Brilliantly colored fungi sprouted in the wet earth – Beata knew them all, which were poisonous, and what remedy to use if poisoned; which were hallucinogenic; which were good to eat. Some of them, Tommy told me, were luminous at night – and this was also true of some of the ferns. Looking down among the ferns, I spotted a low, whisklike plant,
If the cycads conjured up for me the lush forests of the Jurassic, a very different, much older vision rose before me with the
A little farther on, I was startled to see a large accumulation of empty, broken coconut shells on the ground, but when I looked around, there were no coconut palms to be seen, only cycads and pandanus. Filthy tourists, I thought – must have come in and thrown these husks here; but there were few tourists on Rota. It seemed odd that the Chamorros, who are so respectful of the jungle, would leave a pile of refuse here. ‘What is this?’ I asked Tommy. ‘Who brought all these shells here?’
‘Crabs,’ he said. Seeing my confusion, he elaborated. ‘These large coconut crabs come in. The coconut trees are over there.’ He gestured toward the beach, a few hundred yards away, where we could just see a grove of palm trees. ‘The crabs know they will be disturbed if they eat them by the beach, so they bring them over here to eat.’[88]
One shell had a huge hole, as if it had been bitten in half. ‘This must have been a real big crab to do this,’ Tommy observed, ‘a monster! The crab hunters know when they find coconut shells like this that there are coconut crabs all around, and then we search, and then we eat
‘Coconut crabs love the cycads, too. So when I come out to gather the cycad fruit, I bring along a bag for crabs too.’ With his machete, Tommy cut through the undergrowth, making a path. ‘This is good for the cycads – it gives them room to grow.’
‘Feel this cone!’ Tommy said, as we came to a large male plant – I was surprised to find it warm to the touch. ‘It is like a furnace,’ said Tommy. ‘Making the pollen gives it heat – you can really feel it as the day cools, in the evening.’ Botanists have known for about a century (and cycad gatherers, of course, for much longer) that the cones may generate heat – sometimes twenty degrees or more above the ambient temperature – as they ready for pollination. The mature cones produce heat for several hours each day by breaking down lipids and starches within the cone scales; it is thought that the heat increases the release of insect-attracting odors, and thus helps in the distribution of pollen. Intrigued by the almost-animal warmth of the cone, I hugged it, impulsively, and almost vanished in a huge cloud of pollen.