The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (4 page)

This is to overlook, of course, the long savage dispossession of the first peoples by the settlers – but this has been a part of our history that, until recently, the nation has chosen to ignore. A history of surviving savage weather is a nobler sort of history to own up to.

In the sunburnt country, firestorms and flooding rains and ten-year droughts and cyclones are our myths of identity. Which is not to say we get no grief from nature. It's just to note how much of ourselves we find, and how much of our natural and national history we tell, in calamities – and the doggedness of our spirit in the face of them.

But we are not more prone to natural disasters than the international average. There are hotter places, stormier – though there are none, it has to be admitted, drier. It doesn't get dangerously cold; there are no ice storms or heavy-duty blizzards (not unless we include our territories on that driest continent on earth, the Antarctic.) We get dust storms, and we get more than enough cyclones, but we don't get many tornadoes (the most destructive force on the planet); we have no equivalent of America's tornado alley. We do fire as well as anyone, and we'll do it bigger and more often as the atmosphere warms. Drought is our great affliction; and in the years ahead, water – the scarcity of rivers in the
places where most of us live and farm, our profligacy with it, the drying of the climate – is our area of national vulnerability.

Between downpours and conflagrations, though, we get about the greater part of who we are. We make history, most of it quiet, in mild weather. But we tell ourselves in fires and floods; we find ourselves in drought. We think of ourselves as a people who know how to pick up the pieces when the floodwaters ease and the fires are dowsed, when the cyclone has petered out. And so we are, and so the national memory is crowded with images of the damage the weather often enough wreaks, and how bravely we bear it and get on. And it looks like we're going to get plenty of opportunities to keep proving it in the years ahead.

The weather: an intimate essay

When I walked to the river at dusk yesterday, there was no wind anywhere in the valley. Walking across the paddock was like swimming in the shallows – warm air pooled here and there. Nothing much stirred anywhere. At the river, a pair of masked lapwings, probably nesting, circled me and looped out over the river where it bends,
kek-kek-kekk
ing, warding me off. Then some weather started up, as if the cyclonic circling of the birds had conjured it. The eucalypts on the scarp across the water began to weave and sway and roar in a wind that was happening nowhere else along the river. They kept at it, howling down the lapwings. The trees seemed to be articulating some kind of a downdraft – a narrowly adapted katabatic breeze, perhaps, rushing off the ridge as the valley cooled. But why here? And why
only
here? I don't understand what I witnessed, but this was weather. Which is sometimes very small – shaped by and native to a place. Later, sitting at my desk, I heard the wind racing down off the ridge in the dark and then I heard the rain clattering the roof – the larger weather, perhaps, the smaller weather had foretold. Coming to tell me who I am.

Living under the influence of the sky

Weather joins us to everyone and everywhere else, but in its local adaptations, it also shapes, changes and defines us. We are who we are, indirectly and directly, because of the weather we lead our lives in. How we behave, even how we speak, is how we adapt to the weather. Australian weather makes us Australian; Pilbara weather, Pilbaran; Tasmanian weather, Tasmanian. It's a large part of it, anyway. But weather is regional and global, too. We share our cold fronts with New Zealand and Asia shares her monsoons with us. El Niño and La Niña link us to the fates of South Americans. And we all share global warming, unevenly though its effects may be distributed.

More personally, life lived under the influence of weather, mindful of it, as long as one survives that weather, is a life more fully lived. The days in which I am aware of what's going on in the sky, which way the wind blows, what species of clouds came by, are days that feel more lived in. In which my life feels more ample. It helps if the weather is bright, or, on the other hand, wild; it helps if your hat will stay on your head – or your hair, for that matter. But it's the observance, not the value you put on what you observe, that counts. It's a way of dying, as the Buddhists say, to one's self – one's mere self – and opening to the world. It's a bigger kind of life. Humbler. Older, longer. Who you are is so much bigger than what your body encloses, and how your society wants to define you. You're no longer a taxpayer, a consumer, a New South Welshman. You're a citizen of the real world again. A part of a place. You're a-piece with the weather. A piece of the weather, even.

Turbulence

Masters of the universe

It's time to become gonads

Becky Crew

Deep-sea anglerfish (Ceratiidae family)

Being an anglerfish male would be the absolute worst. As proud as most males in the animal kingdom tend to be of their genitals, the idea of actually
becoming
genitals by fusing yourself to your mate is a bit much. Unless you're an anglerfish male, in which case it's just something that has to be done. Some people have to be garbage collectors, others have to be genitals. The bizarre reproductive habits of deep-sea anglerfish were first described in 1922 by Icelandic fisheries biologist Bjarni Saemundsson, who discovered a large female Krøyer's deep-sea anglerfish
(Ceratias holboelli)
with two smaller fish attached to her stomach by their snouts. What Saemundsson didn't realise was that these tiny fish weren't young offspring taking nutrients from their mother, but sexually mature males. ‘I can form no idea of how, or when, the larvae, or young, become attached to the mother; I cannot believe that the male fastens the egg to the female. This remains a puzzle for some future researcher to solve,' he wrote in the journal
Videnskabelige Meddelelser fra Dansk Naturhistorisk Forening.
Three years later, British ichthyologist, ecology and evolution expert Charles Tate Regan found a similar situation. This time a
single small fish was fused to a female, and Tate recognised it not as a mother–offspring relationship, but a parasitic male–female relationship, reporting in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society B:

[The male fish is] merely an appendage of the female, and entirely dependent on her for nutrition … so perfect and complete is the union of husband and wife that one may almost be sure that their genital glands ripen simultaneously, and it is perhaps not too fanciful to think that the female may possibly be able to control the seminal discharge of the male and to ensure that it takes place at the right time for fertilisation of her eggs.

Anglerfish belong to an order Lophiiformes, which is a highly diverse group of fish boasting an array of shapes, including elongated, spherical and flattened bodies, living 300 metres below the surface. There are around 200 species of anglerfish spread around the world's oceans. Anglerfish in the family Ceratiidae, also known as sea devils, live at depths of 1000–4000 metres in the bathypelagic zone where not a speck of sunlight exists. They are famous for the reproductive process that sees free-swimming adolescent males attach themselves to a female and morph into a living, parasitic set of gonads.

Members of the Ceratiidae family are generally top-heavy, with relatively large heads and jaws filled with many tiny teeth set into an extreme underbite position. The females of each species are adorned with a bioluminescent lure that extends from their foreheads in myriad shapes, sizes and lengths. Characteristic of the Ceratioidea is their extreme sexual dimorphism, which describes a genetically determined difference between males and females of the same species expressed by their morphology, behaviour or ornamentation. In birds, sexual dimorphism is the difference between the stunningly beautiful male peacock
and its drab female counterpart, and in the Ceratioidea's case, this means large females and significantly dwarfed males. So dwarfed are the deep-sea anglerfish males, measuring an average of just 6–10 millimetres in their free-swimming, adolescent stage, that they are one of the world's smallest vertebrates. In the most extreme cases, such as the Krøyer's deep-sea anglerfish, the females can be up to 60 times larger than the males, at more than a metre in length, and half a million times heavier.

While Ceratioidea males lack the female's bioluminescent luring apparatus, which is formed by the foremost three spines on her first dorsal, or back, fin, they do have large, well-developed eyes and gigantic nostrils in their adolescence. Researchers have suggested that these are used for homing in on a special hormone emitted by the females. When a male finds a female, it will start to metamorphose, its eyes and nostrils degenerating while its teeth are replaced with large pincers. These are used to grip on to a prospective mate, which begins the fusing process of the male's mouth to the female's body. Some species see just one male attaching itself to a single female, while in other species a female can host up to eight dependent males. Although it may seem like an unnecessarily complicated process to get the males and females to reproduce, researchers suggest that it is the only way, because without fusing with the females, the males will never reach sexual maturity. And likewise, the females will never become gravid, meaning capable of carrying eggs internally, unless they have a male attached. According to American systematist and evolutionary biologist Theodore Wells Pietsch III, one of the world's experts on anglerfish, ‘That sexual maturity is determined not by size or age in these fishes, but by parasitic sexual association, may well be unique among animals.'

Publishing a study in
Ichthyological Research
in 2005, Pietsch said that in some species of Ceratioidea, the fusing of flesh involves the combination of circulatory systems, which means
the males depend entirely on the females for their continued survival, ‘while the host female becomes a kind of self-fertilising hermaphrodite'. Pietsch adds that the males increase:

considerably in size once fused, their volume becoming much greater than free-living males of the same species, and being otherwise completely unable to acquire nutrients on their own, the males are considered to be parasites. They apparently remain alive and reproductively functional so long as the female lives, participating in repeated spawning events.

Pietsch, who is currently the curator of fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, has been studying anglerfish for over 20 years. In early 2012, he went in to bat for them when a group of scientists, led by Louisiana State University graduate student Eric Rittmeyer, declared a newly discovered species of frog to be the world's tiniest vertebrate. Publishing in
PLoS One
, Rittmeyer and his team described
Paedophryne amauensis,
a copper and black frog from New Guinea averaging just 7.7 millimetres in length. Pietsch challenged the new frog's inclusion in the
Guinness Book of Records
promptly after the paper had been published, arguing that the free-swimming adolescent male of an anglerfish he described in his 2005 paper stretched just 6.2 millimetres, making it 11 per cent smaller than
Paedophryne amauensis
. But due to the fact that females of the same species are up to six times bigger than the frog, Rittmeyer's team were not convinced. For now, it looks as though the title of World's Smallest Vertebrate is subject to opinion.

* * * * *

Journal Notes: Deep-Sea Anglerfish

3 June

I never knew my father. Mother told me as soon as I was old enough to understand that he was gone before I was born. My friends all say the same about their fathers, but it doesn't make it hurt any less that he didn't want to stick around to see what I'd look like, what I'd act like, which uni I'd end up going to. So that's why I'm going to learn everything I can about him, discover what clues he left behind so that I might come to understand who I am and who I will become. Ate lunch, got indigestion like always. Note to self: eat slower.

5 June

Questioned Mother while she was making dinner. Got mostly cagey responses, but she put chillies in our meal, which she never does, so suspect chilli is some kind of clue. Suspect Mother is trying to tell me something. Called The Chilli Palace, man on phone didn't seem to want to talk about anything but chilli dogs. Suspect he and Mother are in karhoots cahoots. Watched
Downton Abbey
. Hated it.

6 June

Googled Dad. Discovered that he was a tailor and had a shop in town that's now a comic bookstore that I can't go into anymore because I'm in love with the girl who works there. Found photo of my English teacher wearing one of Dad's Prince of Wales suits while attending a production of
Uncle Vanya: The Musical
on a
Sydney Morning Herald
society site. Googled
Uncle Vanya: The Musical,
universally panned, but there's a good chance Chekhov liked chilli, so ordered a dog from The Chilli Palace. Indigestion.