The Reality Bubble

Blind Spots, Hidden Truths and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World

Ziya Tong

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781838850487
• eBook ISBN: 9781838850500
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

What are we not seeing?

Our naked eyes see only a thin sliver of reality. We are blind in comparison to the x-rays that peer through skin, the mass spectrometers that detect the dead inside the living, or the high-tech surveillance systems that see with artificial intelligence.

And we are blind compared to the animals that can see in infrared, or ultraviolet, or with 360-degree vision. These animals live in the same world we do, but they see something quite different when they look around.

In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong illuminates this hidden world and takes us on a journey to examine ten of humanity's biggest blind spots. What she reveals is not on the things we didn't evolve to see but, more dangerously, the blindness of modern society. Fast-paced, utterly fascinating and deeply humane, this vitally important new book gives voice to the sense we've all had – that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

PART ONE

BIOLOGICAL BLIND SPOTS

WHAT SURROUNDS US

1

THE OPEN JAR

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.
Which of the two has the grander view?

—VICTOR HUGO

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, Dondidier was gone, but his disappearance was not a part of the circus act. As the Hamilton Daily Times reported on August 16, 1913, detectives and sniffer dogs were quickly dispatched to track down the performer, who vanished two days before opening night. Fortunately, the show was not called off. By Friday evening, the acrobat was spotted by a crew member, hiding inside the main tent. And while the fiasco made the headlines, for the public, the real story was not his mysterious return, it was his worth. The circus star was valued at $500, which, in today’s money is more than $12,000; a preposterous amount by all accounts, since Dondidier was just a flea.

A century before the bright lights of Hollywood, the greatest show on earth was tiny: it was the flea circus. The little top was an international sensation, and in cities like New York, Paris, and London, crowds came from afar to watch the parasites perform. There were the ballerina fleas, the sword-fighting fleas, the cannonball fleas, the strongman fleas, the tightrope walkers, the tango dancers, and the trapeze artists. It was here, dazzled by their miniature feats of daring, that audiences applauded the most reviled creature of them all: Pulex irritans, the bloodthirsty, plague-carrying, human flea, had catapulted into the spotlight and become a star.

The popularity of the flea circus came, in part, from its well-guarded secret. The big question being: How do you train a flea? Plucked quite literally from the casting couch, the insects were skilled fugitives and could easily hop off the stage and escape. So, when pressed, the flea trainers, or “professors” as they were formally known, revealed a trick for taming the tiny beasts: to keep the animals under control at all times, they held them in an invisible prison.

To do this, the fleas were dropped into a small glass jar and carefully sealed inside. As wingless pests that evolved to leap onto their hosts for a blood meal, fleas have spring-loaded legs that let them jump over one hundred times their own height and the endurance to keep bouncing over thirty thousand times. But inside the jar, their athletic prowess worked against them, because as the fleas shot skyward, they smacked their bodies hard, and repeatedly, up against the lid.

But soon—to avoid the pain—the fleas learned; instead of jumping high, they jumped lower so they no longer ricocheted off the top. At this point, according to the professors, you could leave the lid off forever and the pests would never escape. For the fleas, freedom was only a bounce away, but the trap had been set in their minds.

The story was good. Good enough to fend off the curious—but it also wasn’t true. And while flea training may yet hold a lesson for human society, it was completely lost on the fleas. That’s because behind the scenes, as the “professors” knew full well, the bloodsuckers could not be trained; that if you put a flea inside a jar and remove the lid, a flea, of course, will flee.

But peering through magnifying glasses, eyewitnesses swore that they saw the fleas dancing and juggling at their master’s bidding. So the question remains: how did the insects perform the incredible stunts? It turns out, the cheerful spectacle had a dark side. For the fleas, it was torture.

Dressed in pink tutus and glued to tiny parasols, the insects were not willing participants. The gold wire leashes that they wore were harnesses that were used to subject them to noxious conditions. “Soccer-playing” fleas, for instance, played with a tiny cotton ball soaked in citronella, which was repulsive enough to them that they kicked it away on contact. The “jugglers,” on the other hand, were held on their backs with glue and the motion of their legs rolled a lint ball above them. As for the musicians in the flea “orchestra,” they were tied down to seats on a music box, each with a miniature instrument stuck to its forelegs. Then, with a little tap on the head to each—or sometimes, more sadistically, with a flame lit beneath—they’d begin flailing their free legs about, giving the appearance of waving to the music.

Now before we cue the tiny violin, we should be reminded that to the average person, one flea’s life is worthless. Even a hundred lives, or a hundred thousand. We wouldn’t blink at a global flea Armageddon; we’d be pleased to be rid of them. But strangely, when people today see “strongman” fleas on YouTube pulling tiny carts, or “acrobat” fleas walking tightropes; when they are onscreen at a scale we can interact with, magnified like micro movie stars, the reaction to these pests changes: You’re hurting the fleas! The leashes are strangling them! This is animal cruelty! Keep in mind, in their own homes, chances are these people would crush a flea dead in an instant and fumigate for good measure.

Here’s the thing: as giants, human beings have a tendency to treat small life as though it’s insignificant. As flea expert and entomologist Tim Cockerill has observed: “Sometimes, in a city like London, you’ll see the tiniest speck flying across the room or landing on the table, or in your beer at the pub, and most people don’t think of this as a life. They’ll just pick it out and flick it away, like it’s a bit of dust or soot or whatever, but that’s actual animal diversity. If you take a moment to look at that speck, it opens up a whole new world.”

And it’s true. In fact, whole new species have been discovered in this way.¹

ROBERT HOOKE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL GIANT, but crippled with scoliosis and Pott’s disease, he was also a hunchback. Regarded by some as the Leonardo da Vinci of England, he made a staggering number of contributions in the fields of astronomy, biology, physics, paleontology, and even architecture. Early on, he developed the wave theory of light, proved the existence of air, defined the limits of human vision, discovered and named the cell, deduced that fossils were the remains of once-living things, and proposed the idea, inconceivable at the time, that species could disappear through extinction. But today, he is best known for one iconic drawing: a magnified illustration of a flea.

Folding out over four pages, and “depicted with the anatomical precision of a rhinoceros,” as Oxford historian Allan Chapman wrote, the magnified beast was a centrefold from Hooke’s 1665 bestseller, Micrographia. And while Hooke’s notoriously difficult personality made him unpopular with fellow academics,² his book at least made him very popular with the public. In it, he presented the wonders of the magnified world: illustrations of bee stingers, fly’s feet, snail’s teeth (they have over twenty thousand of them), and even mites in cheese. The detail of the pictures would still baffle most today, but for people introduced to these “minute bodies” for the very first time, the book was nothing short of mind-blowing.

Because of Micrographia, the flea was elevated to a microscopic muse. And inspired by Hooke’s illustrations another man set his sights on delving even deeper into the world of the minuscule. Grinding finer and finer lenses until his vision was magnified over 270 times,³ Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a contemporary of Hooke’s whose powerful homemade microscopes were so good they landed him the title of “father” of a new field: microbiology.

With the ability to zoom into the level of a micron, or one-millionth of a metre, Van Leeuwenhoek was able to see well beyond the capacity of the naked eye. And so it was that one day, while examining a few drops of rainwater that had collected in a pot, he made an earth-shattering discovery. Wiggling beneath his eyes, at a stupendously small scale, were little creatures swimming through the liquid. They were smaller than anything he had ever seen. He named them animalcules.

It’s important to keep in mind that what we call microorganisms today did not officially exist in the 1600s. Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to access a world that was previously invisible to the human eye. So when in 1673 he began documenting his findings in a series of letters to the Royal Society in London, leading scientists of the day weren’t just skeptical, they thought he was either hallucinating or possibly insane.

What Van Leeuwenhoek had on his side, however, was that he was prolific. And as he began looking closely at everyday things, they transformed into magnified wonders. In 1673, he focused his lens on the life force moving through all of us by putting a drop of his own blood under the microscope. The liquid, it turned out, contained solids: flowing through our veins he saw blood cells, which he described as concave “globules.”

In 1677, he spied an entirely new life form and discovered protozoa. Creatures “so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against another, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse sand.” That same year, he made his greatest personal discovery when he examined another body fluid, his own ejaculate. He became the first person to witness living sperm cells, magnified and “moving like a snake or like an eel swimming in water.”

Writing to the Royal Society on September 17, 1683, Van Leeuwenhoek had turned his detective work to dental hygiene. Observing the plaque, or “white matter,” between his teeth, he pried opened a portal to a whole new dimension: “I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort . . . had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort . . . oft-times spun round like a top . . . and these were far more in number.”

There, in his mouth, he had uncovered a metropolis of life at the most distant frontier of the microscopic world. They are still the tiniest living beings that we know of today. He had discovered bacteria.⁴

But in the scientific community, there were still strong doubts about Van Leeuwenhoek’s brazen claims. In a letter to Robert Hooke, the Dutchman wrote, “I suffer many contradictions and oft-times hear it said that I do but tell fairy tales about the little animals.” And so the Royal Society called upon the eminent Hooke to replicate and confirm Van Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries.

Hooke had looked through a microscope before, but when he reached Van Leeuwenhoek’s magnification, what he saw was baffling and “exceeded belief.” And yet it was true. In his letter to the Royal Society, he reported,

I have here sent the Testimonials of eight credible persons; some of which affirm they have seen 10000, others 30000, others 45000 little living creatures, in a quantity of water as big as a grain of Millet (92 of which go to the making up the bigness of a green Pea, or the quantity of a natural drop of water). . . . If according to some of the included testimonials there might be found in a quantity of water as big as a millet seed, no less than 45000 animalcules. It would follow that in an ordinary drop of this water there would be no less than 4140000 living creatures, which number if doubled will make 8280000 living Creatures seen in the quantity of one drop of water, which quantity I can with truth affirm I have discerned.

Under the microscope’s glass lens, a tiny window had swung wide open, and the universe it revealed was gigantic.

WE TEND TO FORGET that on the scale of living things we are massive. To us, reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95 percent of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb. Even tiny animals like fleas are giants compared to the microscopic life forms that inhabit them. As the old rhyme “Siphonaptera” puts it, “Big fleas have little fleas, / Upon their backs to bite ’em, / And little fleas have lesser fleas, / And so, ad infinitum.” In essence, even our pests have pests. Given that, it’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly what a “pest” is. The term implies a small creature whose very existence and mode of survival is a nuisance. Fleas are only one of a vast number of species we despise. And for good reason: the rat flea notoriously served as the carrier of the Yersinia pestis bacterium that killed millions of people around the world, most notably in connection with the Black Death, the pandemic that peaked in Europe in the fourteenth century.⁵ Because of this, some people have questioned if there is even a point to the flea’s existence. As one commenter wrote online, “There are those creatures that serve no purpose whatsoever. Fleas are such an example. They don’t pollinate any flowers, nor do they prey on any destructive or harmful insects. Instead, they siphon the blood of unsuspecting animals and people all the while passing harmful organisms into their bloodstream!” But the flea is not alone in being deemed “unworthy” of being alive. We hold similar attitudes towards cockroaches, mosquitoes, mites, bedbugs, wasps, ants, silverfish, spiders, flies, and many other unwelcome critters anywhere near our homes. We decide which animals should live and which should die. We divide animals into those we admire or that benefit us—insects that are beautiful or have a “purpose,” like butterflies and bees—and those we’d prefer to exterminate, especially where they compete for our food in the realm of agriculture.

As a result, we have launched our own “Black Death,” a vicious chemical war against these tiny invaders. Globally, agrochemicals and pesticides have become a multi-billion-dollar industry that grows year over year.⁶ But in our efforts to stamp out unwanted pests, we pour over two million metric tons of pesticides onto our plants and soils every year. Unsurprisingly, we aren’t just harming the insects we don’t like; we are destroying the insects we do like as well.

Scientists tell us we are witnessing a catastrophic collapse of insect populations. A German study found that on protected nature reserves, insect numbers had plummeted by 80 percent. Rodolfo Dirzo, a Stanford University ecologist, has documented a 45 percent decline worldwide in insect populations over the last four decades. And on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, of the 3,623 invertebrates being tracked, 42 percent are under threat of extinction.⁷

In our desire to exterminate insects, we’ve lost sight of how critical they are to human survival, but the ripple effect runs right up the food chain. As British biologist Dave Goulson warns, we “are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse.” That’s because insects not only help with pollination, they are nature’s garbage men and recyclers as well. As Goulson notes, “Most of the fruits and vegetables we like to eat, and also things like coffee and chocolate, we wouldn’t have without insects. Insects also help to break down leaves, dead trees and dead bodies of animals. They help to recycle nutrients and make them available again. If it weren’t for insects, cow pats and dead bodies would build up in the landscape.”

We wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Biological Blind Spots
• Part Two: Societal Blind Spots
• Part Three: Civilizational Blind Spots
• Acknowledgements
• Index