I couldn’t take my eyes off them, from the spade-shaped wedge of head to the tapered tail, and all that sinuous muscle in between. These predatory geometries made me want to stroke the snake-laden pages. As Mr. Laita writes: “Their beauty heightens the danger. The danger amplifies their beauty.”
And when we focus on their sheer, alien otherness, we feel more human — as Mr. Laita acknowledges at the end of “Serpentine,” when he quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love.”
The mysterious collapse of bee colonies around the world has turned into a real crisis. In the United States, domesticated bee populations have reached a 50-year low and keep dwindling. The situation is just as dire in many other countries.
And that’s bad news for all those crops that depend on bees. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that “out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated.” Around the world, these crops are worth at least $207 billion.
“You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.” ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
“… Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.”
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time
“But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud…” ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Darkness lets stressed green algae produce hydrogen, restores the vision of amblyopic kittens, and makes dogs four times as disobedient…The obscuration of the ocean’s infrasonic rumblings in Jersey Hill, New York, may cause homing pigeons to lose their way. Dung beetles in a planetarium will, in the absence of a moon, navigate their balls by orienting themselves to the glow of the Milky Way…
A Florida man who claimed to have been bitten by a black mamba was exposed as merely having been bitten by his pet cobra. Embryonic banded bamboo sharks hold their breath in the presence of predators. The Princess of Lake Tanganyika is likelier, under threat of predation, to accept immigrant helper fish who assist with the care of offspring. Dolphins were found to call the names of other favored dolphins from whom they become separated, a misshapen dolphin was reported to have been adopted by a pod of sperm whales, and Chromodoris reticulata sea slugs were found, on disposing of their penises, to produce new ones from an internal spool. Marine biologists worried about the picky eating habits of herbivorous reef fish. The world’s largest crocodile died of chronic diarrhea. The NIH announced the retirement of its hepatitis-C chimpanzees, and a loggerhead turtle in a Kobe aquarium at last achieved swimming success with her twenty-seventh set of prosthetic fins. “When her children hatch,” said the aquarium’s director, “well, I just feel that would make all the trauma in her life worthwhile.”
“The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?” ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Shy rainbow trout have longer memories for the odor of predators than do bold trout, and bees shaken awake every five minutes as they try to sleep will not remember a new route home. New Zealand registered two new species of forget-me-not. Superb fairywren mothers teach their eggs a password that the newly hatched chicks must use when demanding food, and sleeping baby rats’ whiskers were found to twitch even before the ratlings learn to whisk. Dolphins may remain continuously awake and alert indefinitely. “These majestic beasts,” said a marine biologist, “are true unwavering sentinels of the sea.”..
Scientists revealed that a now-dead white whale had learned to imitate human speech. An Asian elephant was found capable of speaking five words of Korean. Sand dunes with varying grain size will sing with greater range…
Coded messages were found in a capsule attached to the skeleton of a World War II carrier pigeon in a Bletchingly chimney. Shropshire badgers were being shot, then dumped by the road to make it look like an accident. Staff at Exmoor Zoo near Barnstaple deployed donated police riot shields against aggressive cranes. Authorities in Gaza captured an escaped crocodile who had been living in the sewers and eating local ducks and goats. “He had a lot of spirit in him,” said police lieutenant colonel Samih al-Sultan. “He wanted to be free.”
Seeta Persaud is the main writer for CMP. Nancy A. Heitzeg is the Editor of Criminal Injustice, published every Wednesday at 6pm CST. Robinswing is the Editor of SistahSpeak.
