Zoo Story Page 12

  The prospect of their deaths did not weigh heavily on Dan or the rest of the herps staff. They accepted that this was the way of things for sea horses, and they knew that soon enough another pregnant male would hatch another huge brood. When biologists talk about reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom, they break it down into two categories of species. Some, known as K-selected species—usually larger mammals such as manatees or tigers or humans—produce only one or a few offspring at a time and then concentrate on rearing and protecting those handful of their young. If one dies, the loss can cut deep, both emotionally and genetically.

  In the herps department, the calculus of life and death was figured differently. Most of the time, the staff worked with what are called r-selected species—fish, turtles, frogs, spiders, and other creatures that typically reproduce in greater number, with a much higher mortality rate and the parents devoting virtually no energy to the rearing of those young. Emotion is largely removed from the equation. Inequity abounds, at least by human standards. Some species of frogs, Dan explained one day, typically produce multiple clutches of eggs. The female lays the first clutch, then the male fertilizes them and carries them on his back toward a suitable hatching ground—someplace moist and warm and dark, such as a nutshell or a bromeliad leaf filled with rainwater. When the first clutch hatches into tadpoles, the female lays another clutch and delivers them, unfertilized, to the tadpoles to eat. The second clutch’s entire function, then, is to provide a meal for the first clutch. Those eggs are devoured before they ever get a chance to wiggle in the water.

  “Whoever hatches first, wins,” said Dan.

  In the herps department, where the animals were cold-blooded and the staff preferred them that way, sentimentality died quickly. It wasn’t that the herps keepers didn’t care about their animals. They were as devoted to the well-being of their geckos and marine toads as Lee Ann Rottman was to the chimps or as Carie Peterson was to the tigers. They just didn’t see the point in projecting human values onto life forms so utterly different.

  The keepers had a running catalogue of stereotypes they deployed to mess with one another, depending on the kind of animals to which they were each assigned. Staffers who worked outside of the aviary joked about asocial misfits fixated on any species with wings and a beak: “those bird nerds.” Primate keepers were portrayed as hypersocial: nonstop talkers, slightly crazed, desperate for attention, and prone to extended outbursts of weeping—much like the chimps. The primate staff did not necessarily disagree with this assessment. In fact, a couple of them prided themselves on their talent for dramatic displays and epic banter.

  The most withering jokes were reserved for the herps keepers, typically characterized as testosterone-laden freaks obsessed with species the rest of humanity despised. This was not entirely fair, since a couple of the herps keepers were women, seemingly well-adjusted, with nothing freakish about them. But when it came to Dan and his boss, Dustin Smith, the assistant curator in charge of the department, the stereotype was pretty much dead-on. Dustin and Dan—as they were invariably called, and always in the same breath—took boyish pleasure in the outlandish qualities of the species housed in their department, which included not just herps and aquatics but also large spiders and a lonely colony of naked mole rats, exiled in a back room while the zoo figured out where to display them.

  Dustin gave lengthy discourses on inspecting the anal notches of turtles to determine their sex and on the virulence and variety of bacteria lurking inside the saliva of Komodo dragons. He talked about how male snakes have two penises, called hemipenes, and how the females have a cloaca, and how they mated side by side. When he gave behind-the-scenes tours of the herps building, he would escort visitors to the edge of the big tub that contained the naked mole rats and explain that although they were mammals, they lived in an underground hive like insects and were ruled by a queen.

  “The wildest thing about them?” Dustin said. “When one member of the colony has a baby, every adult lactates, both male and female.”

  He was fanatical about turtles and tortoises—if it had a shell on its back and lumbered, he was happy—and was always conniving to sneak more of both into exhibits. At the moment he was campaigning for the addition of some Aldabra giant tortoises, a massive species from the Seychelles, off the east coast of Africa. Amazing creatures, Aldabras have one of the longest life spans on the planet; reportedly, they can live for more than a century. Dustin was convinced that Safari Africa, the zoo’s soon-to-be-completed new wing, cried out for Aldabras. He had once worked with several of them. They had personalities; he swore it. They were always following him around, he said, waiting for him to hand over a banana.

  “Like puppy dogs!”

  Dustin was so persuasive he could almost convince you that a tortoise was the most fiendishly entertaining animal on Earth. Dan tended to be more quiet and was not as prone to the hard sell. He wondered aloud at the ability of snakes to move across deserts, over mountains, and across the seas, all without the aid of limbs. He marveled at the brutal efficiency of male tarantulas, who kill each other on sight to eliminate any potential rival. The herps department kept several tarantulas in one of the back rooms, including a goliath bird-eater, the biggest spider in the world, with legs that can span a dinner plate. As Dan spoke, he was feeding it a breakfast of crickets.

  “They won’t eat their prey,” he explained, “unless it’s alive.”

  His favorites were the poison-dart frogs peeping in the small room modeled after the rain forest. Dan was the minor god who held sway over the air and the earth of this miniature ecosystem, calibrating the misters and the thermostat and the lights to re-create the conditions the frogs would have been experiencing if they lived in the wild and not a closet in a zoo. He made sure their water was clean, that none of them showed signs of spindly leg, and that the room temperature never went below seventy-five degrees or above eighty-five. He was watching over several species of the dart frogs, including the powder blues. They were almost gone from their native Suriname, but for now their numbers in captivity were stable. He thought the world needed more and was encouraging the powder blues to breed. He had fashioned breeding huts for them—coconut shells where they could hide from the light. Usually he put two males in a tank with one female, so that the males would feel competitive and wrestle.

  “They’ve got to do a little sparring to be in the mood,” Dan said.

  When he found eggs in the breeding huts, he carefully gathered each clutch and tended to it inside a deli cup from Publix. He dreaded going on vacation because he worried some tadpoles would die while he was away.

  Dan’s precision was a perfect match for his boss’s exuberance. He and Dustin were a team, united in their fascination with all that slithered and slunk. Once, when a Burmese python sank its jaws into Dan’s hand during a feeding and would not let go, it was Dustin who finally pried the snake off by wedging his Lowry Park ID badge into its mouth.

  One of the things that made them such a memorable pair was their physical dissimilarity. Dan was a walking fortress, with a flat-top mohawk and bulging muscles and a Harley parked outside. A tattoo of a dart frog was emblazoned on his right arm, and a Komodo dragon coiled itself around his left, lashing its tongue. The tattoo artist who endowed him with the dragon had free-handed it during a marathon session. Under the needle for more than three hours, Dan had not even winced. He had once been a counselor for juvenile delinquents and also an amateur boxer; recently he had climbed into the ring in a Toughman Contest.

  Dustin was short and slightly scrawny and looked as though he’d just escaped from the eighth grade. Although he was actually twenty-five, with a wife and a mortgage and a title, he had no trouble calling forth his inner adolescent. All day long, he messed with the other keepers. His standard greeting, when he passed them on the zoo’s back road, was to flash an “L” sign.

  “Loser,” he would say, smirking.

  Usually, they rolled their eyes. “Dustin—”r />
  “Whatever,” he’d say, cutting them off.

  Like the boy who waves snakes and spiders in front of girls to make them scream, he was not above placing an occasional centipede on someone’s arm. Not surprisingly, half of the women on staff had dedicated their lives to devising a suitable revenge. None had succeeded as consistently as his nemesis, who happened to be a female orangutan.

  Dee Dee was known around the zoo for her general dislike of men and particular dislike of Dustin. He could not fathom why she hated him so much. As far as he could remember, Dee Dee was one of the few females whom he had never slighted. Perhaps, like Herman, she had a gift for reading people. For years now, whenever Dustin’s duties took him past the orang exhibit, Dee Dee had hurled her droppings at him. She had a good arm. One day, when he was zipping by in a golf cart, she calculated the velocity and movement and led her throw just enough for the bull’s-eye.

  “Women,” he said afterward, shaking his head.

  For all the abuse Dustin invited, he retained a scruffy appeal. Watching him counting the scutes on a turtle’s shell, it was easy to see the child who had preceded the adolescent, the waif who wandered the fields for hours, peering under every piece of rotted wood to see if he could catch another water moccasin, and who was allowed by his mother to bring home countless orphaned creatures, as long as they didn’t devour the family cat. The women at the zoo empathized with his wife. They assumed her patience was heroic.

  Word had spread that she was pregnant with their first child. The idea gave pause even to his friends.

  Dustin was spawning.

  In spite of himself, he was held in great regard by the staff. It helped that he was brilliant and knew more about herps than seemed humanly possible. Also that he was possessed with that strangely winning passion for species almost nobody else wanted to touch. He recognized the depth of the bias his department was up against. Humankind had held a grudge against reptiles ever since the Garden of Eden. Even the chairman of Lowry Park’s board, Fassil Gabremariam, detested snakes. Once, when he stepped onto an elevator with one of the zoo’s keepers who happened to be carrying a ball python inside a small crate, Gabremariam had visibly shuddered and backed against the elevator wall, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the serpent.

  Dustin could quote the studies that showed how little time most zoo visitors spent in front of every reptile exhibit. He knew that endangered mammals were much more likely to get attention and funding and protection than any toad on the edge of extinction. None of this lessened his fervor as a defender of downtrodden amphibians, maligned arachnids, anything that oozed or puffed a dewlap. To follow him through the zoo was to be regaled with a rapid-fire rant on the discrimination that plagued cold-blooded creatures.

  “I don’t know why we call them cold-blooded anyway,” he’d say, headed toward the herps building. “Most of the time, their blood’s about eighty-eight degrees. Do you think that’s cold? I don’t think that’s cold.”

  The preceding is only an approximate rendering of what he said. He was talking fast and walking even faster, making it impossible to catch every word. Wait. He wasn’t done yet.

  “I think we should call them ectotherms.”

  He explained that the term referred to any animal whose body temperature matched the temperature of its surroundings.

  This was Dustin’s crusade. He wanted the warm-blooded world to embrace ectotherms. He understood it wouldn’t be easy, but he was in no hurry. He and Dan and the rest of their staff were biding their time, working under the radar on behalf of all reviled species: feeding bunnies to the pythons, urging the frogs and spiders to increase their numbers, slipping another turtle into public view.

  The sun was barely in the sky when the keepers ducked into the night houses to start the daily routine.

  In the primate department, a cluster of howler monkeys eager to be let out whooped in rhythmic, escalating waves that echoed off the cement block walls. A few feet away, in their den, the Colobus monkeys stayed silent, unable to compete with the howlers’ volume. But the alpha, Grimaldi, declared his presence with an emphatic stream from his bladder.

  “Lovely, Grim,” said a keeper named Kevin McKay, mixing a breakfast of mashed bananas and ground-up vitamins.

  In the Asia department, Carie Peterson sweet-talked Enshalla and Eric, as always, and said hello to Naboo, the male Indian rhino, and teased Madison, one of the clouded leopards, for being so shy.

  “You’re such a crazy girl,” Carie said.

  A pair of bar-headed geese honked and complained when she went into their exhibit to rake. Their names were Ken and Barbie, and Carie insisted that they were the meanest animals in the zoo. In the wild, their species soared above Mount Everest. At Lowry Park, where their wings are pinioned, they could only nip at their keepers’ ankles.

  “Stop,” Carie told them, gently nudging them away with the rake. “You’re brats.”

  Inside the venomous snake room, above the copperhead and the rattlers and the young crocodiles, Led Zeppelin wailed on. There was something perfect about the union of the thunderous music and the deadly species. Also something slightly supernatural, since Led Zeppelin always seemed to be blaring from the radio on the shelf.

  A few feet away, in the dart-frog closet, Dan Costell shuffled between the terrariums to check on the powder blues. Looking under the breeding huts, he stopped and smiled.

  “Eggs,” he said.

  Carefully, he transferred the clutch to one of the deli cups. As his hands reached into the terrarium, the nearby frogs looked extra tiny. He didn’t have to worry about them touching him. In the wild, poison-dart frogs carry paralytic alkaloids on their skin that can indeed be deadly; one species, the golden poison-dart frog, is said to be so toxic that a single frog can poison fifty men. In captivity, Dan explained, poison-dart frogs did not secrete the toxins, because they were no longer eating ants in the rain forest that had consumed the plants from which the toxins are synthesized.

  When Dan talked about the frogs, he usually referred to them by their scientific names. The bumblebees, bright yellow and black, were Dendrobates leucomelas. The powder blues were Dendrobates azureus. He distinguished the individuals by their size and markings; if necessary, he could refer to the numbers under which they’d been registered at the zoo. What he pointedly did not do was name them.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I’m no bunnyhugger.”

  Aside from their respective departments, many of Lowry Park’s keepers unofficially divided themselves into two groups. There were bunnyhuggers, and there were non-bunnyhuggers. Bunnyhuggers spoke in baby talk to the animals, remembered their birthdays and baked them cakes, gave them wrapped presents at Christmas. More than anything else, perhaps, bunnyhuggers relished thinking up new names. They named the animals after candy bars, famous gangsters, characters on Seinfeld and Will & Grace, even one another. Naboo the rhino? Anakin the howler monkey? Bunnyhugger names, given in tribute to a much-admired veteran keeper who worshipped all things Star Wars.

  Sometimes bunnyhuggers grew giddy with naming. In the Asia department, Carie christened every creature that wandered into view. She had even become attached to an anole—a small brown lizard commonly seen in Florida, often sunning themselves on sidewalks—that had recently staked a claim to a log inside the tiger dens. Carie named him Timmy.

  “Everybody’s named,” she said. “Every single plant. Every emu.”

  In the herps department, almost everyone was a certified non-bunnyhugger who scoffed at the notion of naming frogs or snakes.

  “I just can’t see a reason,” said Dan.

  Beneath the surface of this seemingly frivolous debate, an important question simmered. Namely, how should we relate to nature? The bunnyhuggers were drawn to whatever aspects of their animals reminded them of something in themselves. They watched Enshalla dominating male tigers, and they identified with her. They saw the siamangs bonding for life—even holding hands when they went to t
he clinic together—and it reassured them that enduring love was possible. The non-bunnyhuggers reveled in the otherness of their creatures. The very qualities in the animals that terrified and disgusted other people, the non-bunnyhuggers loved.

  The bunnyhuggers and the non-bunnyhuggers didn’t sit around the break room and preside over philosophical discussions on Man and Nature. Instead they waged guerrilla warfare. The herps keepers resorted to shock and awe. They dropped spiders on unsuspecting shoulders; they slipped the molt of an emperor scorpion inside a bunnyhugger’s work boot. The bunnyhuggers retaliated by sneaking into the herps office and plastering Dustin’s and Dan’s lockers with flower power signs and Barbie stickers. They coddled the feeder mice that the herps keepers saved for the snakes, brightening the bare tanks of the doomed rodents with wheels and tunnels and little mouse houses, anything to make their short lives more interesting.

  Back and forth the battle raged. One day, Dan abducted Carie’s lizard, Timmy. “She cried so much,” Dan said, “that we gave it back.” Carie denied that she had cried. She also insisted she did not yelp when she found one of the emperor scorpion molts in her boot.

  Seeking vengeance, Carie told anyone who would listen that Dan was a closet bunnyhugger. Her evidence? The tenderness he bestowed on his poison-dart frogs.

  “He makes houses for them out of coconut. He talks about them like they’re his little kids.”

  Dan threatened to remove arms from the sockets of anyone who suggested Carie was right. Still, he acknowledged that he was not immune to the charms of warm-blooded creatures with names and personalities. He was especially fond of Bamboo, the oldest member of the chimp group. Even though Herman looked out for him, Bamboo remained the lowest-ranking adult. The three females still chased him and vented their frustrations at him.

  When he wasn’t busy in the herps building, Dan liked to stop behind the chimp exhibit and visit with Bamboo. When Bamboo saw him, the chimp ran up to the fence, head bobbing in excitement. Knowing that Bamboo needed a friend, Dan told him to hang in there.