Jurassic Pouch Part I: The Invaders
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“I don’t expect you’ve heard of Dmitry Belyayev…” began Agent Jane.
“Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyayev?” said Frances, dryly. “Yep, never heard of them.”
Jane yielded the floor with a nod. Go on.
“Russian – Soviet – geneticist,” continued the veterinarian. “Who did many things. It’s because of Belyayev that we understand the process of dog domestication, how wolves became dogs.”
“Dogs are wolves,” said Jo.
“Yes, they are, with certain genes switched on and off, and so long ago that we’re not really sure when it happened.” said Frances. “Belyayev tested hypotheses of animal domestication, not on wolves, but on their close cousin, the Russian Silver Fox. Silver foxes were valued for their fur, but antagonistic to humans.
“So they tamed them?” asked Merl.
Jane nodded. “You can tame almost any animal. But Belyayev didn’t just tame the foxes, but bred only from the tamest third from each litter.”
“And destroyed the rest,” said Jo. “Barbaric.”
“So was the fur trade,” said Frances.
“Along with a lot of other things about life in the Soviet Union,” said Jane. “But because of the fur trade, Belyayev’s work in genetics had grudging support from Josef Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union. This was a dangerous time for scientists. Any science that contradicted the official party line was severely punished. Evolutionary biologists, in particular, suffered under the regime’s embrace of crackpot ideas like those of Lysenko. Scientists were exiled, and worse, for exploring the ideas of Darwin and Mendel. But the Silver Fox experiment was a massive and profitable success. It slipped through. After Stalin was gone, the fox experiment continued – it’s actually still going on, more than a century later.
“Belyayev’s experiment was obviously brilliant, not least because it brought surprising results. Within a few generations, the foxes bred by Belyayev and his student, Lyudmila Trut, were no longer feral. They were tame, very tame indeed. Where their great grandparents, only a few years before, would attack their handlers, the descendant generations actively sought human company. By the end of the 20th century, tame silver foxes were raised and sold worldwide, not only for their fur, but in the exotic pet trade. You could trust them as companion animals for children. Belyayev died a hero of Soviet progress, and Belyayev’s student, Trut, continued the experiment well into the 21st century.”
Merl glanced around the Perrera-Paz’s living room, a weary glance met by other dimming eyes, including Cap’s. “Can we skip ahead? What do foxes in Siberia have to do with kangaroos in Yucatan?”
“Trut wasn’t Belyayev’s only student. There were others. Records from the period, especially in the Soviet Union, are scant, and often untrustworthy. But CIA records show that, following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a satellite breeding program was established on an island off the southwestern Cuban coast, the Isla de la Juventud.”
“The Isle of Youth,” translated Gaby.
“Yes,” said Jane. “One imagines that it was a pretty sweet posting for researchers used to the permafrost of Novosibirsk.”
“For humans, sure,” said Frances. “I can’t imagine the foxes liked the tropical heat as much.”
“That’s the thing,” said Jane. “This time it wouldn’t be foxes. The new breeding station would explore the application of Belyayev’s program to the breeding of mammalian species, far removed from Vulpes vulpes on the tree of life.”
“Like Kangaroos,” said Merl.
“Like Kangaroos, or, as you all now must have guessed, wallabies.” said Jane. “Bred, and tamed, and, then, trained. A wallaby can cover a lot of ground, in a hurry. They can leap fences, and dig to get under them. They have a natural curiosity, a fair amount of dexterity, and pouches. With proper conditioning, they could be dispatched to find and retrieve small objects.
Frances exhaled sharply. “Cameras.”
Jane looked surprised. “Cameras, yes. Or film canisters dropped from unmanned aerial recon vehicles, even orbiting satellites, though those lay a bit in the future.”
“Not too far in the future, though,” said MaryLiz. “Sputnik was launched in 1957, two years before Castro’s Revolution. The idea was already in the air.”
“Indeed,” said Jane. “We don’t know what became of the project. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened two to three years after the station was established. Surviving spy photography of the Island of Youth shows a complex of a few small structures built in 1960. The site wasn’t considered significant by western intelligence services: it was dismissed as a harmless agricultural station. It wasn’t a long lasting one, either. Aerial photos from five years later, show the site completely leveled: and not deliberately. It seems to have been wiped out by natural forces.
“The most likely culprit was Hurricane Isbell, which hit Cuba a few months before the last photos were taken. It made a more or less direct hit on Isla de la Juventud before making landfall on the southwestern tip of Cuba, then veered northward towards Florida.”
The stillness in the room among the survivors of Hurricane Henrietta was palpable.
“That’s it then,” said Jo. “Hurricane Isbell liberated the wallabies from captivity, and the Gulf current carried the wreckage and survivors all the way to Yucatan. They founded a colony, and then Henrietta comes along and blows them the rest of the way, to Texas. But how on earth would they have made it inland to the Pool of Xblanque?”
Gaby spoke up. “Those cenotes communicate with the Gulf, though cave passages. Most of them are underwater, now more than ever with sea level rise, but in 1964, there could have been airspace.”
Agent Jane nodded. “We may never know.” Merl noticed that Agent Jane seemed to be staring at something that Merl couldn’t see.