On Moats and Reservoirs
Life as we know it is defined by water. When looking for life on other planets, the existence of water is the most important criterion to determine whether or not alien life is, or ever has been, possible there. Our own blue planet, our pale blue dot in Carl Sagan’s words, is composed of seventy percent water. Incidentally, so are our bodies. But it’s not only human bodies that reflect this ratio of wet to dry. All mammals are wet animals. Insects too contain that same percentage of water in their tiny, alien-looking bodies. Indeed, all within the Domain of the Eukaryotes, including plants and fungi, are composed of water while at the same time consuming and excreting it. At the cellular level too, as evidenced by the Kingdoms of Protista and Monera, the smallest bodies are still liquid life. Even cell-infecting viruses, which hover between the bounds of life and non-life, or alive and inert, are composed of nucleic acid, the medium through which messages are delivered between parts of the body and between generations.
On Earth, many transmissions are waterborne. But like life, movement on Earth is often strange. Consider an Order of the Phylum Mammalia, Chiroptera, which derives from the Greek for flying hand, or winged fingers (cheiros, hand, pterein, to fly). This Order consists of the only mammals truly capable of flight: bats (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Plate 67, Chiroptera, from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904). 1) Plecotus auritus (Linnaeus, 1758), brown long-eared bat; 2) P. auritus, brown long-eared bat, head from front; 3) Nyctophilus geoffroyi geoffroyi (Leach, 1821), lesser long-eared bat, head from front; 4) Megaderma spasma trifolium (Geoffroy, 1810), lesser false vampire bat, head from front; 5) Chrotopterus auritus (Peters, 1856), big-eared wooly bat, head from the side; 6) Lonchorhina aurita (Tomes, 1863), head from front; 7) L. aurita, Tomes’s sword-nosed bat, head from backside; 8) Natalus stramineus (Gray, 1838), Mexican funnel-eared bat, head from front; 9) Mormoops blainvillii (Leach, 1821), Antillean ghost-faced bat, head from front; 10) Anthops ornatus (Thomas, 1888), flower-faced bat, face from front; 11) Phyllostomus hastatus (Pallas, 1767), greater spear-nosed bat, head from front; 12) Furipterus horrens (F.Cuvier, 1828), thumbless bat, head from front; 13) Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (Schreber, 1774), greater horseshoe bat, head from front; 14) Centurio senex (Gray, 1842), wrinkle-faced bat, head from front; 15) Vampyrum spectrum (Linnaeus, 1758), spectral bat, head from front. Image is in the public domain, obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Philosopher Thomas Nagel once asked, “What is it like to be a bat?”[1] His aim in posing this question was to interrogate the Cartesian subject/object dualism and determine whether or not it is possible for a human to know what it is like to be anything other than human. He concludes that limits to human knowledge preclude such shapeshifting, but in the process of reaching this conclusion, he points out that bats are similar to humans in many important ways: we are mammals, we live in groups, we hunt, we raise our young, and so on.
Yet, bats are also very different from humans, and different from all other mammals in that, as mentioned above, they fly unaided, but also because they use echolocation to navigate their world. In this way, bats are also like the ships that humans invented to navigate our oceanic domain, in that ships also use sonar technologies to locate points of interest.
And like ships, to be a bat is to be a carrier of disease. To name just a couple notorious examples, ships transported the smallpox virus (Variola sp.) to the Americas, and the bacteria Yersinia pestis throughout Eurasia, which resulted in the Black Death. If ships are airbound, waterborne reservoirs of disease, bats are waterbound, airborne reservoirs. Fruit bats are the suspected reservoir of the Ebola virus and are known natural hosts of its close relative, Marburg (Family Filoviridae). They are also the hosts of Nipah and Hendra (Henipavirus sp.). Bats have hosted ancestral strains of the virus causing MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), and the fellow coronavirus causing SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) also originated in bats. It is suspected that the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, will also be traced back to bats in the Wuhan province of China. Although all these viruses cause diseases that can be deadly in humans, infected bats display no symptoms. In another difference between bats and humans, the flying mammal’s immune system responds to viral infection in an extraordinary way. When a virus breaches cell walls, mammal cells react by sending out interferons that impede virus replication and act as an alarm system. But unlike other mammals, including humans, bat cells deploy multiple resources for battling dangerous inflammation. And this ability is, oddly, an evolutionary byproduct of their ability to fly. Instead of heeding the recent calls for widespread extermination, we ought rather to heed Nagel’s call, and learn more about Chiropteric subjectivity so that, for one, we might come to appreciate their superior viral defenses.
Unfortunately, what it is also like to be a bat is to occasionally be subjected to capture and sale in so-called wet markets. Wet markets are called as such because vendors sell fresh meat, with some of them holding live animals who are delivered in cages or butchered upon sale. In the vast majority of cases, wet market vendors sell livestock, poultry, or fish to consumers. However, some traffic in wild and exotic animals.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has begun an investigation into the wet markets in Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was first identified. The Huanan meat and animal market is subject to primary investigation because environmental samples taken from the vicinity tested positive for the virus. Although WHO suspects bats as host, they will also sample other animals frequently sold at the market, and trace their routes to and from Huanan, to identify if there was a viral medium—or intermediate host—in the jump between bats and humans. The 2019 outbreak was preceded in 2002 by an outbreak of the coronavirus causing SARS, which was traced back to a wet market selling civets (Paguma larvata), the intermediary host between horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus sp.; Figure 1.13) and humans. In the year following the outbreak, China restricted the sale of wild and exotic animals in wet markets, but by 2019, the legislation had loosened. A similar pattern emerged in 2020, with restrictions placed early in the year already easing if they ever were really enforced.
“If ships are airbound, waterborne reservoirs of disease, bats are waterbound, airborne reservoirs.”
Worldwide, the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals too often ranges from the predatory to the parasitic, which is worrisome for many reasons beyond those that isolate threats to human health. Wet, and more specifically, wildlife markets thrive because a few people feel entitled to the novelty of meats from rare animals. The ethics of such entitlement should be called into question; however, this most recent pandemic was facilitated by an arguably even more repugnant kind of privilege: the globalized capitalism that insists upon the entitlement of all people to live like royalty. The cruise line Princess Cruises, aptly named, markets the allure of luxury to middle-class consumers: retirees, honeymooners, vacationers. Although ostensibly harmless, the insistence upon democratizing the royal treatment comes at an abysmal cost.
One of these is ecocide. As philosopher Paul Virilio famously wrote, the invention of the ship was the invention of the shipwreck.[2] And while old wrecks of wooden sailing ships are often colonized by marine life until they become artificial reefs, wrecked petroleum-burning and petroleum-bearing vessels of modern age wreak havoc on underwater life. Consider the Costa Concordia, a ship of the Carnival Cruise Line, which, like Princess Cruises, is owned by Carnival Corporation & plc, a British-American cruise operator with a net worth of 14.75 billion dollars. The vessel was wrecked in 2012 off the coast of Tuscany, killing five crew members and twenty-seven passengers (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Aerial view of the Costa Concordia after running aground Isola del Giglio, off the coast of Tuscany, in 2012. Image adapted by the author from Wikimedia Commons: Ice Boy Tellderivative work: Ingo1968, CC BY-SA 3.0.
In the following two years, the Costa Concordia was righted, towed to the port of Genoa, and salvaged for scrap. However, in those two years, the damage had already been done. Recent studies demonstrate elevated levels of microplastics in the area of the wreck site, even after the vessel itself had been removed. The greatest impact of the waterborne microplastics, often petroleum-based, were noted in benthic fish. The plastics are working their way through the Mediterranean food chain, permeating bodies of water and of flesh. Now undeniably infiltrating nonhuman life too, fossil fuels and the plastics made from them define modern human life perhaps more than any other material (Figure 3). As philosopher Timothy Morton observes while channeling feminist theologian Mary Daly, plastics contaminate gradually until “the soft boundaries of plant and animal cells become the rigid, smooth boundaries of plastic, having been turned into oil.”[3] The disposability so emblematic of doomed middle-class luxury is exemplified by this average cruise liner and the particulate matter that was left in its wake: vinyl seat coverings protected foam cushions; polyester bed linens wrapped foam mattresses in each of the fifteen hundred cabins; plastic drink cups were stocked for the four thousand passengers onboard; and innumerable plastic-coated electrical wires spanned the 290-meter-long ship, now parbuckled to manufacture more objects for our consumption.
Figure 3. Even for children, plastic enables the fantasy of princess for a day. Broken and discarded plastic tiara found near the author’s home in the wetlands of Conway, South Carolina, USA. Photograph by Sara Rich, 2021.
Not unrelated to ecocide, another cost of the royal treatment is death by virus. In 2020, the cruise ships Diamond Princess, hailing from Yokohama, and Grand Princess, departing from San Francisco, were the sites of major outbreaks that contributed enormously to the spread of the novel coronavirus across North America, where at the time of writing, over half a million people have perished from the disease. Like its sister coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 is characterized by microscopic appendages that, when viewed in 2D, give it the appearance of a crown. Hence, coronavirus, from the Latin corona, or crown. The virus enters cell walls through deceit, like incognito trespassers into the castle gates to usurp the crown in so many fairy tales. How devastatingly appropriate it seems that this diademed virus was aided in its global transmission by ships of the Princess Cruises fleet, whose passengers had embarked to experience a fleeting moment of palace life.
But castles were designed to keep people in as much as out. Separated by iron gates, guards, and moats of dark water, castles share more with cruise liners than perhaps even their marketers have realized. Instead, it was the passengers who found themselves trapped inside the sinking Costa Concordia who may have become aware of the ironic and deadly similarities; the same goes for those quarantined onboard the Princess fleet, locked inside dank cabins with their small porthole to the outside world. Under these confining and horrifying circumstances, the cabin becomes a cell, the cell a dungeon.
“The more we insist on being treated like kings and queens by permitting and promoting unfettered capitalism, the less likely it is that life as we know it will escape the dungeon of our own design.”
Cell-invading viruses have always been with us, but like the fouling of the water that defines life, recent pandemics have also been of our own design. The more we insist on being treated like kings and queens by permitting and promoting unfettered capitalism—by encroaching on the territories of nonhuman Others through the expansion of cities and farmland, through the destruction of forest habitats and waterways, through the heating of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans—the less likely it is that life as we know it will escape the dungeon of our own design. We among Earth’s lively Kingdoms—Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Monera—need each other, and we all need water (Figure 4).
Figure 4. The spectral, bat-filled castle of our pale blue dot. Castle design based on Kasteel Van Horst, Holsbeek, Belgium. Drawing by Sara Rich, 2021.
Our pale blue dot is surrounded by an immense void that keeps out alien others, but more importantly, it holds us earthlings inside—alive for now. And for now, on this side of the moat, within these castle walls, you may still find the bats. Just let them be.
Notes
[1] Thomas Nagel, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435-50.
[2] Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London and New York: Verso, 2008 [1997]), 40.
[3] Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 47; with reference to Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 [1978]), who in turn (on p. 21) channels Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
