A tribal drummer is beating on a rotting bongo at the base of a Sago tree. A white man and woman, dressed in khaki, are standing nearby. The man, an Anthropologist, is dressed like a big game hunter, complete with jodhpurs and pith helmet...1ike he was dressed by Central Casting as a "Classical Archeologist from the 1930s." He points up in the trees and says, "Look!"
The woman, also dressed in safari clothes, looks up quizzically and says, "What is that, is that a dead rabbit up there?"
The Anthropologist replies, "No, that's Uhuru, he's from the neighboring tribe. He is a crayfish, but they have parasites..."
Looking up in the tree we can see a small tan-furred marmoset-like creature, crouched like some Australian marsupial in the branches, holding a megaphone and getting ready to continue the day's broadcast. Next to him, clinging to the smooth tropical bark, are some arboreal crustaceans, bright red boiled-looking crayfish, crawling slowly up the tree. They have pallid white pillbug-like parasites crawling on their carapaces. They are ambassadors of the neighboring crayfish tribe, here on official business.
Back down on the jungle floor, the Great White Hunter Guy is passing around dishes of the local cuisine, steamed witchety grubs in banana leaves. "Here, try these, they're lovely," he says, picking up some white things that look like large, parboiled brine shrimp from a wooden bowl. It is a steaming pile of translucent sand fleas that have been boiled to transparency. He takes a wet handful and hands the bowl to his female companion. "Ummm, delicious." She takes a few herself as he rattles on about the local fauna. He's quite the expert.
Jungleland, it seems, is one of the few South Sea islands where arboreal crustaceans are indigenous. There are ghost shrimp and fairie shrimp, sand fleas and crayfish, all with translucent skins and abdomens of glass so you can see their innards. And on the coral reefs which rim this atoll, the natives harvest spiny transparent lobsters. As a strict Darwinian, he focuses his evaluation on what sort of micro-environmental niche would allow for an evolutionary adaptation such as this, a prevalence of transparent and translucent crustaceans. And tree-dwelling crustaceans at that. What conditions would favor translucency? And why did the crustaceans forsake the waters of their birth for the trees?
Then we are looking at an extreme close-up of a crayfish on the plate, which the woman is holding. It is waving its large red, bulbous claws and wiggling its antennae. It is singing its death song. We all gather around, watching, as this transparent crayfish sings a ballad of woe about the fate of itself and of its kind (these are the exact words to the song):
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O, though you eat me, I will not bite back
with my wondrous claws. For they cause such a delicious sensation upon your palate. O, it is my fate to die upon your dinner plate. And yet I will seek no revenge with my wondrous claws. For such is the fate which has befallen my kind. |
When the crayfish has finished its swan song, the natives disperse, bare-chested, bare-breasted and barefoot, mumbling softly about this moving performance, over the rotting green, green rainforest floor, into the jungle.