The Island of the Colorblind

I had seen only isolated cycads on Guam, perhaps two or three close together – but here there were hundreds, dominating the jungle. They grew everywhere, some in clumps, some as isolated trunks reaching, here and there, twelve or fifteen feet in height. Most, though, were relatively low – five or six feet tall, perhaps – and surrounded by a thick carpet of ferns. Thickened and strengthened with the scars of old leaves, leaf scales, these trunks looked mighty as locomotives or stegosaurs. High winds and typhoons beat through these islands regularly, and the trunks of some of them were bent at all angles, sometimes even prostrate on the ground. But this, if anything, seemed to increase their vitality, for where they were bent, especially at the base, new growths, bulbils, had erupted in scores, bearing their own crowns of young leaves, still pale green and soft. While most of the cycads around us were tall, unbranched ones whose life force seemed to be pouring upward to the sky, there were others, almost monstrous, which seemed to be running riot, exploding in all directions, full of anarchic vitality, sheer vegetable exuberance, hubris.

Beata pointed out the stiff reinforcing leaf bases which ringed each tree trunk – as each new crown of leaves had sprouted at the top, the older leaves had died off, but their bases remained. ‘We can estimate the age of a cycad by counting these leaf scales,’ said Beata. I started to do this, with one huge prostrate tree, but Tommy and Beata smiled as I did so. ‘It is easier,’ she said, ‘if you look at the trunks – many of the older ones have a very thin ring in 1900, because that was the year of the great typhoon; and another thin ring in 1973, when we had very strong winds.’

‘Yeah,’ inserted Tommy, ‘those winds got to two hundred miles per hour, they say.’

‘The typhoon strips all the leaves off the plant,’ Beata explained, ‘so they can’t grow as much as usual.’ Some of the oldest trees, she thought, were more than a thousand years old.[84]

A cycad forest is not lofty, like a pine or oak forest. A cycad forest is low, with short stumpy trees – but the trees give an impression of immense solidity and strength. They are heavy-duty models, one feels – not tall, not flashy, not capable of rapid growth, like modern trees, but built to last, to withstand a typhoon or a drought. Heavy, armored, slow growing, gigantic – they seem to bear, like dinosaurs, the imprint of the Mesozoic, the ‘style’ of 200 million years ago.

Male and female cycads are impossible to tell apart until they mature and produce their spectacular cones. The male Cycas has an enormous upright cone, a foot or more in length and weighing perhaps thirty pounds, like a monstrous pinecone, tessellated, with great chunky cone scales sweeping round the axis of the cone in elegant spiral curves.[85] The female of the Cycas genus, in contrast, lacks a proper cone, but produces a great central cluster of soft woolly leaves instead – megasporophylls, specialized for reproduction – orange in color, velvety, notched; and hanging below each leaf, eight or ten slate-colored ovules – microscopic structures in most organisms, but here the size of juniper berries.

We stopped by one cone, half a yard high, ripe and full of pollen. Tommy shook it, and a cloud of pollen came out; it had a powerful, pungent smell and set me tearing and sneezing. (The cycad woods must be thick with pollen in the windy season, I thought, and some researchers have even wondered whether the lytico-bodig could be caused by inhaling it.) The smell of the male cones is generally rather unpleasant for human beings – as far back as 1795, there were ordinances in Agana requiring inhabitants to remove the cones if they grew male plants in their garden. But, of course, the smell is not for us. Ants are drawn by the powerful smell, said Tommy; sometimes a horde of tiny, biting ones will fly out as the tree is poked. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘See this little spider? We call him paras ranas in Chamorro, ‘the one that weaves the web.’ This type of spider is mostly found on the cycad; it eats the ants. When the cycad is young and green, the spider is green too. When the cycad starts to become brown, the spider takes that color too. I am glad when I see the spiders, because it means there will be no ants to bite me when I pick the fruits.’