Everyday Biophilia

There are many millions of species trotting, slithering, crawling, flapping, splashing, or just sitting around being microscopic and non-motile on our happy little planet. Getting to know them all would be damn difficult, by which I mean impossible, but it’s always fun to meet some creatures we might not have previously been aware of. Which is what we’re gonna do today. So let’s get cracking. Bumblebee Bat ( Craseonycteris thonglongyai ) (Full Grown Bumblebee Bat) These marvelous little animals are also known as Kitti’s hog-nosed bats, after the Thai biologist, Kitti Thonglongya, who discovered them in 1973, and are found only in the caves of Thailand and Myanmar. Bumblebee bats got their nickname because they are truly tiny. They are a little better than an inch long, with seven-inch wingspans, and they weigh in at about two grams, or about the same weight as a dime. Not only are they the smallest bats on the planet, but a case can be made that they are the smallest mammals o...

Concern for the environment is, by any standard, higher today than it has likely ever been. We certainly still have to contend with obstructionist politicians and know-nothing, lying media personalities on the right, but despite their interference we have seen genuine, tangible successes in the effort to mitigate climate change. The overall obtuseness exhibited by denialists has become predictable and in most cases the falsehoods from that camp can simply be ignored. Of far larger concern is the escalating schism among people who fully grasp the reality of climate change, but cannot seem to agree about how to confront the problem. On one side of the rift are those who believe that mitigating our carbon output requires Systemic Change, and on the other we have people who think that environmental improvement can only be arrived at through Personal Sacrifice. The split is getting wider, and too often devolves into the type of vitriolic name-calling and finger-pointing that makes faction...

There are any number of peculiar looking animals in the world, but perhaps none more so than the narwhal. These so-called “unicorns of the sea” have been intriguing people probably since the first human crossed the Bering Land Bridge and got a good look at the creatures. The taxonomic name for narwhal – Monodon monoceros – is one of those Latin descriptors that suggests the animal got a Linnaean classification before scientists knew a whole hell of a lot about the creature they were naming. Meaning “one tooth, one horn,” the tooth part is right, but the horn part isn’t. A narwhal does not have a horn. The thing sticking out of its head that looks like a horn is actually a tooth, or more properly a tusk. More about that in a bit. In Arctic Dreams , author Barry Lopez remarks, “We know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about narwhal.” This is frustratingly true. Biologists still know relatively little about narwhal, due to the fact that they are incredibly difficult to stu...