Randy White - Dead of Night

That was the most unsettling similarity. Multiply X thousands of breeding pairs, then multiply again by X hundreds of thousands of offspring. The population would grow exponentially.

Harrington was right. This wasn’t biovandalism, this was a biological attack. The perpetrators had chosen well. A species that produces many thousands of offspring is an “evolutionary responder.” It is a fecund, or reproductive, response to predators who’ve adapted specialized feeding abilities-“phenotype characteristics”-that make the fecund species easy prey.

It’s called “fecund selection.”

But when a fecund-select species is introduced into a region where there are no predators, it is an environmental catastrophe. Historically, people responsible for these catastrophes have not been terrorists. They’ve been well-intended government officials, or private importers of plants and animals.

I’m a scientific journal junkie. I know that four or five thousand exotic plant species have already established themselves in the United States, along with a couple of thousand exotic animals, all reproducing. I’d read that, annually, these exotics cost us millions a year, because we must assume the aggressive role of artificial predator.

Devastating examples of fecund-select exotics came to mind:

The gypsy moth was brought to the U.S. from France by an entomologist who hoped to cross them with indigenous moths and create better silk. A few gypsy moths escaped, multiplied, multiplied again. They were soon an unchecked cloud that defoliated entire forests throughout New England.

In the 1950s, government biologists turned calamity into cataclysm when they began spraying DDT to kill the moths. It took much too long for officials to admit that DDT also decimated our native insect and bird populations. Several species were poisoned to the brink of extinction-eagles, brown pelicans, and osprey among them.

Dragonflies, which prey voraciously on mosquitoes, were among the earliest of DDT’s casualties, so mosquitoes bred out of control-which required spraying heavier concentrations of the chemical.

DDT is a potent carcinogenic, readily absorbed through the cell walls of pasture grasses, ripening vegetables, and herbaceous fish. It also seeped into our water systems. A generation of children grew up drinking DDT-laced milk and water and eating DDT-contaminated food. Unknown thousands of that generation are still suffering the effects. All because of an exotic moth.

Water hyacinth, a South American floating plant, and kudzu vine, from Japan, were other examples. Kudzu vine arrived by ship in the late 1800s to shade porches of Southern mansions. In the 1940s, government agricultural agents decided it was the ideal answer to erosion because it grows rapidly-up to a foot a day. Within a few years, the vine was suffocating farmlands and forests. It now blankets millions of acres. Hyacinth clogs millions of acres of waterways.

In Florida and neighboring states, there are too many examples of noxious exotics that breed, travel, and destroy, unhampered by natural checks: the Cuban tree frog, the walking catfish, several species of tropical fish, and, recently, the Indo-Pacific species of lionfish-dangerous because its spines are lethal.

Brazilian fire ants are some of the most vicious little bastards on Earth, and among the most ecologically destructive. The ant, named for its fiery bite, entered via ship through Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s-the beginning of a long, slow nightmare. Fire ants sprout wings during their breeding cycle, can travel miles during mating flights, and hatch copious numbers of eggs.

The ant was soon killing local populations of native insects, whole colonies of ground-nesting birds, and infant mammals, as they ate their way into neighboring states. Ironically-and sadly-I’ve yet to hear of an environmental group that has aimed its financial or political guns at this biological cancer. Annually, fire ants destroy more indigenous species than the most heartless of developers.

I’ve done enough reading to know that plague and pestilence are not just words entombed in an ancient book. On the largest of scales, a balance between predator and prey is requisite if a biota is to function as a whole, because the health of the macrocosm is dependent on the health of all its living parts.

It is a fragile symbiosis. Predation is one of the few checks that prohibits one species from dominating, then destroying all others.

The only exotic on Dr. Shepherd’s list that didn’t seem an efficient choice as a bioweapon was the mamba. The species is too dangerous to handle, and snakes lay too few eggs to have much impact on a sizeable geographic area.

But then I gave it some thought. Decided maybe I was wrong.

In the African bush, only once had I seen a green mamba. Along with the taipan of Australia, it’s the scariest snake I’ve encountered. Confronting a mamba? Chilling.

The snake grows more than fourteen feet long. Over ground, some claim, it crawls faster than an Olympic sprinter can run-unlikely, but illustrative of the fear it creates. The grade school janitor said that the snake he killed had charged him. The janitor was lucky. He had a shotgun. I’d heard accounts of pissed-off mambas running down men from behind and biting them in the back. Maybe apocryphal, but the animal’s physical abilities are well documented.

The snake I’d encountered was face-to-face, and once was enough. When agitated, a mamba stands erect, a third of its body off the ground, so it’s at eye level. You and the snake, staring at each other, its face and jaws not much smaller than your own. Just before it strikes, a mamba shakes its head violently, flattening cobralike. It opens its mouth wide to show the black interior. The snake is olive gray to green, not black. The name comes from this attack display.

If a mamba wet-strikes a healthy adult, death is statistically certain if the victim doesn’t receive antivenom within half an hour. It is not a Hollywood death. Because of the megadose of neurotoxin, the victim dies slowly, clearheaded, but as a suffocating paraplegic. Its venom reserve is so massive that there are accounts of a single African mamba dropping through the roof of a house and killing as many as twelve inhabitants before crawling away.

So maybe it was a good choice as a bioweapon. Release a small number of mambas at places chosen to create the greatest possible public outrage: the Mall of the Americas; public schools. The terror factor would be enormous.

“Diabolical”-the right word.

The green mamba I’d encountered had behaved like an irritable, hyperactive teen. “Probably had a nest in the area,” one of the locals told me later. “Makes them fierce. Deadly mean.” The snake’s head swayed like a metronome, but its eyes never broke contact with mine. The eyes were convex scales on an organism covered with scales. They were a lucent gray-blue, as dead looking as keratin plates, yet they implied the irrelevance of all knowledge because they reflected all that could be genetically known: If it touched its mouth to me, my beating mammalian heart would stop.

An African mamba is among the few creatures on earth instinctually certain of its ascendancy. I hoped I’d never face another.

It crossed my mind that the people doing this were another form of exotic. There is nothing sinister about snakes, or sharks, or spiders. They are what they are, beautifully coded, the trophies of adaptation. But these people were purposeful; seditious exotics, no less poisonous than the creatures they’d smuggled into the U.S. So far, they’d operated without being discovered. Like the fecund-select creatures they were using, there was no predator to track them and intercede.

Until now.

I’d been given the assignment. My options included whatever extreme action I deemed appropriate. Eternalize.