed people lifted turtles from tanks one at a time. Each turtle was carried in the same ritual position and taken through the same stations. A wand was waved over each turtle. Quiet words were murmured. Inscriptions were made. Tags were produced. Each turtle in turn was transferred to another serious person in identical garb, who examined it mutely and seriously, inspected the inscriptions, placed the turtle in a special container, and affixed the tag. Observers stood in silence.

I was in the Florida Panhandle, reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill. This was a turtle-washing facility set up in a locked area at the back of Gulf World in Panama City Beach. Media hellhounds like me were being let in, on our best behavior, to behold an early-morning transfer of young turtles from the oiled-turtle-washing-and-stabilization center at Gulf World to a turtle-rehab center at SeaWorld Orlando, on the other side of Florida. (The turtles aren't on display to the public in either place.)

There were reasons for the eerie details. The identically-clad people were Gulf World and Sea World employees in uniform (royal blue shirts, black or khaki shorts, rubber boots). They walked in lines because there was a narrow zone between the “dirty”/oily side of the facility and the clean side. The silence was to avoid getting the turtles  used to human voices. No one wanted them to grow up into “pier rats.” The turtles were carried in the approved way for turtles this size, faced away from the human, held behind the front flippers. Some turtles sculled with their flippers as they were carried. The wand checked a microchip implanted in each turtle.

The grave atmosphere came from respect for the rare animals – endangered Kemp's ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii). It came from determination to help mitigate the oil's damage (and awareness that many more turtles had died). It came from the knowledge that everything was being recorded. (A few times I overheard an acolyte whisper the name of a departing turtle: Mikey! Buzz! It's Lance!)

Media attention was the least of it. Scientific data that might be gained was also subsidiary. (There weren't nearly enough turtles to make a study.) It was explained that the turtles were evidence. The microchips, records, re-checking of records before packing each turtle in a labeled container – all maintained the chain of custody.

CSI: Gulf of Mexico.

Mammal contests

Daniel Everett – then a missionary, now a linguist -- had just come to live in a Pirahã village in the Brazilian Amazon, by the bank of the Maici River. In his book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, he writes, “I was startled by the sight of two small gray porpoises jumping in sync out of the river. I had no idea that there were freshwater porpoises.”

Not in the Amazon Basin, there aren't, so let's call them dolphins.

Things got even better. Two canoes came hurtling around a river bend, furiously paddled by local men who were chasing the dolphins, trying to tag them with the canoe paddles. The dolphins could easily evade the canoes, but kept popping up almost within reach so the men would chase them some more. People in the village gathered to watch, laughing uproariously.

The men chased the dolphins until it got too dark to continue. “In all my years watching this contest between mammals, no porpoise has ever been 'tagged,'” Everett writes.

Everett and his family lived among the Pirahã for years. He learned, and wrote a thesis on, their difficult language, and failed to convert a single person. He lost his religious belief and diverged from the teachings of famous linguist Noam Chomsky in making the controversial argument that the Pirahã language doesn't have features of Chomskian “universal grammar,” notably recursion. He also says it doesn't have names for colors or numbers, and that the Pirahã don't have “motherese” (baby talk). They don't have a creation story. My favorite part is the idea that the language has many suffixes indicating the source of information, so that one distinguishes instantly between, say, “Dan caught a fish (I saw him),” “Dan caught a fish (Keren says she saw it)” and “Dan caught a fish (I assume on circumstantial evidence).”

(A related problem with missionary efforts to the Pirahã seems to be a cultural impatience with extended hearsay. If you were Jesus Christ, they would be happy to talk to you. If you had seen Jesus Christ perform a miracle, they'd be willing to hear that. But if your pastor told you that he read in Bible that Timothy heard that Jesus Christ performed miracles, the Pirahã can't be bothered.)

Everett's claims have created great ongoing controversy, and more non-theological interest in studying the Pirahã language. He's been called a charlatan, or simply wrong about one point or another.

About the porpoises – the only freshwater porpoises were in the Yangtze (probably now extinct). I can't figure out if Everett was seeing the freshwater dolphin called Inia geoffrensis or boto, or the one called Sotalia fluviatilis or tucuxi. He had missionary training and linguistic training, not natural history training, so I don't think imprecise cetacean nomenclature reflects on Everett-as-observer.

Here's a picture of a boto in the Duisberg Zoo.


Here's a picture of what I take to be a tucuxi.


If only I were blogging in Pirahã! This entry would be much shorter, since with simple prefixes I could indicate things like “Everett said this,” “Everett said this, but I think he meant something else,” “Wikimedia Commons didn't exactly say this, but this is a picture the search term sent me to,” and “the boto caught a fish (unless that's Photoshop work).”

I'm still in the dark. Fortunately, I'm nocturnal.

Update on the SF Zoo's tool-flourishing aye-ayes:

I recently got a short tour of the normally-closed nocturnal house. This now houses an elderly mouse lemur and a thriving aye-aye family. Sabrina and Warlock produced a son, Dobby, who looks just as eccentric as his elders. He is only the 2nd second-generation aye-aye born in the US, so the Zoo is extremely proud of him. Asked how they accounted for this success, our guide said that it seems aye-ayes like to mate high in the trees, and the nocturnal house has a high ceiling which can be utilized for this romantic purpose.

Several months ago, to general surprise, Sabrina and Warlock produced another baby. It had been expected that it might take the couple five years to have their next child, not just one year. (Ah, high ceilings...) This daughter is allegedly still unnamed. (I find this unlikely. I suspect she has a name but it is being kept secret for one or more of the usual bizarre zoo rationales for withholding such non-Nature Facts. Or they are just embarrassed that they named her Morticia or Grimalkin or whatever.)

I asked about the wrench. “Oh yes,” said the guide. “We give them wrenches for their teeth.” It seems that aye-ayes have ever-growing teeth, like rodents, and need hard objects to gnaw on so their teeth don't overgrow. For this purpose they are given bamboo and hard wood. And wrenches.

The guide, who does not appear to have been at the Zoo very long, seemed to find this perfectly mundane, and offered no explanation for how wrenches came to be the dental device of choice.

(“Sure, we give the aye-ayes wrenches for teething. Just like we give the otters eggbeaters for grooming, and we give the pelicans assault rifles for nest-building. It's environmental enrichment.”)

Until I get a different suggestion, I am sticking with the hypothesis that this practice originated in an aye-aye act of pilferage.