I keep saying I’m done writing about buggy things for a while and will address something more scientifically pressing, but here we go again.
Because periodically in the summer, a house centipede rears its skittering self, scooting out from under the fridge or appearing out of nowhere on the bathroom wall.
I profess to love all creatures. I truly like snakes and sharks. I’ve learned to love spiders and will happily let them stay put where I find them indoors. There’s one living in my shower right now named Smithers who has heard all my secrets and shared a few of his/her own.
Not these sci-fi freaks. The way they move. All those legs. Can’t tell if they’re coming or going until it’s too late. Ewww. Thank god they don’t fly. They’re almost as bad as those dumb hunchback crickets that leap on you when trying to escape. (Okay, I guess there is more than one critter I’d be happy to see expelled from the Earth.)
Apparently, it’s not just me: Evolution has deemed things that scuttle on many legs and are the color of puke as disgusting to us. That ewwww response (other mammals even make the same face) helps protect us from things that bite or wear a poison coat or shoot venom. For the record, house centipedes are venomous, but only dangerous to their prey—though I guess someone allergic to buggy things might have a reaction to one.
But I need to get over it in this instance, because it’s just silly. It’s just a ‘pede. And I’m trying. I’m on a centipede empathy journey. When I spot one, I name it as I would a spider pal. (Gus, Dude, and Legs McGee have all been used.) I crouch down and talk to it: “Hey there! How’s the family? Any plans for summer travel? Might I suggest my neighbor’s basement?” I peer closer to really get a load of the thing. I look for something to like. The legs at the rear are longer than the others, I’ve noticed, which is apparently to help keep the “stringy” legs from getting tangled while the thing scurries at something like 16 inches per second (OMG, THIS ISN’T HELPING). There ARE pairs of spots running along the body and dozens of “pretty” stripes around its [many, many] legs, so that’s something, I suppose.
It’s not enough, though, to keep me from squashing the f’ing monster with my shoe.
A coyote urine mark I investigated with my nostrils in the snow was lemony and oceanic with an aftertaste of burning sulfur and fetid saltwater.
A healthy piss from a black bear in the sand I’d call oak barrel stank. I got my nose as close as I dared into the stained hole from the gush of a bear squat and I winced, taking in a full breath of meaty, dark acid, like the bear had been holding it in for a while.
Urine smell often worsens over time because it concentrates sulfur-containing compounds called mercaptans, which are also found in skunk spray. They smell like ammonia and garlic, and in excessive, industrial amounts where the compound is used as an oderant, it can cause organ failure, which is why it’s so offensive to us. In smaller amounts, you’ll be fine.
As a tracker, I’d call myself a hobbyist. I’ve followed avid trackers to see where they look. Places where animals have scraped or pissed or pooped are of great interest. In my youth, a field biologist I knew came back from studies in Central African jungles and urged me to explore animals by getting my nose in there. I remember both of us crouched at the same warm pile of fresh coyote scat in the Sonoran Desert. The coyote had been eating honey mesquite seeds, giving the scat the smell of a warm, sweet oatmeal.
An unsung advantage of partnership is not having to be quite so on top of things all the time. Liberated from the relentless need to be competent, you can think more interesting thoughts. This post was originally written a few months into the pandemic, and my own thinking was so discombobulated I have very little memory of having written it. So today I read it as if for the first time, alongside you.
Ben Saunders is a British explorer who has led a dozen expeditions to both of the Earth’s poles, often lasting months at a stretch. As the largest nature reserve on the planet, with no exploitation of resources permitted—and with no national sovereignty over the place—Antarctica lends itself not only to utopian thinking but also to communion with unblemished nature. Or so one might think.
Those who go in wintertime speak of staggering out onto the ice in an extreme-weather suit just for the unobstructed starscape above. What a privilege to be among the few humans to stand here, the only place on Earth with almost no history, in the scheme of things.
I really did think they were sunflowers. The seedlings had the same broad, happy green leaves. And I had planted sunflowers there. I think I planted sunflowers there?
This is my problem with gardening. I start with enthusiasm and good intentions, and then somewhere I lose my drawings that I’ve made of what seeds went where. I forget to water, or I water too much. The weeds overwhelm me. I remember that no matter what I grow, I can always find more beautiful versions at the farmers market. I need to take a nap. I start to think, are they weeds, really, or is that me being controlling?
These ones weren’t weeds. But they also weren’t sunflowers.
For a recent edition of Smithsonian Magazine, I wrote a retrospective on the life and career of Marie Fish — ichthyologist, bioacoustician, and epitome of nominative determinism. Fish spent decades recording marine animals in her laboratory and at sea, and revealed that, far from being the “silent world” described by Jacques Cousteau, the ocean was as raucous as a dive bar on Saturday night. Sculpin hummed like generators, toadfish honked like foghorns, and even seahorses clicked like telegraphs.
Word counts being what they are, though, I didn’t have space to chronicle all of Fish’s exploits. And there was one incident in particular that I especially regretted leaving on the cutting room floor: her session with Baby Snoots.
In June 1956, Fish and her husband, Charles, went to Florida to spend a day recording Baby Snoots, a captive manatee at the South Florida Museum. At first, the hydrophone that the Fishes dangled into Baby Snoots’s tank picked up only the monotonous crunch of a manatee masticating carrots, lettuce, and celery. As the day wore on, though, Baby Snoots began to open up. When Baby Snoots was startled or surprised, the Bradenton Heraldreported, she emitted a sound “like that of old, creaking leather.” She also uttered a squeak, this one apparently voluntary, “something like that made by a mouse in full flight from a housewife’s broom.” “Throughout it all,” the paper added, “Baby Snoots maintained a curious but cautious attitude.”
As I scrolled through these clips, I was struck at Baby Snoots’s apparent celebrity. The Tampa Bay Times described her as “Bradenton’s famous Manatee.” The Herald had deemed her activities of sufficient interest to run on A1 — above the fold, no less. Evidently Baby Snoots had been renowned in her day. What I didn’t realize was just how long that day had lasted, how many it lives it touched, or how recently and tragically it ended.
***
Baby Snoots was born on July 21, 1948, at 51 pounds, to a captive female manatee named Lady. Lady was in the care of Samuel J. Stout, the owner of the Miami Aquarium and Tackle Company (a bizarre facility housed aboard a Danish warship that had capsized in the harbor two decades earlier and been resurrected as a floating restaurant). Stout only had a permit to hold a single manatee in his jerry-rigged facility, so in the spring of 1949 he donated the baby — which he called, creatively, Baby — to the city of Bradenton, which lies in Manatee County, and whose leaders gotten the idea that a live manatee would make a “tremendous attraction” for a festival commemorating Florida’s (bloody and colonial) roots.
As legend has it, Stout drove Baby to Bradenton in a pickup truck, wrapped in a tarp, with an attendant on hand to continually douse the manatee with water. The local sheriff brought a detail of prisoners down to the pier to unload Baby and dump her in a tank inside the Chamber of Commerce. Although less than a year old, Baby was already so hefty that the convicts had to remove the door to get her into the building. One city councilman instigated some controversy when, having decided that Baby needed a more dramatic backstory, he announced that the manatee had actually been captured via harpoon from the wild. That roused the ire of the Board of Conservation and the Humane Society, and nearly got Baby shipped back to Miami. In the end, though, myth was sorted from fact, and Baby stayed in Bradenton for the festival.
After the festival ended, the manatee was transferred to a 3000-gallon tank at the local South Florida Museum, where she was rechristened Baby Snoots — perhaps after a TV show called Baby Snooks, though no one really knows — and fed “from one to two bushels of head lettuce, celery, cabbage, carrots and cauliflower daily.” The world’s only captive manatee, Baby Snoots shot to fame almost overnight. Bradenton slapped her visage on billboards, and her keeper taught her to “perform like a trained dog by rolling over, shaking hands, and making up funny faces.” Soon thousands of tourists were visiting her tank annually. The museum’s curator, Lester Leigh, rightly guessing that not even residents of Manatee County could quite picture a manatee, drummed up publicity with some fanciful analogies:
“She is one of the oddest animals you can imagine… She has a very flat, broad tail that runs in the opposite direction to that of a fish’s tail, that is, her tail is crosswise, or horizontal with the bottom of the tank. The tail is very thick and reminds you of a beaver’s tail. She has two flippers with primitive toenails; in this respect she reminds you of a seal. Her body in the central part is almost perfectly round and very plump and fat. Her eyes are very small in proportion to her size, and her snout resembles that of a hog’s snout… and her skin is somewhat like that of a rhinoceros.”
Throughout the 1950s, Baby Snoots generated news as reliably as a Kardashian. Papers reported when she received a visit from her former owner (the manatee “registered glee over the reunion by rolling about in her tank”), when she was upset by the clamor of building renovations, and when she underwent surgery to have a boil lanced. Hardly a month passed without a reference to Snoots in the Bradenton Herald: “Baby Snoots Greets Public,” one headline trumpeted, like she was Jackie Onassis. She even earned national press from time to time. The Chicago Tribune named her one of Florida’s prime attractions; the Boston Globe photographed her playing with a hula hoop. Not all the attention was positive: A churlish biologist visiting from Iowa described her as “close to the last word in unattractiveness.”
Everyone assumed that Baby Snoots’s time at the museum would be fleeting. Nobody knew then how long a manatee lived, but the museum guessed their lifespans were around 15 years. When Snoots celebrated her seventh birthday in 1955, she was described as “middle-aged.”
But Snoots just kept on ticking. She received penicillin shots and recovered from colds; at the age of 12, an electrocardiogram deemed her heart fit. She made headlines when she got the flu, and headlines when she got better. By 1967 — now living in a more capacious tank at the museum’s new location — she weighed nearly 700 pounds and would’ve been old enough to get sent to Vietnam. “Baby Snoots” hardly seemed appropriate; thereafter, she was mostly referred to as plain-old Snoots, or Snooty.
Around the time Snooty turned 21, the museum’s staff made a surprising discovery: “The sweetheart of Bradenton,” who for more than two decades had been considered a female, was in fact a male. It’s not entirely clear how the error was discovered, but it isn’t surprising that it was made in the fist place; apparently even biologists have a tough time differentiating manatees. Snooty’s twenty-first trip around the sun earned more fanfare than the misidentification of his sex: “He’s been deluged with birthday cards, birthday gifts, and an assortment of birthday cakes,” the Herald cheerfully reported.
And so life went for Snooty — and went, and went, and went. At the age of 23, he grew severely constipated after eating a mechanical pencil that had fallen into his tank; a week later, happily, he had a “close to normal bowel movement” and recovered. When he turned 29, the county commission celebrated “Baby Snoots Day” in honor of his “selfless contributions” to the “education and entertainment of the people and its visitors.” He became the official county mascot; he appeared in Captain Kangaroo; he met Dan Quayle.
As the 1980s closed, Snooty had entered his early 40s; the Herald named him its “Mammal of the Decade.” By 1999, Snooty was 51 years old, and, per the Associated Press, had “lived much, much longer than anyone expected.” Forever a ham, he was wont to “(give) a wave of his flipper to delighted visitors,” or to haul himself onto a ledge and “grin directly into the camera.”
***
If anything, Snooty’s quality of life seemed to be improving as he aged. In 1998, after fifty years of solitude, he received his first tank-mate: Newton, a rambunctious four-year-old orphan who had been rescued from the wild. No one was quite sure how Snooty — now a majestic 1,300 pounds — would react to company, especially such a young and high-spirited companion. To his keepers’ delight, he proved “tolerant of the younger manatee’s puppylike antics.” Belying his pompous name, Snooty became a reliable friend and mentor to the injured and orphaned animals who passed through the museum’s manatee rehabilitation center. Ultimately, he would play host to thirty-three rehabbing manatees.
As I perused the Snooty archives, I assumed that his star would eventually fade. Sooner or later, the public tires of practically every aging performer; surely Snooty was due for a Fat Brando phase. But the Artist Formerly Known as Baby Snoots only seemed to get stronger: As one keeper observed, years of hauling himself onto ledges to charm his fans had beautifully toned his pectoral muscles. When he turned 65 in 2013, more than 6,000 celebrants showed up to fete him — the largest crowd in the history of the South Florida Museum.
Four years later, on July 22, 2017, the museum celebrated his 69th birthday with his traditional cake of fruits and veggies. He was, by this time, the Guinness-certified oldest captive manatee in the world: a hale senior citizen in a state known as a sanctuary for the elderly.
The very day after his 69th birthday bash, though, Snooty’s story came to an abrupt and tragic end. Snooty, the stricken museum announced, had died. An access panel to the tank’s underwater plumbing area had been left ajar, and Snooty slipped through. Undone by his own prodigious bulk, Snooty had been trapped underwater. Baby Snoots, the sweetheart of Bradenton, had drowned.
Bradentonians responded like Brits grieving Princess Di. His fans declared him a “historical monument,” and “the best thing about Bradenton.” “I cried myself to sleep last night,” wrote one mourner. “I feel like a part of my childhood died,” gasped another. He transcended generations, touched lives, became a rite of passage: People had visited him as children in the 1950s, and then taken their own kids to see him, and then their grandkids. Others had gotten married at the museum, with Snooty as their witness.
Snoot-lovers insisted that the county throw him “the best dang funeral a manatee can have,” and, more ominously, that the museum “find out how it happened and take care of those responsible.” (A month after the accident, the museum acknowledged that the panel had been loose for a while before Snooty’s death, and one keeper resigned.) A resident launched a petition to tear down an old Confederate monument in Bradenton and replace it with a bronze statue of Snooty. A trainer described him as “the love of my life.”
Ultimately, though, Snooty’s most enduring legacy wouldn’t be a statue. Before Baby Snoots came along, biologists had disparaged manatees — sluggish and taciturn compared to whales and dolphins — as dullards. One anatomist described their smooth, small brain as resembling “the brains of idiots.” But Snooty put the lie to such unjust perceptions. He was trainable, sociable, and obviously intelligent. In the 1980s, scientists gave him a simple memory test, which he aced. His impressive performance catalyzed a wave of research on manatee cognition and sensory capacities, with Snooty as its star subject. Snooty taught scientists that manatees could see in color; that they could differentiate individual humans; and that, despite frequently being victimized by boat collisions, they had good hearing (Snooty had a special fondness for Elvis).
Research on other captive specimens during the mid-2000s proved that manatees, under the right conditions, were “as adept as experimental tasks as dolphins.” As one biologist put it, tongue half in cheek, to the New York Times: “They’re too smart to jump through hoops the way those dumb dolphins do.”
All of this seemed fitting to me. After all, when I first learned about Baby Snoots, it was in a scientific context: Back in the 1950s, recall, a delighted Marie Fish had recorded his crinkly leather hisses and mouse-like squeaks. After that had come a long, fallow period of research. Even as Snooty waved to thousands of adoring fans, danced with hula hoops, and performed barrel rolls on command, researchers didn’t deign to study his intellect. In Snooty’s middle age, though, biologists had at last come to recognize his loquacity and brilliance. Marie Fish — a woman who spent her career proving that sea creatures had unguessed-at capacities — would surely have admired Snooty’s achievements. So here’s to Baby Snoots: one of the most famous marine mammals who ever lived, and a 1300-pound testament to the brilliance and charisma of our fellow beings.
Above: Snooty celebrates his 63rd birthday. Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Dhphoto.
Father’s Day. Many of the fathers of the People of LWON’s have died, some long ago, some recently; and some haven’t died at all and are entirely alive. We have things that belonged to them, we have things we want to ask them. This sounds like it might be sad but it’s not.
Helen:
Right now, almost anything can remind me of my dad. It’s only been 6 months since he died. I often have an instant of wanting to call or email him about something, before I remember. It’s tiny, just a split second of urge, of starting to reframe my observation or thought for him. A few weeks after he died, I started keeping a list and here are a few: The old car sold for $1685! (12/20/23) You were right about that elm tree at Wayne’s house – it broke and took out the power lines. (1/9/24) What should I do about the water on the floor in the basement? (1/17/24) What kind of car insurance should I get? (2/1/24) What are your tips for catching mice? I know you had a system. (3/6/24) Look at this cute Japanese manhole cover! (3/27/24) Maybe you’d like to go see this musical with me! (5/7/24) My car is parked under a cherry tree and the birds sit over it and it is a MESS. (6/2/24) So now, dear reader, I’m telling you, I guess.
Craig:
On the bookshelf in the foyer is a stack of painted black-on-white potsherds. They are nested into each other and sit neatly between our wedding invitation and the replica skull of a saber-toothed smilodon. The sherds come from a small broken vessel, something I inherited from my father who died thirty years ago. He bought this contemporary Acoma vessel from a dealer in Santa Fe before it was broken, obviously, and I’ve carried it gently from move to move. It was a seed jar, a style with a small opening in the top allowing seeds to be shaken into the hand. This type is significant, probably more than my dad knew. In rubble-mound villages and ruined Pueblo towns around the Four Corners, seed jars date back more than a thousand years. They have been excavated from ancestral dwellings to the tune of one per household per generation, meaning these were pre-Columbian heirlooms. The one my dad bought had been produced in the late 1980’s and I’m guessing he paid a few hundred dollars for it. I must have brushed it when I was putting something away because it tipped over and fell four feet to the concrete floor. I remember the pop. It was a satisfying sound, and turned my blood cold. I gasped as it happened, but once it was done, it was done. There are some things you never get to do over. Some of the pieces, painted in precise black lines classic of Southwest Pueblo traditions, I put in the garden knowing I’d find them over the years, and maybe they’d keep turning up for centuries. The rest I stacked on this shelf so I would think of my dad and, with the bittersweetness of entropy, I’d smile.
[This post ran some years back. I’ve been thinking again about food and gut health and all the bad stuff we do to ourselves, so I thought I’d re-run it. I mean, eat what you like. But be mindful of all the things.]
—–
Here’s what I remember eating as a kid: Oscar Mayer bologna and American cheese (the individually wrapped slices) on white bread. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread. Honey and butter (yup!) on white bread. Grilled American cheese on white toast. Hot dogs on white buns. Deli ham on big puffy white Kaiser rolls.
Why not? After all, white bread was “enriched”! Doesn’t that sound healthy? Never mind that the bread-refining process that made Wonder such a wonder got rid of the naturally occurring nutritious bits (e.g., the mineral-rich grain coatings); “enriching” the bread was the industry’s attempt to put some of those nutrients back. I just remember how pure and soft and spongy the slices were. And it never went bad. And the label promised a loaf full of vitamins and minerals. It didn’t occur to us we were being deprived of anything, or that we were swallowing anything but good nutrition.
I knew it was named after two science writer greats — former AP science editor Alton Blakeslee and AP writer Rennie Taylor, but I didn’t know that the seed money had come from The American Tentative Society.
In a beautiful obituary for her father, Alton Blakeslee, the science writer Sandra Blakeslee explained that The American Tentative Society “was hatched in the wee hours of the morning, over many bottles of Jack Daniels, in Santa Rosa, California.” Her father and friends Taylor and Pat McGrady would get together on occasion.
“Rennie felt that most Americans view science as facts cast in stone rather than as an ever-changing, tentative enterprise. In his will, he stipulated that his estate be used to set up the ATS to honor scientists whose work demonstrates the tentative nature of our knowledge,” Sandra wrote.
The elder Blakeslee served as President of the ATS, and enjoyed throwing luncheons for scientists. “They drank toasts to Rennie, of course, and did more serious work like supporting young science writers.”
Alton Blakeslee told Science magazine that during its first eight years, the ATS was little more than a “lively concept,” but they were looking for projects to fund. (The title of the small blurb printed in Science was “American Tentative Society Has Money, Needs Ideas.”) That was 1974. The organization was eventually disbanded in the 1990s, and the money went to CASW.
Since then, the Taylor Blakeslee Fellowship has supported a large number of up and coming science writers. But we’re all still facing this problem that Taylor had sought to address with the ATS.
As I discuss in my new podcast series, the public too often views science as a creator of facts, rather than a provisional process, full of uncertainties. This misunderstanding has consequences, as we saw during the pandemic when a subset of the public lost faith in science when they saw it updating as new evidence came in. Of course, we also have a long history of nefarious interests weaponizing the uncertainty that’s inherent in science to create doubt in the public’s mind.
How do we counteract the public’s misunderstandings of science? I’ve spent a great deal of my career thinking about this, and I still don’t have a satisfying answer. But I do think it might be time to revive the ATS.
