10

Down Under

This quote, from H. P. Lovecraft, one of my all-time favorite authors, struck me: The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. The idea that the unknown presents real fear to the average human is something I’ve thought about when exploring the remote places I’ve worked around the globe. While some people fear the unknown, poorly explored places oftentimes have the most interesting biology. And I’ve realized something else: while remote places represent the unknown, they aren’t to be feared; they are to be treasured.

As a boy I thought few things as exciting and mysterious as one particular type of remote place. My grade school teachers remarked on the exuberant enthusiasm the subject commanded of me—much to their dismay, something my schoolwork couldn’t muster. The simple mention of one of these places gave me butterflies of the variety found in high school football players before a big game. Culturally, they are incongruous; Hollywood glamorizes them, yet protective parents deem them off limits. They are a paradox in having some characters with quaint simplicity and others with amazing complexity. They exist in a dimension where time isn’t measured in minutes, hours, days, or even years but rather by the development of stalactite and stalagmite gardens. They are places enveloped in perpetual darkness with maze-like corridors, water-sculpted surfaces, otherworldly inhabitants, and endless possibilities. These possibilities were enough for the imagination of a young boy to manufacture a childhood’s fill of adventures exploring them. Etched at the top of my youthful list of must explore places, caves had it all and then some. The stars of the show for me, of course, were, and are, the mysterious, white, and blind inhabitants of the underworld.

So alien to mankind are the denizens of the subsurface that initial human reaction to them is extreme. Our imagination is challenged such that they might as well be entities from another planet. Glaring evidence of our amazement and bewilderment is reflected through the names we give them. As a group, groundwater dwelling organisms were initially designated as stygobites and obligate cave-inhabiting terrestrial organisms as troglobites. The Greek-based name stygobite ties in with the River Styx, a mythical waterway of Hades, home to the dead. Some stygobitic amphipods (shrimp-like invertebrates) in the Ozarks are included in the genus Stygobromus, or food from the river Styx. This is an appropriate name considering that amphipods probably constitute an important dietary component of cave fishes and cave salamanders. Locals of the Ozark Plateau were so taken aback in their encounters with white cave salamanders that they named them ghost lizards. It hasn’t simply been in North America that human reaction to subterranean life forms has been extreme. For example, centuries ago, eastern Europeans stumbled across stygobitic salamanders that had washed from the mouths of caves. Awestruck, they promptly classified the creatures as larval dragons. Scientists later described this as Europe’s famous groundwater salamander, the Olm (Proteus anguinus).

Underground inhabitants have not gone unnoticed by writers. Utilizing settings in the underground environment to add exotic and mysterious flare to a story, who could forget J. R. R. Tolkien’s cave-inhabiting creature Gollum and the blind cave fish upon which he fed? Lovecraft wrote of troglobitic penguins in his At the Mountains of Madness. He described white birds with only vestiges of eyes living in dark caverns built by an ancient race. Michael Mott once wrote, The legends, myths, and literature of mankind have always been filled with fanciful or terrifying accounts of underground lands and races, hidden from surface sight. All these authors conveyed the mystery and sense of adventure people experience and feel when exploring subterranean habitats.

My investigation of caves and their inhabitants has spanned the United States. I spent three years studying the population ecology of the Grotto Salamander (Eurycea spelaea) for my master’s degree. This exposure to cave wildlife fueled the fire. Cave work quickly extended to far-flung places such as China, Thailand, Eastern Europe, Brazil, and Central America. Funding agencies for cave bioinventory work included organizations such as the National Geographic Society, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and several state wildlife agencies. Inasmuch, I strove to improve my photographic approaches while working underground to produce impressive reports and other deliverables. I started by developing my own very crude (but effective) photographic aquaria—systems that would allow me to focus on the detail of the species I was encountering. I also worked to improve my overall photographic skill set, learning more about flash photography and subtle lighting effects. Finally, I invested time in trying to find the right camera rig so that I could photograph aquatic wildlife in cave rivers, streams, and lakes, where and how I found them. This involved an underwater housing for my camera and large strobe flashes mounted on arms that extended from the housing. Several camera rigs later, I will say that spending time in subterranean waterways, photographing the wildlife that lives there, is easily one of the best things I have done in the field. I absolutely love capturing on film stygobionts and troglobionts where they live. Getting to a place at which I had a functional underwater camera rig involved a series of proving trips.

One of my proving trips for a new, smaller aquatic photographic rig took place in a large subterranean river in Tennessee. I was assisting a good friend and colleague, Dr. Matthew Niemiller, with a population count of federally endangered Tennessee Cave Salamanders (Gyrinophilus pelleucus). The cave river meandered through a spacious cave with large pools connected by running streams. I slowly made my way into the largest of the cave pools and floated out toward the center, scanning the bottom of the pool for salamanders. This was the first time I had tried to photograph this species, in situ, and I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to find them while floating at the surface and holding a camera rig. With this smaller and lighter rig, and as if on command, I floated toward a submerged rock ridge and a large adult salamander sitting at the edge of the ridge. I slowly aimed the camera and began shooting. The salamander did not react, and I was able to take a series of images from different angles. Advances in technology had made my life easier. The size of this rig, much smaller than previous versions, was much easier to maneuver.

Another proving trip involved advances in viewfinders and being able to focus a camera rig while looking at the back of a camera, through the aquatic housing, and from a distance. This proving trip took place in Slovenia, while trying to photograph the human fish (Proteus anguinus) in situ. I was fortunate to have a couple of friends from Slovakia who were able to plan a trip for me (to Slovenia) in order to photograph these outstanding amphibians in a large cave river. Most of the opportunities to shoot the salamanders would be in a meter or less of water. To reduce the disturbance and vibration of my movements, hunching over and simply holding the rig, rather than lying down in the water, worked out far better. Very slow and methodical movement of my feet and legs did not bother the salamanders, and I was able to get within shooting distance using the technique. The view finder on the back of the rig, through the aquatic housing, was a major step up in size and clarity. I was able to focus on these ancient groundwater amphibians while looking at the viewfinder held below the surface of the water.

Yet another set of proving trips had more to do with further development of my photographic aquaria than with use of an aquatic camera rig. These units became smaller and more portable, and I added features to help with the proper exposure of organisms that had little pigment. For example, the Georgia Blind Salamander (Eurycea wallacei) is one of the spectacular stygobionts in Florida and Georgia. Most of the caves where this salamander is found are completely submerged, so cave diving is required to access the habitat. The research group with which I have been a part works with a team of cave divers, and they were ideal for our studies of this amphibian. I needed to document details photographically of the animals that the cave divers brought to the surface. I had been working for years on tweaking the design of a standard v-tank. White and pink life forms can be difficult to photograph and are easy to overexpose. I needed aquaria where I could control the lighting and make adjustments. The final design for the aquaria I use today, and used with images of E. wallacei breeding in the lab, provided the flexibility I needed and allowed for the salamanders to sit, motionless, in a position while I made adjustments. One final benefit is that I got proficient enough with these aquaria that I could shoot relevant aspects of a specimen and have everything wrapped up in less than five minutes. Comfortable and flexible designs to these systems allowed for decreased handling time—something we all wanted to see. These proving trips and laboratory exercises were a huge success.

Perhaps the only other real proving trips came with designing a photographic rig that I could use belowground when we were exploring terrestrial cave habitats. I wanted something lightweight but powerful enough to deliver a high-resolution image, appropriate for publication. Advances in photographic technology have provided smaller, lighter rigs that produce images with a resolution that dwarfs older, larger rigs. The same can be said for flash technology. So these proving trips were simply a matter of testing various rigs to see how comfortable they were when crawling through caves or climbing rocks, walls, or ropes. The rigs allowed for the documentation of other herpetofauna in caves, sometimes species there as incidentals but sometimes not. For example, there was an afternoon in south China when we were surveying a cave for the first time. The waterway was the only way into the system. This water-worn cave passage had perfectly formed stone shelves along its walls that provided damp sites of refuge for cave life near the water and then dry hideouts higher above the water. The first dozens of these shelves had nothing living on them, but as we wound around a corner, something moved on one of these shelves. It was a coiled snake. The Asiatic Watersnake (Trimerodytes aequifasciatus) commonly inhabits cave waterways in Southeast Asia. These snakes are rear fanged and mildly venomous, focusing on fishes as prey items. Interestingly, we have found them in many caves with blind cave fishes and have wondered if they consume the obligate groundwater fishes. Probably so. The snakes seem to do well, even in deep reaches of caves, and I was able to use a smaller and lighter rig, perfect for photography while crawling through a cave, to capture images of the species in situ.

I’ve had the great good fortune to meet a host of spectacular cave-obligate amphibians in the process of testing my gear over many years of crawling through caves, swimming through subterranean rivers, and hunting through the rocks of cave streams and pools. As a byproduct of the efforts, I have amassed a nice image library of subterranean fauna. I also discovered an activity that I connect with at my core—snorkeling subterranean waterways. I hope that the image set intrigues the public enough to contribute to conservation efforts of these systems and the species that call them home. Groundwater contamination and overextraction, as well as other activities that lead to the wholesale removal of subterranean habitat, now threaten many subterranean species. They desperately need our help.