Did you know that palm cockatoos will bang drums against hollow trees as they build their nests, a type of drumming that can be heard up to 100 yards away? Or that a species of nettle found inside limestone caves in China can survive on less than one percent of full daylight? Or that a type of moss grows in the Himalayas due to a type of fungi that grows on it?
Those fascinating facts, and many more, about 500 of the world’s animals and plants can be found in Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders.
Wild Life is the third book based on Atlas Obscura, the website dedicated to amplifying information about the world’s hidden wonders (the first book cataloged places, and the second, food and culture).
The book is gorgeously designed, with color photographs, illustrations, and infographics accompanying the page-length entries about each species, as well as interviews with naturalists, scientists, and conservationists.
The book is not a mere catalog of mammals, species of the sea, birds, and bugs. The book also highlights ecosystems, places, particular traits or behaviors that are scientifically significant, informative, or just plain delightful. An entry on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone details how hundreds of species have been sighted in the exclusion area, and how scientists are studying the ways those species are adapting to radioactive exposure — and enjoying the lack of human presence. Another entry, titled “Useful Poop,” expounds on how various creatures — elephants, hippos, butterflies, and storks — use poop, from everything to mark their territory to mating rituals.
Wild Life was written and co-edited by Joshua Foer, Atlas Obscura’s co-founder, and freelance journalist and former staff writer of Atlas Obscura, Cara Giaimo. Giaimo wrote half of the book’s 500 entries; she commissioned, then edited, the other half from freelance writers.
Giaimo is proud that entries were filed from all seven continents and that “a lot of writers wrote about species they have personal experience with or are close to their hearts or lives.”
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During the Portland Book Festival, Giaimo will appear in the Winningstad Theatre on a 10 a.m. panel with artist and educator Julie Beeler, essayist Elena Passarello, and an Eurasian Eagle Owl and its handler, from the Cascades Raptor Center. “It’s a multi-species panel,” she said, laughing. We talked with Giaimo in advance of the Nov. 2 festival. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
This is the third book from Atlas Obscura. Why did you want to do animals and species for this one?
Giaimo: From my perspective, it is an inherently wondrous topic. We exist on this Earth surrounded by all these creatures that have so much in common with us, but are also so different. Thinking about their lives and understanding how they experience the world is something that brings me a lot of wonder every day and really opens my sense of curiosity. I think the hope is that it could do that for others, as well.
The book features 500 plants, animals, and more. There’s way more species than that in the world, of course. How did you decide to curate and decide which would be featured in this book?
It’s such a good question. We could write this book hundreds of times and not run out of amazing things to talk about. I have a lot of really big spreadsheets that were the end result of how to choose what should be included. I was trying to do a few different things. One, I wanted different types of diversity. The book is organized by biome. It goes from forests through grasslands, through mountains, deserts, cities, oceans, and islands. I wanted to make sure that all of those were well represented.
I wanted geographical diversity, that there were different species that can be found all across the world. And I wanted different kinds of species. There are plants and animals, and then within that, different types of animals, different types of plants. And then, of course, fungi and microbes, all the other critters we might think about a little bit less.
Then, different reasons for why species are interesting. Maybe one species has a really interesting anatomy, and another one has a really interesting behavior; another has an interesting evolutionary history or plays some role in human culture that people might not know about. The goal was to have every single page be different from the last.
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I really did think about this. There would be a chapter where I would be like, “I really need a bug with an unusual behavior here.” And then I would be like, “I need a plant from Western Asia,” and I would try to find that. Then some of it kind of came together organically.
I saw that there’s a page for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. That’s a specific place, but also a moment in time that dramatically affected the landscape and the animals that live within it.
Yes. We wanted to make sure that there was a real sense of place in the book. Sometimes that meant including specific places. Or rather than writing about the monarch butterfly, we write about the monarch butterfly’s migration zones, where they end up in Mexico in the winter. Other blurbs are focused on specific species. The publisher likes to say that the book should feel like a bag of potato chips, where every single page, you read it and then say “OK, just one more.”
I thought about what Forrest Gump said about a box of chocolates, that you never know what you’re gonna get.
Yes. I think that’s probably even better, because potato chips are generally all the same. (laughs)
This is all a little bit different, but connected.
Yeah. That’s great.
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Do you have a favorite animal or species, or one that just delighted you?
Totally. I really like insects. I’m a huge bug fan. I learned about a lot of really great insects while writing this book. One of my favorites was the sea skater. I didn’t know this, but they’re the only insects that live on the open ocean. They’re like water striders in terms of having these long legs and light bodies, so they can skate around on top of the water using surface tension. They’re really difficult to study. There aren’t that many people who know things about them. But what we do know about them is very impressive. And it never occurred to me that there could be bugs living on the surface of the sea.
I just flipped to that page. In the margins, it’s written “a sea skater is the size of a peppercorn.” That’s a really great, evocative analogy that you would not necessarily read in a science book. In the writing and editing, were you aware of how the writing would make the subject matter accessible in a different way to readers?
That’s always my goal. I think Atlas Obscura definitely has a specific voice. People call it “voice-y.” It’s humorous. It uses imagery that’s relatable. I mean, who’s gonna see a sea skater? You’d have to be really lucky to end up in a situation where you would see one yourself. We really wanted to help people feel like they were getting to know these creatures.
I imagine that the research for each of these species could have taken days, and you could have gone down as many rabbit holes as you wanted to. How did you know you were doing deep-enough research to understand these species, but not get too complex?
That’s a great question. Since the blurbs are so short, it was usually the best call to focus on one aspect of the species. Like the Mad Hatterpillars (a type of caterpillar), with a stack of heads on top of its head. You could probably say a lot of things about this caterpillar’s life, right? This one thing about it is so striking. Contextualizing that and describing that really well was the goal, rather than giving a comprehensive sense. And once I found three or four good sources for something, I usually felt like I could stop.
I think about climate change often, and the way it is affecting biodiversity. I wonder if that rose to your mind, too, given how many species in this book could be potentially affected by climate change.
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Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Thinking about the emphasis you’ve been putting on the wonder that Atlas Obscura tries to infuse, I have started to question whether all these discussions around climate change almost strip out the wonder around biodiversity.
You mentioned the word “biodiversity.” One crisis that goes hand in hand with the climate crisis, and is affected by it and affects it in turn, is the biodiversity crisis. Because of climate change and because of habitat loss, resource extraction, and other things humans are doing to the world, we’re losing species at an unprecedented rate.
That was definitely on my mind writing this book. Sometimes I felt like, not to get too morbid, but that I’m making this catalog of things that might go away. It lent a little bit of gravitas to the task of writing a book about goofy, wonderful critters.
My hope is that the more wonder and awe and amazement and closeness people feel with other species, the more they’ll feel motivated to make the changes that we need to make in order to live together on Earth well. I think wonder is a beginning step in that journey to thinking about how we’re living our lives as a species and what we could do differently.
Wonder is connected to curiosity, and awe, and appreciation of what one could be learning about. All those things are connected, in my mind.
I wanted this book to be really respectful. It’s kind of a funny word to use, but a lot of writing about animals and plants will focus on their use values: What’s in it for us? Can we eat this? Can we turn this into a medicine? Certainly, that is one way of relating. But I tried to steer away from that. I really tried to make it about how these creatures live, how they experience their habitats, the role they play in their ecosystems. And get away from the human-centric view.
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