Ivory-billed Woodpecker
I’ve always been a very rational person. When I heard about God as a kid, I envisioned an Old Testament-style God with long white hair and a long white beard driving a spaceship. I figured that if space was all that was out there, then Heaven had to be somewhere in space, and so that’s where God must be too. I only ever pictured God from behind, working the control panels with space out the front window and chatting with me over the radio. I liked it, but this God concept didn’t age welI, leaving me in adulthood with only a tenuous grasp on any sort of structured belief system.
I remember when the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker (aka the Lord God bird) was resurrected in the glorious, swampy woods of Arkansas in 2004 and the hope and skepticism that swept through the birding community. The ivory-billed was (and maybe is) the largest woodpecker in the US. It lived in the pine forests and bottomland hardwood swamps that used to blanket much of the southeastern United States and Cuba. As forests disappeared from logging in the mid-nineteenth century, so did ivory-billed woodpeckers. Thought to have been driven to extinction more than once, the world had given up all hope by the mid-1900s and once again pronounced it extinct. The US had lost its largest woodpecker and much of its beautiful, wild home.
Or so we thought until 60 or so years later when a kayaker in Arkansas claimed to see an ivory-billed woodpecker fly out of those magical swamps right in front of his face. A couple of other folks also reported seeing an ivory-billed in the same area. An amateur birder/professional acoustics researcher spent 1,500 hours in search of the bird, capturing a few blurry seconds of video footage as evidence. Biologists poured into the Big Woods in Arkansas to confirm the sightings and then poured over the blurry video pixels to analyze size, movement, and markings to prove the existence of the extinct bird. While there were skeptics, the general consensus was that the ivory-billed was no longer extinct, and it was moved to the critically endangered list.
We are still waiting for evidence that will convince everyone that they are out there. With armies of scientists and photographers only turning up a few sightings and some blurry Yeti-type video footage, the questions raised include: where are they? How is it possible that we can’t find them if they’re there? And how can we believe in the existence of something we can’t see?
Ivory-billed woodpeckers ride two worlds: life and death, dark and light, real and imagined. They raise babies and make life out of dead and dying trees. They soar in the sun over the treetops and glide in the shadowy forest. They are both of the biological and the mythical. Maybe they’re out there dipping between worlds—appearing for fleeting moments in ours and then disappearing into other realms through the portals they’ve cut in trees. Or maybe they’re just residing quietly in that swampland, waiting for someone to bring a decent camera with them on their next kayak trip.
I’ve turned from a Lord God bird skeptic into a believer since the woodpecker came back online 15 years ago. By believing it’s out there, I feel hope for the protection of that special land and for the recovery of other animals. It also means that we can have fun going on kayak trips to try to spot one. Who knows what other cool critters we’ll see along the way? The ivory-billed has also helped me believe more broadly in things unseen. Adult me says that God probably isn’t driving a spaceship in space, but maybe there’s another place God could be. Maybe God is you and me and the ivory-billed woodpecker and the beetle grubs it eats and the tupelo trees in the swamps. Maybe God is just the whole dang world.
If you are lucky enough to spot an ivory-billed woodpecker in your cards, I hope you brought a camera. Like the ivory-billed, we humans also ride two worlds. We are both destroyers and saviors, both all-knowing and blind. We can royally mess stuff up, but we can also be its saving grace. We can’t know everything, but we often can’t accept that we don’t know everything.
The ivory-billed woodpecker is telling us to act as if we don’t know what kind of amazing beings dwell in the forests and deserts and oceans on this earth. Don’t wait until something’s possibly extinct to conserve the land or learn about it. This may translate to your personal life, such as not waiting for a relationship to get almost beyond repair before you start working on it. Or letting a dream die because it seems impossible. Or maybe it means getting to know the nature around you and figuring out your favorite animals that are threatened with extinction, where they live, what they need, and what you can do to help. It’s harder to bring things back from the brink. Consider how we can do the work now to make things better in the future.
CONTRARY
Have you been working hard on a project or idea and aren’t seeing the fruits of your labor? If you picked the woodpecker upside down, it is signaling that now might be the time to consider whether you need to continue on as you’re going, pivot, or desert it all together. You may simply need to be patient. Or maybe it’s time to talk to trusted friends and mentors about the project and whether a different approach might be more successful. On the other hand, it could be time to table it all together and consider other projects. Before you decide anything, take time to search your gut. Be patient. Ask for help. Maybe that ivory-billed woodpecker sighting is just one more kayak trip away.
— A S
Texas Horned Lizard
Old timers—well, even middle timers—talk about the days when Texas horned lizards, or horny toads, ran rampant all across Texas. When you could pluck the state reptile straight out of your own backyard. Those were the days.
Texas horned lizards have since disappeared from large swaths of Texas and neighboring Oklahoma due to a combination of factors, including habitat loss and fragmentation; pressure from the pet trade; and impacts to their main food source, harvester ants, due to invasive red imported fire ants and pesticides. Although they are not threatened with extinction across their range from the southern US and into Mexico, they are listed as threatened in Texas and as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need in Oklahoma.
The good news for horny toads in Texas is that these beloved critters hold a special place in the state’s cultural and natural heritage. Conservation organizations are banding together to support horny toad populations by releasing captive bred lizards in an effort to reintroduce them to areas where they’ve largely been lost, like Central Texas.
Why spend all of this money and time on an animal that’s not even endangered, you might ask? Folks want to make sure that the horny toad steers clear of extinction not only for the sake of the horny toad, but for other Texas critters too. The charismatic horny toad serves as an effective catalyst for creating new generations of conservationists. They’re cute, cool, and pretty easy to catch. And catching horny toads in your backyard is not only fun—it’s a gateway to appreciating animals and their habitats and the environment in general.
And what a gateway critter the horny toad is! They’re like tiny, cute dinosaurs that start out about the size of a penny and grow up to 5.5 inches at most. These highly edible critters also have some impressive ways to avoid getting eaten. Their first line of defense is camouflage. Their mottled coloration helps them blend in with the dusty ground, and their horns break up their body outline, making them harder to see when they aren’t moving. If a predator does see them, they can puff up, hiss, and lunge to try to scare it away. If that predator’s a coyote, dog, or bobcat, they can also squirt foul-tasting blood from their eyelids into the animal’s mouth and face. Cute. Tough. Inspirational.
If you came across the Texas horned lizard, it has a lesson for you about pluck and grit—about defending yourself and getting back up when you’ve been knocked down. Back in 1897, the people of Eastland, Texas entombed a poor living horny toad in a cornerstone of their courthouse as part of a time capsule, along with a Bible and a newspaper—testing a claim that horny toads could hibernate for 100 years. When they demolished the courthouse 31 years later and unearthed the time capsule, they found the horny toad—still alive.* They named him Old Rip and boy, was he a sensation. Although Old Rip died of pneumonia less than a year after his resurrection, he lives on as the supposed inspiration for Warner Brothers’ Michigan J. Frog and through yearly festivities in the town of Eastland. Consider where in your life you could use some of Old Rip’s grit and longevity.
CONTRARY
If you chose the horned lizard upside down, it may be asking you to think about your own defenses. Horny toads have some impressive defenses that help them survive, and they break out different defenses depending on the threat. They’ll run away from a rattlesnake, but stay still if threatened by a whiptail snake. They’re no dummies—they know they can’t outrun a whiptail. Think about your own defenses. Have you cultivated some survival techniques in certain relationships or situations in your life? Do they still serve you? Do they bleed into other relationships or situations? The horned lizard is asking you to pay attention to your defenses and make sure that they’re being used appropriately and effectively.
— A S
* Alledgedly
African Bush Elephant
In some ways elephants are just like us. Like humans, elephants evolved in the forests and savannas of Africa. As long-lived, largely migratory animals, social bonds became important for survival and complex communication evolved to navigate group life. Like us, elephants (specifically the African bush elephant, African forest elephant, and Asian elephant) spread out across Europe and Asia around the same time to settle distant lands. Both of us evolved into intelligent, emotional, and social beings.
In many other ways, elephants aren’t like us at all. This is important to note, because using humans as a goal post for animal behavior can lead to misunderstandings and a lack of empathy and appreciation for animals that are different from us.
Humans have been sharing countless observations that demonstrate how smart and sensitive elephants are for a long time. Science seeks to carefully quantify these behaviors in an attempt to officially explain their intelligence. Do they really mourn? Can they really problem solve and use tools? To test elephant intelligence in the past, scientists administered experiments that failed to consider the unique senses and life histories of elephants. We tested them as if they were humans and then judged them on their performance. Today, the scientific world is only beginning to understand and appreciate the intelligence and emotional complexity of elephants and many other creatures.
Here’s what I know about elephants:
They are enormous. The African bush elephant is technically the largest land mammal in the world, weighing up to 13,000 pounds. The largest elephant on record is estimated to have weighed a staggering 24,000 pounds—or the equivalent of 12 bison (aka the largest mammal in North America).
They are herbivores that spend from 12 to 20 hours each day foraging and eating hundreds of pounds of grasses and fruit and such. Evidence from two African bush elephant matriarchs suggests that they only sleep about two hours a day in the wild and enter REM sleep (aka dream time) every three to four days.
Elephants exhibit empathetic behavior and have been known to comfort each other when they are upset and also help injured friends and family.
They take an interest in their dead that can look a lot like human mourning. They have been known to stand around, explore, and place soil and leaves on top of their dead.
Their trunks can hold more than three gallons of water, take down a tree, smell, breathe, and snuggle a baby.
Elephants make a wide variety of calls, including infrasound calls that can travel up to 2.5 miles but are inaudible to human ears. New research suggests that they also communicate through seismic waves passing through the ground between their feet.
All three species of elephants are in danger of disappearing. In the early 1900s an estimated ten million elephants roamed Africa. Only about 415,000 African elephants remain and we’re losing them to poaching faster than they are being born. In Asia, there are now only 40,000 to 50,000 elephants left in the wild. Asian elephants are endangered due to habitat loss and persecution by farmers when they clash over crops.
Here’s what I don’t know about elephants:
What it feels like to see a wild elephant.
What grief feels like to an elephant.
What elephants think about us.
If you picked the elephant, it’s asking you to think about memory. Elephants can remember individuals from the smell of their urine alone and remember the location of watering holes that are 30 or more miles apart. The memories of experienced matriarchs have been shown to be critical to the survival of their groups during times of drought. Our memories are important for all kinds of reasons, including impressing our friends and family with animal facts and also healing and growing. Recalling memories can give us insight into our current feelings, relationships, and life choices. Sometimes the memories that surface in our dream worlds and the memories of our parents and ancestors can also help us learn and heal. Give yourself space and stillness to notice dreams and memories that are surfacing. What are they telling you about where you’ve been, where you’re at, and where you need to go?
CONTRARY
If you picked the elephant upside down, it’s sending you a signal that you may not be in touch with your memories and emotions. Try keeping a journal and, if you have them, revisiting old journals. You may want to work with a therapist or practice mindfulness work like meditation to get in touch with your emotions and work through any stuck emotions. If you’ve been wanting to get into meditation, but find it intimidating or hard to stick with, try closing your eyes and tapping into a visualization for just a few minutes to get started. I’m sharing one below with an elephant, but you can substitute any animal, environment, and scenario of your choice:
Close your eyes. You’re in a dark, mossy forest under a full canopy of trees. The leaves are gently moving in the breeze and the light is just barely filtering through. There are plants growing on plants growing on trees and the soil is rich and fluffy and so dark that it’s almost black. You smell the rich earth, sun-warmed tree sap, and moisture on the leaves. You see an elephant curled up on the soft ground like a dog napping on a carpet and it looks up at you sleepily, inviting you to come over. It opens up its curl enough to create a perfectly you-shaped spot right in its sideways lap. You lay down in the space that’s still warm from where it’s trunk was resting. You both adjust positions until you are nestled in with the elephant and its head is positioned so that its long eyelashes are lightly brushing your cheek as it inhales and exhales. You inhale and exhale along with it, smelling its warm, musty skin and feeling the rhythmic touch of its soft lashes.
— A S
Arctic Tern
Arctic terns may look unassuming. They’re mostly white and grey, with a long forked tail, sharply angled wings, barely there legs, a bright red bill, and a black cap. They weigh about as much as a deck of cards and reach up to a foot-and-a-half long. These little unassuming birds happen to do something really amazing—they make the longest annual migration of any animal on Earth.
Every year, terns breed in the Arctic and Subarctic and then spend winter in the Antarctic. On average, they travel 44,000 miles round trip every year. As relatively long-lived birds, this means that a 30 year-old tern will have traveled the equivalent of three trips TO THE MOON AND BACK in its lifetime.
This might sound like a pretty exhausting existence, but the Arctic tern lifestyle is pretty appealing. As a human, getting to fly across the world sounds exciting—the views! Also, Arctic terns experience more sunlight each year than any other creature on Earth. Goodbye, seasonal affective disorder! If that isn’t appealing enough, a big part of a male’s courtship routine involves feeding small fish to a female and continuing to feed her throughout the nesting period. Yes, please!
If the tern has flown into your cards, it’s reminding you that you are on a journey. Consider where you are on a physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional path. Is there one of these elements that you have been pushing aside? Is there another that has been receiving the bulk of your energy? Consider where you could put energy toward health, healing, and growth, and take a tiny next step to do so.
CONTRARY
If the tern has appeared to you upside down, it is reminding you to Live. In. The. Now. If you were to draw lines to approximate the Arctic tern’s round trip migration over the Atlantic Ocean, you might see an infinity symbol. We are at one point in the journey of our lives and our lives are one point in the journey of our souls and molecules. But if time’s not even linear, then maybe being at a certain point isn’t even accurate (belated disclaimer: uninformed physics and metaphysics speculation time!)? Either way, right now, we’re humans! And yes, we’re all actually 99.9999999% empty space, and if you got rid of all that empty space we could each fit in a particle of dust—but it feels pretty important to be a human. Don’t forget to make the most of your fleeting journey as a human by being present in the moment. Maybe it feels like a great moment. Maybe it feels like a crummy moment. But gosh darnit, it’s what we’ve got. Don’t waste your time obsessing over the past or worrying over the future. Just enjoy that summer in Iceland while you can and don’t worry about all the miles you’ll need to fly—that part will happen when it needs to happen.
— A S
Komodo Dragon
Komodo dragons only live on a few islands in Indonesia and nowhere else on the planet—and they are intense to say the least.
First of all, Komodos are enormous (technically the largest living lizard). The males can reach up to 10 feet long and weigh about 150 pounds. Because they can eat 80% of their body weight in one go, a Komodo has weighed in at up to 300 pounds with a belly full of undigested deer, water buffalo, or other prey.
Komodos are also fairly fearsome hunters, fighters, and cannibals. Adults are so fearsome that when their baby dragons are born, the babies immediately make a break for the treetops and stay there for one to two years. They’ll also roll themselves in feces to avoid getting cannibalized.
In addition to eating each other, Komodo dragons eat carrion and hunt other live prey. They rely on stealth, speed, and strength to ambush their prey and use their razor sharp teeth to tear it apart. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the inside of a Komodo’s mouth, you might be thinking, “Um, I don’t see any teeth.” Komodo teeth are almost entirely covered with gum tissue—but they’re there. And they’re gnarly. When these dragons bite their prey, they release venom into their saliva through ducts located between their teeth. The venom makes its way into the wound and quickens blood loss and death.
It’s not all blood and gore for the Komodo dragon, however. Apparently they can also be lovely, sweet creatures. I stumbled across an article about a dragon named Krakatoa in The St. Augustine Record. There’s a photo of Krakatoa (described by a handler as being very much like a puppy dog) at his eighth birthday party with a paper party hat and a relaxed look about him. He’s poised to tuck into a sheet cake made of meat and decorated with dead mice, while a group of eight year-old kids look on as part of the celebration. Eight year-old humans celebrating the birthday of an eight year-old dragon? We should do this kind of thing more often.
If you wandered across the Komodo dragon, it’s asking you to think about other ways of sensing the world. Komodos experience the world very differently than us. They rely strongly on their sense of smell. They stick out their long forked tongue to taste the air and then touch the roof of their mouth, which houses their Jacobson’s organ, to create a smell picture of the world. Komodos (and most lizards, frogs, salamanders, sharks, and some others) also have a parietal eye, sometimes called a “third eye.” It is a light-detecting photoreceptor on the top of their heads that can’t form an image, but helps regulate circadian rhythms and is useful for escaping when a predator swoops down from above. We humans also have this third eye—ours just evolved to be buried in our brain in the form of the pineal gland.
What are we missing with our limited senses? What similar views of the world do we share with other animals, like the Komodo, which use their tongues to smell as a dominant sense? What does it feel like to have a parietal eye on the top of your head? Imagine yourself as a Komodo dragon on one of their three tropical islands in Southeast Asia. Close your eyes and smell the deer a mile away in the humid air with your tongue. Sense light and shadow through the parietal eye on the top of your head. Your way of experiencing the world is just one of billions and trillions of ways of experiencing the world. Think of all of the animals together on Earth right now and imagine all of the ways the world appears to them. Our way is just one example.
CONTRARY
If the Komodo appeared upside down, it’s asking you to work smarter, not harder. The Komodo dragon spends a lot of time chilling and waiting for the opportunity to pounce on prey, and its venom makes its job even easier. If you’re facing a challenge that feels daunting or you feel like you’re running around in your life trying not to drop the ball left and right, consider the dragon. Can you come up with a smart solution to work with more ease? Can problem solving be your venomous saliva? Take a walk or sit under a tree and see if nature can’t clear your mind and help you brainstorm a way to a productive but chiller you.
— A S
Bull Shark
Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the fictional book-turned-Steven Spielberg movie about a great white shark that wreaks havoc one summer along the shores of a New England beach town, bears some striking similarities to a true story of an actual havoc-wreaking shark. Except instead of taking place in the 1970s, it took place in 1916. And instead of doing damage along a fictional coastline, it did damage along the Jersey Shore all the way to upstate New York by way of a creek. And instead of being a great white shark (which like most marine animals has adaptations that allow it to live in saltwater, but not in freshwater like creeks), some believe that it was—dun-dun-duuuun—a bull shark.
The bull shark’s ability to not only dabble in freshwater, but to spend real quality time there, is part of why they have earned such a dangerous reputation. Bull sharks have special glands and kidney adaptations that allow them to osmoregulate, or balance their body salts, in both freshwater and saltwater. Bull sharks are so comfortable in freshwater that they have been found in the Amazon River in PERU.* Two fishermen even claimed to find one in the Mississippi River in ILLINOIS in 1937. Some of them also live in Lake Nicaragua, which they reach from the Pacific Ocean by swimming upstream against the current of the San Juan River, arcing into the air like spawning salmon.
Bull sharks are members of the requiem shark family. In Catholicism, a requiem is a mass for the dead. Sharks and death are often lumped together in our scare tactic-loving culture. It’s true that bull sharks are aggressive and inhabit the same shallow waters that swimmers do—a dangerous combination. However, it’s worth looking more closely at the statistics around bull shark attacks. Each year, fewer than 20 people die from bull shark attacks worldwide. In comparison, about 20 million bull sharks die from deaths related to the fishing industry each year. The human activity of shark culling to reduce shark attacks has not been shown to reduce the number of attacks as it intends to do—but it almost certainly does have unintended consequences for the health of marine ecosystems. Due to these human activities, the bull shark is now classified as near threatened with extinction.
If you chose the bull shark, it has a message for you about flexibility and endurance. When it comes to geologic time, sharks are running a marathon compared to humans’ 100 meter sprint. Sharks are older than TREES.** They’ve been around for 400 million years and survived FOUR mass extinctions.*** Instead of bones, sharks have flexible cartilage for a skeleton, allowing them to swim super fast. The bull shark’s ability to adapt its salt intake depending on its environment is another example of flexibility, allowing it to live in the Amazon River if it feels like it. You don’t need to be a shark to be flexible and play the long game. Is there somewhere in your life right now where being more flexible could make things better in the long run? As Jules likes to say: hook your future self up today.
CONTRARY
When you flip a shark upside down, it goes into a state called tonic immobility that looks a lot like hypnosis. Orcas have been seen taking advantage of this in the wild, in at least one case flipping a great white shark over and killing it. One of the most dangerous animals to humans on Earth can be subdued by simply flipping it over. If you pulled the shark upside down, it is reminding you to think outside the box for solutions to challenges in your life. If you always take a similar approach to solving a problem and it no longer seems to work, take a moment to think creatively and find another solution. It may be simpler than you think.
— A S
Hagfish
Sometimes it’s hard to love an animal whose face you don’t understand. The hagfish is one such animal. Try as you might, that face is not going to get any easier.
Many things about the hagfish, besides the face, are challenging. It’s a fish with a skull (okay), but no jaws or backbone (hmm). Looking at the hagfish, you might think that it’s just an evolutionary blip—a short rest stop on the road to something much more impressive. But when you compare today’s hagfish with the hagfish of yore, it doesn’t appear to have changed much in 300 million years. So that weird, wormy body does seem to be working for them in some crucial ways.
Hagfish are really good at eating and at not being eaten. They spend much of their time boring into dead carcasses on the sea floor with their keratinous tooth-like structures. Since they don’t have jaws, they use a few quick moves to tie their bodies into a knot to create torque and get some power behind their bite. Hagfish can also go a long time without eating and instead absorb nutrients directly through their skin, giving them a lot of flexibility in the meals department.
Hagfish have some scrappy strategies to avoid being eaten themselves. Their ability to tie their bodies into a knot is not only an effective eating strategy, but also allows them to slip away from would-be predators. They can also unleash some real Ghostbusters-worthy slime on predators if needed. When threatened, hagfish can exude a combination of mucus and protein fibers from pores along both sides of their body. The protein fibers unravel with the motion of the ocean, expanding the mucus up to 10,000 times its original volume in less than half a second. The slime can clog the gills of the predator—like a shark—after it bites the hagfish, giving the hagfish time to escape.
But isn’t it a problem that the hagfish already got bitten by the shark, you ask? Yes, but the hagfish has a super saggy, blood-filled skin sac as an external body covering that is only loosely connected to its other insides. This means that a shark can bite and hit skin, but miss vital muscles and organs, allowing the hagfish to slime another day.
Hagfish are known for burrowing themselves into a whale carcass and, at times, eating so much that they need to digest before they can wriggle their way back out. If you chose the hagfish, it’s not telling you to do that. I just wanted to add that as another fun fact. The hagfish is actually telling you, “You do you.” Maybe others think your slime defense is weird and gross. Sure, that may be true—but before you buy into peer pressure and adapt to more “normal” behaviors, consider the power of your unique abilities. This hagfish slime, as gross as it is, both helps hagfish survive and contains fibers that, when dried, are super strong threads with lots of potential for future fabric applications like artificial tissues and more. Your uniqueness is more valuable to you and others than you might think.
CONTRARY
Want to eat, but don’t have a jaw? No problem. Just tie your body in a knot so that the firm, flat part of the knot is right about where your jaw should be and voila! The rest of your body is now your lower jaw. A little too easy.
Maybe you don’t think you have the right tool for the job or the right skills to get what you want. If you chose the hagfish upside down, it’s letting you know that you have more resources and abilities than you are aware of at the moment. In the same way that you didn’t think a knotted-up body could serve as a jaw, you may not be seeing your own hidden talents and resources. Consider what you might already have in your possession to problem solve your way out of a situation or propel yourself toward a goal. It may be something that is right in front of or inside of you, but that you’ve overlooked or haven’t considered. The hagfish inspires us to work with and appreciate what we’ve got.
— A S
Brown Pelican
Sometimes it’s hard to love an animal whose face you don’t understand. The hagfish is one such animal. Try as you might, that face is not going to get any easier.
Many things about the hagfish, besides the face, are challenging. It’s a fish with a skull (okay), but no jaws or backbone (hmm). Looking at the hagfish, you might think that it’s just an evolutionary blip—a short rest stop on the road to something much more impressive. But when you compare today’s hagfish with the hagfish of yore, it doesn’t appear to have changed much in 300 million years. So that weird, wormy body does seem to be working for them in some crucial ways.
Hagfish are really good at eating and at not being eaten. They spend much of their time boring into dead carcasses on the sea floor with their keratinous tooth-like structures. Since they don’t have jaws, they use a few quick moves to tie their bodies into a knot to create torque and get some power behind their bite. Hagfish can also go a long time without eating and instead absorb nutrients directly through their skin, giving them a lot of flexibility in the meals department.
Hagfish have some scrappy strategies to avoid being eaten themselves. Their ability to tie their bodies into a knot is not only an effective eating strategy, but also allows them to slip away from would-be predators. They can also unleash some real Ghostbusters-worthy slime on predators if needed. When threatened, hagfish can exude a combination of mucus and protein fibers from pores along both sides of their body. The protein fibers unravel with the motion of the ocean, expanding the mucus up to 10,000 times its original volume in less than half a second. The slime can clog the gills of the predator—like a shark—after it bites the hagfish, giving the hagfish time to escape.
But isn’t it a problem that the hagfish already got bitten by the shark, you ask? Yes, but the hagfish has a super saggy, blood-filled skin sac as an external body covering that is only loosely connected to its other insides. This means that a shark can bite and hit skin, but miss vital muscles and organs, allowing the hagfish to slime another day.
Hagfish are known for burrowing themselves into a whale carcass and, at times, eating so much that they need to digest before they can wriggle their way back out. If you chose the hagfish, it’s not telling you to do that. I just wanted to add that as another fun fact. The hagfish is actually telling you, “You do you.” Maybe others think your slime defense is weird and gross. Sure, that may be true—but before you buy into peer pressure and adapt to more “normal” behaviors, consider the power of your unique abilities. This hagfish slime, as gross as it is, both helps hagfish survive and contains fibers that, when dried, are super strong threads with lots of potential for future fabric applications like artificial tissues and more. Your uniqueness is more valuable to you and others than you might think.
CONTRARY
Want to eat, but don’t have a jaw? No problem. Just tie your body in a knot so that the firm, flat part of the knot is right about where your jaw should be and voila! The rest of your body is now your lower jaw. A little too easy.
Maybe you don’t think you have the right tool for the job or the right skills to get what you want. If you chose the hagfish upside down, it’s letting you know that you have more resources and abilities than you are aware of at the moment. In the same way that you didn’t think a knotted-up body could serve as a jaw, you may not be seeing your own hidden talents and resources. Consider what you might already have in your possession to problem solve your way out of a situation or propel yourself toward a goal. It may be something that is right in front of or inside of you, but that you’ve overlooked or haven’t considered. The hagfish inspires us to work with and appreciate what we’ve got.
— A S
American Alligator
On a hot summer night in 2009, I was alone on a boardwalk deep in the Everglades National Park. The glow of Miami’s nightlife was only smudging out a slice of the ink-dark sky. Facing south, you could see all of the stars. The stars were coupled with a near plague of fireflies, haphazardly communicating with each other using their bioluminescent abdomens and criss-crossing flight patterns. I pointed my flashlight beneath the horizon and four hundred alligator eyes reflected my light back at me. They began moving toward me in silent unison. The gliding eyes, the diagonal flashes of the insects, and the broad sections of the Milky Way struck me with a profound sense of deep time and synchronicity. I wondered how long this particular dance had been going on and was struck with awe by the scale of such a timeline.
American alligators hit me with this same awe every time I see them lying on a bank, gliding through a marsh, or silently peering out of the water at the world above: they are fascinating windows into deep time. Crocodilians entered the scene more than 240 million years ago when their lineage diverged from that of birds. Ancestors that look very similar to present day crocodilians arose between 80 to 90 million years ago. One ancestor, Sarcosuchus, grew up to 36 feet long, weighed more than 8 tons, and ate dinosaurs for breakfast. Then, some 65 million years ago, the KT extinction event occurred, resulting in the extinction of about 75% of animals on Earth at the time, including non-avian dinosaurs. The ancestors to present day crocodiles and alligators survived. Today there are 23 species of crocodilians inhabiting almost all of the tropical regions on Earth.
Crocodiles and alligators (which appear to be very similar creatures, save for a few distinguishing characteristics such as the U-shaped snout and bluish-gray skin of the alligator, versus the V-shaped snout and olive green skin of the crocodile) are members of the archosaur lineage—as are today’s birds. Archosaurs (which also included both dinosaurs and pterosaurs) split off from the larger reptile lineage (namely lizards, snakes, and turtles) about 245 million years ago. Crocodilians are therefore more closely related to birds than they are to other reptiles alive today.
The American alligator is a rare conservation success story. Populations across its range were nearly decimated by the mid-1950s due to hunting and habitat loss. In 1967, American alligators were listed as federally endangered under a law that preceded the Endangered Species Act. Thanks to hunting restrictions and other conservation efforts, including captive breeding, they made a full recovery and were removed from the Endangered Species List in 1987. Today they have healthy populations across the southeastern US.
But are these survivors from deep time safe from the effects of climate change? The sex of an alligator is determined by hormones and by what temperature the eggs are kept at during the thermosensitive period of incubation. Eggs kept at around 91 degrees Fahrenheit produce males, while eggs kept above or below that temperature typically produce females. With a sex determination system that relies on the environment, hormone-mimicking pollution and a warming climate could affect alligator reproduction.
If you pulled the alligator card, this may be signaling the benefits of dual ecosystems. Alligators live an amphibious lifestyle, spending time in and out of the water. Do you have a place for refuge and a place for action? Maybe this is calling your attention to the need for boundaries between work life and personal life, for creative time versus social activities? What binary construct is on your mind these days, and how are you balancing the two worlds?
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If you pulled the alligator card upside down, maybe this ancient leviathan is asking you to look back through time and forward into the future. How little or how much have you evolved? Are you challenging yourself to grow in new and important ways? Are you staying true to your roots? Where do you want to go from here?
— J B J
Black Widow Spider
Female black widow spiders have one of the more villainous reputations in the animal kingdom, right up there with werewolves and velociraptors. Their sleek, shiny, tar black exoskeletons; the Ferrari-red hourglass symbol stamped on the underside of their bulbous abdomens; and their gangly, jointed legs all reinforce their creepy reputation as deadly killers who hide in the shadows. But the problem with this reputation is that it oversimplifies the beautiful complexities of these amazing animals.
Black widows are arachnids, like all spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites. They are famed for their uniquely toxic venom and are considered the most venomous spiders in North America. Male black widows are much smaller and browner than their female counterparts. Female widows are the ones that present the most danger with their larger venom reserves and beefier biting muscles. These spiders have one of the most potent venoms by volume known to people, but their bites are seldom fatal to humans. The black widows’ diet usually consists of other small invertebrates, but they’ve been known to trap and consume small mammals and reptiles at times. Contrary to common belief, only females of some widow species perform acts of sexual cannibalism and consume the male after mating.
Despite their highly toxic venom, casual attitude toward cannibalism, and resemblance to Dracula, the black widow is a fairly docile creature and a master of mixed messages. Their ability to create and weave beautiful, incredibly strong and functional webs using their own tools and designs has crowned them as creators and communicators in cultures worldwide.
If you’ve pulled the black widow card, perhaps she’s suggesting you pay attention to your audience. Black widows use aposematic coloration to warn predators of their highly toxic venom. They build their webs horizontally and hang on them from below, flashing their red hourglass to birds and other suspecting hunters above, while showing nothing but their infinitely dark exoskeleton to those below. There are times to show your colors and times to conceal. Read your crowd. This can prevent unnecessarily hurting people’s feelings or boring people at parties. It also builds healthy social skills and can strengthen relationships.
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Black widows typically inject their prey with enough venom to paralyze it, then inject enzymes that liquefy its insides and drink the juices from the corpse. When under threat from larger, inedible animals, the spider can bite and release no venom or just enough to sting (and cause nausea, severe abdominal and back pain, and paralysis of the diaphragm, which can make breathing a challenge—so no big deal). If you’ve pulled the black widow upside down, perhaps she is signaling the strength in pulling your punches. Sure, you may have the deadliest venom in the country, but what good is releasing it all into an animal you can’t even eat?
—JBJ
Loggerhead Sea Turtle
Caretta caretta, where you been so long? For a long time, nobody knew where exactly baby loggerhead sea turtles go after they’re born. Loggerheads, the largest shelled sea turtle on Earth, are born on temperate and tropical shores across the globe. From around April to August, mature females (ages 18 to 37 and up, depending on the population) drag their hefty selves out of the ocean and onto beaches, where they lay about 100 to 130 eggs in a depression in the sand. After around 45 days, tiny 2-inch-long loggerheads hatch and make their way to the ocean. Then, a decade or so later and a few feet longer, they return to the coastal waters off of their natal shores. The years in between are known as the “lost years” due to the black hole of knowledge that exists surrounding their whereabouts. Scientists and loggerhead lovers alike wondered: where do the hatchlings go and what do they do for those several years out at sea?
Folks knew that the journey of loggerhead hatchlings involves booking it as fast as possible into the deep ocean where predators are less plentiful, then taking a round-trip ride on ocean currents. Radio transmitters existed to better track animal movements, but none were small enough to attach to a wee sea turtle. Thanks to developing technology and the ingenuity of a biologist and her manicurist, scientists finally MacGyver’d tiny enough radio transmitter backpacks out of an old wetsuit, manicure acrylic, and hair extension glue. They put them on some young sea turtles and discovered something cool.
Before this research, we already knew that turtles born on the southeastern US coast catch a ride on the North Atlantic gyre to the Mediterranean and back for an 8,000 mile round trip migration. They use an inherited map to guide them along Earth’s magnetic field and take advantage of ocean currents in the gyre to travel faster and with less effort.
What surprised researchers when they tracked the young turtles’ movements was that instead of simply circling around in the gyre as predicted, at least some of these little turtles duck out of the current to hang out in the calm, seaweed rich center of the gyre: the Sargasso Sea. They seem to spend their time on mats of Sargassum seaweed, warming themselves in the sun and growing nice and big and strong.
With females laying a few clutches each season of about a hundred eggs each, you might think the oceans would be totally overrun with loggerheads. Unfortunately, it’s tough out there for a turtle. Habitat loss and degradation by coastal development, beach driving, and plastic, water, noise, and light pollution take their toll on nesting turtles. Newborn hatchlings that get drawn toward artificial light instead of taking a direct route to the sea, for instance, are at greater risk of dying due to exhaustion and predation. Once turtles are out to sea they risk getting killed or injured by fishing lines and traps and ingesting plastic objects like balloons that they mistake for food. These risks are so great that loggerheads are threatened with extinction.
If you chose the sea turtle, it’s asking you to embrace and nurture the ways in which you continue to grow. Loggerheads take their sweet time riding ocean currents and hanging out in the Sargasso Sea before becoming adults. Are you feeling like you should be further along in some ways than you are? Take a break from the current to spend some time in your Sargasso Sea to nurture yourself and your development at your own pace. Celebrate the fact that we never stop learning and growing, even if we seem to be just laying on some seaweed in the sun.
CONTRARY
As part of efforts to keep loggerhead sea turtle eggs from getting eaten by predators, well-intentioned folks put wire cages over nests. It turns out that the metal cages mess with the magnetic field around the eggs and may affect hatchling’s magnetic maps and cause problems with navigation. If you chose the sea turtle upside down, it’s asking you to gather all of the information about something before diving in to help. Sometimes you might think you’re helping, but if your actions are uninformed, they may have unintended consequences. If you’re trying to help a person or group of people, make sure that you ask them what they need instead of assuming you already know. If you’re trying to help other animals or the environment, research things you can do to help. For instance, cutting out single-use plastics and making reusable decorations instead of buying balloons are fine steps to take if we’re thinking about loggerheads.
— A S
North American Porcupine
I love to be surprised by an animal. Take the sounds of the North American porcupine. Some of you may already be familiar with “Teddy Bear the Porcupine’s Halloween Feast,” a YouTube sensation from 2013. In this brief video, Teddy Bear the porcupine happens upon a basket of small pumpkins and proceeds to tuck right in. For the entire video he’s munching and mumbling a series of cute, breathy squeaks and squeals that at times sound like a human baby. The sounds are surprising and cute enough to make you watch an entire video of a porcupine eating small pumpkins.
You may not be surprised to hear that the porcupine is the second largest rodent and the only quilled mammal in the United States. Or that it has some cool predator defenses, like 30,000 quick-releasing quills that continue to work their way into a predator’s body after the attack. If a porcupine feels threatened, it will first clack its long, yellow rodent teeth in what a gentleman named Darvil on YouTube calls “battle chatter.” It can also release a stink that resembles really intense human body odor. If all else fails, porcupines can run backwards into the offender, release their barbs into its body, then make a quick getaway. (Well, not that quick. They’re actually pretty slow, lumbering, bow-legged critters.)
What you may find surprising, however, is that their quilly defense can sometimes backfire on a porcupine. Porcupines like to spend a lot of time in trees. If they slip and fall, they can injure themselves with their quills. Other New World porcupines have evolved a prehensile tail that helps keep them from falling out of trees. While the North American porcupine lacks a prehensile tail, it has a layer of topical antibiotic on its quills that helps prevent infection should self-quilling occur.
Mating also comes with its surprises. Female porcupines are only fertile for eight to 12 hours each year, so mating time is pretty intense. A female will release vaginal mucus and urine to let males know that she’s getting ready to mate. Males will track her down and fight for access. The winner will guard a female and projectile urinate on her to induce estrus (aka fertile times). If she doesn’t like him, she may make indignant-sounding squeals, shake off the urine, and even threaten him with her quills until he leaves. If she does like him, she will raise her tail over her back to cover her quills and mate with him. Seven-ish months later, she’ll give birth to usually a single porcupette and together, they will make a prickle (the name for a mom and her porcupettes).
If the porcupine waddled into your world, it has a clear message for you: protect yourself, but don’t wreck yourself. Balance self-preservation with vulnerability. Your beautiful, bountiful soft fur says, “Hey, check me out, nice to meet you!” But the thousands of black-and-white spines mixed in warn, “We’re doing things on my terms.” You’re all party in the front and all business in the back. Consider your life and how vulnerability and self-protection manifest themselves in your actions and relationships. Are you feeling protective of a project or idea and scared to share it with the world? Or are you feeling some trepidation around opening up to a person? On the other hand, is there a relationship or situation where you could be putting up some stronger boundaries to protect yourself?
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When porcupettes are born, their quills are soft. They later harden into a weapon. If the porcupine appeared to you upside down, it is telling you to be careful not to harden too much yourself as you age. An upside-down porcupine is hiding its quills and revealing its vulnerable belly. Don’t forget to maintain a sense of wonder, curiosity, and play as you grow up and take on more serious responsibilities. How can you add a little lightness and play into your life?
— A S
Four-eyed Fish
I don’t know when or why we started collecting tautonyms—the scientific names of animals where the genus and species name are the same—but it’s been fun and we’ve amassed quite a list. If you look out for tautonyms when you’re reading about animals, you’ll be surprised at how many you come across.
An early and treasured member of our collection is the four-eyed fish, or Anableps anableps. Anableps live in the muddy waters of mangrove forests in Trinidad and in the northern parts of South America. They get their name from the fact that their two eyes actually function as four eyes. The top and bottom of each eye is separated by a membrane and each eye has two pupils. The top of the eye is tuned to wavelengths that work better for vision above water, and the bottom is tuned to wavelengths that work better below. This allows them to swim around at the water’s surface, keeping half an eye out for danger above and half an eye out for danger below.
Anableps belongs to a group of fish known as “one-sided livebearers.” Individuals are thought to be either left-handed or right-handed and only able to mate with a member of the opposite sex that has opposite handedness.* The male has a specialized anal fin called a gonopodium, which serves as his sex organ to impregnate females. If the male finds a complimentary-sided female who wants to mate, she’ll move a scale flap and they’ll mate. The female will then carry the eggs inside of her for a few months and give birth to about ten live young.
If Anableps swam into your cards, it may be telling you to juggle different perspectives. Are you focused on the details, the day-to-day, the mundane? Expand your vision to see the big picture and how you fit into it. Look into the past for insight and direction, while keeping your focus on the present. You may also need to juggle your own perspective with a partner or family member’s perspective. In all of these things, just remember: clear four eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.
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Sometimes it’s hard to focus when there’s so much going on around you. If the four-eyed fish appeared to you upside down, it’s time to dial in your attention to the things that most need it. If you’ve been procrastinating or avoiding a project or situation, make an effort to exercise discipline. Maybe you’ve been wanting to make progress on a personal project, exercise regularly, eat healthier, spend less time with your phone, or get into birding. Pick one thing that could use more of your time and attention, schedule it into your routine, and stick with it. Remember to be patient with yourself throughout the process and to always appreciate what you have and where you’re at in this moment.
— A S