Save the Galaxy. Eat a Porg.
Welcome to Team Trash, now on Substack
First: Yes! Here we are, on Substack. You should have received this email just like normal. “But why Substack?!” you might groan. “Everyone is on Substack.” Well in part that’s why. I want to recommend other newsletters to people, and…well there weren’t any other science newsletters on Beehiiv! Substack makes it easy to recommend. And there’s this whole Notes thing starting up.
Why change things up? Well, one of my goals for this year is to try and grow this newsletter, to bring more people on to Team Trash. Unlike most people begging you to subscribe to their Substack, I am not looking to turn this into my paid gig (though I am, of course, begging you to Subscribe to my Substack. I can add some vocal fry to the request if it would help). The reality is that, for the first time in a long time, I have opinions.
If this is your first time here, hi! I’m Bethany, and I wrote this book.
In my research, I began to develop educated opinions on human-wildlife conflict that I really want to share. Because knowledge is the first step toward understanding, and understanding is the first step toward changing the way we exist in our environments.
Anyway, that’s enough introspection. Onward. To porgs. Do you have a moment to talk about porgs?
Yes. Porgs, the cute things seen in Star Wars Episodes VII and VIII.
These.
Many people might look at this face and see an adorable CGI workaround for the puffins on Skellig Michael, aka Ahch-To. I see a cute, charming, complete menace to the galaxy’s ecology as we know it.
To be clear, the porgs are just a CGI workaround for the puffins that the moviemakers could not prevent from getting in all of the shots of the island. This is, actually, an excellent analogy. The moviemakers took the puffins and made porgs. I’m going to tell you to take porgs and make porg pie.
Let us begin with what we know about porgs. They are, like their real-world Atlantic puffin cousins (taxonomic relationship actually unknown), cliff dwellers. Also like puffins they are white on the breast, with darker backs and wings and orange detailing.
Like the puffin, porgs can fly and swim, but look very silly landing. Unlike puffins, which lay one egg per season, porglets are produced in pairs. But the biggest difference, and the one that matters, the one where the menace truly lies, is in the face.
It’s not the big, adorable eyes. The weirdly wide-spaced tiny nostrils. No. Puffins, you see, have a beak. They specialize in seafood, and like shrimp, herring and sprats, which they gulp down whole.
Porgs, though. Porgs have teeth. Not only do they have teeth, they have long lower canines and what appear to be a row of slicing teeth at the top. Puffins specialize in fish. Porgs? Porgs specialize in everything.
They’re not going to be eating plants, of course. Judging from their diving behavior, they also eat fish, but jaws like that won’t stop there. A porg is probably capable of eating pretty much any meat it chooses. Comfortable on land, sea, and sky, the porg is adaptable to multiple ecosystems. They’re even cliff dwelling, a characteristic that has allowed birds like pigeons and red-tailed hawks to nest in skyscrapers and on apartment buildings.
Porgs, like rats, are also intelligent and curious. They investigate lightsabers and toddle into the Millenium Falcon. They even make a nest, clearly very comfortable associated with humans (and Wookies. And droids). From there, the highly adaptable porg can take to the stars, colonizing new planets. The fast-breeding porg can quickly take to new areas and decimate the local fauna.
Invasive species are species that are not native to where they have established themselves, and which are likely to cause environmental harm where they’ve ended up. Burmese pythons are invasive species in the Everglades. Lionfish in the ocean. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, feral swine basically everywhere. As any ecologist will tell you, when you bring in a generalist to a new ecosystem? Hold on to your butts.
And now, the porg. Fast breeding, non-native predators. Picture them nesting in the eden of Endor, the forest of Batuu, or in your own backyard. No longer in a galaxy far, far away, the adorable porg is here to snack on your songbirds and feed voraciously on your voles.
With its huge, winning eyes, hilariously clumsy gait and soft fur(?), the porg will face no resistance. Who could possibly resist such charm?
It is up to us to be strong. To stand up for our ecosystems and arm ourselves with rotisserie, pie tins and deep fryers. Much like efforts to get rid of invasive species by dining on lionfish, bullfrogs and garlic mustard, we need to be brave. Unlike Chewbacca, we cannot be softened by innocent looks. We may not have the Force. But we have our forks.
This is all completely silly. Of course it is. Porgs don’t exist. But it could serve as a campaign for many other species that humans have tried (and, so far, failed) to eat as a result of their invasiveness. Feral hog recipes abound, chefs are preparing lionfish. There was a brief moment when people tried to get other people to eat kudzu. Somehow, it never seems to go beyond a few recipes and think pieces for most people.
Why is that? Hatred and disgust and social mores. Maybe I’ll talk about that next week.
Where have you been?
This is a section where I recommend a few science things I’ve read or seen that are interesting!
Thing 1: For those ex-academics who read and loved “the snake fight portion of your thesis defense” did you know…there’s fan fiction about it? There is, and it’s one of the best satirizations of academia I have ever read.
Thing 2: Sometimes, the hardest part of writing an award winning story isn’t cultivating the contacts or the fact checking or the investigation. It’s getting an outlet to publish it at all. “the roadblocks that I encountered were less about the work, about my subject, and more about the industry. Specifically, it is about who in journalism gets to write those long, sweeping stories that grace the cover of magazines, the richly reported features that sprawl along column inches in the newspaper, the stories that take 10, 20, 30 minutes to scroll through on the web.”
Thing 3: People with Down Syndrome used to only live to an average age of 4 in 1950. Now, the average age is 58. But the medical system still often sees these people as their condition, or as children, not as full adults. Love this empathetic reporting from Tony Leys.
Where have I been?
This is the section where I let you know what I’ve written recently, and where I’ve been on book tour, etc. I put it at the end because I feel very bad about self-promotion and feel judged putting it anywhere else!
I wrote about the NYC rat czar in Slate! And why the effort is probably doomed, unless all of NYC’s sanitation gets a major, and I do mean major overhaul.
Yay! Welcome to Substack :)