NOTES

INTRODUCTION: NATURE’S BEST AMBASSADORS

1. Zuri didn’t yet have a name when we first met. “For now,” I wrote in the Salt Lake Tribune on September 8, 2009, “you might just call her Exuberance.”

2. Guinness has long contended that it is Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia, which is estimated to be 130 million years old; others have suggested Daintree Rainforest in Australia, which might be 135 million years old and perhaps older than that. The debate offers excellent opportunities to explore the question of “oldest” from many points of view and, in doing so, strengthen our scientific understanding of both of these amazing places. That’s one of the things I’m hoping to do in this book, too. Resolving subjective debates is pointless. But we can use these debates to expand our understanding.

3. The bullet ant, tarantula hawk, and warrior wasp all register a 4 on the 4-point pain scale developed by entomologist Justin Schmidt, who wrote about his work comparing the impacts of stinging insects on humans—mainly using himself as the test case—in a wonderfully whimsical book called The Sting of the Wild.

4. Probably the diplodocus, which might also have had the “fastest” tail, as well. One computer model suggests that the great sauropod’s tail could reach supersonic velocities, making a noise like the cracking of a bullwhip.

5. That’s what Guardian science editor Robin McKie calls our ancestors. She also noted that what we now call “trophy hunting” might be deeply ingrained in our evolutionary history. In “Humans hunted for meat 2 million years ago,” McKie wrote about a 2012 discovery, by anthropologist Henry Bunn of the University of Wisconsin, that pushed back the date of systematic human hunting by hundreds of thousands of years.

6. I came to know about Conraua goliath from Steve Jenkins’s excellent children’s book, Actual Size. Jenkins is brilliant. His other titles include Biggest, Strongest, Fastest and Apex Predators, so he is clearly as enamored by superlative creatures as I am.

7. I often mock esoteric paper titles, but seemingly esoteric research can be extremely important. This paper, by Jie Xie, Michael Towsey, Jinglan Zhang, and Paul Roe, came as a result of the recognition that frogs, while excellent indicators of the state of the environment, can be hard to count. Automated frog call classification is an important part of monitoring frog populations.

8. This study showed that metal pollutants have different impacts on different frog tissues, and demonstrated that the liver and skin are better for assessing metal-induced oxidative stress than muscle is. This research was led by Marko Prokic of the Department of Physiology at the University of Belgrade.

9. At the time it was last assessed, the goliath frog was listed as endangered because the number of mature individuals was thought to have declined by more than 50 percent over the previous fifteen years.

10. The care and feeding of animals, as described in scientific reports like this, is always fascinating. “For more than a year we have fed them only with finely minced beef liver,” the authors wrote in “The aging of Xenopus laevis, a South African frog” in the journal Gerontologia in 1961.

11. Yes, I have strange hobbies. I started doing this in 2018 on a program called UnDisciplined on Utah Public Radio.

12. Writing in the journal Cells Tissues Organs in 2018, researchers from the Institute of Zoology in Stuttgart, Germany, called frogs “an undervalued model organism,” and argued that frogs are “a more time- and cost-efficient animal model to study human disease alleles and mechanisms.”

13. Yes, it’s as adorable as it sounds. And yes, we’ll be talking more about it—in chapter two.

14. Severe penicillin allergies are rare, with the estimated frequency of anaphylaxis at no more than 5 per 10,000, according to Dr. Sanjib Bhattacharya in “The facts about penicillin allergy: A review,” published in the Journal of Advanced Pharmaceutical Technology & Research in 2010. That’s of no comfort, of course, if you are one of the rare afflicted individuals, which is why individual genetic sequencing is so important to the future of medicine.

15. A lot more people have died from not getting penicillin than from getting it. In “What if Fleming had not discovered penicillin?” a team of researchers from King Saud University and the University of Sheffield imagined a world in which the antibiotic age had never occurred. It was not a pretty picture.

16. In the spring of 2017, for example, the New York Times commissioned a survey of more than 1,700 Americans who were asked to identify North Korea on a map. Only about a third could, and the others’ guesses, mapped with blue dots on a gray map of Asia, were all over the place, with concentrations of dots in India, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Vietnam. Those who didn’t know were nearly 20 percentage points more likely to believe the United States should engage in a war with that nation. Familiarity may not always breed affinity, but ignorance does seem to correspond to contempt. And geospatial illiteracy is no different than scientific illiteracy—both afflictions lead people to care less about important things.

17. The quest to answer the question “How fast is the universe expanding?” was detailed in Marina Koren’s 2017 Atlantic article of that name. (Our universe is expanding at a rate of 45 miles per second per megaparsec, according to some estimates.)

18. As Bill Nye famously observed in the first episode of his show The Eyes of Nye in 2005.

19. The kindest compliment I’ve ever received came from the author, essayist, poet, and journalist Sarah Gailey. “You write about terrible things, beautifully,” they told me. I certainly aspire to. Many of the pieces referenced here, and other journalistic works from my career as a newspaper reporter and freelance journalist, can be read at mdlaplante.com.

20. Forty-eight hundred pounds, as of the day I wrote this, give or take her last meal.

CHAPTER I: ALL THINGS GREAT AND TALL

1. Delelegn said he thought the society’s estimate, published in the journal Tropical Zoology in 2000, was high. He felt like the number was likely around 200, noting that he and the others who did the count “knew the elephants and knew where to find them.”

2. It was not until 2010 that a genetic study revealed the existence of a third species—the African forest elephant, Loxodonta cyclotis.

3. Hybridization of African and Asian elephants is possible in theory, as they share the same number of chromosomes, but there’s no clear scientific or conservationist purpose for such a creature, and only one such animal is known to have ever existed. “Motty,” who had an Asian mother and an African father, died twelve days after he was born in England’s Chester Zoo.

4. Shoshani was killed in a bus bombing in Addis Ababa in 2008. We lost a passionate advocate for elephant research.

5. Elephants is one of the best coffee-table books you’ll ever find—and you can pick up a used copy for $10 online.

6. In “The sound of silence,” published by Wired in 2006, the journalist John Geirland wrote about the fascinating history of infrasound, including an exploding-rocket experiment that will “generate data that promises to make the science of infrasound more precise.”

7. Though it’s not actually explicit in any of Cope’s more than 1,300 publications.

8. This was more explicitly stated in 1948 by the German biologist Bernhard Rensch in “Historical changes correlated with evolutionary changes of body size,” in the journal Evolution.

9. Maureen O’Leary from Stony Brook University led a team of dozens of scientists who “discovered” this hypothetical “mama to us all.” Their findings were detailed in “The placental mammal ancestor and the post-K-Pg radiation of placentals” in Science in 2008.

10. You might think that we’d have a good idea of the number of animals we share this rock with. As late as 2011, though, a research team from Dalhousie University in Canada noted in a PLOS Biology article titled “How many species are there on Earth and in the ocean?” that “the answer to this question remains enigmatic.”

11. Bonner’s work in books like Why Size Matters was often lauded for being “readable” and “unusually clearly written”—which should really be the rule, not the exception, for scientific books.

12. In “Cope’s Rule and the dynamics of body mass evolution in North American fossil mammals,” published in 1998 by Science, Smithsonian paleontologist John Alroy wrote that the body mass estimates for 1,534 North American mammal species showed that new species are 9 percent larger on average than older species in the same genera, and that the effect is stronger for larger animals.

13. “Sometimes, in evolution,” journalist Mark Strauss wrote in National Geographic in 2016, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” He was writing about a study, by Hervé Bocheren and his team from Germany’s University of Tübingen, that theorized the large size of Gigantopithecus, combined with its restricted dietary niche, likely led to its demise at the beginning of the last ice age when tropical forests turned into savannas; the study was published in Quaternary International in 2017.

14. Figuratively speaking, of course. Redwoods don’t have feet (they have relatively shallow root systems that extend out for hundreds of feet), and neither do whales (although their ancestors appear to have retained legs for millions of years after leaving the land for a life at sea).

15. When the sauropsids and synapsids parted ways, the former ultimately evolved into birds and reptiles, while the latter evolved into mammals—and all of this happened before plants had evolved to produce flowers, Michael Marshall wrote in “Timeline: The evolution of life” in New Scientist in 2009.

16. Goodman was prolific, working right up to his death in 2010. He left behind a briefcase of unfinished manuscripts. Years later, papers were still being published under his name. Among his final papers was “Phylogenomic analyses reveal convergent patterns of adaptive evolution in elephant and human ancestries,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

17. I’m not bad at reading scientific papers, but Goodman’s report, which is a deep dive into nonsynonymous and synonymous nucleotide substitution rates, would have read like Klingon to me if not for the reporting of science writer extraordinaire Ed Yong, perhaps the best in the game at translating science for “civilians.” He wrote “Elephants and humans evolved similar solutions to problems of gas-guzzling brains” for Discover in 2009.

18. “Patients and doctors know all too well that cancer is not one disease and there is no singular cure for the complex group of disorders,” Dina Fine Maron wrote in “Can we truly cure cancer?” for Scientific American in 2016.

19. In preparation for human clinical tests, Alex Stuckey wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune in 2017, “Schiffman has formed a spinoff company, PEEL Therapeutics. Peel is the Hebrew word for elephant.”

20. Kinzley and her staff were also hesitant to let Osh roam free among the cows since bulls can be very aggressive. One of the Oakland Zoo’s female elephants, Medunda, is particularly nervous around Osh. She maintains a friendly demeanor when there is a fence to keep them separate, but will run away if the gate is opened. Zoo officials said Medunda had been attacked by a bull in musth years ago, and had been nervous around bulls since—the connection to the long-term impact of sexual trauma experienced by humans is clear and ripe for further study.

21. Asian elephant spermatozoa, it turns out, don’t respond well to cryopreservation, so every new discovery helps, Kiso and fellow researchers reported in “Pretreatment of Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) spermatozoa with cholesterol-loaded cyclodextrins and glycerol addition at 4°C improves cryosurvival,” published in Reproduction, Fertility, and Development in 2015.

22. Among other things, this study on elephant sperm helped inform the work of scientists working to save a rare breed of wild horses in India, Kiso’s team reported in “Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) seminal plasma correlates with semen quality,” which was published by PLOS One in 2013.

23. In “Liquid semen storage in elephants (Elephas maximus and Loxodonta africana): species differences and storage optimization,” published in the Journal of Andrology in 2011, Kiso and her colleagues demonstrated sperm sensitivity to different “semen extenders” showing different products worked differently on Asian and African elephants.

24. “It is essential,” Comizzoli wrote in Reproduction, Fertility, and Development in 2013, “that more fundamental studies be directed at more species.” In the Asian Journal of Andrology, two years later, Comizzoli also noted that biobanking efforts needed to expand “beyond mammalian species, which will offer knowledge and tools to better manage species that serve as valuable biomedical models or require assistance to reverse endangerment.”

25. Lamarck wasn’t even the first to suggest that acquired characteristics could be inherited; that idea had been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Scientific historian Michael T. Ghiselin calls the Lamarck of our textbooks “an invention.” His essay on that subject, published in 1994 in The Textbook Letter, was entitled “The imaginary Lamarck: A look at bogus ‹history› in schoolbooks.”

26. There has been a resurgence of appreciation of some Lamarckian principles as we’ve discovered more about epigenetic inheritance but, as evolutionary biologist David Penny points out in “Epigenetics is a normal science, but don’t call it Lamarckian,” in the Journal of Clinical Epigenetics in 2015, it’s not the same thing.

27. Journalist Henry Nicholls detailed the evolution of this idea about evolution in “Giraffes may not have evolved long necks to reach tall trees” for the BBC in 2016.

28. Isbell made this observation along with Truman Young in “Sex differences in giraffe feeding ecology: energetic and social constraints,” which was published in the journal Ethology in 1991.

29. The publication of “Winning by a neck: sexual selection in the evolution of giraffe” in The American Naturalist in 1996 marked a substantial shift in evolutionary thought about how the world’s tallest land animal got its long neck.

30. Douglas Cavener led the team that compared giraffe and okapi genome sequences for the paper “Giraffe genome sequence reveals clues to its unique morphology and physiology,” published in Nature Communications in 2016. Among other observations, the team noted unique genetic changes in signaling pathways that regulate both skeletal and cardiovascular development, and genes that impact mitochondrial metabolism and volatile fatty acids transport, which might have something to do with the ability of giraffes to eat plants that are toxic to other animals.

31. Traditionally, one giraffe species and up to eleven subspecies have been recognized, Janke and his team wrote in “Multi-locus analyses reveal four giraffe species instead of one” in Current Biology in 2016, but “their genetic complexity has been underestimated, highlighting the need for greater conservation efforts for the world’s tallest mammal.”

32. “The whole endeavor of trying to understand and communicate about the diversity of life is being compromised by a naming system that is outdated and has bad consequences,” Yale University evolutionary biologist Michael Donoghue complained to New Scientist reporter Bob Holmes in 2004.

33. Kevin de Queiroz described some of the complexities around deciding whether something is a species in “Ernst Mayr and the modern concept of species” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

34. Science moves slowly. The 2016 assessment was based upon an interim consensus that a single species of giraffes is resident on the African continent. “Until an extensive reassessment of the taxonomic status of giraffes is completed,” the IUCN has declared, “it is premature to alter the taxonomic status quo.”

35. There are some species and subspecies that have come close, though, and they may not end up surviving. Western Pacific gray whales are in dire trouble, for instance. The Chinese river dolphin, a toothed whale also known as the baji, was declared functionally extinct in 2006—although there may have been a sighting of one in 2016, according to Guardian reporter Tom Phillips in “China’s ‘extinct’ dolphin may have returned to Yangtze river, say conservationists.”

36. It’s also where I earned my undergraduate degree. Go Beavers.

37. NPR’s immersive geology lesson, “Stand at the edge of geologic time,” narrated by Kirby, is simply riveting. It was published by NPR in 2016.

38. Whales are still being hit by ships way too often, according to research from the University of Washington that was published in Marine Mammal Science in 2014—although the paper, titled “Do ship strikes threaten the recovery of endangered eastern North Pacific blue whales?” answered its titular question with a cautiously optimistic “no.”

39. In 2018, Torres and her collaborators published their findings in “Documentation of a New Zealand blue whale population based on multiple lines of evidence” in the journal Endangered Species Research.

40. We tend to think of whale migrations as north-to-south affairs, but they also travel latitudinally. Marine biologist Juan Pablo Torres-Florez has identified one female blue that made a record-setting 3,200-mile journey from the Galapagos Islands to the coastal waters of Chile. He nicknamed the global traveler “Isabela,” after his child, because, he told me, “I’d like my daughter to know she can do amazing things.” Torres-Florez’s study, “First documented migratory destination for Eastern South Pacific blue whales,” was published in Marine Mammal Science in 2015.

41. This is one video of one whale in one place doing one thing—a single-point observation. It’s hard to overstate, however, what a truly “aha!” moment this footage offers. I’ve shown it to dozens of people, and every one of them sees the same thing: a whale choosing to forgo a small meal because it’s a small meal.

42. Intent listening to music in a car, for instance, has been shown to be a significant risk factor for young drivers. It’s probably a risk factor for older drivers, too, but only young ones were assessed in the study, “Background music as a risk factor for distraction among young-novice drivers,” which was published in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention in 2013.

43. That, it turns out, makes some of the world’s largest animals quite similar to some of the smallest. Ants do this as well, as we will examine in chapter eight.

44. We’ll dive deeper on that matter when we look at some of the world’s smartest animals.

45. I was on my way to work at the McMinnville News-Register, “that September day,” when I heard the news on my car radio. I had recently begun work as a sportswriter at that small-town Oregon newspaper. It’s a reflection of how little we initially knew about the extent and gravity of the attacks that morning, that the first thing my editor said, when I walked in the newsroom door, was, “There is a problem with your column about the cheerleading team; go fix that and then you can work on this New York thing.”

46. If that happened suddenly, NASA’s Sten Odelwald has observed, the atmosphere would continue to spin at the planet’s previous rate of motion, and “all of the land masses would be scoured clean of anything not attached to bedrock. This means rocks, topsoil, trees, buildings, your pet dog, and so on, would be swept away into the atmosphere.”

47. Cornelia Dean, who writes beautifully about science, explained this study in “From 9/11, a lesson on whales, noise and stress” for the New York Times in 2012.

48. Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik noted in 2015 four landmark scientific achievements over the prior year—including the first spacecraft landing on a comet, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, the development of the world’s fastest supercomputer, and new research in plant biology. “Then comes the punchline,” Hiltzik wrote. “None of these were U.S.-led achievements.” Why? Declining investment.

49. “For life to survive as we know it,” Marshall told the New York Times in 2002, “millions of people are going to have to die. It’s sad to say that, but it’s true. Millions of people are already dying—it’s just gonna have to start happening here.” Marshall’s logic—that it would take many deaths in the developed world to get people to start caring about the environment—was shocking to me when I first heard it. I’ve since heard only slightly less violent echoes of this reasoning from a number of respected scientists who have given up hope that anything but a global cataclysm will shake us from our stupor. None of them have ever advocated for terrorist acts, though.

50. And the number of trees has gone down considerably in the past few thousand years. Based on projected tree densities, the authors of “Mapping tree density at a global scale” wrote in Nature in 2015, “we estimate that over 15 billion trees are cut down each year, and the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.”

51. “The story of the carbon is huge,” Humboldt State University scientist Robert Van Pelt told San Jose Mercury News journalist Paul Rogers in 2016. “The carbon part of a redwood may be more important than the lumber part in the coming decades.”

52. In the California Gold Rush of 1849, according to the Save the Redwoods League, these giant trees were logged extensively. Today, only 5 percent of the original forest remains, along a 450-mile coastal strip.

53. I wrote about the great clone with an undergraduate student named Paul Christiansen in a story called “Devastated” for City Weekly in 2013. That piece was later honored with a Kavli Award for science journalism by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

CHAPTER II: ALL THE SMALL THINGS

1. With great humility, van Leeuwenhoek was always writing to other scientists asking for advice, feedback, and even criticism. “I shall be obliged to you for sending me the objections raised to my observations, that I may forward my further observations to your address,” he wrote to the German natural philosopher Henry Oldenburg, the father of scientific peer review. “But please to remember who I am and to take my opinions for what they are worth. I have always intended to stand by my speculations and my considerations till I should be better instructed or more experienced and then to abandon my previous opinions and to accept my latest views and put them down in writing.”

2. If you are a parent, or plan to become one, I strongly recommend Gilbert and Knight’s book, Dirt Is Good.

3. Nobody in the world is better at getting researchers to talk like real folk than science journalist Carrie Arnold, who wrote about “The never-ending quest to rewrite the tree of life” for PBS’s NOVA Next in 2017.

4. In Genesis 1:26, God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” You can blame humans for screwing up nature all you want, but if you believe in this particular god, it sure seems like it’s their fault for telling us we were in charge to begin with.

5. The authors of “Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity,” which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, later told me that they might have guessed high, noting that they had begun to wonder, after the paper was published, whether there had in fact been enough time in the 3.5-billion-year history of life on Earth for one trillion species to evolve. Whatever the number, the vastness of microbial diversity is hard to fathom.

6. This approach was also used in a 2002 rape case, also in Washington, resulting in the 2007 arrest of the murderer of a twelve-year-old girl, according to a 2015 article by Sara Jean Green in the Seattle Times.

7. The team found twenty genes with significant effects on facial features; the combination of these genes can be applied to approximate the appearance of a face from genetic markers, as described in “Modeling 3D facial shape from DNA” in PLOS Genetics in 2014.

8. How good of a picture can we really get from 90 percent of something? Imagine a tyrannosaur chasing after another dinosaur. Then recognize that the picture in your head—hungry eyes, mottled skin, gnashing teeth, lumbering legs, and tiny swaying arms—comes from a species from which we’ve recovered just a handful of fossils more than 50 percent complete, and just one that was 90 percent intact. (That fossil, known as Sue, is named for adventurer Susan Hendrickson, a salvage-diving, amber-mining, dino-digging legend.) Just like we’ll never have a perfect picture of a T. rex, it’s possible we’ll never have a complete image of all of the organisms discovered in Rifle. In both cases, though, there’s still a lot we can know from what we have found.

9. Banfield and her team detailed their findings about “ultra-small bacteria” in an article in Nature Communications in 2015.

10. That was the case in 2015, when the Rifle study was published, and still in 2018 when I was researching this book.

11. More or less, at least. In “Peculiar properties of mycoplasmas: the smallest self-replicating prokaryotes,” published in 1992 in FEMS Microbiology Letters, they were called “the smallest self-replicating prokaryotes.”

12. “Cum rerum natura nusquam magis quam in minimis tota sit.”

13. Globally collaborative science is some of the best science. There were sixty-nine named co-authors who contributed to “The ecoresponsive genome of Daphnia pulex” for the journal Science in 2011.

14. “Of all the invertebrate genomes sequenced so far,” journalist Rebecca Boyle wrote in Popular Science in 2011, “the water flea shares the most with us, and scientists hope these shared genes can help them understand how humans respond to environmental threats.”

15. Groups like ostracod crustaceans, for instance, as demonstrated by researchers at Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography, who published “The genome sizes of ostracod crustaceans correlate with body size” in 2017 in The Journal of Heredity.

16. Bristol-based science writer Hayley Bennett writes beautiful British-sounding sentences like “Actually making it, however, is rather trickier.” Her 2010 article on “The first synthetic cell” in Chemistry World is a great primer on the world’s first human-made microbe, a fully functional organism even capable of reproduction.

17. Which is not, in fact, a line from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

18. Science reporter Rachel Feltman explained this process in accessible detail in “This man-made cell has the smallest genome ever—but a third of its genes are a mystery” for the Washington Post in 2016.

19. Because one incredibly complex video is apparently just not enough, OK Go shot two vids for this song. The decision to make a second video seems to have come out of the band’s dispute with its record label over how to make viral videos sharable online.

20. Self-proclaimed “professional wildman” Wes Siler appears to have been the first person to notice that OK Go seems to have a strange attraction to the souped-up Escort. LeMons is a race series in which teams enter junk cars—lemons, as it were—that cost no more than $500.

21. Remarkably, a team of scientists from the University of Washington and Microsoft later encoded and decoded that video on strands of DNA, reasoning that it was a delightful representation of how our genome often works.

22. Some historians have speculated that van Leeuwenhoek, who was born in the same year and lived just a few hundred feet from Vermeer, may have served as a model for the painter. The theory has been most notably put forward by author Laura Snyder, who suggests in Eye of the Beholder that van Leeuwenhoek might have been the model for Vermeer’s Geographer.

23. Falkowski’s book, Life’s Engines, gave me a far better appreciation of the role that microbes played in creating the world we know today.

24. Rob Knight’s TED Talk is 17 minutes and 20 seconds of whoa. Watch it; it will impact the way you see almost everything.

25. Last time I checked, it was up to 11,190 contributors. Full disclosure: I am one of them. Fuller disclosure: As of this writing, my test kit is still sitting unused on my desk. Because, um, gross.

26. She once told the food science writer Michael Pollan that she was happy to finally be down to giving Knight just one sample a week, but “I keep a couple swabs in my bag at all times,” she said in Pollan’s May 19, 2013, piece in the New York Times Magazine, “because you never know.”

27. The really informative—and really funny—Follow Your Gut was co-written with excellent science writer Brendan Buhler.

28. American adults with allergies, especially to nuts and seasonal pollen, have low diversity, reduced Clostridiales, and increased Bacteroidales in their gut microbiota, according to «Analysis of the American Gut Project,» published in EBioMedicine in 2016.

29. Interestingly, the authors of “Migraines are correlated with higher levels of nitrate-, nitrite-, and nitric oxide-reducing oral microbes in the American Gut Project cohort,” published in mSystems in 2016, found higher concentrations in oral samples and slight but significant concentrations in fecal samples.

30. “Adults born by Cesarean section appear to have a distinctly different composition of their fecal microbial population,” the authors of “Diversity and composition of the adult fecal microbiome associated with history of Cesarean birth or appendectomy: analysis of the American Gut Project” wrote in EBioMedicine in 2014. “Whether this distinction was acquired during birth, and whether it affects risk of disease during adulthood, are unknown.”

31. Obituaries are amazing things. This one read, in part: “We remember Burt in the special experiences and memories he gave us: Camp Filibert Roth pine cone and water fights, hot spiced cider, apples, speed-driving and hiking, Halloween exam hi-jinks, ecosystems of mystery, creative campfire songs, epic pot lucks, chile-plastic/recycled silverware-jam session, mystery plants, impersonations, 100 station tests, jug band, Paul Bunyan Dance.”

32. “As far as knowledge of Hawai’ian insects, he was the best,” Dick Tsuda, a fellow entomology researcher who was one of Beardsley’s students, told the newspaper.

33. Kikiki huna’s discovery, described in 2000 in “A new genus of fairyfly, Kikiki, from the Hawaiian Islands,” came while researchers were engaged in a generic review of the Hawai’ian genera of Mymaridae. Sometimes the most amazing things in the world are discovered when we’re not really looking.

34. Hat tip to my favorite beta reader, Sarah Gailey . . . I wasn’t clever enough to identify this nomenclatural Easter egg.

35. In this same study, an even smaller size for K. huna was identified, and another tiny insect was discovered as well. “A new genus and species of fairyfly, Tinkerbella nana (Hymenoptera, Mymaridae), with comments on its sister genus Kikiki, and discussion on small size limits in arthropods,” was published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research in 2013.

36. As of 2009, the costs of brown tree snake detection and control were estimated at $2.5 million per year, according to the US State Department.

37. The authors of “Effects of an invasive predator cascade to plants via mutualism disruption,” published in Nature in 2017, conservatively estimated the loss could be “only” 61 percent, but might be as high as 92 percent. This is terrifying.

38. Just ten years after its arrival in the United States, the tiger mosquito had spread to 678 counties, according to the 1997 report “Aedes albopictus in the United States: ten-year presence and public health implications” in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

39. Not to be mistaken for the also-invasive zebra mussel, though the quagga is named, as it happens, for an extinct species of zebra.

40. This observation comes by way of New York Times science writer Erica Goode in “Invasive species aren’t always unwanted.” Goode is one of the best in the field at putting the march of science into social context.

41. Ken Thompson, a biological devil’s advocate from the University of Sheffield, wrote about Elton in his brilliant book Where Do Camels Belong?

42. A good background on the history of “invasive” things is in Charles Elton’s book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants.

43. This in a year in which the Soviet Union tested at least thirty-six nuclear bombs, and the United States and United Kingdom entered a nuclear mutual defense agreement.

44. The website Untamed Science offers a great video on the nuances of this controversy. “Invasive species–Fight ‘em or throw in the towel?” is worth a watch.

45. That contention was made on the National Wildlife Federation’s website in 2013. That page has since gone dormant, but it’s still available via archive.org.

46. “Today’s management approaches must recognize that the natural systems of the past are changing forever,” Davis and his colleagues wrote in “Don’t judge species by their origins.”

47. A thin plastic disc upon which a tight spiral of grooves are read by a needle, creating sound.

48. Their study, complete with really cool photos and a map of where they found the little frogs, was published in PLOS One in 2012.

49. This may lead to first-line antiviral treatments during influenza outbreaks, according to “An amphibian host defense peptide is virucidal for human H1 hemagglutinin-bearing influenza viruses,” published in the journal Immunity in 2017.

50. The common prefix for both of these micro-vertebrates, “paedo,” means “child” or “childlike.”

51. At that point, the Thai population of bumblebee bats had been impacted by collectors and tourists, such that it was getting harder to study these animals in anything close to their natural state. The Myanmar find offered a second chance for scientists to see this species in the conditions in which it evolved.

52. According to “The evolution of sensory divergence in the context of limited gene flow in the bumblebee bat,” published in Nature Communications in 2011, geographic distance has a larger role in limiting gene flow than echolocation divergence.

53. When biologists Ahmet Selcuk and Haluk Kefelioglu took a survey of tiny mammals in northern Turkey, they had to search through 100 pellets to find just one with an Etruscan shrew’s remains in it. Their study, “New record of Suncus etruscus Savi, 1822 (Mammalia: Soricomorpha) in Northern Turkey,” published in Biharean Biologist in 2016, revealed the first record of S. etruscus in northeastern Anatolia, Turkey.

54. Despite having a brain that is only 64 mg in weight, the Etruscan shrew “demonstrates a wide range of social and exploratory behaviors, as well as sophisticated prey-capture capabilities and unique adaptations of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to small body size,” according to Robert Naumann in “Even the smallest mammalian brain has yet to reveal its secrets,” published in Highlights and Perspectives on Evolutionary Neuroscience in 2015.

55. “Small size, high-speed behavior, and extreme dependence on touch are not coincidental, but reflect an evolutionary strategy, in which the metabolic costs of small body size are outweighed by the advantages of being a short-range high-speed touch and kill predator,” the researchers wrote in 2011 in “The neurobiology of Etruscan shrew active touch,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

56. “One of the beauties of whiskers is that the whisker can get damaged but still works—all the sensing is done at the root,” Alan Winfield of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory told CNN in 2013.

CHAPTER III: THE OLD DOMINION

1. The Smithsonian’s spectacular “Human Evolution Timeline Interactive” exhibit notes that some of the most important human milestones—brain development, the control of fire, and bipedalism—have occurred during times of the greatest climate fluctuation.

2. I’ve heard scientists throw around estimates of 30,000 years, too. But everyone concedes that these are guesses.

3. That’s the tallest and shortest averages from a group of 98 nations, although Africa was largely left out of the list these are drawn from, published by the Telegraph in 2017.

4. The institution has a super-cool acronym: RED Lab.

5. Pollen in sediment offers another way to see the world thousands of years before the common era, as highlighted in 2017 in the paper “Climate variability and fire effects on quaking aspen in the central Rocky Mountains, USA” in the Journal of Biogeography.

6. You might recognize this as one of the key takeaways of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, in which the journalist and author demonstrates the ways in which humans who exist at either end of the bell curve help us understand everyone else.

7. So protective is the Tasmanian government of L. tasmanica that when the journalist Graham Lloyd set out to write about it a few years ago, he had to sign a legally binding agreement not to disclose its location, and the Tasmanian National Parks rangers who were his guides still decided to blindfold him, just to make sure. Lloyd’s article was published in The Australian in 2014.

8. With infinite time and infinite pianos, an infinite number of monkeys would eventually perform one of Mozart’s concertos, and enough mules have had enough sex to have a foal or two (though when it happened in Morocco in 2002, locals reportedly feared it signaled the end of the world, as Nancy Lofholm reported for the Denver Post in 2007). This could potentially happen with triploid plants, too. Sexual reproduction, that is. Not the end of the world.

9. Two other known G. renwickiana clones are about half the size of the biggest. That’s still really big. All of the remaining known clones were mapped in “Spatial genetic structure reflects extensive clonality, low genotypic diversity and habitat fragmentation in Grevillea renwickiana (Proteaceae), a rare, sterile shrub from south-eastern Australia,” published in Annals of Botany in 2014.

10. Maynard Smith observed in 1958 that Drosophila subobscura flies live longer when they are sterile, a finding that was later replicated in the more popular lab species, D. melanogaster, as well as in Caenorhabditis elegans, the extensively studied roundworm that Cynthia Keaton used to discover genetic causes for aging. A good primer on these studies can be found in “Survival costs of reproduction in Drosophila” by Thomas Flatt in the May 2011 edition of Experimental Gerontology.

11. Their study, “Human longevity at the cost of reproductive success: evidence from global data” was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology in 2001.

12. Rogers (who is not the same Paul Rogers as the California journalist who wrote about how redwoods sequester carbon) sounded the alarm with Darren McAvoy in “Mule deer impede Pando’s recovery: Implications for aspen resilience from a single-genotype forest,” which was published in PLOS One in 2018.

13. This was game management at its worst. The Mountain Lion Foundation has published a thorough timeline of the various bounty programs that were in place across North America, starting in the 1500s, at mountainlion.org.

14. Science writer Kate Tobin did a marvelous job of bringing this slow-moving ecological story to life in “Did wolves help restore trees to Yellowstone?” for PBS in 2015.

15. “We can place this book on the shelf that holds the writings of Thoreau and John Muir,” the San Francisco Chronicle once wrote of A Sand County Almanac. It’s on my desk next to the Bible, and I reach for Leopold’s words far more often.

16. “The story, which quickly grew as twisted as a bristlecone’s, went something like this: Ancient tree grows for millennia on a Nevada mountaintop until it becomes the World’s Oldest Tree,” Shaun McKinnon wrote in the Arizona Republic in 2015. “Because it’s so remote, hardly anyone ever sees it or thinks of it.”

17. It will likely come as no surprise to you, at this point, to learn that Harlan’s lengthy obituary in the Arizona Daily Star did not include the words “claimed to have identified the oldest known bristlecone pine in the world.”

18. Sarah Zielinski wrote about Procopius and new analyses that combine ice cores with data from tree rings in “Sixth-century mystery tied to not one, but two, volcanic eruptions,” for Smithsonian.com in 2015.

19. Salzer and research partner Malcom Hughes connected frost rings to volcanic eruptions over a 5,000-year period in “Bristlecone pine tree rings and volcanic eruptions over the last 5000 years” for the journal Quaternary Research in 2006.

20. Another Salzer study, “Recent unprecedented tree-ring growth in bristlecone pine at the highest elevations and possible causes,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, offered this superlative observation.

21. The results from that study, titled “Analysis of telomere length and telomerase activity in tree species of various lifespans, and with age in the bristlecone pine Pinus longaeva” and published in the journal Rejuvenation Research in 2006, suggested that increased telomere length may contribute to the longevity of bristlecones.

22. “We found no evidence of mutational aging,” the authors of “Does bristlecone pine senesce?” wrote in 2001 in Experimental Gerontology. “We conclude that the concept of senescence does not apply to these trees.”

23. “At first sight negligible aging, like cessation of aging, does not seem to fit neatly under Hamilton’s theory of a decline of the force of natural selection with increasing age,” Martínez wrote in Frontiers in Genetics, alluding to William Hamilton’s 1966 paper, which sought to explain aging and supplied basic lifetime scaling forces for natural selection.

24. While one species of hydra, Hydra vulgaris, has shown no signs of aging, another, Hydra oligactis, can be induced to undergo reproduction-associated senescence, according to «Hydra as a tractable, long-lived model system for senescence,» published in Invertebrate Reproduction & Development in 2015.

25. Davy’s collaborators were researchers from the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study, a longitudinal investigation of the rates, risk factors, and genetic causes of cognitive decline and dementia in aged Japanese American men. “Exceptional longevity: insights from hydra to humans” was published in Current Topics in Developmental Biology.

26. “Constant mortality and fertility over age in Hydra,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, looked at 2,256 hydra in two laboratories, with cohort ages up to forty years.

27. There are several versions of this story. Michael Cohen’s 1998 book, A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin, includes what appears to be the most well-sourced version.

28. The episode featuring this story was broadcast on December 11, 2001.

29. The Currey tale is the subject of one of the best Radiolab episodes ever. And that’s saying something, because Radiolab is simply brilliant.

30. By comparing the rings of living (or recently killed) clams to shells from dead clams, researchers have been able to build a timeline of abut 1,000 years that offers information about temperature and salinity of the seawater at the time of the growth of each ring. Researchers from Cardiff University and Bangor University explained this in “What 500-year-old clams can tell us about climate change” in The Conversation in 2016.

31. “It’s an epic shellfish saga,” science reporter Rebecca Morelle wrote for the BBC, “with all the makings of a rather tasty story.”

32. This is an absolutely terrifying study, published in 2016 in Nature Communications and sort of hidden under the inconspicuous title “Annually resolved North Atlantic marine climate over the last millennium.” In short, it says that a geologic effect that appears to be as old as the oceans themselves has changed—because of us.

33. The process used to arrive at this superlative conclusion is explained in “Siliceous deep-sea sponge Monorhaphis chuni: A potential paleoclimate archive in ancient animals,” published in 2012 by the journal Chemical Geology.

34. And we know what the genes are that create the stem cells, thanks to Werner Müller’s “The stem cell concept in sponges (Porifera): metazoan traits,” published in 2006 by Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology.

35. “Like in chess, in which all pieces have to protect the king, the condition for a long life in a perennial plant is to protect the roots (or at least, the capability to regenerate roots quickly . . .),” Munné-Bosch wrote in Plant Physiology in 2014.

36. They also found changes to genes for thermoregulation, sensory perception, dietary adaptations, and immune response, according to “Evolution of longevity from the bowhead whale genome,” published in 2015 by Cell Reports.

37. Two studies, one from Ecology and Evolution in 2014 (“Stressful environments can indirectly select for increased longevity”) and another from Ageing Research Reviews in 2015 (“Aging and longevity in the simplest animals and the quest for immortality”), help build the case for stress and simplicity.

38. Although China didn’t start issuing formal birth certificates until long after the Bapan centenarians were born, family documents, military records, and the culture of shengxiao, the twelve-year Chinese zodiac, provides compelling evidence that these individuals are indeed as old as reported.

CHAPTER IV: FAST TIMES

1. The researchers recorded data from 367 hunts. In no case did a cheetah exceed 58 miles per hour, and the runs went for an average distance of just 173 meters, according to “Dynamics and energetics of hunting in the cheetah,” a series of research projects supported by the Royal Veterinary College in 2016 and 2017.

2. BBC Earth did a good job of explaining this in “The cheetah: nature’s need for speed,” for Mother Jones in 2011.

3. Veterinary physiologist Naomi Wada’s team demonstrated the ways in which cheetahs operate like a rear-wheel-drive car, with the thrust power coming from the back legs and turning and breaking power up front, in “Distribution of muscle fibers in skeletal muscles of the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)” for Mammalian Biology in 2013.

4. Science journalist Matt Bardo explained Wada’s work in “Cheetah’s speed secrets are revealed” for BBC Nature in 2012.

5. In “A general scaling law reveals why the largest animals are not the fastest,” the researchers unpacked a fundamental constraint on the upper limit of animal movement, offering a better understanding speed in nature. Their work was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution in 2017.

6. Science reporter Helen Briggs explained “Why the cheetah is a champion sprinter” for BBC News in 2017.

7. “To get around those limitations,” journalist Sid Perkins wrote for Science Magazine in 2017, “Hirt and her colleagues looked at previously collected data for a wide variety of creatures, including ectotherms (so-called cold-blooded animals) as well as warm-blooded endotherms.”

8. The researchers created charts—with little silhouettes of animals, no less—that demonstrate the ways the curves are similar.

9. And the science is . . . well . . . it’s just bad, as Phil Plait and Daniel Hubbard explained for Slate in 2015. But “nerd sexy” Jeff Goldblum is still dreamy. And dinosaurs eat people. And that’s all that matters.

10. But a velociraptor might have done 35!

11. In “Excess of genomic defects in a woolly mammoth on Wrangel Island,” researchers wrote about their findings of an excess of deletions, an increase in the proportion of deletions that affected gene sequences, and an excess of truncated, incomplete, or nonfunctional genetic protein products, none of which is good for long-term viability of a population. Their work was published in PLOS Genetics in 2017.

12. When “Skin grafts and cheetahs” was published in Scientific Correspondence in 1996, a lot of people didn’t believe it, but further experiments demonstrated that populations of other animals with low levels of genetic variation can also have significant histocompatibility.

13. According to “Genomic legacy of the African cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus,” a study to which O’Brien contributed in 2015 for Genome Biology, no other mammal we know of comes anywhere close.

14. At least with one population of free-ranging cheetahs in Namibia, however, this does not appear to have affected their immune systems, according to researchers from Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, who wrote about the Namibian cheetahs in 2011 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

15. It’s one thing to survive one population bottleneck. Surviving two is improbable at best.

16. Studies like “Tracking data from nine free-roaming cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) collared in the Thabazimbi area, Limpopo Province, South Africa” from the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Carnivore Conservation Program, published in 2017 by Biodiversity Data Journal, offer a very depressing glimpse into the lives and deaths of endangered species.

17. Those were Asiatic cheetahs in Iran, which are at even greater risk of disappearing, according to “The critically endangered Asiatic cheetah Acinonyx jubatus venaticus in Iran: a review of recent distribution, and conservation status,» from the journal Biodiversity and Conservation in 2017.

18. Based on body shape alone, the pronghorn probably shouldn’t be able to run as fast and far as it does. Which is why researchers writing for Nature in 1991 concluded “their performance is achieved by an extraordinary capacity to consume and process enough oxygen.” Their report was titled “Running energetics in the pronghorn antelope.”

19. Diving deeper into the linguistic weeds, the word “buffalo” derives from from the Greek “boubalos,” which referenced both wild oxen and, as it happens, antelope.

20. University of Chicago Marine Biological Laboratory manager David Remsen wrote in a 2016 paper for the journal ZooKeys, called “The use and limits of scientific names in biological informatics,” that the consistency in the relationship between names and taxa “places limits on how scientific names may be used in biological informatics in initially anchoring, and in the subsequent retrieval and integration, of relevant biodiversity information.”

21. Science writer Brian Switek explained how the pronghorn won the evolutionary arms race, then refused to disarm, for NationalGeographic.com in 2013 in “Did false cheetahs give pronghorn a need for speed?”

22. For all intents and purposes they’re running from ghosts, Byers writes in Pronghorn: Social Adaptations and the Ghosts of Predators Past.

23. Oh. And don’t forget the hyenas that were equipped with cheetah-like limbs and huge jaws. As Byers told New York Times reporter Carol Kaesuk Yoon in 1996, “I don’t think there’s a predator alive today that would’ve been as ferocious as that long-legged hyena would’ve been.”

24. The story of how scientists concluded that a human ancestor called the Taung Child had been killed by an eagle is a truly fascinating tale. Riaan Wolmarans covered the story for Agence-France-Presse’s South African Press Association in 2006 in “Taung child’s death puzzle finally solved.”

25. In “Animals that are peerless athletes,” published in 1993, Times reporter Natalie Angier described the pronghorn as “a goat-sized ungulate that may rank as the greatest athlete alive.”

26. This has really got to be one of the most kick-ass biology labs in the world.

27. We may have made a titular claim upon it, but Periplaneta americana did not, in fact, come from America. It originated in Africa and came to the New World by way of ship in the early 1600s. Cockroaches should be, then, a very small reminder of the abject evil upon which the United States was built. They are part of a legacy of slave-holding in America and, in my mind, are a symbol of the ways in which that legacy still permeates every corner of the nation in which I was born and live.

28. Pretty much anyone could set up an experiment like this. That’s part of what I love about it. The methods were described in the University of Florida’s Book of Insect Records in 1999.

29. Moreover, they are able to withstand sidewalk surface temperatures from 40 to 60 degrees Celsius. If I were running on a sidewalk that hot with bare feet, I’d probably be pretty fast, too. All of this and more was described in “Exceptional locomotory performance in Paratarsotomus macropalpis mites,» published in The FASEB Journal in 2014.

30. And, if we’re being technical, it actually might have been walking, not running. Runners, after all, leave the ground between strides. Like competitive walkers, who are permitted to only have one leg leave the ground at a time, mites never have more than four of their eight feet off the ground when they’re dashing from place to place.

31. In “Putting nanoparticles to work: Self-propelled inorganic micro- and nanomotors,” in Anisotropic and Shape-Selective Nanomaterials, Kaitlin Coopersmith wrote about “machines inspired by nature’s elegant use of chemical gradients and cellular tracks for independently driven molecular processes.”

32. The videos included in “Exceptional running and turning performance in a mite” are thrilling to watch. The research was published by the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2016.

33. Psychologist Robin Rosenberg’s What’s the Matter with Batman? An Unauthorized Clinical Look under the Mask of the Caped Crusader is fun reading for anyone who wants their hero ruined for good.

34. Tom Harpole’s 2015 article for Air & Space Magazine on Ken Franklin’s quest to understand falcon flight, “Falling with the falcon,” is riveting reading.

35. 27 Gs of deceleration, according to Harpole.

36. Wild observations alone likely would never have produced this finding. In freely roaming falcons, the authors of “Diving-flight aerodynamics of a peregrine falcon” wrote in 2014 for PLOS One, “these high velocities prohibit a precise determination of flight parameters such as velocity and acceleration as well as body shape and wing contour.”

37. Yes, that’s seven years before Kitty Hawk. “If it seems there are a few caveats to the Wright brothers’ achievement 106 years ago,” Jason Paul wrote for Wired in 2009, “it’s because there had been several people before them who had already managed to get aloft in some sort of device, including the brothers themselves. What the Wrights did was put it all together in a way that made the airplane workable.”

38. This was part of the European Commission’s PEL-SKIN project, aimed at discovering an airfoil coating to improve the aerodynamic performance of aircraft. It was described in “The PELskin project-part V: towards the control of the flow around aerofoils at high angle of attack using a self-activated deployable flap” for the journal Meccanica in 2017.

39. Although the figure was apparently quite pervasive in the pre-internet era as well, once websites began sharing it, and citing each other, it seems it stopped mattering where the original information came from.

40. Like “Hydrodynamic characteristics of the sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus) and swordfish (Xiphias gladius) in gliding postures at their cruise speeds,” published by PLOS One in 2013.

41. One possible source is Arthur Upfield’s “The Mystery of Swordfish Reef,” a fictional story published in 1939 that puts Upfield’s protagonist, Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte, on the end of a rod and reel being torn of its line at lightning speed. “There had been nine hundred yards wound on it,” Upfield wrote. “Now there were only seven hundred yards. Three seconds later there were but six hundred yards.” Bony’s companions compare him to Zane Grey in that book.

42. “To put this in perspective,” oceanographer Molly Lutcavage’s Large Pelagics Research Center reported on Medium in 2015, the sailfish’s 1.79 G acceleration could be compared “to the sports car Bugatti Veyron’s 1.55 G, which reaches 0–60 mph in 2.4 seconds” (and the fish would be faster!).

43. That study was a hoot, though. A group of mechanical engineers from Seoul National University caught a seven-foot sailfish in the South China Sea, killed it, froze it, stuffed it, put it into a wind tunnel, and then gave it several nose jobs to see if the size of the fish’s bill had an impact on drag. It didn’t, according to “Hydrodynamic characteristics of the sailfish (Istiophorus platypterus) and swordfish (Xiphias gladius) in gliding postures at their cruise speeds,” published in 2013 by PLOS One.

44. Premium bluefin can go for more than $100,000 at auction, and one 489-pound fish went for $1.7 million in Japan in 2013. It was a bit of a publicity stunt by Tokyo Zanmai restaurant chain at the first auction of the year, where restaurant chains try to outbid one another for the “New Year Tuna.” Still, that’s about $3,500 a pound, according to Faine Greenwood’s piece for PRI’s GlobalPost in 2013.

45. “Electronic tagging of Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus, L.) reveals habitat use and behaviors in the Mediterranean Sea,” for PLOS One in 2015, confirmed the Med is used as a spawning ground and overwintering foraging location.

46. Eastern and western Atlantic bluefin differ greatly in size; the former is about 10 times the size of the latter. The genes of different populations of this fish vary widely, too—so much so that when scientists studied nearly 1,000 eggs from Mediterranean bluefin, they found 129 different haplotypes, more than half of which had never been detected in the Med before. “Individual spawning duration of captive Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) revealed by mitochondrial DNA analysis of eggs” was published in PLOS One in 2015.

47. A double-edged sword: The same science that is being used to understand and protect tuna can be used to identify foraging aggregations, leading to concentrated fishing efforts, according to “Seasonal movements, aggregations and diving behavior of Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) revealed with archival tags,” in PLOS One in 2009.

48. “Dolphins have been used in mine hunting in the Iraq war and even anti-enemy swimmer roles in Vietnam. And the reality is that for the time being, animals have superior agility and even sensors than most robotic systems,” defense strategist P. W. Singer told Carl Prine of the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2017. As robots continue to advance in speed, maneuverability, and autonomy, however, this is likely to change.

49. Researchers from the National Marine Mammal Foundation, which works with the US Navy, have published scores of studies in recent years.

50. “If you’re going to keep them in captivity then the research you do with them has to have a direct, positive input into their conservation in the wild,” Rose told San Diego’s CBS News affiliate in 2017.

51. Some studies, like “Speed limits on swimming of fishes and cetaceans,” published in 2008 in the Journal of the Royal Society, have suggested that burst speeds as high as 33 miles per hour are possible for dolphins, but that’s still a far cry from what a tuna can do.

CHAPTER V: AURAL SECTS

1. That’s apparently pLW²/6, if you’re trying this out at home.

2. “Some studies say that women find deeper voices to be more attractive,” Knapp told Salt Lake Tribune reporter Rich Kane in 2015. “Other studies have found that the deeper a man’s voice pitch, the more women they’ve slept with.”

3. The sports car–owning men were six times less likely to say they were “smaller than average” than their partners. The “fast car, small manhood” survey might align with a whole lot of anecdotal evidence, but it absolutely must be taken with a grain of salt. The purported survey’s sponsor reported its results, but not its methodology, in the Daily Mail in 2014.

4. “The problem for researchers has been that they have had to rely on participants providing their own measurements,” Tom Hickman wrote for Salon in 2013. “Where men and their penises are concerned there are lies, damned lies, and self measurements.”

5. At least until adulthood, when we typically lose the ability to hear frequencies at the top end of that spectrum.

6. For one study, Payne examined 548 songs from humpback whales in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, finding rhyme-like structures occur “in songs containing the most material to be remembered,” according to her 1998 report with Linda Guinee, titled “Rhyme-like repetitions in songs of humpback whales” in the journal Ethology.

7. Payne’s book, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, is pure joy.

8. Elephants were the first terrestrial mammals reported to produce infrasound. That revelation was published in “Infrasonic calls of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus)” in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology in 1986.

9. Famed elephant researcher Joyce Poole’s research into elephant musth has been essential for understanding reproduction. Poole’s “Rutting behavior in African elephants: the phenomenon of musth” was published in the journal Behavior in 1986.

10. It now seems obvious that elephants would communicate in different ways depending on how far away other elephants were, but as late as 2000, when W. R. Langbauer wrote about “Elephant communication” for the journal Zoo Biology, it was a revelatory finding.

11. There have been at least 164 different species of proboscideans. Only a few are left, according to “Understanding proboscidean evolution: a formidable task,” published in 1998 by Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

12. It took an expert in whales to unlock the secret of elephant infrasound. And it took elephant infrasound to help us better understand aquatic audition in marine mammals like whales, like the adaptations described in Darlene Ketten’s “The marine mammal ear: specializations for aquatic audition and echolocation” for The Evolutionary Biology of Hearing in 1992.

13. Clues offered by one type of animal often help us ask better questions about other animals, even ones with which we think we have great familiarity, like the cows that were the subject of “Vocal behavior in cattle: the animal’s commentary on its biological processes and welfare,” published in 2000 by Applied Animal Behavior Science.

14. Scientists studying “distress vocalizations” in baby animals have relied on what has been learned about how elephant calves communicate. Such research is described in “Do infant rats cry?” published in 2001 in Psychological Review.

15. Once we realized that many animals hear outside the frequencies we hear, we realized that what we did outside those frequencies, like the “pings” of military and research sonar systems, mattered to many creatures, like those described in “Anatomy and physics of the exceptional sensitivity of dolphin hearing (Odontoceti: Cetacea),” published in 2010 by the Journal of Comparative Physiology.

16. Recorded sound analysis can give us “a deeper understanding of their meaning and significance with respect to well-being of farm animals,” the authors of “Vocalization of farm animals as a measure of welfare” wrote in Applied Animal Behavior Science in 2004.

17. As we’ve learned more about how rodents communicate distress, we have been able to connect verbalizations to brain activity and other actions, such as those described in “The ascent of mouse: advances in modelling human depression and anxiety” from Nature Reviews Drug Discovery in 2005. We couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t started looking for sounds outside our range of hearing.

18. The process Galton took to develop and test his whistle is an important example of how science needs engineering. A good primer on the history of this invention is “The Galton whistle” in the March 2009 edition of the Observer, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science.

19. Carol Kaesuk Yoon wrote an appreciation of Griffin’s fascinating life for the New York Times in 2003.

20. And according to “Communication of adult rats by ultrasonic vocalization: biological, sociobiological, and neuroscience approaches” from ILAR Journal in 2009, these calls are reliable predictors of increased chemical activity in the brain.

21. But not guinea pigs, opossums, and beluga whales, according to Comparative Hearing: Mammals, published in 1994.

22. Martin and University of New South Wales professor Tracey Rogers wrote about this in “Why do elephants bellow but whales squeak like a mouse?” for The Conversation in 2016.

23. “Does size matter? Examining the drivers of mammalian vocalizations” was published in the journal Evolution in 2016.

24. Also known as “rock-paper-scissors,” and by a variety of other names, the game may have originated in China during the Han Dynasty.

25. There was absolutely no sense of humor in this study, published in the journal Applied Entomology and Zoology in 1990, which was called “Sound production in Synaptonecta issa (Heteroptera: Corixidae, Micronectinae)—an Asian bug that turned up in a New Zealand aquarium.” There should have been.

26. Technically speaking, it’s the insect’s right penis. Yes, there is a left one, too.

27. A motorcycle at 25 feet comes in at 90 decibels; a power lawn mower registers at 100.

28. The charts published in the 2011 study “So small, so loud: extremely high sound pressure level from a pygmy aquatic insect (Corixidae, Micronectinae)” in PLOS One show the water boatman is an exceptional outlier.

29. The fascinating physics of a pistol shrimp’s snapping action were described in “Vortex formation with a snapping shrimp claw” for PLOS One in 2013.

30. It was a popping bubble, not a snapping claw, that was causing all that racket, according to a 2000 study called “How snapping shrimp snap: through cavitating bubbles” from Science.

31. In a moment of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them brilliance during World War II, the US Navy used the little snappers as sound screens to hide its submarines from hydrophones in Tokyo Bay, according to “Shrimp aided submarines” from the Associated Press on March 16, 1947.

32. When a long-held assumption is destroyed, new research applications are never far behind. That’s one of the lessons in the article “Effects of ghost cavitation cloud on near-field hydrophones measurements in the seismic air gun arrays,” presented at the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers’ 2017 annual conference.

33. American inventor Amos Dolbear invented a telephone more than a decade before Alexander Graham Bell, but didn’t have Bell’s command of “patent office formalities,” according to an 1881 article in Scientific American.

34. Scientists thought they’d re-found it four times between 1891 and 2012. They hadn’t. The story was unpacked in “The spider-like katydid Arachnoscelis (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae: Listroscelidinae): anatomical study of the genus,” published in Zootaxa in 2013.

35. I cannot say enough nice things about this book, which helps fill in the gaps between “life began” and “then dinosaurs arrived.”

36. This is called the photoacoustic effect, and best we can tell it was indeed first discovered by Alexander Graham Bell.

37. Phil Senter covered this in a chapter on the pre-Cenozoic evolution of animal acoustic behavior in Historical Biology in 2009.

38. The large square-shaped vocal fold in cats of the genus Panthera extends the dynamic range of the cats who use it to roar, according to “Adapted to roar: functional morphology of tiger and lion vocal folds” from PLOS One in 2011.

39. That’s according to “Coos, booms, and hoots: the evolution of closed-mouth vocal behavior in birds,” from the journal Evolution in 2016.

40. “Changes in acoustic interactions may thus go with the break of maternal care as well as dispersal of juvenile crocodilians,” the team wrote in “Size does matter: crocodile mothers react more to the voice of smaller offspring” for the journal Scientific Reports in 2015. This trait might have been present in other archosaurs like dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

41. “In Puerto Rico, where the coqui frog has always been part of the island’s life, there is a deep respect for it,” Will White and Kate Sensenig wrote for the Washington Post in 2015. Not so much in Hawai’i.

42. “The frogs’ high-pitched nighttime mating calls have caused residents many sleepless nights,” Sarah Lin wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2014.

43. That was one of many plans for defeating the coqui and other nonnative species back in 2002, when science writer Janet Raloff noted that, “after working their way through soaps, surfactants, and off-the-shelf pesticides” anti-frog warriors considered “products in the grocery store, including acetaminophen (Tylenol) and cigarette nicotine” before settling on “a caffeine-rich anti-sleep preparation.” Raloff’s article was published in Science News in 2002.

44. The state’s Plant Industry Division offered the 10,000-amphibians-per-acre fact as an indicator of the frog’s negative impact on the native environment. That might very well be true, but they were putting the cart before the frog.

45. Singer’s Panic in Paradise: Invasive Species, Hysteria and the Hawaiian Coqui Frog War covers his concerns in depth.

46. Interestingly, when the playback intensity of the two-note call reaches a certain threshold, the males answer by uttering just a “koh” note almost half the time, according to “Communicative significance of the two-note call of the tree frog Eleutherodactylus coqui” from the Journal of Comparative Physiology in 1978. It seems that when one coqui senses another is nearing, the aggressive part of its call takes center stage.

47. The American soccer player John Harkes could be Exhibit A: Within years of his arrival, the first Yank to play in the English Premier League had swapped out his northern New Jersey accent for one that was decidedly more British—and hints of the English Midlands were still dripping from his lips a decade after he returned to the United States.

48. University of Hawaii at Hilo researchers Francis Benevides and William Mautz examined duration, inter-note interval, call repetition period, center frequency, and bandwidth in “Temporal and spectral characteristics of the male Eleutherodactylus coqui two-note vocalization in Hawaii” for the journal Bioacoustics in 2013.

49. Narins is a great example of what scientists can do when they are able to focus on something for long periods of time. The study about the two parts of the coqui call was published in 1978; the follow-up came in 2014. It was titled “Climate change and frog calls: long-term correlations along a tropical altitudinal gradient” and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

50. The study was called “Sound perception by two species of wax moths” and Spangler made no superlative declaration. Thus, when it was published by the relatively obscure Annals of the Entomological Society of America in 1983, it was widely missed.

51. “Possibly this moth’s success depends in part upon the adaptability and multiple uses of its ear,” Spangler observed in 1984 in “Responses of the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella L. (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) to continuous high-frequency sound” for the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society.

52. “This moth can hear the calls of any bat,” James Windmill, an acoustical engineer at the University of Strathclyde, marveled to Nature science writer Ed Yong in 2013.

53. Some of Spangler’s other work was actually cited in “Extremely high frequency sensitivity in a ‘simple’ ear” for Biology Letters in 2013, but not his work on frequency range.

54. This is one way scientists have concluded that these early bat species echolocated, Michael Novacek reported in “Auditory features and affinities of the Eocene bats Icaronycteris and Palaeochiropteryx (Microchiroptera, incertae sedis)” for a 1987 edition of American Museum Novitates.

55. The tiger moth, Bertholdia trigona, is the only animal in the world known to have this ability, according to «How do tiger moths jam bat sonar?» from the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2011.

56. The barbastelle bat, Barbastella barbastellus, makes calls up to 100 times lower in amplitude than other bats that catch prey while in flight, researchers reported in “An aerial-hawking bat uses stealth echolocation to counter moth hearing” for Current Biology in 2010.

57. Beale wrote this in 1839 in admonishment of another writer, Abbe Lecoz, who reported that the sperm whale emitted “terrible groans when in distress.”

58. Hal Whitehead’s Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean paints a beautiful and detailed picture of “the great leviathans.”

59. That was based on just fourteen hours of underwater sound recordings, published as “The monopulsed nature of sperm whale clicks,” for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2003. A larger sample might produce even louder sounds.

60. Eric Wagner covered this masterfully for Smithsonian magazine in 2011 in “The Sperm whale’s deadly call.”

61. Fifty-seven percent of the creaks were produced in the deepest 15 percent of the whales’ dives, the researchers reported in “Sperm whale behavior indicates the use of echolocation click buzzes ‘creaks’ prey capture” for Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in 2004.

62. The basic idea is that the features that make something like sea grass visible to sonar may be quite different from the features that make a fish, a sand ripple, or a sunken piece of a ship visible, according to “Environmentally-adaptive target recognition for SAS imagery,” presented at the 2017 SPIE Defense + Security Conference.

63. The researchers believe that these young whales hadn’t had a chance to learn to adopt alternative navigational strategies when they got lost, according to “Solar storms may trigger sperm whale strandings: explanation approaches for multiple strandings in the North Sea in 2016” in the International Journal of Astrobiology in 2017.

64. Today the global population is probably in the hundreds of thousands, reports the IUCN.

CHAPTER VI: THE TOUGH GET GOING

1. There were other dinosaurs that looked a lot more like the raptors from Jurassic World. They just didn’t happen to be velociraptors, as Brusatte reported in “New fossil reveals velociraptor sported feathers” for Scientific American in 2015.

2. In a fight between Chuck Norris and a water bear, I do profess, the latter would win with seven hands tied behind its back.

3. We might have as little as 100 years left here, Hawking has predicted.

4. When Washington Post reporter Ben Guarino wrote this up in 2017, the headline said it all: “These animals can survive until the end of the Earth, astrophysicists say.”

5. “Tardigrades are as close to indestructible as it gets on Earth,” Batista told The Harvard Gazette in 2017.

6. That will likely happen some time in the next 3.5 billion years.

7. Leaving them “at risk of population reductions or even extinction,” according to “Will the Antarctic tardigrade Acutuncus antarcticus be able to withstand environmental stresses due to global climate change?” for the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2018.

8. Want to transfer life from one planet to another? Some NASA researchers believe the best bet isn’t going to be humans, but tardigrades, an option discussed in “The tardigrade Ramazzottius varieornatus as a model animal for astrobiological studies” for Biological Studies in Space in 2008.

9. “These findings indicate the relevance of tardigrade-unique proteins to tolerability and tardigrades could be a bountiful source of new protection genes and mechanisms,” Kunieda and his team wrote in “Extremotolerant tardigrade genome and improved radiotolerance of human cultured cells by tardigrade-unique protein” for Nature Communications, in what may have been the scientific understatement of 2016.

10. I was shocked and honored to win a Kavli Award for science journalism alongside Shubin in 2014. My award came for a story I wrote about Pando, the world’s largest clonal organism, while Shubin’s came for the three-part PBS series that was based on his book. I’ve never been so humbled.

11. Cautiously, the researchers who sequenced the coelacanth genome wrote in “Elephant shark genome provides unique insights into gnathostome evolution,” for Nature in 2014, that their analyses indicate evolution in the coelacanth lineage “has occurred at a relatively slow rate, similar to that of non-mammalian tetrapods.”

12. I’ve told Quong that if he ever gets another chance to swim with the elephant sharks, and needs someone to hold his gear, I’ll be on the first plane to Australia. His remarkable video of the elephant shark release was published on YouTube in 2013.

13. It’s important to note, though, that fifteen years after announcing the completion of a project to sequence the first human genome, scientists were still working on filling in some rather pesky gaps in the code. Sharon Begley covered this in 2017 for STAT News in the article “Psst, the human genome was never completely sequenced. Some scientists say it should be.”

14. The North American beaver, Castor canadensis, had its genome sequenced in honor of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Canada—an important occasion, to be sure, but not one that carries any sort of scientific weight.

15. In “Conservation of all three p53 family members and Mdm2 and Mdm4 in the cartilaginous fish,” the researchers wrote that their analysis showed that the elephant shark genome encodes three members of the p53 gene family: p53, p63, and p73. The paper was published in Cell Cycle in 2011.

16. Further exploration of the ways in which genes have evolved in species like the elephant shark and the naked mole rat, which is long-lived and resistant to cancer and many other diseases, “could bring novel insights into treating human medical issues,” Michael Furlong and Jae Young Seong wrote in the journal Biomolecules & Therapeutics in 2017.

17. “Streak the Wonder Fish” learned to swim through hoops, eat from my fingers, and follow a pencil in a figure eight. Streak is buried next to a tree in the backyard of my boyhood home.

18. Hugo’s book, Strange Biology: Anomalous Animals, Mutants, and Mad Science, is required reading for anyone who loves weird science.

19. “A creature that can regenerate lost body parts is strangely reminiscent of a Spider-Man backstory,» Hugo wrote for Newsweek in 2018.

20. In “Mexican salamander helps uncover mysteries of stem cells and evolution,” Phys.org reported in 2010 that University of Nottingham researcher Andrew Johnson explained his preference for studying axolotls because, unlike many other frogs, fish, flies, and worms that are used in the lab, they have pluripotent cells. Like humans, their embryonic stem cells can become any other kind of cell.

21. “They are also distributed so commonly to labs for research that they are basically the white mice of amphibians,” Sam Schipani wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2018.

22. Writing of “A Tale of Two Axolotls” in BioScience, three axolotl researchers declared “a concerted global effort is needed to protect and manage this irreplaceable species in natural and laboratory environments.” That was in 2015. At a global level, little has changed in the years since.

23. There are as many ways to measure slowness as there are to measure speed. In this case, we’re talking about the mammal that is slowest, in absolute terms, when moving at its fastest speed.

24. “People say, what’s in a name? Well, quite a lot when it is a synonym for a deadly sin,” zoologist Lucy Cooke wrote in The Day. “Yes, the sloth was damned from the moment it was named after one of the world’s most wicked transgressions.” Cooke deserves great credit for having extricated from the dusty shelves of biological history the mean-spirited quote from Georges-Louis Buffon, “or buffoon as I like to think of him,” she wrote.

25. They weren’t hard to find, Pauli told me. “They don’t go far.”

26. There seems little way that sloths could survive with fewer calories. They live life on the edge.

27. Sex, as it turns out, is just about the only thing sloths do with any speed whatsoever. An entire sexual encounter might last as little as five seconds. “By all intents and purposes,” Iva Roze Skoch reported for PRI’s GlobalPost in 2012, “sloths might just take the honors for being every female species’ worst nightmare.”

28. I’m pretty sure that’s what she said, at least. This, my dear Cambodian American friend Chhun Sun tells me, means “you don’t understand.”

29. In March of 2018, University of Iowa researcher Andrew Forbes and his colleagues made a compelling argument that wasps, not beetles, are a more diverse group of animals in “Quantifying the unquantifiable: Why Hymenoptera—not Coleoptera—is the most speciose animal order.”

30. For a long time, scientists believed that the smallest insect was even smaller, per a description of a species of beetle called Ptilium fungi from John Eatton Le Conte in 1863. Le Conte’s estimate was far more general than the way it was later cited, though. He had written that P. fungi was “scarcely more than 1-100 of an inch,” but later measurements showed this to be incorrect. A more precise record was established in “How small is the smallest? New record and remeasuring of Scydosella musawasensis Hall, 1999 (Coleoptera, Ptiliidae), the smallest known free-living insect,” which was published by ZooKeys in 2015.

31. The study “Ninety-eight new species of Trigonopterus weevils from Sundaland and the Lesser Sunda Islands,” published by ZooKeys in 2014, included ninety-nine photos of weevil penises, differences in which helped the researchers identify many of the species as unique.

32. One clade in particular, Polyphaga, appears to have had a family-level extinction rate of zero for most of its evolutionary history, according to “The fossil record and macroevolutionary history of the beetles,” published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences in 2015.

33. At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion individual insects alive, according to Smithsonian. In the United States alone there are more than 90,000 known species.

34. Wallace was brutal. “What the Maine Lobster Festival really is,” he wrote, “is a midlevel county fair with a culinary hook.”

35. The first sushi restaurant didn’t come to the United States until 1966, and it was almost exclusively frequented by Japanese immigrants. So how did sushi become such an American success story? The answer, according to Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice, includes the TV miniseries Shōgun, emerging ideas of healthy foods, and the Californication of foreign cuisine.

36. Martin’s book is a delightful journey into “the next big trend in the global food movement.”

37. In 2009, Rachael Rettner wrote about Gillooly for LiveScience in “Insect colonies function like superorganisms.”

38. In chart after chart, the various colonies hugged the relational lines created by unitary organisms in “Energetic basis of colonial living in social insects,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.

39. Collectives react in ways that are strikingly similar to the nervous systems of individual organisms, according to “Differentiated anti-predation responses in a superorganism” from PLOS One in 2015.

40. Contrary to popular belief, the queen doesn’t give orders, Tovey wrote for The Conversation in 2017. Each ant controls itself, in mind-bogglingly complex coordination with other ants.

41. Great apes, including humans, are some of the few exceptions. Giraffes might be exceptions to this rule, too, but no one seems to know for sure.

42. Flannery’s review of Bert Hölldobler and Edward Wilson’s 2009 treatise on ants, The Superorganism, in the New York Review of Books, was as good as the book itself. Flannery called The Superorganism “a profoundly important book with immediate relevance for anyone interested in the trends now shaping our own societies.” He’s right.

CHAPTER VII: DEADLY SERIOUS

1. I thought at first this might have been a story my guide was telling me to keep me in line. Later, Dirk Donath’s disappearance was confirmed in the media.

2. Want to know what’s actually most likely to kill you? You can find that and more in “Global and regional mortality from 235 causes of death for 20 age groups in 1990 and 2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010” from the Lancet in 2012.

3. Spiders are just one of many animals we fear far more than the numbers indicate we should. CNN reporter Jacqueline Howard, in response to an alligator attack that claimed the life of a boy in Florida in 2016, noted the death was “without a doubt horrific—and extremely rare.”

4. If you believe in a god who smites people, consider this: Lightning kills more than three times more men than women, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

5. The Insurance Information Institute’s handy mortality risk chart is fun reading for anyone who drives, flies, swims, or lives in a country in which guns outnumber people.

6. The tourism industry hailed the government’s decisions, but environmentalists did not, as Reuters reported in “Spate of Australia shark attacks could take a bite out of tourism” in 2017.

7. The United States Department of Agriculture’s handbook Plants Poisonous to Livestock in the Western States reads like a textbook from one of Professor Pomona Sprout’s classes.

8. This kind of death was described in “Pyrrolizidine alkaloidosis in a two month old foal” in the Journal of Veterinary Medicine in 1993.

9. These benefits include the development of animal models, isolation of novel compounds, and insights into the biological and molecular mechanisms of plant-based chemicals, according to “The good and the bad of poisonous plants: an introduction to the USDA-ARS Poisonous Plant Research Laboratory,” from the Journal of Medical Toxicology in 2012.

10. Matthew Herper wrote about “The curious case of the one-eyed sheep” for Forbes in 2005.

11. “Many plants evolve toxins to ward off bugs and animals,” Brian Maffly wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune in 2017, “and biomedical scientists have discovered these can be harnessed for medicinal uses,” but first they have to find places where these plants can successfully grow.

12. According to “Anticancer potential of Conium maculatum extract against cancer cells in vitro: Drug-DNA interaction and its ability to induce apoptosis through ROS generation,” published in Pharmacognosy Magazine in 2014, the researchers deduced that hemlock hinders the process of cell proliferation and cell cycle.

13. John Mann from Queen’s University Belfast wrote of the history and potential of deadly nightshade in the 2008 article “Belladonna, broomsticks and brain chemistry” for Education in Chemistry.

14. Death generally takes place within 36 to 72 hours of exposure, according to the US Centers for Disease Control.

15. Phytoremediation may also be good for biodiesel production, medicinal product development, and carbon sequestration, according to “Ricinus communis: A robust plant for bio-energy and phytoremediation of toxic metals from contaminated soil,” published by Ecological Engineering in 2015.

16. In one study, “Evaluation of Ricinus communis L. for the phytoremediation of polluted soil with organochlorine pesticides,” published in 2015 by BioMed Research International, the plant showed a remediation effect of up to 70 percent.

17. There are scores of Sinularia species, also known as “leather corals,” in the ocean. Some have been known for more than a century, but few have been examined by scientists, as detailed by “A new norcembranoid dimer from the Red Sea soft coral Sinularia gardineri,” in the Journal of Natural Products in 1996.

18. “Why would a plant produce two types of substances which may act as physiological antagonists of each other?” Oné R. Pagán, the authors of Strange Survivors, asked in 2012. “This is kind of weird when you think about it; like giving a poison and its antidote at the same time.” Later, we’ll discuss how a plant called thale cress uses two conflicting chemicals.

19. If there’s a guidebook for starting a tobacco business, it’s Tobacco: Production, Chemistry, and Technology, which covers everything from seed to store and from storage to sales.

20. As of 2010, David Heath noted in the Atlantic in 2016, tobacco companies were still routinely arguing “that the nation’s top-selling cigarette, once known as Marlboro Lights and now called Marlboro Gold, reduces the risk of cancer.”

21. In 2017, finally, tobacco companies admitted they purposefully made cigarettes more addictive. Seriously, it wasn’t until twenty-frickin-seventeen. That November, NPR’s Alison Kodjak explained why for All Things Considered.

22. Jennifer Maloney of the Wall Street Journal explained how this worked to NPR’s All Things Considered in 2017.

23. “It’s a great time to be a cigarette company again,” Maloney wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2017. “Far fewer Americans are smoking, and yet U.S. tobacco revenue is soaring.”

24. It was long thought that Euro-American traders were responsible for the spread of tobacco across the United States in the late 1700s. While that might be true when it comes to N. tabacum, archeologist Shannon Tushingham and her colleagues have demonstrated through the molecular analysis of ancient pipes that N. quadrivalvis and N. attenuate were being used in what is now considered the American West at least 1,200 years ago. The team published these findings in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the United States of America in 2018.

25. Counterintuitive findings like this usually do quite well in the media; for whatever reason this one flew under most science journalists’ radars. That might have had something to do with the title of the study, which was published in 2017 in the journal Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry: “The tobacco cembranoid (1S,2E,4S,7E,11E)-2,7,11-cembratriene-4,6-diol as a novel angiogenesis inhibitory lead for the control of breast malignancies.”

26. Writing for Forbes in 2016, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist specializing in addiction medicine who studies the intersection of medicine and culture, called these policies “absurd.”

27. Their 2014 study, “Phosphoinositide-mediated oligomerization of a defensin induces cell lysis,” was published in eLife, which at the time was a two-year-old open-access journal with a low impact factor relative to heavy hitters like Nature, Science, and Cell. A lot of research demonstrating beneficial uses for tobacco is published in journals like this.

28. “I am beginning to feel kindly towards the genus Nicotiana,” she wrote in 2014.

29. Please don’t do this. Ever. But do feel free to listen to Tarvin describe the experience, which she did for NPR’s All Things Considered in 2016.

30. Tarvin and her team, from the University of Texas, St. John’s, and Harvard in the United States, and the University of Konstan in Germany, published their findings in “Interacting amino acid replacements allow poison frogs to evolve epibatidine resistance” for Science in 2017.

31. Sometimes, the best scientists can do is to “log” a species and take a few specimens, Carrie Arnold reported for National Geographic in 2017.

32. There are nearly as many species of amphibians categorized as threatened as those of birds and mammals together, a group of biologists warned in the journal Sapiens in 2012 in the article “The Amphibian Extinction Crisis—what will it take to put the action into the Amphibian Conservation Action Plan?”

33. The question now is whether these species face an even greater risk of human-driven extinction, according to the 2015 report “Antipredator defenses predict diversification rates” for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

34. The results suggest “that how a species defends itself might be part of the puzzle of working out which species are in need of conservation efforts,” Kevin Arbuckle of Swansea University told the Express in 2016.

35. The work, headed up by Stanford University chemist Justin Du Bois, may pave the way for subsequent studies aimed at understanding the many small molecules found in the toxins of frogs and other animals, according to 2016’s “Asymmetric synthesis of batrachotoxin: enantiomeric toxins show functional divergence against NaV” in Science.

36. The structure of the toxin—and a partial synthesis—was first described in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1969.

37. With the price of one of the most effective rattlesnake antivenom treatments at $14,000 or more, you might rather just take your chances. (But please don’t. Get the treatment and then “go to the mattresses” with the hospital and insurance companies.)

38. Like the sixty-year-old Kentucky man who was killed while handling a snake during a Sunday service at a Pentecostal church in 2015.

39. Also in 2015, a Missouri man who was twice bitten by a water snake died the following day after refusing to go to the hospital.

40. Another Missouri man died after voluntarily picking up a wild snake. Unsurprisingly, he was bitten.

41. An eighteen-year-old Texas man named Grant Thompson “died surrounded by animals that intrigued and fascinated him,” according to his obituary in the Austin American-Statesman in 2015. A police investigation concluded he’d purposefully allowed his pet cobra to bite him multiple times while sitting in a car in the parking lot of a home improvement store in Austin, Texas.

42. Snakes just beat out spiders as the scariest animal in a 2014 survey by the British polling firm YouGov. Interestingly, the older a respondent was, the more likely they were to report being “very afraid” of snakes, while the number of those reporting tremendous fear of spiders decreased with age.

43. That work built on earlier research showing that lab-raised monkeys with no prior exposure to snakes had no fear of the reptiles, even though they could detect snakes more quickly than other harmless creatures. Lee Dye offered a good overview of this research for ABC News in 2011 in “Afraid of snakes? Scientists explain why.”

44. The study was led by Stephanie Hoehl of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, and published with the I-am-sure-to-read-this title “Itsy bitsy spider . . . : infants react with increased arousal to spiders and snakes,” in Frontiers in Psychology in 2017.

45. An estimated 5.4 million people are bitten by venomous snakes each year, according to the World Health Organization.

46. Isbell’s book, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent, suggests snakes gave humans an evolutionary nudge that made us what we are today.

47. In 2013, Isbell told NPR’s All Things Considered how she began to wonder about the snake–human connection. The story involves a cobra, of course.

48. “Pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

49. Interestingly, female and juvenile monkeys detected the snakeskin better than adult males.

50. At just four months old, the monkeys were able to recognize snakes and engage in anti-predator behavior, according to “Scales drive detection, attention, and memory of snakes in wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus),” from the journal Primates in 2017.

51. Test subjects showed the largest early posterior negativity reactions to snakes. Spiders triggered medium reactions. Slugs barely moved the needle. “Testing the snake-detection hypothesis: larger early posterior negativity in humans to pictures of snakes than to pictures of other reptiles, spiders and slugs,” from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in 2014, was eye-opening reading.

52. To me, this is one of the most interesting findings. Some humans have developed fear, but all humans, it seems, carry attentiveness to snakes in our psyches, as exhibited in “Snake scales, partial exposure, and the Snake Detection Theory: a human event-related potentials study” in Science Reports in 2017.

53. “A global biodiversity crisis is threatening the very snake populations on which hopes for new venom-derived medications depend,” the authors wrote in “Snake venom: from fieldwork to the clinic” for Bioessays in 2011.

54. “The harsh fact is that the continent is largely devoid of safe, effective, and affordable treatments for something that is eminently treatable,” Williams wrote in “Snake bite: a global failure to act costs thousands of lives each year” for the British Medical Journal in 2015.

55. They heard back from 43 percent of the health agencies, 27 percent of the poison centers, and 13 percent of the manufacturers. That’s dreadful. The conclusions in “Needs and availability of snake antivenoms: relevance and application of international guidelines” in the International Journal of Health Policy and Management are thus couched in caveats.

56. The project aimed to create “a strong impact for European competitiveness, at both an academic and economic level,” according to the Venomics report summary from the Community Research and Development Information Service of the European Union. Saving lives was secondary.

57. Jenny Bryan covered the history of this drug in “From snake venom to ACE inhibitor—the discovery and rise of captopril” for Pharmaceutical Journal in 2009.

58. Later some of the indigenous groups accused researchers of “biopiracy,” and Brazil began to crack down on companies that patent products without compensating the nation or its indigenous peoples, according to a 2010 Reuters article titled “Brazil to step up crackdown on ‘biopiracy’ in 2011.”

59. Because Nobels are often given for work that is many years old, laureates’ speeches are often focused not on what they are being honored for, but on what they are doing now.

60. Thus we now have very large libraries of toxin variants that can be tested against myriad diseases, thanks in part to a scientist named Zoltan Takacs, who founded the World Toxin Bank. I learned about the toxin bank from Kath Nightingale’s “The bite that cures: how we’re turning venom into medicine” for the BBC’s Science Focus in 2016.

61. Data journalist Sascha Steinhoff has created a very useful and searchable database of venomous snakes at http://snakedatabase.org.

62. Researchers from Monash University in Australia reported their findings on the inland taipan in “Some pharmacological studies of venom from the inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus)” for the journal Toxicon in 1998.

63. The researchers, from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology in France, reported their findings to Nature in 2012 in the article “Black mamba venom peptides target acid-sensing ion channels to abolish pain.”

64. It also has an elegant chemical structure, viewable on the DrugBank databank, which is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, among other organizations.

65. The researchers, from Tezpur University, published their findings in “Proteomics and antivenomics of Echis carinatus carinatus venom: Correlation with pharmacological properties and pathophysiology of envenomation” for Scientific Reports in 2017.

66. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 3,000 species of snakes in the world. Only about 600 are venomous, and only about a third of those are suspected to be “medically important.”

67. Death certificates aren’t required in many countries where box jellyfish attacks are common, Stuart Fox wrote in “How deadly Is the box jellyfish?” for LiveScience in 2010.

68. “Jellyfish and other cnidarians are the oldest living venomous creatures,” Fry told Catherine Paddock of Medical News Today in 2015, “but research has been hampered by a lack of readily obtainable venom harvested in a reproducible manner.”

69. It takes half an hour in the magic spinner, according to Fry’s technique, which he described in “Firing the sting: chemically induced discharge of cnidae reveals novel proteins and peptides from box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri) venom” for the journal Toxins in 2015.

70. In “Stonefish toxin defines an ancient branch of the perforin-like superfamily,” the researchers, from Australia’s Monash University, gave the world its first high-resolution insights into how the Membrane Attack Complex-Perforin/Cholesterol-Dependent Cytolysin domains interact in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

71. “The largest and most clinically important pharmacopoeia of any genus in nature,” Center for Health and the Global Environment founder Eric Chivian told National Geographic in 2003.

72. The Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan described this scene beautifully in an August 13, 2017, article about Marí’s work.

73. C. Renée James told this story and more like it in her delightful book Science Unshackled: How Obscure, Abstract, Seemingly Useless Scientific Research Turned Out to Be the Basis for Modern Life.

74. Daisy Yuhas noted in Scientific American in 2013 that the cone snail’s toxins could be used to treat epilepsy and depression, too.

75. “Spiders exist in the most northern islands of the Arctic, the hottest and most arid of deserts, at the highest altitudes of any living organisms, in the depths of caves, in the intertidal zone of ocean shores, in bogs and ponds, on high, arid moorlands, sand dunes, and floodplains,” the Canadian arachnologist wrote in “Ecology of the true spiders (Araneomorphae)” for the Annual Review of Entomology in 1973.

76. That’s about 1 percent of the net production of meat for the entire terrestrial Earth, according to “An estimated 400-800 million tons of prey are annually killed by the global spider community,” published by researchers from Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany in The Science of Nature in 2017.

77. Ingraham’s reports on “all things data” for the Washington Post are always fascinating and often hilarious.

78. Okay, the world would be a nicer place with a few more butterflies. But still.

79. However, “if the researchers are to develop a drug or therapy involving compounds from spider venom,” Lecia Bushak wrote for Medical Daily in 2015, “it will likely be quite some time before they can be tested in a clinical setting.”

80. Fun fact from Rachel Nuwer’s “Could spider venom be the next Viagra?” on Smithsonian.com in 2012: A persistent, intensely painful erection is known as priapism.

81. Former US vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore loves talking about this, but he doesn’t explain it as well as Geoffrey Fattah did for the Deseret News in 2011 in the story “A web of possibilities: Utah researcher uses goats to make one of the strongest known substances.”

82. Gates was passionate and quite funny in his eighteen-minute talk, which is worthwhile watching for anyone who wants an optimistic primer on the battle to end malaria.

83. I’ve never seen, or heard, a better example of the ways in which privilege impacts perspective.

84. As of 2013, the World Health Organization put the spending on malaria control at $1.8 billion; on hair loss, at $2 billion, according to “Medical research: the bald truth,” a 2013 editorial in The Guardian.

85. “Antimalarial drug resistance,” a good primer on antimalarial drug resistance, was written by Nicholas White of the Mahidol University in Thailand in 2004 for The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

86. Jerry Alder’s article “Kill all the mosquitoes?!” noted that gene-editing technology had advanced to the point that scientists had the ability to wipe out all of the known carriers of malaria and Zika. The unresolved question, he noted, was, “Should they?”

87. Fang asked questions in “A world without mosquitoes” that a lot of scientists hadn’t even thought about yet. It’s still thought-provoking reading.

88. Almost immediately, other countries lined up to volunteer to be Oxitec’s next guinea pigs, according to “GM mosquitoes wipe out dengue fever in trial,” from Nature’s news blog in 2010.

89. Oxitec officials rejected the notion that their trial was secretive. It was well known, they said, on the island, “but just not picked up internationally,” Martin Enserink wrote for Science in 2010.

90. And, in an example of Darwinism in action, there is some evidence that female mosquitoes have figured out how to avoid the genetically engineered males, Alder reported.

91. Framing is everything. The authors of “Highly efficient Cas9-mediated gene drive for population modification of the malaria vector mosquito Anopheles stephensi” began their 2015 study report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences not by introducing the background of the technology they were using, but the problem they were battling: a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.

92. “Many people think it’ll be efficient and predictable. But that’s not the case here. We need to know how to talk about to the public, so they understand the risks,” she told journalist Alex Zielinski from ThinkProgress in 2016.

93. Pugh, though, seemed on the fence about the question. “Humans have been selectively breeding both plants and animals for hundreds of years,” he wrote in The Conversation in 2015, “and this can be viewed as an indirect form of genetic modification that we do not find morally problematic.”

94. The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community might put you to sleep. Once asleep, though, it might also give you nightmares.

95. In 2017, Cornell University’s Robert Reed once told Ed Yong that CRISPR had turned “the biggest challenge of my career . . . into an undergraduate project.”

96. Yes, you can get a fairly sophisticated CRISPR lab sent to your home; I’ve got one. For now the chief argument suggesting that people won’t use these to create malicious transgenic organisms is that it’s actually easier to create other sorts of bioweapons that could do even more harm. That’s not reassuring.

97. UC Berkeley professor John Marshall’s primer on the agreement and its relationship to bio-engineered bugs, “The Cartagena protocol and releases of transgenic mosquitoes,” is important reading.

CHAPTER VIII: SMARTER ALL THE TIME

1. The entire interaction, video of which was included as supplemental information with the 2018 article “Precocious development of self-awareness in dolphins” in PLOS One, lasts just about thirty seconds. When I watch it, I don’t see much more than a truly adorable dolphin. But I’m not a dolphin expert.

2. “It’s easy to prove that dolphins are capable of doing something—it only takes one dolphin to do that,” research analyst Hannah Salomons told me. “But showing dolphins can’t do something is a lot harder. We had to run this experiment with a lot of dolphins. There are three buckets, and they guessed right about a third of the time.”

3. “Measurement of hydrodynamic force generation by swimming dolphins using bubble DPIV” was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2014.

4. And sharks, of course, attack and kill a lot of dolphins, too, as Joshua Rapp Learn wrote in “Tracking the scars of dolphin-shark battles” for Hakai Magazine in 2017.

5. “The dolphins in this photo have been backed into a corner, with fishermen and certain death on one side, and the net separating them from freedom on the other,” Bridgeman wrote for Ecologist in 2013.

6. We’ve known this for quite some time—it was first reported in “The limbic lobe of the dolphin brain: a quantitative cytoarchitectonic study” for Journal für Hirnforschung in 1982.

7. His book In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier mixes philosophy and science in thought-provoking ways.

8. It’s tempting to think of this as “values-driven behavior.” If you do, you need to take the good with the bad. Typical circumstances for dolphins also include actions that we would call infanticide and rape.

9. This remarkable recall, James Ritchie wrote for Scientific American in 2009, may be a factor in the elephant’s survival—another anchor keeping them on the top side of Cope’s Cliff.

10. In “Post-traumatic stress? It doesn’t even exist!” journalist Paul Strudwick reported Bhugra’s claims that “the condition is not a true mental illness but instead is being diagnosed as a result of the influence of ‘insurance firms and drug manufacturers.’”

11. The national studbooks for both African and Asian elephants show the majority of elephants on display throughout the United States were captured in the wild as juveniles.

12. In most cases, Schobert said, the calves he purchased for his zoos were still drinking their mother’s milk when they were separated from their herds, and had to be trained to use a bottle. I first reported this for the Salt Lake Tribune in 2008.

13. “Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations,” by Emory University researchers Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler, was published in Nature Neuroscience in 2013.

14. “The study of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance by definition requires the maintenance and breeding of more than one generation of organisms and the significant costs in time, money, space, etc., that are required,” he wrote in “Epigenetic inheritance and its role in evolutionary biology: re-evaluation and new perspectives” for Biology in 2016.

15. Not “octopi,” since “octopus” does not come from Latin. And even though the word is Greek in origin, most folks don’t say “octopodes,” either. (But if you want to say it that way, the pronunciation is ock-TOP-uh-deez.)

16. Godfrey-Smith first wrote about this in a 2016 essay for the New York Times called “Octopuses and the Puzzle of Aging.” In it, he speculated that if octopuses could evolve to tilt the odds in their favor a little more, their lifespans might increase, although maybe not to as long as a human lifespan. “And when one contemplates the thought of a century-old octopus,” he wrote, “perhaps that’s just as well.”

17. Where does all that intelligence come from? The octopus genome is slightly smaller than the human genome, but it has 50 percent more genes, and has hundreds of novel genes not found in any other animal, Independent science editor Steve Connor reported in “Armed with 10,000 more genes than humans” in 2015.

18. In a 1998 article for Current Biology, Brenner told fellow biologist Lewis Wolpert that he was envious of Charles Darwin, “but it is impossible to begrudge him his success and demand that he should have waited a century or so to allow me a fair chance to compete with him.”

19. In “The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties,” published in Nature in 2015, Brenner’s team reported on their successful sequencing of the genome of the California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides.

20. In “Octopus inspires AI robots on a mission,” published by Seeker in 2016, science journalist Tracy Staedter wrote about a cephalopod-based AI project underway at Raytheon in Aurora, Colorado.

21. Females from the genus Neotrogla have an elaborate structure called a “gynosome,” which fits into the male genital chamber. Copulation takes up to seventy hours. “Nothing similar is known among sex-role reversed animals,” the authors wrote in “Female penis, male vagina, and their correlated evolution in a cave insect” for Current Biology in 2014.

22. Physarum polycephalum is a large amoeboid that changes its shape as it crawls. If food is placed at two different points in a maze, the researchers showed, P. polycephalum will find the minimum-length distance between the food, according to «Intelligence: maze-solving by an amoeboid organism» for Nature in 2000.

23. Fascinatingly, the amoebas do eventually “forget” their last turn—after about ten minutes of inactivity, according to “Persistent cell motion in the absence of external signals: a search strategy for eukaryotic cells” in PLOS One in 2008.

24. We know that circadian rhythms are powerful forces in all sorts of organisms. They are as old as the connection between life on Earth and our sun. But in “Amoebae anticipate periodic events” for Physical Review Letters in 2008, the research team demonstrated an anticipated response to rhythm in single-celled organisms after just a few hours of “training.”

25. First conceived in 1971 by the influential electrical engineer Leon Chua, memristors remained a theoretical construct until 2008, when a team from Hewlett-Packard demonstrated that memristance occurs in natural nanosystems.

26. P. polycephalum probably isn’t particularly special. “These biological memory features are likely to occur in other unicellular as well as multicellular organisms, albeit in different forms,” the authors wrote in “Memristive model of amoeba’s learning” in Physical Review E. in 2010.

27. Jacek Krywko did an excellent job at breaking this down in “Electronic synapses that can learn signal the coming of the first real artificial brain” for Quartz in 2017.

28. “With that much power, it must be doing some important work. Curing cancer, perhaps?” Andy Boxall wrote for Digital Trends in 2012. “Sadly not, it’s going to be running simulations of the effectiveness of nuclear weapons, and working out how to safely extend their life.” This is the best (and worst) example of humans exploiting their best minds to support their worst impulses.

29. When Rebecca Boyle pointed this out in “Simulated brain ramps up to include 100 trillion synapses” for Popular Science in 2012, I felt proud to be human for a few moments.

30. Their paper, “Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C,” published in Nature Climate Change in 2018, is terrifying reading.

31. Grollier’s talk, called “Realizing a brain on a chip,” will blow your mind.

32. This opens paths to “unsupervised machine learning,” the authors hypothesized in “Learning through ferroelectric domain dynamics in solid-state synapses” for Nature Communications in 2017. What happens after that is anyone’s guess, and could either give us the help we need to survive, with AI increasingly responsible for the second-by-second decision making needed to keep our world running, or put the final nail in our coffin, as superintelligent machines realize the world would be a much better place without us.

33. And yet they exhibit behaviors that are often as complex, and sometimes far more complex, than those of much larger species, the authors pointed out in “The allometry of brain miniaturization in ants,” published in Brain Behavior and Evolution in 2011.

34. A great analogy, served up even better by Bryan Walsh in “Your ant farm is smarter than Google” for Time in 2014.

35. John Koetsier explained how this works in “How Google searches 30 trillion web pages, 100 billion times a month” for Venture Beat in 2013.

36. In 2014, Kurths told the Independent that the mathematical model used in his study of ant search algorithms might also apply to other homing animals, like albatrosses, the world’s largest seabird.

37. In “Learning universal computations with spikes” published in PLOS Computational Biology in 2016, researchers from the Netherlands and the United States showed how short electrical impulses in animal brains help generate a picture of the world that is both in chaos and broadly predictable.

38. In “A modified BFGS formula using a trust region model for nonsmooth convex minimizations” published in PLOS One in 2015, researchers proposed a new algorithm for identifying the best solution out of many possible solutions for certain nonlinear problems.

39. In “A hybrid optimization method for solving Bayesian inverse problems under uncertainty” published in PLOS One in 2015, a team of Chinese researchers offered a new method for history matching, the process of building multiple numerical models to account for measured data.

40. In “Army ants dynamically adjust living bridges in response to a cost–benefit trade-off” for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2015, the authors suggested there could be “potential implications for human engineered self-assembling systems.”

41. Oh, and they can’t even see, Morgan Kelly from Princeton University explained in “Ants build ‘living’ bridges with their bodies, speak volumes about group intelligence” in 2015.

42. That’s what he told Bryan Walsh at Time.

43. One exception is the Australian bulldog ant Myrmecia nigriceps, which has significantly better eyesight than other ants, according to “Attack behavior and distance perception in the Australian bulldog ant Myrmecia nigriceps,” published in 1985 by the Journal of Experimental Biology.

44. “The ant odometer: stepping on stilts and stumps” was published in the journal Science in 2006.

45. Writing in the journal Science in 2016, the authors of “Prospective representation of navigational goals in the human hippocampus” concluded that a hippocampal-cortical network supports a “mind map” whenever we make a navigational goal and seek it out.

46. In “We’ve been looking at ant intelligence the wrong way,” for The Conversation, Antoine Wystrach of the University of Sussex also argues that, although “it seems intuitive to start with our own assumptions about human intelligence,” we can’t answer questions about insect intelligence with a “top-down approach.”

47. “The average velocity of the ants is almost independent of their density on the trail,” the authors observed in “Trafficlike collective movement of ants on trails: absence of a jammed phase” for Physical Review Letters in 2009. That’s amazing.

48. When self-driving cars arrive in a construction zone, Aarian Marshall wrote for Wired in 2017, they “can’t even.”

49. Sherman’s song is based on the tune of Amilcare Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.”

50. The Secret Life of Plants is actually a pretty good read. Take it with a grain of salt, though. Or maybe a whole mountain of salt.

51. Rolling Stone didn’t agree with my assessment. The brilliant music critic Ken Tucker acknowledged it was “full of tiny pleasures” but also called it “uneven” and marred by “bloated tedium,” adding “one person’s nectar is another’s Karo syrup.” And whether it was the music or the subject matter, a lot of people really loved the movie. My amazing editor, Leah Wilson, is pretty sure she watched it in a biology class in the 1990s.

52. “The fact that the term ‘neuron’ is derived from a Greek word describing a ‘vegetable fiber’ is not a compelling argument to reclaim this term for plant biology,” the authors wrote in “Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain?” for Trends in Plant Science in 2007.

53. Michael Pollan wrote about the debate for The New Yorker in 2013. “Depending on whom you talk to in the plant sciences today,” he wrote, “the field of plant neurobiology represents either a radical new paradigm in our understanding of life or a slide back down into the murky scientific waters last stirred up by The Secret Life of Plants.”

54. “This relatively long-lasting learned behavioral change,” Gagliano and her collaborators wrote in the journal Oecologia in 2014, “matches the persistence of habituation effects observed in many animals.”

55. Robert Krulwich (of Radiolab fame) crafted a masterfully understated lead in his piece about Gagliano’s work for National Geographic in 2015. “There’s this plant I’ve heard about that had a really bad afternoon a few years ago,” he wrote.

56. Some scientists do believe we are getting closer to understanding how memory works in the human brain, Elizabeth Dougherty explained in “Map in your mind” for Boston University in 2016.

57. “Learning by association in plants,” published in Scientific Reports in 2016, is beautiful for its simplicity. A talented middle school student could replicate this process with another species of plant for a science fair project. (Hey, Spike: That’s a hint.)

58. A lot of human decision-making processes work in similar ways, and even using similar chemical signalers, the authors of “Temperature variability is integrated by a spatially embedded decision-making center to break dormancy in Arabidopsis seeds” wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017. Perhaps plants—eukaryotes just like us—really are “slow animals.”

59. “The biomass distribution on Earth,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, offers plenty of humbling perspectives on our relative importance to this world. For example, every animal in the world combined accounts for less than a third of the biomass of the planet’s archaebacteria.

60. Gibson writes eloquently on the intersections of art, philosophy, and science, including in “Pavlov’s plants: new study shows plants can learn from experience” for The Conversation in 2016.

CONCLUSION: THE NEXT SUPERLATIVE DISCOVERY IS YOURS

1. Their collective screeches are among the loudest animal sounds ever recorded, according to Brad Erisman and Timothy Rowell in “A sound worth saving: acoustic characteristics of a massive fish spawning aggregation,” published in Biology Letters in 2017.

2. Flesher’s “Analysis of Populus tremuloides clonal variation and delineation in the Ottawa National Forest” is a beautiful piece of science.