Ep. 27 – Ed Yong on telling the grand, urgent and surprising stories of animal worlds

“People often are best at learning when they encounter something that defies their expectations, where the gap between reality and expectation is the widest,” says Yong. “I think one wonderful thing about covering the animal kingdom is that there are so many such gaps. Animals constantly surprise us in what they do and what they are capable of; even the people who know them best and who study them, people who devoted their lives to the understanding of the animal kingdom, are constantly surprised.” Photo courtesy of Ed Yong.

“Every human being is a colony,” Pablo Picasso once said. The insight is made literal in Ed Yong’s acclaimed book, I Contain Multitudes, about our hidden relationship with the microbial world. “If we zoomed in on our skin,” he writes, “we would see them: spherical beads, sausage-like rods, and comma-shaped beans, each just a few millionths of a meter across. They are so small that, despite their numbers, they collectively weigh just a few pounds in total. A dozen or more would line up cosily in the width of a human hair. A million could dance on the head of a pin.”

These microbes are not just hitching a ride, but enabling us to become ourselves: they help digest our food, sculpt our organs, and craft and calibrate our immune systems. To be at all, Yong demonstrates, is to be in partnership with them. Yong’s work has contributed to a radical shift in how we understand animals — from discrete organisms motivated by competition to living islands, communities of hidden beings.

“Toughie,” the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog, died in captivity in September 2016. The species is now considered extinct. Yong wrote about Toughie and the people who cared for him in his story, “Animal Extinction Caring for the Last of a Species.” Photo source: Brian Gratwicke.

Nonhuman beings, and the people who study them, animate Yong’s vast, award-winning and kaleidoscopically varied body of journalism. His vivid stories explore the lives of scientists, the origins of life, whale hearts, the sixth extinction, and the individuals we lose when a species vanishes. A staff writer at The Atlantic, Yong’s work has been also featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, New Scientist, Scientific American, and other publications. He has won numerous awards and his book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller. In this episode, we speak with Yong about the wonders and burdens of telling stories about the animal world. 

As of summer 2019, there were an estimated 411 North Atlantic right whales left in the world. One percent of the population was killed in the span of a month that summer due primarily to ship strikes and entanglements, Yong reported.  “Every one of these whales is an individual that has its own story, its own social ties. When you lose a whale to a ship, you are losing all of its experiences, which matter a lot to a long-lived social animals that learns from each other in a social context,” Yong says. “You lose a member of a family. You lose what one might think of as a friend to other whales. So I’m trying to give readers a sense of the animals not just as these far removed entities that manifest in population counts, but as individuals and entities in their own right.” Photo source: NOAA.

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