The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Nature’s Lessons in Gender Equality, Gender Diversity, and True Love: The Male Pregnancy of the Seahorse and the Fearless Trans Fish of the Coral Seas

Nature’s Lessons in Gender Equality, Gender Diversity, and True Love: The Male Pregnancy of the Seahorse and the Fearless Trans Fish of the Coral Seas

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” the great nature writer Henry Beston insisted nearly a century ago. “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

Over the long sweep of evolution, our fellow creatures have developed wondrous forms and faculties far superior to our own — from the strange splendor of the octopus, endowed with Earth’s most alien consciousness, to the olfactory prowess of the dog, capable of accessing layers of reality wholly hidden from us. (“Never say higher or lower,” Darwin scribbled in the margin of a book. “Say more complicated.”) To fathom the worlds of such creatures requires that we “shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place,” as Rachel Carson wrote in the pioneering 1937 essay that first invited the human imagination to consider this precious shared planet from the perspective of non-human creatures.

Art by Millie Marotta from A Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals

But in the century since Carson and Beston, some of this world’s most extraordinary animals have been driven to near-extinction, vanishing from the biosphere, vanishing from the dictionary and from children’s imagination. Along with them vanish the voices we shall never hear — voices that can teach us a great deal about being better creatures ourselves.

Welsh illustrator and author Millie Marotta celebrates forty-three of these astounding creatures in A Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals (public library) — a collection of short, stunningly illustrated encyclopedic “profiles” of wild and wondrous creatures: miniature dragons of the underworld, desert-dwelling fish, marsupial tree frogs, otters with a hundredfold more hairs in a square inch of fur than you have on your entire head, and the clandestine cousin of the extinct dodo. What emerges is a testament to naturalist Sy Montgomery’s conviction that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom — and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.”

Art by Millie Marotta from A Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals

Some of Marotta’s creatures contain in their hard-wired biology subtle allegorical answers to some of our most pressing sociological concerns and aspirations — particularly around gender equality, gender identity, and gender diversity. From the seahorse — one of only three known species, along with the pipefish and the leafy seadragon, in which pregnancy is allotted to the male — we get a lesson in subverting traditional gender roles not only in child-rearing but in child-bearing, as well as a stubborn defense of true love (or what we might have to begin calling, nowadays, monoamory), almost at the price of survival. Marotta writes:

Many species of seahorse remain faithful to their mates throughout the breeding season, greeting each other each day in a courtship dance. Other pairs remain monogamous their entire lives, among them the tiger tail seahorse, so named for its distinctive stripy tail.

When breeding, the female deposits her eggs into the male’s brood pouch, found toward the bottom of his belly. He fertilizes them in his pouch, then keeps them there, safe and nourished, as they develop. After two to three weeks, hundreds of miniature, perfectly formed tiger tail seahorses burst out into the water. The babies, only 1 cm long, are immediately independent of their parents and drift away, at the mercy of the ocean currents.

Seahorses are rather inept at swimming, so when it comes to hunting they rely on stealth and disguise. Anchoring themselves to a piece of coral, and changing color to camouflage themselves from both predators and prey, they wait, toothless snout at the ready, to hoover up tasty brine shrimp as they drift by.

From the corpulent, fearless, luscious-lipped humphead wrasse of the Indo-Pacific coral seas — nature’s Orlando — we receive the ultimate affirmation of the transgender identity as a thoroughly natural mode of being.

Art by Millie Marotta from A Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals

Marotta writes:

Among the coral reefs of the Red Sea, a young female humphead wrasse leaves her deep — water cave to feed. She hoovers up vast quantities of mollusks, crabs, lobsters, sea cucumbers… but she is also one of a few species that will tuck into the toxic crown-of-thorns starfish. This starfish eats growing corals, so in eating them the humphead wrasse is preserving her own habitat, which is already damaged by fishing methods involving dynamite and cyanide. As she hunts, she must keep an eye out for poachers: As one of the most expensive fish in Southeast Asia, she is vulnerable.

At about seven years old, she is almost ready to mate. By nine she has grown bigger than most females her age, and as she keeps growing her skin changes color, from rusty red orange to a vibrant greenish blue, and she loses her ovaries and develops testes. Incredibly, she changes sex and becomes the dominant male — known as a super male. He is a giant among his species — up to 6 ft long and a colossal 400 lbs in weight. That’s more than two average-sized men. Only the very largest of females have a chance to become super-males and mate — and they will stay male forever.

Complement the lovely Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals with Eve Ensler’s stirring letter to Mother Earth, sparked by the disappearance of 2.9 billion birds, and illustrator Jenni Desmond’s empathic picture-book invitations into the worlds of two other gravely endangered animals — the polar bear and the blue whale — then revisit this lyrical vintage chronicle of a year in the life of the majestic sperm whale and Sy Montgomery on what working with 13 animals taught her about being a good creature.


Published November 10, 2019

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/10/millie-marotta-wild-child/

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