Literature is full of testaments to the hold that scary, man-eating predators have had over the human imagination, from Leviathan -- that monstrous beast who "maketh the deep to boil like a pot" -- to the Minotaur; the nine-headed Hydra; the three-headed Cerberus; the fire-snorting Chimera; the queen of Babylonian monsters, Tiamat; and of course Grendel, that "powerful demon" of Cain's clan, whom Beowulf must confront.
As the science writer and naturalist David Quammen observes in his absorbing new book, Monster of God, alpha predators -- among whom he counts lions and tigers and bears, as well as crocodiles, leopards and the Komodo dragon -- have "played a crucial role in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world." They remind us of our limitations and our place in the great chain of being; they are symbols of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to random death and disaster, our primal awareness, in Quammen's words, "of being meat."
Today, extinction faces more and more of the great, meat-eating predators, threatening not only to deprive us of these potent symbols of our own mortality but also to topple the delicate balance of many ecosystems. When so-called keystone species, which help stabilize relationships in the food chain, are removed, this argument goes, a "trophic cascade" can result.
"Lose the big predators," Quammen writes, "and there may come an overabundance of middle-sized predators, of herbivores, of seed predators -- a pestilence of minor nibblers, cropping the vegetation down to stubs, interfering with tree reproduction, jeopardizing the long-term renewal of the forest canopy, exterminating populations of ground-nesting birds and probably of other small creatures as well."
Quammen is decidedly pessimistic about the long-term prospects for alpha predators. Given the human population explosion, the growing contraction and isolation of wilderness areas that can sustain large carnivores, and such animals' dwindling genetic pools, he predicts that "the last wild, viable, free-ranging populations of big flesh-eaters will disappear sometime around the middle of the next century."
The year 2150, he suggests, is "a probable end point to the special relationship" that has existed between Homo sapiens and the alpha predators for more than 35,000 years, at least as far back as the magnificent paintings of lions and leopards done in the Chauvet Cave in France.
As he did in his critically acclaimed 1996 book, The Song of the Dodo, which did for island flora and fauna what Monster of God does for alpha predators, Quammen combines reporting, library research, interviews with experts and his own observations to give the reader a wonderfully visceral appreciation of his subject.
There is a curiously arbitrary quality to the book, as if it had been pieced together out of magazine assignments: lots and lots of space devoted to the author's travels in India in search of lions, but only passing mentions of the great white shark and killer snakes like the python and anaconda; pages and pages about the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's obsession with hunting (or rather, butchering) bears, but scant discussion of how effective conservation efforts to protect large predators have been around the world.
Yet Quammen manages to make this elliptical narrative work, using his instinct for storytelling and his tactile prose to create an emotionally resonant mosaic. His firsthand accounts of visits to India, Australia, Romania and the Russian far east (in search, respectively, of the Asian lion, the saltwater and freshwater crocodile, the brown bear and the Siberian tiger) give the reader a vivid picture of the remote landscapes in which these animals live and their complicated relationships with indigenous peoples, and his historical asides underscore just how rapidly things have changed in the last few decades, how social and political developments can unleash all manner of unintended consequences on other species and our shared habitat.
Quammen, who wrote a science column for Outside magazine for many years, is able to make highly complex biological and ecological dynamics readily accessible to lay readers, while at the same time regaling us with what initially sound like stream of consciousness musings on such disparate matters as the relationship between authoritarian governments and alpha predator populations; the existential terror of being attacked by a crocodile; the dentition of various sorts of carnivores; the contentious relationship between tigers and dogs; and the attitude colonizing powers tend to take toward native wildlife.
But as the book progresses, the reader begins to realize that such musings are less digressions for the sake of digression than illuminating asides that underscore the marvelous complexity of nature, its fragile system of checks and balances, and the dominolike effect that change and flux can have on its intricate machinery.
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