Dictionaries define a survivor as a person or thing that
continues to function or prosper in spite of hardship or setbacks. Biology has
named many organisms in its time, though not all have survived in the way that
Richard Fortey defines survivor in this book. For Fortey, a naturalist and
paleontologist, a survivor is an organism that has survived as close to its
original form through geologic time.
That is, through the hundreds of millions of years. Hominins (human-like
organisms), to the best of our knowledge, have walked Earth for only about four
million years. Fortey’s survivors are truly ancient.
Though a paleontologist – and one obsessed with trilobites –
Fortey does not play favourites. In a rare foray into the world of living
organisms, he runs the gamut from microscopic algae to plants to musk oxen, describing
each one in the lyrical language that makes his writing come alive and make
even the most humble creature seem like the most exciting thing on the planet…at
least for that chapter!
In his visit to Yellowstone National Park, Fortey visits the
many geysers in search of extremophiles, the microscopic algae and bacteria
that thrive in the acidic, boiling hot water where the pH is around 2 and the
temperatures around 80C. It was here at the Obsidian Pool that a group of
hyperthermophile (extreme heat loving) Archaea (bacteria-like cells) named
Korarchaeota were discovered and in 2008 were claimed based on molecular
evidence to be the most similar in structure to the first living cells ever. In
response to this Fortey says:
“Now we start to see the horseshoe crab as an afterthought,
the velvet worm as a postscript, and even seaweed as a tardy arrival: we have
taken a huge bound back to the earliest moments of life on earth.”
That would be in the range of 3500 million years ago.
As for plants, they do not date from quite as far back as
the Archaea but Huperzia, a small
green herb known as a club moss, is related to the massive trees from the
Carboniferous of 300 million years ago whose tree trunks were one of the major
contributors to coal seams. Fortey traveled to Norway to visit Huperzia, which had survived both the
Permian and Cretaceous extinctions meaning it would have been on earth near the
Silurian – 400 million years ago – when plants first began to colonize land and
developed vascular tissues in order to transport water throughout their bodies.
Fortey describes Huperzia as “the
botanical equivalent of the horseshoe crab”, which also dates from the same
geologic era.
Throughout the descriptions of the many organisms in this
book, Fortey explains in the simplest terms possible the relationship between
organisms as well as their relative positions on the evolutionary tree. He
discusses the hypotheses for their ability to survive alongside those
hypotheses about why others were not able to survive the same conditions
without getting bogged down in terminology or the minutiae of debates amongst
evolutionary biologists. In this way he makes this information accessible in a way many writers on evolution are unable.
At times Survivors
takes on a more polemical tone, as Fortey involves humans in the fight for
survival of his survivors. Sharks and their relatives have also survived since
the Paleozoic along with Huperzia and
the horseshoe crab, although they may now have met their match in humans who
may engineer the loss of several species of shark due to an “appetite for their
fleshy fins”. Sharks from which fins are removed are not killed, but are thrown
back into the ocean where they spiral to their deaths in the depths as their
fins are what stabilize them as they swim. Fortunately, Fortey makes these
arguments without falling in to the trap of many who make similar claims of
humanity’s effects on the populations of organisms, that there are just too
many humans on earth causing destruction of nature by their mere presence and nature.
Instead his tone is more measured, and about how it is human choices that are
wreaking havoc on populations, from shark finning for making soups to contributing to
the climate change that may throw off reptilian gender balances.
“I grieve that the Nautilus
that has survived the dinosaurs is declining because of a trade in tourist
trinkets. … The extinction event that is happening right now is the first one
in history that is the responsibility of a single species. There’s no meteorite
this time, no exceptional volcanic eruptions, no ‘Snowball Earth’, just us,
prospering at the expense of other species.”
Fortey wrote this book because he cares about survival of
ancient bacteria, lungfish, musk oxen, sharks and the multitudes of other
organisms he wrote about in this book and the ones he hopes to write about in a
future volume. I believe in writing Survivors
Fortey also hoped to make its readers care about these organisms’ survival as well,
and to work to make choices that will allow that to happen. Since many
extinctions are happening as a result of things like habitat loss and climate change, these choices and changes
are well within our reach.
