Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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animal. This does not mean I go feral or become base. It is not complicated. If you pay attention, you can feel animal many times a day: when you fuck, shit, breastfeed your baby, run, swim, eat, or have a hot flash. But I find it hard to sit in the void with my animal self. I want to check my phone every few minutes, to make sure I have enough soy milk for my morning coffee, to see how many people liked the picture I posted on Facebook of my cat.
Menstruation brings thoughts of the beastly to the writer Carmen Maria Machado. “I think of my body as an animal,” she writes, “one that perpetually needs more than I can give her.” Menopause, too, brings the sense of being animal. As one woman breaks into a full-body sweat at a parent-teacher conference, she feels like “a trapped animal.” Another feels like she’s finally able to accept her corporeal form: “I am conscious that I am and have always been an animal.” There is the woman who thinks of her hot flashes as honey badgers, as in the social media meme “honey badger don’t care.” Many women associate a new don’t-give-a-fuck quality with the animal. For most, including myself, a sense of the animal is connected to mortality—that we are creatures inside a life cycle. For the first time, I feel I have a time stamp, an expiration date.
Nothing quite prepares you for the sight of an elephant up close. Ambika, the sixty-eight-year-old, post-reproductive female I’ve come to visit at the National Zoo, is like a swatch of a dream ripped out and pasted into my flat and ordinary reality. When she opens her mouth, her breath makes a big cloud of condensation in the cold air. She reaches her trunk up, the tip wet and pink like a toothless second mouth, and sniffs my shoes, my shoulder, my hair.
For weeks, in anticipation of this visit, I’ve been watching YouTube videos of Ambika delighting crowds with sprays of water and by throwing dirt up onto her back. I’ve read her biography, researched by her keeper Maria Galloway: how she was captured in 1959, at age eleven, in the Coorg forest in India, trained by a mahout in an elephant camp, and shipped to the United States on a steamer. When she caught a cold during the crossing, she was given, along with her usual hay, a fifth of bourbon and a ten-pound bag of onions.
Galloway points out signs of age: Ambika’s bony protruding forehead, her frayed cabbage-leaf ears, how she drags her right foot because of arthritis in the ankle. She’s smaller than the other elephants, delicate, even frail. Her energy is centered, though, steady and intense, unlike that of the young bull who, with his trunk, continuously rattles the gate lock.
It’s this gravity that in the wild gives older female elephants their edge. Matriarchs lead their family groups to food and water and dig wells in times of drought. They are skillful listeners. Phyllis Lee, an elephant researcher at the University of Stirling, found that the older the matriarch, the longer she listened to audio recordings and the better she was at deciphering the unique sounds of other elephant groups, as well as distinguishing the roar of female lions from that of the more dangerous male lions. Karen Mccomb, another elephant researcher, found that matriarchs also distinguish between tribes. When played a recording of phrases of the elephant-hunting Maasai tribe, the matriarch signaled for her family to form a defensive bunch, while phrases from the Kuba, a tribe that does not hunt elephants, elicited no response at all.
Across animal species, both menopause and post-reproductive life are not common. Some female insects and fish have short but heroic post-reproductive lives. Salmon, as is well known, die after swimming upriver to spawn. Research has shown that those females who live for even an extra day can protect their eggs from predators. The adactylidium mite mother makes the ultimate sacrifice, as her young hatch inside her body and eat their way out. My favorite is the social aphid. After she is finished reproducing, this tiny she-warrior pulls off her wings and sets herself up to guard the mouth of her nest, where her daughters now breed. When an intruder tries to break in, like the flailing ladybug larva I watched on YouTube, the post-reproductive female throws herself at the predator and, using wax she secretes from her abdomen, latches her small self to the larva’s mouth.
Studies concerning the later-life fertility of elephants and gorillas are ongoing. Their fecundity diminishes with age, but unlike that of killer whales and human women, their fertility does not cease completely and is not followed by many years of post-reproductive life. Menopause remains one of the great mysteries of biology. It goes against the theory of natural selection—that a creature’s main focus must be having as many offspring as possible. Menopause is an enigma, a physical characteristic that should, according to Darwin’s theory, have been selected against.
At the zoo, Galloway tells me, they take no chances on their inhabitants’ fertility. All the other female elephants, except for Ambika, are on birth control. At sixty-eight she could technically still be cycling. In the wild, elephants as old as sixty have been known to give birth, after a gestation period that lasts twenty-two months, and most live six to twelve years after their last baby was born. Their post-reproductive life is short but rich. They not only lead the greater herd but also help their individual offspring. A recent study found that the older the matriarch, the longer her daughters lived and the higher their reproductive rates.
Ambika’s reproductive history is straightforward. She has never had a calf. When she turned fifty, blood clots were found in her uterus—a condition similar to endometriosis in women. Her keepers decided to use hormone blockers to shut down her reproductive organs. My questions about Ambika’s sex life are answered frankly. Maybe it’s the trauma of captivity, Galloway says, but Ambika has never been mounted by a bull. Never even shown signs, as some of the other females have, of masturbating.
Ambika, like any creature who has lived into her sixties, has a long emotional history to go along with her biological one. While there is no way to know exactly how Ambika feels, Galloway has written about what she has witnessed. Elephants bond for companionship and emotional support. These friendships can last a lifetime. When her current bond mate Shanthi’s calf died, Ambika remained constantly by the grieving mother’s side. When Toni, another elephant friend, died, she spent time with the body, caressing Toni’s head with her trunk. Most heart-wrenching was Ambika’s fit of grief over the dead body of her first bond mate, Shanti (without an h), as she was cut up with a chain saw and removed piece by piece from an adjoining stall. “Ambika became very distressed,” Galloway writes in a zookeepers’ newsletter. “She acted out to the point keepers thought she was not safe and needed to be moved. They had to walk her past Shanti’s body to get her to another place further away. For many years after, Ambika refused to walk into a stall unless another elephant walked in front of her.”
“A lot of people ask,” the primate researcher Sue Margulis tells me, “if the post-reproductive gorillas are grumpy.” While she and her team can check hormone levels, there is no way for them to assess if the older gorillas are physically uncomfortable, no way to tell if they endure menopausal symptoms like moodiness or hot flashes. “At one point we thought of aiming a laser gun at them to see if their temperature was fluctuating.” The technology for this experiment was never perfected.
Margulis, who teaches at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and spends mornings studying gorillas, tells me there is still considerable controversy surrounding the question of menopause in nonhuman primates. She and her research partner, over the past twenty years, tested the hormone levels in thirty older female gorillas living in zoos across North America.
Several times a month, keepers collected fecal matter, packed it in dry ice, and mailed it to Margulis, who tested the waste for hormone levels. Most of the females were living in potential breeding situations with their silverback, a sexually mature male with a thick coat of silver-gray back hair. In the wild, gorillas live in harems with one silverback male to several females. Their menstrual cycle is much like humans’, lasting about thirty days. Estrus, or the time during which females can become pregnant, lasts two to three days. During that fertile time, keepers also took note of when the females masturbated, inspected their genitals, or gave their silverback what is known as “the look,” the one that says in no uncertain terms, I want sex.
What Margulis found was that “menopause” in gorillas, while slightly more pronounced than in elephants, is not as clear-cut as menopause in humans. Hormone levels do drop, and, like women, gorillas also become less fertile with age. Margulis tells me that part of the reason it’s so hard to be certain about