Quotes from Sy Montgomery

We kill 100 million [sharks] yearly. By 2050 we will have filled the sea with more plastics than fish.

And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didn't have a chance to grow.

They don't want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we're the same. They know what it's like to have an itch. They can imagine what it's like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They

Soul is the fingerprint of God.

A light, actually powered by the eel's electricity, flashes across a panel built on top of the tank to show when the eel is hunting or stunning prey....The eel was fast asleep. Then suddenly we saw the voltmeter flash. What's going on? I asked Scott. I thought the eel was asleep. He is asleep, Scott answered. And then we both realized what was happening. The eel was dreaming.

Then suddenly, we saw the voltmeter flash. "What's going on?" I asked Scott. "I thought the eel was asleep." "He is asleep," Scott answered. And then we both realized what was happening. The eel was dreaming.

species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

emotions aren't confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.

His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world's mistreatment of pigs

The emperor Caesar Augustus had a parakeet who greeted him daily, and after his victory over Mark Antony in Egypt in 29 B.C., he purchased a raven whose trainer had taught him to say "Ave, Caesar Victor Imperator." (The trainer had wisely taught another bird to say "Ave, Victor Imperator Antoni" in case the battle went the other way.)

They have the instinct to hunt and fly," Nancy told me, "but how to hunt, they learn. It's as if there's some file folder in their heads about hunting success that they learn and never forget.

In 1820, two years before the Catholic Church began permitting the teaching of heliocentrism

I wanted to meet octopuses who lived in the wild ocean. In the shower, I began to repeat in my head the first words of the Fisherman's Prayer, the words to which John F. Kennedy kept on his desk at the White House: Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small....I fervently longed to get out of that boat and enter the Creator's great ocean, if only for an hour at a time, as a breathing, swimming sea creature.

How tired she must be, I thought, after her rich, full life—a life lived between worlds. She had known the sea's wild embrace; she had mastered the art of camouflage; she had learned the taste of our skin and the shapes of our faces; she had instinctively remembered how her ancestors wove eggs into chains. She had served as an ambassador for her kind to tens of thousands of aquarium visitors. What an odyssey she had lived.

Dying did not bother her at all. We had spoken of this a little in the weeks before. For her, death was the portal to my father. She was eager to see him in heaven. Only one thing bothered her: she was worried, incredibly, that my father might not be there.

Preserved pufferfish. Former flounders. Ex-eels.

Pigeon racing was introduced to Taiwan from Japan at the turn of the last century; the country's obsession with the sport really began only about forty years ago.

There he found his two youngest daughters unconscious. Wet, cold, and mesmerized with terror, the other members of the family had forgotten about the two girls and were actually sitting on them—they had nearly suffocated.

Although pigs are generally good-natured, more people are killed each year by pigs than by sharks.

With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.

Hyenas 'appear to violate the rules of mammalian biology,' Holekamp tells me. 'Studying the oddballs can teach you about the basics,' she explains. 'They allow us to gain insight into what the rules actually are.' And by showing us an alternative way to sociality and intelligence, they help us better understand our own beloved pets, and perhaps even ourselves.

All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

patches, she is radiantly beautiful, the very picture of a healthy octopus and a diligent mother. She fluffs the

It was one of almost 20 global mass extinctions in the history of complex life, a list that includes 5 cataclysmic outliers, when the planet nearly died