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I am not referring to the late ahuehuete, next to whom Hernán Cortés supposedly wept on the “sad night” of 1520 when the Mexica defeated him; Nor the most famous sycamore tree in Britain, which lived right next to Hadrian’s Wall and which someone just felled with a chainsaw. The tree I’m talking about is a scientific illustration that Marco Antonio Pineda, Mexican biologist and nature artist, made for a recent paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Mutilation of the Tree of Life via Mass Extinction of Animal Genera, written by Gerardo Ceballos, a renowned ecologist who has done very important work in alerting us to the extent of mass extinction of living creatures, and Paul R. Ehrlich, a 100-year-old entomologist who, along with Anne H . Ehrlich’s controversial book The Population Bomb (1968).
For more than two decades, Ceballos and Ehrlich have worked to focus their colleagues and the public on the extent of the biodiversity crisis; First they suggested that population disappearance was a prelude to species extinction, and now they are urging us to consider the loss of broader taxonomic groups as an important criterion for research and conservation.
To illustrate the generic mutilation of the tree of life, Pineda proceeded from the idea suggested by Ceballos, drawing a tree loosely based on a ceiba tree and arranging sixteen detailed animal portraits in its branches. Eight of them are already extinct (that’s why they hang on leafless branches) and the others, nestled in the leafy upper branches, belong to currently threatened genera.
To make the importance of this publication known, I decided to approach this tree and interview its creator. At the beginning of our phone conversation, Pineda told me that he has been working with Ceballos for almost three decades. A year ago, the researcher from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) looked for some of the 73 genera of vertebrates that have disappeared in the last five centuries (an extinction rate 35 times faster than the last century). million years) and those most at risk of extinction if we fail to stop the immense ecocide caused by human destruction of wild habitats.
The extinction of a genus means the loss of a unique and unrepeatable branch of the tree of life that has been growing and branching for more than three billion years. From the perspective of the genetic pool of evolution, the extinction of a mouse from the Mus branch, which includes 39 different species, is not as serious as the extinction of the Teporingo (knock on wood, like my grandmothers). used to say), one of the smallest rabbits in the world (the only species of the genus Romerolagus), which lives on the slopes of the volcanoes east of Mexico City: Popocatépetl, Iztaccíhuatl, Chichinahuatzin and El Pelado.
The Teporingo is located at the top of the Pineda tree. At first I thought the illustrator had taken a nationalistic liberty by placing this tiny Mexican rodent in such a prominent place, above imposing animals such as the African elephant, the king cobra or the gavial crocodile. In our conversation, he made it clear to me that the order of animals in the tree obeys more of a biological convention in which members of evolutionary newer and more “advanced” groups, such as mammals, are ranked higher than those of older groups. or “Primitives”. ” Therefore, the animals on the lowest branch of the tree are now extinct amphibians and reptiles: the Delcourt giant gecko, a huge species that lived in New Caledonia until the 19th century and is known from a single stuffed specimen in the Natural History Museum of is Marseille; the giant tortoise of Rodrigues Island (it looks like the one from the Galapagos Islands, but lived in the Indian Ocean); the Yunnan sea newt and the gastric brooding frog from Queensland, Australia.
I was surprised to learn that Pineda had never drawn most of these species, depicted with virtuoso familiarity. Although I would like to write a Stephen Jay Gould-style essay on each of them, I have no space here other than to record some rarities mentioned in the article, such as those of the frogs of the genus Rheobatrachus mentioned above. When they died out half a century ago, a unique form of motherhood was lost: after their eggs were fertilized by males, females ate them and incubated them in their stomachs. During this time, the devoted mothers stopped eating food and producing gastric juices, a feature that the authors say may have contributed to medical research into treating digestive disorders in humans. For these frogs, vomiting meant the birth of a child.
How do you draw an amphibian that has been extinct for two hundred years and of which there is only one specimen, like the Delcourt gecko, or a giant that has been missing for at least half a millennium, like the elephant birds of Madagascar? As Pineda explained to me, naturalistic art involves not only exact copying of models, but also understanding animal morphology and imagining postures that are simultaneously natural and maximize the organism’s anatomy. Furthermore, housing all these different animals in circular frames of the same size posed an additional difficulty, which he solved with the mastery of his thirty years of experience.
Since I’m neither a taxonomist nor an art critic, my interview included rudimentary questions, such as which animal was the most difficult to draw. The answer was the kakapo: the world’s only flightless parrot, of which only 247 remain in New Zealand. The reason it was so difficult to capture (with acrylic paint, on 300 gram Fabriano paper) is because its plumage has many tones and shapes; Although green predominates, there are shades of yellow and brown, as well as very thin cream-colored feathers around the beak. The kakapo is a bird that, like the extinct dodo, was evolutionarily prevented from escaping by living on the island. His earthly robustness makes him seem a little ridiculous, and it is particularly difficult not to reinforce this lack of vigor when painting him.
It was also difficult to paint the Teporingo because it has a coat that Pineda described to me in great detail: “dark base and light tip, long on the belly, thick on the back, very short on the face.” This coat is particularly suitable for Protection and camouflage for rabbits in the heights of the neovolcanic mountains. In addition to grassland grazing and burning, the teporingo has two other powerful enemies: Christmas trees and fossil fuel burning. The planting of Christmas pines has created an exceptional scenario in which the environmental crisis is not caused by deforestation, but by the reforestation of alpine meadows ideal for Teporingo. Global warming caused by carbon emissions is reducing the cold environments in which this species can thrive, pushing it to higher elevations where there are apparently fewer and fewer areas for it to colonize.
Although there are many photos of the teporingo (many of them taken at the Chapultepec Zoo, where high mortality has been recorded in recent years), the hand drawing highlights many features (the mustaches, the eyebrows, the white masks) that give it to us allow you to know the species better than an automatic reproduction of its image. This is why the work of artists like Pineda is irreplaceable. “Photography,” he tells me, “is a tool, but it does not replace illustration,” which allows us to “choose the angle and position we need” to enrich our scientific view of the world.
What we need most right now is an artistic look at the world: attentive and thorough, curious and amazed. We must approach the Tree of Life with the reverence inherent in the works of Ceballos, Ehrlich and Pineda, to whom I say goodbye after a pleasant digression on drawing dinosaurs. When I hang up the phone, I feel alone and think that if we do not change our course of civilization, we will be left alone on earth with a pile of burning firewood.
Jorge Commensal He is the author of The Mutations, Junkies of Letters and This Boiling Void. Collaborates with Transformación de Conflictos Socioenvironmentales, AC and the condor reintroduction project in Baja California, Mexico. At EL PAÍS he is a columnist for América Futura.