NATIVISM IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 94

ging? That is the subject of the remaining chapters of this topic. But, before that, here is a reminder of
how nature gets to work, from the purest laboratory imaginable—a new island.
Early one November morning in 1963, a crack opened in the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, south of
Iceland. Red-hot magma rushed up through the crack, and icy cold ocean water poured down into it.
Nearby fishers noticed black smoke rising from the sea and a stench of sulfur. For months afterward,
there was a constant submarine battle between the volcano, which spat out more than a cubic kilometer
of lava in total, and the ocean, which did its best to wash it away. Eventually the volcano won, and over
three more years of intermittent eruptions, before the eyes of an astonished world, an island formed and
solidified above the waves.
The island was named Surtsey, after a mythical Norse fire-eating giant. Its creation was a dramatic
affair. Magma had erupted about four hundred feet below the ocean surface. Each time the eruptions
resumed, the sea boiled and the lava solidified into tiny fragments that formed bright red fountains and
sent mushroom clouds of steam and black ash high into the stratosphere. Bolts of lightning shot to the
ground from the volcanic clouds. The ash rained onto the newly formed land, often inside giant hail-
stones. The fallout eventually created a wide black ash plain around a central crater of solid volcanic
rock.
It was, some said, like the world being born afresh. Even as early as Surtsey's first spring, in 1964,
when Icelandic scientists first tentatively set foot on the new island, it was no longer barren. Those first
visitors found a fly on the shore, and some seeds, apparently dropped by passing birds. The following
spring, they were greeted on the high-tide line by the pretty white flower of a single sea rocket plant, its
roots sunk into the ash.
The scientists swiftly declared Surtsey a nature reserve to which they would control access. But
from the start, the speed, ingenuity and sheer unpredictability of nature's colonization of Surtsey wrong-
footed them. 30 The scientists guessed that the most visible early invaders would be lichens and mosses,
brought by sea birds or blown on the winds from neighboring Icelandic islands. Not so. Instead, flower-
ing plants and grasses took the lead. The sea rocket was no fluke. The species settled in and was swiftly
followed by lyme grass, sea sandwort, cotton grass, and ferns. It was 1967 before mosses arrived, and
lichens only limped aboard in 1970. 31
A further mistaken assumption was that all the colonizers would be local Icelandic species. Surtsey
is only twenty miles south of Iceland. If you keep going south, you hit nothing until Antarctica. But
it swiftly became a welcome stopping point for birds migrating across the Atlantic between mainland
Europe and North America. From the start, visiting geese, ravens, and whooper swans brought seeds
and insects from distant lands. Snow buntings carried in their gizzards the seeds of bog rosemary from
Britain. And while Surtsey's first slugs and earthworms were Icelandic, many of the insects came from
mainland Europe.
So far, there are around sixty species of plants on Surtsey, a similar number of lichens, and rather
fewer mosses and liverworts. There may be three hundred species of insects and hundreds more other
invertebrates and microbes. Insects hitched rides on floating tussocks of grass or in birds' feathers. Mites
washed up first on a floating gatepost. Spiders came by air, lofted through the atmosphere on silken
threads. Some flies are thought to have arrived in scientists' lunch boxes. And a parasitic wasp came as
a larva inside the body of a fly that flew from neighboring islands. 32 But nobody guessed the big winner:
the sea sandwort ( Honckenya peploides ). Textbooks say this plant lives on dunes and around the edges
of lagoons from Alaska to Ireland to Siberia. It turns out also to like outcrops of magma in the ocean off
Iceland. It covers more than 60 percent of the island.