JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2006

The Leprosy-Experiment Armadillos of the Fakahatchee Swamp

The niggly little problem here is that there apparently are no leprosy-experiment armadillos in the Fakahatchee swamp. Cool title, though, eh?

Indeed, just as those supposed experiment escapees made a cool pseudo-factoid with which Susan Orlean could decorate her famous 1998 book “The Orchid Thief.”

Orlean is a journalist, and journalists are wrong all the time; there’s nothing too exciting about that. But what’s fascinating is how she’s almost right. Turns out, armadillos really are the golden geese of leprosy research. And some reportedly have escaped the labs into the wilds—just not those of southwestern Florida’s Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve.

If Orlean had simply checked a fact that is on its hands and knees, tugging at your pant leg, begging to be checked, she would have had more than a hollow verbal illustration for her book. She would have cracked open a geode of subterranean reality in all its weird, gorgeous richness, and easily found the material for another book in the bargain. That’s why I sit here stoking the fire of obscurity in all its multicolored glory, as it shines through the keyholes and stained glass windows and moth-eaten motel-room blinds of consensus reality. This is where the good stuff is—the light is good, the fire’s warm and the stories told round it are true.

“The Orchid Thief” is the true story of an oddball orchid dealer operating out of the Fakahatchee, largely a dense, swampy forest. Describing various non-native species that found their way into the Fakahatchee and stayed, Orlean writes, “And so have armadillos, the offspring of armadillos used in leprosy experiments in a Jacksonville hospital that managed to get away.” (Virtually the same sentence appears in an early version of the book’s chapter that appeared in the December, 1998 issue of “Outside Magazine.”)

That one tiny sentence is all she had to say, but it’s already passed into prefab fact. I heard about the supposed leper-dillos not from “The Orchid Thief,” but from James Balog’s stunning and highly recommended 2004 book “Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest.” His narrative about a photo taken in the Fakahatchee includes: “When armadillos escaped from a leprosy experiment at a Jacksonville hospital (400 miles away), their descendants migrated to the Fakahatchee like religious pilgrims seeking the promised land; their breeding success shows they found what they were looking for.” It’s a bit more purple, but it’s all Orlean; Balog told me she was his only source for the mini-tale. “She’s a very good reporter and I was counting on her being right,” he said, which is fair enough.

Problem is, she is almost certainly wrong. Orlean didn’t respond to my questions, so I have no idea where she got the story.¹ Mike Owen, the Fakahatchee’s park biologist and companion of Orlean on part of her “Orchid Thief” reporting, didn’t respond, either.

In fact, I can’t even confirm there are armadillos in the Fakahatchee. The little armor-plated beasts are burrowers and generally shun the Everglades and similar swamps for obvious reasons. The Fakahatchee does have significant dry spots, however, and armadillos do like living along streambeds.

In any case, the spread of armadillos through Florida—a fairly recent phenomenon—has received scientific attention. Leprosy-experiment escapes are not a cited vector—in Florida or anywhere else.

Armadillos first migrated from Mexico into the US in Texas around 1850. They’ve spread everywhere warm enough since then, often with help from humans who kept them briefly as pets. That’s likely one way they got across the Mississippi and eventually spread into the Florida panhandle, probably around the 1940s. (There were no reports of the animals in the panhandle until sometime between 1950 and 1960.) Though it must be noted that armadillos can cross major rivers themselves—they swallow air and float.

But it was on the main Florida peninsula that armadillos were first spotted and spread, surely from escaped or released animals formerly held in captivity. The first recorded Florida sighting was in 1922, when a boy’s dog caught one somewhere between Hialeah and Allapattah in what was then Miami’s far suburbs. The boy took the armadillo to the Miami zoo for identification. An investigation by the zoo’s H.H. Bailey found that a Marine from Texas stationed near the Hialeah canal locks during World War I brought along a pair of armadillos as pets, then released them, possibly creating the first peninsular population.

However, a more serious study later opined that Florida’s armadillo population came from another 1922 incident: the escape of two armadillos from a private zoo in Cocoa run by one Gus Edwards.² (“The Gus’s Zoo Armadillos of the Fakahatchee Swamp” may be a more appropriate title, I must sadly conclude.) Purchased in Texas (likely from the Apelt Armadillo Company, which also turned the animals into baskets, among other things), the possible Adam and Eve of Floridian armadillos promptly escaped into the Florida underground—literally—and were soon reported as hanging out in the nearby Williams Point area.

Convincingly enough, a population of armadillos was established in that area, exploding in the 1930s and ’40s. A 1948 survey of game wardens found that the armadillo had become common throughout Florida’s central eastern coast and was apparently spreading to the western coast—including Lee and Hendry counties, fairly close to the Fakahatchee.

Today, the animal is common in virtually every non-swampy part of mainland Florida (including the Kennedy Space Center, not far from where those Cocoa armadillos first found freedom).

(Incidentally, I am speaking specifically about the nine-banded armadillo, a type that unfortunately cannot roll into a complete ball like some other armadillos. One of the tangential joys of this column’s research has been reviewing all the types of armadillos, especially the pink fairy armadillo of Argentina, a delightful little beastie about 5 to 7 inches long with the aspect of a guinea pig with armor plates on its back. The real guinea pigs in leprosy research, however, are the nine-bandeds, as we shall see.)

The story that places Edwards as the father of the Floridian armadillo is pretty convincing. But it’s important to note that tracking specific origins of invasive species is really difficult. A pair of released or escaped animals doesn’t necessarily create a breeding population; likewise, sightings can merely reflect escaped animals that don’t survive, not the existence of a larger population. And animals can often exist in an area for years without being spotted, making specific dating difficult, if not specious.

All that being said, there are many other escaped Floridian armadillo tales to choose from as the origin of Florida’s (and thus the Fakahatchee’s) population. As far as I can tell, none of them involve leprosy experiments, and none come from farther north than Orlando, putting Jacksonville squarely out of the picture.

While armadillos escaped from a leprosy lab wouldn’t necessarily be infected with leprosy, it’s worth noting that leprosy has never been found in wild Florida armadillos (and yes, researchers have looked for it), making Orlean’s story even less likely.

And frankly, simple dates make this all moot: armadillos were first used in leprosy experiments in the 1970s, at least 30 years after a population was well-established in southern Florida. Even if there was some kind of leprosy-lab armadillo escape nobody else has ever heard of, it’s highly unlikely those particular armadillos would somehow infiltrate Florida’s existing population to specifically populate the Fakahatchee, and virtually impossible for anyone to discern the fact if they did.

Nor does the story appear to be even a common urban legend. The Miami Metrozoo, the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens and the Naples (Florida) Zoo told me they’d never heard of the story, nor had the likely authorities connected with them. The story also doesn’t appear in books likely to contain it if it was common currency.³

So Susan Orlean was trippin’. That’s worth correcting; and there, I’ve done it. But I’m provoked not just by her being incorrect, but by why she was incorrect. (Or why I think she was incorrect, which in my little domain is, naturally, the same thing.)

On a basic level, it irritates me that it’s a moment of her turning into an apostate of the obscure. Orlean is, after all, the person who caused the ghost orchid to haunt the popular imagination. Women surfers, strange Saturday-night activities—her work thrives on the arcane and minute. At one point, she wrote of her titular orchid thief, “When I first met him, he told me he had found the only gem-grade fossil pearl in existence, a boast so specific I couldn’t resist investigating it, and no one I talked to ever confirmed that such a thing could be true.” Yet here is a truly bizarre reference that turns into a gaffe because Orlean apparently thought it not worth pursuing.

The armadillo reference in “The Orchid Thief” is couched amid far more detailed arcana about the Fakahatchee’s weird history. The “Outside Magazine” version of the chapter—stripped down and lacking book padding—reveals her intent more clearly.

As a slangy, casual New Journalist, Orlean takes a chatty-Fifth-Avenue-shopping-trip-companion-telling-you-about-it-over-cocktails approach to her subject, and the chatting in this case basically boils down to, “Swamps! Eew! How gross!” Finding her own walk through the Fakahatchee extremely unpleasant (apparently for psychological reasons beyond the sheer physical facts of the incident), Orlean breathlessly rushes bizarre details, both current and past, about the swamp past our eyes until we are dizzy with its disgustingness. She self-consciously strings grotesqueries together with “ands” to create a rosary of nature-phobia: “…hot and wet and buggy and full of cottonmouths and diamondbacks and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and…” Ampersand infinitum.

Leprosy-experiment armadillos are ultimately just another “and” here. They’re coloratura, gargoyles, KISS make-up. Orlean doesn’t look any deeper than ascertaining the story is a sufficiently grotesque prop for the horror show she’s building.

What Orlean felt about the Fakahatchee, I feel for excessive whining about nature’s supposed grossness, so I begin with my hackles raised. But the true disappointment is that this is exactly how the mainstream deals with the obscure, the unusual, the out-of-place—as a paisley on the executive necktie, an acanthus leaf on the mansion’s front columns, a hood ornament on the limo. Reality becomes decoration on the artifice of consensus reality; which is why the consensus is often totally incorrect. “Offbeat news” is generally much more revealing than headline news. And so on.

Orlean may or may not know better, but she has certainly written better and given the obscure its due. (As is demonstrated, it must be said, by the vast majority of “The Orchid Thief.”) And the crazy, still-inexplicable thing is how her tale is, nonetheless, sort-of true.

So, fine, let’s talk about reality for a change. Because the reality is that there are leprosy-ridden armadillos roaming Louisiana—also home to America’s last leprosy-patient prison camp—and that is so much more interesting. Leprosy and armadillos are both mysterious things with unusual properties, and their nexus is all the stranger.

Leprosy is one of those diseases everybody knows vaguely as an age-old scourge that can lead to terrible deformity, not to mention utter ostracization.⁴ In fact, leprosy is very difficult to contract and rarely manifests severe symptoms anyhow. Today, the disease is relatively controlled and to some extent curable, though vague stigma surrounds it even in the US, where there are only a handful of new cases per year.

It’s now usually referred to as Hansen’s Disease (or “HD,” after pioneering researcher Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen) to avoid the stigma and the even worse term “leper” for its sufferers, which became a synonym for outcasts. Considering that in the 20^th century United States, when leprosy was known to be treatable and very hard to catch, leprosy sufferers were still automatically seized and tossed into a guarded “National Leprosarium” in Louisiana, a little euphemism is understandable.⁵

Leprosy is a bacterial disease, closely related to tuberculosis, that attacks the nerves and skin, and sometimes the respiratory system, the eyes and/or the male genitalia. It can typically be cured if discovered early, or otherwise kept in check, by a regimen of antibiotics. That much is known.

But leprosy is weirdly mysterious in most other ways. To this day, nobody’s sure how it is transmitted to other people. Or why the vast majority of people are apparently totally immune to it. (By “immune,” I mean they are asymptomatic; the bacteria are in there living happily all the same.) Even most sufferers experience only the mild form, and symptoms usually take years to develop. Stranger still, its transmission rate appears to be higher in tropical areas; nobody’s sure why.

The leprosy bacteria have never thrived in Petri dishes, and virtually all other lab-type animals are immune to it. That made searching for a treatment extremely difficult for decades. For a long time, sufferers were stuck with the ancient Indian treatment of chaulmoogra oil, taken from various Asian tropical trees; applied orally, topically or through painful, infection-prone injections, it was best known for adding extreme nausea and ulceration to its patients’ already notable sufferings.

Leprosy has never been widespread in the US, but has somehow lingered in parts of Texas and Louisiana since the 18^th century. That’s where most indigenous cases pop up now. (There are other US cases that typically involve recent immigrants. There are enough cases for the government to run a nationwide clinic program; one such clinic operates monthly in my Greater Boston area.) As usual with leprosy, nobody’s really sure why.

With that kind of background, Louisiana naturally was a center of leprosy treatment and research from the late 1800s to the late 1900s—especially via the government hospital at Carville, which was essentially a militarized leper colony. If you contracted leprosy around, say, 1930, the government came for you and locked you up in Carville, behind barbed wire. You lost all your rights, essentially. You didn’t even keep your real name. And you likely would never leave. Carville even had its own cemetery.⁶

Carville mellowed a bit over the decades. More significantly, it was long the center of crucial leprosy research.

Of course, there was something else unusual in Louisiana—armadillos.

Armadillos are strange creatures with many odd abilities and tendencies. They’re hearty enough to spread widely, yet can be killed off by relatively mild cold. They’re known to jump straight up in the air when startled, which supposedly contributes to their frequent appearance as roadkill.

They’ve turned up as a factor in the spread of another bizarre disease—equine protozoal myeloencephalitis. In 2001, University of Florida researchers found that opossums that eat dead armadillos (or also skunks) can pick up the parasite that causes the horse disease. When the opossums incidentally defecate into water drunk by horses, the disease is transmitted.

However, there’s one bit of strangeness that, above all, has determined armadillos’ fate as leprosy experiment subjects: they almost always give birth to identical quadruplets. Texas scientists discovered that fact in the early 1900s and began using the armadillo for various types of medical research, such as reproductive biology. (The Apelt Armadillo Company supplied animals for these ventures, too, until 1971, whereupon the industry was cornered by one Sam Lewis, who was also the “inventor of the jalapeño lollipop and promoter of armadillo races.”⁷)

As I mentioned before, lab animals have proven largely resistant to leprosy, stymieing searches for a cure. It was considered a big breakthrough in 1960 when a researcher was able to infect lab mice—though only their feet became leprous, in what must be considered one of the more grotesque achievements of science. (Chimps and some monkeys round out the known animals that can contract leprosy, and they may in fact do so in the wild.)

Then researchers thought to try armadillos. They hit the leprosy jackpot.

Turns out, armadillos are actually more susceptible to leprosy than humans, or any other known animal—they get it much easier, and they tend to get it much worse. (Once again, this being leprosy, nobody knows why.) And coming in identical quadruplets, they provide built-in experimental control subjects. Armadillos have become the key in testing leprosy treatments and in the creation of diagnostic materials. Essentially, they are turned into living Petri dishes of leprosy bacteria.

That’s the tidy little science-book story. But in fact, the armadillo breakthrough was the subject of a savage war between two former fellow scientists, a strange and raving battle that included allegations that leprosy-infected animals escaped a Louisiana lab and possibly spread the disease among their wild fellows. There’s a fair chance that leprous wild armadillos have, in turn, infected humans.

Back in the day, Dr. Waldemar Kirchheimer of Carville and Dr. Eleanor Storrs of the Gulf South Research Institute (GSRI) in New Iberia, Louisiana (a lab-animal breeding facility), were collaborators on leprosy research. They were the ones who discovered, in 1971, that they had successfully transmitted leprosy to an armadillo.⁸

Storrs, whose doctoral thesis was about armadillo reproduction, is the one who suggested armadillos as leprosy-experiment subjects and secured a grant to try them out. But, it appears, Kirchheimer took the credit, leading to criticism from Storrs’ defenders and a bitter falling-out between the two researchers.

Then GSRI announced that it had found leprosy occurring naturally in wild armadillos its staff had captured for experimental purposes around Louisiana in 1974-75. This was a shocking finding with all sorts of unpleasant implications and questions.

Kirchheimer instantly announced that it was impossible and had to be some other disease besides leprosy, and that even if it wasn’t impossible, it meant only that GSRI had leprosy-contaminated facilities or, worse, had released infected animals into the wild. (He apparently never said, “Or all of the above!”, but you get the picture.) Occasional dueling media stories to this effect continued in the local and sometimes even national press for years; the controversy lingers to this day. The one thing that’s clear is that Kirchheimer’s first beef was wrong—DNA tests have demonstrated that the disease was indeed leprosy.

As part of the war, Kirchheimer and his government allies claimed that some ex-GSRI employees had told them that the facility not only sometimes discarded leprosy-infected waste out in the open, but that an unspecified number of leprosy-injected armadillos had escaped into the wild. Either or both could be a vector of the spread of leprosy among wild armadillos.

Yes, folks, there it finally is: a potential real-life escape of leprosy-experiment armadillos.

It does seem at first blush that the wild armadillo leprosy revolves around the GSRI and/or Carville region. Leprosy has not been found directly in wild armadillos in South America (where leprosy in humans is much more prevalent), though recent examinations of animals from Argentina and Grenada have found related antibodies. As aforementioned, it hasn’t been found even in Florida armadillos. But it has been found in Louisiana and Texas armadillos, as well as in Mexican animals and at least one case in Mississippi. (Estimates are that no more than 15 percent of armadillos in the main region are leprous.) Hey, it’s leprosy—it’s all a mystery and we can’t say for sure what’s going on. But it’s something peculiar to that area, which also happens to be the relative hotbed of human cases.

It’s possible, but uncertain, that infected wild armadillos are transmitting leprosy to humans (who, among other things, are known to eat the animals). Patient surveys about armadillo contact conflict, and are indirect evidence in any case. It’s clear that you can contract leprosy without having any contact with armadillos. It’s also clear it wouldn’t kill you to, like, wash your hands really good if you do grab one. Or even before you grab one; one possible origin of wild armadillo leprosy is direct transmission from infected humans.

Now that’s a true story for you, and a pretty decent one, if I say so myself.

Speaking from my obscure little corner, I will gladly give up the leprosy-experiment armadillos of the Fakahatchee swamp for the leprosy-experiment armadillos of the Louisiana bayou.

¹ Ten days after the publication of this column, Orlean e-mailed me the following: “I am sorry to say I can’t remember where I heard about the armadillos. I read a lot of Fakahatchee histories, and interviewed a million people, so it’s all a blur to me. It might have been one of the park service rangers who first told me about it—but then again, it might have been something I read in a history of the area. Sorry I can’t be more helpful. It’s a pretty weird factoid, that’s for sure.”

² “The Armadillo in the Southeastern United States” by Henry S. Fitch, Phil Goodrum and Coleman Newman, “Journal of Mammalogy” no. 33, 1952.

³ Including “Florida’s Fabulous Mammals” by Jerry Lee Gingerich and “Florida Lore Not Found in the History Books!” by Vernon Lamme, the latter of which mentions the introduction of armadillos into Florida briefly and is cited by Orlean as an “Orchid Thief” source. (The appropriate passage of the Gingerich book was provided to me by the Jacksonville Zoo.)

⁴ Though the leprosy mentioned influentially in the Bible is likely not what we now call leprosy; it may have been vitiligo, smallpox or some similar skin-affecting disease. For that matter, the Bible says objects can be “leprous”—likely meaning covered with mold or mildew.

⁵ And yet, I will use “leprosy.” That’s because it’s the common term used in our armadillo reference, and is still current among medical organizations and treatment products.

⁶ In his memoir “Alone No Longer,” Carville resident and activist Stanley Stein (originally Sidney Levyson) recalled feeling the sole ray of hope on his first day there when someone mentioned a patient who was no longer there. “This was the first heartening word I had heard all day. Then it was true that people actually did get out of Carville! ‘When was he discharged?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he wasn’t discharged,’ Jeremiah replied. ‘He committed suicide.’” It was suicide by drinking Lysol.

⁷ “The Amazing Armadillo: Geography of a Folk Critter” by Larry L. Smith and Robin W. Doughty.

⁸ This success led a scientist in the Philippines to try the same thing with another bizarre, armor-plated mammal, the pangolin. He injected two of them with the leprosy bacteria. One died. The other—yes, escaped into the wild.

Stein’s book recounts a leprosy-experiment animal escape at Carville one Halloween in the 1930s, “when our irrepressible wags had opened all the cages in the animal house near the old Protestant chapel and loosed scores of experimental beasties on the delta country side. The liberated rats and mice had all been inoculated with bacilli taken from Hansen’s disease patients, and there was some uneasiness in neighboring communities, completely unjustified, inasmuch as the major block in basic research then, as now, has been the problem of growing Hansen’s bacillus outside the human body.” Stein was writing before the breakthrough experiments on armadillos. Indeed, one might be concerned today that such escaped animals, still temporarily harboring the bacteria, might spread them to wild armadillos, though that would be unlikely, as Stein was correct about the general unviability of the bacteria in lab mice and rats.

Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: “The Armadillo in Florida and How It Reached There” by H.H. Bailey, “Journal of Mammalogy,” no. 5, 1924 (this volume is also worth checking out for its notes on fish-eating deer); Cindy Castelblanco, spokesperson, Zoological Society of Florida (Miami Metrozoo), via e-mail; Diana Dodge, animal programs coordinator, Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, via e-mail; http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Chlamyphorus_truncatus.html (the pink fairy armadillo); http://bphc.hrsa.gov/nhdp/default.htm (US Department of Health and Human Services National Hansen’s Disease Programs site); http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/UW082 (“The Nine-Banded Armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus),” factsheet by Joseph M. Schaefer and Mark E. Hostetler, University of Florida);

http://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/lhc/docs/published/2003/pub2003048.pdf (“Chaulmoogra Oil and the Treatment of Leprosy” by John Parascandola); http://news.ufl.edu/2001/08/29/road-kill-hot-line-helps-uf-solve-puzzle-of-horse-disease (University of Florida’s equine protozoal myeloencephalitis announcement and, incidentally, the most vividly descriptive URL in history); http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/1298/9812field.html (Orlean’s “Field Notes” article in “Outside Magazine”); http://svm369.vetmed.lsu.edu/images/truman/Human%20and%20Armadillo%20Leprosy.pdf (“Human and Armadillo Leprosy” by Capt. Richard W. Truman, National Hansen’s Disease Programs);“The Oxford Companion to the Bible,” Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, eds.; Denise Rendina, Naples Zoo spokesperson, April 10, 2006 interview; “Where Leprosy Lurks” by Gordon Grice, “Discover,” November 2000; www.floridastateparks.org; www.friendsoffakahatchee.org; www.ilep.org.uk/content/home.cfm (International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations site); www.niaid.nih.gov/dmid/leprosy (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases overview); www.rootsweb.com/~flbaker/lore.html (online version of Lamme’s book cited above); www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/Burchfield/index.html (overview of Carville-GSRI controversy, with supporting materials, on site of Prof. Brian Martin at University of Wollongong). Many thanks to Ms. Dodge for extraordinary assistance. Posted April 17, 2006. Updated April 27, 2006 and Feb. 25, 2007.

JOHN THE OBSCURE HOME