Unlikely Friendships - Jennifer S. Holland [37]
Still, as this book has hopefully convinced a few skeptics, emotion and empathy, pleasure and disappointment aren’t only in the human domain. The task of collecting these stories opened my eyes to just how often animals can surprise us with their depth of caring. As word got around that I was gathering interspecies stories, the photos and narratives flowed in daily—many more than I could use. I was introduced to a special place in England called Twycross Zoo with a decadeslong history of primates befriending dogs, and to households of mixed pets that played and ate and slept in tandem like human brothers and sisters. I was told about a pup that cuddled with an orphaned porcupine, and I read of a chimp that found a bird in his cage and gently set it free. I considered images of a chick riding atop a turtle, an orangutan walking a dog on a leash, and a mouse balancing beside a lovebird on its perch. I had to cut myself off lest I fill hundreds more pages with funny, sweet, and inspiring tales.
Still, there is one more story that I just cannot leave behind, my own story, so I’d like to close with it here. It depicts an odd combination of fish that I witnessed together on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 2009. It doesn’t quite fit the “friendship” bill, perhaps, but it’s a wonderful account of an interspecies interaction just the same.
Of course, countless types of fish bump fins in the coral reef environment, but this species pairing not only made me laugh (not easy with a scuba regulator in your mouth), but it made me wonder just what might be going on in those little fish brains. The scene was ripe for anthropomorphizing. Please, allow me.
A different baby gibbon embraces a buddy.
A lab and baby gibbon cuddle at twycross Zoo.
{AUSTRALIA, 2009}
The Author, the Sweetlips, and the Puffer Fish
ORIENTAL SWEETLIPS
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Actinopterygii
ORDER: Perciformes
FAMILY: Haemulidae
GENUS: Plectorhinchus SPECIES: P. vittatus
STARRY PUFFER FISH
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Actinopterygii
ORDER: tetraodontiformes
FAMILY: tetraodontidae
GENUS: Arothron
SPECIES: Arothronstellatus
ON AUSTRALIA’S GREAT BARRIER REEF, IF YOU DIVE down with the sun’s rays as they slice into the sea, a festival of life explodes into view.
At least 2,000 species of fish, plus invertebrates and other critters, wriggle and flit along the walls of the reef, which is a series of coral mountains that rise and fall for some 1,400 miles—the largest living natural structure on Earth. There, on one particularly lively stretch of rock, I witnessed a marine partnership unlike anything I’d seen before.
The ocean is a good place to find “symbiotic” relationships—associations of different species that may offer benefits like access to food, protection, or just a ride from here to there. Think of clownfish that gain security from predators by living within toxic anemones, or the remora fish that clings to a shark’s belly to feed on the parasites living there.
But this was not a case of symbiosis I’d heard about before, nor one that had an obvious explanation. It was truly a bizarre assemblage of “friends.” Our dive group—on assignment for National Geographic magazine, and including photographers David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes—had been exploring this site for days, and we’d all seen the puffer fish before. He (I’m guessing the animal’s sex) was an old specimen, a tattered softball of a fish. He was always alone, lolling about on the sea floor or moving slowly through the shallows. Oddly tame, he let me approach to within inches and swim alongside him. The manic vibrations of his tiny fins propelled the bulbous fish forward, one eye twitching