December 17, 1995

Worlds Within Worlds: Symbion pandora, a creature that breaks all the rules

Diane Ackerman

Ithaca, N.Y.

When I read of the just-discovered Symbion pandora, a radically new life form that's pinpoint small, trisexual (it will try anything) and lives on the lips of lobsters, my first thought was: Do lobsters have lips? But that was quickly followed by a renewed sense of wonder at the quirky fantasia of life on earth. With a mouth like a hairy wheel, and other anatomical oddities, pandora is so outlandish that a special phylum was created for it -- Cycliophora, of which pandora is the only member.

I must admit, I get a devilish delight when the miraculous appears right under my nose. After all, the marvelous is a weed species. One can glimpse it on one's doorstep. People often ask me where they might go to find adventure. Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them. It's something you take with you. The astonishing can turn up in the leaf clutter, or even a neighborhood restaurant, in a dingy tank, on the lips of lobsters.

We forget that the world is always more and stranger than we guess. Or can guess. Instead, we search for simple answers, simple laws of nature, in a sleight of mind that makes us uniquely human. Just as we're addicted to rules, home-truths and slogans, we're addicted to certain ways of explaining things. There's bound to be a simple answer to everything, we insist. Maybe not. Maybe complexity frightens us. Maybe we fear becoming as plural as all we survey. Maybe we still tacitly believe that the universe was created for our pleasure, that we pint-sized demi-gods are its sole audience and goal. Then something like pandora turns up, a minute being with a sex life even stranger than our own, a creature that breaks all the rules and gives biologists a jolt.

Because we have swarmed across the world with our probing fingers and agile minds, we sometimes think that nature has been fully explored, but that's far from true. Plants and animals are going extinct at an appalling rate -- some estimates are as high as 300 species a day -- and many of them are vanishing mysteries. The riches of the natural world are slipping through our fingers before we can even call them by name. Hanging on by a suction cup, and reaching around to vacuum up fallen morsels from a dining lobster's lips, pandora reminds us that we share our planet with unseen hordes, and it hints at the uniqueness of our own complex niche.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things. Think of a niche and life will fill it, think of a shape and life will explore it, think of a drama and life will stage it. I personally find cactus an unlikely predicament for matter to get itself into, but no stranger than we humans, the lonely bipeds with the giant dreams.

I rarely dwell on this when I go out biking through the countryside. I don't worry about the mites that live among my eyelashes either. I have other fish to fry: the local land trust's campaign for acreage, the plight of endangered animals and landscapes, Wal-Mart's advances, what will become of the residents of a local psychiatric institution who were kicked out because of recent state cutbacks, not to mention all the normal mayhems of the heart. But I get a crazy smile when I think of pandora. I like knowing that the world will never be small enough to exhaust in one lifetime. No matter how hard or where we look, even under our own or a lobster's nose, surprise awaits us. There will always be plenty of nature's secrets waiting to be told. This is one of those tidy, simple-sounding truths I mentioned, the sort of thing humans crave. And I believe it because I got it straight from a lobster's lips.

Diane Ackerman New York Times 12/17/95 Week in Review pp. 13; 2

Diane Ackerman, a poet, essayist and naturalist, is author most recently, of "The Rarest of the Rare," about endangered animals an landscapes.

RELATED ARTICLE:

A Whole New Animal -- Call it the original lobster bib.

In the scientific journal Nature last week, scientists reported discovering that the mouthparts of a lobster are populated by a flyspeck-sized animal, Symbion pandora, that sweeps up and eats food spills from the sloppy lobster itself.

The big surprise is how different this creature is from anything studied before -- so different that its discoverers, Peter Funch and Reinhardt Mobjerg Kristensen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, wrote that they have classified it in a new phylum, the second-highest category by which scientists classify life forms.

There are only 35 or so known phyla; the only higher category is "kingdom," as in the plant or animal kingdoms. The new phylum: Cycliophora.