Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
hospital grounds, and an officer showed me Komodo monitor photographs from his
travels in Indonesia. Off duty I read scientific journals, worked on manuscripts, and kept
in touch with friends like Jay Cole, who had moved to Arizona for a Ph.D. Weekends I
prowled the Chihuahuan Desert, where I caught a New Mexico whip-tailed lizard for
Roger Conant to illustrate in his new
Field Guide
and a crevice spiny lizard that later
gave birth in my terrarium. I found my first black-tailed rattlesnake and marveled over
its beadwork appearance, the consequence of each scale having only a single color.
Then I got the sort of lucky break that haunts one's later years. Nine medics in our
clinic received overseas orders within a week, seven to Vietnam and two, including me,
to Germany. Up to that point my job at Beaumont had been dentistry, enlivened by oc-
casional duty as a surgical technician, but one summer day, as my transfer overseas
loomed, I noticed a putrid, vaguely sweet odor and remembered the morgue downstairs.
Just then an officer who knew of my funeral home experience sought help identifying a
couple of bodies, so of we went, wearing flimsy paper masks against the stench. Leak-
ing gas had killed a private and his wife in a house trailer; they'd lain there more than
a week and were so badly decomposed that we could only distinguish them by her long
hair. I used wooden tongue depressors to force open the melted holes that had been
mouths, then stared at a ceiling light while the captain compared their teeth with dent-
al records. That was the last time I winced at rotted human flesh, but the fate of those
other seven soldiers still clouds my memories of military service.
For almost two years Donna and I lived in Frankfurt am Main, birthplace of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, where I was assigned to the medical detachment of a tank divi-
sion. The half day a month that soldiers were allowed off I visited the Senckenberg Mu-
seum of Natural History, itself founded by Germany's most famous poet. On weekends I
discovered fire salamanders under logs in the Taunus Mountains, snatched yellow-bel-
lied toads from roadside pools, and photographed an adder basking in a Bavarian bog.
Vacations were devoted to sunnier, more biologically diverse Mediterranean landscapes.
We camped in an olive grove along the Arno River in Florence, rode motorbikes through
the hills above Nice, and in Madrid's Prado Museum I was taken aback by Francisco
Goya's darkly powerful
Tres de Mayo,
reminded by his faceless Napoleonic execution-
ers of my own run-ins with human cruelty.
While we were on vacation in Spain, I lifted a flat rock and was greeted by the
open-mouth threat of a sixteen-inch-long ocellated lizard, and under smaller stones I
found Iberian worm-lizards, recognizable by their vestigial eyes and rings of rectangu-
lar scales—the first individuals I'd encountered of the elongate, limbless Amphisbaenia.
Back in Frankfurt I bought a South American checkered worm-lizard in a pet store and
noticed that when I touched its head or body, the burrowing reptile waved its black-
and-white blotched tail. On my next afternoon off I reviewed literature in the Sencken-
berg and realized that other amphisbaenians and snakes with similar displays fell into
two groups, implying different ways of thwarting enemies. Some species seemed to use
bright colors to advertise noxious qualities, while others distracted predatory attacks to
a specialized tail, away from the more vulnerable head and neck.
During trips to natural history museums in Leiden and London I tested those ideas
by examining hundreds of preserved specimens of two Asian species. Red-tailed
pipesnakes look like deadly cobra relatives yet rarely had scars or incomplete tails, con-
sistent with a bluffing function for their gaudy displays, whereas more than 50 percent