Torching for Newts. Anita Roy. Dark Mountain Project, Feb 10 2021. https://dark-mountain.net/torching-for-newts/
A century ago there were a million ponds in Britain, home to the mighty great crested newt. Now with increasing building work and a hostile government, amphibian life is being squeezed out of its territories. But not entirely. As their first migrations from land to water begin next month, Anita Roy goes into the Somerset night to discover the tiny dragons that live in the liminal spaces of our land and imaginations.
Anita Roy is a writer and editor based in Wellington, Somerset. She is the co-editor of Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the 21st century (July 2021) and author of A Year in Kingcombe.
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Hannah handed me a torch. It was a serious piece of kit, with a battery-pack the size of a toaster slung on a broad black strap across my shoulder. I strafed the undergrowth enthusiastically until she suggested mildly that I might like to conserve the power until we actually got where we were going. I quickly switched it off, partly to hide my blushes.
I was the only rookie accompanying four ecologists to check for newts in the ponds on the edge of town. Seven years ago, a new housing estate was being built here and the developers had had to create several new ponds in order to relocate a small population of great crested newts. The ecologists I was with – Hannah, Polly, Mark and Paul – had overseen the whole operation and our mission tonight was to check how the newts were faring in their newbuilds.
We left behind the sodium glow of streetlights, and headed down the slope into the tall grass. The last vestiges of daylight showed as a streak of rose madder beneath clouds as rich as plums. Darkness pooled in dips and ditches and our pupils dilated to drink in what little light lingered. Tattered shadows flitted overhead: bats.
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The pond was one of three that had been created to ‘mitigate’ the effects of the housing estate. Polly – who forged along ahead of me, battery-pack knocking against her hip – was one of the original team who had supervised the gathering up and resettlement of newts before the bulldozers arrived.
Pond number two was more established and seemed richer with wildlife possibilities. The rushes were fatter and lay in dense beds around the water’s edge. A few passes of the torch through the sepia water and – bingo: newts. ‘Lots of them,’ said Polly. ‘Good.’
These were smooth and palmate newts, the commonest of the UK’s three native species. Slim little creatures, as long as your little finger, they slipped through the water in tiny Chinese brushstrokes, with an elegant economy of movement. With their vertical fish-tails and four legs, they seem not quite fully formed – like adult frogs who have been unable to shake off their tadpoley youth, or an illustration from a children’s encyclopaedia on evolution: your Middle Devonian great-great-great-great-to-the-power-x grandmother, dragging herself out of the primaeval soup and onto the newly formed land.
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Amphibians are well-named: from the Greek ‘amphi’ meaning both, and ‘bios’, life. They live a double life, moving between aquatic and terrestrial realms. Half in the water and half out, creatures of the twilight world between day and night, living on the outskirts of town and the margins of countryside, newts seem most at home in liminal spaces.
Like all salamanders, newts can re-grow a lost limb or amputated tail. This regenerative ability has long fascinated humans. It is a superpower we are eager to steal, a piece of real animal magic. The mad scientist eager to exploit the process for their own gains is a familiar figure in popular culture. In the 2012 Amazing Spider-Man movie, Rhys Ifans plays Dr Curt Connors, a scientist obsessed with regenerating his own amputated arm using a serum extracted from lizards. Inevitably, the experiment goes horribly wrong, as the mild-mannered doctor morphs into an evil monster, Lizardman, and goes on the rampage. The eponymous hybrid man-fish of the 1954 horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon also proved hard to kill, recovering/regenerating from each bullet-riddled denouement to rise again in sequel after sequel. The creature is reincarnated in Guillermo del Toro’s Shape of Water in 2017. As in the original movie, it has been captured from deep in the Amazon where it was worshipped as a god and brought to the lab, where it is known only as ‘the Asset’: biological raw material for humans to mine and extract knowledge from, at no matter what cost to the beast.
In 1994, Dr Goro Eguchi of the Shokei Educational Institution, Japan, and Panagiotis Tsonis at the University of Dayton, Ohio, decided to investigate this apparently magical ability for real. In the lab, they cut open the eye of a live Japanese fire-bellied newt (Cynops pyrrhogaster) and removed the lens to see if it would regenerate. It did, perfectly. And not from residual lens tissue but from epithelial cells in the iris. So they did it again. And again. Over the course of sixteen years, they cut out the newt’s eye no fewer than eighteen times. And each time, the poor newt grew it back, fresh, complete, in fully working order. The eye of a newt half its age.
Dr Tsonis is quoted in one article as pointing out the ‘good news’ from this study: once we fully understand it, he says, ‘age will not be a problem’ in terms of, for example, wound repair. After all, he says, ‘old people need regeneration, not young ones.’
Perhaps it is no wonder that ‘eye of newt’ is an essential ingredient for the most famous magic potion in history: the hell-broth Macbeth’s witches boil up in order to reveal the future. It is no surprise that the future foretold involves hubris, nemesis and murder most foul.
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