A queer retelling of The Lindworm, a Danish fairytale. (2.5k words)
On the day the prince was born, the king had been off on a crusade. In his absence, the kingdom rejoiced, for the queen, who had struggled for years and years to even fall pregnant, had given them a perfect little prince with hair as red as a fiery rose.
But while the people celebrated, another child screamed and cried, her wails heard by no one. Abandoned in the woods by the very midwife who delivered the prince, the lindworm cried for her mother the queen, her twin brother, even her crusading father, who she had never even seen.
Eventually, she grew so hungry that she could no longer cry. With her white scales gleaming in the moonlight, she moved forward, dragging herself forward in search of food. Lizards she could snap up in her maw, crickets she could catch in her claws, rats she could pounce upon, food most unfit for a princess. All the while her brother was given milk from the finest cows, the sweetest fruit, and the most tender meat.
As the prince grew from a babe to a royal, so too did the lindworm grow from a mere winged serpent into a dragon. While the prince learned of courtly etiquette and hunting for sport, the lindworm learned of scaring peasants away from her lair and hunting for her next meal. As the prince learned to ride horses, scraping his knee as he fell from gentle mares and was fretted over by royal nannies, the lindworm learned to fly, jumping from branch to branch with no one to tend to her bruised and scraped belly when she fell.
But the prince and the lindworm were similar in one regard. While the prince would turn his head to take a second look at lovely maidens who passed him by, so too would the lindworm. Washers getting water, milkmaids leading their cows, farm lasses separating wheat from chaff. Because she had never been told to think otherwise, she knew that what she felt when she saw these women was desire. And so, when she patrolled her woods, she often stopped to watch them pass by.
It just so happened that one day, while she was watching a merchant's daughter, she learned a most interesting thing. "The prince is going to set out to find a bride."
The lindworm, hearing this, listened closely, as the merchant told his daughter, "I heard he seeks a princess' hand. I would expect no less for our only prince.
To this, the lindworm snarled and flew away, setting off to meet with her brother, remembering his scent and his bright red hair. When she found him on the road, she landed straight in his path, the ground shaking as she landed, his horse spooking, and she spoke, "A bride for me before a bride for you."
The prince managed to calm his horse enough to ride back to the castle, the lindworm chasing after him, only stopping her pursuit at the city gates. Knights stood at the ready and people around her screamed in fright.
When the prince returned to the palace, short of breath and sweaty from the fright and flight, he asked his mother and father why a lindworm had accosted him in such a way. The very moment the question left his lips, the queen began to sob in shame and despair, and regaled the story of the prince's conception.
One day, while walking in the woods, lamenting her infertility, she happened upon a witch. This witch was not wicked, in fact, she had heard the queen's woes and offered her a solution. She was to place a silver pitcher upside down in the north corner of the palace garden. In the morning, she would find two roses under the pitcher, one white and one red. If she desired a son, she would eat the red one, the white one for a daughter. But she must not, under any circumstances, eat both.
"I did not believe her at first but saw no harm in it. So, I did as she commanded. In the morning, I saw two roses and thought long and hard on my choice, for it is not one I thought I would make. I became fearful that if I ate the red one, you would be called to war, and I would lose you. If I ate the white, my daughter may be married to a foreign king, and I would lose her company. In the end, I chose the white rose, preferring a living but distant daughter over a dead but glorious son. But the rose was so sweet and lovely that I forgot the witch's warning and ate the red as well. And months later, I gave birth to twins. First the lindworm, and then to you. She is your older sister; she must marry before you can."
The king, knowing she was right, said, "Then I shall find a knight brave and true to take her claw in marriage. She can't possibly expect a bride."
The prince objected, "Father, is it wise to risk angering a dragon?"
And though the king wanted to argue that such a thing would be no marriage at all, he knew his son was right. He sent a letter to the neighboring kingdom, telling them his child wished to marry, but he did not tell them which child. Thinking that their daughter would be marrying the handsome and noble prince, the kingdom sent the princess. Upon arriving and meeting the lindworm, the princess grew fearful, but she consented to the marriage, for who would ever marry the dreadful beast and free up the prince if not her?
So, the two married. When it was time to kiss the bride, the princess kissed the lindworm between the eyes, and they feasted. The lindworm tasted cake and wine and spiced meat for the first time. Would this be her life now? To live as decadently as her family?
In the marriage chamber, the lindworm settled into bed told her bride, "Princess, remove your shift." Thinking only that they would do as all married couples did.
The princess did this hastily and went up to the lindworm, sitting in front of her and kissing her scaly lips. However, upon tasting the fear on the princess' lips, the lindworm's dragon nature could not be stopped, and before she knew what had occurred, she had devoured her bride.
In the morning, when the king and queen went to wake the newlyweds, they found the lindworm with tears in her eyes, the chamber flooded. Upon seeing her parents, the lindworm only said, "Bride."
Thus, the king sent word to a faraway kingdom that his child wished to marry, though did not say which. Thinking of the handsome and noble prince, they sent their daughter. The princess grew disgusted when she met the lindworm upon arrival but consented to the marriage. For if anyone could tame such a beast, it was her.
So, they married. When it was time to kiss the bride, the princess kissed the lindworm on the snout, and they feasted. When they were alone in the marriage chamber, the lindworm said, "Princess, remove your shift."
The princess did this hastily and went to the lindworm, kissing her scaly lips. But upon tasting the disgust on her bride's lips, the lindworm could not stop her dragon's nature and devoured her bride before she knew what had happened. When the king and queen arrived to wake the newlyweds, they once again found the lindworm alone and the chamber flooded with her tears. Her eyes still wet, all the lindworm could say was, "Bride."
Knowing that to ask for yet another princess would bring war to his kingdom, the king went to see his shepherd and commanded him to give his daughter's hand in marriage to the lindworm instead. For the shepherd had been loyal for many years and would never think to disobey.
"Your majesty, please, reconsider. She is my only child!"
"I know this, good shepherd, and I assure you, should your daughter be devoured, I shall have the lindworm, my own flesh and blood, slain.
But the shepherd's daughter did not consent to the marriage when she was told, running off into the forest at the thought of being a bride to a creature who would eat her own lover.
When she was deep in the woods, the shepherdess had many thoughts of how to escape her fate. She could offer her services in shearing and herding to the neighboring kingdom. She could stay in these woods. She could even make a home up a tree if need be. Like the great gnarled tree she stopped to look at. Then suddenly, in front of that tree, there was a gnarled old woman. And she spoke, "You're a long way from your flock, and you look as if you've met death. What troubles you, dearie?"
Though she had been startled, the shepherdess sighed and confessed to the old woman, "I'm afraid I may meet death very soon indeed. You see, they want me to marry the lindworm, but she has already eaten two princesses. What is to stop her from devouring a simple shepherd's daughter?"
"Ah, the lindworm. Such a shame, she would have made such a pretty princess, and we would have none of this trouble, had Her Majesty heeded my warning. Worry not, dearie, I can help you save both yourself and the lindworm. All I ask is that you follow my word to the letter."
The shepherdess considered the witch's offer and because she had few options, agreed to it, "Alright. You need only tell me what to do."
And so, the shepherd's daughter went home and consented to the marriage. When she met the lindworm, she grew determined. Never again would anyone suffer from this beast's appetites, least of all the beast herself.
So, the two were wed. When it came time to kiss the bride, the shepherdess kissed the lindworm on her scaly lips. Upon tasting the determination on her bride's lips, the lindworm's dragon nature did absolutely nothing. Thus, they feasted, and while all were distracted, the shepherdess pulled a servant aside and told him to bring a tub of lye, a tub of milk, and a bullwhip to the marriage chamber.
When they came to the chamber, the lindworm saw the implements, but did not ask what they were for. She simply settled down, telling her newest bride, "Shepherdess, remove your shift."
The shepherdess, now nervous but still determined, in turn said, "Only if you shed your skin."
The lindworm was stunned, telling her bride, "I have not shed in years, and never on command."
"If you will not shed, then I will not shed."
The lindworm, seeing no point in refusing her wife, thus shed a skin. Her scales were now brighter in the candlelight. When she did this, the shepherdess removed her shift to reveal another underneath. The lindworm, puzzled by what she saw, blinked, and told the maiden, "Bride of mine, remove your shift."
"Only if you shed a skin."
And so, the lindworm shed another skin, her scales gleaming even brighter, but also making the lindworm feel weaker. And when the shepherdess removed her shift once more, she revealed yet another underneath.
They did this ten times, until the shepherdess was down to her last shift and the lindworm's skin was raw and weeping, the beast unable to move. Now that this was done, the maiden took up the bull whip and dipped it in the lye before striking the lindworm.
The lindworm screamed out in agony and the shepherdess stopped. It was one thing to watch the lindworm shed until she looked like a scab that had been peeled before its time, quite another to induce pain on her. But she also knew better than to disobey the witch, especially this far in, so she continued. She dipped the whip in the lye and struck the lindworm again. She did this five times before she took up the tub of milk and poured it over the lindworm, the creature moaning in relief the instant the liquid touched her skin.
The witch had said the shepherdess could do whatever she wished at that point, so long as she stayed in the chamber with the lindworm. And seeing the poor beast on the floor, surrounded by her skins, and slashed by the whip and bleeding, covered in milk, there was only one thing the shepherd's daughter could do. She got down, took the lindworm's great neck into her arms, and embraced her.
The lindworm, never having been held so gently, began to sniffle, and then began to weep. Using the very last of her strength, the lindworm leaned into the embrace and asked, "Why?"
The shepherdess told her, "Because if someone did to me what I just did to you, I would want to be held by someone who cared." The lindworm sniffled once more and stayed in her bride's arms. The both of them falling asleep in that embrace.
The next morning, the king and queen went to wake the newlyweds, the prince with them this time. But when they entered the chamber, they saw not the shepherdess devoured, but the lindworm gone. In the shepherdess' arms instead was a maiden, with hair as white as a snowy rose.
As the two woke, the prince threw a blanket over his sister to preserve her modesty, the king picked up the shepherdess in a grateful hug, and the queen tried to hug her still sitting daughter. The former lindworm, however, crawled away from her with wide eyes, as if the thought of her own mother touching her terrified her.
The queen backed off at this, the king instead letting the shepherdess go and asking the princess, "What will you do now, daughter mine? Join court? Seek a proper groom?"
The princess looked at the shepherdess, the shepherdess back at her, and there was an understanding. The princess could not lead the court like this. Not when she had been an unloved dragon such a short time ago. And the thought of a groom was distasteful to her.
"I shall teach her to be human, your majesty. We are wed, so I have a duty to care for her. When she is ready, I'm sure she'll return to the palace."
The queen spoke once more then, telling her, "We will be waiting. In the meantime, you are always welcome in the palace. The way you should have always been."
And so, the shepherdess and the princess went home, the princess needing to be carried, though she didn't mind. It allowed her to embrace the shepherdess. Thus, they lived happily, and the princess never did move back into the palace
"In the 1960s, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger Payne switched his attention to whales. In 1971, he published two historic papers. (...) The second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payne’s career.
That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.
Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.
Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.
In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)
Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.
Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?
Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”
The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.
Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."
- Ed Yong, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
"In the 1960s, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger Payne switched his attention to whales. In 1971, he published two historic papers. (...) The second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payne’s career.
That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.
Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.
Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.
In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)
Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.
Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?
Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”
The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.
Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."
- Ed Yong, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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