Science writer Alex Riley: 'Even if humans cause mass extinction, life will still endure'

Within just a few weeks, I had nearly been wee’d on by a naked mole-rat, waited for five hours for a few horses to poo and smelt the sulphurous pong of some seafloor sludge collected from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Such is the honour of a science writer interested in how life survives in places we previously thought inhospitable. 

My latest book, Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Impossible Places, is the product of three years of research, Zoom interviews and reporting trips. It’s a heady mix of the sublime and awe-inspiring powers of nature, of imagining what life would be like on one of Saturn’s icy moons while also journeying to southern Spain in search of ants that thrive in temperatures above 50C. 

There are also stories much closer to home. I spent a June evening waiting for darkness to descend in the hope of seeing an elephant hawkmoth, for example, an insect that can see colour even on a moonless night. While my eyes could only see shades of black and grey, the hawkmoth can use the light from distant stars to find its favourite colour of honeysuckle.

As I write in the book, the eyes of these common but rarely seen animals have a decent case for the most ‘out of this world’ organ on Earth. When this animal visited the honeysuckle that grows over our wall from the neighbours’ garden, I stood transfixed, struck by the sheer magnitude of this relationship between a moth, its flowers and unseen worlds. 

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I collected samples of moss from a dry stone wall near my home in south Devon and found water bears with a USB microscope I bought for £8. Also known as tardigrades, these microscopic animals can survive being boiled, frozen and irradiated, a set of skills that you wouldn’t automatically associate with an animal that is so undeniably cute. With eight chubby legs and a pig-like snout, one author described a water bear as “a little puppy-shaped animal very busy pawing about with eight imperfect legs but not making much progress with all his efforts… a very comical amusing little fellow he was”.

They are also known as “moss piglets”. In recent years, scientists are discovering how these comical animals survive extremes that would kill a human in seconds, learning more about how their unique biochemistry could lead to new methods of preserving food, vaccines and stem cells. 

Read more:

• What if the same science that takes us to space holds the key to saving our planet?
• If people don’t trust climate science, how will we ever get them to change their ways?
• Breathtaking images from humankind’s first missions to space, remastered and seen for the first time

Science can be full of jargon and inaccessible to the general public. But Super Natural, I hope, provides an easy way in. I have always read a lot of fiction alongside non-fiction, and my science writing is always led by a good story; the key is finding an accessible guide to an otherwise indigestible topic.

These can be animals, such as naked mole-rats that introduce us to the science of life without oxygen. Or it can be a particularly interesting person: Edmund Jaeger, for example, hiked up a mountain in the cold winter of 1946 and discovered a bird nestled into a boulder of granite. This was the first time scientists discovered that not all birds migrate. The common poorwill, a common part of the nighttime soundscape in North America, hibernates. 

Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a particular environmental condition that is in excess or absence: Water, Oxygen, Food, Cold, Pressure, Heat and Radiation. The latter is where we meet the horses, an exciting study subject that is being used to understand how radiation at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone might actually be beneficial to life around the exploded nuclear power plant.

Fungi grow on the exploded reactor, for example, but do Przewalski’s horses benefit from the mutations that radioactivity provides? Does a species hunted to near extinction in the 20th century gain some genetic diversity from the constant radiation this ecosystem provides? 

At the same time as awe and wonder, I explore our own actions on this planet, how we are shaping new extremes that are pushing species beyond their limits. But, as I write in the epilogue, huge shifts in climate – and the mass extinctions that followed – have happened before on Earth, once caused by the evolution of trees on land and also by cataclysmic volcanic activity and asteroid impacts.

But the difference this time around is that the cause of climate turmoil is aware of its actions, and it can change. Like otherwise ordinary soil fungi that now grow on Chernobyl’s reactor four, we are innovators, a species that can harness new forms of energy when opportunities arise. Whether its solar power or nuclear fusion, carbon capture or bioplastics, a sustainable future beckons. 

And even if it doesn’t, even if we are the cause of another mass extinction event, life will still endure. As I write in Super Natural, “once life has emerged on a planet it is very hard to kill.”

Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Impossible Places by Alex Riley is out now (Atlantic, £22).

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