Previously, I explored themes like monstrous creatures, limits of scientific exploration, the future of fungal diseases, and our protagonist’s experimental pursuits from the movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982). Here are some more observations to tickle your ecological and philosophical fancies.
Non-Human Communication
Early in the movie, Lord Yupa accidentally provokes the arthropod-like red-eyed creature, called Ohmu, which sheds its shell in the forest and is being chased by it. Nausicaä comes to Yupa’s rescue, quick-witted that she is, we witness an atypical understanding between her and the Ohmu, whom she manages to calm down using flash bombs to snap the Ohmu out of the rage. Slowly, the Ohmu’s red eyes turn blue. At one point, the Ohmu does seem to look back at her, the white glider reflected across its glassy eyes, a symbolic scene of reciprocal recognition.
The thought of a giant insect being able to recognize Nausicaä is not a far-fetched science fiction plotline. Studies in insect behavior in recent years have shed light on many phenomena like consciousness and facial recognition that are predominantly thought to be anthropocentric in origin and mechanism. Unusual findings are found in Lars Chittka’s remarkable book The Mind of a Bee.
Adrian Dyer, a vision scientist and photographer, discovered that honey bees when shown a set of black and white photographs from a standard test to diagnose prosopagnosia (“face blindness”, a condition where you have difficulty recognising people's faces) performed remarkably well in recognizing human faces. This showed that facial recognition was possible in living creatures devoid of any specialized apparatus for it in the brain. Since bees do not have brain modules for recognizing human faces, they are presumably using circuits involved in flower recognition. Jolly good! Imagine yourself as a dainty little begonia when a bee whizzes past you next time.
Furthermore, one of the most remarkable findings in recent years has been Elizabeth Tibbetts and colleagues’ discovery of individual face recognition in Polistes wasps. Here’s an excerpt from The Mind of a Bee detailing wasp facial recognition ability:
[…] some species of the Polistes wasps have very small colonies in which each individual has distinct facial markings. Wasps of a colony recognize one another, and know their place in the colony’s hierarchy after determining their rank via fights with competitors. Because such fights are costly—they can cause injury or even death—they are best not repeated; it is useful to know one’s place in the pecking order. […] discernible differences were found in the visual systems of these wasps from those of related species in which face recognition does not occur.
So, wasps do not duel blind.
Our penchant for imagining other creatures lacking sensory shenanigans similar to ours is a barrier that must be broken down. Tibbetts on her website mentions this in her research interests: How does communication coevolve with cognition? Here I do not posit views of animism but merely suggest that sister science is showing the path where bugs and bees are looking back at us in the same way we are looking at them. Don’t you find a sense of camaraderie like Nausicaä did?
Collective Consciousness and Swarm Intelligence
Remember the pink tendrils peeking out of the long, black, silky braids of the Na'vis in Pandora? They are called neural queues. The Na’vis use these appendages, extensions of their nervous systems, to tap into the interconnected neural network joining all flora and fauna of Pandora using a phenomenon called Tsaheylu. Jake finds them unusual at first. Cameron’s Avatar is a 101 in first contact etiquette. The empathy that Sigourney Weaver’s character displays in the movie towards the Na’vis and their culture is a fine example of how to approach unknown and understudied life forms on Earth. The latest movie in the franchise makes a poignant case for oceanic life, a topic for future discussion.
The Na’vis form lifelong bonds with the wildlife of Pandora and become a part of the interconnected collective consciousness. For the Na’vis, this is their life blood running through every creature, tree, and being. Of course, this is a speculative realm. But tsaheylu, the Na’vi word that translates to “bond”, quite resembles the great mycorrhizal network beneath the Earth’s surface consisting of fungal mycelia and enables trees to communicate with each other over vast distances.
In Nausicaä, the adult Ohmus respond to the baby Ohmu’s distress signal and rush at once in a swarm to defend it. They depict the classic fundamentals of Swarm Intelligence in Social Insects. A swarm is a set of mobile agents liable to communicate directly or indirectly with each other to carry out distributed problem-solving. This makes swarming an emergent functionality; depending on the swarm’s internal dynamics and its interactions with the environment. Both these characteristics are present in the collective dynamics of creatures in the movies I stated above.
To bring it home, the movie ends with Ohmus calming down and using their golden tentacles (something like the Na’vi queues) to resuscitate Nausicaä who was run over by the swarm in their rage over the kidnapped baby Ohmu.
Not to douse our blissful animistic excursion, but Artificial Swarm Intelligence (ASI) is a thing and thriving. The relationship between biomimicry and military-grade applications (and financial forecasts; late capitalism is a shark that keeps eating newly burgeoning technologies) has always been strong but ASI has also been used to forecast famine hotspots around the world. Personally, I wonder how could we swarm better like the Ohmus and vote consciously in the next election season. The human hive mind needs a recalibration of its own.
Tissues and Connectivity
Halfway through the movie, Kushana, the ruthless Princess of Tolmekia leaves for her homeland with Nausicaä and a group of prisoners leaving Tolmekian soldiers to rejuvenate the God Warrior. But soon after they depart from the Valley, their aerial convoy is attacked by enemy gunships. Nausicaä escapes with a few survivors in a gunship that belongs to the Valley but is forced to land inside the Sea of Decay. Among the survivors of the crash is Asbel of Pejite, the pilot of the enemy gunship. Amid this rescue attempt and trying to flee from the forest’s monstrous insects, Asbel and Nausicaä sink into quicksand and land in a cold and crystalline space below the Sea of Decay.
They are shocked to realize they can breathe perfectly in the blue cavernous hall. When they look around, they see ginormous stone trunks that resemble stalagmites. The scene where Nausicaä walks away from Asbel reminds me of an “as above, so below” in reality, their reflection cast in the clear water, walking through the ancient calcified remains inside the marrow of a bone city. A cathedral of bones if you will. A nod to the importance of connective tissue running around inside our bodies and in both plants and animals.
Similar networks are found in plants: xylem and phloem. In vascular plants, water absorbed by roots is transported up the plant by transport tissue called the xylem made up of long tracheary elements called tracheids and short vessel elements. The water transport is passive since most tracheary elements are dead at maturity. A similar role is played by the dead tree trunks in the movie which are filtering the poisonous top soil maintaining reserves of freshwater below the Sea of Decay. Years of filtration have turned the vessels into sand-like material. They are dying. But they continue to function as bioremediation agents. Our heroine is overwhelmed with this realization as she lies down on the floor with an odd mixture of grief, relief, and reverence for the healing capacity of the forest and how it has been misunderstood for thousands of years.
Do we misunderstand death in nature? Dead trees in forests have immense ecological importance such as providing habitat to wildlife, decreasing erosion, nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and influencing moisture and soil parameters.
An ecologically healthy forest is one with bushfire remains, dead logs, and broken tops as opposed to sanitized, managed forests. In death, they find a second meaning.
That’s all from me with this second part of Nausicaä analysis. If you have suggestions for closely looking at the next Ghibli movie, do leave a comment. Thank you for all the responses to the first part of the analysis. Meanwhile, be kind to bugs and what looks dead might not be dead after all. Something to think about.