Summary: Into the Wild: Part 2

Part 2, “Into the Wild,” deals with current efforts to conserve species and ecosystems that have been threatened by human impact. Elizabeth Kolbert opens Part 2, Chapter 1 with an anecdote about William Lewis Manly (1820–1903), who wrote about his experiences leading a group of would-be gold miners through Death Valley in 1849. Manley planned to travel from Salt Lake City, Utah, to gold country in northern California. However, his group started out too late to take a direct route over the Sierra Mountains. Instead, they followed a trail toward Los Angeles, where they met another forty-niner who claimed to know a faster path west.

Manly and a few dozen others took the new path, which caused them to detour around a canyon and into a wasteland with little water or forage for the oxen. Manly scouted the trail and later wrote about his approach to Death Valley. Lying near the border of California and Nevada, the valley is the hottest and driest part of North America. There the group fortunately found a cavern with a pool of water filled with tiny dancing fish.

Kolbert describes the cavern, now called Devils Hole, and the fish, a species called Devils Hole pupfish, so-called because as the males fight they look like puppies playing. Sapphire blue, they have “intense black eyes” and “heads that are large for their body size.” Their existence in the cavern pool, which is over 500 feet at its deepest end, is a mystery. This species of pupfish is found nowhere else. They have “the smallest range of any vertebrate” and may be the rarest fish in the world. Scientists have created a replica of the cavern to preserve the fish, but meanwhile a “plume of radioactive water” is heading toward the actual cavern from what is now called the Nevada National Security Site. The site was formerly used for testing nuclear weapons. 

Four times a year, a team of biologists from the National Park Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Nevada Department of Wildlife count the pupfish. Kolbert visits the team and the cavern. Kevin Wilson is the National Park Service ecologist who oversees the task. Before two of the biologists dive into the pool with scuba equipment, the group guesses how many pupfish they will find, with a range of 140 to 177. The actual total of pupfish in the water and on the shelf where they spawn is 195, and the group celebrates.

Kolbert relates the way in which hunters emptied the woods of North America of wild turkeys, moose, cougars, beavers, wolverines, and bison and caused the disappearance of eastern elk and passenger pigeons. Humans have caused the extinction of other species, such as woolly mammoths, since Paleolithic times, but not with the “sheer pace of the violence” of the 19th century. The 20th century has only sped up the biodiversity crisis, as a high pace of extinction is known. Extinction rates “are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher” than the rates for the rest of geological time. Furthermore, the losses can be found in every continent and ocean and across all taxa, or groups of organisms. Birds, insects, and entire ecosystems are threatened.

The author visits the replica Devils Hole cavern and finds the same water temperature, pupfish, and the algae and other species that the fish eat. While pupfish usually live longer in the replica than in the cavern, the pupfish population has crashed due to a beetle. The beetle was found in the real cavern but was so successful in the replica environment that it began eating larval pupfish. The staff must trap the beetles each day, then pick them out of the traps with tweezers. Watching the process, Kolbert thinks “how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.”

Kolbert next presents arguments for how to date the onset of the Anthropocene, the geological era dominated by the impact of human activity on climate and ecology. One possible date is the early 1950s, when aboveground nuclear testing left behind radioactive particles that can exist for tens of thousands of years. More support for this date as the start of the era is the Department of Defense’s detonation of numerous nuclear bombs at the now called Nevada National Security Site, which is 50 miles north of Devils Hole. The tests began just months after President Truman made Devils Hole part of Death Valley National Monument in January 1952 to protect its pupfish.

The existence of the test site created numerous threats to the Devils Hole pupfish. Developers built a town to house the test site’s workers, sinking wells near the cavern and pumping water that lowered the level in the pool. The pupfish’s spawning area shrank dramatically by the end of 1970, causing frantic efforts to save the species. An artificial shelf installed in the pool was destroyed in an earthquake. Pupfish moved to other locations did not thrive. The federal government finally sued the developer in a case that went to the Supreme Court. The fish won out, and the land instead became a wildlife refuge.

Kolbert visits the replica cavern and sees the pupfish nursery, where eggs collected outside of the breeding season are raised. Looking at an egg’s heartbeat under a microscope prompts her to reflect on the relationship between nature and human culture. As an example, she says the idea of tame and wild wolves didn’t exist until after humans domesticated wolves. This intersection of nature and human allows the concept of “synanthropes” to exist. These are animals that have not been domesticated yet live well on farms and in cities, such as raccoons, Asian carp, house mice, and cockroaches. The plant world has similar distinctions.

However, human activity has caused far more species to decline than to thrive, and so the International Union for Conservation of Nature keeps its Red List. The list makes the following distinctions:

• endangered: Numbers have declined by more than 50% over the last decade or three generations.
• critically endangered: The species has lost more than 80% in the same time span.
• extinct in the wild: Species found only in captivity.
• possibly extinct: The disappearance hasn’t been confirmed.
• extinct: Species no longer found living on Earth.

Kolbert considers that humans could simply accept the biodiversity crisis, given Earth’s history of large extinction events such as the asteroid impact that killed about 75% of all species on Earth. But, she says, for some reason—she offers “biophilia” (the tendency to be drawn to nature), “care for God’s creation,” and “heart-stopping fear” as possibilities—people are “reluctant to be the asteroid.” Thus humans have created a new class of animals, the “conservation-reliant” that depend on humans for survival. The Devils Hole pupfish is a classic example. Kolbert calls it a “Stockholm species” after the syndrome in which prisoners become friendly with their captors. The National Park Service even brings supplemental food for the pupfish. Other such artificial methods being employed to conserve “at a minimum . . . thousands” of species include enclosures, managed burns, hand-pollination, artificial insemination, and more.

Next Kolbert visits the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, the land prohibited from further development by the Supreme Court decision. In its harsh desert conditions, the refuge has 26 species that can be found nowhere else. The author focuses on visiting fish. She then begins touring Desert National Wildlife Refuge to look for the elusive poolfish. This fish has been moved around by humans searching for a good environment. In one pond in this refuge, a scientist has created artificial reefs for the poolfish to spawn on.

In Part 2, Chapter 2, Kolbert considers ecosystems. She describes the work of Ruth Gates, an English expert in marine science who studied corals and their symbionts, or the tinier plants that live inside the cells of corals. (Alive at the time of Kolbert’s interviews, Gates subsequently died in 2018.) Gates studied Caribbean coral reefs in the 1980s, a time when development, overfishing, and pollution were devastating the reefs. During the decade, about half of the Caribbean’s coral cover disappeared. Gates’s continued studies have investigated events such as a 1998 “global bleaching,” when rising water temperatures killed more than 15% of corals worldwide.

Kolbert discusses the dangers of warming ocean temperatures to ocean chemistry. Corals need alkaline waters, but fossil fuel emissions make the seas more acidic. But, Gates realized, some corals are able to bounce back. Using grant money, she studied corals to see what traits help them to survive climate change. At the time Kolbert met Gates, spring 2016, Gates was director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. She was raising corals under stressful conditions and planned to crossbreed the survivors to “seed the reefs of the future.” She called herself a “futurist” and said her project was “acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

Kolbert reflects on how naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was studying coral reefs around the time he began writing down his thoughts on evolution. His groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Kolbert compares Darwin’s theory of “nature’s power of selection” to the selective pressure that humans now apply to nature—by changing the climate, destroying habitats, introducing predators, pollution, and other methods.

Marine scientist Madeleine van Oppen, who worked with Gates to study coral reefs, is the author’s next interview subject. Van Oppen’s work is done in Australia, where the Great Barrier Reef experienced a horrific global bleaching event in 2016–2017. Later in the chapter, Kolbert will point out that the Great Barrier Reef is actually a collection of 33,000 reefs that stretch over 135,000 square miles. Kolbert explains that in a bleaching event, it is the relationship between the corals and their algae symbionts that breaks down. The algae give off dangerous substances as water temperatures rise, causing the corals to expel their algae and turn white. Given lowered temperatures, the coral can recover; otherwise they die of starvation.

At the time Kolbert meets with van Oppen, the scientist is exploring whether there is a way to feed corals to make them more resistant to bleach. Some coral algae are better than others at surviving heat. Van Oppen and her students are raising a variety of algae under conditions of the future. The scientist reflects that while the world might actually reduce the gases that cause rising ocean temperatures at some future point, her sort of work—“assisted evolution”—can bridge the gap in the meantime.

Next Kolbert describes a visit to Australia’s National Sea Simulator, or SeaSim, where corals are grown under current conditions and those of a hotter future. She is there to witness “coral sex,” the once-a-year event when individual corals, or polyps, release bundles containing sperm and eggs to produce coral embryos. Van Oppen’s team plans to collect the bundles and crossbreed different species to create more resilient ones.

Kolbert says that one patch of reefs within the Great Barrier Reef contains a remarkable number of species—200 in one coral colony alone. One in four creatures in the oceans probably “spends at least part of its life on a reef.” Therefore, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s report that the reef’s long-term prospects are “very poor” is cause for alarm.

At the time of Kolbert’s interview, the authority is planning to spend the equivalent of about $70 million to investigate ways to save the reef. One is “cloud-brightening”—spraying tiny drops of salt water into the air to create a mist that reflects sunlight back out into space. Kolbert reflects on how it is natural selection that has created life’s “astonishing diversity.” One is the Great Barrier Reef, the result of 10 million years of evolution. Yet under current conditions, it is only realistic to think of preserving part of the reef.

In Part 2, Chapter 3, Kolbert turns to the topic of genetic engineering, calling it “middle-aged” because the first genetically engineered bacterium was produced in 1973. A genetically engineered mouse, tobacco plant, and tomato followed. In the past decade, the process has changed because of a variety of techniques known as CRISPR (“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”). With CRISPR, a scientist can take a piece of DNA and then either disable the section’s sequence or replace it. CRISPR allows biologists to create such things as ants that can’t smell and coffee beans with no caffeine.

In pursuit of her topic, Kolbert visits the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL). Researchers at AAHL are trying to address an Australian pest called the cane toad by editing the toad’s genome (the set of genes found in its cells). Biochemist Mark Tizard is her guide. Tizard has no qualms about his work. He says the environment is already genetically modified by invasive species. In his words, he is “using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma.”

The cane toad, which is toxic enough to poison humans, can grow to be 15 inches long and weigh nearly six pounds. Cane toads eat everything from mice to other cane toads. Originally brought to the Caribbean to eat beetle grubs in sugar cane crops, the toads were shipped to Hawaii and then to Australia for the same reason. However, the toads didn’t eat cane grubs, because they couldn’t reach them. Instead, they multiplied and advanced steadily north. Their invasion rate sped up as they evolved longer legs. Their toxicity threatens other species that try to eat them, including the marsupial called the northern quoll. Tizard’s goal is to break the gene that makes the toad toxic.

Using CRISPR, one of Tizard’s scientists edits cane toad embryos to delete the gene that causes the toad’s poison to become hypertoxic. The long-term plan is to train northern quolls to eat the somewhat toxic toads so that they get just sick enough to avoid the prey. The team is also considering altering the toad’s genes so that its eggs can’t be fertilized.

Kolbert discusses other uses of CRISPR, including to exploit the power of gene “drives”—genes that manipulate ordinary biological processes to increase their chance of being passed on. This allows scientists to create species with altered traits, further blurring the line between humans and nature with regard to the process of evolution.

Mice will probably be the first mammal with a CRISPR-assisted gene drive. Kolbert discusses a group called Genetic Biocontrol of Invasive Rodents, or GBIRd, which wants to wipe out whole populations of rodent pests. Such work has already been done with malaria-carrying mosquitoes. One way to control mouse populations, for instance, is to alter the sperm of the males so that only its male offspring survive.

Scientists don’t want to completely destroy invasive rodents such as the Pacific rat and the house mouse. They try to create gene drives that have some controls, such as coming to an end after several generations. The author pauses to reflect on the “strongest argument” for gene editing invasive pests: there is no alternative. There is no way to bring back nature. Kolbert says, “The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?” She provides examples of projects that attempt to bring back extinct or nearly extinct species, including the passenger pigeon and the American chestnut tree. But there is an inherent danger in doing such interventions, that they will unleash still more biological “screwups.”

Analysis: Into the Wild: Part 2

Kolbert’s style is to provide a series of anecdotes around a topic, all based on personal interviews, research, or both, and then to connect them with concise conclusions that are often cynical, witty, or both. Her style is on display in Part 2 as she discusses William Lewis Manly and the discovery of the Devils Hole pupfish, the ecology of the pupfish and scientists’ efforts to count and conserve it via a replica cavern, the biodiversity crisis, the beetle causing problems for the pupfish population at the replica cavern pool, and the various candidates for dating the beginning of the Anthropocene era. Then she brings out the fact that starts to tie together all her anecdotes: the establishment of a testing site for nuclear bombs near Devils Hole and the land development that followed. They were just the beginning of the threats to the pupfish that ended only with a Supreme Court case. Today the pupfish is “conservation-reliant,” depending upon human intervention for its survival.

Part 2 looks at multiple attempts to counteract threats created by human impact on the environment. They have a common thread: the scientists working on these projects see them as the most hopeful response to such human activity as invasive species and warming ocean temperatures. The most optimistic of the scientists Kolbert interviews, Madeleine van Oppen, sees her work as bridging the gap between the present time and a future in which the problems behind the need for solutions have been eliminated. Biochemist Mark Tizard, in contrast, believes the environment has already been modified and the task at hand is to try to address the results.

Kolbert concludes Part 2 by considering the ethics of genetic engineering. On the one hand, humans may be obligated to try to correct the mistakes they have made in the past. On the other, the solutions may be just as problematic as the issues they were developed to fix.