Each year, Kirstin has her biology students complete brackets for “March Mammal Madness,” the famous-in-our-community yearly event in which scientists organized by Katie Hinde tell stories about what might happen during encounters between various animals (only some of whom are mammals, but I can’t fault Hinde the alliterative title) if they were to cross paths in the wild.
No one can expect to make perfect predictions in March Mammal Madness – as in nature, sometimes unforeseen circumstances cause disaster for even the most well-adapted creatures. But I often do reasonably well, since I know enough about evolutionary biology to make informed guesses about the traits that would best allow a creature to protect any given swath of territory.
In the 2023 competition for March Mammal Madness, though, I was led astray by Antone Martinho-Truswell’s charming The Parrot in the Mirror. In addition to a plethora of interesting descriptions of...