Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022) 272 pp. £30 Hb. £16.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780691180472
Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (Random House, 2022), 416 pp. £10.99 Pb. £9.99 e-book. ISBN: 9780141991146
Both books reviewed here are invitations to travel to imagined worlds: to the mind (or inner world if you will) of a bee in one case and the many worlds that have existed in our earth’s past in the other. I use the word ‘imagined’ deliberately for these worlds are not imaginary by any means, but can only be experienced by the imagination. And arguably there are no better guides to lead readers through these worlds than the imaginations and minds of the scientists who have authored these books.
Entomologist, ecologist and ethologist Lars Chittka has spent over three decades studying the behavioural ecology and evolution of bees, and has used his formidable experience to offer a highly accessible account of what it’s like to be one in The Mind of a Bee. Although bees share the same planet as we humans do, he claims that their world is so different from our own, that they may be ‘accurately regarded as aliens from inner space’ (p.1). Moreover, he claims that far from being part of a ‘mindless cog,’ each bee, like a human, is an individual. It is Chittka’s goal, through this book, to convince the reader that every individual bee has all the ‘key ingredients of a mind’: awareness, knowledge, memories and emotions (p. 2). Following an introductory chapter with a bee’s-eye (or mind) perspective on ‘what it’s like to be a bee,’ he takes the reader through 11 more chapters, each chock-full of rich and intimate detail about the different ways in which bees are so different from humans in every imaginable way, and yet share the property of their essential individuality.
One of the most fascinating aspects (or should I say facets?) of the Chittka’s book for me personally was the relationship of bees to colour. Not only do bees see or perceive a different spectrum than us humans (chapter 2), but they also they use it to learn about space (chapter 4) and about flowers, and therefore their food (chapter 5). Bees can see ultraviolet light and Chittka even provided a colour wheel (p. 24) akin to our own blue-red-green wheel to attempt to demonstrate how bees see, but the colour he labels ‘bee-purple’ looks like black to me. I daresay it is not so different from dogs being able to hear wavelengths that I cannot, but somehow I’m able to intuitively feel or recognise that difference better than the bee’s perception of colour. Perhaps it is because blowing a dog-whistle produces an immediate effect on the dog’s response, whereas I can only see a different colour than a bee. I could go on with more examples from other chapters about how bees communicate with one another, their personalities and emotions but will leave the readers the pleasure of reading and finding out for themselves.
That Chittka’s book is a formidable achievement is beyond doubt; one only needs to see the large number of enthusiastic reviews the book has received in academic and lay publications alike (see publisher’s website) to know how widely it has been read and appreciated. But as impressive as The Mind of a Bee certainly is, paleobiologist Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is equally, if not more, so. Imagine if it had been David Attenborough rather than his older brother Richard who had collaborated with Stephen Spielberg on Jurassic Park. Such a collaboration is entirely within the realms of possibility, for it was the natural historian, documentary-producing David who, from a young age had collected amber containing fossilised insects, the item used to populate the prehistoric theme park with its dinosaurs in the film by his movie actor-producer brother. Rather than the blockbuster film and the numerous sequels it spawned, we might have had a documentary series resembling Otherlands. The terrifying raptors and gargantuan T. rex would have no doubt still been a part of the series – albeit in different chapters or episodes than the one devoted to the Jurassic period (Halliday, chapter 8) – but so would have a host of other beings from Earth’s past.
Unlike Chittka, Halliday cannot claim three decades of scholarship in his chosen field. He published Otherlands a mere half dozen years after he received his PhD, but I should hasten to add that his gravitas as a scholar is no less legitimate for that. He received the John C. Marsden Medal from the Linnaean Society of London for the best doctoral thesis in biology in 2016 and in the years since he has not neglected his scientific scholarship either, as evidenced by the long list of his research publications. All of which makes his book even more of a masterpiece. Working backwards in time, he takes us to and through 15 different eras and places in the deep history of the Earth, introducing us to the flora, fauna and climate of each. He begins 20,000 years ago, in the period we have dubbed the Pleistocene in Alaska, with evocative descriptions of creatures somewhat, though not exactly, familiar to us: shaggy, short-legged Alaskan horses, enormous dusty-red mane-less American lions and of course woolly mammoths. He ends 550 million years earlier, in the Ediacaran period when life was just emerging.
As made clear at the outset of this review, the main reason I felt that reviewing these two books together was appropriate despite their vastly different subject matter was their common feat in making available to a broad public, worlds that can only be imagined and never experienced first-hand. A second reason that makes this pairing suitable especially in the meeting place of literature and science, is the beauty of the prose and the erudition of both authors. Both have prefaced every chapter with appropriate quotes from a wide swath of source material. If I show a slight – only slight mind you – partiality for Halliday, it is because he has quoted passages from writings in multiple languages, and calls as much on legends, myth and fiction – The Epic of Gilgamesh, Herman Melville – as he does on scientists. It may also be worth mentioning that in addition to hard copies of these books, I listened to the audiobook editions. In this medium Halliday had an advantage. At least part of the reason is that The Mind of a Bee comes well-supplemented with figures, illustrations and charts which add much to the experience of the book, but which by necessity are absent from the audio version. Although Halliday also provides some maps and illustrations for his book, they are not as integral to the experience, and all one has to do is let the lyrical descriptions take you to his different worlds.
Unexpectedly – though perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise for both authors are, in essence, ecologists after all – there was another common thread in these books, expressed in both cases at the very end. This common thread is the warning that we ignore the dangers of global climate change and its accompanying fallouts at our peril. In these chaotic times of human denial and refusal to face up to the costs of ignoring the real costs of the destruction and/or neglect of our world, these books offer both a temporary escape or refuge, and some lessons to take to heart.The message is eloquently imbued throughout the entire epilogue of Otherlands paradoxically titled ‘A Town called Hope’. Chittka put it very succinctly in the final sentence of his afterword: ‘We owe the bees. Act accordingly’ (p. 213). In order to find out how, I highly recommend both these reads.
Neeraja Sankaran, Ahmedabad University, India
