Huxley Sir Julian - On Aggression

My childhood dream of flying is realized: I am floating weightlessly in an invisible medium, gliding without effort over sunlit fields. I do not move in the way that Man, in philistine assurance of his own superiority, usually moves, with belly forward and head upward, but in the age-old manner of vertebrates with back upward and head forward. If I want to look ahead, the discomfort of bending my neck reminds me painfully that I am really an inhabitant of another world. But I seldom want to do this, for my eyes are directed downwards at the things beneath me, as becomes an earthly scientist.

Peacefully, indolently, fanning with my fins, I glide over fairy-tale scenery. The setting is the coast of one of the many little islands of coral chalk, the so-called Keys, that stretch in a long chain from the south end of the Florida peninsula. The landscape is less heroic than that of a real coral reef with its wildly cleft living mountains and valleys, but just as vivid. All over the ground, which consists of ancient coral rubble, can be seen strange hemispheres of brain coral, wavy bushes of corgonia and, more rarely, richly branched stems of staghorn coral, while between them are variegated patches of brown, red and gold seaweed, not to be found in the real coral reefs farther out in the ocean. At intervals are loggerhead sponges, manbroad and table-high, almost appearing man-made in their ugly but symmetrical forms. No bare surfaces of lifeless stone are visible, for any space between all these organisms is filled with a thick growth of moss animals, hydroid polyps and sponges whose violet and orange-red species cover large areas; of some organisms among this teeming assortment I do not even know whether they belong to the plant or the animal kingdom.

My effortless progress brings me gradually into shallower water where corals become fewer, but plants more numerous. Huge forests of decorative algae, shaped exactly like African acacia trees, spread themselves beneath me and create the illusion that I am floating not just man-high above Atlantic coral ground, but a hundred times higher above an Ethiopian steppe. Wide fields of turtle grass and smaller ones of eelgrass glide away beneath me, and now that there is little more than three feet of water beneath me, a glance ahead reveals a long, dark, irregular wall stretching as far as I can see to each side and completely filling the space between the illuminated sea-bed and the mirror of the surface: it is the border between sea and land, the coast of Lignum Vitae Key.

The number of fish increases rapidly, dozens shoot from under me, reminding me of photographs of Africa where herds of wild animals flee in all directions from the shadow of an aeroplane. In some places, above the fields of thick turtle grass, comical fat puffers remind me of partridges taking offfrom a cornfield zooming up only to glide down to land again in the next field or so. Other fish, many of which have incredible but always harmonious colours, do the opposite, diving straight into the grass as I approach. A fat porcupine with lovely devils horns over ultramarine blue eyes lies quite quietly and grins at me. I have not hurt him, but he or one of his kind has hurt me! A few days ago I thoughtlessly touched one of this species, the spiny boxfish, and the razor-sharp parrot-beak, formed by two opposing teeth, pinched me and removed a considerable piece of skin from my right forefinger. I dive down to the specimen just sighted and, using the labour-saving technique of a duck in shallow water, leaving my backside above the surface, I seize him carefully and lift him up. After several fruitless attempts to bite, he starts to take the situation seriously and blows himself up; my hand clearly feels the cylinder strokes of the little pump formed by the pharyngeal muscles of the fish as he sucks in water. When the elasticity of his outer skin has reached its limit and he is lying like a distended prickly ball in my hand, I let him go and am amused at the urgency with which he squirts out the pumped-in water and disappears into the sea-weed.

Then I turn to the wall separating sea from land. At first glance one could imagine it to be made of volcanic tuff, so fantastically pitted is its surface and so many are the cavities which stare like the eyeholes of skulls, dark and unfathomable. In fact, the rock consists of coral skeletons, relics of the pre-Ice Age. One can actually see in the ancient formations the structure of coral species still extant today and, pressed between them, the shells of mussels and snails whose living counterparts still frequent these waters. We are here on two coral reefs: an old one which has been dead for thousands of years and a new one growing on the old, as corals, like cultures, have the habit of growing on the skeletons of their forebears.

I swim up to and along the jagged waterfront, until I find a handy not too spiky projection which I grasp with my right hand as an anchorage. In heavenly weightlessness, cool but not cold, a stranger in a wonderland far removed from earthly cares, rocked on gentle waves I forget myself and am all eye, a blissful breathing captive balloon!

All around me are fish, and here in the shallow water they are mostly small fish. They approach me curiously from a distance or from the hiding-places to which my coming had driven them; they dart back as I clear my snorkel by blowing out the water that has condensed in it; when I breathe quietly again they come nearer, swaying up and down in time with me in the gently undulating sea. It was by watching fish that, still with a clouded vision, I first noticed certain laws of animal behaviour, without at the time understanding them in the least, but ever since I have endeavoured to reach this understanding.

The multiplicity of the forms surrounding me many so near that my long-sighted eyes cannot discern them sharply seems at first overwhelming. But after a while their individual appearances become more familiar and my gestalt perception, that most wonderful of human faculties, begins to achieve a clearer, general view of the swarms of creatures. Then I find that there are not so many species as I thought at first. Two categories of fish are at once apparent: those which come swimming in shoals, either from the open sea or along the wall, and those which, after recovering from their panic at my presence, come slowly and cautiously out of a cave or other hiding-place always singly. Of the latter I already know that even after days or weeks the same individuals are always to be found in the same dwelling. Throughout my stay at Key Largo I visited regularly, every few days, a beautiful ocellated butterfly-fish in its dwelling under a capsized landing-stage and I always found it at home. Among the fish wandering hither and thither in shoals are myriads of little silversides, various small herrings which live near the coast, and their untiring hunters, the needle-fish, swift as arrows. Then there are grey-green snappers loitering in thousands under landing-stages, breakwaters and cliffs, and delightful blue-and-yellow-striped grunts, so called because they make a grunting noise when removed from the water. Particularly numerous and particularly lovely are the blue-striped, the white, and the yellow-striped grunts, misnomers because all three are blue and yellow striped, each with a different pattern. According to my observations, all three kinds swim frequently in mixed shoals. These fish have a buccal mucous membrane of a remarkable burning-red colour, only visible when, with widely opened mouth, a fish threatens a member of its own species, which naturally responds in the same manner. However, neither in the aquarium nor in the sea have I ever seen this impressive sparring lead to a serious fight.