Meet our own little nanotech expert

As the beech leaves fall in all their legion colours and float on the garden pond or lie on the bottom like a bright mosaic under the clear water, whirligigs scud about on the surface like little, black, four-legged ice skaters or sometimes rest on slowly-floating leaves that are half submerged.

The beauty of the leaves underwater cannot but make me think of something Japanese and delicate, perhaps a wallpaper or a kimono pattern. There is an oriental quality to the fallen leaves, so vibrant in their dying colours. And when I look out at the pond with our semi-resident grey heron standing at its edge, I see that the whole picture might well be oriental and a thousand years old.

Bird, leaves, water in winter sunlight, a timeless scene. How important are the first two commas in that sentence; without them it would be “Bird leaves water in winter sunlight“, an example suitable for entry in the best-selling book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Foxes are abroad in this weather in unusually large numbers. When I visited some of my children and grandchildren in the UK last week, my son-in-law and I saw no less than three fine foxes in full colour during our 20-minute drive from Heathrow Airport.

Then, upon my return to Cork, as my wife drove me home from the airport, I saw three more madra rua all in as fine fettle as their English cousins boasting autumnal red coats and silky brushes. The difference was that, while the latter casually crossed quiet streets between houses, our native specimens took to their heels when they saw the car headlights, all but for one which stood boldly alongside a plastic carrier bag of rubbish discarded onto the Bandon-Timoleague road.

In every week of every year for some two years now, somebody throws one or more bags of household waste from their car onto that road. They make a regular habit of it. As cars hit the bags, rubbish is strewn along the verge. Now, we have foxes scavenging. The vandal who discards the bags through his or her car window must regularly commute along that route and use it as a convenient dumping place.

Clearly, the dumper, although adult, is immature. Maturity is defined as the ability to empathise with others, to realise that one isn’t the only person in the world and that the world does not revolve around one.

The dumper is unable to foresee how a stretch of the country road looking like a rubbish tip will affect others, or they believe the world centres around themselves, with inferior human beings whose life-role is to clear up their mess. They are sad people these dumpers; they cannot see beauty in nature, surely an awful blindness to live with and a serious spiritual defect.

Meanwhile, on a happier note, the little whirligigs keep whizzing about the pond surface and may contribute to science. Classified as Gyrinidae beetles (from the Greek gyros or Latin gyrus meaning ‘circle’) their bodies are flat, oval, and have a blue-black sheen. With divided or compound eyes, they are capable of seeing both over and under the waterline at the same time.

Whirligigs are gregarious, and the dynamics of their changing interaction or placement as they swim interests scientists. With middle and hind legs shaped like oars, they sometimes duck underwater to avoid predators. A replenishable air-bubble on the abdomen gives them an oxygen supply when submerged.

Most species fly well and can go pond-hopping in search of food or mates. Active during the day, the adults fly on autumn nights in search of new ponds. In July the larvae pupate, like the adults, are predatory, feeding on mosquito larvae and other invertebrates.

It is surely extraordinary that so much intricate technology should have evolved in these humble creatures. But then, similar ‘technology’ created all natural things, and all are ‘miracles’, even the sightless, soundless, mute, immobile rocks which are miracles of volcanic creation with, often, durability, usefulness and great beauty to boot.

As nanotechnology scientists study the seemingly random (but possibly not) gyrations in which whirligigs swim in order to determine how groups of robots might coordinate movements, the whirligigs on my pond may have an important part to play in my future.