I have some disappointing news: March 2026 is upon us and I am still nowhere near publication of The Slime Mold’s Guide to World Domination.

When I turned in the manuscript back in the first week of July 2025, I thought for sure that within just a few short months my little book would be zipping along through Simon & Schuster with the ruthless efficiency of a Cheetoh in the Frito Lay factory. How wrong I was!

Here is the actual timeline:

July 7, 2025: Submit full manuscript. Manuscript took me 2 years, 2 months, and 1 week to write, and after cutting 40,000 words from manuscript in 1 week after being informed of such necessity. Author giddy with glee and relief. Know in heart of hearts is is the best and cleanest copy I have ever produced. Editor informs author the wait for edits will be 5-8 weeks.

September 10: Receive first round of edits. Edit letter with suggested changes is nine pages long. Manuscript contains 1-9 comments/questions per paragraph for entire 95,000 words (to be fair to editor, some of this is praise or expressions of amusement. Much is not). Despair.

October-December: Persevere. Fortitudine Vincimus. Swearing may have been involved.

December 21: Submit painstakingly edited manuscript. Author simply relieved not to have to think about book again for a while. (Aside: Also in December, KGNU broadcast a new interview with me I’d recorded way back in August about slime molds. Check it out here!)

January 6, 2026: Editor returns from vacation and indicates it will be an additional 8-10 weeks before I can expect second round of edits. Author works on image permissions, contemplates proper moment and methods for fact-checking, cleans out kitchen and kid room, organizes office, researches summer camps, does taxes, and scrubs more toilets, toilet-scrubbing somehow still being an inescapable fact of life in 2026, despite apparent advent of autonomous war-killing machines, book-writing computers, and self-driving cars. Call me when you’ve got the toilet-scrubbing robot.

Oh, and I started my next book.

I can’t yet say what it’s about, but I will say 1) it’s not about slime molds and 2) I am already having a blast. Now that I actually know what I’m doing, the wind is in my sails. However, I have also been advised it would be best to not even try to sell this sucker until well over a year from now. More waiting.

Being this far away from publication of Book 1 while already starting Book 2 also feels weird. Really weird. Every time people ask what I do now and I say I’m an author who’s written a book that won’t be published for an indefinite amount of time, but probably way over a year, I feel like I’m displaying signs of some sort of bizarre book-related mental health disorder. Sure, you’ve written a book. Suuuure.

Also crazy-making is the whole Hurry Up and Wait M.O. of Publishing World. They wanted my book by a certain deadline and I had to ask [grovel] for extensions twice, but the pace of actually producing the books seems … relaxed. So here I am, almost eight months since I turned the book in, still only halfway(?) through the editing process, with no clear end in sight. I have been informed the current publication target is May 2027. I sold the book in January 2023. What does give me some hope is that I’ve noticed that many of the “Best By” dates food I’ve been buying lately are now after May 2027.

In the meantime, we wait, and wait, and wait some more. A fellow 2027 debut science book author has told me she has learned the key to navigating book publishing is patience and acceptance. I accept that I must be patient, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I’m not getting any younger, and I want to get that book in your hands as soon as possible. Much of that is out of my control.

What is in my control is starting the next book, as well as publishing this newsletter. Along with keeping you posted on book progress, I also plan to share some science book recommendations/reviews with you. While writing my book, I read a lot of science and other nonfiction books, and I have opinions. You’ll hear about the good ones. I’d also like to try and sneak in a short natural history column or two, just like the old days.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about writing a nonfiction book generally or about this book in particular, just ask!

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NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

On July 7, 2025, I handed in the first full draft of The Slime Mold’s Guide to World Domination to my editor at Simon & Schuster, two years, two months, and seven days after I started. She was delighted and told me it would be five to eight weeks before I could expect a reply. I made some homemade smoked gouda mac ’n’ cheese and drank some wine and watched the sunset on the deck.

And it was good.

Five to eight weeks of guaranteed rest felt like winning the lottery!

You know that writing a book is going to be hard. You know it’s going to take a long time, but have no idea how much. You see the mountains of papers and books still unmined and think, “I don’t know when I’ll ever finish all this but I will just keep taking the next small step on faith I will get there some day if I just don’t quit.” I posted the Shackleton family motto on my desk: Fortitudine Vincimus, Through Endurance We Conquer. In the midst of all this uncertainty and difficulty, you feel the pressure of that deadline gun at the back of your head every day and every night for years at a time.

Just prior to finishing, my editor had let me know US and foreign publishers prefer shorter nonfiction books than in years past—especially for science debuts—and she suggested that for best chances of book sales success, I needed to cut 40,000 words from my ~140K book. Although I had been dreading that news, I’d long known it was likely. I signed a contract for 80,000 words. And one of the things I often see nonfiction readers grousing about on Goodreads is overstuffed books.

“There is a certain type of non-fiction writer who seems hellbent on inflicting everything he or she learned while researching the book on the misfortunate reader. No detail is spared,” as one reviewer put it about writers like me. “Leaving everything in is the simple, intellectually lazy, option. Where non-fiction is concerned, the reader has a right to expect the author to take the trouble to shape his material into some kind of coherent whole, recognizing that while some details are critical, others are not, and pruning accordingly.”

Voltaire was pithier: “The secret to being boring is to say everything.”

So although painful to hear, this news was not unexpected, nor unwelcome, nor a hard sell, but I really had no idea how difficult it would be to cut. As it turned out, using the time-tested “Is this material relevant to the book’s argument?” rule, and now knowing how the book ended (I didn’t actually know for sure until I read the final stack of research), to my surprise, I cut 40,000 words in just a week, followed by another 6,500 words of flab on the final read-aloud, which took another week. (Juicy but tangential tailings—and there were many—will not go to waste; some will end up here and other may find homes elsewhere around publication time).

The evening I finished the 40K cut was the moment that I finally no longer felt like a poser with a book contract, but a real author at last. The hour, dear reader, was sweet.

However, patiently waiting for me here on the Blessed Other Side are disgusting bathrooms, stacks and stacks of un-filed papers and kid art, a partially overgrown garden, and the accumulated housework of three to six months. You know you’ve just finished a book when the idea of scrubbing toilets actually seems like a refreshing change of pace.

And the truth is I’m nowhere near actually done. Still ahead are several rounds of edits with my editor, book review by several scientists (a stipulation of winning the Alfred P. Sloan science book grant), fact checking (by me), image and text permissions, blurb acquisition, cover design, copy editing, and page proofing. And then the real fun (ha) of publicity and marketing starts.

And here’s where you come in. I could use your opinion on the subtitle. As happens with nearly every nonfiction book, the book and its subtitle have changed in the course of writing. In my proposal, I called it The Slime Mold’s Guide to World Domination: An Irreverent Natural History of a Highly Unusual Organism. My acquiring editor thought that the title was great, but that a long title warranted a short subtitle: A Natural History. I immediately saw the sense in that, but a second subtitle occurred to me that might be even better: A Natural Mystery.

This book started as a straight-up natural history, but early on a potential agent asked me, What is the engine of your book? Good question. Really good question. After some thought, my answer was: mystery. If I turned the book into a mystery that I set up with evidence at the beginning—how can a giant crawling cell possibly be intelligent??—that would be the engine that would drive readers to the end.

This is a method I’ve long favored. I got the idea at an environmental journalism fellowship when I was a newspaper reporter in Wyoming. Everyone knows environmental stories can be both deadly dull and depressing—not a formula for winning readers. One of the many relief methods suggested by former Wall Street Journal environmental reporter Frank Allen on that trip was to use beloved story forms, one of them being the old-fashioned mystery.

In 2007, I used it to write a two-part investigation into a series of mysterious elk deaths in Wyoming, for which I won a AAAS science journalism award. I used it in 2013 when I wrote a feature story for Scientific American about a strange epidemic of wild yeast-related deaths in the Pacific Northwest. And now I would use it to write my book. I was stone-cold sure that this was the way. (Ironically, Potential Agent did not see things that way. She preferred a hybrid memoir/science book, which is a very popular form these days, but not for me.)

Fast forward to now. I wrote that mystery. I made a strong argument for what I think is the solution. And when it came time to cut the book by 40K, the parts that had to go were parts of the original natural history that were not relevant enough to the argument of my book to stay. So now I think the book really is more of a natural mystery than a natural history. My new elevator pitch for this book is “The Right Stuff meets Agatha Christie starring a giant crawling cell.”

On the other hand, that subtitle might make some people think they are buying fiction, not nonfiction (people really hate making that mistake). And, I don’t know, maybe readers would prefer to buy a natural history of slime molds? The first two-thirds of the book still is, largely, a natural history.

So now I’d like to know what you think. Would you give me a quick click in the poll below please? And if the spirit so moves you, please elaborate in the comments. NOTE: I accidentally reset the votes on this poll two hours after it opened. If you voted during the first two hours (noon to 2 pm ET 7/22) please vote again!

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For the last two years I have been writing my first book, The Slime Mold’s Guide to World Domination. I have some news to share.

First, last year I was lucky enough to win an Alfred P. Sloan Science Book Grant, which has been an incredible aid in finishing this book. With the foundation’s help (you might remember them from PBS: “This program is brought to you by … The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation”), I was able to afford translators of German, Japanese, and Latin. And I was able to help support my family at a difficult time when my husband was out of work. I send my deep gratitude to all the good folks at the Sloan foundation for this invaluable assistance in making creative works about real science come to life for the public. Alfred’s generous bequest is as needed and appreciated now as it was when he made it in 1934. Thank you.

Second, I am now incredibly close to finishing this ding dang book. I have turned in 11 chapters and am now about a third of the way through the last chapter, 12. I had a bit of a Pit of Despair moment during the writing of what turned out to be two chapters, 10 and 11, feeling as though I’d never find my way out. But with the encouragement of my friend and book consigliere Nathan Pieplow, and the help of my husband who gave me a whole week to do nothing but write in March while he took our kiddo to see the grandparents, I made it. Now, I am like the pack horse that has sighted the barn: with every paper or book I finish reading and writing up, I am that much closer. This book is happening.

Next, in March, I gave an interview for a youtube show on Civic Science for Prof. Fanuel Muindi of Northeastern University recently, who saw my Sloan Grant award announcement and was curious enough about my book title to want to chat. We talk about the process of writing a book and about getting a Sloan Grant.

And finally, as you surely sensed from my interview, I have realized one of my missions in life is to get more science writers to write science books. Why? Because the world needs more good science books, because it’s been incredibly fulfilling (at least for me), and because I think it can only help your career, whatever the outcome. We need more science writers with sustainable careers.

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To wit, a short Q&A:

Q: What has surprised you about the writing process?

How much fun it is, and how much incredible science book material is sitting around in dusty old journals and books just waiting to be unearthed. This is a call to arms, science writers. We have so much more book ore sitting around out there unmined than the history writers do. Entire realms of research are just waiting out there, hitherto untouched by the hand of any professional writer. And yet there are scores more history books than science books published each year. Why is that?

Q: Would you recommend I write a science book?

Honestly, yes — if you are already an experienced science writer, and if you can find a book idea you are passionate about. First, for the reason just mentioned in the last question: so much great book material is waiting, and the world needs more great science books. But second, newspapers are dying. Magazines seem to be dying. You know what isn’t dying? Books. Books are doing great. Net book sales in 2023 in the U.S. were $12.57 billion – that’s billion with a b, folks. And nonfiction outsells fiction. For some reason, people — even many young people — LOVE books.

Plus, in a book, you are actually encouraged to have your own voice, rather than trying to make it conform to Magazine or Newspaper X’s institutional voice. Nay, book editors often say the very books they are looking for are precisely those authored by writers with strong, distinctive voices – even in nonfiction. And that was even before ChatGPT and other large language models came along. The premium on a unique human voice is probably only going to get stronger now.

Finally, lots of nonfiction editors say they are looking for science and nature books. Just to take one example, on my publisher Simon & Schuster’s editor website, one-third of the nonfiction editors mention “science” or “nature” as a book topic they would be interested in publishing. There seems to be a desire of nonfiction editors for science books that is not commensurate with the number of good science book proposals being received, judging by the number of science books these editors have actually published.

Becoming an author is always risky, and most books do not turn a profit. On the other hand, a few do. It’s a gamble. But I knew I wanted to write books 20 years ago. It was my dream, and damn the torpedoes. If you have ever suspected you might have it in you to be a nonfiction author, I encourage you to go for it. If your book does succeed, your financial reward will be commensurate with that success – also unlike in newspapers and magazines. If your book does not succeed, you are now a book author, and that is a lifelong credential that makes you a more marketable science writer. What have you got to lose?

Q: But writing a book seems scary. I’ve never written one before. How can I write one if I don’t know what I’m doing?

It is scary. Let me tell you about the long, sobering pause in my office before I signed my book contract. It felt like jumping off a cliff — and I already had two chapters under my belt to get me to the point where I could at least believe I could do it most of the time. I have not always been certain I can pull it off. In this capacity, I have made liberal use of Shepard’s Prayer.

But if you are a smart person, you will figure it out as you go. You will. Talk to other science writers. Ask questions. Read lots of nonfiction books, and books about writing nonfiction books. Have faith in yourself and trust that the passion you feel for your book will give you the strength to figure out how to write it.

But the best advice I ever got was: just start.

Q: How can I learn more about what makes a great nonfiction book?

If you are interested in writing a nonfiction book, I recommend two books: Thinking Like Your Editor, by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, and Working by Robert A. Caro. I also encourage you to read—or at least, skim—lots of science and other nonfiction books to find out what you like and don’t like (Aside: The Right Stuff is my favorite nonfiction book of all time, and if you like my style and are even moderately interested in the space race, you will love this book).

Read great fiction, too, because the best nonfiction is written like fiction (I personally recommend Wolf Hall), and not like textbooks or a collection of magazine articles on a given topic. Instead, they have a discernible voice, literary merit, and a propulsive story arc with a beginning, middle, and an end. Whether reading fiction or nonfiction, humans have the same deep need, as Salman Rushdie has pointed out: “Tell me a story”. In my opinion, in science this story is not hard to find, because it is intrinsic to the whole endeavor: is is mystery.

If you think you might have a book in you, but you’re not sure what, see if you can find a great driving question that you’ve always wondered about. Great questions produce great nonfiction books. Tom Wolfe’s “grew out of some ordinary curiosity. What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?” I do not think he realized he would end up writing about military test pilots, and basically creating the entire concept for Top Gun, but that is what happened.

My question was, “How can a giant slimy crawling cell possibly be intelligent?” And trust me, it has taken me places I never expected to visit either. I can’t wait to share the answer with you.

Current publication estimate: October 2026.

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NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

I’m finally approaching halfway through writing The Slime Mold’s Guide to World Domination and I have news: my book has changed publishers. Last year, my acquiring editor moved from Penguin Random House to Simon & Schuster, and requested my book follow. I agreed, and after four months(!) of waiting and contract renegotiations, I signed on the new dotted line last month.

Since the publishing industry seems to be in perpetual upheaval, books apparently get “orphaned” a lot as editors migrate. This is not generally considered to be a good thing from the author’s perspective, unfortunately. However, I was lucky to both have another enthusiastic editor at PRH volunteer to adopt my book (rather than getting assigned to it, which often results in a less-than-ideal dynamic) but then also to have the original acquiring editor believe in my book so much that it was worth the effort to try to resell it to new bosses, which he did. I am grateful to both editors for their faith and enthusiasm in my work.

Today I thought I’d do a little Q & A about science book writing, since this process is so mysterious, and you may be wondering what I’ve been up to the last year.

Q: How hard was it to get an agent and sell your book?

A: It was difficult, but not as hard as it is for fiction authors. I learned the hard way that you should not approach one agent at a time – given the freedom to take their time, they usually will. If you get a yes from one agent, that speeds up the decision-making process for the others, so I recommend aspiring authors query about three to five agents at a time. Before you approach the next batch (if necessary), recalibrate your material based on any feedback you got.

My process took about five months from my first submission to getting a yes and I ended up approaching five agents during that time. Two were decisive nos. Two were almost yesses. One was an enthusiastic yes. The yes was the fourth answer out of the five. My understanding is that it is not uncommon for fiction authors to have to submit to 80 or 90 agents before getting their first yes, so comparatively speaking, we have it easy.

But believe me, no amount of rejection is fun, and there were nights after I got rejected that I cried and questioned whether I even had a future in this business — and who was I if I wasn’t a science writer? Consequently, I was already training to be a native plant landscaper if the whole book thing didn’t work out.

As for the book sale itself, that went quickly. We submitted to three editors and had strong interest within two days. The book ended up going to auction and there were two bids. And just like that, after decades of dreaming about it, I had a real book contract!

Q: How much preparation did you do before approaching agents?

A: The idea of writing the proposal was very intimidating to me. I worried I’d write one and then if I did get an agent they’d make me toss it out and write a new one to their specifications. It kept me from writing the book for many years. The consigliere of my book (a mafia term I am here using to mean my chief strategist) recommended I just start writing the book, which seemed much less intimidating. Since I already had years of experience and a platform as a science writer, he counseled that once I had significant book and was far enough along to believe I could finish it, taking care of the rest wouldn’t be too hard. And he was right.

I started writing the book around 2016, just fifteen minutes a day (that process is a whole other story), and then spent January - May of 2022 (right after I nearly lost the whole book in the Marshall Fire) doing nothing but working on it.  So when I approached agents, I went with a polished query letter and two full book chapters. None of them complained I didn’t yet have a proposal. Once I had my agent, I wrote the proposal in a couple of weeks (how much easier it seemed once I had wind in my sails!), and we worked together to polish that and the sample chapters over the next month.

Q: What is it like writing a book?

A: This has been, without question, the most satisfying professional experience of my life. I actually look forward to starting work in the morning, and I’m bummed when I have to quit. The time flies by (this is actually a double-edged sword because in the long term it actually makes life feel measurably shorter!). I cannot believe how much fun I am having. How many people can say that about their jobs? 

On the other hand, by pure chance, in the last year I’ve had the most health challenges that I’ve faced in any single year of my life. None of them turned out to be life threatening or shortening, thank god, but several were quite debilitating -- between all the tests, doctors’ visits, and just feeling lousy -- and made it hard to work.

Long ago, I thought I wanted to be a bench scientist, and I got depressed when I realized it wasn’t for me. That was especially confusing because I still loved science. What I have learned writing this book is that I actually WAS meant to do science research – science book research. The process of writing this book has to me been like getting to be a detective and prospector combined – digging through old books and journal articles trying to solve a science mystery, uncovering both gold nuggets and whole Comstock Lodes of amazing and interesting forgotten science in the process.

It can be exhilarating. I have so many times gotten to have light bulb moments where I say – ahh! I finally understand this piece of the mystery now. Or – THAT’s how they figured that out. Or, oh my god, can you believe THIS thing they found out that slime molds can do that no one knows about! And these answers can turn up in totally surprising and unpredictable places, which is also a big part of the fun.

Then I make get to make it all into an entertaining story, which is the easy part. Not once have I had writer’s block. On the contrary, my Achilles’ heel is that I am a slow reader, and careful reading of often difficult texts is almost always the first step of science book writing. And let’s be honest: there are unpleasant parts too. No job is perpetually fun. Even with otter.ai, I still have to go in and manually fix the interview transcripts. Sometimes, the right turn of phrase just won’t come. But overall, I’m in heaven.

Robert Caro, the revered author of The Years of Lyndon Johnson and The Power Broker, said he wanted to become an author because years ago, that was something people aspired to be, like a firefighter, or an astronaut. You don’t really hear people say that anymore. Here’s what I think you should know: becoming a nonfiction author can be a dream job, and not nearly as difficult as breaking into the world of fiction books if you are already a professional writer or journalist. If you are at a crossroads in your writing career, give it some serious thought.

Next time, I’ll answer some more questions about getting started writing science and nonfiction books.

Any questions on this week’s edition? Ask away!

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The lid of the carnivorous pitcher plant has a seemingly obvious purpose: prevent tropical downpours from swamping the vessel beneath, where concentrated digestive juices carry insects on to glory. But just over ten years ago scientists discovered that, in three species found on the island of Borneo, the lid, perplexingly, stands erect.

Scrutiny of the pitcher contents revealed the surprising truth — bait strategically positioned on the upright lid forces tree shrews to spread ‘em over the bowls to reach it. That’s right. These pitchers have evolved to be spectacular, Art Nouveau snack bars/toilets with bar stool(!) pitchers. It’s as if you spied some freshly fried tacos nailed to a wall just behind an open manhole, and you also happened to not be wearing pants.

Pitcher plants (genus Nepenthes) originally evolved to be pitfall traps, botanical Hotel Californias with less exciting views (and lately, better weather). They evolved from leaves, then subsequently sub-evolved into upper and lower pitchers that target flying or crawling insects respectively.

The vessels themselves are eye-poppers. Natural selection has produced designs that wed the costumes of 1930’s Sci-Fi villains with the stylings of Phylum Cnidaria. The result is a spectrum of pitchers in every dress size in shades of lime, maroon, crimson, and cream bedecked with spines, hairs, and fluted rims as sharp as radiator ridges. Nepenthes has clearly decided more is more.

Nectaries that serve as bait may be tucked in strategic locations around the trap. Once bamboozled, the deal is sealed for unwary insects by the lining of the pitcher, which is frequently greased by wax, hairs, glands, and crescent-shaped slippery cells. Several sub-strategies have evolved, including the “lobster-pot” (a constricted opening), “fly-paper traps” (sticky), the bog (jelly-like layer beneath the water in which prey get mired), the lantern (translucent walls of the pitcher glow through an opening on its side, luring in light-attracted insects), and of course, the crapper. One of the three W.C. species — N. lowii — produces pitchers with a distinctive constriction in the middle which really does give them the uncanny appearance of an aerial toilet bowl.

Like many carnivorous plants, pitchers seem to have evolved as a way of fertilizing plants in areas with sunny, wet, acidic, nitrogen-poor soils at high elevation. But as altitude increases, insect diversity and abundance — particularly of ants, pitchers’ favored prey at low altitude — decreases. Enter the need for Plan B, or in this case, Plan #2. It’s easy to imagine how the plants might have evolved in response to mammals raiding what was meant to be insect bait and leaving behind little “presents”, which in this case actually were presents.

Scientists recently decided to investigate how big a contribution the toilet pitchers’ both conventional and unconventional fertilizer makes to pitcher plant nutrition, particularly in comparison with more traditional scuttling and buzzing fare. In an early study of these plants, scientists calculated that somewhere between half and all of the Nepenthes lowii’s leaf nitrogen came from their shrew bar bathrooms.

In the new study, scientists pointed out that ants (pitcher plants’ favorite food at low elevation) are a richer nitrogen source than shrew poo and pee, but what they lack in quality they make up for in quantity and reliability. They calculated that Nepenthes that target animal poop had 1.3 times higher mean total nitrogen than their insect-eating comrades, and almost two-fold higher mean animal-derived nitrogen. It turns out crap is a great fertilizer whether humans or small chittering mammals apply it.

Moreover, tree shrews and occasionally summit rats are not the only mammals to supply pitcher plants with poop on Borneo. Nepehnthes hemsleyana acquires about a third of its leaf nitrogen from the guano of bats that roost inside (hereafter known as bat flats). There is even a bird — the mountain blackeye — that poops in pitchers of N. macrophylla. For some non-obvious reason, no toilet pitchers have ever been found outside the island.

Sadly, there are more Nepenthes at risk of extinction than in any other carnivorous plant genus; 40% of species in the genus are currently classified as “Critically Endangered”. I, for one, don’t want to live on a planet without fancy plant toilets (and Anthropologie wallpaper designers, if the occupied tree shrew loo is not among next season’s designs, I will boycott*). I mean, what are we going to put in the Earth travel brochure, if not this??

*I have never actually bought Anthropologie wallpaper

I am overjoyed to announce that I have signed a book contract with a division of Penguin Random House called Dutton, and am actively working on my first book.

I am attempting to write a funny natural history of slime molds that’s also a mystery — how can a single cell possibly be intilligent? — with a plot twist ending. Send your book-completion brain rays my way, please.

As a first-time book author, I have often wondered what the process of writing a book is really like. So I’m going to share parts of my experience so far with you, names redacted to protect the innocent (that would be everyone but me).

I first had the idea to write this book about 10 years ago. Actually, I had the idea to write a book waaaaaaaaaay back in grad school at Cornell University (when trilobites roamed the Earth), where I was studying plant pathology. I was in grad school more or less as a stalling tactic: I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life and I needed some more time to figure it out. I chose plant pathology because I had been very interested in biodiversity since high school, and I figured plant pathology would give me the maximum number of weird little things to study. All kinds of things attack plants!

I was not disappointed with my choice. I remember walking through the silent and dusty stacks at the library one day and thinking “My mission in life is to tell the world about all the magical creatures buried in these stuffy journals.” At the time, I thought that meant writing a book about biodiversity generally.

Then I went to grad school at MIT to study science writing, and I learned about the importance of storytelling to grabbing readers. Particular stories. Of particular things. Five or 10 years later, somehow the idea of that general book on biodiversity had settled down to a book about one organism: the slime mold. There is more to the choice of that particular creature, but I will save that for a future date.

Around that time I won the AAAS Science Jounalism Award for a story I did about the investigation into a rash of mysterious elk deaths while I was the health and science reporter at a newspaper in Wyoming. When I went back to MIT to claim the award, I mentioned my book idea and how overwhelming the idea of actually doing it while holding down a day job seemed to the director of the science writing program. I didn’t know where to start. He said, “Have you considered starting a blog instead?” That put me on the path to Scientific American, where I blogged for nine years.

Shortly after my blog was picked up by SA in 2011, I mentioned my slime mold book idea to a fellow MIT alum at the NASW meeting. She mentioned she had just gotten an agent and sold a proposal, and offered to introduce me. I jumped at that opportunity. The agent was kind and smart, but after a while I got the feeling she was pushing me to write a book that was not the book I really wanted to write. Instinctively, I backed away, still also haunted by the feeling that I was inadequate to the task and didn’t really know what I was doing.

Time passed. I blogged. I felt occasional pangs of extreme guilt at the book I knew I should be writing that I wasn’t. At intervals, people whom I respect told me I should write it when I mentioned the idea.

Several years later, a person whom I think of as a friendly rival published a first book. I discovered a full page ad in full-color glory on the back of a Scientific American that had been sitting in my office for a while. You know those moments when your vision dissolves to red (or perhaps it’s green)? I had one of those moments. I spoke to a friend of mine who had published some books already about where to begin and my overwhelming terror of signing a book contract with a deadline when I wasn’t sure I could do it. He counseled: just start. Write the book you want to write. And when you reach the point where you really believe you can do it, go get it published.

That still wasn’t quite enough to kick my slothful hindquarters into gear, though. The enormity was still too enormous. Something more important always came up and I just couldn’t get started. I needed help. I had heard a RadioLab episode called “You vs. You” that said science has shown humans respond much better to avoiding short term pain than chasing distant gain. The opening story was about a woman named Zelda who had tried for years to quit smoking, and finally, in desperation, told her friend to donate an enormous sum of her money to the KKK if she ever picked up another cigarette. And it worked. I knew I was like Zelda. I needed the stick.

I discovered a website called stickk.com and created a commitment contract linked to an anti-science charity. I set a weekly writing goal of working on the book at least 15 minutes a day, five days a week, sick days and vacations excepted. I couldn’t stand the thought of giving my anti-charity ONE CENT of my money, so I only pledged $5 a week (the minimum). I could do anything I wanted in that 15 minutes, as long as it was related to the book. I found that the real obstacle was those first five minutes; once I’d made it past the five minute mark, I often worked much longer than 15 minutes. In the 75 weeks I worked that way, I only had to cough up the money once.

After 20,000 or so words, I got pregnant, had a baby, and then six months later the pandemic hit. That June, Scientific American’s blog network closed. My world imploded. There was a moment where I hit bottom. I vowed that once I got out of twin pandemic/baby prison, no fears of book writing would ever hold me back again. I was done being cowed and insecure. Then in December of 2021, we spent a night thinking our house had burned down in a massive wildfire. As we had been on holiday travel, my computer was in the house. And I couldn’t remember the last time I had backed it up. I thought that night the book was really dead.

Except it wasn’t. Though the fire came within a quarter mile of my house, it was spared. The miraculously saved book would wait no longer.

Then I got COVID from the person in whose house we’d sought refuge from the fire.

After I recovered, I opened up my files after three years of digital dust accumulation and was both dismayed and delighted by what I found. Some parts were a mess. But some parts sparkled. I worked every day from January to May to clean up and expand the book, ultimately amassing an additional 20,000 words. Now, NOW, I felt sure I could write this book, and that the material was worthy of it.

After my friend generously read the first half and offered comments, I went back to my agent with what I had. After a month, she decided to pass. That was tough to hear, but I knew I had only just begun to fight. The confidence I now felt was expansive and unshakable. I asked my friend if I should rewrite the opening of the sample chapter. We agreed I should. I tore it apart and started over. Then I went to a second agent who had approached me years ago.

If there is one lesson I have learned about the process of getting an agent, it is this: DO NOT go to just one agent at a time. Approach several. You’ll have to tailor your materials to each, but don’t just go to one, even if you think you have a strong preference. Because I have learned 1) what everyone says is true: after maybe just starting the damn thing, finding an agent is the hardest part of writing a book and 2) finding the right agent is a lot about finding an agent who both grasps your vision and knows the right editors to sell it to. Like many things in life, that’s a numbers game.

This second agent expressed interested, requested a phone chat, and asked an excellent and vital question about the engine of the book. I made a major structural adjustment that has remained with the book to this day. However, even with this major improvement, she, too, took a month to give me an answer, and the answer was no.

Now I was really getting my dander up. I knew, KNEW this book was meant to be. One final agent had approached me in the past, but by now I knew I wasn’t going to mess around with one at a time anymore. I had learned another good method was to read the acknowledgements in books similar to yours and find out the names of those authors’ agents. This time, I wrote to three. The results were: quick no, slow no, and quick yes. Yes! YEEEESSSSS! I finally got to yes. End Zone Dance, Nerd Style! [Gyrating around the office while singing “Levitating” along with Dua Lipa]

Now we had to sell the book to a publisher. Oh, and I had to write a proposal, as all I’d been working from so far was a giant sample chapter and a query letter. I was spooked about writing a 20-page proposal without getting their guidance first (says the woman who wrote 40,000 words before she had an agent or editor). As it turned out, I was left largely to my own devices and I used the book, Thinking Like Your Editor by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. They gave sound advice. My agent was happy with what I turned in and requested few edits.

By January, we were ready to go. I was practically vibrating with excitement. He decided to start with just three editors. One bit within two days, and a second after a poke a few days later. The third, who had solicited a book from me directly before I had an agent, passed. You can never tell!

I ended up getting two interviews and two offers. I was a very happy lady. After all the self-doubt, dithering, work, and rejection (really not much by the standards of fiction writers), at last I had both the book and the means to bring it to you.

And so I shall. I promise you with every fiber of my being that this book will be in your hands in two years. And if I do my job right, it will be one of the most entertaining and interesting nonfiction books you have ever read. What I have already managed to dig out of those dusty library stacks — long forgotten science that maybe a handful of people on Earth ever read about even when it was published — will add up to a whole that I hope will delight and astound.

At the Oscars this year, Ke Huy Quan gave an acceptance speech that made me cry. He said, “Dreams are something you have to believe in.” Belief is an action — it’s something you have to do. If you’re scared, if you doubt your dream is possible, do what you need to do to make yourself believe you can do it. That made all the difference for me.

In the meantime, please continue enjoying this Substack, which I will update as often as I can when I need a break from slime molds. Next week: pitcher plants of Borneo with highly alternative ideas on fertilizer sourcing.

Until then, go outside this weekend, and spend some time noticing. You’ll be glad you did.

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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Each night, the mites that live in your face — arachnids whose kin include ticks and spiders — pick their way out of your pores on eight stumpy legs with lovin’ on their minds.

Their comically microscopic, knob-like limbs are operated by three lonely muscle cells. Not three muscles, three cells — one per segment. In spite of the legs’ obvious shortcomings, they somehow still manage to power (if such a word can be used) mites toward connubial bliss at a rate of around 12 millimeters per hour, which, in automotive terms, is 0.00000746 miles per hour.

Yet that is more than sufficient to the rice-shaped arachnids’ purpose: finding a mate, acrobatically clinging to one of your hairs while in flagrante delicto all … night … long (I mean, Rome wasn’t built in a day), then retiring to your pores to lay their eggs and sleep it off as the sun rises. Even if your love life has hit a dry spell, rest assured your follicle mites never lack for partners or libido, and reproduce themselves on your face — and potentially many other exciting body parts — with vigorous abandon roughly every two weeks. Although, it should be added, because you have many mites, this is probably happening somewhere, and possibly multiple special somewheres, every night.

There’s only one small issue: due to a hardly noticeable loss of a mite developmental gene, the male’s genitalia are no longer located in the usual spot. Instead, they have migrated to his back, in the position of a shark’s dorsal fin. In order to complete his mission, the male has to position himself in a very un-missionary position under the female.

Oh, and in addition to that tiny mix-up, and the fact their legs are running on absolute minimum thrust, there’s also the small matters of the complete loss of genes that protect them from UV light, the ones that tell them to wake up when it’s light outside, and something like, oh, 27 DNA repair genes. They’ve also lost the gene that makes melatonin, but no problem — they’ve just outsourced it by freeloading on ours. Laissez les bons temps roulez!

As it turns out, the clearly decaying human follicle mite has the smallest number of functional genes of any known joint-legged animal (and its genome is just over half the size of that of a tiny animal called Trichoplax that is nothing more than a millimeter-wide gliding sheet of cells). For reasons we will come to shortly, the genome of the human follicle mite is falling apart, setting them on an evolutionary trajectory in which they may be doomed to extinction. But it is an extinction in extreme slow motion, one whose contours are illuminating parts of the process we have never seen before. It also begs the question: where does a symbiont end and a human begin?

If the realities of your arachnid housemates creep you out, take comfort in the fact that we’re far from alone. The mites — called Demodex, and ranging in size from about one-tenth to three-tenths of a millimeter long — likely infect, infest, or co-habit (depending on your perspective) more than nine in 10 adult humans. Such mites are not unique to us either; they are common in mammals and marsupials. They live in our pores, feeding on … well, we’re not 100% sure, but probably body oil called sebum and maybe some of the cells lining your hair follicles (trust me, you do not miss them).

The story of probable follicle mite doom is tied up in the story of how mites move between humans — or rather, how they don’t. In a study published last summer in Molecular Biology and Evolution, a team of scientists working in the United Kingdom, Austria, and Spain found that follicle mites are primarily passed from mother to child and remain with us our entire lives, the only animal known to do so. They compared the DNA of mites on 31 people in 10 families, including children, grandchildren, and spouses. They found six examples of maternal transmission — in two cases passed down two generations to grandchildren — but only one example of transmission between spouses.

Follicle mites are thus, like sub-cellular machines called mitochondria, living heirlooms inherited from your maternal ancestors. You likely have the same mites your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother did, to the point where your mites’ DNA can be used to determine the geographical region from which your maternal ancestors hailed.

How exactly they reach you from your mother is another set of harsh realities you may regret knowing by the time you finish this piece. For yet another true fact about follicle mites is that they rather have a thing for human areolas and nipples, dwelling there happily and abundantly. It is suspected that the “increased temperature and moisture levels” at the nipple during breastfeeding facilitate their moving house.

The less likely human follicle mite-transmission scenario does not improve on matters. Among the other possible dwelling-places of human follicle mites are follicles in vulvas (and, it should be added, in penises; I will let you form your own emotional reaction to both pieces of news). So it is also possible your mites acquired new homes during the well-known messy and — thanks to humans’ possibly unfortunate move to begin walking upright — excruciatingly slow process of childbirth. Even a follicle mite, apparently, can catch a birthing baby under full throttle.

It may be that babies are the primary means of mite transmission because they present choice real estate that also happens to be unoccupied. Because a mother’s mites necessarily get there first, it may be nearly impossible for later explorers to oust them, unless the baby remains unoccupied into adulthood. Once happily ensconced on their new sweet-smelling (if noisy) homes, most mites take up residence on the wings of the nose, the forehead, eyelash follicles, ear canals, and in the nipples, but, depending on the human, other locations may provide happy, oily homes.

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So are follicle mites parasites? Scientists expect that parasites should spread from person to person in the community, not from mother to child. This team hypothesizes that the evolution of efficient mother-to-child transmission eliminated the need for them to be “freely contagious” and simplified their lives considerably. But it has also led to isolation and inbreeding; to a transition from free-agent, host-injuring parasites to couch-potato, possibly beneficial (they may help clean our pores) but doomed symbionts. If our mites never mingle, they are also mating eternally with their brothers, sisters, and cousins.

The team of scientists also examined the follicle mite genome in detail, and based on their analysis, the consequence of this turn of events is genome decay that may be irreversible and ultimately fatal. Because they live in stable, cozy homes with abundant food (us) and without competitors, a situation called “relaxed selection” results, with effects not unlike the acquisition of relaxed blue jeans (See also: Dad jeans). The relentless inbreeding on its own wouldn’t be a problem if the population was allowed to expand or mix with other populations with non-broken genes. But when inbreeding is combined with relaxed selection, the relentless bottlenecking that occurs when a few founders crawl from boob or vulva to new baby, and a phenomenon called “genetic drift” — the takeover by pure chance of versions of genes in small populations — the results are catastrophic. Mutations arise, they take over by chance or because relaxed selection allows it, inbreeding prevents corrective or beneficial versions of genes from re-entering the population, and the bottleneck between generations seals the deal.

The resulting genetic and morphological decay is stunning. Follicle mites, as mentioned, have both the smallest number of protein-coding genes and the second-smallest genome (the shortest belongs to a plant parasitic mite). In Demodex, mutation has run so wild that even the mite’s normally sacrosanct Hox developmental genes have been tampered with (probably resulting in the unorthodox penis geography).

They’ve lost a set of 21 non-Hox body sculpting genes whose disappearance appears to have left them with legs just 15 micrometers long, shorter than many fungal spores and only as long as a few average-sized bacteria. The cycle becomes vicious and perhaps even exponential when the failing genes start to include those that repair DNA, and as mentioned, something like 27 have now broken.

The decay extends to the very number of cells in a mite. Demodex has more than 500-times fewer cells than a fruit fly — around 600-900 cells versus more than 600,000 in the fly — which they discovered because someone (presumably ill-starred grad students) counted. The mites have dispensed with eyes and have only very basic photosensors. The entire function of the midgut — a hollow, multicellular tube, as you will recall, in most animals — has been replaced by individual giant cells through which digesting food physically passes. (Yet Demodex does, in fact, still have a tiny true hindgut from which it poops during the course of its short three-week life. Reports that they expire with all that poop saved up inside, leading to a massive post-mortem poosplosion that inflames human skin, are scandalous falsehoods according to the authors.)

The adult Demodex actually appears to have fewer cells even than its own most senior juvenile stage: around 900 in females and 600 in males compared to 1,400 in the eldest juvenile. This was a surprise. Scientists had assumed that a reduction in cells would start early in development, and not, seemingly inefficiently, later. It is the first example of its kind, and, the authors hypothesize, perhaps the first step in becoming an animal symbiont.

Muller’s Ratchet is the idea that sex is favored over cloning because its signature shuffling of gene variants defeats deleterious mutations. But when follicle mites mate relentlessly with their brothers and sisters and cousins for thousands of generations, through repeated regular bottlenecks, and in cozy, easy conditions that lead to sloppy genomes, they can shag all they want on your sleeping face but they’re not going to escape Muller’s Ratchet. They are functionally — and ironically — asexual. Extinction by decrepitude has actually happened before to symbiotic bacteria and fungi (they get replaced by more functional species), but has never been before observed in an animal; the human follicle mite may be the first that we know of because we are watching it happen.

You know what this should remind you of, of course. That would be the House of Hapsburg, which through successive and relentless generations of uncles marrying nieces and double cousins marrying double cousins resulted in the Spanish King Charles II (El Hechizado, “The Hexed”). Based on the Hapsburgs’ well-documented pedigrees, Charles’s genome was slightly more inbred (Inbreeding Coefficient (F) = 0.254) than if his parents had been brother and sister or parent and child (F = 0.250). Charles was so sickly and disabled (he may have had not just one but two recessive genetic diseases) that it was impossible for him to father children. With his death, the Hapsburg dynasty died in Spain.

(The inbreeding record holder among the Hapsburgs was actually a woman: Maria Antonia of Austria (F = 0.3053), daughter of Austrian Emperor Leopold I and his niece Margaret of Spain. The insatiable Hapsburgs actually had plans to marry her to Charles II, which would no doubt have been a genetic catastrophe on par with the sinking of the Titanic or the Hindenberg disaster, but fortunately for all concerned these plans came to nothing.)

The Hapsburg political philosophy was expressed in the late Middle Ages as Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube – 'Let others wage war: thou, happy Austria, marry’. The Hapsburgs, who thought this both a prudent and clever way of acquiring and maintaining territories, were quite unaware of its biological consequences and no doubt happy with their strategy right up until the end, but it nonetheless doomed their Spanish branch to extinction. Human follicle mites seem to have taken the Hapsburg strategy to 11; the death warrant of their species may likewise have been signed when they discovered the most expeditious way to reach the next generation was to just hop on the nearest baby. Felicitous in the short term, maybe; in the mites’ best long term interests, no. Both groups fell into a biological trap. At this point, the authors of the new paper write, follicle mite extinction may be a mathematical and statistical certainty.

Should we be sad about that prospect? Are follicle mites a part of us? They’re a lot more part of us than even our gut microbes, long considered human symbionts. Although gut bugs are well-known to be transmitted from mother to baby at birth and through breast milk (incredibly, immune cells may ferry maternal gut bacteria to the boobs, which dispense up to one million bacteria a day), we don’t keep those early bugs for long and our microbiome is subject to change throughout our lives. Our gut microbiome is also made of a whole ecosystem of species, can be transmitted from person to person, and many human species may even be able to survive in other mammals’ guts.

On the other hand, the sub-cellular machines called mitochondria that, perhaps a few billion years ago, were free-living microbes that fused symbiotically with other microbes to give rise to most large life forms, are utterly inseparable from us. Even though they still have their own small genome, mitochondria cannot survive outside cells, and cells cannot survive without mitochondria. They are us.

So where does that leave follicle mites? They can, and obviously do, walk right off us onto new hosts. So they are separable from a human. But they are not separable from humans. They can live nowhere else, associate with no other species, and are totally dependent on us for almost everything (except, obviously, scoring). So, probably not human — but almost as close as it’s possible to get. Which is pretty darn astounding, when you think about it, considering that they are, after all, still arachnids.

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Problem: There’s too much carbon dioxide in the air.

One Solution: Put it somewhere else.

Sub-solution: Whales?

I mean, whales are huge! We’re talking about a mammal the size of an airplane. Tons of carbon get sucked out of the air (and ocean) to feed and grow even one whale, so each one is a blubbery, singing carbon sink. Given that they have human lifespans, and that when they die (or poop … let’s not forget about the whale-sized quantities of poop) that matter heads straight for Davy Jones’s locker, where it tends to remain and get locked in the sediments of carbon prison, it seems like a solid proposition of unknown quantitative value.

This bold idea is studied in detail in a new opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, where the authors argue this is a low-regrets solution that we should be working on. This is exactly the sort of bold, innovative climate thinking we need, because it is demonstrable that a) we have too much carbon in the air and b) we do not have enough whales in the water. Win-win!

Please enjoy this delightful and helpful graphic from the piece, demonstrating what we might term a virtuous fecal cycle. It showcases whales’ talents as scatological catalysts of carbon storage:

As you can see, whales trap carbon in several ways. First, each whale possesses a massive, highly efficient, long-lived body. Although it’s true the krill that could feed one great whale can be consumed by many more smaller organisms, due to whales’ massive economy of scale, the amount of carbon stored by the smaller animals collectively is smaller. One study calculated that the amount of krill that supported one 92-ton blue whale would support seven minke whales or 1,800 Adelie penguins, but that the minkes would only have 50% of the biomass of the blue while the penguins would replace just 8%.

Next, when they die, whalefalls inject carbon directly into the seabed or into communities of animals where it is likely to stay trapped by stagnant water, beneath the maximum annual mixed layer depth.

Third, given that whales ingest what the authors themselves term “extreme” quantities of prey, the inevitable result is “extreme” quantities of something else that serves as plankton fertilizer and food (and in case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like, here you go.)

Whale poo seems to favor the growth of heavier plankton like krill (itself whale food) and glass-shelled diatoms that are more likely to sink quickly when they die. These organisms also migrate daily between the surface and the deep, which puts the carbon that much closer to prison when they happen to do their business or die at depth. Is there actual evidence for this indirect effect? Scientists have observed that ecosystem productivity has declined in areas with depleted whale populations like the Southern Ocean.

Then we have the “Great Whale Conveyor Belt”, which on first impression strikes me as being like one of those sushi trains driving your lunch around except in this case for krill headed baleen-ward. In actuality it refers to the fact that Pacific whales do much of their nomming in Alaska and the Aleutians before returning to Hawaii to breed, give birth, and, you know, scuttle the ballast. That ballast includes not just the usual Number One and Number Two but also things like whale placentas (did you ever stop to think about the fact that whale placentas exist before? I didn’t.) and sloughed skin. Whales may die here too. While they’re in Hawaii, the whales usually don’t eat and subsist entirely on blubber (and that includes making milk by nursing mothers(!)).

The oceans excel at trapping carbon, but they are best at doing so at high latititudes and near shore. Although they seem like paradise to humans, the waters around remote tropical islands can be a bit like food deserts to the animals that live theere. All this whale junk is a veritable windfall for them, pumped in from the rich waters of Alaska and now available to the deserving but undernourished biota of Hawaii, boosting numbers of fish, scavengers and invertebrates in the process.

OK, just how many potential future whales are we talking here, you may ask? Excellent question. As it turns out, there happens to be a lot of proven room in the ocean for more whales. In the last 300 years, the human appetite for whales was so voracious that, by one estimate, the volume of whale flesh on the planet declined by 81%. To give you a sense of what that means in real numbers, in 1900 (after a century of large-scale whaling, but with so much more to come) there are estimated to have been 762,400 fin whales. By 2001, that number was 109,600. For blue whales, the numbers are 340,280 to 4,727.

One blue whale is about the size of two school busses end-to-end (or two T. rexes similarly arrayed), and they are but one of almost a dozen large whale species that were hunted and decimated. Doing the math, scientists estimate the oceans are missing 17,000,000 tons of carbon that used to be whale or organisms supported by whales but is now mostly floating around in the atmosphere. That’s one hell of an underused carbon storage facility.

Considering also that these whales live far longer than most ocean life, on the order of our lifespans or even longer (Arctic bowhead whales can live over 200 years), they constitute one of the largest and most stable carbon pools of open ocean. Current estimates indicate that whales are storing, sequestering, and exporting carbon on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of tons a year, and could be doing so by at least an order of magnitude more if their numbers were restored to historic levels.

Yet it’s a thing that’s much easier said than done. Although some whales have mounted stunning recoveries, many species’ numbers are still falling or stagnant. While whales face many intractible unique obstacles to recovery, one big one they all share is this: their reproduction is slow. We can’t get around that biological constraint, but we could all look into doing more.

It’s almost poetic (ironic?) that the same thing that saved sperm whales from American whalers at the end of the 19th century — cheap petroleum, which began to fuel lamps instead of whale oil — is also the same thing that is also today precipitating our climate crisis, and yet might itself be converted back into whale form.

I also want to send a hearty thanks to the authors of this paper and to Trends in Ecology and Evolution for publishing this important perspective, because it does actually make a great point. Blue and fin whales are the biggest animals EVER to evolve (including dinosaurs, folks!) and we should be doing absolutely everything we can to make more of them. And, I mean, climate crisis aside, how can you not want more of these things on your planet? It reminds me of what Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins said upon splashing down in the technicolor Pacific after just over a week of space and moon monochrome: “Nice ocean you’ve got here, Planet Earth”. We’ve got a bona fide miracle going on this pale blue dot. Let’s make it even better.

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NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

On moonless nights in the Caribbean Sea, the love child of the firefly and the squirt gun—the ostracod—magically appears.

Rising from their usual homes in coral and sand, such ostracods are little arthropods that look more or less like fleas (or perhaps shrimp trapped inside a clams), and are sometimes sweetly called “seed shrimp”. Typically measured in millimeters, ostracods live inside a hinged, transparent shell, legs and all. Don’t let their size and diminutive appearance fool you, though. Their reach far exceeds their tiny appendages’ grasp. Ostracods are found throughout the world’s waters and have even invaded land in places like South Africa and New Zealand, where they live in damp soil.

Although their appearance is nothing to write home about (unorthodox shell notwithstanding), the marine versions may have a special trick up their valves: they can squirt bioluminescent goo from their faces. In most of the world’s waters, this is a simple burst. It’s calculated to startle a predator. But in the waters of the Caribbean, that flak-like function has evolved into a sexy symphony of ephemeral light. Unlike a firefly’s anatomically-fixed light display, an ostracod’s is a temporary art installation housed in a liquid medium. If you were hovering next to one and waved your hand through it, the glow would blow away like smoke.

Science published a lovely video about these ostracods this past week, that highlights the advances in camera technology that have made studying them so much easier over the last decade. But the new footage taken by those cameras is itself spectacular, so please enjoy this holiday light display courtesy the crustaceans of the Caribbean:

That bit about the non-signalling sneaker males (did you see them flit by at 3:26?) is pretty interesting. From reading Marah J. Hardt’s Sex in the Sea, I know that this “sneaking” (females would probably have a different name for it) is a not-uncommon strategy among marine life. But it’s one thing to read about it, and it’s another thing to see the enormous swarm of opportunist sex-seekers tripping over each other trying to get in on the action. You can see how stoked the scientists were about seeing it, too. Better living through technology, friends!

I actually traveled to see these beauties in person and wrote about them for The Artful Amoeba way back in 2014. Some of the folks from the video appear in the text. Sadly, the images are broken now, but it may still be a worthwhile read for those of you interested in a firsthand account of the show. If you’ve ever thought about getting dive certified, I can recommend it for this experience alone.

Happy Holidays to you all! I am so pleased to be back writing The Artful Amoeba and grateful to be getting reconnected with you, my readers. If you like what you read here, please consider sharing it with others.

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Feedback is invited and welcome. You can either comment directly on this page or send me email at frazer@nasw.org. Thanks for reading!

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For nine years, I wrote a blog called The Artful Amoeba for Scientific American. It’s back at Substack.

In 2011, I lucked into my dream job at Scientific American, writing in my own voice about Earth’s obscure or overlooked life. I am still grateful to all editors past and present at SA for the opportunity. Then, in early June 2020, the SA blog network closed.

Now I’m bringing The Artful Amoeba back on Substack. For those of you who are new to my work, think of it as a Mary Roach-style approach to natural history, biodiversity and biology, particularly of things without fur, feathers, skin, or scales. When I’m doing it right, my work combines wonder and humor in equal measure.

Here are some highlights of my past and most recent work:

• My two guest appearances on RadioLab, From Tree to Shining Tree and Smarty Plants.

• My most recent opinion piece for Scientific American, published in September, on the crazy world of bacterial predators.

• My most recent print publication in Scientific American magazine on bacteria that are effectively immortal, and its 15 seconds of fame on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”.

• My post-blog essays for the Opinion section at SA.

• The old Artful Amoeba blog at Scientific American (2011-2020)

• My Twitter account.

And I have more news: I am working on my first book. Since that consumes a fair amout of time, work here will be irregular for a while, and this Substack will be free for the time being.

Why relaunch? Because there are still so many other wonderful, funny, interesting and/or overlooked short biology stories to write about, and I want to continue sharing my take on them with you. I have also found there is a dearth of media outlets that publish columns or essays like mine, and Substack seeems like a good place to fill that void. Finally, unlike the last incarnation of TAA, I plan to capitalize on the Substack format to link to others’ work I think may be of interest to readers here (so you can go read it), and also to give you my two cents.

Who do I want in this community? Anyone who is interested in a humorous, vivid take on the planet’s abundant, unsung life is welcome here. If you ever want to reach out to chat or ask a question, make a request, or give me an idea, you can reach me at frazer@nasw.org, or on Twitter @JenniferFrazer. And please subscribe and tell a friend if you think they may be interested!

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