On Guam, John continued, warming to his theme, the most common form of toxic seafood illness was ciguatera poisoning – ’It’s so common here, we just call it fish poisoning.’ Ciguatoxin is a powerful neurotoxin produced by a tiny organism, a dinoflagellate called
‘At one point,’ he added, ‘people wondered if the lytico might be caused by some similar kind of fish poisoning – but we’ve never found any evidence of this.’
Thinking of the delectable sushi I had looked forward to all day, I was conscious of a horripilation rippling up my spine. ‘I’ll have chicken teriyaki, maybe an avocado roll – no fish today,’ I said.
‘A wise choice, Oliver,’ said John. ‘I’ll have the same.’
We had just started eating when the lights went out. A groan – ’Not again!’ – went around the restaurant, and the waiters quickly produced candles, which they lit. ‘They seem very well prepared for power outages,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ said John, ‘we have them all the time, Oliver. They’re caused by the snakes.’
‘What?’ I said. Did I mishear? Was he mad? I was startled, and for an instant wondered if he had somehow eaten some poison fish after all, and was beginning to hallucinate.
‘Sounds odd, doesn’t it? We have millions of these brown, tree-climbing snakes everywhere – the whole island is overrun by them. They climb the telephone poles, get into the substations, through the ducts, into the transformers, and then, pfft! We have another outage. The blackouts can happen two or three times a day, and so everyone is prepared for them – we call them snakeouts. Of course, the actual times are quite unpredictable.
‘How have you been sleeping?’ he added, inconsequentially.
‘Rather well,’ I said. ‘Better than usual. At home, I tend to be woken by the birds at dawn.’
‘And here?’ John prompted.
‘Well, now you mention it, I haven’t heard any birds at dawn. Or any other time, It’s strange; I hadn’t realized it until you asked.’
‘There is no birdsong on Guam – the island is silent,’ John said. ‘We used to have many birds, but all of them are gone – there is not a single one left. All of them have been eaten by the tree-climbing snakes.’ John had a prankish sense of humor, and I was not quite sure whether to believe this story. But when I got back to my hotel that evening, and pulled out my trusty
The next morning I had arranged to spend some time hunting for ferns in the Guamanian jungle. I had heard of Lynn Raulerson, a botanist, from my friends at the American Fern Society in New York. She and another colleague, Agnes Rine-hart, both work at the herbarium at the University of Guam and had published, among other things, a delightful book on