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

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Its brain lies just behind its eyes in what is really the body, not the head—and each time the octopus devours a snack of crab or cockles, the brain can stretch itself if need be to make room for its esophagus. Octopuses are some of the only animals found whooshing and gliding through every single ocean on the planet: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern.

Tassos could free-dive so deep that the others on the hunt completely lost sight of him—including his shadow—even in the sparkling clear sea.

quivering from the pain of being left behind. I tried to console him that it’d be too cold, too deep, too scary, but this—this was a mighty injustice, to be left to wander the shore with his mama and little brother, particularly given his love of the hunters’ quarry. He had dressed as a cephalopod for Halloween for the previous three years, and most recently as a blue-ringed octopus costume that I stuffed and stitched together for him, complete with eyes made from pop lights.

The horizontal slit of an octopus’s eye is a door that judges us. I am certain it knows we humans are messing up entirely, that in just a matter of decades the oceans will become unswimmable to any of us animals.

They were cradling an octopus, bringing it back to their teacher, who had been swooning and hoping to see one for most of the month. Hold out your hands, hurry! they yelled, and plop-slopped it into my spread fingers.

My eldest started to panic—Why is it not moving, Mommy? Let’s put it back. It’s probably so scared! We tried to revive it in the water, but its lavender body floated in the incoming tide, spectral against the white marble that lined the beach. There had been too much stress, too many hands holding it out of the water; it was all just too much for that creature who prefers solitary senescence, the slow and steady stage of not moving much at all and just taking in the world and water around them. Everyone grew quiet. Some students slipped away to gather up their towels and leave.

Cockatiels are famous for their “cheddar cheeks,” tiny wheels of orange on each cheek, making them the little clowns of the bird world.

You can teach a cockatiel the following tricks: flips, handshakes, how to fly away (and come back) on demand, extending their wings as if they are about to offer up a hug, and whistling on command.

Dad scooped Chico up into the boat of a black umbrella, and my parents cooed over their wild luck. Later that night they clipped the cockatiel’s wings in the kitchen sink. My parents slept sound that night after walking miles around their neighborhood lake, their bed made extra soft and so full of hope. As Emily Dickinson once wrote, hope is the thing with feathers.

Flamingos gather around lakes where few fish can live, so they don’t have to compete with anything that eats their favorite food—

When flamingos sleep, they tuck one leg under their feathers, alternating with their other leg to regulate body heat and keep one leg warm at all times. What we think of as a flamingo knee is actually its ankle. A flamingo’s actual knee isn’t visible through its belly feathers.

People at the zoo that fateful day noticed a forty-five-year-old man acting somewhat erratic, pacing back and forth, but none could imagine why he reached over, grabbed Pinky by the neck—in front of children watching—and hoisted the five-pound bird over his head, throwing Pinky with brute force to the hot cement. Her foot was nearly severed from the trauma. The veterinarians wept as they euthanized her the next day.

We’d study through the day and maybe take a “disco nap” to help us stay out late. At around nine in the evening we’d start getting ready, and we’d waltz into the bars with barely any ID checks, in boy jeans and chunky black shoes, a mess of choker necklaces, and thin straps of leather bracelets. We’d hear stories of a girl who never made it home. I thought that was just the nineties. Before cellphones to check in and to call for backup from your friends, or to call the police with a few buttons.

If I’m out late at night, it is usually to pick up something for a late-night craft project for one of my kids. I still look over my shoulder in a dark parking lot. I text my husband to let him know I’m in the car and headed home.

I say a silent prayer for them all to come back safe to their nests late at night, again and again. So far, every one of them has come home. When I see groups of young women out together, I can’t help but silently offer something like prayer for them: Tonight, let them tuck their legs under safe covers, let their parents breathe steady in their own bedrooms and receive no panicked late-night phone calls

The ribbon eel also has a scruffy yellow goatee on its lower jaw, which stores all its taste buds.

Ribbon eels are mainly content to stay in the same reef hole or coral heap for years, poking their heads out with their mouths ecstatically open as if to say, Wow—look at this spectacular place I call home! Really it’s just drawing water over its gills to help it breathe, though, and that’s how it spends most of its days, most of its brilliant, flat body tucked away. In conditions like these, ribbon eels thrive and live up to twenty years. But the biggest threat to ribbon eels is the home aquarium trade because they don’t survive long in captivity. Inside a tank, they soon stop eating, a silent protest against the ugly hands that lifted their elegant bodies up and into a bag or bucket. Most don’t last even a year.

If I turned off a lamp, and whispered that it was time to sleep, and slowly let my eyes adjust to the darkness, I would see him still staring at me with eyes as big as malted milk balls in our moonlit room. His pouty mouth parted in a perpetual state of delight. His wispy eyebrows and fine spread of owl-feather hair.

And that is how we passed our quiet days at home together during the first cold season of his life, enveloped under blankets while a foot or two of snow fell overnight. Mouths wide open in astonishment at things I’d easily pass over any other time during the busy academic year.

And his favorite: light switches! In every room! The dining room had a dimmer dial, his favorite. I’d save it for last, and he’d kick his footie-covered legs while we slowly approached the dial.

When we have family movie nights, he grabs a blanket and jumps into my lap and arranges pillows around us: Look, Mommy! We’re in a cave! He curves his matchstick body against mine so closely I can almost imagine him a toddler again. He has not completely swum away.

The town had never seen that many saris and Barong Tagalogs—the men’s formalwear of the Philippines, hand-loomed from pineapple fibers—all gathered together before, and our wedding made the front page of the paper.

The superb is a bird of many colors. Its beak is like the blackest-black night in January, when you’re trying to write a letter on black construction paper with a black swan feather dipped in India ink: it’s pretty black.

Iridescent blue feathers on the superb’s head flash extra blue as they catch the sun, little eyes against the black oval of its nape.

Perhaps my favorite detail about these birds is that the male actually clears a “dance floor” before he gets his groove on, laying down leaves or scraps of paper to mark the boundaries.

We had only three songs on the “Do Not Play” list for our wedding DJ: “Strokin’,” “The Chicken Dance,” and “Macarena.

People were still smiling, drinking, chatting, but no one was dancing

Too late: I recognized those rumba notes at once.

The 1996 music video for “Macarena” is a riot of color: the featured dancers wore silver hot pants, orange headscarves, a pouf of lavender hair, bare midriffs galore, chunky platform shoes. Skin color was a rainbow among the dancers, too—I think it was the first time I had seen an Indian woman in braids and a bindi on MTV.

I know it’s the worst earworm. I know the video is obnoxious with glee. I know the song is now banned from most weddings. But didn’t your foot tap ever so slightly when I first mentioned the song?

And so, I ask: When is the last time you danced like a superb bird of paradise?

It might take two to tango, but it only takes one to strut their stuff and shake their tail feathers, even a little bit.

My last night in New York was spent with my two fifteen-year-old best friends, Americ and Sara, crying in our sleeping bags through the night, and then over the ruckus of the robins and warblers who greeted us at dawn. We promised to always be in touch and meant it, but at fifteen, when every change seemed ultradramatic, the weight of this impending move seemed to shift my whole body into waves of not even knowing how I could possibly live without these girls in my daily life.

When you spend as long as the red-spotted newt does in a search like this, you grow pickier, more discerning, but are never really salty for long. You measure summers in merry-go-round time, in mental maps of the various walks from your mother’s workplace in Kansas to the temporary motel in Iowa you had to live in for a few months, to your dream home you left in Arizona, imagining walks past cactus, riverbed, across neighbors’ yards, and past chipped park benches in so many states.

In its juvenile stage, the red-spotted newt—called an “eft”—is a delightful orange with dark red spots outlined in black.

Years later, when the newt reaches its adult stage, all that gorgeous color turns to an olive green, with only the scarcest pops of orange left scattered on its now shiny and glossy wet back.

Scientists in Indiana recently discovered that newts find their way home by aligning with the earth’s electromagnetic field. They transported several newts about forty-five kilometers from their home pond and set them up in tanks.

In every one of the experiments, the newts gathered to the side of the tank, orienting themselves in the direction of their home pond.

These newts are one of the only amphibians to contain a ferromagnetic mineral in their bodies, and that, combined with their incredible capacity to memorize sun- and starlight patterns to return to their original pond waters, make them an animal on par with salmon for their excellent homing capabilities.

A decade after I left Western New York as a teenager, I was finishing up a fellowship year in Madison, Wisconsin. I scanned the academic job boards for entry-level professorships and had to blink twice when I saw there was an opening not too far from my old home. It was a long shot, I knew, but I applied anyway, even as I drove around to local bookstores and coffeehouses in Madison to apply for jobs there.

But it wasn’t my forever home. Though we still keep in touch, my best friends had long since moved away. I was still one of too few brown people in town. I was tired of acquaintances at the post office asking about “my people,” meaning Filipinos or Indians; tired of people saying Namaste! to me in the grocery store, when I was least prepared for it; tired of the increasingly hostile climate at work if I dared to suggest more diversity on campus; and simply tired of being the one brown friend to so many people.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d spotted such a newt in the hardest, coldest days in New York, when all I could do was daydream of how to move my family anywhere else. I’d like to think if I’d seen those orange-taillight spots, I might have been able to pacify my increasingly restless self, might have been reminded of the promise that no matter how cold your home pond feels, a thaw always draws near, eventually.

I could feel it in my bones, my homing instinct pulled me so strongly to this land, a new and exciting landscape for my family to explore—a landscape full of blue sky and whirls of thick kudzu and cricket song.

The gumball-colored reds and blues of a cassowary’s head and featherless neck can make you think of a carnival in the jungle, all festoon and bunting. It’s comical from head to toe, really.

But don’t underestimate the cassowary—it is one of the only birds on the planet ever known to kill a human.

This “murderous nail,” as Ernest Thomas Gilliard described it in 1958, “can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease,” but misguided pet owners aside, usually it’s only employed when food is involved. For example, cassowaries can get used to humans feeding them and will begin to approach any human expectantly. If they’re denied, they’ll kick and slash. Puncture and lacerate.

The casque helps them figure out the acoustics of their surroundings, amplifying the sounds of a dense forest, helping them run about thirty miles per hour even if there doesn’t seem to be a clear path in a forest. Cassowaries run with their heads lowered, so the casque also functions as a helmet. A recent discovery of bones of the Corythoraptor jacobsi–a strutting dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous period—revealed a strikingly similar skeleton to the cassowary’s, complete with a crest-like casque, reinforcing the cassowary’s nickname: The Living Dinosaur

Females grow five to six feet tall, taller than their male counterparts, and flash much brighter blue necks. They can leap up to seven feet high. They hate dogs and cats and horses, and no one knows why.

Fruit trees benefit from the cassowary’s diet, too; scientists have discovered that seeds from the ryparosa, a highly prized Australian tree, are more likely to sprout after a ride through the cassowary’s digestive tract. Still, even with the cassowary’s natural propensity to help its own environment—to give back, so to speak—only 20 percent of their natural habitat remains.

Most cassowary deaths are due to being hit by cars while the birds are scrounging for food too close to a highway.