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.
“I think in the universe, there’s a whole spectrum of other minds,” Beauman tells us. “Some of them are probably in clouds of cosmic gas, some of them are in fish, some of them are on a server at Microsoft somewhere. They can all do different selections of things. There’s a whole rainbow of different minds in the universe. It’s like one of those n-dimensional scatter graphs. The minds are in different locations on the graph, but there’s no pyramid where humans are at the top. The idea that we could ever be at the top is an illusion that I think will only last ten more years.” Photo by Alice Neale.
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.
Author Danielle Clode poses with a koala munching on a eucalyptus leaf. Photo courtesy of Danielle Clode.
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.
Horowitz spent a year studying the science of how puppies grow up while closely observing the development of her own new family member, Quid. “Instead of following an instruction manual for a puppy, I wanted to follow the puppy: through introductions to a new world, meeting suspicious older dogs, a playful feline with long claws, and an adolescent boy who, in his enthusiasms and energy, bridges the world between dog and human,” writes Horowitz. “By slowing down to observe the changes in our new charge from week to week, I hoped to make new sense of the dog’s behavior in a way that is missed in a focus only on training.” Photo courtesy of Alexandra Horowitz.
“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.
In The Year of the Puppy, Horowitz compares the development of young dogs and young humans. On the topic of dogs’ often downplayed communication abilities, she writes: “When a researcher (or parent) gushes over the creativity of a two-year-old child’s ability to put together words in a novel way, to express a new meaning—water plus bird for a duck, say—I smile, nod my head agreeably, and remember the moment that Quid put together two actions—walking over to the stairs to our bedroom, and looking at us—to express a new meaning: I need to pee. I’m just sayin’.”
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.
“Wonder is contagious. Awe and astonishment is contagious. I think this book has served as an invitation for people to say, ‘God, I remember this!’ or ‘I did this with fireflies’ or ‘did you ever see this kind of firefly?” … And oftentimes, the most heartwarming stories involve siblings or parents who aren’t around anymore, that they hadn’t even thought of a particular outdoor memory of them for so long. I just feel so grateful that for whatever reason, my book has served as a spark or conduit to get them thinking.” – Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Photo by Caroline Beffa)
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.
“To look at the skull of an extant freshwater crocodile is to read a character description. The buttressed processes and arches evoke Gothic architecture, here resisting not the weight of a cathedral roof but the powerful force of the jaw muscles. The high-set eyes and nostrils speak of low swimming, peering, and breathing just above the water surface; the long series of teeth, pointed but round, and set in a long, sweeping snout, suggest a feeding style of swiping, grabbing and holding prey, suitable for catching slippery fish. The scars of life are there, with fractures sustained knitted together. Lives leave their marks in detailed, reproducible ways.” – Thomas Halliday
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.”
The rock record of the Earth is “an encyclopedia of the possible, of landscapes that have disappeared,” Halliday writes. “This book is an attempt to bring those landscapes to life once more, to break from the dusty, iron-bound image of extinct organisms or the sensationalized, snarling, theme-park Tyrannosaurus, and to experience the reality of nature as one might today.”
“These laws [of biology] are often very much at odds with our daily behavior,” says Dr. Rob Dunn. “In the context of a world that we’re rapidly changing, they seem actually to be growing in their importance, rather than contracting. And they’re not really a part of our discourse. We tend to get caught up with Elon Musk flinging himself out into space, and not pay attention to the fact that whatever we do in space, the species that we bring with us into space are still going to obey the rules of life that we’ve come to understand here on Earth.” Photo by Amanda Ward.
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.
Wolf 21 — one of Yellowstone’s most revered and beloved alpha males — howls as he approaches the long-dominant Druid Peak Pack. Born in 1995, Wolf 21 was known for never losing a fight, never killing a defeated opponent, and for his deep commitment and visible affection for his mate, Wolf 42. Video still by Bob Landis.
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.
“One of the things that strikes you, probably more than anything else, is what emotionally fulfilled lives they live,” says McIntyre. “They have deep emotional connections to each other.” Photo by Julie Argyle.
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.”
After retiring from the National Park Service, McIntyre wrote a series of biographies of Yellowstone’s greatest wolf leaders: Wolf 08, one of the first reintroduced wolves who grew from a runt into a powerful pack leader; his adopted and brave son, Wolf 21, known for his long and successful reign as king of the park’s Druid Peak pack, his deep devotion to his mate, and his unusual benevolence to his defeated rivals; and 21’s nephew, Wolf 302, who started life as an irresponsible Casanova, but transformed his character and died as a heroic father.
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.
Wolf 302, whose life is the subject of McIntyre’s latest book, showed little promise as a renegade young wolf of living up to the legacies of the great Yellowstone wolf leaders who came before him. But Wolf 302’s character matured as he got older, and he ultimately came to lead — and sacrifice for — a new pack in his old age. “302 was a free spirit who marched to a beat that was different from the other male wolves I’ve known,” McIntyre wrote. Photo of Wolf 302 by Doug Dance.
McIntyre’s first book on the Yellowstone wolves, The Rise of Wolf 8, tells the story of the reintroduction of wild wolves to the park through the life of one of the original reintroduced wolves, Wolf 8. Born in Alberta, Wolf 8 (far left), his parents (center), and his three much-larger brothers (one of which is on the far right) were released in the park in the mid-1990s. The smallest of his brothers, Wolf 8 was mercilessly bullied in the pack’s temporary acclamation pen. As a yearling, he encountered a mother wolf, Wolf 9, and her eight pups in desperate straits after the pups’ father was illegally shot by a hunter. Unexpectedly, Wolf 8 bonded with the family and became the alpha male of the park’s largest pack until his death in 1999. Photo by Jim Peac, National Park Service.
In her magnificent new book, The Sound of the Sea, journalist Cynthia Barnett explores the epic and often overlooked history of humanity’s relationship with seashells and the marine mollusks who make them. “This book is about seeing what has gone unseen,” she writes. “The life inside the shell; the Maldivian queens and others left out of history books; the connections between the human condition and that of the sea. Just as we’ve loved seashells for the gorgeous exterior rather than the animals that build them, we’ve loved the oceans as a beautiful backdrop of life rather than the very source.” Photo by Aaron Daye.
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.
“Something small reflecting something big – that is what this book is about,” Barnett tells us. “You mentioned that I teach journalism at the University of Florida, and part of what we teach young journalists is the beauty of finding something tiny to tell a big story. And I’ve been teaching that lesson for my whole career, and now, at this more advanced time in my career, I actually did that in a really huge way.” Photo by Betsy Hansen.
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.
“The open ocean is a place without hiding places,” Dr. Edie Widder tells us, explaining the origin of bioluminescence in the ocean’s creatures. “As the ocean filled up with predators that could see at a distance and swim fast, the only hope for prey was either to out-swim their predators or find a way to hide. And the best way to hide was to go down into the darkness. The problem is, the food is produced at the surface through photosynthesis. So animals would hide in the dark depths during the day, and only come up and feed in the surface waters under the cover of darkness. As a consequence, most of those animals spend most of their lives in darkness or near-darkness. So there’s been a lot of selective pressure to develop more sensitive eyes and advanced visual signaling, which is where bioluminescence comes in.” (Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
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.
Deep-sea shrimp, Heterocarpus ensifer, releasing bioluminescent “spew.” (Photos by Sönke Johnsen and Katie Thomas, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.)
Ecologist, author, and hedgehog advocate Hugh Warwick is leading a national campaign in the United Kingdom to make “hedgehog highways” — 13 centimeter holes in the bottom of fences that allow hedgehogs to move freely among gardens — a legal requirement for new housing developments. Warwick’s Change.org petition that has garnered almost a million signatures and international attention. Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.
European hedgehogs are perhaps the most beloved mammal in the United Kingdom. When the BBC Wildlife Magazine ran a poll a few years back asking readers which species should be the national icon, hedgehogs triumphed. But these endearing, small, strange, slug-munching, spiky creatures — named for their pig-like noses and the hedgerows in which they thrive — are being destroyed across the country that holds them so dear. It’s estimated that Great Britain’s hedgehog population has dropped by 90 to 95 percent since the second world war. Today, there are less than 1 million.
Industrial agriculture has driven the loss of hedgerow habitat that long characterized the British countryside, while farms’ use of pesticides is wiping out the insects that hedgehogs eat. Meanwhile, housing developments are breaking up habitat into smaller and more fragmented parcels, and motor vehicles every year mow down around 100,000 hedgehogs. That’s about one hedgehog in every five nationwide. There are other, smaller threats too that add up, from drowning in uncovered swimming pools to getting caught in litter rubber-bands and fast food cups. In 2020, hedgehogs were listed as vulnerable to extinction in the next twenty years on the Red List for British Mammals. Tragically, they have a lot of company. More than 40 percent of UK species have seen their populations plummet in recent decades.
But while the future of hedgehogs remains precarious, there is grounds for hope. Across Britain, people are turning their love for these creatures into action to try to save them in significant, surprising, and delightful ways. Take the country’s hedgehog highway, for example. Hedgehogs need up to 30 hectares worth of territory — around the size of an 18-hole golf course — to forage for food and find mates, but the average U.K. garden is a tiny fraction of that size.The Hedgehog Street project was launched ten years ago in an attempt to link these habitats by asking homeowners to put 13 inch diameter holes through their garden fences to give hedgehogs the pathways they need to survive. Nearly 14,000 such holes have since been created, linking entire neighborhoods and towns.
“We live in a landscape that has been turned into a linescape,” writes Warwick in Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife. “The hedges, ditches, roads, power lines, canals act as barriers for wildlife. We need to work with the linescapes to reconnect landscapes for wildlife. The habitat fragmentation that these barriers cause is one of the greatest threats to Britain’s wildlife.” Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.
This up-swelling of attention, love, and effort for hedgehogs is thanks in no small part to the contagious enthusiasm, relentless obsession, vision, and passionate career-long commitment of our guest, ecologist and hedgehog expert Hugh Warwick. Warwick has studied, celebrated, written about, and fought to protect hedgehogs and other British wildlife for more than 30 years. He is the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the author of five brilliant books on British fauna, including most recently TheHedgehog BookandLinescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife, which explores the impacts of manmade lines — including hedges, roads, walls, powerlines, and canals — on the ability of wild animals to thrive.
In this episode, we speak with Warwick about why hedgehogs need our help, his role as the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, the national campaign he is leading to make “hedgehog highways” a legal requirement for new housing, the extraordinary impacts of manmade lines — such as walls, roads, and power lines — on the ability of wild animals to thrive, and the importance of loving your hedgehogs.
