Obstinate Nature

Philippe Cury, Daniel Pauly

• Publisher: Odile Jacob
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9782738156136
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Oceanografía

"A system is viable only if it combines speed and slowness, " write Philippe Cury and Daniel Pauly. "Nature's cycles tell us that viability requires a combination of these dynamics—fast and slow, innovation and inertia." Obstinate Nature, a concise and powerful collaboration between two accomplished marine biologists, is centrally concerned with the imbalance in those dynamics that currently threatens our planet, our environment, and our survival. Since our emergence as a species, Homo sapiens has overridden the slow and cyclical natural order in the ceaseless pursuit of faster everything: population growth, territorial expansion, food cultivation, and technological development. Now, as climate change and declining resources push us ever closer to the brink of collapse, the true test of a sustainable future will be whether we can reconcile our perpetual thirst for linear acceleration with the painstaking natural cycles that allowed us to exist in the first place. Through encounters with remarkable animals, such as sea turtles and jellyfish, and eye-opening stories about exploitative practices like overfishing and institutionalized animal cruelty, Obstinate Nature shows in personably philosophical language just how steep a price the natural world is paying for our follies and excesses—and what our future holds if we fail to embrace and respect the rest of life on earth. Coming not a moment too soon, Obstinate Nature is a chilling portrait of unchecked and longstanding human arrogance, and a sober exhortation to find our place within nature, not over it, before the clock runs out. Philippe Cury is research director at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, scientific co-director of the Euromarine Consortium, and former director of the Center for Tropical and Mediterranean Research in Sète, France. Recognized globally as a leading specialist in marine resources, Daniel Pauly leads the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, of which he was formerly director.

CHAPTER 1

The Cycles of Life

“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night. Let me think.

Was I the same when I got up this morning?

I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.

But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1

Animals spend huge amounts of energy to complete their life cycles. Marine turtles, salmon, cod, sharks, and birds travel thousands of kilometers to return to their place of birth to reproduce. Other animals, such as jellyfish, undergo various transformations to achieve the same goal. Careful study by pioneering naturalists has unveiled the complexity of these behaviors and the existence of slow cycles in nature, which are fragile despite appearances to the contrary. Our perception of nature is quite different: we perceive animals as belonging to a category of machines designed to satisfy human needs. This is the deadly misunderstanding between Homo sapiens and other living beings.

The millions of sardines that school in the oceans, the thousands of salmon migrating up a river, or the hundreds of sea turtles climbing laboriously onto a beach to breed all seem identical to the untrained observer, no matter how attentive. Yet, like us humans, each individual is different, its life not quite the same as that of its relatives or its immediate neighbors. Each individual differs in subtle ways from its conspecifics. But most of this diversity eludes us. To us, a salmon is a salmon, a sea turtle is a sea turtle, and a bird is a bird. This is how we perceive the living world: by the yardstick of resemblance. Yet, in the wild, all salmon, sea turtles, and birds are different, even when they belong to the same species or population.

Nature also sometimes seems baroque, in that it often takes very winding paths to reach its ultimate goal: reproduction. Solutions that we perceive as optimal are not always the ones that are favored. This is certainly one reason it took so long for us to realize that each individual animal has unique habits and preferences. Another reason was the difficulty of observing individuals and understanding their actions. For this, it was necessary to first give meaning to this diversity among individuals.2 What is it for? Is it really helpful? Why has nature created millions, often billions, of individuals differing only in the details of their shapes or behaviors? All these questions are fundamental but difficult, both in terms of observations and at the theoretical, even philosophical level. Naturalists have been perplexed by the sometimes confusing multitude of animals. Studying diversity among individuals of the same species has never really been at the heart of ecological studies,3 and only a few passionate naturalists have plumbed the depth of this mystery.

Our origins on land and sea

Charles Darwin opined that “the migration of young birds across broad tracts of the sea, & the migration of young salmon from fresh into saltwater, & the return of both to their birthplaces, have often been justly advanced as surprising instincts.” This quote, originally part of a draft of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, was deleted before publication and published posthumously.4 However, similar observations appear in the various “notebooks” the great naturalist kept in order to stimulate his reflections.5 During his long voyage on the HMS Beagle, from December 1831 to October 1836,6 Darwin recorded all his field observations and theoretical reflections in such notebooks, when he was not scribbling thoughts about his projects on disparate pieces of paper – a habit he kept all his life.

Darwin loved life in all its forms and in all its complexity, considering each observation or reflection worthy of pursuit. As a careful naturalist, he knew that in order to develop a convincing, broad theory, he had to patiently and methodically resolve its difficulties, one after another. In the process, he would accumulate a mountain of facts to overcome doubters. Darwin’s notebooks from 1837 contain observations on animal behavior, which he planned to include in the major book of which On the Origin of Species was an “abstract” published in 1859.7 Later he thought the behavior of individuals, about which he had continued to collect information, was a topic too important for the amount of time he could devote to it, and contacted a colleague, the British naturalist and psychologist George John Romanes, encouraging him to orient his research toward the development of mental abilities in animals.

The question of animals’ instincts and ability to learn is one that should be studied carefully before stirring up controversies.8 In Darwin a new type of naturalist was born: not someone who studied only dead animals in museums, but a traveler, an observer of nature, whose discoveries could lead to an understanding of nature’s intimate workings. However, the subject of affection – even love and solidarity and cooperation – among fish, birds, and mammals opened the door to comparisons between humans and animals, an idea that was barely tolerable in Darwin’s time – it inevitably implied that humans had instincts as well, another outrageous notion.9

Darwin saw individual variations in animal instinct as no more or less than the variation of other biological traits on which natural selection works, but he wanted his colleague Romanes, who worked on animal intelligence, to explore these variations in detail. Unable to take up this intellectual challenge, Romanes did not elaborate a theory of instincts and their variations. However, well after Darwin’s death, he published two essays entitled “Mental Evolution in Animals,” to which were appended Darwin’s notes on “instinct.”10

“But how a small and tender bird coming from Africa and Spain, after traversing the sea, find the very same hedge-row in the middle of England, where it made its nest last season, is truly marvelous,” noted Darwin, who continued to be amazed by animal habits. This “natural instinct,” he posited, not only allowed migratory birds to return to the place where they were hatched, but also allowed fish such as salmon to do the same. However, he observed, the “migratory salmon, also, often fails in returning to its own river.”11

The few facts reported in Notebook B and the attendant Darwinian research program bearing on our behavior can be said to have originated in the second half the twentieth century with ethology, or the study of animal behavior. With this emergence, instinct took on a deeper meaning, that of an ancestral legacy – a genetic, behavioral, and cognitive program resulting from a long evolutionary history. Since nature does not speak, it is necessary to follow individuals throughout their life cycle to understand that each one has its own survival solutions. Individuals do not seek an optimal solution valid for all individuals; rather, they make the best of the experience they have inherited from their parents and grandparents. The reality of individual life cycles that so intrigued Darwin has since been unveiled for species such as sea turtles, salmon, birds (figure 1), sharks, and cod, all by nature-loving naturalists who took the time to observe it.

Figure 1. In each species of large animal studied, biologists have found a tendency for adults to undertake large-scale breeding migrations to return where they were born, completing their life cycle. This “obstinacy” makes sense: the site in question is undoubtedly favorable to the reproduction of certain members of their species – their parents – and consequently they need not run the risk of finding an alternative site to reproduce. Nature never abandons these hard-won life solutions.

Archie Carr’s sea turtles

The French author La Fontaine warned that we should never underestimate slowness. In his famous fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” he tells us that perseverance, when combined with slowness, can be a quality that surpasses many others. However, slowness is often viewed as bad. Various dictionaries define it negatively: as “lack of rapidity in movement and in action,” for instance, or “the quality or state of lacking intelligence or quickness of mind.”12

Turtles, whether marine or terrestrial, share either a great defect or a special quality: slowness.13 While the overall shape and lifestyle of marine turtles remained unchanged for some two hundred million years, thousands of other groups appeared and/or disappeared, notably the non-avian dinosaurs. Such longevity is in itself worthy of consideration. However, the turtles’ pattern of persistence has not always been a source of wonder. Before they became a subject of study, especially among conservationists, turtles were often seen as repulsive, even frightening.

“The tortoise uttered horrible shrieks when its head was smashed with iron hooks; his screams could have been heard at a quarter of a league; and his mouth, foaming with rage, exhaled a very stinky vapor.” So said Monsieur de la Font, chief engineer of the French port city of Nantes, of an unusual catch in the area north of the estuary of the Loire River on August 4, 1729: a two- to three-meter “fish” that scholars identified as a leatherback turtle.14 On October 25, 1752, the herring fishers of Dieppe, a port city in Normandy, took into their net a “monstrous beast,” an “extraordinary fish.” Seized with terror, they managed to tie up the animal and bring it back alive to the harbor. At a length of 2.15 meters and weighing 416 kilograms, the animal attracted a crowd of curious onlookers. Twenty-four hours after its capture, it was bought for fifty crowns by the queen’s purveyor, who sent it immediately to the court at Fontainebleau to be served at the royal table.15

Turtles have always fascinated people. The shell that covers them is a feature that prevents them from ever going unnoticed. Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist and author of a monumental encyclopedia, the Natural History, wrote on the differences between terrestrial, marine, and freshwater turtles. He was the first to describe the biology of marine turtles,16 noting that “the turtle has no teeth; but the edges of the mouth are sharp, the upper jaw closing on the lower like the lid of a box. In the sea, it lives on shellfish, and has such hard jaws that it is able to break stones; when on land, it lives on herbage. The female turtles lay eggs like those of birds, one hundred in number; those, she buries on dry land and covers them with earth which she pats down with her breast; then having rendered it smooth, she sits on them during the night…”17

It was not until several centuries later that we came to understand the biology and ecology of these enigmatic animals, which disappear at sea for decades before returning to beaches to lay and bury their eggs.

The anonymous author of the 1878 book The Great Fisheries of the World18 mentions catches of sea turtles that came onto the beach at full moon to reproduce, whereupon they were taken by locals who ate their eggs and meat and made ornaments from the scales of their shells. Irish traveler Sir Emerson Tennent reported that, according to local lore, marine turtles return to the same place from one year to the next to lay eggs, which facilitates their capture. In 1826, he said, one of the scaled (or “caretta”) turtles recovered on a beach was found to have a mark on one of its legs made thirty years earlier by a Danish officer hoping to prove that the turtles returned to the same beaches. It took many years for researchers to demonstrate the validity of this observation, which established marine turtles’ “return to the fold” behavior.19

In the United States, herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians) has a rich history. The great explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as John James Audubon and William Bertram, collected reptiles during their long explorations of North America. Drawings from that time represent alligators as monsters emerging from the waters with fish in their powerful jaws. It was not until the work of Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a Swiss immigrant who taught zoology at Harvard, that knowledge of American reptiles developed systematically.

Still, in the early twentieth century, zoology professor Theodore H. Hubbell understood that the studies on Florida’s fauna published at the time were very incomplete, and that economic development required a better understanding of natural resources. He recruited several young students who “loved Florida and were passionate about field studies” to begin studying the state’s reptiles.

With turtle-like perseverance, Archie Carr – one of the first students from this group to obtain his doctorate, in 1937 – studied marine turtles throughout his life.20 The reasons for this passion date back to his childhood: Carr inherited a love for nature from his father, a Presbyterian minister who was also a knowledgeable hunter and fisher.21 When Archie was young, during holidays home in Georgia, he would spend whole days engaged in capturing the turtles going up the river in search of oysters and other food. He particularly remembered a giant turtle he had seen for six consecutive years, which weighed more than a quarter of a ton. He was able to identify it because, in addition to its size, the turtle bore a distinctive barnacle that had taken up residence on its shell above the right eye.

Carr was fascinated by slow animals. On field trips to Central America, he spent long hours in the sun watching chameleons and sloths. He studied the evolutionary implications of their behavior and of animal slowness in general. It is reported that he devoted five days of sustained attention to two sloths of opposite sex, slowly moving toward each other. They were less than two feet apart when a child came to tell him he had to resume his trip: his plane had been repaired and the crew awaited him. Imagine his frustration – five days of waiting, and still he had not seen how sloths mated! Nonetheless, he had to return to study the migrations of marine turtles.

The first approaches to tracking these migrations were bizarre by today’s standards. In the 1960s, Carr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Foreword
• Translators' note
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 - The Cycles of Life
• CHAPTER 2 - Humans and the Arrow of Time
• CHAPTER 3 - Darwinian Reconciliation
• Notes
• Contents
• Collection