Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific

249 Pages·2012·2.15 MB·English

by  Tim Flannery

TIM FLANNERY
AMONG THE
ISLANDS
Dedication
To ALS
Contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
Introduction
Map
PART 1 IN THE REALM OF THE SUNBIRD
CHAPTER 1 Woodlark, the Wandering Isle
CHAPTER 2 Arrival of the Snake Man
CHAPTER 3 Alcester, the Lonely Isle
CHAPTER 4 Goodenough Not Near Enough
CHAPTER 5 Island of Lepers
PART 2 BISMARCK’S ISLES
CHAPTER 6 Manus
CHAPTER 7 New Ireland, and Travelling in Time
PART 3 THE SOLOMON ISLANDS
CHAPTER 8 Guadalcanal: Emperor, King and Little Pig
CHAPTER 9 Probing towards the Summit
CHAPTER 10 Makira’s Mysterious Rat
CHAPTER 11 Malaita
CHAPTER 12 The Face Never Seen
CHAPTER 13 Poncelet’s Giant and the Last Great Forest
PART 4 FIJI AND NEW CALEDONIA
CHAPTER 14 Bats at the Limit
CHAPTER 15 Fiji’s Garden Isle
CHAPTER 16 Nouvelle Calédonie
CHAPTER 17 The Mystery of Mont Panié
Afterword
About the Author
PRAISE FOR TIM FLANNERY
Also by Tim Flannery
References
Index
Photographic Inserts
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
or over a decade during the 1980s and 90s, I had the best job in the
F
world. I was leading a team of researchers, and together we travelled
the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific looking for marsupials,
bats and rats found nowhere else on Earth. It was pioneering work. No
summary of the mammal fauna of the region existed, so we had nothing
to guide us apart from brief accounts scattered in the scientific literature.
Many of the islands were a great blank, not having been visited by
anyone interested in mammals since some pioneering naturalist dropped
by during the age of sail.
Island biodiversity is exquisitely vulnerable to human disruption. The
fate of New Zealand’s biodiversity is typical. Over a third of its land bird
and bat species have become extinct since human settlement, and
another third are threatened with extinction. Such figures made me
wonder how the mammalian inhabitants of islands further north were
faring in the face of introduced species and European colonisation.
Because nobody in recent times had gone to the islands to look, it was a
question without an answer, and it became the raison d’être for our
quest. It was possible, we knew, that some species had vanished before
anyone even realised that they were endangered, making our adventures
somewhat quixotic. But it also seemed possible that a species or two
existed among the network of islands, reefs and misty peaks that had
evaded earlier visitors, and so awaited scientific discovery.
Planning for our expeditions was carried out in musty libraries and
museums, for these were the days before the internet, and if one wished
to consult the pages of the journal of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale
di Genova, or the obscure, Shanghai-published journal Memoires
concernant l’histoire naturelle de l’Empire Chinois, one had to front up at a
library that held the volumes—and oftentimes ask for help from a
translator as well. But many important finds were not even mentioned in
print. Perhaps their discoverer had died among the islands and his trove
of treasures had been shipped home to find nobody knew enough, or
cared enough, to publish an account of what was in them. And so we
worked among often forgotten collections held in museums great and
small, from London to Beijing, poring over stuffed skins of rats and bats
for evidence. Many had somehow survived fire, war and penury, and as
we chased down century-old clues to the existence of such bizarre
creatures as giant rats, monkey-faced bats and piebald cuscuses, we
stood in awe of those who had built the collections, as well as the
curators who had tended them through decades or centuries of peril.
To open the drawer of an old museum cabinet and find the remains of
a creature that lived on a distant tropic isle long since dramatically
changed by European impact, and which had travelled halfway round
the globe to reach its keeping place, is a magical experience—like
travelling in time itself. That moth-eaten skin, or even fragment, may be
all that remains of an entire species, tinting the thrill of seeing it with
immense sadness. For here lies all, perhaps, that is knowable of a branch
of life that may have gone its own way for a million years or more, a life
form that once played an important role in an island ecosystem, but
which had now winked out, never to be seen again.
Or had it? Who could really say whether it might still survive in the
densest jungle or remotest peak of its island realm. The most elusive
specimens lacked even a clear indication of where they’d been collected:
their labels cited a whole island group, or even the voyage of discovery
on which they’d been collected, rather than a precise island as their
origin. Such species present a great challenge, but even the better known
kinds presented us with a daunting quest. Where, and how, does one
begin on an island the size of a European state to search for a fist-sized,
nocturnal creature that has not been sighted for over a century? But we
were young, and confident that we could make sense of the clues.
Sometimes guided by no more than a single word on a specimen label,
we found our way to unimagined places—to villages that had not seen a
white face in living memory, or mountaintops crowned with surreal
vegetation—and then we knew that the quest was at least as important
as the goal.
As our work progressed, the high peaks of the Pacific Islands began to
hold me in their thrall. From a biological perspective they are among the
least known places on Earth, and even today some island peaks—which
rival Australia’s Mount Kosciusko in elevation—remain unvisited by
Europeans. Often held sacred by the native people, these mist-wreathed
summits are in some respects lost worlds—islands in the sky crowning
islands in a tropical sea. But reaching them was not easy. Local taboos,
foul weather, dense jungle and sheer remoteness combine to make them
some of the hardest places on earth in which to conduct biological
research.
The great arc of islands between Sulawesi and Fiji was our stomping
ground. Extending over 6000 kilometres, and crossing the Equator, it’s a
huge realm: stretching further than the distance from Paris to Montreal,
and almost as far as Beijing to Cairo. But it’s different from any similar-
sized region in that it consists of thousands of islands, each distinctive in
its geology, vegetation, shape, size and history of human colonisation.
From the picture-postcard Polynesian atoll, to some of the largest,
highest, most rugged and ancient islands on Earth, the region truly is a
version of the world writ small.
Among these varied lands are some that originated as slivers wrenched
from ancient supercontinents a hundred million years ago. Others are
continental chips torn more recently from the great island of New
Guinea. Yet others formed as volcanoes that belched forth from the
ocean depths, arriving above the waves as virginal lands innocent of life
until drifting seeds, spores and insects arrived. Krakatoa, which blew
itself apart in a paroxysm of volcanic activity in 1883 and then grew
anew from the sea, gives us some idea of the process. First ferns and
insects, then flowering plants, birds and lizards arrived to colonise their
new-found land. Krakatoa is just a few tens of kilometres from Java and
Sumatra, and less than a century old. Imagine a volcano surfacing a
thousand kilometres from the nearest land, then receiving its pilgrims
over a million years.
There are other ways, too, for islands to form. Some are simply heaved
above the waves by the movements of continental plates, while others,
known as land-bridge islands, were, just 10,000 to 20,000 years ago,
attached to much larger landmasses by connections now drowned in a
rising sea. Some islands originated as combinations of several of these
processes. But all islands, regardless of their origins, have one thing in
common: transience. True, some islands are longer-lived than others, but
all, in the unfolding of geological time, are destined to sink beneath the
waves or amalgamate with larger landmasses. Over just the past few
centuries, dozens of islands have been born and have died, and like us
ultimately all of them will die, even as new islands are born.
On islands, evolution can be slowed down or speeded up. It can also
take unlikely directions, fashioning novel creatures adapted to the
particular conditions of the island. Why do islands have such peculiar
powers over the evolutionary process? Imagine taking a species from the
complex, rich continental ecosystem in which it has evolved, then
releasing one or two randomly chosen individuals on an island where
nothing like it has previously existed. If they survive, the individuals
that begat the island population will have just a small subset of the
species’ genetic diversity, and this alone will wield an influence. To
understand how, just imagine choosing two humans—say a red-head and
a very tall person—and leaving them on a desert isle, then returning in a
million years to examine the characteristics of their descendants.
But genetics is only the start, for when any creature reaches an island,
it has effectively been transplanted into a new world. Its predators,
competitors, diseases and even favoured foods may not exist in its new
home, and, instead of the boundless habitat of a continent, it finds itself
part of a tiny population hemmed in on each side by sea. Such
circumstances can greatly speed the evolutionary process. In the
beginning the species is likely to breed up rapidly, for in the absence of
predators and disease there is no check on its rate of increase. But soon
it faces overpopulation: most individuals will die and only those with a
particular advantage will survive. Perhaps those lucky few can utilise
some food inaccessible to the rest, or perhaps they can conserve energy
because they don’t fly much, or perhaps they are smaller than average
and can subsist on the slender resources the island affords them. Because
the population is small and the selection of the survivors so rigorous, the
evolutionary process is greatly accelerated. The influence of such
powerful evolutionary pressure can be profound. As we see in the dodo,
sometimes it creates beings which don’t appear to belong here on Earth.
Hardly anybody studies mammals on islands: it’s those able colonisers
the birds that usually get the attention. Yet some island mammals have,
like the dodo, been as remarkably transformed. On islands, bats have
been known to take on some of the characteristics of apes, and rats those
of badgers, shrews or possums. Even humans and their behaviours are
shaped by island life, and as a result island cultures have become as
varied and novel as any on Earth.
Not all island life is established by vagrants arriving by raft, wind or
wing. Islands that originate as slices of continents, severed from the
mainland by powerful geological forces, carry with them a subset of
continental life. When that happens, entire ecosystems are set adrift to
adjust over millions of years to life in a small, isolated sphere.