My Last Chat with St Peter

My Last Chat with St Peter

“We called you back,H ecologgeri, 463 because you were starting to enjoy the sex too much,” tpaths St Peter to my brain. “Just a left over aspect of your human brain we needed to retain. And besides we have much more important work for you in the future. Now we must send you through your second reincarnation.”

“Hold on there. I didn`t have enough time to properly analyze what was happening to me.”

“So tell me how far you were able to go in your analysis.”

“I began to learn what it was like to be the main actor in the continuance of life,that is being female. As a female millipede I found out what it was like to lay eggs. But I found the sex a bit weird and didn`t really know how to enjoy it. It was pretty rough the first time. The studly guy doing it seemed a little put off too, as if it was his first time as well.”

“Yes, he was a retread also and suffering the same residual human feelings, but from a male point of view.

Your feelings about that are just a downside of having to keep part of your old brain intact so you can learn from being another species. Humans have much more capacity for feelings than cold blooded species. These latter species are a simpler design which has been shown to perpetuate life quite well in their forms. They have no feelings comparable to the concept of human emotion. But they are very important for the continuance of humans as a species.”

“So tell me, St Peter. Were you ever a human?”

“Yes I was, about ten thousand human years ago, but I too was reconstituted from other species that I had been.”

“What do you mean by reconstituted? And how did you get your current job?”

“I don’t remember how. A very small portion of reconstitution comes from the atoms buried deep by colliding plates of the earth. Only a few of the atoms of previously deceased life forms get recycled this way per unit time. The annual rain runoff from land into oceans carries a significant number of atoms from dead land life. Many of the atoms are taken up again as a mix of land animal species by small organisms feeding on the ocean floors. These are subsequently eaten by larger organisms, which are eaten by fish, which become food for humans; hence, some atoms are recycled back to new humans. There are other biogeochemical routes as well.

The ‘dust to dust’of early religions is just a small part of these biogeochemical cycles. The complexity and time involved in these cycles were only figured out in the last 200 years. But again, there are aspects of the innards of atoms which your scientists have not yet discovered.

Enough of this discussion. Its time for you to become another species to learn more about decomposition. Do you want to be a soil mite like Hoplophorella thoreaui1chewing dead spruce needles into fine pieces thus minimizing the buildup rate of whole needles in the boreal forest, or a dung beetle like Kheper lamarcki2on a Rhinoceros midden in the dryer parts ofAfrica? The taste won’t be the same, but either endeavor will impress you with the importance of keeping production of living matter in balance with the decomposition of dead, previously live matter. Did you know that some of your human scientific colleagues have imported dung beetles to Australia where they never existed before? They did that to control the massive new buildup of dung from the large population of cows which humans rear for hamburger meat there.”

This is a difficult decision for me. I say “Give me a few minutes please, to ponder on that.” But St Peter seems to have short minutes.

“Times up. Our new recycle machine will send you to Africa. Have fun eating shit.”

As I turned around I could see that I was on a high point standing on my first two pair of legs. My rear abdomen with the other pairs of legs was up in the air2. The high point of the rhino midden was where I had landed when booted out of the recycler. The midden consisted of heaps of fresh rhino feces and urine. Damned near standing on my head as I looked down the 45 degree slope. A ‘white flocculent substance, resembling fine cotton wool’2 was extruding from tiny openings on both sides of my upper abdomen. I’m also kicking my hind legs up high and folding them in again rapidly every 20-30 seconds. This weird movement breaks the flocculent stuff into light pieces so that they float away in the air. It contains my sexy attractant.

Down below me, (my new brain register says my name is Bobalong), there were several other dung beetles crawling up toward me. One of my genus was getting near, so I suddenly sat back on my 2 hind pair of legs and raised my forelegs against the challenge to my king-in-the-castle position. The other guy raised his forelegs and we grappled. I threw him off my rhino hill. This happened 3 times in a row.

Down below I could see about 5 other different species (cultures) among the hundreds of challengers within my genus. These cultures tended to do their life cycles slightly differently than I did. I had also learned, by talking with one of my competitors after we did battle, that there were about 5000 such cultures of true dung beetles in the world. Asadult beetles we press the juices for ingestion out of the feces frequently with our mandibles. The intense battles between us makes us thirsty for that zesty liquor. We can clean up a large midden so quicklywithin a couple of hours that fungal and nematode parasites of wild grazers and cows don’t get a chance to establish in the fecal material, hence their life cycles are curtailed.

In general there are many more individuals and genera of insects living among the humans all over the earth. The functions of insects are pollination of plants in their reproductive phases of their life cycles, eating plants such as grasses to help them grow faster and, as hyperparasites and predators, controlling other insect populations. Many insects breakdown the dead tissues of plants and animals into smaller fragments; thus, enhancing the rate of microbial decomposition of these fragments into molecules and atoms for recycling.

Insects and many genera from broader invertebrate groups are knitted together with higher animals and plants by a range of parasites and microbes that live within us and on us for at least one stage of their life cycles. Thus stabilityof the natural systems of life on the surface of the earth was achieved before humans began growing only grain crops and vegetables in large areas without grazing animals.

I guessed that I was the winner of the contests for the hilltop as a female came along next. I advanced on her keenly. We touch antennae and I got excited.

My forelegs are very heavy with strength in the upper parts and 4 large horns projecting forward on the lower parts, used in battle to grapple. My massive forehead has an even larger set of 4 horns for engaging competitive males. The front part of my body has large amounts of bristles2for detecting where I am when deep in dung.

My new mate was smaller than I and with smaller surficial protuberances, but just as bristly. She ran around more frantically than I did.

“ What’s your name, big fella?” says my mate.“Mine is Henrietta and I’m bossy ‘cause I like to get things done.” Henrietta was attractive and gave me good vibes. She also had a good smell about her.

“Bobalong,” I say.

This was a new experience for me because I was used to being accepted by SHMBO (an acronym for “She Who Must be Obeyed” by the Irish playwright, John Mortimer) as sufficient to do the job. In my enthusiasm I broke the top of the dung pile off and we pushed it down the slope together. At the bottom of our castle hill Shmbo stopped and worked at making the piece of dung as round as possible, muttering all the while about incompetence. We had to roll the dung easily because it was a long distance across the land to our secret hideaway where our union would be consummated.

“ Quit bobbing along so slowly, Bobalong. For a big guy you don’t seem to be rolling your weight.”Shmbo says.

“ I’m saving myself for the big event.”

After what seemed like a long time Henrietta finally decided where to bury the perfect dung ball. She guarded it from theft as there were some quite shifty looking dung beetles4, the turd rustlers, in the area. I went under the edge of the 3" diameter ball5 to scoop out a hole deep enough to cover the ground flat with other dirt sonothing could be seen. Then we went below the dung ball to do our business, She stayed to lay an egg and poke it into the center of the dung ball. She stayed for several days so the larva could pass through the 3 skin-sheadings3 as it grewin size from eating the nutritious4 dung ball from the inside to out.

I spent one night on the surface smelling a new rhino midden to find its northwest direction by the position of the moon4, and then tookoff to start the cycle all over with a new female. I told Henrietta how to find me if she wanted to do it again.

As the weather cooled, the pace slowed down for us. I had encounters about 3 times with Henrietta, at different middens each time.During this time our larval offspring were emerging from their pupal stage as new adults.

Just before I died a second time, St Peter pulled me back to his place. There he was, the same old geezer working with another couple of retreads and sending them somewhere. He turned around and spoke directly to me.

“Well, what did you learn?”

“I learned how connected and interdependent all the life forms are. Apart from being a small beetle I encounter all sorts of internal and external smaller organisms that live in me or on me.”

“It’s the same for humans,” says St Peter. “They have the arrogance to think they are separate from Nature when in fact each human individual is made of several species. Good ones are in the hind gut to aid digestion and a few others elsewhere that live as parasitesor commensals, sometimes switching back and forth, in humans. Man has always tried to ride himself of his internal organisms, but it is impossible to do so for some, like the fungus for athletes foot or some of the wee viruses once you catch them. Viruses, like HIV6-p55are insidious and may not show up for many years after infection. But the virus scientists are starting to catch on. They now have a team of virus searchers looking globally for more sneaky viruses like HIV.6-p74 Their understanding of the genetics of viruses is also improving.8”

‘Yes, my reading before I died was starting to make me think about the evolutionary direction of future life systems. At present, animals and plants range in size from big to very small. There are fewer individuals in the larger organisms and many more of the smaller organisms. For instance, in a city there may be a million people, but there will be many more feral individuals of mice, rats, plants, birds, insects and worms, etc of smaller size than humans . The smaller the size, the shorter the generation time for each species relative to that of humans. Generation time occurs between birthing the first offspring and when that offspring births their first progeny. Part of the reduction in generation time is related to the generally higher densities of smaller organisms doing the same job of living. Virus generation times can be just a few days7,8 ,whereas humans take 30 years on the average.

So I started to wonder if viruses could change so fast genetically that we would not be able to compete with them for the energy bestowed on the earth by the sun. Would there be a shift to many smaller species so that the big species would need to compete harder or die out?

Will viruses outcompete humans or control their behavior for the advantage of the viruses at some point in the future? I could not find any virologists who could answer such a question before I died. But I did find another author with similar thoughts.9

References

1)Effects of aerial application of Zectran on populations of the forest soil mite Hoplophorella thoreaui (Jacot.) Can. For. Serv. Int.Rept. M61. 1970. By George G Shaw

2)Chapter 3. First Investigation of the Semiochemistry of South African Dung beetle Species. Barend (Ben) Victor Burger as author. In Neurobiology of Chemical Communication. Boca Raton (Fl) CRC Press; 2014. At http:/

3)Picture by M Bulbert of the Australian Museum.

4)Dung Beetle.

5)Scarabs for Kids, page 2. –for-Kids/cycle.html

6)A Planet of Viruses 2012. By Carl Zimmer. 109 pp. The Young Scourge, Human Immunodeficiency Virus. page 55, and Predicting the Next Plague, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) page73.

7)7) Estimating Mutation Rate and Generation Time from Longitudinal Samples of DNA Sequences. By Yun-Xin et al. Mol Biol Evol (2001) 18(4): 620-626. At

8)Viral Evolution. An update Dec 2014 at

9)Zoobiquity: What animals can teach us about being humans. By Ba. Natterson-Horowitz, MD., and Kathryn Bowers. Pages 200-207