World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Some of the planet’s most vibrant light shows come not from the land or air, but from the ocean. With the pulse and undulation of the comb jelly, hundreds of thousands of cilia flash mini-rainbows even in the darkest polar and tropical ocean zones.

when you piano your fingers over the leaves of this plant, they give a shudder and a shake and quickly fold shut, like someone doesn’t want to spill a secret.

This was my cephalopod year, the closest I ever came to wanting to disappear or sneak away into the deep sea.

Sometimes, at sea, you can still see Kablay and his wide eyes searching for a small ship, a scrap of moonlight. And every April he comes back to Donsol to see if he left any coins behind.

In one evening, at the beginning of a summer filled with new love and joy, a cacophony of color and laughter and dancing signaled the start of a love story unexpectedly born and grown from the wheat fields of Kansas and the tropical shores of India and the Philippines.

But I wonder if it takes a zoo or aquarium for us to feel empathy toward a creature whose habitat is shrinking due to humans, toward a creature most have us have never seen or heard?

A question conservationists ask always!! Working for an AZA facility has broadened my understanding of zoos and aqauariums as an empathy building tool but i still wonder about alternatives

The phrase “I can feel it in my bones” is synonymous with “I know it to be true.” What if the cassowary’s famous boom is also nature’s way of asking us to take a different kind of notice of them?

Because no matter what, you are not alone, not with ten quintillion insects on this planet and 390,900 plants known to science—no, you are most certainly not alone in this rich and dark dirt.

It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world.

If you let yourself be open to wonder, I mean really open yourself to being able to receive it, it’s the closest thing to falling in love I think—