.rm75
.ls2
.pn36
2. Choosing Damsels
.lm18
.rm50
And I serve the fairy
queen ,
To dew her orbs upon the
green .
A fairy
.lm1
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Scientific names remind me of foreign
diplomats, suddenly cast into
the
light by events half a world away. Duane
Dunwoody hears odd voices on
television
and accepts them as a necessary element of his now global
communications
network. Other Sandhills families, even
more physically
isolated
than Dunwoody, do the same. So if we are
to sit around the dinner
table
and talk about political forces ripping at the human fabric, we must
mouth
unfamiliar words. And if we're to talk
about delicate beauty,
frailty
battling the prairie gales, striking microscopic colors emerging
from
a vile and smelly froth, Paleozoic patterns now resting on our
outstretched
finger, we must also make our peace with ancient languages
spoken
in exotic places. Tami handles such
words easily; she's practiced
them
daily for years.
" Ischnura verticalis ,"
she says, easily and smoothly, with the
softness
of someone recognizing a tiny friend in a far off land. She slips
Ischnura
verticalis into a hole in the lid of a plastic gallon jug.
" Enallagma civile ," she calls the next one, just as
gently and easily,
just
as instructively, and slips Enallagma civile into the same hole where
Ischnura
verticalis disappeared. Tami is
choosing damselflies, an activity
in
which she can become totally, completely, absorbed in a world of her
own,
progressing slowly through the weeds.
She flicks the net. A soft whisper of gauze brushing grasstop
floats
across
the glassy surface of Dunwoody Pond. She
holds the fine white linen
up
to the sunlight. Inside a pair of
damselflies flutters against the
webbing. Their membranous wings sparkle in the glare,
sending iridescent
flashes
through the cloth. Tami reaches down
into the flimsy bag,
carefully
working her hand through the fold until her fingers press gently
on
the wings. Death awaits Ischnura
verticalis , for Tami is a businesslike
reaper. And as surely as she's chosen one
I . verticalis out of the
thousands
that rest, chase tiny prey, and seek mates along the shore of a
pond,
she's also chosen a path into the next century, a path aligned
closely
to the fates of her insects and the other animals that live inside
them.
Her trek through the arcane jungles of
Invertebratology began when she
was
given a small card with another odd name on it: Siphonia tulipa . Go to
wonderland,
she was told, and find Siphonia tulipa . But when she climbed
the
shining marble staircase and pushed open the ancient creaking doors,
she
found so many elegant items that she forgot Siphonia tulipa for a
time,
and
became lost among the rock leaves, stared back at the stone eyes
looking
up at her from their beds of green felt, took a trip back four
hundred
million years, riding there in the frozen writhing arms of a black
star,
felt sadness for the crushed flowers that were not real flowers at
all,
but sea lilies, from a far off time.
Around her feet the children played, and
ran calling to one another to
come
look at all the strange creatures made of rocks and epoxy and
information
and the hard work of people who dug into the Earth for evidence
of
past worlds. I must find Siphonia
tulipa , Tami thought, eventually, and
when
I do, it will be the most beautiful of all these wonders. She was
wrong. It was not the most beautiful, nor the most
complex of fossils in
the
museum, but it was hers, for upon the card she'd been given was not
only
a lyrical name, but also an assignment:
write a story, about Siphonia
tulipa ,
that will make one of these children want to grow up to be just
like
me--forever young of mind, forever curious about the lives I cannot
live. She leaned over, then, staring closely
through the glass, and asked
her
questions of the rock: What is your
secret? How do I make a person
choose
an animal, then because of that choice, choose a life, just by
telling
a story? What kind of a story might this
one be?
Now, in the hot mid-morning, Tami stalks
through the weeds with the
same
sharp curiosity as she'd entered the museum.
She's just as surrounded
by
wonderland, just as aware of her ultimate task and the labor that
follows,
and just as ready to ask the same questions of Ischnura verticalis
and
Enallagma civile as she'd asked of the cold rock Siphonia
tulipa : What
is
your secret? But she's older now, five
years down the road, and she
knows
the secret: giant problems have giant powers of attraction. They
consume
your thinking time, lead you into exotic dangerous places, turn you
into
a monster your friends don't recognize.
So you get new friends,
people
who walk through the weeds and choose giant problems as easily as
they
choose Ischnura verticalis .
And she knows, too, the kind of story she
has to tell in order to make
some
child choose a damselfly, or a fossil, or for that matter a beetle, a
worm,
or a bird, as a guide to wonderland. The
story cannot have an end,
only
a beginning, then a middle with an infinite, branching, interconnected
maze
of pathways. When the child enters the
maze, expecting to find an
answer,
an end, she sees only choices, and these in turn are never clearly
defined
as right and wrong. Ahead lie many
roads, all disguised as
something
they are not, all leading into scenery that can shatter your
perceptions
of a well organized universe. I was that
child, once, Tami
thinks
back, and smiles at the memory of a card with a magic name: Siphonia
tulipa . And I wrote my story, and it did make one kid
want to become a
scientist. I'm that kid!
She flicks her net, choosing damselflies, on the
shore
of Dunwoody Pond.
But Tami's new tulip does not lie frozen
in stone in a museum case.
Within
her chosen damselflies live an astonishing array of other animals.
In
the laboratory, she peels open an intestine, using her fine forceps to
tear
a strip down one side, causing the rest of the tube to turn itself
inside
out. Sometimes a dozen long white bodies
then appear, their "heads"
buried
into the gut wall, between the cells.
These are the parasites that
Tami
has picked for the topic of her mental labor.
If she uses them
properly,
they will open doors for her, carry her to a podium in a far off
city
where she'll throw her ideas out for discussion to an auditorium full
of
scientists waiting to see how well she succeeds as a member of their
club. And no matter what happens to her for the
rest of her life on Earth,
these
odd, elongate cells will sit beside Siphonia tulipa in her memory as
the
pieces of nature she used to build her career.
But even as she cuts the tiny damselfly
intestines, and gently teases
the
parasites away from the gut lining, Tami knows that she faces two tasks
disguised
as one. Her ultimate goal is to reveal
the various mechanisms by
which
these one-celled animals attach to the damselfly intestine. Before
she
gets to that point, however, she must deal with several tongue-twister
names. Siphonia tulipa was lyrical enough
to make her want to say the
words;
Ischnura verticalis had a certain mixture of hard and soft sounds,
like
chocolate and salt, that she enjoyed; Enallagma civile reminded her
of
a
relatively tame, but nevertheless entertaining, jigsaw puzzle. Except
for
one species, however, the long one-celled parasites in the damselfly
intestines
have no names. Instead of memorizing
exotic words, Tami must
make
some up then defend her reasons for assigning them.
"This is the one I'm going to call
dunwoodii ," she says, leaning back
from
the microscope. Duane Dunwoody, for all
his bluster, has been a
friend
whose help cannot be measured, nor adequately priced, nor even
repayed,
except in the most respectful and quiet way: an honorific name,
published
in a scientific journal, thus spoken forever, around the world,
whenever
anyone talks about the animals that live inside damselflies that
carpet
the shore of Dunwoody's.
In naming parasites after people who've
been a significant part of her
life,
Tami follows in the tracks of another young woman, Sarah, who also
came
into the Nebraska Sandhills to study biology and ended up naming the
one
species of damselfly parasite Tami recognizes.
Sarah walked into my
lab
one day and said: I'm here to do
research, but it has to be on
something
nobody else has ever worked on. At the
time, Sarah was an
undergraduate
at Brown University looking for field experience out on the
western
Great Plains. Study the parasites of
damselflies, I suggested, if
you
really want to work on something that nobody else has studied. What
kind
of parasites? she asked. They're called
'gregarines,' I replied, and
they're
the most insignificant, unappreciated, mysterious, and economically
unimportant
animals I know. Which is probably why
nobody else has studied
the
ones in damselflies, at least around here.
But, I added, they're
beautiful,
too, and reasonably captivating. How do
I start? wondered
Sarah. Write fifty questions, I answered. About animals I've never seen?
She
was getting the picture quickly--a positive sign! Well, go find some,
then
write your fifty questions, I said, handing her an insect net.
Sarah, like Tami in the museum, went
searching for her animals, which
she
found by the thousands along the shore of a place called Martin Bay
Pond,
about two miles away from Dunwoody Pond.
Martin Bay Pond has long
since
dried up; Sarah's two summers along its shore may have been a
singularity--an
idyllic, highly instructional, emotionally captivating,
intense
intellectual experience which can never be repeated because the
place
she had it has disappeared. In fact, the
disappearance of Martin Bay
Pond
stimulated the search that led, eventually, to Dunwoody's. We'll come
back
to Martin Bay Pond, or rather to the dried mud bed, later, when it's
time
to talk of droughts, both natural droughts, which lay bare the land
and
bring into prominence the hardiest, oldest, and most tolerant of
organisms,
and droughts made of bad human decisions, which lay bare the
lands
of opportunity and bring the most creative, resourceful,
individualistic,
and blasphemous minds out into the open where they
flourish. But at the time of Sarah's explorations,
Martin Bay Pond is
full,
and damselflies-- Enallagma civile --blanket the tops of grasses
growing
right up to the water's edge. With one
sweep of her net, Sarah is
able
to get a week's work. The first
damselfly she cuts open has nearly
three
hundred parasites.
"What are they?" asks Sarah.
"Probably members of the genus
Actinocephalus ," I reply, looking
through
the microscope, "but you have to discover what their spores look
like
before you can be sure."
"What's the species?"
"I don't know. There's a lot of literature to consult, a lot
of
measurements
to make. Maybe you have a new
species. Maybe you'll have to
publish
a description."
A strange smile smile comes over Sarah's
face.
"That would be great," she says,
"before I came out here, I told my
sister
I was going to name a parasite after her."
I don't pursue that line of conversation
very far. The night she
discovers
the spores, we celebrate with microwave burritos from Pro-Mart,
the
24 hour a day filling station that serves as the emergency ration
source
when discoveries that need celebrated are made in the middle of the
night. The name of her undescribed species of
Actinocephalus had been
decided
before she'd caught her first insect.
Her sister was about to
become
immortalized in print.
"Carri Lynn, have I got a present for
you!" says Sarah, taking another
bite
of her microwaved burrito. After two
years of dissection, counting,
measurement,
and library research, she's convinced her species is a new one
and
is ready to write her description.
Sarah's two summers studying the parasites
of damselflies are of
significant
help to Tami. Out of the five or six
species of large
gregarines
in damselflies along the shores of Dunwoody Pond, only one,
Actinocephalus
carrilynnae , is familiar and identifiable.
Sarah has gone
to
Arizona to pursue other questions, but her contribution stays behind to
help
those who follow in her steps.
Actinocephalus carrilynae is one of
Tami's
species whose status is, at least temporarily, defined and accepted.
The
rest of these species constitute, as is sometimes said in the
profession,
a "taxonomic mess."
The first time students encounter such a
mess, right under their
noses,
in some common and familiar place, the edifice of scientific
knowledge
suddenly appears cracked, if not shattered.
Few experiences
point
so sharply, so quickly, and in such easily understood terms, toward
that
vast sea of ignorance every practicing scientist knows is "out
there,"
as
being unable to identify an animal using available literature.
Parasites
inside small animals are particularly unstudied. Of all the
millions
of damselflies that scientists have watched, collected, put away
in
museums, relatively few have been examined for parasites. And of those
that
have been dissected by someone looking for parasites, three young
women
from the prairies--Sarah, Aris, and Tami--are quickly accumulating
the
world's overwhelming majority. Not
surprisingly, the first thing they
discover
is that they are suddenly among the world's experts. The second
thing
they discover is that in order to answer any question of process,
they
must first answer the question that plagues all ecologists at some
time
in their careers: What is it?
The gregarine parasites of damselflies are
relatively large, for
single
cells, and their differences are manifested primarily in two
features:
their anterior ends, with which they "hold" onto the damselfly
intestine,
and their spores, more properly called "oocysts," by means of
which
they get distributed throughout nature.
Tami has decided to focus on
the
first of these features, the holdfast structures, although in a larger
sense,
she's actually studying evolutionary events that probably took place
a
hundred million years ago between two species' cell membranes. Tami's
convinced
that with the electron microscope, she can see differences
between
species' solutions to a common problem: how to hold on to your
place
and complete your life history in a turbulent, mushy, environment.
The
unspoken assumption is that if she discovers how various species
accomplish
this daunting task, then maybe she'll be able to apply such
knowledge
to her own life history, hopefully to be lived out in academia--a
no
less turbulent or mushy environment than one finds in a damselfly gut.
The names of her animals, however, remain
in her head, instead of on
the
journal page where they'd be of use, and furthermore, the names
themselves
are neither fully formed nor firmly affixed to their respective
parasites. Back in the city, Tami consults another lab
mate, Rich, who's
chosen
beetles as his source of mystery, reputation, and career. Beetles,
as
a group may be the most common animals on earth; there are a quarter of
a
million described species. Most of these
species contain their own
microfauna,
and whereas the parasites of beetles are better known than
those
of damselflies, still only a handful of parasitologists have looked
inside
beetle guts. When these scientists have
published their work, the
papers
have often appeared in old, odd, and foreign journals that few
American
libraries contain. Through patience and
diligence, Rich has
accumulated
file drawers of obscure and convoluted literature, as well as a
lexicon
of scientific Greek and Latin words and their meanings. Together,
microscopic
animals in one hand, this literature in the other, the two
young
scientists search for the perfect syllables.
Euphonious and descriptive are Rich's
personal criteria for names;
euphonious
and published so she can get on with her work are Tami's. Their
search
for perfect words reminds me of a Michael Lipman story-- The
Chatterlings
in Wordland --that is among the treasured items remaining from
my
childhood bookshelves. The Chatterlings
were delightful little elves
dressed
in red tailed jackets and pointed caps with a pair of feathers.
Their
eyes were mostly white circles, i.e. wide open.
The King informs
Prince
Tip o' Tongue that he's ready to retire and turn the kingdom over to
Tip,
but the Prince has to go get himself a crown.
When the poor kid comes
back
from the Royal Hat Maker, he has only a coronet. Of course as
punishment,
Tip gets sent on a rambling search--not unlike Tami with
Siphonia
tulipa --for the pair of words that means exactly the same thing.
The Chatterling-type search also leads to
a history lesson. Among the
obscure
scientists who'd cut open damselflies looking for parasites was an
Izushi
High School teacher, Kinichiro Obata.
Obata published descriptions
of
many species of parasites from Japanese insects. Tami and Rich know
these
insects; they've been at the microscope themselves, fine forceps in
hand,
pulling out an intestine from some of the same species Obata studied.
Obata's
published paper, however, contains a narrative that the young
scientists
hope never to have to write in one of their own:
.lm5
"I began the study of gregarines of insects
in 1942, but I lost many
data and manscripts be the fire caused by
the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima.
After the second World War, I came back to my work, and
ressumed [sic] some parts of my previous
study."
.lm1
Although the collections and manuscripts
may have been lost, Kinichiro
Obata's
papers tell us that damselflies, and their parasites, as well as a
person
who studied them, survived a nuclear weapons attack. None of
Obata's
assigned species names commemorate the war.
He names a parasite
species
tokonoi because its insect hosts were collected near Mt. Tokono;
another
he calls ozakii and dedicates it to his "respectable
professor" Dr.
Y.
Ozaki. Others he names after prominent
physical features, a decision
that
Tami and Rich are somewhat inclined to repeat.
" Steganorhynchus doesn't
sound quite right," I offer my opinion on the
pair's
choice of complex words for the generic name.
"That sounds like a
dinosaur
instead of a parasite." The animal
Tami proposes to name after
Duane
Dunwoody not only is a new species, it's also a new genus. If the
descriptive
paper is accepted by a scientific journal, the animal would be
known
as Steganorhynchus dunwoodii .
Stegano - translates into
"sheathed" or "covered," rather like a
lampshade;
rhynchus translates into "nose." The Stegano - describes a
delicate,
membranous, veil that adorns the end of this parasite's
attachment
stalk. So to honor her local rancher,
Tami picks a name that
means
Dunwoody's Lampshadenose. What is a
Dunwoody's Lampshadenose? A
one-celled
animal with a long stalk at the front end and a membranous,
lampshade-like
structure at the end of the stalk. Of
course. No wonder
people
think biologists are odd. Before her
entanglement with one celled
animals
ends, Tami and Rich will find names for the others. The names will
be,
above all, colorful: Nubenocephalus
nebraskensis ; this one has a tiny
attachment
stalk that eventually disappears, whereupon the entire front end
of
the animal becomes a sucker.
Nubeno - means envelope; cephalus refers to
head;
- ensis means "living in;" N .
nebraskensis is an envelope-head living
in
Nebraska.
I ask Tami and her co-author Rich if that
particular name is also a
subtle
honorific. They smile and answer no,
reminding me that I once
suggested
naming new species after politicians.
The logic went something
like
this: politicians are so enamored of glory that they'd be curious
about
the animals they were named after. Such
curiosity might heighten the
ecological
awareness of those in positions of political power. This
heightened
awareness might lead to more rational and enlightened policies
toward
natural resources. But what happens if
the politicians discover the
animals
they've been named after are parasites?
They might not appreciate
the
honor, I agreed. In the end, we decide
against the politicians as
honorees,
concluding that the naming of species after individuals ought to
be
reserved for people who truly deserve the honor, people whose names you
want
entered permanently into the scientific literature. So Duane Dunwoody
gets
his parasite. Some others, whose names
you read in your daily
newspaper,
do not. And if history is any guide to
the future, people will
be
saying Steganorhynchus dunwoodii for many years, if not centuries,
after
the
politicians' names have disappeared into oblivion.
Tami's final species is a member of the
genus Hoplorhynchus .
Hoplo -
is
a tool, or a weapon; rhynchus is again nose. Hoplorhynchus is a weapon-
or
tool-nose. Out of deference to the
memory of Kinichiro Obata, and as a
reminder
of the vulnerability of pure science for the love of science, Tami
prefers
to think of weapons, rather than tools, when she sees a species of
Hoplorhynchus . This parasite's holdfast organelle has a
crown of hooks.
Tami
settles on acanthatholius for the specific epithet;
acantha - means
spines;
a tholia is a conical hat with a broad rim. Hoplorhynchus
acanthatholius
will be a parasite whose weapon is a conical hat, perhaps a
dunce
cap, with a broad rim of spines. Tami is
especially pleased with
this
name. Those who lead with weapons on
their noses need to be reminded
that
they're really wearing a dunce cap with thorns.
Kinichiro Obata would
probably
have appreciated this subtle symbolism contained in the name of an
inconsequential
parasite of an insect of no economic importance but of
great
beauty.
Speaking of names--not long ago, Tami's
lab mate Rich got up in front
of
a small audience and presented the results of some fairly sophisticated
experiments
involving the physiological ecology of three species of
parasites
that lived in beetles. In this audience
were some of the most
successful
scientists in the country, including several that had large
grants
to study molecular biology and genetics.
I had listened to many of
their
talks, as well as other lectures by "modern" scientists studying the
expression
of genetic information, genetic engineering, biochemistry,
immunology,
and the like. Those experiences were
often a painful struggle
for
me, both intellectually and emotionally.
Why, I kept asking, do I feel
so
outdated, so ill-trained, so obsolete, listening to these fellow
scientists,
when they never seem to reveal any feelings of inadequacy when
listening
to me? Yet I'd been asked questions, and
heard comments about my
work
and that of my graduate students, that indicated my fellow scientists
had
not understood what was being said, or else had superimposed their own
wishes
and desires on my data. I looked around
at the audience; everyone
seemed
attentive, focused on Rich's talk. You'd
never have suspected that
a
ten minute talk on whole animals and reproduction had sailed right past
them.
Yet after this presentation, during an
intermission, one of the most
senior
of these scientists commented in private on the paper involving
insect
parasites. For a mixed audience, he
said, the student should
simplify
his jargon, and especially so if he [meaning the student] gives
the
same material in a job interview seminar.
I pursued the meaning of the
term
"jargon," having heard plenty of jargon that nobody ever bothered
explaining
to me being presented as cutting edge science.
You know, he
said,
all those names. Maybe he should just
call them parasites A, B, and
C. The problem, it seemed, was in the scientific
names used by this
student
in front of an audience made up of biologists.
How, I wondered,
can
you speak to professional biologists if you can't use scientific names?
Then
it dawned on me: the Latinized names of plants and animals are almost
symbols
for Nineteenth Century biology--the Golden Age of Exploration.
Nobody
talks that way any more unless, of course, they want to make sure
everyone
else knows exactly what kinds of organisms are being discussed and
have
some sense of the evolutionary histories and relationships involved in
the
discussion.
At the other end of the spectrum of
scientific education are the well
educated
professionals--usually businessmen and their wives--who say to me,
at
various social functions, comments like "John, I really couldn't make it
through
your last book. I hope you
understand. It was just so difficult
and
so technical." Difficult and
technical? I work so hard to make them
easy
and non-technical. Compared to the junk
bond, savings and loan, and
terrorist
financing scandals of recent years, all reported extensively in
local
newspapers, the life of a parasite is relatively simple and
straightforward. I usually tell my friends that. Then they get
apologetic. Oh you know, they say, all those complicated
names. The
scientific
names? I ask. Yes.
Then I wonder if maybe their parents
should
have bought them a copy of The Chatterlings in Wordland when they
were
children.
But I'm usually polite enough not to
express that wondering out loud.
Instead,
I make a comment about my class roster.
Every time I record
grades
for two hundred students, I relive the colonizaton of America, the
survival
through three and four generations of Eastern European, German,
Scandanavian,
and Irish names, now carried with pride and a sense of
cultural
continuity. But recently my class
rosters have carried other
kinds
of names, too--Hispanic, Indian, Pakistani, Asian, and especially
Vietnamese
words, odd combinations of vowels and consonants that apply to
the
bright and eager faces I see spread across a large auditorium. This is
the
linguistic milieu into which Tami will be thrown if she is successful
in
pursuit of her chosen career as a college professor. Her struggle with
names
like Siphonia tulipa , Steganorhynchus dunwoodii , and
Hoplorhynchus
acanthatholius ,
now seems to have been good training.
It's taught her to
be
patient with odd words whose meanings have significance for you
personally. Kinichiro Obata would likely have understood,
and greatly
appreciated
the value to Tami, of her etymological lessons delivered at the
hands
of un-named parasites living in damselflies.
* * *
From the shores of Dunwoody Pond and the
gallery filled with ancient
words,
Tami retreats into darkness to answer her original question about
the
animals that live inside insects: How do
the cell membranes of
damselflies
interact with those of this community of parasites? She sits
before
a giant steel machine, her hands on its knurled knobs, her fingers
making
delicate adjustments. Strange images
pass across a screen whose
green
light reflects off her face. She's at
the end of her search, seeing,
at
last, why she chose damselflies, spent those untold hours at the
microscope,
cut open so many intestines, struggled with long words and wing
veins
and markings that showed she'd caught the right species. In the
darkness
she smiles at the naive questions ringing in her ears, the
questions
strangers often ask: What good can
possibly come out of your
work? Satisfied with a picture on the screen, she
presses a button and
turns
the image into a photograph. I chose an
insect, and because of it,
became
a child in wonderland, and will forever be a child in wonderland.
But what good comes from your
work, they ask again, persistent,
unsatisfied. I have produced a child who will forever be
in wonderland,
she
says one more time, firmly, with a touch of new hardness in her voice,
losing
some of her patience with people who continue to ask questions but
don't
seem to want to hear the answers. The
bandage is gone from the
finger
that twists the knobs to move her specimen sealed away into a giant
vacuum
cylinder. This single slice of
biological material she's studying
represents
a year of work and waiting. The bandage
represented her lesson
in
patience with herself. Her parasite is
embedded in a block of plastic.
She
needed to cut that block into a certain shape in order to slice off a
section
so thin the plastic looks golden. Blocks
are trimmed with glass
knives. Glass knives are made, broken from squares of
quarter inch plate.
Glass
knives are sharp as hell; eventually you cut yourself. Then you wait
while
the finger heals. The diamond knife,
used to slice off the golden
section,
is also sharp, and unforgiving of those who've not learned their
first
lessons with glass.
The waiting is nothing new. Tami waited until the plastic hardened,
and
before that, she waited while her specimens took their journeys through
caustic
chemicals and buffers, each step timed, each step a potential loss
of
her year's work. Earlier she'd waited
for her microscope lessons. On
the
shore of Dunwoody Pond, she'd waited for summer, for the right species
of
damselflies, and then for exactly the right species of parasites to
appear
in the intestines. Then she waited for
the parasites to produce
spores,
and she waited for literature to be sent from across the ocean.
She
was patient with her own mistakes.
Before a specimen could begin its
trek
from her lab bench to the electron microscope, it had to be fixed in
place,
attached to the insect gut lining. In
order to be of any value, the
parasite
had to stay attached through all the processing and handling.
Many
were lost along the way. By the time her
parasites were embedded in
plastic,
they were black, almost unrecognizeable versions of themselves.
She
had no idea whether they would be satisfactory for her purposes. If
they
were not, then she'd have to wait another year, for another crop of
damselflies
and another generation of parasites to emerge from Dunwoody
Pond.
Her finger healed, she had to wait for
"time on the scope." Big
expensive
scientific instruments are heavily used; she had to schedule her
hours
far in advance. She spends her waiting
hours writing. Once she had
an
idea, she remembers, and decided to explore it, beginning with some
insects
she'd caught on the shore of Dunwoody Pond and some questions that
came
into her mind when she saw the parasites in the insect's intestines.
She
knew early on that she'd eventually have much writing and waiting to
do. If she could return to that first day when
she walked into wonderland
with
her card-- Siphonia tulipa --and waded through the excited children
swirling
around her knees, what would she say to herself, and to these
kids? Be patient.
Science takes time. The distance
from Dunwoody to the
dark
room can be measured in many ways, by the lengthening list of
technical
skills she's acquired, by the stack of obscure literature
accumulating
in her files, by the roster of published names of parasites.
But
the most telling measure of her success at converting herself into a
scientist
is Tami's patience, her understanding of the strictly human
trait--patience--that
permeates all work well done.
The lives Tami sees on the electron
microscope screen are not so
easily
analyzed as crushed midge parts in an adult damselfly's intestine.
She
gets the distinct feeling that what she's seeing first appeared on
earth
during the Carboniferous, that the cell membranes so delicately
pushed
together are evidence of a relationship that's been kept alive,
through
repeated encounters between damselflies and their internal
parasites,
a sort of reaffirmation of a common need, for two hundred and
fifty
million years. She focuses on the exact
spot where Steganorhynchus
dunwoodii
and Ischnura verticalis come together. The picture looks nothing
like
she'd envisioned it earlier. Electron
micrographs are impressionist
drawings,
to be deciphered only if you have a clear sense of what you
started
with; and electron micrographs of parasite membranes up against
their
host's, when viewed at a magnification of ten thousand times, present
one
with an additional problem: which one is the parasite, and which one is
the
host?
In this case the question is fairly easy
to answer. Magnified ten
thousand
times, all those gregarine parasites with the elegant,
geographical,
honorific and euphonius names are seen to have row upon row
of
regular folds at their surfaces. As Tami
turns the knobs and moves
these
folds through the viewing screen, their marching patterns are almost
hypnotic. See?
Here's where they've been pushed aside by the contact
with
a damselfly cell; here's where they're cut so cleanly by the diamond
knife
that you can see tiny tubes supporting each fold; and here's where
the
spaces between the folds are filled with something dark, making you
think
of glue, or other sticky secretions. In
the electron microscope, a
damselfly
looks like a beautiful stomach ache.
Cells lining the intestine
are
very tall, packed together like the stalks in sheaves of wheat, puffy
and
fragile, especially at their globular top ends that appear to break
open,
spilling enzymes into the gut. Tami
turns the knobs still further,
following
the marching parasite folds down into the sheaf of damselfly
cells
pushed aside by the gregarine's neck.
And at the end of the neck,
Dunwoody's
Lampshadenose's nose: the lampshade is actually a fuzzy balloon
filled
with mysterious granules. I wonder what
those granules are? Tami
asks
herself in the dark. After all this
time, all this waiting, all this
work,
she's still in the dark, both literally and figuratively, having
found
only more difficult questions as answers.
Once more she smiles. At
the
end of a long and arduous search and all I find are more difficult
questions? Good; I must be on my way to becoming a
scientist!
* * *
Six years after I hand her a card with the
name Siphonia tulipa on it,
Tami
hands me a book, non-fiction, bound in black, its title embossed in
gold,
and containing 143 pages. This book has
four chapters. The events
and
situations described in those four chapters, as well as the physical
appearance
of the characters involved, tell a formal story. In places, the
language
is almost stilted, a requirement of the genre.
In other places,
the
sentences are long, complex, descriptions of pictures. The information
is
not necessarily given in the sequence in which it was acquired; the
story
has been arranged to guide the reader through the author's series of
tasks
and thoughts. In the beginning, the main
characters are described
and
we learn something of their history. The
second chapter tells about
these
characters' homes, the environments where they live and die, the
disruptions
they have to contend with daily. In the
third chapter we get
involved
in the characters' lives, see how they solve problems in their own
unique
ways, and find what their common environment forces upon them in the
way
of compromise. In the final chapter, we
see inside these characters,
into
their innermost secrets, the mysterious and unique traits that keep
them
apart from other members of their families.
Upon closer examination,
our
impressions from chapter three are shown to be somewhat naive. By the
end
of this book, a reader knows he's been taken on a journey to places no
one
else has gone. Tami's name is on the
front. My first reaction to
receiving
it is to place the cover against my nose and breath in deeply.
Brand
new bound thesis copies have a smell that is uniquely intellectual,
unquestioningly
academic, the smell of major accomplishment.
"Thanks," I say, "let's go
get a beer."
We adjourn to a local watering hole. A crowd gathers. Tami is on her
way
to Texas, metamorphosed, like a damselfly, off to bigger ponds,
carrying
her own versions of Steganorhynchus dunwoodii , Actinocephalus
carrilynnae ,
Hoplorhynchus acanthatholius , and Nubenocephalus
nebraskensis .
Somebody
asks her if she's going to miss her work, her insects, the high
plains
wind, hot muggy mornings around Dunwoody's, and the nightime storms
over
the prairie.
"Sort of," she says, then
brightens. "But I've got a
reminder." We
enter
a long discussion about the proper sites for your research animal
tattoos. Small fish go on the ankle; beetles might be
most effective on
the
back of your hand; frogs are a toss-up; snails go on the wrist so
you'll
see them every time you check your watch.
"So let's see it," someone asks.
Tami turns so the crowd can inspect the
back of her shoulder, where
rests
Enallagma civile , permanently.
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