[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

the more senseless, somehow the reverse behavior is the more
appalling. In the death of the parent in the jaws of its offspring I
recognize a universal drama that chance occurrence has merely
telescoped, so that I can see all the players at once. Gall gnats, for
instance, are common small flies. Sometimes, according to Teale,
a gall gnat larva, which does not resemble the adult in the least,
and which has certainly not mated, nevertheless produces within
its body eggs, live eggs, which then hatch within its soft tissues.
Sometimes the eggs hatch alive even within the quiescent body
of
172 / Annie Dillard
the pupa. The same incredible thing occasionally occurs within
the fly genus Miastor, again to both larvae and pupae.  These
eggs hatch within their bodies and the ravenous larvae which
emerge immediately begin devouring their parents. In this case,
I know what it s all about, and I wish I didn t. The parents die,
the next generation lives, ad majorem gloriam, and so it goes. If the
new generation hastens the death of the old, it scarcely matters;
the old has served its one purpose, and the direct processing of
proteins is tidily all in the family. But think of the invisible
swelling of ripe eggs inside the pupa as wrapped and rigid as a
mummified Egyptian queen! The eggs burst, shatter her belly,
and emerge a live, awake, and hungry from a mummy case which
they crawl over like worms and feed on till its gone. And then
they turn to the world.
 To prevent a like fate, Teale continues,  some of the ichneumon
flies, those wasplike parasites which deposit their eggs in the
body tissues of caterpillars, have to scatter their eggs while in
flight at times when they are unable to find their prey and the
eggs are ready to hatch within their bodies.
You are an ichneumon. You mated and your eggs are fertile.
If you can t find a caterpillar on which to lay your eggs, your
young will starve. When the eggs hatch, the young will eat any
body in which they find themselves, so if you don t kill them by
emitting them broadcast over the landscape, they ll eat you alive.
But if you let them drop over the fields you will probably be dead
yourself, of old age, before they even hatch to starve, and the
whole show will be over and done, and a wretched one it was.
You feel them coming, and coming, and you struggle to rise& .
Not that the ichneumon is making any conscious choice. If she
were, her dilemma would be truly the stuff of tragedy;
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 173
Aeschylus need have looked no further than the ichneumon. That
is, it would be the stuff of real tragedy if only Aeschylus and I
could convince you that the ichneumon is really and truly as alive
as we are, and that what happens to it matters. Will you take it
on faith?
Here is one last story. It shows that the pressures of growth
gang aft a-gley. The clothes moth, whose caterpillar eats wool,
sometimes goes into a molting frenzy which Teale blandly de-
scribes as  curious :  A curious paradox in molting is the action
of a clothes-moth larva with insufficient food. It sometimes goes
into a  molting frenzy, changing its skin repeatedly and getting
smaller and smaller with each change. Smaller and smaller& can
you imagine the frenzy? Where shall we send our sweaters? The
diminution process could, in imagination, extend to infinity, as
the creature frantically shrinks and shrinks and shrinks to the
size of a molecule, then an electron, but never can shrink to abso-
lute nothing and end its terrible hunger. I feel like Ezra:  And
when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and
plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down
astonied.
II
I am not kidding anyone if I pretend that these awesome pressures
to eat and breed are wholly mystifying. The million million
barnacle larvae in a half mile of shore water, the rivers of termite
eggs, and the light-years of aphids ensure the living presence, in
a scarcely concerned world, of ever more rock barnacles, termites,
and aphids.
It s chancy out there. Dog whelks eat rock barnacles, worms
invade their shells, shore ice razes them from the rocks and grinds
them to a powder. Can you lay aphid eggs faster
174 / Annie Dillard
than chickadees can eat them? Can you find a caterpillar, can you
beat the killing frost?
As far as lower animals go, if you lead a simple life you prob-
ably face a boring death. Some animals, however, lead such
complicated lives that not only do the chances for any one anim-
al s death at any minute multiply greatly, but so also do the
varieties of the deaths it might die. The ordained paths of some
animals are so rocky they are preposterous. The horsehair worm
in the duck pond, for instance, wriggling so serenely near the
surface, is the survivor of an impossible series of squeaky escapes.
I did a bit of research into the life cycles of these worms, which
are shaped exactly like hairs from a horse s tail, and learned that
although scientists are not exactly sure what happens to any one
species of them, they think it might go something like this:
You start with long strands of eggs wrapped around vegetation
in the duck pond. The eggs hatch, the larvae emerge, and each
seeks an aquatic host, say a dragonfly nymph. The larva bores
into the nymph s body, where it feeds and grows and somehow
escapes. Then if it doesn t get eaten it swims over to the shore
where it encysts on submersed plants. This is all fairly improbable,
but not impossibly so.
Now the coincidences begin. First, presumably, the water level
of the duck pond has to drop. This exposes the vegetation so that
the land host organism can get at it without drowning. Horsehair
worms have various land hosts, such as crickets, beetles, and
grasshoppers. Let s say ours can only make it if a grasshopper
comes along. Fine. But the grasshopper had best hurry, for there
is only so much fat stored in the encysted worm, and it might
starve. Well, here comes just the right species of grasshopper,
and it is obligingly feeding on shore vegetation. Now I have not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]