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

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

For a beetle, fireflies live long and full lives—around two years—though most of it is spent underground, gloriously eating and sleeping to their hearts’ content. When we see these beacons flashing their lights, they usually have only one or two weeks left to live. Learning this as a child—I could often be found walking slowly around untrimmed lawns, stalling and not quite ready to go inside for dinner—made me melancholy, even in the face of their brilliance. I couldn’t believe something so full of light would be gone so soon.

Many herpetologists fear “unnamed extinctions,” meaning that more kinds of dancing frogs might become extinct before they’ve even had a chance to be discovered. And to lose them would be would be no small disaster—we’d lose their unique connections to eighty-five million years of evolutionary history.

A red-spotted newt spends years wandering the forest floor before it decides which pond to finally call home. 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.

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.

all I knew was that I wanted to stay in the classroom, but I also wanted to be able to spend time outdoors and write.

Suppose that boom shaking in our body can be a physical reminder that we are all connected—that if the cassowary population decreases, so does the proliferation of fruit trees, and with that, hundreds of animals and insects then become endangered.

There’s a spot over Lake Superior where migrating butterflies veer sharply. No one understood why they made such a quick turn at that specific place until a geologist finally made the connection: a mountain rose out of the water in that exact location thousands of years ago.

These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they’ve never seen, sound waves breaking just so, and fly out of the way. How did they pass on this knowledge of the invisible? Does this message transmit through the song they sing to themselves on their first wild nights, spinning inside a chrysalis? Or in the music kissed down their backs as they crack themselves open to the morning sun? Does milkweed whisper instructions to them as it scatters in the meadow?

EXamples of sketches and drawings of the barreleye fish have existed since 1939, but because the transparent, fluid-filled shield disintegrates without the water pressure of the deep, scientists never knew about the membrane until deep-sea cameras were able to catch one in a photo.

There are so many birds on this planet found only in the forest. So what happens when forests are cut down to make room for another high-rise or resort? We know the answer.

My name is important. I have been mocked for it all my life. I’ll never change it now. I wish more people would care to get tree names right. Teach yourself the difference between red maple and sweet gum. Spicebush and sassafras.

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.

All these names, silent, with still thousands and thousands more small silences following as fireflies hatch, wiggle through their larval stage, pupate, crack out of their shell, and then—winged—decide not to flash their chartreuse light. Scientists still don’t know how, when, or why fireflies decide to stay visually silent. And even though a field of tall grass might be teeming with fireflies, the space and time between flashes have grown longer over the years.

Where does one start to take care of these living things amid the dire and daily news of climate change, and reports of another animal or plant vanishing from the planet? How can one even imagine us getting back to a place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day? A place where “a bird” navigating a dewy meadow is transformed into something more specific, something we can hold onto by feeling its name on our tongues: brown thrasher. Or “that big tree”: catalpa. Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.

You might think of a heartbeat—your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.

Wonder for me is when you get surprised by your own curiosity when confronted with something unfamiliar or unexpected and that sense of curiosity turns into a kind of joy and excitement.

I’ve been visiting elementary school classes to teach poetry since I was in grad school, and little kids don’t have to be reminded or taught to wonder. They naturally are curious and astonished by cloud shapes, leaf shapes—bugs and birds—they have a gabillion questions for me about making a line of poetry, about the planet, and they naturally speak with metaphor. I’ll never forget one sweet boy who missed his dead mom and said, “I have a cloud in my pocket,” instead of saying I feel sad.

but I also try to suggest finding a different kind of currency—in addition to, not instead of—another way of being rich: with time, with friends, with knowledge.

I think it goes back to if you open yourself to wonder and learn about a plant or animal—human too—that you didn’t know about before, like if you knew their names, knew the tender way they took care of their tiny eggs in their very own mouths (jawfish), knew how they used the moon and stars to figure out how to fly home (indigo buntings), knew how they pulled a blanket up to their son’s chin on a cold night, I would imagine it would be harder … how could you still want to make violence on them?

Since you asked, it takes about seven to ten years for a corpse flower to finally unfold, and its bulb is only the size of a potato, and I really wish we could have kept the Indonesian name, bunga bankai—which is ten times better than what the English called it when they smuggled it out of Sumatra, no?

“The world is still stuffed with astonishments beyond our wildest imagining—isn’t that the most alluring sentence ever? Isn’t that the sentence we should have pinned up on every bathroom mirror in the world, so we all see it first thing in the morning every blessed day before we brush our excellent choppers?”