Carnivorous Nights (30 page)

Danny turned to show us a filmy fern, a nearly translucent green frond, growing off the trunk of a tree fern. Just as he was telling us that the filmy fern was only one cell thick, a land leech dropped onto his hand. We crowded around to look. It moved like a villainous black inchworm across his skin.

Ahhh
, we thought,
finally we meet our nemesis.

Without going through a true metamorphosis, the leech exhibited disturbing shape-shifting properties. Perched on Danny's hand, it looked like a little periscope, twisting back and forth, its head curled in an upsidedown U, searching the high seas for blood and a soft place to start chewing. It elongated its body like a living rubber band and morphed its head into a needle-sharp probe.

“Is it feeding on you?” we asked Danny hopefully.

“No, he's looking for a spot. They take quite a while to latch on— a couple of minutes.”

“That's
Philaemon pungens
, the smaller of Tasmania's two land leech
species,” Alison interjected. Both land leech species had two jaws that worked like rasps with which they chewed through the skin and made a V-shaped incision.

In wet forests like this one, leeches could survive for months, possibly even years, without a meal, living through dry spells and all-out desiccation, until they sensed blood and dropped down on an unsuspecting donor. After a thorough blood meal, they could expand to several times their size.

“Once it attaches, it also has an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing,” said Danny.

“How do you get it off, if it does attach?”

“You can put salt on them or you can burn them off.” Danny tossed his leech back into the forest—before it had a chance to start feeding. We remembered the famous, cringe-inducing leech scene from the 1951 movie
The African Queen.
The bloodsuckers cover Humphrey Bogart's body, and he and Katharine Hepburn, their hands quavering in primal fear, have to burn them off with a lit cigarette. “Filthy little devils,” Bogart curses.

The field naturalists returned to their pursuits and flipped over a rotting log. Underneath it was a riot of life. Eight-legged creatures, forty-two-legged creatures, and many with no legs at all. Alison found a millipede, but wasn't sure of the genus. Jim picked up a fast-moving centipede. It was greenish gray with a red head, legs, and tail. “It's got jaws,” he said.

They heaved over a second log. Alison found a harvestman. “This is an arachnid, but it's different from a spider in that it doesn't have a waist.” It was a little beige daddy longlegs.

“Harvestmen don't dissolve their prey like spiders,” Jim added. “They have to rip it apart.” (Spiders inject their prey with venom, wait for its insides to liquefy, and then suck the insides out like a vanilla milkshake.)

Each of these small creatures had its own story—a fact not often appreciated by laypeople. One thing invertebrate lovers have in common is their dismay that so much attention is given to animals with spines. Vertebrates are wonderful, they would tell you, but limited. For example, how many kinds of humans are there? Just one.
Homo sapiens.
That makes human beings very special, but not at all diverse. If you want to see a different
type of human, good luck. But take leeches. There are five hundred different kinds around the world. Or take harvestmen—there are five thousand different kinds and probably many more waiting to be discovered. Ninety-nine percent of all animals are invertebrates.

The reason the spineless get such scant attention is that they're so little. It's size that put the giant squid—the world's largest invertebrate— on the map and at the top of everyone's research agenda. And that's why Tasmania's own giant freshwater lobster is slowly gaining notoriety. If each of the creatures under the log were the size of an echidna or a pademelon or a person, then we might all show a bit more respect. In fact, we'd all be running screaming out of the woods, shit-scared for our lives.

John produced a snail from under the log and held it in the flat of his palm. Everyone gathered around. “We haven't seen one of these for years,” he said excitedly. It was a Northeast forest snail (
Anoglypta launcestonensis
), one of Tasmania's 116 species of land snails. Like so many Tasmanian animals, this slow-moving creature lived nowhere else in the world—and it occupied its own island within an island, a forty-two-mile by thirty-mile area surrounding the Field Naturalists clubhouse. Its habitat is the underside of rotting logs where it is believed to eat detritus and fungi.

Although the snail was keeping its body hidden, we got a good look at its curious shell, which had a sideways look to it as if the snail was wearing a beret. The shell's outer side was brown, rough, and grainy. John turned it over, exposing a smooth, swirling black underside with a bright lime-colored stripe following the contour of the spiral.

Like the thylacine, this little animal had once been a missing species. In 1970, “they sent parties up into the Northeast to find one, because it hadn't been seen for eighty years,” John said. The snail was located, oozing about its old haunts, but this rediscovery eventually launched a controversy.

In an issue of the
Tentacle
, the newsletter of the mollusk division of the IUCN—The World Conservation Union, Tasmanian zoologist and snail expert Kevin Bonham wrote that the Northeast forest snail “arouses strong emotions even among scientists because of its beauty and taxonomic distinctiveness.”

In 1995, the snail was listed as a vulnerable species under the Threatened
Species Protection Act. Tasmanian conservationists began using the snail's protected status as a shield against the clear-cutting of old-growth forests in the Northeast and held numerous “Save the Snail” rallies. However, in 1996, Bonham determined that the snail's population was secure (much larger than previously thought) and two years later advocated that it be delisted. Conservationists were livid, and an ugly battle, with namecalling, ensued. As the delisting seemed to coincide with new logging proposals, Bonham was accused of being a collaborator with the forestry department—this despite the fact that he was simultaneously advocating that three other snail species be added to the threatened species list.

Alexis snapped a photo of
A. launcestonensis.
“It's an honor to meet such a celebrity,” he said.

When we emerged from the shelter of the fern gully, Danny led us over to a big sandy lump on the ground. “Have you heard of jack jumpers?” he asked. “They're very aggressive ants. Very common in Tasmania.”

When a jack jumper nest is disturbed, the ants race up from the ground and jump about in an attack frenzy. In their rage to defend their nest, they can leap as far as four inches, eight times their body length. To demonstrate, Danny poked a stick into the ant nest and then kicked it several times. The result was volcanic. Ants with bright orange jaws came hurtling out like chunks of hot lava.

We weren't sure what a respectful distance was. “They hurt, but they're not poisonous, right?”

“Oh, yes, if you're allergic,” Alison informed us. “The allergic reaction is almost cumulative.”

“They've got big nippers on the front end,” said Jim, “and everybody thinks they're getting bitten, but they're actually holding on with those nippers, and doing the actual damage with the other end, stinging like a bee. It's quite an ancient group of ants. Most of the ancient ants sting. The modern ants bite.” Over the last twenty years, at least three Tasmanians had died of anaphylaxis after being stung by jack jumpers.

After our walk while cooling off in the shade of a wooden gazebo, we started to question the field naturalists about thylacines. Had anyone ever seen one? Alison mentioned that her father had spotted a tiger when he
was a schoolboy in the 1920s near a golf course in Tasmania's Northwest. “But that was a long time ago,” she said, “before they died out.”

Then Danny—hassler of ants and leading club prankster—took us aside. “I want to tell you a story,” he said. He didn't seem keen on anyone overhearing. About eight years before, he said, he had gone for a hike near Golconda, north of Mount Arthur … “It was dawn and we were coming along a track that had been put in by a bulldozer, and we went down to a clearing. I saw a Bennett's wallaby running through the bush and it looked pretty frightened. Then I saw this other animal come past and it stood there and yawned. It was front-on and quite large, dog-sized with a big jaw and a woolly front. When it walked off, it didn't move like a dog. It was much more …athletic. Because of the time of the day and the shadows, I didn't get to see the stripes. But it had an arrogant look in its eye, like it was telling me, ‘I'm king of the castle.’ Slim chance it was a dog. I was a bit freaked out. The hackles went up on my neck.”

In Australia and Tasmania, “taking the piss” is a national pastime. It means “taking the piss out of someone,” knocking them down a peg, joking, making fun of people. After the sugar bush incident, we were feeling particularly leery.

Danny seemed distressed when we asked if he was kidding. “This is not a joke. I don't tease about biology.” Besides, he added, why would he? “People who report seeing tigers—people think they're crazy.”

He said he hadn't had a camera with him, but he did return later to see if he could find any evidence. “I found a scat, but I never got it tested. There were no tracks. The area was quite hard. I've gone back since then, but haven't seen one. The problem is that houses have been going up in that area. So I reckon that thylacines wouldn't be there anymore.”

“How sure would you say you were that what you saw was a thylacine?”

“Ninety, ninety-five percent. I'd want to see it one more time to be sure. I do think thylacines are out there, small populations of them.”

We told him we had spent a night listening for the thylacine in the Milkshakes—but hadn't seen or heard anything, except for some mysterious flashing lights.

“Ahhhh …min min lights,” he said.

“What are those?”

“They're like spirit lights. The aboriginal people won't even talk about them.”

As he reached the end of his explanation, we realized the skies were getting darker. There had been a shift in the wind and the smoke from the wildfires was blowing in our direction.

“Maybe the fires are headed our way,” Jim said. The botanizing party started to break up, and we drove off through the eucalyptus-perfumed haze, pondering Danny's strange report.

Back at the low-budget motor lodge where we were ensconced in Launceston, Alexis convinced us to join him in a “bowl.” We decided to take a puff each—and instantly regretted it. This was not the pot from our high school days. The effect was immediate, like getting whacked with a shovel. Over the years,
Cannabis sativa
had been crossbred to get stronger and stronger. The geniuses that made this weed should be hired to clone the thylacine. They could probably get the job done in weeks.

Alexis seemed to be filled with bliss after breathing in the potent smoke, but we were flooded with dread. Our tongues became dry and swollen. Swallowing became a frightening act. Paranoid ideas floated through our heads.

“Do you think the people we've met are taking a piss on us?”

“That's taking
the
piss,” said Alexis.

“You think they're taking our piss? Maybe they're all in cahoots.”

In our pot-induced stupor, we imagined the Tasmanians we had met were organized in a vast, interconnected cabal to …to
what?

“Don't you
get
it?” we insisted. “The thylacine exists, but they're hiding it from us. When we get home, they'll reveal to the world the last surviving Tasmanian tigers.”

“Okay,” said Alexis. Having smoked this stuff every day, he was immune to its disorienting effects.

“Everywhere we've gone was their suggestion. We're like pawns on a chessboard. It's all a game. And while we're sent off on wild-goose chases, they're moving the tigers around from safe house to safe house. Bob Green has something to do with it.”

“Who's Bob Green?” asked Alexis.

“The zoologist guy Jim said still
believed.
”

“Yeah right. We'll go to his house and he'll answer the door in his bathrobe with a thylacine on a leash.”

“Exactly.” We started rooting around for a phone book to find Bob Green's address. Maybe we would just go over there and check for ourselves. “Remember that guy Carl at the Backpacker's Barn? He's probably hiding an entire population of tigers in the Tarkine. That's where they're breeding them up … Geoff King's in on it. Do you think Geoff King's in on it, Alexis?”

“Definitely.”

“Yeah, he played footie with Todd Walsh.”

The next day we were feeling like ourselves again. But Alexis insisted that we drive by Bob Green's house. Neither the zoologist nor his pet thylacine were home.

W
hile driving west, we dissected Danny Soccol's sighting. Danny was a trained biologist and able to identify a host of obscure invertebrates. A five-foot-long quadruped should have been a piece of cake, but because he had not seen the animal in good light—and could not check for stripes—even he was not 100 percent sure.