Return to Janus VI... sort of.

Horta eggs.

In “The Devil in the Dark,” one of the more memorable episodes (as demonstrated by the fact that Curmie still remembers it) of the original “Star Trek” television series from the mid-‘60s, our intrepid heroes of the Starship Enterprise are called to the planet Janus VI, where miners of the rare mineral pergium are being attacked by a seemingly malevolent monster. There’s a fight, the creature is wounded, but it doesn’t attack when it has Captain Kirk trapped. Something is afoot! Mr. Spock does that really cool Vulcan mind meld thing on the creature and learns that it’s called a Horta, and that it means no harm. It’s just that those little spheres about two feet in diameter the miners had played games breaking open aren’t just silicon nodules; they’re her eggs, and she’d been protecting her young.

And so all is well. Dr. McCoy patches up the injured Horta, saving her life. The miners apologize for their deeds, claiming they didn’t understand the true nature of the eggs and that they meant no harm. The Horta’s babies (not all the eggs were destroyed) can mine the pergium faster than the miners can, and since they have no use for it, the miners are welcome to it, and they’ll get rich. And then everyone sits in a circle and sings Kumbaya. (All right, I made up the last past.)

Least tern eggs.

Curmie thought about this tale from over a half century ago when reading about the real-life destruction of hundreds of eggs of the least tern, a tiny bird (adults weigh only about an ounce and a half) on the endangered species list and protected (would ‘twere so!) by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The culprits were presumably beachgoers who seized their breeding ground on Sand Island in Alabama for a volleyball game. (We know this because these idiots left their net up when they left.) Yes, really.

The Audubon Society’s release on their website reads in part:

[Emma] Rhodes and [Andrew] Haffenden [of Birmingham Audubon’s Coastal Programs] found abandoned plastic tent poles, an erected volleyball net, and about 30 Least Tern eggs stacked in small piles and arranged decoratively around wide mounds of sand. Human hands must have plucked the eggs out of their simple sand nests, likely to clear the beach for a volleyball game, says Katie Barnes, coastal senior biologist for Birmingham Audubon. “It’s really hard to imagine how someone could do that to a little egg,” she says.

Around the makeshift volleyball court, Rhodes and Haffenden counted at least 100 abandoned nests—likely an underestimate, as they didn’t want to disturb the colony to get a more precise count. Each nest held one to three dead eggs that had cooked on the sand when the human disturbance forced the parents, whose bodies shield their unhatched young from the hot sun, to flee, Barnes says.

The New York Times adds that Haffendon had seen 17 boats around the volleyball net on July 4. He said “we really need to get out there”; it’s unclear why it took nearly a week to do so, although of course it may have already been too late. [Side note: the Times also reports that the least tern is not endangered, and proceeds to link to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service page, which says that it is. Thanks, “paper of record”!]

The Alabama and Janus VI stories converge at one particular point: the destruction of another creature’s eggs in an act that is simultaneously wanton and yet seemingly without malice. Certainly we are led to believe that the miners on Janus VI feel actual remorse that they unknowingly destroyed intelligent life forms. Whereas it would be a stretch to claim as much for the jackasses who  wiped out most of an important breeding ground for an endangered species, it would take a similar leap of faith to conclude that they intentionally targeted the eggs and hatchlings of a protected species.

But here is where the two stories diverge. Whereas the miners might have exercised a little more brainpower, figuring out the connection between the destruction of those spheroids and the attacks, we can forgive them for not understanding that the life forms (or at least one such life form) on Janus VI is silicon-based, so the silicon nodules they discovered might be more than they seem.

Our volleyballers, on the other hand, are the perfect storm of stupidity, arrogance, and insensitivity. Curmie will not hold it against them that they didn’t realize the eggs they dug up and arranged in a decorative circle were from an endangered species, but they sure as hell knew they were eggs, and if they couldn’t figure out that disturbing a nesting site, even to the point of interfering with eggs that had already begun to hatch, would have serious consequences for the birds in question, they’re also too stupid to understand the rules of volleyball… of course, given the fact that one of those rules is to take the damned net with you when you’re done, maybe Curmie just proved his own point.

The point is not merely that these people are proudly ignorant (there’s a lot of that in Alabama… and elsewhere), but that they just didn’t care: didn’t care that they scared off the adults, didn’t care that their actions would surely cost dozens if not hundreds of lives of baby birds, didn’t care that they might well be violating not merely the dictates of everyday compassion but federal law, as well.

And now we’re at another difference between Alabama and Janus VI: whereas the Horta knows who attacked her eggs and magnanimously forgives them, the least terns will have no such opportunity, as the possibility of ever identifying the culprits is roughly equal to the chance that Curmie will vote for Ted Cruz this November. Moreover, new “guidance” from the Trump administration last December effectively eviscerates the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (mostly to protect corporations rather than individuals: imagine Curmie’s surprise), making prosecutions problematic even if the miscreants were identified. There is no happy ending in Alabama; the best we can hope for is that the species will ultimately survive despite the insensitive human interference.

Curmie, who spends most of his life surrounded by post-adolescents, and who has witnessed a significant decline in empathy on the part of the 18-25 crowd over the last decade or two, is tempted to blame this on “kids these days,” especially when reading about the game of “beach volleyball,” a sport practiced only by the young. But a volleyball game on a beach is not necessarily “beach volleyball,” and the culprits could just as easily be a family, or a beer league softball team, or the Weekend Explorers Club at the Happy Hollow Retirement Village. And one doubts that all those boats were operated by college-aged folk.

Still, it’s kind of worth hoping that Curmie’s “kids” theory is accurate. An adult who displays this level of callousness is probably beyond hope; a teenager who comes to see the consequences of his/her actions might be salvageable. Of course, if it is teenagers and they don’t see the light, we’re stuck with their level of pathological obliviousness for a lot longer. It’s kind of a no win situation.

Maybe someday we’ll figure this whole co-existing-with-other-species thing out… but we clearly haven’t yet, and all indications suggest we’ll make only marginal progress by Stardate 3196.1. Alas.