Some of nature’s curiosities are so spectacular that you can’t miss them. But then there are things you aren’t going to see unless you know what you’re looking for — like ants living in treetops that protect their colonies by blowing themselves up or psychedelic toad milk.
A new book by Atlas Obscura sets out to catalog some of the living creatures whose behavior should possibly be up there with the great wonders of the world. It’s called, “Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders.”
Cara Giaimo and Joshua Foer are the authors, and spoke to the World’s Host Carol Hills about the new publication.
Carol Hills: I want to start by diving in and asking you about some of our favorite entries. Cara, tell us about this creature, an adorable, flightless parrot that lives on isolated islands off the coast of New Zealand.
Cara Giaimo: Yes, the kakapo is really one of the funkiest and cutest birds probably in the world. They look a little bit like bowling pins. They’re very round. They have these sort of like shiny green and yellow feathers. And like a lot of birds in Oceania, they are very, very endangered, very rare. Something cool about that part of the world is that birds evolved there sort of without a lot of large mammals to eat them. So, they got very strange.
Kakapos are not very good at flying. They’re not very good at hiding. They’re not very good at doing any of the things that you might expect birds to do. That kind of makes them endearing, but it also makes them have trouble surviving in a place where there are now things like stoats, rats, introduced predators that, they see a kakapo and they basically see like a rotisserie chicken just sitting in the middle of the path.
Kakapos are not very good at flying. They’re not very good at hiding. They’re not very good at doing any of the things that you might expect birds to do. That kind of makes them endearing, but it also makes them have trouble surviving in a place where there are now things like stoats, rats, introduced predators that, they see a kakapo and they basically see like a rotisserie chicken just sitting in the middle of the path.
So, they’re endangered. What’s being done to try to protect them?
Cara Giaimo: Scientists have done really unusual things in pursuit of allowing these birds to have more offspring and therefore survive. For a little while, they were using something called a sperm-copter to fly kakapo sperm from the sperm emitter to the sperm receiver based on, you know, genetically who the best match would be. They would get a sample in the wild and like drone it over to another bird. There are just like a lot of different ways that they have tried to matchmake these kakapos to enable them to keep existing. And so far, it’s going okay. At the same time, they’re doing predator eradication so that these birds can be safe being their strange little selves.
Carol Hills: Josh, we’re going to travel now to two of the longest rivers in South America: the Amazon and the Orinoco, home of these almost fantastical creatures.
Joshua Foer: The pink river dolphin is a species that’s close to my heart. I’ve been very lucky to travel the world, and as part of my career as a nature wildlife journalist, see lots of the most interesting, charismatic creatures that we’ve got. These are some of the most special.
So, the pink river dolphins of South America have probably been in there for about 16 million years when there was an inland sea. And I actually had a really extraordinary encounter with one in Peru. One had been caught up in a fisherman’s net. And I was with somebody when we helped release this dolphin from the net. And, right at about a foot from his eye, looking eye-to-eye with him as we were cutting this net open, and I don’t think I’ve ever looked into an animal’s eye and said “there is something going on here” quite in the way that there was with the pink river dolphin.
They’re incredibly smart. Their brains are humongous. And they’ve got this glowing pink skin, particularly the males, that almost looks like human Caucasian skin, which is part of what’s so unnerving about them.
So, the pink river dolphins of South America have probably been in there for about 16 million years when there was an inland sea. And I actually had a really extraordinary encounter with one in Peru. One had been caught up in a fisherman’s net. And I was with somebody when we helped release this dolphin from the net. And, right at about a foot from his eye, looking eye-to-eye with him as we were cutting this net open, and I don’t think I’ve ever looked into an animal’s eye and said “there is something going on here” quite in the way that there was with the pink river dolphin.
They’re incredibly smart. Their brains are humongous. And they’ve got this glowing pink skin, particularly the males, that almost looks like human Caucasian skin, which is part of what’s so unnerving about them.
Kara, I want to ask you, what was the thinking behind this book, “Wild Life,” about these living world wonders? What inspired it?
Cara Giaimo: Yeah, so the ethos of Atlas Obscura has always been to look around the world and find things that will make you feel like you didn’t actually know everything that was going on after all. In our time of being hyperconnected by the Internet, you can get this sort of jaded feeling like, “I know everything that’s out there.” But Atlas Obscura tries to sort of disrupt that, like showing you that it’s actually impossible to know everything incredible and amazing that’s going on around us. People talk about, “what if aliens came to visit?” To me, looking around, it’s like we have alien life all over this planet, and we don’t always remember to appreciate that or think about it that way.
To hear the rest of this conversation, including a discussion about the golden poison frog and the white bellbird that has shattered the record for the loudest call, click on the player above.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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