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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
December 16, 2025 at 9:56am December 16, 2025 at 9:56am
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I'm not saying I agree with this Nautilus article. Or disagree. I just find the temptation too great.
See, the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden is commonly translated to English as "apple." But in the original Hebrew, from what I recall anyway, the word used is a more generic word for "fruit."
And since fig leaves were canonically right there, covering up all the fun parts, now I'm wondering if it should have been "fig."
When you bite into an apple, a pear, or a peach, you bite into the result of thousands of years of interactions between these fruits and primates.
Otherwise known as selective breeding, or proto-genetic-engineering.
When you let a fig squish in your mouth, you are savoring an even more ancient story.
I was way older than I should have been when I realized "ficus" was "fig." That's apropos of nothing, really, it just came to mind.
Before the fruit, in a beginning, all of the seeds that dangled from trees fell from those trees. These were gravity’s seeds.
This is some poetic shit right here, harking back to both the supposed "beginning" with the forbidden fruit and all and tying that to another mythical apple that mythically fell on a certain philosopher's head.
No idea if it's backed up by evolutionary research, but I'll acknowledge the poetic license.
Then, some plants evolved fruits. Fruits were a radical evolutionary innovation; they surrounded seeds and attracted animals in order that those animals might consume them and ingest their seeds. They called out, “Eat me.”
And so we get to the real reason I saved this article to share: "Eat me!"
They evolved in the tropics, around 60 million years ago, in the shadow of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Those first primates have been hypothesized to have consumed the fruits of trees as well as flowers, and then, also, insects attracted to fruits and flowers.
"Hypothesized" doesn't mean much of anything without evidence.
Over the succeeding tens of millions of years, some of the descendants of those first primates became more dependent on fruits. Meanwhile, many trees grew increasingly dependent on those fruit‑eating primates for dispersal of their seeds; this was a relationship of mutual benefit and dependency.
I'm pretty sure, however, that it wasn't just primates who were attracted to fruit and therefore helped with the fruit tree's reproductive strategy. I remember reading a bit about how avocados co-evolved with some sort of megafauna, which later became extinct and almost took the avocado with it.
Metaphorically, a forest can walk across a landscape inside the gut of a primate, traveling one defecation at a time.
You know, I appreciate biology and poetry, but some metaphors, I could do without.
There's a bunch more at the link, but I got a bit exhausted with all the metaphors and speculation. As I mentioned, I'm not saying it's wrong or right. And it is, after all, an ad for a book.
I just thought the comparison with the Eden story, and the Newton myth (one wonders if that was actually a fig, too, leading to the popular Fig Newton), was too good to pass up.
Also, "Eat me." |
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