Undomesticated Peeves Part 1

(Well, they can’t be “pet peeves” if they’re about wildlife, can they?)

Recently Patti Abbott posted a question on her blog asking what relatively small things annoyed her readers. Being who I am, I had to struggle to keep the list down, but one of my foremost irritations is, of course, a biology-related one.

Often—faaaar too often, in our supposedly civilized society—people confuse mammals with animals. This is not to say that mammals are not animals. However, just as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, “animals” is a category that includes a vast array of species that are not anything like mammals (which themselves make up only a tiny percentage of the number of animals out there).

And I have to admit, I’m baffled when people say that insects or fish or octopi aren’t animals. What do they think they are—fruit?

[this mantis shrimp is having an existential crisis:
when it looks in the mirror, does it see an animal?]

This is not just a trivial thing, given that it highlights both our mammal-centric thinking (dangerous as well as profoundly inaccurate) and our general ignorance of basic zoology. Or maybe it’s not true ignorance so much as carelessness; surely if someone paused to think, he or she would realize that there is no category other than “animal” into which they could place alligators or stick insects or barnacles. But it worries me that anyone would have to pause to think about it.

Maybe I’m just being snobbish, complaining about these taxonomical inaccuracies. But—here’s the great part—I don’t care!

Don’t say that jellyfish, or fruitflies, or any other species lacking hair and mammary glands, aren’t animals. There’s just no excuse for that kind of thing.

Stay tuned for more of my education-through-harangues campaign!

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Prism Break

The first kind of photography I learned to do all the way through, from taking the photos to developing the film to printing the pictures, was black-and-white photography, and for a while in college, when I had regular access to darkrooms, I was—maybe not obsessed—but certainly very taken by it. When I got into digital photography I felt I had to relearn how to use color in compositions.

Now I’m relearning how great it can be to leave color out.

I’d forgotten how much fun black-and-white photography is. I’d forgotten too how it lets you focus on texture and shape and portraiture and drama in a way that can occasionally get cluttered up by color.

For example, when photographing the howler monkey with her new(ish) baby, the absence of color helps me better frame their tender moments.

The absence of color makes the movements of the giant Pacific octopus, Pandora, as startling, sinuous, and striking as they are in real life.

It lets me enjoy the silky, liquid texture of a poison-dart frog without being distracted by its brilliant color.

I wish I could be more articulate, or more profound, but far more talented photographers than I have already done so. Suffice to say that it’s always nice to be reminded, yet again, that there are an infinite number of ways of seeing the world.

I recognize that not everyone responds to darkroom lights and fixative fumes as if they were memory- and perception-inducing madeleines. But have there been news ways in which you too have discovered the natural world?

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One good shot...

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Flamingo Friday: Dinosaurs

With tangerine scales...

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Intertidal Parabola

Sanderlings, which plunge their long skinny beaks into wet shore sand to catch clams and mole crabs and other tasty, burrowing morsels, run away from each approaching wave…

…But rush towards each retreating wave…

This can result in some interesting, if fleeting, beach art:

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}