Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Vanishing Treasures with Katherine Rundell

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

What can we do to help save the most vulnerable animals? Sharon McMahon is joined by #1 NYT Best-Selling author Katherine Rundell to talk about extraordinary animals like the Greenland shark which can live to be over 600 years old, or the American Wood frog that freezes in the winter, and kickstarts its own heart in the spring. Katherine shares stories about animals you’ve probably never heard of, the challenges they face, and the urgent need for preservation and mindful coexistence with the natural world. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest is Katherine Rundle. And oh my gosh, this conversation is just, just the sound of Katherine's voice. You're going to love it. Katherine is the author of Vamishing Treasures. And this is a conversation about one of my favorite topics, animals. Why can't I have just an all animal podcast, I ask you. I'm wondering why not. Today's episode is just a delight. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a delight. We are chatting from across the pond, as some people say. And when I first saw your book,

it was like an immediate add to cart for me. Anybody who has been listening to me for any period of time knows that I love animals. And you know, I could have like a whole podcast just related to animals. But your book, Vanishing Treasures, bestiary of extraordinary endangered creatures, caught my eye right away. And it has this sort of, in addition to talking about animals, it has this sort of fanciful whimsy aspect to it.

And I'm curious about how you even conceptualized writing a book of this nature. So it began a long time ago. I grew up partly in Zimbabwe, and I was very lucky to have a childhood very intimately engaged with living things. You know, snakes in the garden and scorpions under the rocks, and occasionally in your shoe and monkeys down by the shopping center. But I used to go back to visit some of my family who still lived there. And while I was there, I went to see at a wildlife reserve a pangolin. And it was truly a kind of coup de foudre. It was one of the most extraordinary things that I've ever seen in my life. It

was spectacular. But then when I got home to England and I tried to tell people about this extraordinary living thing I had seen, the vast majority of people had never heard of a pangolin. Yeah, exactly. What is a pangolin? People are definitely gonna be like, what is that?

Right, so a pangolin is like a scaly anteater. They have the body shape of an anteater, but the armor that you would imagine perhaps of a crocodile or a snake, and the face of an unusually polite academic. They are exquisitely beautiful. They walk sort of on their hind legs with their forelegs knitted in front of them. And they have a tongue which they keep internally stored in a pouch near their hip, which is as long as their torso. And they have just this exceptional sense of wildness. They are 80 million years old. They have been here long, long before we arrived. And so when I got home and wanted to tell people

about this breathtakingly beautiful, strange, living, real thing, nobody could understand what I was talking about. And so the book began as a kind of act of evangelism for the living world. I wanted to say, there is so much out there that we risk losing before we have even begun to understand the scope and sweep of its complexity, intelligence, beauty. Pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world, and their safety net is when they see a predator coming, they will roll themselves into a ball, and if they have a pup coming, they will roll themselves into a ball. And if they have a pup, their mother will roll itself around the pup like a sort of Russian nesting doll. And that is a very good defense against a lion or any kind of predator.

But of course, for a human, what they've done is render themselves readily portable. So their defenses are the opposite of defenses against us. And so that's how the project began, with the desire to say, would you look, only look, at what is out there. Not just pangolins, but also the strangeness and beauties of things perhaps that we don't understand always as strange and beautiful, like crows or spiders. I wanted to try to lay out for people in a way that they might find readable some of the beauty and complexity of the Parliament of the Non-Human. The Parliament of the Non-Human. Pangolins look like low miniature dinosaurs.

They do. They look like they would have been alongside dinosaurs because, of course, they would have. Yes. And I've seen pictures of them. Tell me if this is true or if this was like a staged shot of them carrying their babies around on their tail. This is entirely true. So especially there are many subspecies of pangolin and some of the tree-climbing pangolins can climb up a tree with the pangolin pup hanging on the back of its tail and on the far bit of its back. This extraordinary thing, which as you say, looks like a dinosaur riding a dinosaur. It is exceptional to witness. And of course, we all have limited time. We

all have limited space in our lives, but I long to ask of people, could you use some of that time in learning about the world that you share the world with? Because I think it is so easy to forget we are nature, and it is fitting that we therefore understand nature because we are not outside it. We are part of it. We are it. Why, by the way, this is just out of curiosity, why are pangolins the most trafficked mammal

in the world? This is us in our hunger. They are used often in traditional medicine. In a lot of Asia, they're a delicacy and so they are one of the many things that we have endangered through our desire for them, through our consumption. So often when you think about human destruction you have to remember to nuance it that it is often to do with human desire. We generally have endangered things by our longing, either to be close to them, but more often to consume and own them.

You mentioned one of the animals that I'm surrounded with, which is the American Wood Frog. I live in the woods on a dirt road. You cannot see my house from the road. I can't see any of my neighbors. It's literally just like a little house in the big woods. And in the springtime they have lots of vernal pools in them. There's standing water and then that of course gets absorbed down into the water table, into the aquifers and all these kinds of

things. But in springtime they're called around here spring peepers, which is that when the frogs wake up from their hibernation, they all sing together at dusk. Thousands of them and the noise that they make, their singing, is quite loud, taking in combination with each other. And you certainly can't see thousands of frogs, but you're very acutely aware in the early spring that they have awakened from their winter slumber and you even mentioned this right in the introduction you say the American Wood Frog gets through winter by allowing itself to freeze solid and this is so interesting we think of like hibernation as something like bears do and we find like a cozy den and we curl up and we take a little

nap. But we think of it in terms of human sleep, right? Like I'm just gonna sleep an extra long time like a bear does. But this idea you say that its heart slows and then stops altogether. the water around its organs turns to ice, and then comes spring, it thaws, and the heart kickstarts itself spontaneously into life. And you mentioned like science does know why. How does that work? We don't know how the wood frog knows exactly the right moment to restart its heart. And they all do it at the same time, Catherine. Extraordinary. Have you ever seen one of the frozen ones? I never have.

Yes. Oh, yes. In addition to being surrounded by the woods, we also have ponds in my yard. One of my daughter's hobbies is frogs. So I'm like almost too acutely aware of the life cycle of frogs. But yes, how they know to restart their own hearts at the same time is very curious. These things are extraordinary in the same way that, you know, we don't really fully understand how birds know the route to fly south through the winter. We think it's to do with the gravitational pull of the Earth, but we don't know. There is such a colossal burgeoning of things that we do not know. And I spend a lot of my time, because I have a fellowship at Oxford, with scientists, and the thing they are always so eager to tell you is human knowledge is a miraculous thing. We know so much. Our knowledge has been hard won, but we barely know enough to brush the

very edges of the beginning of a percentage of the truth of the living world. Yeah. You know, we talked a little bit before we started recording about the work of people like Ed Young and his book Unimmense World, which is about the science of animal senses. He says the exact same thing. We don't even know what we don't know yet. And that is part of what is both incredibly beautiful and also slightly heartbreaking in that the potential for all of this knowledge, the potential to know things that we don't even know about, is disappearing if we don't do something to stop some of what has been happening to the natural world. So I'm curious how you chose

the subjects in your book. So the criteria for inclusion of the sort of 20-something animals in the book was a species or a subspecies was endangered. But that narrows it down almost not at all. Almost every animal has a species or subspecies that is endangered or threatened with imminent endangerment. And so it was often based around the idea of a story that I thought might seize people. I wanted to offer something that would root itself under your skin, like the idea that a giraffe once walked into Paris and ate rose petals from the hands of the King of France and was made a fleur de l'oeil, a loin coat. I want

that to be something that people know, that the minute that giraffe arrived, the entirety of Paris went giraffe mad because they knew there was something in giraffes that is so extraordinary that it required madness. So people had giraffe wallpaper, giraffe soap, giraffe dresses. Women would make their hair into towers to resemble the giraffe's horns, their otter cones, and they were so towering their hair that they would have to sit on the floor of their carriages rather than on the seats because their hair wouldn't otherwise get through the door. I wanted to offer stories of the way that we have adored the world. And then I also wanted to offer stories of the way we have destroyed the world. And stories of the way we have misunderstood it. The way that the wonderful Pliny the Elder

in the year 70 was writing The Natural Histories, the first ever encyclopedia, and he posits that the way that hedgehogs feed their young is by rolling in fruit like grapes or strawberries and then running away with it to their burrows, which may or may not be in trees, like sort of 1970s cocktail sticks. And that was one of the things that we believed for a long time. And I wanted also to offer ideas of biological, extraordinary, miraculous nature of the living world. The idea that a swift can sleep on the wing, fly in its lifetime two million kilometers, so enough to get to the moon and back twice and then once more to the moon. And the idea that when they want to wash, they find rain

clouds and fly through them slowly with their wings outstretched to get rid of the dust of the journey. These things I think we should know about if we are to stand truly on the earth that we share with them. I'm very curious about the Greenland shark. I'm curious about all the animals in this book and this is one of the reasons I really loved it. First of all, it's very beautifully written. You can see that you have a sense for the poetic just in the manner in which you speak. But each of these sort of portraits of these vanishing treasures is very approachable, fascinating. You're not reading, you know, a thousand pages on

the Greenland Shark. You're offering us almost like an appetizer on which to snack. And it kind of leaves you wanting more. And then you are moving on to the next beautiful portrait. But the Greenland shark, Earth's oldest vertebrate. How scientists even began to be able to ascertain how old Greenland sharks are, how long they can live, that in and of itself is kind of a really interesting feat of science. Can you share with us, how do we know how old this animal is? So this is extraordinary and it's a fairly recent piece of science, but there is a radioactive isotope called carbon-14, which is found in the Earth, and there are huge spikes of it according to historical happenings like nuclear weapons. and you can use it to carbon date the lens

crystallines in the shark's eye. And so they tested a number of sharks, and the largest of the sharks, a female, was found to be around 270 to 512 years old. So there's a big gap there. But we think that size is a good indicator of age, and this shark that they tested was 16 feet, but Greenland sharks can grow up to 23 feet. So they concluded that it seems very possible that there are sharks currently swimming today who are in their sixth century, which would mean that there would be a shark who is alive today, who was alive alongside Shakespeare. And the idea that they have swum and swum, one above, whole civilizations have been built and burned and built again, and the shark continues. I find that an extraordinary thought that there

is a shark in the water today whose parents would have lived alongside Picachio and its great grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office. With insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs.

Guess who's sitting next to me, Steve! Ah! Ah! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag

to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies re-watch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. The best word that comes to mind is that it's awful, not awful in the sense of bad, but

like in the sense of full of awe. It makes you feel like almost beautifully insignificant in the world in that I am but one tiny creature that has such a finite lifespan, and the idea that there are like 600-year-old sharks just swimming slowly, very slowly around the ocean. They're not really edible. They're not things that humans are that interested in. They live in places where there aren't a lot of humans. Just the idea that there's this 600-year-old animal swimming very slowly around the world's

cold water. It just makes you feel like, dang, maybe the fact that my child didn't want to wear a coat to school this morning and we had an argument about whether or not it's too cold to wear a coat or not. You're like, maybe my problems are really rather insignificant. Do you ever feel that way, Catherine, where you are learning about these things and you're like, well, who am I? All the time. All the time. And I think this is the great benefit they can give us. I think

if we could learn to think of ourselves as humans, as miraculous thinkers, extraordinary in our capacities both for destruction and for creation, but also one of a great parliament in which we are only one constituency. The shark born today, if we allow it, will live far beyond anything that you or I can accurately imagine. And they live so deep down, they live 7,000 feet, so sort of seven Eiffel towers down where it is cold and dark. And at that depth, there is life that we don't even suspect, life that we cannot imagine. And I think sometimes it is worth sitting and closing

your eyes and imagining not just all the people going about their lives, loving and endeavouring and destroying, but also the extraordinary plethora of beating hearts, of life, all of which have forms of knowledge that we cannot even begin to fathom because we are very poor at imagining knowledges other than our own. I find it profoundly liberating from the confines of our moment. I totally get what you're saying. In the Greenland Shark chapter, you say, I'm glad to not be a Greenland Shark. I don't have enough thoughts to fill 500 years, but I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through whichever spinning chaos we may currently be living through, and the crash that will

come after it, and they will live through the currently unimagined things that will come after that, the transformations, the revelations, the possible liberations. That is their beauty, and it's breathtaking. They go on. I just think that's very profound to think about that they just continue. They do. I wrote that a couple of years ago. I just think that's very profound to think about that they just continue. They do. I wrote that a couple of years ago. And of course, now I would add a very strong caveat. They go on if we do not make it impossible for them to do so. Because we could fill the

water with such noise that communication becomes impossible, and with such pollutants that life becomes impossible. We could end up with a world in which the seas are almost empty and the skies are almost silent. I think when we think about love, we have to think about it as something that needs increasingly to be active and furious. Just an angry, raging love seems to me to be the thing that is called for now. You talk about in your book too about raccoons, and I have an interesting raccoon story to share with you, if you're interested. I'm never not interested in raccoon stories.

You talk about an interesting one from history about the raccoon that lived in the White House. And that is an interesting story. I like it. But I used to have a raccoon that lived in my house. Oh, wow. Not a pet. Not as a pet, a wild raccoon that lived in my house. I used to live in a very old house, certainly not old by some of Great Britain's standards, but old by American standards, over 100 years old. One night we were lying awake in bed, just kind of drifting off to sleep, and we heard what sounded like a very bizarre noise that one could not pinpoint. It sounded a little like, almost like a cartoon yelling at you from the other side of the

wall. That's the best way I can describe it. And then it was coupled by very distinctive sounds of scratching and walking. And then just kind of this like thump, thump, thump. Well, it was very obvious that there was something inside the walls. And soon it became very obvious that there was more than one something in the attic and each night these somethings would return from their daily sojourns to their cozy home in the attic of my house and we figured out where they were getting in and attempted to during the day like we called an expert and they were like you need to

block off their entrance during the day so you don called an expert, and they were like, you need to block off their entrance during the day so you don't trap them in your house. You want them to come back and realize like, oh no, I can't get in there anymore. Well, guess what? That did not work. They just found a different way in. It did not work even a little bit.

It didn't even work for one night. They found a different way in. But then one day we came home and there was no electricity on only the second floor of my house, not on the main level, only on the second floor. So we called an electrician to come fix the electricity on the second floor of the house. An electrician opens up the little door to the attic. He pops that open, gets a ladder, and is immediately met by a very angry raccoon who does not want the electrician in her space around her babies. So as one can imagine, raccoon mommies are protective

of their young and the electrician immediately closed it and was like, nope, I will not be fixing your electricity today. So the question then became like, what does one do with the raccoons? Because we don't want them destroying our home, which is what they will do given the opportunity. They're not a respecter of human residences. No, they eat your electrical cords as a hobby, absolutely. But neither do we want to harm them, right? So we'd called a wildlife expert, decided that we would humanely live trap them and relocate them to another location. Like we would not harm them, we would just catch them and then move them somewhere else. So we did that.

We live trapped them. Again, they were not injured. And we did that. We live-trapped them. Again, they were not injured. And we drove them far, far away. I'm talking many miles, not far away like a park down the street. I'm talking like 10 miles. And wouldn't you know it, within the week, they were back. They found their way home. And I won't belabor this story,

but we never fully rid our house of raccoons. We lived there for 10 years. And when we sold the house, we told the new buyers, there are raccoons that live here now and then. And the new buyer was like, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And I'm friends with the new owner on Facebook, and the new owner has frequently posted about the raccoons that she shares the house with. She's just come to the conclusion that there's just no way to get rid of them. They're too opportunistic, and they're too wedded. Apparently, they're very wedded to their place of birth. They remember where they were born. This is a safe place for me.

This is where I want to be. And then of course, if you have a mother who has two babies, and then those babies go on to have two babies, suddenly you have 15 raccoons who all believe they need to live in your house. All of them. This is my house. So I now live in the woods where I have no raccoons, but in town I had plenty of raccoons. I don't know what to make of that. Why do you all need to live with me? But the sound of like, it's very distinctive. And you do become accustomed to it over time, I will say. Have you ever lived with a raccoon, Catherine?

I have never seen a raccoon. You've never seen a raccoon, Catherine? I have never seen a raccoon. You've never seen a raccoon? I can see the logistical difficulty of living alongside them because their intelligence makes them so difficult to peacefully cohabit with. They can open rabbit hatches and dustbins and window latches. They can unlock doors if you leave the key in. But I long to see one. They're quite cute.

They're beauty, those banded faces. Yes. And also that sense of extraordinary inquisitiveness that they have. Although I can see that being a householder with a raccoon as a tenant is not ideal. No. I do think that like, you know, the things they can do. The book talks about how there's a famous thing called the Aesop test, which is a cylinder with a marshmallow floating on water too far down to reach by grabbing. And the raccoons are shown a human who drops stones into the water to raise the level of

the water so that you can then snatch the marshmallow. And several raccoons who had been shown this were able to replicate it immediately, but another one of them just knocked it over, which no other animal thought of. I find their ingenuity and their beauty very compelling, even though I can see that as a bedfellow or indeed a wallfellow, they might not be ideal. They're little human hands. Their hands appear so human and dexterous, and then they have very expressive little faces. And if they weren't viewed as nuisance animals in the United States, you can see why somebody would even want one as a pet. Because they're charming and they're

smart and they're floofy and they're cute. And you know, we keep all kinds of other animals that fall in that genre as pets. That's a lot of dogs except raccoons are apparently even smarter. Seem to have better memories. Yeah human little hands where they can like make all kinds of things happen. They make dogs seem like giant dopes. In comparison you know like we're dogs all we have is our nose to like boop things with and our little paws to smack things around. And we're really motivated by a treat. We're very easy to get. We could just be distracted by a treat. Raccoons don't care about your treats. Right. They are their own being. And of course, we know that famously, the Coolidge administration,

Calvin Coolidge, had a pet raccoon, and it lived in the house and had a beautiful embroidered collar and would unscrew the light bulbs and overturn the block parts and play with the soap and used to sit across his shoulders like a sort of muffler until one day we believe she did the thing that many people have longed to do and very few have done, and she bit did the thing that many people have longed to do and very few have done, and she bit the President of America. That was the unforgivable crime, yes. You know, I love bears as well, and one of the things that amuses me about bears is, and I will frequently on my social media, I will post a clip of a bear doing whatever they want. And I will often on my social media, I will post a clip of a bear doing whatever they want.

And I will often post the caption as though I'm attributing a quote to a bear like bears. I do what I want. Go ahead and try to stop me. I'm gonna do what I want. And if I wanna swing on your porch swing, I'm going to. And if I want to lay on a floatie in your pool, I'm going to. You know, like to lay on a floatie in your pool, I'm going to. You

know, like there's nothing a bear can't do if it decides that's what it wants to do. I do what I want. I would love to hear what do you think it is about bears that humans in particular are so enamored by? Why do we love bears so much more than other furry creatures? Because like we just mentioned, raccoons are extremely charming, extremely smart, cute little faces, cute little hands. What is it about bears that humans love so much? I think it must be that fabulous contrast between the extraordinary sweetness of the cubs and the extraordinary beauty of their faces and that

kind of Disney-like colossal eye of a bear cub and the extraordinary strength and power of the adult bear. And we have, as you say, we have loved them for so long. For a while there was this fabulous theory, which I love, that was very much in fashion at the time that I mostly study, which is Renaissance England, where we believed that a muller bear gave birth to a lump of unfound flesh and then licked it into shape. And so there's a Dunn poem where he says, you know, loves a bear whelp born. If we are lick our love and force it new strange shapes to take, we are an oven lump a monster make. And I love this idea.

And then their extraordinary ferocity. In England, we used to have bear baiting down in this slightly lawless area near the Globe where you would find prostitutes and people selling very strong drink. There you would also find the bear. And Byron had a bear in his rooms at Trinity College, and when he was asked what he was going to do with it, he said that he thought it should sit for a fellowship. You say in the book that bears are a species of large and capacious astonishments. The Kodiak brown bear is a prodigy of growth. At birth, a cub weighs less than a pound, a small loaf of bread, but can end by weighing more than fifteen500 pounds. If we grew at the same rate, an adult man would weigh the same as a rhinoceros.

And their sense of smell is 100 times better than ours. A polar bear can smell you more than 18 miles off and swim 100 miles without stopping to rest. England to France, five times over, without pause. Swimming 100 miles without resting, that is bananas. The Greenland shark doesn't even do that, right? And that's not a warm-blooded mammal. Do you ever learn these facts about animals and just think to yourself, how? Constantly. And it is a constant refrain, I think, for all the scientists who are working

on the living world. The thing they constantly say is, so rarely do we discover that we have overestimated a living thing. Almost always we discover that it is more complex, more nuanced, its intelligence, its senses are sharper and stranger. It is always more than we thought, and we are discovering now how much more. And yes, the process of writing this book over several years was just a process over and over again of how, how can a bear do that? How can they be so swift, so colossal? How does a spider know the difference on a television screen between a rainforest and the Real Housewives? But they do. You can teach a seal how to speak English. There's a seal who speaks with like a strong Maine

accent, not anymore, but in the 1970s because he was adopted as a baby by a human. And there are recordings that you can Google and find. And the accent is really very strong and it says, hello there, get over here. And it sounds exactly like a slightly disgruntled man in his 60s. I think writing the book, what I wanted to do was just try to lay out, kneeling in front of someone and pouring into their lap, just this cornucopia of wonders in the hope that one of them will get under your skin, in the hope that a little bit of it might, in a kind of Trojan horse

way, because I've wanted to write the book to be short, all of the pieces, they're never longer than about two and a half thousand words, and they would always start at about six and it would whittle and whittle down and down, on the hope that you could read them at one go in a sitting. And the hope would be that maybe it might trojan horse its way into your consciousness and just remind you that we are not alone and it behoves us to act in a way that honours that fact. I always say that I slightly wrote the book for people, perhaps, who do not believe in the urgency of the need for conservation. You You Sharon, you are, I am preaching to the

converted, but there are those for whom it feels like a secondary or not even close to secondary concern. And I don't know how you galvanize in someone a sense of urgency, but I think one possible way of all the many ways might be adoration, might be astonishment, might be insisting on a wonder that is educated and engaged and adoring and angry. I love that. Have you discovered this phenomenon that many people do not know that narwhals are real? I, none of this. I did not know that people did not know that. And so I periodically will post, and this is no joke, on my Instagram, I have 1.2 million followers on Instagram,

I will be like, this is your quarterly reminder that narwhals are in fact real and not mythical creatures. I think we have become so accustomed to seeing narwhals on children's clothing, on stuffed animals, on the movie Elf in which the narwhal is like, bye buddy, hope you find your dad. And he's like claymation. And we never see them on our whale watching excursions because we're not whale watching in the Arctic, obviously. But North Americans, even most Canadian North Americans would never have occasion to see a narwhal in the wild. And so they have been relegated to this like mythical creature status for many people and very much like a unicorn, you know, the unicorn of the sea, unicorns on land

are mythical. And the number of people who are like, I am 37 years old, and I just learned today that narwhals are in fact real. Is this a worldwide problem, Catherine? Catherine McAllister I was telling a friend about the narwhal, a friend who is a professor at Oxford University of Philosophy, and he admitted that he up until that moment, he's in his forties, had fully believed that narwhals were very much like the almaraj, which is a horned hare, or the Ratatoska, which is a horned squirrel, based in Bahat'li, maybe like Norse mythology, not understanding that

they are, of course, real. But, of course, the extraordinary thing is there has always been slippage. Queen Elizabeth I was given a narwhal horn studded in emeralds and rubies, and she was told it was a horn of the unicorn of the ocean. And at around the same time, about 80 years before, an Italian scholar was writing that he had seen a real unicorn, a land unicorn, in the Sinai Desert with a horn a meter long. So that was always a sense of possibility. LESLIE There's always a sense of possibility, but yet not in the modern era, apparently. We've just decided that's not real. This is so fascinating.

People ask me when I tell them they are real. They're like, how does the tusk get out of its mother? You know, they don't realize that it grows after the baby is born and that it's actually like a tooth that grows through its lip. And you say in the book too, that scientists have found that the tusk is shot through with around 10 million nerve endings. And by rubbing tusks on meeting, the narwhals may be passing on information about the salinity and therefore propensity to freeze of the water through which they have just passed. And you say perhaps the tusks make them not aggressors, but cartographers. What a thought that animals mapped the globe in their own way.

Isn't that just such a fascinating thing to think about? Extraordinary. The idea that we, who understand time and space in our specific way, live alongside those who also understand the idea of mapmaking in a completely different way, but yet with the same need, they too need to know the ocean as it dies. And so it does seem possible. We don't know that's what they're for, because of course, not solely,

but largely it's just the males that grow them. You do sometimes see a narwhal striking a fish, and then once it's stunned, going to pick it up and eat it more readily so that maybe it's multipurpose. Again, it falls into that colossal basket of things that we do not fully know. LW And they're difficult animals to study because you can't keep them in captivity and run experiments on them the way you can with a raccoon or a bird. And they live in such remote places, very, very difficult animals to learn things about, but yet still very real.

That beauty is the beauty of the real world. They look exactly right for something that lives deep, dark down. Well, I want to keep talking because I want to go through every single animal in this book and I want to talk about it. Do you experience this, Catherine, where when you have learned something fascinating, it brings you a tremendous amount of pleasure to share with somebody about that thing? I do. It makes me difficult to live with because of my desire to grab my partner's wrist and say, did you know that possibly it was a coconut crab that ate Amelia Earhart?

And the idea that once you have learned something, the thing you most urgently want to do is pass it on to another person. And my hope would be that if one person might read the book, then maybe they would pass on five of the real and imagined truths and half truths of the living world that we have lived alongside. Maybe they'll pass those on about the fact that the narwhal is real. Maybe they'll pass that on and, know one hopes for the possibility always of a ripple effect one doesn't always get them but they are possible you say in the book and I think this is a somewhat sobering but important way to end this conversation you say we are Noah's Ark in reverse and you're referencing how

the world's wildlife has declined by almost 70% in the last 50 years. You say it is as if we are raging through the bowels of the boat, setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water. Faced with such destruction at such pace, acquiescence becomes impossible. And the time to fight with all our ingenuity and tenacity with love and fury is now. What do you hope will happen as a result of writing this book? What does fighting with love and fury for the natural world look like? If you can, it looks like engaging in politics at every possible level, the local, the national, not just in one vote every four or five years. It looks like protest. It looks like remembering that some things that we treat as normal have only been normal for 150 years, eating meat every day,

flying everywhere. Those are habits we have learned swiftly and could unlearn. It looks like trying to be a member of the community who tries to push forward visions of play, luxury, leisure, delight, that don't involve the relentless consumption of new things. I think it looks like building a kind of no-passer-an-they-shall-not-pass for your own soul. I think it looks like not giving in to a vision of the world that is exploitative or authoritarian or militaristic. I think it looks like insisting on hope, not passive hope, not the hope where you sit alone in your room and you think maybe everything will be okay, everything will not be okay. The hope that is active, that is a discipline, the hope that says despair is something we have no time for.

No human can save everything, but every human can save something. I think that is what it will look like. Like every possible fight we can offer, I think now, the next crucial 10 years will be the time to offer it. I love that. That no human can save everything, but every human can save something. And speaking of, you shall not pass, which of course is a famous Gandalf quote from the Fellowship of the Ring, where Gandalf says, you cannot pass, and he's saying this to the orcs that are standing in his path. He says, I am a servant of the secret fire. And of course

people have like over the years many interpretations of what that means. I love to know what that means to you, Catherine. If it means anything at all, what does it mean to be in this moment, Gandalf? You shall not pass. What does that mean to you? that we must brace ourselves for a fight that will be so hard, actively dangerous potentially. But also I think over and over and over there is a great temptation to say, well, given the now political landscape that we have, the disinformation, the power of fossil fuel companies. Maybe now it is the time to say, well, we've lost, we'll give up, we'll

have a gorgeous time, we'll party, because it will make no difference. And the thing is that's not how the world works, That's not how the future works. We cannot know in advance what will make a difference. And so the thing I tell myself over and over every day, the time to give up is never. I love that. We could keep talking, but I'm going to let you go for today. And I really appreciate you. I appreciate your time. I really loved reading Vanishing Treasures. This is such a beautifully written sort of love story to the natural world. If you're somebody who enjoys those sort of what I call brain tangle moments where you're like, I did not know that. And it gives you like a singular pleasure to share facts with your partner

or your children or the lady behind the counter at the doctor's office. This book is full of them and I am so grateful for your time today. Thank you so much, Katherine. Thank you so much for having me. You can buy Vanishing Treasures wherever you buy your books. If you want to support your local bookshop, head to yours or go to bookshop.org. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show? That helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon.

Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks, and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.