Killer Echinoderms in Indian History

By Virender Murkblob

The first in the Blaft Monographs on Cryptodiversity and Decoherence chapbook series.
From the world's leading researcher in military echinodermology comes a short treatise about malevolent marine invertebrates and their diverse attempts at attacking and/or infiltrating Indian civilization. Episodes covered include the Brittle Star War on the Vijayanagar Empire in the early 16th century, the strange case of Raja Sukh Chand of Chhota Guler (who may have lived for ten years with a parasite slowly devouring his brain), and the hidden history of the crinoid-myzostomid battle during Subhash Chandra Bose's submarine transfer in the last years of World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blaft Publications
• Release date: Aug 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9789380636634

Book preview

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There is a clear bias in wildlife conservation efforts that favors vertebrates, and mammals in particular, over other creatures. We Homo sapiens are more interested in protecting the furry panda bear than the slimy earthworm; to us, the cheetah cub seems far more cuddly than the beetle larva. One possible explanation offered by ethologists attributes this bias to kin altruism, a naturally-selected behavior pattern which leads us to treat close genetic relatives better than we treat more distant ones. In the modern world, however, there is no longer any utilitarian logic which supports such preferential treatment. The earthworm, loyal friend and tireless aide to the farmer, is infinitely more important to our species’ continued survival than the giant panda.

A similar sort of illogical tribalism affects our view of history. When not completely focussed on human endeavor and folly, a chronicler of ancient times might for a moment turn her or his attention to the roles played by other gnathostomes in history: the domestication of sheep, the use of elephants as royal mounts, the symbolic role of snakes in religion, or the Kiribati warriors’ sharktooth swords and porcupine-fish armor. In contrast, even a tenacious researcher will be hard-pressed to find reliable information about the impact of invertebrate phyla on the development of our civilization.

And yet that impact is considerable. The Oriental rat fleas that caused the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century are probably the best known example, but far from the most important. Even if we limit ourselves to the arthropods, we have the Biblical locust plagues of Egypt; the soldier fly invasions of Scandinavia circa 2300 B.C.; the Millipede Trade War, which largely determined the fortunes of the city-states of the Late Classic Maya, and affected much of the rest of Mesoamerican civilization as well; and the Pseudoscorpion Samurai League, whose depredations completely altered the political power structure of medieval Japan.

On the Indian subcontinent, though, it is not the Arthropoda, but a different phylum of invertebrates whose interventions in human affairs at various crucial junctures of history continue to reverberate through our society, framing and informing daily interactions in ways we rarely