When I go out into the rainforest
at night, I bring two flashlights. I don’t wanna be out there without light.
The dark is imposing. My flashlight provides me with a little shelter from the
dark, a small bubble of visibility. But I know that if my battery goes out—if
the bubble bursts—the night will flood in upon me. It’s better to just bring a
spare.
It’s kinda
cool in my little bubble though. My perception is limited because I can’t see
past the film of the night. The only thing I can see is what my light touches:
a branch, a fern, a palm leaf. So there’s no question about where to look. I
don’t have a choice—wherever my light lands.
With my perception channeled into
one point, I look more closely at whatever is illuminated. I move more slowly
and find things I previously might have missed: a cat-eyed snake ascending a
vine, the eye-shine of a wandering spider on a bromeliad, a cask-headed lizard
pretending not to exist. It’s a different world in the rainforest at night, and
a flashlight is my visa.
The weird thing is that I tend to
forget the rainforest isn’t actually illuminated. Since I can’t see it without a
beam of light, I can’t form an accurate image of what the rainforest looks like
at night. So I turned off my light. The world disappeared.
Only for a second though. Then
sounds started to emerge—a chorus of drones and groans and cheeps and chirps.
Each sound was a reminder that though my world had disappeared, life here was
very much still happening. Loudly.
I looked to my left—nothing. I
looked to my right—nothing. I waved my hand in front of my face—still nothing. I
waited. I wanted to see how long I could last without my headlamp on. Turns out
over a minute was too tall an order.
When I turned my headlamp back on,
my light was shining directly on a net-casting, ogre-faced spider. Its
twig-thin body hung motionless above a mossy palm leaf. My light beam reflected
off its translucent blue silk-snare, stretched out between its forelegs like
the string of Jacob’s ladder. It was ready to strike, to drop down and pluck up
an unsuspecting insect in the blink of an eye.
I was startled by how unfazed the
spider was by my light. It didn’t even twitch. It could catch its prey
perfectly fine in conditions that left me incapacitated.
Ogre-faced spiders have a pair of
greatly enlarged eyes that consist of an array of compound lenses. This enables
their eyes to refract light almost twice as efficiently as an owl. They don’t
even have a permanent retina. Instead, they construct a fresh photo-sensitive
membrane. This grants them a brand new set of eyes every night.
Other spiders have a different
adaptation. Cupiennius spiders have
finely tuned hairs on their bodies that are capable of detecting the slightest
disturbances in the air. A passing
cricket churns up the air enough to garner the spider’s attention.
The 45 seconds I spent with my
light off reminded me just how limited my senses are. It’s one thing to read
about the extraordinary adaptations in nature. It’s quite another to be alone
in the dark of the rainforest and compare them to your own.
Tom Jackson
University of Virginia
Great imagery, Tom. I enjoyed reading your experiences very much, especially since I have done what you describe many times. One thing you may discover next time you turn off your light is that it takes more than a couple of minutes fro your eyes to start to adapt to the darkness and see more. Only on a moonless, overcast night, the darkness is total and oppressive. On a moonlit night, you can even read and write in your journal by the light of the moon!
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing your experiences and sharing them.
Carlos