As dusk fell in the rainforest and the sun burned a dying orange band across the eucaplypts, our field biology instructor told us his worst nightmare: letting a baited mammal trap go unrecovered through the night, with a furry bush rat or antichinus starving inside.
For the next two hours, our group of seven students ploughed a line through tropical rainforest in Lamington National Park, Queensland. We set Elliott and wire cage traps at intervals of five to ten meters. The Elliotts sprung into shape like cardboard boxes, and we baited them with peanut butter, oats, and cat food. We marked each trap by tying yellow flagging tape around a nearby tree.
At midnight that night, we would retrace our steps and painstakingly check each trap to study and release every animal we found.
We set the last trap just as darkness fell, and tallied the results. We set 23 Elliotts. The numbers on the trees ran to 22.
We had lost one.
It was abandoned in the bush, an unmarked grave waiting to bury a rodent alive. Our headlights bobbed like a strand of Christmas lights as we combed the bush in a line. The LEDs lit up the metal boxes like mirrors.
As I pushed branches aside, I remembered the stinging tree, which electrifies its victim on contact. The venom plunges the victim into thrashing, writhing pain, leaving residual effects for up to 18 months. I wasn’t good at identifying them, even in the light.
The leaves seemed to close in all around, vines and roots emerged from the ground, the dark holes beneath trees grew darker. Vines became coiled snakes.
Then, less than half an hour later, someone shouted, “I found it.” The hunt was over.
We returned to our canvas Safari tents, each one a small fortress, just in time for dinner. As breathless as the search for the lost trap was, it fit perfectly into discipline I would immerse myself in for the next week. Biological science is a system of ruthless categorization, of numbering and taping, positioning and tweaking to within millimeters of perfection. It places webs and grids on the wildest landscapes on earth, and every puzzle piece must fit in its place.
That night, we checked the traps. We tilted and blew on the Elliotts until the animals shot into Ziploc bags. We cradled the first bush rat for fifteen minutes, eyeing it from every angle and debating its sex.
After the third animal, we grew jaded and organized into a dispassionate scientific factory. Bag the animal, check for balls, hang it from the scale, release. Repeat as needed.
At the end of a three-hour night, we had recorded 19 small rodents, more than double the number trapped by the most successful Lewis & Clark group before us.
The next day, we took measurements on a 15- by 15-meter plot of rainforest, comparing it to its twin in the dry eucalypt forest just down the trail. The two biomes were separated by an ecotone, a divine pencil line marking where rainforest ends and dry eucalypt begins.
We were handed a tape measure and proceeded to wrap it around tree trunks, stretch it over leaves, and defiantly hold it up to the boughs of the stinging tree. We measured our ears, our chests, our wingspans, our inseams. We almost measured our penises (for science, of course).
Another day, we were introduced to a grey-haired, bespectacled entomologist. She trawled the grass with glass vials, scooping up glittering specks and saying things like, “what a lovely lady this one is,” while I said, “aaaaahhhhhh.”
She led us into another tract of unexplored rainforest and set us loose, armed with plastic cups, bug nets, sticks to beat ants out of the bushes, handfuls of vials and jars of ethanol. There was bait tied to little twigs and plastic tubes to suck up ants.
My partner and I eschewed the arsenal of sophisticated scientific equipment. We flipped over logs instead. We knew what we were doing. We had been training for this since we were five-year-olds romping through the woods.
We were wildly successful. We galloped back to our professor clutching cockroaches, pill bugs, freakish ant-spider hybrids and our prizefighter, a predatory beetle in iridescent armor.
We turned it over to the professor, and under her spectacles it was reduced from a badass gladiator mealworm-devouring predator to a beetle. The apocalyptic softball-sized cricket we found a day later was just a King Cricket. Every radioactive mutant beast we captured in the wilderness had been pinned to a board, soaked in alcohol, categorized, named.
That night, we trekked into the rainforest under a net of stars, winding our way toward a “wishing tree.” We passed trumpet-shaped fungi, cast our lights on more King Crickets, and crossed a swinging bridge, whistling the India Jones theme.
We ducked beneath the levitating roots of the hollow wishing tree and descended to a ravine. There, we found the object of our search, white blue constellations of glowworms. They encircled us, at once womb and expansive sky dome. It was like the ravine walls had hollowed and let the starry night sky shine through. You could stare at one light and the walls would fall away, and you were on your back under a fig tree, searching for Orion and the Southern Cross, and everyone you loved was searching for the same stars. Inexplicable.
Except that it wasn’t. There was a perfectly scientific explanation. The glowworms reclined in DIY silk hammocks, dangling threads with the white blue lures to attract gnats.
They were fishing, that’s all.