I come from a long line of naturalists and scientists going back many generations, and in each generation we have had the gift of discovering hard-to-see phenomena, from a shelled amoeba lurking between two sand grains, to the misfolded limb of a protein pointing to a genetic flaw. This book also follows a venerable family tradition, but one never exposed to public view. Perhaps “trait” would be a better word than “tradition.” Every so often, that is, every second or third generation, someone is born in our family who sees invisible animals. Our clan accepts the odd-sighted person without quibbles or qualms, in the spirit of generous tolerance and fun that animates the scientific community. In the late twentieth century, the odd-sighted arrival was myself. My induction into the family’s attitude was typical. As a small child, I complained to my granduncle Erasmus—my predecessor, the elder spotter of invisible beasts—that since no one liked to go with me to catch invisible beetles, I wanted to see only what the other kids saw. From a height beclouded with cigar smoke, Granduncle rumbled, not unsympathetically:
“And what if Leeuwenhoek had wanted to see only what other people saw?” I retorted that Leeuwenhoek had had his microscope, but I couldn’t make the other kids see what I saw. They didn’t look hard enough. They didn’t try, they didn’t care, they laughed at me, and so forth. I must have sounded quite upset, because—like a monstrous barrier reef looming through brownish waters—the grand-avuncular mustache approached my face and stopped within a few inches, smelling of ashes and leather; I observed Granduncle’s nostril hairs in the defile above his mustache, flying on his breath like pinfeathers.
“It’s not how hard you look, Sophie. It’s the way you see.” A tusky yellow smile nailed these words to my mind. Decades later, they have led to this book.
Why have I written a book that could expose me, and my family, to ridicule and imputations of lunacy?
If the animals I saw weren’t invisible, this book would not be unusual; it would be merely another in the current trend of wildlife catalogs. With the rate of species extinction at some four per hour, one hundred per day (according to Richard Leakey), how could we not create such projects as the online ARKive, where you may see and learn about the most imperiled animals? Mass extinction influenced me to write, especially because, for the first time, the family gift of seeing invisible beasts has not skipped a generation, but has descended directly to my nephew. I should have been Granduncle’s age before meeting my replacement; and I suspect that this acceleration is linked, somehow, to the urgency of biological crisis.
But—you may ask—if these are my concerns, why strain credibility by writing about phantoms? Why not join with other eco-minded citizens and write about saving the animals that we agree exist, because we can all see them?
To this reasonable question, I respond with my granduncle’s words: it’s in the way you see. I believe the time has come to share the way I see. That is, expressed in a nutshell: Human beings are the most invisible beasts, because we do not see ourselves as beasts. If we did, we would think and act differently. Instead of believing ourselves to be above animals, or separate from them, we would understand how every aspect of our lives—spiritual, psychological, social, political—is, also, an aspect of our being animals. As it is, our understanding is superficial: everyone “knows” that he or she is a beast, yet how many of us ponder our animality, our condition of a creature among creatures, as we do our economy? We don’t even have the proper words. Look at how animal and beast are used. Do you think you’re a beast? Not really. Not you. I, however, seeing animals where no one else does, am that much more aware of our human blindness—a blind spot in our collective mind, roughly the size of the planet, that’s turned on every creature including ourselves. Our distorted vision of life will only be corrected when we see the beasts that we don’t see. How can we? For starters, read on.
Some decisions should be explained. I have selected a limited number of invisible beasts out of the many that I have observed, as well as scores of others recorded by my granduncle and the beast spotters before him. A principle of selection was needed, but was hard to find. Entertainment? Any beast is as good as a circus—better, if you loathe circuses. Beauty? Not if the reader can’t expect to see them. Oddity? Show me the animal that isn’t surprising, and I’ll show you a Disney film. Usefulness as pets? Not the Kraken. Finally, I decided to select those animals that taught me things I don’t forget. Broadly put, the beasts you’ll meet here are those who teach a memorable lesson in the meaning of their particular company to the human animal.
Another decision was to include more personal details than usual in a catalog of natural wonders. Without anecdotal touches, I would not be able to explain, for instance, why it’s a misfortune when your Truth Bats desert you, or how I solved the riddle of invisible dogs. My family enters the picture as well. My younger sister, Evie, is a biologist specializing in soil science. Without her expert assistance, I couldn’t begin to describe the lives of invisible creatures. Evie’s enthusiasm is as helpful as her knowledge; she truly enjoys treating invisible beasts as biological thought experiments. She is a natural part of the book, especially since her son, Leif, is this century’s successor to Granduncle Erasmus and me.
The hardest decisions involved organization. How should the animals be named? Greco-Latin taxonomies were out, because those require generations of systematics by people who see what you see. So all names are informal, and I’ve classified the creatures according to my best guesses about the kinships between visible and invisible life. The same goes for the categories: common, rare, and imperiled. These are provisional, drawn from long-range observations by me and my predecessors, like population estimates made by a few researchers working in a remote jungle or desert. As with all my conclusions, the categories await scientific verification. I wish to present invisible beasts to the reader without making unwarranted claims; I merely claim my practice to be that of a naturalist, and hope that my descriptions may someday assist in a more scientific approach to this fascinating subject.
How, then, is the book organized?
My inspiration comes from sunflowers, whose seeds grow in a spiral progression called the Fibonacci series. This book’s chapters take the form of a diminishing Fibonacci series: 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1, like the spiral of a sunflower disk (a very young one!) traced inward, taking the reader from a periphery of common invisible beasts, through shrinking circles of imperiled, rare, and others types of beasts, to the central mysteries pondered in the epilogue. Now, the Fibonacci series is one of those mathematical doohickeys, like constants and ratios, that nature seems to carry in her overall pockets and keep handy for routine work. Both scientists and artists use it on occasion, and in its small domain of tasks, the series is not a bad symbol of modest, all-around utility. So let the order of the chapters before you represent my chief wish for this book, modeled after a growing sunflower or paper nautilus: that it be found useful.