It is important to choose the right word for the unknown

 We knew that giant sharks were patrolling the coast beyond the surf. But, in the shallow pools, we could wade about freely, without fear of man-eaters. Apart from taking care not to step on the ominous black sea urchin, all we had to be on guard against were the evil-eyed and ferocious moray eels, which could reach huge proportions in the Marquesas. But Tioti had assured us that there were not too many. Liv wanted to know why. Why were the pools not filled with this ferocious beast, which was fierce enough and strong enough to conquer all the friendly little creatures that flitted about?

 The same natural law prevails in the tropical seas as in the Norwegian mountains, I said, reminding her of my favorite field research as a zoology student. The mechanism that brought about a constant balance between carnivorous animals and small rodents in the Scandinavian highlands had fascinated me and some of my contemporaries at the university. On biology excursions, and during our vacations, we had observed the fauna and made statistical curves of the variations in frequency of animals seen. There were years when the colorful little Norwegian lemming would multiply in such incredible quantities that great throngs would start on their famous migrations. Each female could produce a new litter of eight every twenty-one days, and the young would be ready to mate when they were only fifteen days old. The mass of these short-tailed, yellow-brown and black-mottled rodents would move fearlessly ahead in a straight line, and while swimming together across the rivers and lakes, many would drown and thereby infect the waters. Even ordinary field mice would have years when they multiplied so fast that they became a menace to the environment. Nature's unwritten and unexplained law of equilibrium was then immediately set moving, with visible consequences. By unknown mechanisms, this excess of food stimulated an abnormal fertility among carnivorous mammals and birds of prey. Foxes and ermine would breed larger litters; hawks and falcons would lay more eggs. Some of these beasts and birds of prey would mate and reproduce twice in a normal mating season. This sudden excess of carnivorous animals would quickly devour the excess of rodents, and in the following year our biological curves would show mice and lemmings back to normal, whereas birds of prey, foxes, and other carnivorous species could be observed in large quantities, searching restlessly for food. Failing to find the vast quantity of food that was the necessary basis for their own increase in number, the birds and beasts of prey, like the rodents, would soon drop back to their normal proportions. The environmental scale of living species automatically tipped back to a state of equilibrium.

 "Only man, with all his supermodern arms and fishing gear, is able to tilt his own environment out of balance," I explained. "The moray eel, if left alone, will always spawn and multiply in proportion to its own allotted food supply, tomorrow as in the days of Adam."

(...)

Liv was content with the brief seminar on animal birth control, although she wished I could have told her how it could be adjusted to the law of equilibrium so precisely that each animal pair always had exactly two of their offspring growing up. She had studied social economics, and pointed out that, if each pair had more than two youngsters that survived, then that species would multiply and begin to threaten the environmental balance. If fewer than two reached maturity, the species would die out. Now, she said, a fish might produce one hundred thousand eggs at once, so how could the moray eels know that they were supposed to eat exactly 99,998?

 She left me puzzled, too, as she waded away. My textbooks had evaded that problem.

 I put my face into the water to see better. Small red fish immediately sensed danger and wriggled away to pause above a spot of red marine "lichens," where they knew they could hardly be seen. I grabbed for some tiny, blue fish. They shot in between the bristling quills of the poisonous black sea urchin; somehow they knew that this was a safe stronghold against larger enemies, since the drawn bayonets around them had toxic tips with barbs like harpoon points that broke on touch and were next to impossible to extract from a wound. As my hand approached, gaping clams and pearl shells, with their doors ajar, hurried to close and bolt them so securely that no fingers could prise them open. A frightened little squid disappeared in a flash behind its own black smoke screen, as fast as a rocket, thanks to its own built-in jet propulsion.

 I managed to grab the hard shell of a crab waving its antennae and staring at me with the eyes of a robot. It sprawled in my hand like a mechanical toy, fighting back continuously with its fossil mittens. Liv came wading back with an expression of having found a treasure chest, and unfolded her pareu, which was filled with resplendent mother-of-pearl, abalone, and cowrie shells. She was again disappointed when I, as a zoologist, could not tell her how each of these strangely shaped creatures could know how to make love. And how to eat the right things.

 "Instinct," I said.

 "Instinct," she repeated. "That's an empty word."

 "Science has to coin a word even for things we do not understand," I explained. "Take, for instance, gravity. We do not know what permits us to walk on opposite poles of a round planet, so we call it gravity. We need a word even for the unknown."

 "The word instinct is nothing but camouflage," Liv insisted. "Learned men use it as a scientific term to hide from ordinary people the fact that they don't know the answer."

 She argued that neither crabs nor sea slugs would survive if all their activities were directed by their own meditations and reasoning. If Mr. Sea Slug does not think, she said, some other intelligence has to guide him. If we call it instinct, it becomes science; if we call it the Holy Ghost, it becomes religion.

 "Yes," I agreed. "It is important to choose the right word for the unknown."

From Fatu-Hiva ...

by Thon Heyerdahl