Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (which was originally published by HarperCollins in the UK in 2011, as Survivors) was an extraordinarily slow read for me, though I’m not sure how much I can blame the book for that. I started reading it while I was in England for work, which meant I started it at a time when I didn’t have my normal twice-a-day subway ride as built-in reading time. Then I was back from England, but it was the week of Thanksgiving: a short work week, a last-minute trip to the Philadelphia area for a long weekend, and more time being social than reading. The weekend after Thanksgiving, I went to San Francisco for another long weekend, and again, didn’t read much (I did basically catch up on back issues of The New Yorker on the plane!). Back in New York, nearly a month after starting it, I was able to give this book my attention again, and finally finished it.
The distractions of travel aside, this might have been a slow read for me anyway. The book’s title is “The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind,” but it sometimes feels less like a single story than a bunch of related stories, as Fortey jumps between continents and geological eras and kinds of organisms, focusing on the different sorts of creatures that are evolutionary survivors from the deep past. He uses the phrase “living fossils” but also explains that it’s maybe not ideal: it implies a stasis that isn’t necessarily true. (Even if a given plant or animal has been present on the planet for thousands and thousands of years, it’s not unchanging: it’s still evolving on a genomic level.) The shifting settings and focuses of the book sometimes made it hard for me to stay engaged, as did the fact that it was more science-y than I expected: Fortey is good at explaining key facts and concepts in a way that’s understandable to those of us who never studied biology after tenth grade, but there are a whole lot of genus/species details and Latin names in this book that I knew, even as I was reading, that I was unlikely to remember.
But there are things I appreciated about Fortey’s style: his dry humor works for me, and when he’s describing the experience of being in a particular place or observing a particular creature, his prose can be really interesting and/or elegant: “I am there with my notebook and a fluttering heart,” he writes, when he talks about going to Delaware Bay to see mating horseshoe crabs (3). And then comes this, which I love for how it combines a description of what a horseshoe crab looks like, in general, with the very specific experience of a particular night of listening to and looking at them:
The shoreline seems to heave with gentle movements.
First, I notice some very odd sounds. There is a general hollow clattering, a tapping and grinding sound, somewhat like that made by knocking coconut shells together (once used on the radio to imitate horses’ hooves) but altogether less rhythmic, and with a kind of underlying push. Then, as my eyes get used to the darkness, low shelly mounds the size of inverted colanders can be seen slowly pushing and jostling all along the shore and perhaps six metres up onto the sands. Their bumping and clambering together is the source of those tap-tapping percussive sounds. The flash of an infrared torch reveals more details. The head-shield of the horseshoe crab is domed upwards and carries a few weak spines; at its back end a hinge marks a jointed boundary with a second large plate, spiny at the edge, which can flap downwards; and beyond that again projects a stout triangular spoke as long as the head, which can waggle up and down. (4)
Other highlights of the book for me were the bits about stromatolites because I hadn’t known anything about them previously (they’re aquatic mounds made up of layers and layers and layers of cyanobacteria) and the passages that are more travel-writing or nature-writing than science-writing, like this:
Sugar gums are the prettiest trees with their clustered crowns of leaves resembling so many stacked, pale green parasols. All along the Rocky River the landscape is airy and full of light, because eucalyptus has dangling foliage that does not challenge the sun: the shade made by the tree is always dappled. (216)
Or this:
We follow one of the paths leading off from the Centre into the bush. One of these soon leads into regenerating mallee country, where the vigorously sprouting scrub is interspersed with the occasional surviving big tree. The sounds of bells and whistles keep us company. Birds with gently curved bills, honeyeaters, flit through the branches, calling as they go. There is always a species of Eucalyptus somewhere in flower to satisfy their thirst. It is hot, and there is a kind of dreaminess about the walk, a feeling I remember from wandering along hill paths on Greek islands. A feeling anything could happen. (217-218)
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