Ernest Naylor

Lunacy we could use

In our anthropocentric world, we rely on the sun. We have internal circadian clocks that our bodies use to regulate our systems. We can throw them off by quickly changing time zones, but we pay the price in jet lag. If we let them do their work, they give us homeostasis, the best place to be. But there’s more to the world than us. All kinds of species regulate by the moon and the tides. Some have two clocks – sun and moon - and employ them as needed. Moonstruck examines a wide variety of species from insects to fish to turtles and birds, and how they take advantage of these entirely predictable benchmarks of the year.

The sheer variety of lunar use by earthbound species is daunting. Dung beetles can walk a straight line in the dark by monitoring polarized moonlight. Various aquatic species breed according to high and low tides, depending on whether they want their spawn to spread or stay close. Some employ the tides to land them at specific places on the beach and take them out again. Or up an estuary and out again. Sooty terns breed every tenth lunar cycle, making them seem chaotically random to us and our sun-based prejudices. And of course, we interfere with those who employ pure moonlight, such as turtles, by posting spotlights on beaches to deter the amorous.

Much like our poor sense of smell compared to dogs, or our poor sense of sight compared to raptors, we seem to have little way of leveraging the moon in our personal lives. Naylor has searched high and low for proof, and is quick to tell us there is no substantiation for this claim, or there is solid proof for that claim, or it looks like this other claim is going to be proven undeniably, just not yet. What I came away with was awe for the many brilliant ways species leverage the moon that we could never even consider. We have only just begun to examine, catalog and prove them. We have no idea which species are doing what. It is a huge, largely untapped area, dependent on us not losing the species before we know. They have a lot to teach us.

David Wineberg… (más)