In the not-too-distant future, twelve years after the last non-cloned giant panda has died, when biobanks of genetic data are the sole remnant of tens of thousands of vanished species, extinction has become an industry unto itself. A market of extinction credits – vouchers granting the right to kill off the last of a species – has made the eradication of the world’s biodiversity just another cost for companies. A cost that, thanks to loopholes and definitional workarounds, has become almost negligible. It’s a bleak future that, in the hands of British novelist Ned Beauman, becomes the backdrop to an arresting, cutting, and devastatingly funny story of two peoples’ quest to hunt down a very ugly, very intelligent, and very vengeful fish, the venomous lumpsucker.
Venomous Lumpsucker, Beauman’s satirical, vivid, tour-de-force fifth novel, follows Karin Resaint, an animal intelligence biologist, and Mark Halyard, an environmental impact coordinator for a multinational mining company, who each, for very different reasons, have a whole lot riding on finding any survivors of the eponymous species. Their mission takes readers across a Northern Europe 15 or so years in the future–one that’s been shaped by now-crumbling neoliberal efforts to rein in species collapse and climate change. From a biodiversity reserve that runs on revenue from extinction credits to a floating city that’s a regulation-free haven of biotech development, Resaint and Halyard search across set pieces at once both shocking and deeply believable. All the while, these two ill-matched, profoundly memorable characters debate the morality of human-caused species extinction and what cost–or even penance–we should have to pay for our destruction.
In late 2019, amidst record-setting heatwaves and droughts, bushfires swept across the Australian continent. The severity and scale of destruction wrought by these “Black Summer” blazes was unprecedented, burning more than 40 million acres of land, releasing over 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and killing an estimated three billion animals. Amid the smoke and devastation, one animal in particular became the face of the fires’ toll — a face almost synonymous with Australia itself — the koala.
The fires killed and injured more than 60,000 koalas and incinerated the highly flammable eucalyptus forests on which koalas depend, leaving the species already beleaguered by habitat loss, infectious disease, and myriad other threats, even more at-risk.
Koalas, masters of sending their throaty, guttural bellows across long distances, soon became messengers to the world about the devastation that our actions are bringing to many other species. Heartbreaking images and videos of the large-nosed, fluffy-eared marsupials went viral around the world – koalas sitting in laundry baskets in rehab centers with singed fur and burned paws, koalas cowering and silhouetted in burning trees against apocalyptic orange backdrops, koalas sipping from the water bottles offered by firemen and good samaritans. Koalas evinced both the toll of climate destruction, but also humans’ capacity for action and compassion for non-human animals. Yet, as our podcast guest has written, for as visible as they are and how much they have to teach us about ourselves and our world, there’s so much we don’t know about these unique, often misunderstood creatures.
Most books about puppies are dog-improvement manuals, guiding readers on ‘How to Raise the Perfect Dog’ or how to achieve ‘Perfect Puppy in 7 Days.’ Dr. Alexandra Horowitz‘s profound and totally delightful new book is not that type of book. It’s an unprecedented look at the complex, overlooked, and often hilarious journeys of puppies becoming themselves.
“Instead of following an instruction manual for a puppy, I wanted to follow the puppy,” she writes. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously watched his own three children grow into adults and his observations of them helped inspire many of his theories about how young human minds develop. Horowitz, a world-renowned expert in dog cognition, set out to do the same for her family’s spectacularly eye-browed, exquisitely sensitive, and rambunctious new bearded lady, Quiddity. In The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves, Horowitz observes, documents, and revels in the first year of Quid’s life from her birth on Day One through the puppy equivalents of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
Horowitz is a bestselling author of multiple books on dogs, the host of the podcast Off Leash, and the founder and leader of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College. She combines deep scientific expertise with the doggedness of an investigative reporter, the gift and imagination of a master storyteller, and the infectious enthusiasm of, well, a puppy. She has devoted her career to trying to answer the question, “what is it like to be a dog?,” and has inspired people around the world to try to better understand the complex inner lives of our closest four-legged companions. In this podcast episode, we spoke with Horowitz about the science of puppyhood, how Quid is enjoying her big literary debut, and what we have to learn from trying to understand how puppies encounter and make meaning of the world.
Florida’s waterways are home to beloved and iconic gentle giants, manatees. These half-ton, lumbering mammals – with their wrinkled, whiskered skin and paddle-shaped tails – are believed to have evolved from the same grass-eating land ancestor as elephants over 50 million years ago. Florida manatees are famously playful, sensitive, and inquisitive. They spend much of their lives grazing, cow-like, on meadows of seagrass; congregating in warm-water refuges; expressing emotion through complex chirps, whistles, and squeaks; nursing and caring for their young; nuzzling each other with their noses; hugging with their flippers; and maneuvering slowly at around 3 to 5 miles per hour through the state’s rivers, estuaries, and shallow coastal waters. These remarkably peaceful herbivores have no natural predators and express no aggression towards other creatures. Despite being so gentle and defenseless, they can live more than sixty years in the wild. But, today, few do.
The iconic Florida manatee is facing a multitude of intersecting, human-caused crises. Nearly all of the estimated remaining 7500 Florida manatees have been scarred by boat strikes, while more than half are estimated to have the toxic pesticide glyphosate coursing through their veins. Years of worsening water quality from Florida’s unfettered agricultural pollution and real estate development have resulted in increased toxic algae blooms that block sunlight from reaching the seagrass meadows upon which the manatees depend. Fishing gear entanglement, habitat loss, and climate change are also driving major manatee losses. In 2021, Florida’s manatees died en masse, with a record 1,100 manatees – more than 12 percent of the state’s total manatee population – perishing. Most died of starvation.
It’s hard to imagine a more lovable or compelling creature than a manatee, but enthusiasm is not enough to save them. For manatees to have a chance, that love needs to be translated into enforced protections for both these animals and their habitats.
Our guest, Patrick Rose, has devoted the past 45 years to propelling Florida manatees to public prominence and to advocating on their behalf with extraordinary dedication, creativity, and effectiveness. Rose is the executive director of the Save the Manatee Club. An aquatic biologist, he is one of the world’s leading experts on the Florida manatee. He was the first biologist hired by the State of Florida to do work related to protecting manatees, and has advocated on their behalf before the Florida Legislature, governor, and Cabinet, provided policy guidance and direction for state-wide recovery efforts, and served as a member of every federal manatee recovery team. As one of his colleagues once put it, Rose is the ‘MVP of manatee protection.’ Over the past couple years, as manatees have made headlines for the crises they face, he has served as their spokesperson and much needed champion.
In 2020, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil published her first nonfiction book, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. In the book’s thirty dazzling essays, Nezhukumatathil weaves love stories about being a daughter, a partner, a mother, and a teacher with reverence for wild animals and plants and what they give us – their ability to expand our imagination and empathy, to connect us to others, to unearth memories, to break our habits of thinking, to teach us lessons big and small, and — perhaps most of all — to simply leave us gobsmacked, humbled, and thrilled to remember that creatures like narwhals and newts exist in this world.
At a time when reflection on the natural world is often defined by despair and loss, Nezhukamatathil’s work is exuberant and full of contagious joy for the beauty and kinship that the world still offers us. The daughter of a Filipina mother and a Malayali Indian father, Nezhukamatathil writes about the human and non-human organisms she has learned from and who have shaped her. The peacocks that she fell madly in love with as eight-year-old on her first trip to India, and then proudly drew in class in small town Iowa, only to be reprimanded by her teacher for not drawing an “American” animal. The beloved and lost pet cockatiel, Chico, that her parents spent hours frantically searching for, and eventually found safe and sound on the tip-top of the persimmon tree. The superb bird of paradise whose spectacular courtship moves parallel the ebullient synchronicity of the dance floor at her wedding when the DJ played the “Macarena.” The fireflies that remind her of summer nights with her parents and sister in their Oldsmobile.
The fossil record acts as both a memorial to life’s spectacular possibilities and as a warning to humanity about how fast dominance can become forgotten history, according to our guest, Scottish paleobiologist Dr. Thomas Halliday. Halliday’s research investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record, particularly in mammals. In his magnificent and daring new book Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Halliday translates cutting-edge science into vivid portraits of sixteen fossil sites and their inhabitants extending back 550 million years.
In this podcast episode, we speak with Halliday about his travel guide to the history of multicellular life on Earth, the fragility of ecosystems, how entire extinct worlds are reconstructed from remnants in the Earth’s crust, and the importance of realizing that the lives and the worlds that we know were preceded by hundreds of millions of years of other life and other worlds, “simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.”
Humans try hard to control the natural world. We’ve dammed and straightened meandering rivers and filled in wetlands. We’ve transformed primordial forests into farms and turned oceans into highways. Humans and our domestic animals now account for an estimated 96 percent of all terrestrial mammal biomass. Wild mammals account for just four percent. Amid the cataclysms of the Anthropocene, we tend to think of ourselves as the primary shapers of our planet. But for all our efforts to tame, simplify, and cordon off nature, we remain just as beholden to the world’s ecological laws as we were more than 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Like the laws of physics, paying attention to our planet’s biological laws empowers us to understand how the world works and to make predictions about the outcomes of our actions. In his latest book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob Dunn – an extraordinarily creative author and ecologist – warns that continuing to ignore these laws will cause us to fail again and again in our attempts to build a sustainable future for our species.
Dunn makes the case that the human species will survive not by simplifying and isolating, but through embracing biodiversity and living in accordance with the knowledge that we are at the mercy of the law of natural selection, the species-area law, and the diversity-stability law, to name a few examples. These laws aren’t merely fascinating phenomena. Understanding these inescapable rules of ecology is key to our survival and quality of life. Whether or not we heed them will have profound consequences for our future.
When Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872, gray wolves — which had roamed and shaped North America’s landscape for millions of years — were being massacred nationwide in a government-led extermination campaign. The eradication of these predators, who were cast as livestock-threatening villains, began soon after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Bay. The colonists set bounties on wolves and the war escalated in the decades to follow. As our guest once documented, wolves and their pups were shot, trapped, hunted with dogs, poisoned, dragged from dens, baited with fish hooks, set on fire, and intentionally infected with mange. One community even paved a road with wolf carcasses. In Yellowstone, the job was completed in 1926 when the last two pups in the park were killed.
The loss, brutality, and profound ecological consequences of this atrocity slowly began to sink in. Seventy years after the last Yellowstone wolves were killed, the U.S. government took unprecedented measures to reclaim what it had destroyed. In 1995 and 1996, more than thirty wolves from multiple packs were brought to the park from Canada and released in a grand experiment that would become the most successful wildlife reintroduction effort in history. Within years, more than 100 wolves in 10 packs were thriving across the 2.2 million acre park and the ecosystem was rebounding spectacularly. The roughly 100 wolves that live in the park today — which awe, inspire, and fascinate millions of visitors each year — are their descendants.
Our podcast guest, the internationally renowned wolf expert Rick McIntyre, has dedicated his life to those wolves. As a ranger naturalist, he spent more than 40 years observing wolves in America’s national parks. For the past 26 of those years, he’s observed the wolves in Yellowstone nearly every day, accumulating more than 100,000 sightings — more than any other person in history. What Rick saw unfolding through his telescope is awe-inspiring: epic adventure stories of wolf family dynasties. He watched wolves perform acts of bravery and kindness, suffer crippling injuries, conquer enemies and then treat them with benevolence, wage war over territories, form lifelong partnerships with touching loyalty, and play exuberant games of king of the castle. His work leaves no doubt that wolves are individuals with unique personalities, emotions, and complex relationships like our own. His stories have shown millions of people that these still-persecuted animals deserve our respect and need our empathy.
Since retiring from the park service in 2018, Rick has published a magnificent series of biographies of some of Yellowstone’s most noteworthy wolves. These include The Rise of Wolf 8,The Reign of Wolf 21, and his latest book, The Redemption of Wolf 302. As the writer Nate Blakeslee aptly put it: “With this third installment of Rick McIntyre’s magnum opus, the scope and ambition of the project becomes clear: nothing less than a grand serialization of the first twenty years of wolves in Yellowstone, a kind of lupine Great Expectations.”
These stories are especially important right now. Wolves desperately need federal protection from extreme and cruel wolf-killing laws recently enacted in the states of Montana and Idaho. These laws could destroy the state’s wolf populations, undoing decades of progress. In this episode, McIntyre tells the extraordinary stories some of Yellowstone’s greatest wolves, describes the wolves’ unique personalities and the pack’s dynastic dramas, and explains why science-based federal action is needed to protect these wolves, who are at risk of being massacred once again due to draconian new state laws.
As kids, we learn that if you place a shell against your ear, it becomes an auditory portal to the ocean. It’s a powerful illusion as, merged with your ear, the shell creates an echo chamber of noises that transports us to breaking waves and sea breezes, creating a moment of intimacy and wonder between us and the natural world. Much as shells have done throughout human history, as journalist Cynthia Barnett writes in her exquisite new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. Since the dawn of humanity, our history has been inextricably tied to the pearlescent, the ribbed, the spiraling, the speckled, and the iridescent calcium carbonate wonders and the unsung animal artists of the ocean that create, inhabit, and leave them behind.
Shells are the legacies of some of the world’s most inventive and prolific architects: mollusks. Biomineralization, the process by which these animals recycle ocean minerals into hard protective structures, evolved in microorganisms more than 500 million years ago, which eventually gave rise to the tens of thousands of known mollusk species today. These soft-bodied creatures have, quite literally, shaped the world as we know it. As Barnett writes, “We walk on a world of shell.” From limestone aquifers, to chalk, to marble, shells made by soft-bodied animals are the foundation for much of life on earth and are a blueprint for our ever-changing planet, their fossils even documenting Mount Everest’s more humble origins in the seas.
Early in her career, the ocean explorer and scientist Dr. Edie Widder received a phone call from a distraught physicist. The physicist was working on a major project aimed at detecting neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that can give off faint flashes as they move through water. He and his colleagues needed the darkest place they could get, so they placed their ultra-sensitive light detectors deep in the ocean, beyond the reach of the sun’s rays. But there was a problem. The sensors were detecting a lot of light. A colleague suggested the light could be from animals. ‘Could it be true?’ the physicist asked Dr. Widder, now a world authority on marine bioluminescence. ‘Yes,’ she told him. And then, after a long pause, he followed up: ‘Is there some place in the ocean where there isn’t any bioluminescence?’ ‘Not that I know of,’ Dr. Widder replied.
Like many of us land-lubbers, the physicist had assumed that light-making among ocean creatures is an exotic and rare phenomenon. But that’s wrong. The majority of animals in the ocean — which means the majority of animals on the planet — are capable of making light. From top to bottom, the ocean is absolutely teeming with unforgettably beautiful and extraordinarily diverse light shows made by living things that we’re only beginning to understand. There are deep-sea shrimp that spew glowing mucus like fire-breathing dragons to distract predators. Single-celled algae that glitter en masse as a form of burglar alarm. Crustaceans that put on complex, twinkling courtship displays. Fish that counter-illuminate their bodies to match the water above them for camouflage from creatures looking up from below. Squids that backlight their body tissue in flickering patterns that seem to coordinate group hunting. These are just a few examples of the roughly 75 percent of ocean animals that can make their own light. According to Dr. Widder, there are possibly quadrillions of light-producing fish in our seas.