Five Rules for Rebellion by Sophie Walker

Author:Sophie Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Rule

4

COLLABORATE WITH COMPASSION

‘I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that’s ever happened to me has taught me compassion.’

– Ellen DeGeneres

My daughters and I are watching daredevil caterpillars.

It’s a Sunday evening and we are curled up together on the sofa watching David Attenborough’s Our Planet on Netflix. The natural world’s best-known and most effective advocate is demonstrating two essentials of activism: storytelling and how collaboration is vital to survival.

Against a backdrop of waving grasses, Attenborough introduces a species of butterfly, the Alcon blue, which resides in ‘the ancient hay meadows of Hungary, still farmed in the traditional way’. In his sonorous voice, Attenborough explains that each female must mate and lay eggs on just one species of plant – the Marsh Gentian – that soon hatch into caterpillars.

‘High up on the plants, they’re safe from predators below,’ he tells us gravely, as the scene cuts to lines of translucent amber ants with fearsome mandibles patrolling grains of sand. The music takes on a mildly threatening air as Attenborough intones: ‘But then the caterpillars do something seemingly suicidal. They abseil down on threads of silk to the ground below and into danger.’

My girls and I are open-mouthed. Betty shrieks and pokes me as one black-faced, purple-speckled fuzzy caterpillar lands, bunches and squirms along the ground for mere seconds before it is seized upon by an ant and hauled away.

Attenborough explains to us that the caterpillars have no defence at all against the ants, but they are producing a scent like that emitted by an ant’s larva in order to incite precisely this scenario. On screen, a caterpillar is borne, legs waving feebly, down a dark hole in the ground, across the rattling clatter of rushing ants. The ants are taking the caterpillars back to their nest, where they deposit them in the colony’s brood chamber, among the ants’ own white larvae, where, despite being a shockingly different colour and shape, the caterpillars give off just the right signals and the nurse ants rush to feed them.

‘But there is more. The caterpillars now start to mimic the sounds made by the queen ant and, as a result, the ants treat them like royalty,’ Attenborough tells us. Seventeen-year-old Grace makes a sound of appreciation. ‘They give them such quantities of food that the caterpillars grow hugely. And there, underground, the caterpillars feed and grow for nearly two years. Until one day there is nothing for the ants to feed. The caterpillars have pupated.’

From our sofa we burst into applause as, in a tiny tunnel, from a yellow walnut-shaped cocoon, crawls a crumpled cornflower-blue butterfly. On trembling legs, it walks slowly up towards the entrance of the burrow before taking flight and joining the others that dip and glide above the grasslands. ‘This complex life may be labour-saving for the butterfly. But it’s risky,’ concludes Attenborough. ‘If anything happened to the ants or the Gentian, the Alcon blue would become extinct. Only tiny fragments of these ancient meadows are left in Europe.’

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