#4 -- Cymothoa exigua -- "fish tongue parasite"

Okay, so this might not be one of Earth's "greatest" hits, but it certainly one of her weirder ones. I am pretty fascinated by parasites, and while doing some research on villains for my upcoming novel, Silksinger, I read a lot about them (though I went in a different direction, ultimately, and didn't end up using any of that research!) One of the gross things that sticks out from that reading was how when Napoleon's troops were crossing the Sinai Peninsula, they drank river water contimated with tiny leeches, and the leeches attached inside their throats, engorged, and suffocated them!!! Terrible.

But the Cymothoa exigua is by far the MOST memorable parasite. Here's what it is: It is a crustacean that gets into a fish's mouth through its gills, attaches itself at the base of the fish's tongue, cuts off the blood supply, and kills the tongue so it falls off. Then. . . and this is where it gets really crazy, it becomes the fish's tongue!!! It actually replaces the tongue with itself, and does the tongue's job, and does no further harm to the fish. It lives there in the fish's mouth, helping itself to food. Unbelievably disgusting and cool!

This is the only known example in nature of a parasite effectively replacing an organ.

AND, as I'm sure you've guessed, it's really really pretty:

How would you like to have that thing living inside your mouth???

By the way, the host fish is always a spotted rose snapper. Did you know that for every "free-living" species on the planet there is at least one parasite dedicated exclusively to it? That means there are a lot more parasite species than there are free-living species. Ewww.

HERE are some more really weird, nasty, and fascinating parasite facts. Enjoy! (But maybe not while you eat.)

#3 -- Earth's Highest Flyer, the Bar-Headed Goose

If you have never really considered that a goose might be one of Earth's greatest hits, considered this "bar-headed" guy: the world's highest flyers, they migrate from India to Tibet every spring, even flying right over the tippy top of Mount Everest. Keep in mind, Everest's peak is at 29,028 feet, a height at which 1/3 the amount of oxygen is available as at sea level, at which kerosene cannot burn and helicopters cannot fly, at which exposed flesh freezes instantly and a river of winds (the jet stream) moves at more than 200 mph. And these geese cruise through it. Using the jet stream as a tail wind, they might travel more than a thousand miles in a day!! WOW!
Barheads are powerful flappers with big wings, the surface area disproportionately large to their body mass -- they can fly over 50 mph just on their own power.

Did you know that all birds have a cool breathing mechanism that allows them to circulate air through their lungs twice, increasing their oxygen intake? But bar-headed geese are even cooler than that: they also have a special kind of hemoglobin for super-absorption of oxygen at high altitudes! Most other migratory birds fly between 200 and 4000 feet altitude. Bar-heads have been spotted at 33,000!!

And an interesting note: panting in birds does not constrict blood vessels in the head, as it does with humans, so the geese are not prone to get loopy from oxygen-deprivation the way, say, a climber on Everest might. Cool, huh? (This information was plucked from a great Audubon article when I was doing research for Silksinger.)

#2 -- Pollination

I'm a fan of pollination. I know that's really going out on a limb; it's like confessing to being a fan of. . . rainfall. Hurray, rainfall! But how often to we think about pollination (gardeners and bee keepers aside)? Me, not very often, but it definitely falls into the category of "Earth's greatest hits." What is it? Basically, it's the transfer of pollen from the [male] stamen of a flower to the [female] pistil of another flower, allowing the flower to develop seeds. It sounds kind of simple, but it's an amazingly complex system -- mind-blowing, really. There are a lot of different kinds of pollinators: flying insects are the most common, but also wind, birds, mammals like bats, even snails. I'd like to send a shout out to the pollinators of a few of my favorite plants:

• Cacao, dear to my heart, is actually pollinated by midges! (No, not midgets, though I wonder if that's where the Oompa Loompas came from!) -- tiny gnats, essentially. Hurray, little gnats!
  
• And mangoes are primarily pollinated by the insect order diptera, that is: flies. Not the glamorous honey bee, but plain old flies.
  
• For coffee, we have the honey bee to thank (and I do. Deeply). Thanks!

Some other fun pollination factoids:

• The fig tree -- a keystone species (well, actually there are over 1000 fig species) of the rainforest ecosystem, responsible for feeding many, many critter species all year around -- is pollinated entirely by tiny fig wasps -- and yes, for each species of fig, there is a specific species of wasp.
  
• Butterfly-pollinated flowers tend to be brightly colored but not fragrant, since butterflies have poor senses of smell.
  
• Moths, however, have excellent sense of smell, and pollinate very sweet-smelling, night-blooming flowers, generally pale in color to be visible by moonlight.
  
• Get this: Moths are hover-feeders (like hummingbirds), and moth-pollinated flowers have deep tubes that correspond exactly to the length of the pollinator species' tongues! WOW!
  
• Bat-pollinated flowers smell musty and kind of funky, and they have to be sturdy to withstand the bats' bristly licking tongues. Having observed bats licking certain, er, body parts, at the zoo, I would say this would have to be a sturdy flower. Look at the licky bat:
  (Check out this link, where some bloggers have photos of bats dining at their hummingbird feeders. Cute!)
  
  
• Over 90 food crops in the US depend on honey bee pollination. Honey bee colonies are transported around to fulfill this function in, for example, the almond orchards of California. The value of this service performed for free by the bees is worth an estimated $18 billion in this country annually. I read another estimate last week (can't remember where) that the annual global value of pollination could come in at around $70 billion.
  
• Honey bees are in crisis. An estimated 40-60% of the honey bees in the US died or were severely weakened in 2005. California lost half of its bees! The Varoa mite is blamed for this crisis, and though this isn't getting wide-scale media coverage, it is a very serious matter if you happen to like to eat plants or to eat animals that eat plants, which I guess most of us do. The losses in 2007 to bee colonies are being called "unprecedented." Weird that there's not more talk about this!
  

So: pollination. Yay! Yay bees and midges and wasps and moths and bats and everything else. Thank you for feeding us. Thank you for flowers.

P.S. I am no scientist. Feel free to correct me on anything above or to tell me more. Thanks!

*Update*--thanks Tinker, for the link. The honey bee crisis is being called Colony Collapse Disorder and is very serious, and more can be read about it here.

#1 -- Lizards!

Look. At. These. Creatures.


























And this, apparently, is not a snake, but a freaking legless lizard. What?

Thank you for spending a moment looking at lizards. Can you believe how amazing? I was looking for some reference for an illustration and I kept crying out, "Wow!" and "Holy Cow! Look at this one!" and I had to share. I'm such a big kid this way, being constantly overwhelmed and amazed by the weird wonderfulness of our planet, I will probably turn this into a random little series of celebrations. I wonder what will be up next.