Like most of our ape ancestors, we have really had only one response to the fall of night. We have stretched and yawned, we have climbed upwards, we’ve lain down somewhere soft, closed our eyes and shut the whole thing out until morning. Humans may have exchanged tree trunks for a set of stairs, and bunches of green leaves for sprung mattresses, but the same basic reflex has been ongoing among large primates for four million years.
The new exhibition at the Natural History Museum, Life in the Dark, reveals to us a little of what and who we have been missing as a result of our diurnal bias. Not surprisingly, it turns out that night-time is peopled with creatures that we find scary. The show includes some of our favourite cast members from the horror genre: sharks, snakes, vampire bats — even vampire squid — scorpions, giant cockroaches and whip spiders. One senses that many of these wonderful animals were selected with children in mind, and I imagine that the creators got huge pleasure in anticipating the impact of some of the skin-crawling exhibits.
A good example is the screen illuminating what a pit viper can detect in conditions of total darkness. The snake has a cavity called a fossa between the eyes that enables it to see in the infrared spectrum. You realise that the portrait flashing up as you walk past, which shows your face as a sickly white cavity and your clothed body in shades of glowing yellow and pink, is not just a weird heat-generated selfie; it is a precise image of what a snake would see if it struck.
However the scariest, if also funniest, moment comes in an early part of the exhibition, where we are invited to explore the sensory adaptations required for a nocturnal lifestyle.
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