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Danny Buerkli
@dannybuerkli
This
@LRB
podcast with Katherine Rundell is just as enchanting as the book itself, highly recommended: lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-v
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Danny Buerkli
@dannybuerkli
Katherine Rundell’s “The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure” is such a joy to read. Magical. I first came across Rundell’s writing in the @LRB. Her short hermit crab essay (also part of the book) is well worth your time, if you haven’t read it yet: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/
Image of the book’s cover
The Roman poet Horace was stridently anti-giraffe. The animal was, he believed, conceptually untidy: 'If a painter had chosen to set a human head on a horse's neck for if a lovely woman ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish, could you stifle laughter, friends? His account of the giraffe in Ars Poetica (c.8 BCE) ends on a plea: Let the work be what you like, but let it be one, single thing. When Julius Caesar brought a giraffe back to Rome from Alexandria in 16 BCE (a gift, some said, from Cleopatra), those lining the streets saw, as Horace did, a creature made of two parts. Cassius Dio wrote in his Historia Romana that it was like a camel in all respects except that its legs are not all of the same length, the hind legs being the shorter ... Towering high aloft, it ... lifts its neck in turn to an unusual height. Its skin is spotted like a leopard. But the crowds rejoiced in the creature's bravura hybridity.
The seahorse is the only species in the animal kingdom in which the male gives birth. The female deposits her eggs in the male's abdominal pouch, in a process that looks like a more intimate version of using a post box. He fertilises them as they enter, and keeps them safely gestating for between two and six weeks. The process of giving birth is both triumphant and disconcerting. It's more akin to a confetti cannon than most other births; the male seahorse appears to convulse, as if sneezing or vomiting, and from the opening at the top of his womb erupts a herd of minute seahorses, up to one and a half thousand fry, until he disappears in a cloud of his own offspring. Less than 0.5 per cent of the tiny young will survive into adulthood, which is probably why the male takes on gestation; it allows the female to immediately begin making another batch of eggs, which allows for more pregnancies during the breeding season, which allows for more fry, and more possibilities of life.
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Danny Buerkli
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"Part of the answer is to believe in politics again. Yes, we could stop people wanting giraffe-skinned bibles. But there will always be dickheads. So we do need people to create systems that are better than the worst of us."
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