Eight Little Piggies Read Free Page B

fad in coiffure:
    An unbecoming fashion in one respect is now almost universal: it is the cutting of hair, or rather shaving it, from the upper part of the head, in a circular form, so as to leave only an outer ring of hair. The missionaries have tried to persuade the people to change this habit: but it is the fashion, and that is sufficient answer at Tahiti as well as at Paris.
    Darwin’s heterodox judgment had not been widely shared. Captain Bligh, who got such a bum rap from Charles Laughton, may not win any medals for grasping human psychology, but he was a great seaman and no more dictatorial than the normal run of British shipmasters. The celebrated mutiny on his Bounty owed as much to Fletcher Christian’s longing for Tahiti and the woman he left behind as to any of Bligh’s shipboard policies.
    Tahiti may be beautiful, but the title for “picture perfect paradise” has usually been awarded—and rightly so in my judgment (for I have just returned from my first visit to French Polynesia)—to the neighboring island of Moorea. Located just twelve miles northwest of Tahiti, Moorea is an extinct volcano, with a soaring crater rim, deeply dissected by later erosion into jagged peaks and draperies. Seen from Tahiti, especially when enshrouded by its usual entourage of seemingly personal clouds, Moorea becomes a most fitting symbol of beauty combined with mystery. One day on Tahiti, Charles Darwin scaled a local peak and received his dose of Moorea’s spell:
    From the point which I attained, there was a good view of the distant island of Eimeo [the old name for Moorea]…. On the lofty and broken pinnacles, white massive clouds were piled up, which formed an island in the blue sky, as Eimeo itself did in the blue ocean.
    This impression of beauty and mystery has certainly persisted. Oscar Hammerstein used Moorea as his model for Bali Ha’i, the off-limits paradise of delight in South Pacific:
    Rali Ha’i will whisper
    On the wind of the sea:
    “Here am I, your special Island
    Come to me, come to me!”

    Bali Ha’i. A photograph of Moorea from Crampton’s monograph on Partula. Carnegie Institution of Washington .
    Who could resist these enticements, especially for a few francs and a forty-minute ferry ride? So my son Ethan and I visited Moorea on our recent trip. We were not disappointed. Unfortunately, the lure of Bali Ha’i has attracted other guests, some not so harmless. This essay is a story of genocide in paradise, a preventable wholesale slaughter, just completed in one human generation. You do not know the tale only because it pitted snail against snail, rather than man against man. But do not breathe a sigh of relief for moral exculpation of our species. Snails killed snails, but humans imported the agent of death—consciously and for decent motives, but with tragic and easily avoidable misperception.
    Oceanic islands are our great natural laboratories of evolution, the source of so many ideas about organic change and of so many classical examples from finches on the Galápagos to flies on Hawaii. The combination of geographic isolation and difficult access, with frequent absence of predators or competitors, provides explosive possibilities for creatures who manage to reach these bounteous havens. (On the Galapagos, for example, finches radiated into a series of ecological roles usually filled by several families of birds on continents. Some species eat seeds of varying sizes; others act like woodpeckers; one species uses cactus needles to pry insects out of crevices. Darwin was bamboozled during his celebrated visit and classified these birds into several groups. He only learned the true story and significance when a professional ornithologist surveyed his collection in London and recognized the anatomical signature of finches beneath all the diversity.)
    Land snails provide some of our finest and most intensely studied examples—and for obvious reasons. Few manage to make the long and fortuitous ocean