Hi, friends!

Have your kids started school already? Maybe you don’t have kids, and the only milestone marking this time of year for you is a Pavlovian urge to buy Post-its.

In my household, camp is over but we have another week and a half before school starts. I’m enjoying these less-structured days of late summer. But with little to do and lots to anticipate—new teachers, new sports seasons, a big birthday, a trip for a family wedding—some of us are getting a little testy. Crabby, even.

Inspired by my kids (“She kicked me first!”) and by my limited time for writing this week, I’m rerunning an old Dear Inkfish column below. But I’m adding a bonus video that represents something I have called my children in my own less charitable moods.

What I’ve Been Working On

I’ve been reporting and writing a couple of fun pieces that are due at the end of the month. For one of them, I’m driving around town and visiting people with their reptiles or amphibians. It’s a tough job, etc.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time exploring new ways to spread the word about my book. “Spread the word” is what I say because I still don’t understand which things are called publicity and which are called marketing. Anyway I have some exciting things in the works, including a trip to NYC for an event on September 22. If you’re based in New York, I’d love to see you there!

Also in September, I’ll be doing my first book club visit. If you’d like to read my book with your book club and have me pop in on your discussion, either virtually or (in the Boston area) in person, please send me a note! And make sure to sound like a human when you write, because book clubs are one of the categories of AI spam/scam plaguing my inbox by these days.

[This column originally ran in October 2024, before most of my current subscribers were here. Our fictional letter-writer back then was, um, probably stressed about the presidential election. But we can imagine that today they would be able to find other things to worry about.]

Dear Inkfish

Everything is stressing me out right now: personal life, work, the world. Social media is just people I know tangentially shouting at each other about political topics that make me panic. When I leave the house for a walk, the unseasonably beautiful weather makes me think about climate change. I’m in a bad mood all the time. How can I exist in stressful times without becoming a jerk to my family and friends?

—A Crab

Dear Crab,

You’re not alone. All kinds of animals living under stressful conditions become grouchy. Researchers have used this tendency to study animal welfare: for example, pessimistic pigs or cows might suggest that a farm’s living conditions need improvement.

One recent study even found that stress can cause a bad attitude in an invertebrate. Namely, a cuttlefish.

Cuttlefish are cephalopods, like an octopus or squid. Researchers asked whether a species called the stumpy-spined cuttlefish gets into a bad mood when its life is stressful.

For cephalopods, stress doesn’t come from reading the news or going for a walk (no legs). Instead, the scientists gently stressed cuttlefish in their lab by doing two annoying things. First, they took away all the items that made the cuttlefish tanks pleasant and homey: sand, artificial plants, hiding places. They left each animal in a bare tub for a few days.

Then an experimenter started chasing the cuttlefish around their bare tubs with a net and briefly capturing them. This happened for a few minutes twice a day, three days in a row.

After this stressful period, the researchers gave their cuttlefish a test. They also tested other cuttlefish that they hadn’t been harassing.

All the cephalopods had previously been taught to associate stripes with snacks. Half the cuttlefish were trained with vertical stripes, and the other half with horizontal. When the cuttlefish entered a box and saw two signs—one horizontally striped and the other vertically—they knew which side of the box held a tasty shrimp.

In the experiment at the end of the very annoying week, the researchers again put their trained cuttlefish into boxes with two striped signs. This time, one of the signs had diagonal stripes, which the animals hadn’t seen before. Would they guess that this ambiguous sign pointed to food? Or would they assume it didn’t?

The stressed cuttlefish seemed more pessimistic. Compared to unstressed animals, they were less likely to investigate the ambiguous sign. It was as if they were thinking, Nothing good has happened this week; why would this be any different? But the cuttlefish who’d had a better week were willing to check out the diagonal stripes. Might be a shrimp here. Why not?

What’s the takeaway for those of us with backbones?

It’s natural to feel bad when things are bad. This tendency is in your bones (or not bones). It’s normal, as you’re being chased around your empty tank, to wish everyone would leave you alone and maybe give you a nice shell to crawl inside.

On the other hand/arm/tentacle, the bad times can make your brain interpret everything badly, even signs that are truly neutral. For now, you can do your best with your friends and family while trying not to believe everything your stressed brain is telling you. And maybe add some nice plants to your tank.

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Bonus video (title: Wow, You Are a Whole Bucket of Crabs Today)

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Hi, friends!

I’m just back from a whirlwind, kid-free trip to Amsterdam to meet up with a group of college friends, which was completely impractical and also wonderful. We had beautiful weather, amazing food, immaculate air quality (apparently that’s what happens when everyone bikes instead of driving), and no one fell into a canal.

This morning I’m celebrating my return home with by sitting outside with a cold-brew coffee. In Europe they do a lot of things better than we do, but their stance against both iced coffee and drip coffee is incorrect.

What I’ve Been Working On

I had two really fun podcast conversations air recently:

On the Emerging Form podcast, I talked a lot about the behind-the-scenes of writing the book, and confessed to the hosts about my writing strategy involving imaginary gnomes:

Emerging Form

Episode 170: Elizabeth Preston on Getting From Big Idea to Book

“Sometimes I let the subconscious deal with it,” says science writer Elizabeth Preston, author of the new book The Creature’s Guide to Caring, How animal parents teach us that humans were born to care. In this interview, we talk about the evolution of a manuscript–how she went from the “Big Idea” to the actual book. Other threads include the importance …

Listen now

a month ago · 4 likes · Christie Aschwanden

For paid subscribers to the podcast, there’s also a bonus episode where we continue the conversation.

And on a podcast called Birds and Nerds, I talked about my book, as well as my recent story about crow friends for Audubon magazine. Listen or watch here!

Dear Inkfish

Summer parenting is WEARING ME OUT. There’s not enough structure, the kids are antsy, and they’re constantly demanding more snacks or complaining that they’re bored. And yet I know once the busy-ness of the school year starts, I’ll be wishing for these relaxed days back. Do you have tips about how to make summers with kids more enjoyable?

For me, this summer has felt more relaxing than previous ones. I can’t take full credit, because my kids made a lot of it happen on their own. But I realized the secret is that I’m parenting like a banded mongoose.

Despite being a caring mother, this small African mammal can’t tell you where her kids are, or what they’re doing. She doesn’t even know what they look like.

Banded mongooses are meerkat relatives that live in cooperative groups of up to 40 animals. Researching these animals for my book The Creatures’ Guide to Caring, I learned that childcare for the group’s pups is a shared responsibility. In underground burrows, moms freely nurse each other’s young; other adults look after the pups at the den or out in the world.

This may sound like a dream to overextended human parents, but it’s more like a memory: Ancient humans likely had a similar system of cooperative care. Our extended family or community members helped raise our kids, and children grew up knowing many caretakers. By emulating the mongooses—and our own ancestors—we can live more naturally and easily in the summer and beyond.

The cooperation of banded mongooses stands out in the lion-eat-gazelle world of the savannah. They facilitate this cooperation in a surprising way: the group’s pregnant females somehow synchronize their births, often delivering their babies all on the same night. When a fresh batch of mongoose pups wriggles into the world, these moms don’t pay attention to whose are whose. Instead, they nurse anyone who comes crawling to them.

Unlike the mongooses, I parent aboveground, living with my husband and two elementary schoolers in a dense Boston-area neighborhood. The other moms and I didn’t use any biological tricks to synchronize our births. Yet our single block holds a half-dozen kids in my older daughter’s grade. A few of my younger daughter’s classmates live on our block too, and more of their peers are on the surrounding streets.

Recently the bigger kids discovered the joy of walking down the block and ringing someone’s doorbell to ask if they can play. We let our daughters leave the house unsupervised as long as they stick together. Sometimes this means I don’t know whose house my kids are at, or whether all the kids have landed at the park to play. At other times I find a pack of other people’s children squeezed into my kitchen.

I do know which ones belong to me, unlike a mongoose mom. But I’m happy to feed mango popsicles to someone else’s brood. Sometimes my daughters return from a friend’s driveway dripping wet after a water balloon fight, and I consider this a fair price for the space and quiet I had in the meantime.

Mongoose mothers also don’t give up their freedom when they have kids. A few babysitters stay at the den with the youngest pups while the moms and the rest of the group go foraging for bugs and other food.

When the pups are old enough to venture out too, they’re accompanied by adult mongooses whom biologists call escorts. These mongooses—usually young adult males—will groom the pups, help them find food, guard them and play with them. Escorts even impart their own habits to their proteges, teaching the pups to break open eggs and beetle shells by either biting them or hurling them against a tree.

In this way, the mongooses pass down their cultural traditions, like the recipes or skills that humans share—or like the friendship bracelet patterns or nonsense songs that my daughters bring home from day camp, when they leave our street and travel farther into the world.

The counselors at their summer camps are mostly young adults, like the mongoose escorts. On the savannah, escorts form one-to-one relationships with certain pups. My kids went to nature camp earlier this summer in the woods of Massachusetts, where the main threat is not predation but poison ivy (or, on one memorable occasion, ground-nesting wasps), so a single counselor can manage several kids. Still, my older daughter has had bonds with some of these early-adult guides that last across years.

It’s not surprising. Scientists believe our own species, like the banded mongoose, evolved to rely on “alloparents”: helpers such as aunts and uncles, grandparents, older children, or friends, who fed and wrangled our kids and protected them from harm. Parents weren’t on their own.

Because any human might be called on to help, our Homo sapiens brains evolved the capacity to care for other people’s children, whether or not we’re parents ourselves. And children evolved to grow up with the attention of many caretakers—loving and learning from their grandparents, their neighbors who offer a place to play, their camp counselors who put ice packs on their stings.

The same kind of cooperative caretaking has popped up across the mammal and bird family trees, and even in fish and reptiles. When researchers look across species to ask why this strategy has arisen in certain lineages, while so many other species rely on just one or two parents to raise their young (or do no caring at all), they’ve found that cooperation is more common in regions where the climate is harsh or unpredictable. Apparently, when the world is most uncertain, it makes sense for animals to lean on each other.

Maybe this is a good time, then, to practice leaning on our own children’s alloparents. Uncertainty is everywhere today, defining both our literal and metaphorical climate. It’s hard to imagine what the future will look like for my kids. Last month we finished sweating through a brutal heat wave, then experienced a full day of biblical rain.

As soon as the clouds cleared, though, I watched my daughters run back out the door.

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Hi, friends!

I’m writing to you from Cape Cod. It’s funny to recall that last summer when my family came here, I was in the middle of proofreading my whole manuscript. I sat on the porch in the morning with a big stack of pages and my coffee and the birds. This year the book exists in the real world but everything else is the same.

I hope you’re finding a way to enjoy some nature this month, even if it’s not the same as my family’s chosen activity for the day (harassing fiddler crabs).

What I’ve Been Working On

Sending a lot of pitches and submissions into the void, if we’re being honest. Avoiding writing a feature that’s due imminently. I’m sure this will work out great.

Last week I also teamed up with writer/artist pal Perrin Roosevelt Ireland, author of Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex, for a joint book event at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Was it G-rated? No. A terrific time? Oh yes.

We’ll be doing it again in NYC in September! Details are on my events page.

Dear Inkfish

I have a problem with professional jealousy. I would love to be happy for the accomplishments of my peers, but instead when I hear about nice things happening to people I turn into a petty monster. Please help??

I’m going to tell you about one thing I did this year that (accidentally) helped me with jealousy, and one thing Asian giant honeybees do that’s bizarre and might help all of us.

First: Oh yes. Jealousy.

Many people have said you should use jealousy as a kind of secret decoder ring or window onto your own psyche. When your inner petty monster shows up, ask her: What does that other person have that you want so badly? And could we maybe spend some energy trying to get that thing for ourselves, rather than feeling like this colleague has personally attacked us by achieving something nice?

I find this approach useful, sometimes. Another thing that’s been useful in my recent book publishing journey is, um, making friends.

I had been thinking for a while that it might be nice to reach out to other science writers with books coming out imminently, especially debuts. Maybe we could pool resources and cross-promote. Maybe we would just commiserate.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to go for it. Instead of pretending to be cool, I messaged several people basically asking them to be my friends. Some were writers I already knew to a degree; others were strangers.

And they were like: Sounds great!

So we started a little online group. There’s some complaining, some congratulating, some questions about the opaque and mystifying industry that is book publishing. But one unexpected outcome was that I realized basically everyone publishing a book is…really going through it.

Our poor egos are trampled, our beloved projects manhandled. Our inboxes are full of praise from readers who are actually AI-based scammers. We have family crises and bills to pay. Now when I see something nice happening for a fellow author, whether they’re in this group or not, it’s easier for me to think: Good! They could use a break!

And probably I’m still a small percent jealous. But it’s easier for me to fend off the inner monster when I see myself as less alone and more a part of a collective. Like an Asian giant honeybee.

These bees have a frankly disconcerting habit of building “open” nests. That means rather than hiding their fuzzy bodies, they form a huge, upside-down mountain of bees.

They have another disconcerting practice called “shimmering,” which looks like this:

When a threat approaches, the bees can quickly flip their bellies over in succession, kind of like a stadium full of soccer fans doing the wave. Personally I wouldn’t need any extra incentive to stay away from a mountain of bees, but the shimmering may spook potential predators.

In a recent study, scientists tried to figure out exactly what cues trigger shimmering. The nests they studied were clinging to the underside of a fifth-story roof over a university building in India. “Though there were many colonies at this location, it was challenging to obtain colonies that were accessible for conducting experiments,” the authors write, which is one of those sentences in a Methods section that you can tell has a whole novel’s worth of struggle behind it.

When they managed to reach these suspended colonies with their experimental setup—an object moving along a wire, in front of a cardboard backdrop hung on the building’s outer wall—the scientists found that not everything triggered shimmering. An object flying past the hive horizontally, like a predatory hornet might, made the bees shimmer. An object looming from above, like a bird, didn’t.

It’s possible that birds aren’t put off by bees doing the wave, so the insects have evolved a different response to threats from above. When a bird approaches, they’re more likely to send a stream of bees from the hive to try to sting it. (If the predator is a bird called a bee eater, though, it lures these bees away from their colony, then turns around and swallows them.)

Humans are not colonial insects, and a lone person can certainly be a star. But maybe we’re more capable of shimmering in a group.

Shoulder to shoulder with our peers, we can understand each other better. We can react to each other, uplift each other, work in concert.

Maybe there’s something you can do to bring yourself closer to the peers you might envy. Not, like, dangling from a fifth-story roof. But a group text? A happy hour? I don’t know what most people do to socialize professionally; I haven’t had a real job since the Obama administration. You’ll figure something out.

The threats you face might be real, with talons or teeth. Or they might be only passing shadows—hurt feelings, frustrated ambitions. Either way, you don’t have to respond by flying alone and angry. You can squeeze closer to the group and make your shimmering greater. Together, you can dazzle.

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Hi, friends.

How’s your July? Are your popsicles abundant? Is your air conditioned?

I put together a picnic for my family on July 4, which got spectacularly rained out halfway through. But after we got home and filled the tub with everyone’s wet clothes, we spread the picnic back out on the dinner table, and had our strawberry shortcakes, and it was fine.

The other thing that happened on July 4 (before the clouds rolled in) is that I suddenly thought, “Sketching outside would feel nice.” So I took a sweaty walk to the garden behind the library and then sat in my puddling sweat and drew some day lilies, and a little voice in my brain said “…every day??” So I drew for 8 days in a row, until I forgot on the 9th day because we were busy coming home from a quick camping trip.

What I’ve Been Working On

I had a great conversation on a live radio show called How on Earth with KGNU in Boulder/Denver. Listen here!

I also participated in the Arlington Author Salon, a really fun quarterly reading at my favorite local cafe. I read with two other writers and we each had to bring a “sensory element” for the audience. I passed around a collection of crafts woven by caretaking animals, for people to see and touch (or, theoretically I guess, smell).

Dear Inkfish

I recently published my first book and I can’t stop checking my Amazon sales rankings approximately one thousand times per day even though I know this is pointless and usually makes me feel bad. Why am I like this.

I won’t even pretend this one isn’t autobiographical, LOL. Did you know that Amazon updates those rankings hourly? What are they trying to do to all of us??

Maybe the real question is, why do humans choose to mildly hurt ourselves when we know better?

That impulse we can’t ignore could be something like “Transcribing this interview is boring, so I’ll just click over to the internet to find out whether I’ve become a global literary sensation in the past fifteen minutes.” Or it could be, you know, any other human vice. If we were better at resisting things that feel immediately good but ultimately bad, entire industries would cease to exist.

My interest was piqued, then, on a recent day when I took a break from refreshing Amazon and skimmed through the scientific studies waiting in my inbox. The one that caught my eye was about goats who are so committed to head-butting that they give themselves traumatic brain injuries.

The paper is just a small pilot study of three animals. And it’s a preprint, which means it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or published in a journal. But it’s striking. So to speak.

Scientists put three young domestic male goats in a pen together for six months, and used an overhead videocamera to record what the goats did. They also put an accelerometer on the horn of one of the goats, to measure the forces the animal was experiencing.

Male goats, as you may know, love to smash their heads together. It’s kind of their whole thing. From the recordings, the researchers calculated that each goat experienced an average of 227 head impacts per day.

The goat with the most collisions actually sustained more than 20% of them against the fence: Literally banging his head against a wall. You can see why this paper spoke to me.

The scientists may or may not have been thinking about their own vices, but the bigger reason they cared about these self-harming farm animals is as a potential model for human brain injury.

Sampling the goats’ cerebrospinal fluid during the course of the study, they found evidence of the brain cell damage and protein buildup that are hallmarks of human neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or CTE. Examining the animals’ brains after the experiment confirmed that, although they were still young, “the goats already demonstrate the criteria for mild brain damage.”

In humans, neurodegenerative diseases become more likely after head injuries. That means goats could be a useful model for scientists to study the biology of these conditions. Unlike a standard lab rat or mouse, goats helpfully damage their own brains.

You and I, though, are not goats. Unless you have a contract with a professional football or soccer team, you are not compelled to give yourself head injuries.

We’re also not required to do things that hurt us psychologically—even though, like the goats, we do have impulses that are harmful. Not all of an animal’s instincts are good or healthy.

But goats are, respectfully, not bright. You or I can do better. We can observe when we are smashing our head against a wall, and we can at least try to create a better habit instead.

I’m going to start right away. There’s just one little thing I have to check on the internet first.

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Hi, friends!

I hope you’re surviving whatever heat waves you’re dealing with, wherever you are. Today I’m writing from my favorite shady park with an iced latte, because I know that for the rest of the week I won’t want to linger outdoors.

Last month I did a podcast interview with a very kind host in the UK during a heat wave there, and when I asked how that was going he said I could probably tell from his complexion that he wasn’t built for these temperatures. Poor guy’d had to turn off his fan for the recording and was starting to resemble a stewed tomato.

What I’ve Been Working On

After months of writing and publishing stories that are adjacent to my book and talking about the book ad nauseam (ad my nauseam, at least), I’m working on a feature assignment that has nothing to do with the book. Or so I thought, until the MD I was interviewing the other day told me that the root of the problem we were discussing lies with our Western over-reliance on a nuclear family model. I can’t escape!

(By the way, if you want to hear more about problems with the nuclear family model and haven’t yet read my book or been thoroughly nauseam-ed by hearing about it, I noticed it’s discounted 20% at two corporate retailers that I’m not supposed to mention but rhyme with Schmarget and Flamazon.)

In other news, I finally published a VERY fun feature for Audubon magazine about human-crow friendships, featuring my sister Annie and her avian buddies Sal and Pal: Are Crows Really Our Friends?

Audubon also featured my book in this nice roundup of birdy books to read for the summer. “A delightful read that will make you think and feel”!

And Undark magazine gave me another lovely review!

…finally, a reminder that if you HAVE read my book and enjoyed it, you’re extremely welcome to share your own thoughts at Amazon, Goodreads, Storygraph, or the newsletter of your local Naked Mole Rat Appreciators chapter. Word of mouth really matters.

[The below column originally ran in June 2025. A lot of readers enjoyed it last year, and I have about twice as many subscribers now as I did then, so I thought it was worth re-sharing. Also my imaginary mailbox is empty.]

Dear Inkfish

You keep talking about how people should have creative hobbies, so I took up screenwriting! Rather than wasting a lot of time learning the mechanics, I’ve been using ChatGPT to write scripts. Then I refine them however I like. I’m wondering if you have any tips about where I can submit my screenplays for publication, or how to find an agent?

—Bard 2.0

Wow! OK. Hobbies are great; screenwriting is cool; the Giant Plagiarism Machine is not my favorite, and I’m going to tell you why in the most succinct and least-jerky way I can, which will involve Sumatran orangutans.

First, generative AI tools were created by stealing and chewing up huge amounts of copyrighted text and images created by real humans (like me!). If those tools regurgitate anything that looks like art, it’s because of humans’ work. Like your iPhone in the middle of a text message, ChatGPT and the rest are just offering the most predictable answer to a question, which is both a bad way to search for facts and the opposite of creativity.

That’s not to mention that generative AI is cooking the planet even faster than it was already cooking. Or that in a recent study, people who wrote essays using ChatGPT became increasingly lazy and disengaged with their work. Oh! And talking to chatbots is making people psychotic.

Now that I’ve made myself upset, let’s please take a trip to the rainforest.

We humans aren’t the only animals who need to create. Like a college student facing new assignments each week, or a parent staring into their refrigerator when dinnertime comes around yet again, orangutans need to build themselves a new nest daily. In the wild, adults make a nest every single night, and sometimes another nest during the day for napping.

It’s not simple. They bend and weave branches together, sometimes across multiple trees, to make a platform. They line the platform with more branches and leaves. They may fashion a pillow out of foliage, and pull more leafy twigs on top of themselves as a blanket.

In a recent study, scientists saw that Sumatran orangutans learned to make their nests by “peering”—that is, looking over the shoulders of other orangutans who were building their own nests. Young orangutans watched their mothers, for years (an orangutan may stick with Mom until it’s eight or ten years old). As they got a little older, they started peering at other orangutans, too.

After watching someone else building a nest, the young orangutans practiced choosing and manipulating twigs and branches. They were most interested in watching the more complicated tricks, such as connecting branches across more than one tree, or adding pillows and blankets to their beds.

Just being in proximity to someone building a nest wasn’t enough to get the young orangutans practicing. The important thing was the peering: choosing to watch the process, step by step.

Orangutans are apes, like we are—and this result isn’t really a surprise, is it?

To learn to build a nest, apes need to observe how it’s built. If a machine came down from the sky and handed them a completed nest each night, of course they’d never gain the skill of making one. They also wouldn’t know whether the nest was any good, or how to adjust it to the materials they have available, or what leafy pillows are comfiest on their own heads. And this isn’t a great metaphor, but if their, you know…sky-machine WiFi broke, they would have to sleep on the ground.

We make our bed, and then we lie in it. If you want learn to write or create, starting with the finished product won’t help you. That’s because you’re not a machine but (thank goodness) a human.

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Hi, friends!

How are we doing? This solstice is approaching; is it summer yet for you? We had an intense heat-and-humidity wave over the past several days, and I have one kid finishing school this week and another next week. So it’s feeling pretty summery here.

I had two terrific events to wrap up my spring book tour: Last week at Symposium Books in Providence, RI, and the week before at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts in Berkeley, CA. (I have more local events on the calendar for later in the summer, and hopefully one in NYC on a date TBD. Check my events page for updates!)

What I’ve Been Working On

Flying around. Driving around. Visiting with friends and family. Attending three end-of-year concerts, three birthday parties, a school picnic and a soccer festival. Thinking about writing.

I was also on some podcasts and radio shows:

This Is the Author (Something different: A show from Penguin Random House that’s simply authors talking about recording our audiobooks. I answered these questions immediately after 3.5 days of taping the book, in a fugue state)

The Roundtable (From WAMC, a more straightforward conversation about the book)

Science Friday (Attempting to answer listener questions with parenting tips from the animal kingdom) (!!!)

Dear Inkfish

I recently got disappointing news from my agent about a project I’ve been working on for a long time. It turns out my book may not be sellable at all. How do I get past this and figure out what to do next?

First of all, that sucks and I’m sorry.

Secondly, I’m realizing this newsletter might have a weird thing about beetles adjacent to poop, because this is about to be the third time—at least!—that I’m bringing one up. Last week we talked about self-promotion by way of a weevil that disguises itself as a bird turd. Almost a year ago I wrote about dung beetles enjoying a little treat.

Let’s not pause to read too much into this trend, because right now I have to tell you about a beetle that hunts on top of fox poops.

It’s called a gold-and-brown rove beetle. It can grow to almost an inch long, and is mostly brown, with a metallic gold rear end that might serve to warn predators it’s toxic. Or maybe the blinged-out butt is just for fashion. Which: fair enough.

I suspect somebody placed the above beetle on a flower for the sake of the picture, because this species prefers to hang out on dung, animal carcasses, and other decaying matter. Mm.

In a new paper, scientists on Isle Royale, a national park in Lake Superior, made a lucky observation. While collecting samples of wildlife poop, they noticed a rove beetle sitting on top of a fox scat. A little cloud of flies, presumably attracted to the poop, was hovering above. As the scientists watched, the beetle leapt about 4 inches in the air, grabbed a large fly, and killed and ate it.

They started checking other poops for beetles, and found rove beetles on 10 percent of the island’s fox scats—but not droppings from other species such as wolf or moose.

Foxes eat a lot of berries, and the scientists think this might be why the gold-and-brown rove beetles hang out on their turds: the berry-rich poop is especially attractive to flies. The beetles use these fruity feces as a hunting ground because they know something good will fly over.

OK, let’s be done with these guys and get back to you.

Right now you’re sitting on a large piece of work that you’ve been told (not in so many words) might be crap. You should take whatever time you need to feel upset about that. But when you’re ready, take a look around you.

Maybe your agent is wrong. Even if she isn’t, though, you won’t be starting your next project from the ground. You’re already standing on something significant, whether or not it has value on its own right now.

And once you turn your attention away from that work, the new ideas will come.

They might buzz in one at a time. Or they might arrive in a whole wild swarm. Sometimes letting go of our first, treasured vision makes space for other, even better thoughts to fly into our brains.

You’re right where you need to be. You’re waiting and you’re sparkly gold. When you see your next great idea, you’re going to leap up and grab it.

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Hi, friends!

Apparently it’s June?? A great month for eating a mango ice cream bar from Trader Joe’s, becoming completely overwhelmed by your family’s summer calendar, and leaving a review of my book somewhere/everywhere on the internet.

What I’ve Been Working On

Back when I was doing reporting for my book, I visited biologist Lauren O’Connell at Stanford and learned all about poison frog parenting. Lauren also told me a little bit about one of her grad students, Billie Goolsby, who was doing fascinating research involving a robotic tadpole. Finally, I was able to follow up and write a really fun profile for Nature about Billie and her work. (You may have to create a free login to read the whole piece.)

I also asked the scientists I interviewed for the book to keep me posted about new research they had coming out. When Harvard neuroscientist Catherine Dulac told me about some new work on loneliness and the brain, I turned it into this feature for Knowable.

Of course, I’ve also been continuing to ride the book promotion train. I recorded a couple of podcasts/radio shows that I’ll be excited to share soon. And I traveled to Syracuse, my hometown, for a lovely event that was also a reunion with old teachers and family friends.

Dear Inkfish

I’m a writer getting ready to publish my first book, and I’m absolutely dreading the publicity piece of it. I’ve heard authors have to do a lot of this themselves these days. But it feels so cringe to share links and announcements about my work over and over. Can’t I skip all that and just let the work speak for itself?

Weird—another question that spookily aligns with my own interests at the moment, almost as if all of these letter writers are people I made up!

Look: It’s a free country (something we used to say). You can skip all of it. Personally, I’m proud of this book that I spent forever making, and I want as many people as possible to read it. So I’m doing the podcasts and the posting and the flying and the shilling.

To do these things, you may have to get comfortable with being a little annoying to yourself. For inspiration in that department, please let me introduce a weevil.

Its name is Sternuchopsis trifida and it lives on kudzu vines in Japan. Not unlike certain writers, it strongly prefers not to be noticed. That’s why it has evolved a blobby black-and-white coloration. When it sits still on a leaf, it looks like a bird dropping.

This doo-doo disguise is less effective, though, when the weevil has to move around, like when it’s eating or looking for a mate. And when scientists presented 20 Japanese tree frogs with weevils in the lab, they discovered that poop impersonation isn’t this bug’s only trick.

The frogs spotted the weevils walking around and nabbed them. But the weevils refused to be swallowed: they grabbed onto the tongues or lips of the frogs and didn’t let go.

Only two frogs managed to swallow their prey. Several others spat the bugs out immediately. The frogs whose tongues had been firmly grasped—the weevils did this using spines on their legs—needed anywhere from 3 minutes to nearly an hour and a quarter to dislodge the bugs.

Maybe putting yourself out there is gross. Maybe repeatedly nagging your friends and pleading with strangers to engage with your work makes you feel like crap. I get it.

But when the world is giving the gift of its brief attention to this work that’s precious to you, why let yourself be immediately digested and done with? Why not seize your audience and cling tight?

You’re more than a bird turd. You’re a being with something unique to offer, and this is your moment. Hold onto it.

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Hi, friends!

It’s been a busy two weeks since pub day. I signed a big stack of preorders at Porter Square Books—thank you to everyone who ordered! If you still want a signed copy, you can use the same link. Or, if you’re local, you can find signed books at Belmont Books, Harvard Book Store, or (by the end of this week) Brookline Booksmith.

On Friday of pub week I had a lovely and full launch event at Harvard Book Store. Then I flew early the next morning to Chicago for an event in conversation with my illustrator, Marnie Galloway, where I reunited with many dear friends and exchanged about a million hugs. I had a gorgeous solo Mother’s Day (sorry, kids) roaming around my favorite Chicago neighborhoods from the years I spent living there. After returning home for a few days, I drove to Williamstown for an event at my alma mater, caught up with some old professors, and navigated the Route 2 mountain pass in the densest fog I’ve ever seen.

I’m feeling very lucky to be having all these experiences. I was overcome with emotion while running around North Pond in Chicago and thinking about returning to the home of my twenties as a published author and meeting so many of my old friends’ children. I’m also feeling lucky because both my kids were sick twice during that stretch, and I dodged all the viruses like Neo in The Matrix.

One request: If you’ve read my book, I would be incredibly grateful if you’d leave a review somewhere. Or everywhere! You can copy and paste the same review into Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, and anywhere else you can think of. If I pass a certain number of reviews on Amazon, Jeff Bezos will start beaming his visage directly into people’s homes to perform a singing telegram about how great my book is (not a direct quote from my agent).

What I’ve Been Working On

So much publicity! More audio and video:

A conversation on Substack with Darby Saxbe, one of the scientists featured in my book and author of the upcoming DAD BRAIN

Quirks and Quarks, a radio show from the CBC in Canada

What We’re Reading, a radio show from KAXE

Think, a radio show from KERA

Another book excerpt:

The surprising reason female mongooses start wars — and what it reveals about group survival in Big Think

Original pieces (these are what kept me so busy in the month before publication):

Nine Animal Parents Who Could Really Use a Day Off, in Orion (a fun one!)

These Animals Expect Other Species to Raise Their Young, in National Geographic (it may look like there’s a paywall, but if you enter an email address I believe you’ll be able to read it)

There’s a Reason Moms Are So Overworked, an op-ed in Slate that explains why orangutans are the tradwives of the animal kingdom

…and I got this very exciting review in the UK Sunday Times! The UK edition of the book comes out this Thursday. (Not a lot of review action so far on this side of the Atlantic, which means if you leave me a reader review someplace, your voice will really count!)

Dear Inkfish

I’m an adult who still lives in the city where I grew up. My parents live here, and my siblings are nearby, too. But now I’m considering taking a job in another city that would be a plane ride away. I’m torn about leaving my home. I’m single and don’t have kids, so it’s relatively simple to relocate, and it would be a new adventure. On the other hand, will I just end up lonely and regretful?

There’s nothing wrong with being a homebody. In many animal species, young adults who stay at home for a while—or their whole lives—are critical caretakers for their younger siblings. (I wrote about a lot of them in my book! Maybe you’ve seen me mention it already? lol)

But other animals leave the area where they were born, a strategy called natal dispersal. It can be important for establishing a territory, and for having babies without the risk of, ah, inbreeding.

Although plenty of animals hop far from home as soon as they can, hares and rabbits aren’t generally among them. These species usually disperse to within about three miles of where they were born, according to scientists in Norway and Denmark.

Yet when these scientists trapped a few dozen mountain hares in Norway—baiting their traps with sunflower seeds, then giving the hares lightweight GPS collars—they got a surprise.

One male hare hopped away from the capture site and then just kept hopping. He moved for 12 days, mostly at night. Twice, he backtracked and chose a place to stay for a few days, then decided to keep moving. Finally he settled into a new home, 59 kilometers (almost 37 miles) from where he’d been trapped. It’s possible he was already traveling before the scientists caught him.

None of the other animals in the study moved very far. So the gallivanting hare was unusual. But he gave scientists a new idea of what’s possible for his kind. Likewise, although you come from a family of animals who stay close, you may be capable of something different.

When animals disperse to new places, their movement can help the larger population by spreading gene variants and adaptations. One way mountain hares are adapted to their environment, for example, is that their coats change to white in the snowy winter and gray-brown in the warmer months.

On the other hand, the scientists note that this hare might find his new home to be a bad fit: Now that he’s moved from an area with longer winters to a coastal home where spring comes sooner, he might keep his white winter coat too long and make himself a target.

Still, they spotted the hare later that spring alive and well, and apparently chasing after a mate.

You might thrive in your new city, or it might not be a good fit. But a move could bring you new opportunities to chase. It will also bring your own unique ideas and resources—the DNA of your character—to a new community that might not have known they needed you.

And unlike the hare, if it doesn’t work out, you can hop on a plane and come back.

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I can’t believe it, friends: The day is finally here.

More than 13 months after I turned in the final manuscript and endnotes to my editor, and more than 7 years after I thought “Maybe I could write a book about the evolution of parenting?” while working on an ill-fated fellowship proposal, my book is on sale today.

You can buy it in hardcover, digital or audio (read by me!) anywhere you like to get books. Or request it from your library. If you really want to be a pal, write a review and post it at Goodreads and/or Amazon (you don’t have to buy the book there to leave a review). I’ll be trying not to compulsively read these, but they’re super helpful for helping other people find the book.

Oh, and you can come see me in person! Here are the events I have scheduled so far. You’ll find more details, as well as any others that pop up, at my events page.

What I’ve Been Working On

I have several new stories coming out soon that are related to the book. In the meantime, I’ve been yapping on some radio shows and podcasts, which you can hear at these links:

• I talked to the podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood about cooperative caretaking and the myth of “mom brain”

• I was on KQED’s show Forum answering listener calls about animal parenting (let’s not talk about how I had read my emails too quickly and didn’t realize until immediately beforehand that this was live radio OMG)

And you can sample my book by reading excerpts at these sites:

• LitHub, with a nice chunk of the introduction

• The Boston Globe, on the universe (and universality) of motherhood

• McSweeney’s, on meeting a bunch of naked mole rats

Dear Inkfish

What’s it like to publish a book? PS: If you don’t answer this with some sort of animal metaphor I’m going to feel personally betrayed.

Don’t worry! This is the newsletter for advice of questionable relevance from the animal kingdom, and that’s what I’m going to share. But briefly, because I probably have a podcast or something in a few minutes.

There’s one tidbit I gathered early in my research for this book that didn’t make it into the manuscript. Well, there are lots of things that didn’t make it in. But what I’m thinking of now is the brood patch.

This is a phenomenon in certain bird species: When they make their nests, they also lose their feathers over a patch of skin on their belly or chest. Some birds’ feathers fall out on their own. Other birds physically pull them out, such as mallard ducks, which use the fluff to line their nests.

This exposed skin is what will rest on top of their eggs while they’re incubating. With the insulating feathers stripped away, the heat of the parent’s body can better warm the eggs.

Depending on the species and how the parents divide their roles, both parents might have a brood patch, or only the mom. The bird in the photo at the top of this post has its brood patch just peeking through. If you hold a nesting bird belly-up and blow on its feathers (I mean, if some kind of expert does it—please don’t go harass any nesting birds) you can see more of the bare skin:

I’ve always been struck by how this simple fact about some birds makes the metaphor of parenting so literal: To protect their young, they have to strip away their own protective layers and bare their vulnerable chests. The baby has to be close to the heat of the parent’s blood.

This is also how we create, no?

A child, a book, anything we birth and care for: putting it into the world and helping it grow outside of ourselves requires vulnerability. We let others see us a little more closely and uncomfortably. We expose our hearts.

Today the project I’ve nurtured for many years is walking away on its wobbly little legs, and I hope the world is kind to it.

But also, it can’t live here anymore. It was starting to talk back to me.

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Hello, friends!

Here in Massachusetts it’s both spring break and Patriots’ Day—a holiday that allegedly has something to do with the Revolutionary War, but I’m convinced is just an excuse to watch the Boston marathon on TV. While the runners are slogging away, I’ll be attempting to get some work done even though my kids are home and the libraries are closed. No doubt I am also headed for Heartbreak Hill.

What I’ve Been Working On

Guys, book publicity is no joke. Everyone I’ve seen within the past few weeks has asked, “So, is there anything left for you to do?” and I’ve responded with some kind of deranged snort. I have to work out details for in-person events; promote those events to make sure people actually show up and I’m not talking to an empty bookstore; write/revise/approve the excerpts and articles related to the book that will be publishing over the next few weeks…I’m doing my first podcast tomorrow and just now realized that it has a video element, so suddenly I’m adding “dust/tidy bookshelf” to my task list.

Anyway it’s all good stuff, but it’s a lot.

Want to come hang out with me in person? As of right now I’ll be in Cambridge, Chicago, Williamstown, Syracuse, Berkeley and Providence (with a couple more Boston-area events happening later in the summer). Check out the details here.

And here’s my obligatory reminder that while any way you want to read or share the book is very much appreciated, preordering it is ESPECIALLY helpful! You can click here to order a signed copy through Porter Square Books, my favorite local shop. Or you can buy it in hardcover, digital or audio anywhere else you like.

Thank you!!

Dear Inkfish

I feel that it’s important to stay informed. But the news alerts I get all day are almost all depressing or stressful. How can I keep myself fortified against the constant onslaught of bad stuff?

Obviously the short answer is to turn off your push notifications. Stop trying to be a superhuman compartmentalizer. Just. Turn. Them. Off.

The only alerts my phone is allowed to give me are for calls or texts—that is, messages someone is actually trying to deliver to me. The bad news does not need you to answer its call or tell it which pasta shape you need from the grocery store. It can wait.

But in case you don’t trust me, I’m going to give you an illustration from the animal world that might be helpful.

For background, you’ll need to know that an octopus doesn’t have a penis. (I might be stretching the definition of “need.”) But this cephalopod also doesn’t follow the example of so many other ocean creatures, which do their fertilization externally: a female lays a pile of eggs, and a male blorps some sperm on top and hopes for the best.

Instead, male octopuses use one of their arms as a sperm-delivering tool. They move a little packet of sperm down a groove to their arm tip, then stick that arm right inside the female’s body.

In most octopus species, the penis arm—it’s called the hectocotylus—is the third arm on the right side. It develops differently from the other arms, with a sort of scoop at the end.

This arm is valuable. And although an octopus can regrow an arm, it takes 2 or 3 months, which is a long time for an animal that may only live a year. So the male octopus protects its hectocotylus.

In a recent study, scientists collected dozens of wild Japanese pygmy octopuses. They found that many of the octopuses—more than three-quarters—had arms that were missing or in the process of growing back. One unlucky individual had lost seven arms. (Besides having an arm chomped by a predator, a small octopus can also lose a limb to a crab, the authors note, or be stung badly by an urchin.)

Yet the losses weren’t random. While 13 females had lost their third arm on the right side, only one male had lost that arm.

Octopuses have been seen holding the hectocotylus tip close to their body while swimming. In experiments, the researchers saw that Japanese pygmy octopuses also used that arm differently while exploring. When the researchers put a fishing sinker in a tank, the octopuses investigated it curiously; their arms let them taste as well as touch. But the males never used their hectocotylus arms to explore the mystery object.

In another experiment, the researchers put a piece of frozen shrimp inside a box with a hole. Males did stick their hectocotylus arms in the hole—but only after they’d used their other arms to check it out.

My point is that this cephalopod recognizes it has a vulnerability.

It doesn’t just throw all its limbs out into the world with abandon. It protects the part of itself that it can least afford to lose.

The other day, I discovered my first negative book review, from an anonymous reader. Two stars! It was from a biologist who claimed I made some errors, which is certainly possible. I reminded myself how much effort I put into fact-checking the book, and that minor mistakes wouldn’t affect its substance. Still, a little sting of worry stayed with me, as from a sea urchin.

People say authors shouldn’t read reviews from readers on sites like Goodreads. In the future, I’ll remember to avoid it. Hahaha just kidding! I don’t have that kind of willpower.

But maybe, like the male octopus, I can be more mindful of what I’m exposing my sensitive bits to. Am I comfortable with the risk of reaching my attention into the dark hole of strangers’ opinions?

Maybe you, too, can consider your valuable resources—your attention, your emotions—and what you’re allowing to touch them. We’re all swimming in stressful waters. But it’s natural to recognize the vulnerable part of yourself and keep it close.

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Hello, friends!

I hope you’re having a good Easter season/Passover/April/anything else you may be observing. In my household, Sunday got off to an extremely grumpy start after the Easter bunny apparently hid some of the eggs too well. Look, kids, not everything gets handed to us in life, OK?

Yesterday also marked one month until my book comes out, and I decided everything will be fine as long as (in addition to all the other pre-pub work I have to do) I get the whole house clean and organized before I start traveling for book events. This is rational and I won’t be taking feedback.

What I’ve Been Working On

I turned in a feature story draft that was almost entirely about stuff happening in mouse brains, so it was a challenge to make engaging. (Perhaps somewhere my editor is reading this and thinking, “Well, you didn’t.” We’ll find out soon!) I also worked with a fact-checker on another feature that’s been in the works for a long time.

In the next 10 days I have to write (checks calendar in alarm) three more stories, and prepare for a kid’s birthday. I also have a constantly growing list of tasks related to book publicity, which I’m trying to do a little of every day.

Oh, and I completed a fun block-printing project and made a stack of thank-you notes for people who helped with the book:

Dear Inkfish

I graduated from college a few years ago, and I really want to have a writing career. I’m writing most days, submitting my work, blah blah. I know I’m also supposed to be “developing my voice.” But I’m stumped about how to do that. When I read the work of writers I admire, I find myself imitating them. And honestly, I like that work better, because it sounds more professional. How am I supposed to sound like a writer without sounding like another writer?

Standing out from a crowd goes against a lot of our human instincts. I have a theory that this is what makes daycare possible: At home, a toddler is a chaos machine. At daycare, all the toddlers obediently line up for hand washing, or lie down together on their nap mats when the lights are out. I think little kids in a group have a herd instinct: since they actually have no idea what’s going on most of the time, they feel it’s safest to follow whatever the crowd is doing.

Even as adults, we sense there’s security in going along with the group. Oh, are wide-leg pants what we’re supposed to be wearing now? (clicks “add to cart”)

Let me introduce you to a bug, though. I’m pretty neutral about most bugs, but this one delighted me:

She’s an adult cicada that researchers found on a Panamanian island. Usually, cicadas of this species are a pale, leafy green. When the scientists came across this startling hot-pink insect, they didn’t know what to make of her. They put her in a cage to learn more.

After four days, they noticed the cicada’s color was fading. She had become more of a pastel pink. After another week, the pink had become green. The cicada was now indistinguishable from her leafy peers.

Why would a normally green bug grow up to be hot pink, instead? And why did her color change over time? The scientists had some ideas, which they described in a paper called—in a charming nod to Chappell Roan—Pink Cricket Club.

On this Panamanian island, about one-third of the plant species have something called delayed greening. Their young leaves may start out as white, red or pink instead of green, due to a lack of chlorophyll. This makes the leaves less nutritious, and helps the plants avoid being eaten right away.

Perhaps this cicada species has evolved to usually blend in by being green, but occasionally blend in by being shocking pink instead. A pink cicada, hanging out near some delayed-greening leaves, could camouflage just as effectively as a green cicada.

In fact, by imitating a leaf that’s less nutritious, the cicada might even be more protected, because her color deters other critters from taking a nibble. (Or those critters could just be nervous about eating something they haven’t seen before.)

The scientists have no clue why their cicada changed color over time. She might have done it intentionally, to blend in with the green leaves in her cage. Or her diet might have played a role; they were feeding her only green foliage. Or whatever pigments are involved might have naturally broken down or built up over time.

In fact, the entire fact of her being pink might have been an accident. Without gathering more data, the researchers don’t yet know whether this one insect represents a cool adaptation, or a genetic fluke.

Your identity, too, will take some time to come into focus.

Matching the style of your peers can be a route to safety. What’s working for them might work for you. Blending in can help you stay alive—but it also means no one sees you. Your fragile little body is indistinguishable from the forest.

Trying something new and flamboyant is less safe. If you stand out too much, you could be plucked from a branch before you even get a chance to mature.

But looking different from everyone else can be another way to survive.

Maybe when you do the work that’s really your own, you’ll find you don’t look like every other writer—because you look like a kind of writer that hasn’t been invented yet. You’re not trying to sit on the green branch. You’re doing your own thing over here on the pink branch, and it might be a wild mistake, or it might be brilliant.

The only way to know is to keep on writing. Keep on dancing.

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Hi, friends.

I don’t know about you, but I cannonballed into this Monday like a kid into a ball pit. My children are finally both back in school after missing all of last week when our household was hit by—I am not making this up—Covid and flu B simultaneously.

Yes, we also missed an entire week of school in January with flu A. Yes, I am now a person with an informed opinion on the presentation of two different influenza strains in children, like a sad viral sommelier. Yes, we got all our shots this fall. It’s fine.

The good news is that spring is here. I hope wherever you are, you’re seeing some flowers poking through the mud.

What I’ve Been Working On

Reporting for the (mumble mumble number of) assignments I overconfidently promised to complete before May.

Also/always, book publicity! I now have an EVENTS tab on my website, where you can see what’s in the works. Check back for more to come.

AND, I’ve arranged a preorder campaign with a beloved local shop! If you preorder my book through Porter Square Books, I’ll sign your copy and you’ll avoid giving money to any potentially evil corporations. (Or you can buy the book at your own favorite bookstore, or anywhere else you prefer, of whatever moral status.)

Dear Inkfish

The past month has been an absolute you-know-what-storm in both my personal and work lives. Whenever I finally get a window of time and try to accomplish something, I’m likely to find myself staring at a wall instead. Do you have any tips about being productive when your brain feels like it went through a Play-Doh extruder?

As a matter of fact, I do have some advice from the animal kingdom about how to stay productive when your resources are drained:

Don’t.

Have you heard of torpor? It’s like a mini hibernation. True hibernation is when an animal more or less sleeps through winter by lowering its body temperature and heart rate and slowing its breathing. Torpor is a shallower, shorter snooze. You might think bears hibernate, but they really use torpor. (Sorry to be a Well, Actually guy; I don’t like myself right now either.)

Like hibernation, torpor is a way for an animal to save energy in lean times. Lots of mammals and other animals employ this tool. The birds that use torpor mostly take very shallow snoozes. Only a few types, including hummingbirds, conk out more deeply—or so scientists thought until recently.

Researchers in Australia glued little temperature-logging devices to the backs of nine white-backed swallows for up to a couple of weeks. These birds hunt insects by day, and sleep in burrows at night. But anecdotally, during stormy weather, some people had observed the swallows tucked into their burrows during the day, “in an unresponsive state.”

Although rainfall was rare during the experiment in this dry part of Australia, the scientists managed to collect data from two of the birds during and after rainstorms. What they saw was startling.

On a normal day, these birds had body temperatures around 39 degrees C (about 102 F).* Their temperatures dropped about 4 degrees C at night. But in a rainstorm, the birds turned practically icy—their nighttime body temperatures fell to about 25.5 degrees C (only 78 F).

Those body temperatures suggested a deep torpor, which the swallows repeated for days after the storms. The longest bout of torpor was 17.5 hours, well into the daylight hours. Even when the birds were at normal temperature, they tripled the time they spent tucked into their burrows during the daytime.

Until now, the authors write, no one knew a songbird could survive such a low body temperature. But now that they’ve seen the swallows taking their epic naps, they wonder whether deeper torpor might be secretly widespread among songbirds.

Why sleep through a rainstorm and the following days? When it’s rainy, cold or windy, insects stay out of the air. That means the birds would have a hard time finding food if they kept up their usual activity. They would burn up their fuel and put themselves in danger. Better to hunker down and save the energy they have.

In other words, when conditions are harsh, these swallows don’t try to power through. There’s no hustle culture. They look out of their burrow, see a bad day happening, and turn their bodies right off.

What would it look like for us humans to do the same? Maybe when we’re facing a you-know-what-storm, we can decide to just stop trying for a little bit.

Survival can mean deciding not to keep pushing, but to save our energy. Cool off. Slow down our hearts, slow down our breathing. No—even slower.

When the wind changes, we’ll be ready.

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*just like my kids all last week LOL

Hi, friends.

It’s almost spring. How are we feeling? My calendar and inbox and to-do lists are starting to get a bit frantic, so here’s the energy I’m going to try to channel:

On Saturday, I dragged my family to a nearby farm and wildlife sanctuary for a program called Maple Magic. We saw tapped sugar maples, lifted the lids on their buckets, and caught drips of sap on our fingers to taste. We learned about tree identification and boiling points and colonial recipes. We sampled some finished syrup that—our guide confessed—came from Costco, because the farm can’t afford to give theirs away.

We also met an elderly man named John. He was standing on a porch with a view of thawing snow and chickadees, feeding logs into a wood stove and endlessly boiling clear sap down into syrup. He was intermittently swallowed by a cloud of the best-smelling steam.

John looked so happy.

What I’ve Been Working On

Starting reporting for the articles I have to write between now and May (possibly too many, help).

Also—mostly—sending a lot of cringe-y emails and trying to put together a little bit of a book tour. It’s hard but I’m making some progress. For now, I can share this!

Dear Inkfish

I have a large creative project launching soon, and I can already feel how hard it’s going to be to just appreciate my own experience, and not obsess over the successes of others. How can I avoid letting comparison be the thief of joy?

—Definitely a real reader

Wow, what a timely question relevant to my own concerns!

My own book launch is certainly going to drive me to depths of neuroticism I have not previously explored. However, for this letter writer who is not myself, I can offer some calmer advice.

Specifically: There can be more than one queen.

Let me tell you about some really weird ants.

You may know that colonies of ants, like honeybees, generally have a queen who gets special treatment and makes all the babies. The workers—her daughters—care for new generations of eggs and larvae. (Males are mostly irrelevant. The queen’s sons are born with wings so they can fly away from the colony in search of mates. The queen herself relies on sperm that she’s stored from a brief dalliance with those flying males in her youth.)

But in Japan, researchers have discovered a rare ant species with a unique lifestyle: Everyone is a queen.

In this species, there are apparently no males at all. The female ants lay only unfertilized eggs, which develop into daughters. This is the opposite of most ants and bees, in which unfertilized eggs only become sons. (When female animals can produce daughters with no dads, it’s called parthenogenesis. I wrote an article about parthenogenesis in condors and reptiles—and why mammals can’t do it—here, if you’re the kind of person who thinks that’s interesting.)

Furthermore, in this weird ant species, all the daughters are queens. There are no workers, no division of females into two classes. All of them are fertile and fortunate.

Except that their lives are tough. To survive and reproduce, those queens need to carry out a hostile takeover of another nest. An invading queen will enter a colony of a different ant species and attempt to sting its queen and some of its workers to death. If she’s successful, she becomes that colony’s ruler. She lays her own eggs, and the captured workers raise her young—more queens.

In lab experiments, the researchers let 43 of these ant queens attempt to take over other ants’ colonies. Only seven survived and had babies. The rest were either killed by the workers they tried to overthrow, or died on the colony’s doorstep.

So, OK, maybe this isn’t the best pep talk. A creative life is tough. We’re all out here scrapping.

But in that Japanese ant species, all of the queen’s siblings are also queens. Why not try to think of your fellow authors or artists in the same way? One person’s creative success doesn’t take away from another’s. All of you represent a rare and strange species. All of you are built to be royalty.

That doesn’t mean you—we—are guaranteed to rule. You might be disappointed. Your project might expire on the threshold of what you thought was possible.

But that ant queen who does achieve her goals, who fights her way to success, doesn’t proceed from there with caution. Even though it guarantees them a hard future, she makes her offspring in her own image: only queens.

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Hi, friends.

I’m writing to you before dawn, on the second snow day after February vacation. My kids haven’t been at school for 11 days. On Thursday they both independently told me how much they miss school, and now it’s Tuesday. It’s fine.

Normally I deal with having kids at home/everything else by taking a lot of walks, but yesterday it didn’t stop blizzarding until the evening. After we’d eaten dinner and gotten the kids to bed, I finally stepped outside at 9:30 PM and immediately remembered that I’d promised my younger daughter a piece of peanut butter toast three hours earlier. I got up to make it and then…?? I guess she’ll be hungry when she wakes up today.

I hope you all are staying warm and keeping your brains organized!

What I’ve Been Working On

Before our endless “vacation” started, I wrote for the New York Times about a fascinating paper on North Macedonian reptiles: Constant Sexual Aggression Drives Female Tortoises to Walk Off Cliffs (gift link). You may not believe me, but it was purely a coincidence that this story published on Valentine’s Day. It was trending the next day, so I guess people found it relatable.

I’ve also written pitches and gotten assignments for a few new pieces this spring that will be related to my book, and written a bunch of pitches for book excerpts. (When a new book is coming out, publishers aim to place excerpts from that book in various outlets around the same time, to spread the word about the book. These excerpts might be lightly adapted so they can stand alone, and often appear in the opinion section.)

Oh, and I got a nice review in Publishers Weekly!

Dear Inkfish

I’m at a stage of life where I wish I had more close friends, but I don’t know where to find them. It feels like all my time when I’m not working is taken up by schlepping my kids to and from school and activities. Everyone else at school pickup seems to be PTO moms who are already besties with each other. Where do I find people who are like me?

You might assume you have nothing in common with the PTO moms. (God bless the parents who have enough bandwidth to take on volunteer organizational roles—I am not personally among them!)

But a crowd of creatures who all look the same can hide surprises.

Let me tell you about a study that just came out from scientists at the University of Arizona. It’s about “cryptic species.” These are not to be confused with cryptids—mythical creatures like yetis and the Loch Ness monster and the PTO dad. (Only teasing, dads!)

Cryptic species are two animals that look the same on the outside but are actually, if you look at their DNA, significantly different. For example, the authors say, take the Chinese giant salamander. This unnerving amphibian is the size of an adult human and lives in rivers in China. A genetic analysis suggested that what appeared to be one species—blobby and mottled, with stubby limbs and tiny eyes—is actually several distinct species.

The authors of the new study looked at a swath of other genetic research and found that although cryptic species are hidden, they’re not rare. Studies have found abundant cryptic species among fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and even mammals.

Across all the animals with backbones, the authors estimate, there may be one hidden species for every known species. In other words, the vertebrate world might be twice as diverse as it looks.

This re-accounting isn’t just academic. The Chinese giant salamander, for example, is critically endangered—as one species. When you divide it into five or more species, the plight of each of those animals is even more dire.

If we haven’t properly counted the number of creatures out there, we may be losing entire species without even knowing it. Or we might not realize the importance of a particular patch of land or ocean that’s home to a rare, hidden animal.

Among humans, too, the diversity you find depends on how closely you look.

A crowd of moms at school pickup might look like all one type. But of course they’re not, as you know because you, too, are a human person. You know about the multitudes you contain.

Somewhere among those moms and dads and grandparents and sitters is a person who’s from your hometown, or goes to the same Pilates studio as you, or shares your passion for board game design. Or maybe the PTO moms are dying to meet someone who has no opinion on the best format for the next fundraiser raffle. Give them a chance?

Finding the people we want to spend more time with does require effort and close looking. It’s easier to stand back and assume that everyone else is the same salamander, the same bird. But if we stay at that distance, we might let some opportunities for connection go extinct.

And maybe reaching out to new people will be easier than you expect. You, too, could be a different kind of creature than you thought.

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Hi, friends.

How’s your February going? Our stove suddenly and dramatically* fried itself at the end of January, and I’ve been making our family dinners without the use of a stove or oven while we wait (and wait) for the new one to arrive. Luckily we were offered help from many friends and family. A neighbor lent me her electric kettle so I didn’t have a caffeine emergency. Other friends lent us a fancy hotplate, which disappointed my kids because they were hoping we could just have “charcuterie board” (cheese and crackers and deli turkey) every night.

But the good news is that I looked out the window yesterday at 4:30 PM and it was still sunny. Negative a million degrees, but sunny. Moving in the right direction!

What I’ve Been Working On

I spent most of last week recording my audiobook. Picture sitting in a dim, heavily padded phone booth all day, trying to perform a hundred straight pages of a book that some jerk author has stuffed with words like “vomeronasal organ” and “plainfin midshipman” and overlong sentences like this one, while a guy outside the door listens on a supersensitive microphone and interrupts you whenever your body makes a digestive noise. Or a sleeve rustle. Every half a chapter, your remote director gives you 5-10 minutes to sprint to the bathroom because of all the water and tea you’ve been chugging.

Every evening I was the thirstiest and most tired I’ve ever been. Still, it was an incredibly cool experience to record my book. The Penguin Random House style is that after reading the title, you say “THIS IS THE AUTHOR.” As in, hey listener, hope you weren’t expecting a professional actor because IT’S ME! And my perfectly noiseless sleeves.

Dear Inkfish

My tween has finally taken a break from saying “six sevennnnn!” all the time, but I know it’s only a matter of time before the next bewildering kid trend hits my home. Why are they like this??

In my house it’s also “forty-onnnnnne!” and “twenty-onnnnnnne!” and I’m wondering whether some savvy middle schoolers have realized they can just say a new number in the same voice and convince every younger kid it’s a thing. On the other hand, my third grader has informed us that 6-7 is “not a thing anymore,” thank goodness.

The way a nonsensical trend can sweep the nation’s children is kind of incredible, isn’t it? Some of them must see these things online, but others are just getting their intel about what’s cool from the playground.

And kids care so much about what’s cool. But the rest of us are interested, too; why else did I recently click on a New York Times article about how Gen Z ties their scarves differently from millennials? (“Does Your Winter Scarf Make You Look Old?” Pretty sure it’s not the bookmark knot so much as the number of years elapsed since my birth, but thanks.)

For a social animal, following trends isn’t just a way to annoy older generations, though. It can be a way to stay alive.

Consider the humpback whales.

These behemoths swim in all the world’s oceans but are still recovering from being nearly wiped out during the whaling era. Different humpback whale populations have their own traditional songs, and they may adopt new songs from neighboring populations—like picking up a new catchy phrase at recess.

Humpbacks also have culturally preferred ways of feeding. There’s more than one way to swallow a huge mouthful of fish and tiny krill, and the whales like to share tricks. In a recent paper, scientists asked whether humpback whales are learning one of these tricks, called bubble-net feeding, from each other.

I’ll let the authors describe it. “The behaviour itself is a multi-step task,” they write: “diving beneath a shoal of schooling fish or krill and emitting a stream of bubbles through the blowholes while swimming in a spiral or circle [and] creating a curtain ‘net’ of bubbles, concentrating the prey.” The whales may also use special vocalizations while they make their net. Finally, they lunge through the dense clump of prey, mouths wide. Whales can make a bubble net on their own, or by working together in a group.

(Video: A humpback bubble-nets while her calf swims nearby. From Wray et al., 2026.)

The researchers gathered observations of a humpback population in the northern Canadian Pacific over two decades. They saw that bubble netting became more common over that time, especially in more recent years.

Analyzing the spread of this feeding technique, the scientists saw evidence that it was spreading socially. That is, it didn’t becoming more common because a lot of whales from a different, bubble-net-obsessed population immigrated to Canadian waters. Instead, the Canadian whales were learning from each other. (Interestingly, though, their bubble-netting technique is similar to that of a nearby population in southeast Alaska, where one whale in the group gives a distinct “feeding call.”)

The rapid spread of this trend happened around the same time as a very bad heatwave hit this part of the ocean, from 2014 to 2016. As their prey fish became harder to find, the humpbacks may have realized that trying new feeding techniques was a good idea.

This kind of cultural evolution, the scientists say, could be critical as the whale populations fight to survive boat strikes, fishing gear entanglements, and climate change. Innovate or die.

“Six-seven” isn’t going to save anyone. But our kids and their dopey memes are practicing for life as social animals who share information to stay alive.

We humans rely on others to show us what’s cool, what’s dangerous, what’s going on. We absorb bits of our neighbors’ cultures to enrich our lives, and we share what’s valuable with our loved ones. So we shouldn’t judge our kids when they come home obsessed with a new trend. Someday, they might even teach us something useful. (I’m not doing the scarf thing, though.)

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*For people asking: ZZZZZAAAAAPPPP!!!, then pfft

Hi, friends.

I’m writing this on Monday night. I was planning to get it done this morning, even though I knew my kids would have a snow day, which in retrospect was poor planning. Have I met my kids? Anyway, we got about a foot and a half of snow, they have another day off tomorrow, and here I am.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re staying warm and safe.

What I’ve Been Working On

NOT A WHOLE LOT given that my children missed more or less a whole week of school with the flu, then had MLK Day off, and now are at home continuously handing me wet outerwear to hang in the tub. Somewhere in there, I did manage to revise a feature story and send a few pitches.

I just learned I’m going to be recording my audiobook very soon, which is exciting but also intimidating. My producer told me to “be well-hydrated and rested!” but I already know I’m going to be up all night panicking about how to pronounce “Jean-Henri Fabre.” I was very charmed by this 19th-century burying beetle researcher when I was writing the book. Now that I have 3.5 days of studio time on the calendar, I’m wishing I had mentioned him less.

Dear Inkfish

I’ve been donating money to various organizations in response to things happening in the news. And it made me wonder: Are we the only animal that gives aid to strangers?

In one way, probably. In another way, not at all.

The concept of faraway strangers—animals like you that you’ve never seen, but are living parallel lives somewhere else in the world—seems unlikely to exist for species that don’t have newspapers or TV or the internet.

I mean, I’m speculating. Maybe migratory birds have noticed that there are, like, a lot of other birds out there. But if you’re an average animal trying to survive, find food, and make babies, I don’t see an evolutionary reason why you would know or care about the animals who don’t share your physical space.

Why did humans evolve to care about the welfare of other humans—or, heck, dogs or cats or sea turtles—we’ll never meet? That’s a question I wrote about in my book! (Have you preordered?)

Even without WiFi access or a credit card, though, other animals manage to touch the lives of strangers.

Those animals might not seem friendly. Take a polar bear, the Arctic’s top predator. There’s a reason the saying about bear encounters goes, “If it’s brown, lie down; if it’s black, fight back; if it’s white, say goodnight.” They’ll kill you. The regular diet of a polar bear is mostly seals, but they’ll also eat any other marine mammal if an opportunity (such as a stranded beluga) presents itself on the sea ice.

In the spring, the season when they eat the most, a polar bear will kill one seal every 3 to 5 days. But they aren’t actually consuming all that meat. Polar bears like to open up a carcass, feast on the high-calorie blubber, and often leave the rest. They don’t bother guarding their kill or storing it for later; they just move on to the next seal or unlucky whale.

In a recent study, scientists estimated that the average polar bear kills about a thousand kilograms’ worth of mammals every year, and leaves 30 percent of that scattered around the Arctic. In this cold, dry climate, the carcasses decay slowly.

And they don’t go to waste.

Grizzly bears feed on the left-behind bodies. So do other polar bears, when they’re scavenging instead of hunting. Wolves and foxes also eat the leftovers. Gulls, hawks, owls and ravens do, too.

In all, the researchers counted eleven vertebrate animal species that are known to scavenge on the remains of polar bear hunts, plus eight more animals that might do it on the sly. The polar bear’s leftovers help feed creatures throughout its ecosystem.

The bear isn’t sharing out of the goodness of its heart—more like the pickiness of its palate. Nevertheless, the bear has more resources than it needs, like you do. And like you, it allows those resources to nourish unseen strangers who may be trying to make it through a cold winter.

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Hi, friends.

Happy New Year? Twenty twenty-six is off to…a start, and that’s the best thing I can say about it. It has started. We’re in it.

The good news is that my family had a mostly nice break. Santa came, I baked a fancy cake, and we spent a lot of time with relatives who were willing to learn the rules to children’s card games. And my five-year-old is in a phase of asking excellent questions, such as:

• (whispered to me at dinner) “Why is poop funnier than pee?”

• “Why is the earth round, but it’s not round for real?”

• (with great concern) “Why…why…why…why are your fingers…all different sizes??”

No one warned me how much of parenting is science communication. Luckily I’m prepared. No idea about the fingers, though.

What I’ve Been Working On

Sweeping up pine needles. Planning which toys to secretly disappear so we can fit the new ones in the house. Trying to figure out how book publicity works. Oh, and I turned in a draft of a magazine feature that you’ll be able to read this spring. (Spoiler: Crows!)

Dear Inkfish

Look, I’m trying to have perspective. I understand that previous generations, in my country and elsewhere, have lived through historical moments that felt apocalyptic. But those people didn’t have descriptions and videos of the apocalyptic things constantly beaming into their eyeballs from the same device they were required to stare at all day to make money and feed their families…you know? How am I supposed to hold it together?

When I started this newsletter in the fall of 2024, I thought I’d be giving advice that was less existential. More cute and entertaining, maybe? But here we are.

So let’s be somewhere else for a moment: China. And let’s take that historical perspective you mentioned and think about the Great Wall.

I don’t need to tell you what it is. This wall is 5,500 miles long (!) and has been standing for at least 500 years. Some sections are more than two millennia old. Contrary to what they say, you can’t see it from space. Even so, it’s maybe the world’s most famous piece of architecture—quite an accomplishment for a structure that in most contexts is only one-fourth of a room.

About a quarter of its length is natural structures such as mountain ridges or rivers. The rest of the wall was built from varying materials—often, dirt. Much of the wall is “rammed earth,” which is very tightly packed soil. That means it’s at risk of eroding or cracking from forces like sun, wind, rain, and cycles of freezing and thawing.

It’s a massive, long-standing edifice that at its foundation is surprisingly precarious. Like, I don’t know…a country? Democracy?

Parts of the wall have already crumbled. But one thing helping to hold the rest of this edifice together is its community of incredibly small, seemingly insignificant life forms.

In dry ecosystems, a coating of organisms such as mosses, lichens, algae and tiny fungi can cover the soil. This living layer of schmutz is called a biocrust. Something similar recently made me throw two of my children’s water bottles in the trash. But in China, biocrust is helping to hold up the Great Wall.

Scientists in China sampled areas of the wall and found biocrusts on two-thirds of the sections. Compared with bare portions of the wall, the crusty parts were tougher and less permeable to water. The wall was stronger and more resistant to erosion where biocrusts covered it.

More recently, those scientists learned about the smallest life forms on the wall by sampling the microbes within those biocrusts.

Microbes are everywhere. But the crusty wall portions harbored a much richer, more diverse community of bacteria and fungi than the bare portions.

And the microbes within those rich communities, the scientists saw, do different jobs than the loner microbes on bare earth. Just by living out their microscopic lives, these communities alter the physical and chemical properties of the wall itself, such as how much moisture or oxygen is in the soil. Those factors might help protect the wall from erosion. The biocrust communities also have fewer microbes producing acids that would wear it away.

Clinging to an exposed wall in the drylands isn’t an easy life. But these microbial communities, the scientists found, are adapted to tolerate stress.

We’re tough, too. And if you and I can’t turn off the screens that are showing us the dire news, maybe we can remember that a community of apparently powerless life forms is holding together the Great Wall of China.

Their diversity makes them thrive. They aren’t cute, but they’re hard at work. They survive harsh conditions by linking their fates together. The wall stays up a little longer.

We’re so small, but together we can be felt and seen—not from space, but maybe from the future.

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Hi, friends!

I’m going to keep this short because I have a bunch of stuff to wrap and an overly ambitious baking project to attempt, and I imagine you have things filling your own plates, too.

First, THANK YOU for being here with me this year. I’m grateful to everyone who gives me the gift of their attention, especially those of you who allow me to sneak my writing into your inboxes every two weeks. (If you find value in these newsletters, please consider forwarding one to a friend who might enjoy also!) So many things are grim right now, and it feels like a tiny miracle when a group of us can come together to read about—and wonder at—the natural world.

I hope you can find some joy and rest during this holiday season.

What I’ve Been Working On (extended edition)

My first feature story for Scientific American, which has been in the works since May (omg), is finally live! It is paywalled, but I have a PDF I can share if you email me. It will also be in the January print edition (yes, those still exist): Rising Temperatures Could Trigger a Reptile Sexpocalypse

(Apparently some people got push notifications about this story via Apple News; I saw screenshots of the phrase “reptile sexpocalypse” popping up on mystified people’s lock screens. Amazing.)

Because I love to use this time of year to look back and reflect, here’s a roundup of other work I did in 2025:

NYT:

It Took a Century to Find This Colossal Squid

Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’

How a Parasitic Bird With No Parents Learns What Species It Is

These Majestic Seabirds Never Stop Pooping

Why the Green Cheese Turned White

This Squid Is Playing Peekaboo at the Bottom of the Ocean

National Geographic:

Scientists found a 750-year-old shoe in a vulture nest. That’s just the start of it.

Orangutan adopts little sister after their mother’s death

bioGraphic:

Investigating a Treetop Baby Boom

Onstage interview with Mary Roach:

Humor writing:

While I’m on Vacation, Would You Mind Checking on My Horrors?

I’m Wearing This Weighted Vest because Merely Existing as a Middle-Aged Woman Isn’t Heavy Enough

Book:

Oh yeah, and for the first few months of this year I was frantically finishing a book! Whee! Preorder it here from the retailer of your choice, and check out some of the amazing blurbs I’ve gotten.

Dear Inkfish

…is on hiatus this week. See you in 2026!

Love, Elizabeth

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Hi, friends!

I hope you’re surviving December OK, and your elves are on the shelves, or not on the shelves, or wherever they’re supposed to be. (I don’t really know how all that works. The elves have to do magic tricks, too? Some of you people must be drinking stronger coffee than I am.)

What I’ve Been Working On

I published a cool story about apes at National Geographic: Orangutan adopts little sister after their mother’s death (To view the story, you may have to create a free account by entering your email.)

I also—inevitably—used my kids’ stop-motion app to make a very silly video, after my publisher sent me a fresh package of book galleys. The traditional book unboxing video features an author with a knife, opening their new books and maybe crying. I felt more secure with construction paper and stuffed animals.

Dear Inkfish

Are you going to publish a gift guide for the holiday season?

I am not!

I enjoy a curated shopping guide as much as the next guy, but I’ve seen lots of good ones already, and I don’t really think you need another list from me. Plus my to-do list this month looks like the mountain that the Grinch lives on top of. (Yes, I just did a quick fact check to make sure my recollection of the old animated movie was correct. It’s called Mount Crumpit.)

Everyone (maybe? I didn’t fact check that one) loves to crowdsource gift recommendations. Even scientists recently used the wisdom of the crowd to gift themselves a new dataset about urban ecology.

Specifically, the researchers wanted to know more about insects killed by cats. There’s plenty of data, they say, about birds, reptiles and small mammals that people’s cats hunt. But it’s harder to figure out what bugs they’re eating. You can’t easily ID insect remains in cat poop, for example.

So the scientists went to the internet. They searched a site called iStock. They also searched TikTok, hoping to find videos of cats attacking bugs.

And boy, did they! In addition to 31 photos or videos from iStock, the researchers found another 519 relevant videos on TikTok.

All of these amateur wildlife documentarians, crouching on their patios or kitchen floors to record their cats’ antics, had come up with some material that could actually be valuable to science.

Insects such as grasshoppers and crickets were the most common in the crowdsourced material, followed by cicadas and their relatives. That lined up with existing scientific papers, which have also found that these bugs are common prey for cats.

The third-most common bugs in the internet photos and videos were cockroaches, which was more of a surprise. And some bugs that were offed on social media—walking sticks, certain flies—haven’t shown up in any scientific literature about what cats eat.

The scientists say that crowdsourcing data in this way could help ecologists better understand how people’s pets are affecting their local environments. Some of the insects that cats kill, both in research papers and on TikTok, are species that are in trouble—such as certain moths or butterflies. Even when the prey insects aren’t at risk (I don’t think anyone cares if cats kill cockroaches), it’s valuable to get a better picture of the entire urban ecosystem.

If you’re using the wisdom of the crowd to do your own holiday shopping, I hope your gifts make everyone’s hearts grow three sizes. Maybe some unexpected recommendations will crawl or flutter out of the woodwork. And if you’re shopping for a gift for your cat, maybe consider a (non-threatened) bug.

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P.S. If you want to get someone a gift that will delight ME—and will delight that person, I hope, in May—you can preorder my book! Please don’t send me any grasshoppers.

Hi, friends!

We’ve had approximately 0.75 days of school this month, between holidays and sick kids and parent-teacher conferences, but we are SOLDIERING ON. I hope you’re finding some joy in these very, very brief days (here in Boston the sun will set tonight at 4:16). Pumpkin pie will help, right??

What I’ve Been Working On

I wrapped up a feature story that will be in a real print magazine (!) in January, and a digital story that will be online any day now. I sent some pitches that may or may not become stories. I got a feature assignment that I’m super excited about.

On Sunday afternoon when my kids were especially crabby, I downloaded a stop-motion animation app, and we made some silly videos together. Highly recommended!

Dear Inkfish

I can’t look at a single news story these days without thinking that we (the country, the world) have collectively lost our heads. Like…we’re really going to let the planet boil so that we can flood social media with fake videos of elderly people in costumes? We decided to bring back measles? What are we doing?? Sorry to be a bummer in a holiday season, but I’m having a hard time feeling positive about, you know, the future of humanity. Help?

Look, I feel you. Things are bleak.

Can I tell you something about heads, though?

One of the very first things an animal has to do in life is sort out where its head will go. A lot of complicated stuff happens right after an egg and sperm get together—cells dividing rapidly, molecular signals flying around, a blob of cells poking a hole in itself that will become its mouth or maybe its anus (or, for some animals, both).

Before it can grow, an organism has to determine which end is which. If it has a left and right side like we do, it will need to do even more organizing.

I took a developmental biology class in college because I thought it would be fun. The readings were difficult. There was a lab with a fertilized chicken egg, which we were supposed to gently crack into a dish under a microscope so we could watch the chicken embryo develop in real time, but for some reason I kept breaking the yolks and I felt terrible about it. There was another project where we could choose something monstrous to do to a tiny worm. I cut an important little piece from somewhere in its body and stuck it somewhere else and as a result the worm grew a second head. This was a success, I guess.

I learned that developmental bio isn’t my jam, and that organizing and orienting the body is one of the most basic parts of biology—and not just when you’re an embryo.

Some animals can regrow limbs they’ve lost. (We humans aren’t too impressive, but we can heal our skin and broken bones, and can regenerate a liver.) Some creatures can even regrow pretty much their whole bodies.

For these animals, being headless isn’t the end. Sea anemones, for example. Here’s one called Nematostella vectensis, or the starlet sea anemone:

If you cut her in half, her head (the end with the tentacles) will grow a new foot (the other end). Her food will grow a new head. No problem.

In a recent paper, scientists asked how the remaining portion of the anemone knows what to regrow. They engineered some anemones such that they were missing a large portion of their nervous system. Then they cut the anemones in half. Now the animals’ heads, instead of regrowing a foot, grew another head.

Within three days of the injury, new tentacles appeared. In less than a week, an entire second head was present, pointing the other way, like a battery with two positive ends.

If the scientists cut these creatures in half again, each head would grow another new head. (Left alone for a few months, though, the two-headed anemones eventually separated themselves into two normal animals.)

The researchers concluded that a nervous system is essential for the anemone to orient itself. Growing a head is kind of a default setting—since this is one of the animals whose mouth is also its butt, a lot happens in the head end—but the nerves, if they’re present, tell the stump of the anemone’s body what it really needs.

Am I about to make this squishy, brainless invertebrate into a tortured metaphor? Obviously.

We humans cannot survive being headless. But in nature, losing your head isn’t always a death sentence. Regrowth is possible.

Regrowth in the right direction, though, requires feeling. The anemone needs the information from her nervous system to tell her which way is up and which way is down.

Will we get out of our own messes? Does human society have the same regenerative capacity as a simple sea creature? I don’t know. But it seems right that if we’re going to get to a better place, even after losing our heads, we’ll need to feel our way forward.

It’s OK if you’re feeling bleak right now. We’ll need to notice and perceive what’s happening—not to numb ourselves, but to experience all the sensations we can. Then we might find our way back to our feet.

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P.S. Have you preordered my book?