Silly Little Things

Nature is many things - awe-inspiring, beautiful, efficient, deadly. 

Animals evolve for countless millions of years, their behavior being refined over endless generations, and they adapt ever closer into perfect organisms. Yet they never quite get there, for their environments are changing too. There is always something to improve on. Evolution is always in action, working upon each and every living thing. 

But each creature is not a robot mindlessly going about a program coded by natural selection. There is some individuality, differing expressions of behavior - personality. And sometimes an animal does something that goes against what it is "supposed" to do for reasons only known to that animal alone. To an outside observer, such activities do not make logical sense. And yet these sorts of behaviors occur in virtually every creature, at some point or another. Nature, no matter how one tries to organize it into neat boxes, is ultimately impossible to fully understand. It is simply unpredictable.

It is silly.

In the green treetops of northern Serinaustra in the late hothouse, a young male flutterfox is doing a silly little thing. He courts a huge (to him) moonbeast, bringing her tidbits of food he has collected throughout the day, every day, for an entire summer. Though these tribbetheres have many resemblances in common due to convergent evolution, they are not closely related enough that they should ever amicably interact, and they could never reproduce, and so his behavior could be construed as dysfunctional. But is it, really, if it makes him fulfilled? The flutterfox seems to take great joy in visiting the moonbeast. Why the tiny, flittering creature whose pelage shimmers in brilliant colors in the sunlight takes an interest in a fierce, shadow-hunting predator who may well kill him at nightfall is impossible to say. At first it is a fully one-sided relationship, and one to which she reacts with hostility, for she cannot either understand his intentions. Hissing and baring sharp teeth, the hunter frightens off her suitor. Yet he returns each day, and over time she habituates; when he begins to bring her food, she tentatively accepts - what is there to lose? And so as the weeks stretch on, the "couple" get to know each other and become comfortable in the other's presence. 

The tiny flutterfox brings the predator treats he gleans from the tree's leaves by day as she rests, and then settles somewhere nearby to groom himself and admire her from as near as she will allow. By night he flies off to some unknown roost as she begins her day hunting small vertebrate animals, some just like him. But though she is a hunter, and he is prey, they come from opposing worlds. Unlike moonbeasts of more polar regions, she does not have to hunt in the glare of daylight, and well-fed by night hunts, does not even think to do so. As her strange visitor comes only in the day, she finds him an annoyance at worst. Yet gradually, she grows more tolerant of him, and toward the end of summer even allows him to sit side by side and to preen her fur, a sensation that may bring to mind the gentle affection once provided by her mother, a long, long time ago. Come the shortening days of autumn, he visits less often, the changing seasons telling him that mating season is over, and to begin focusing on himself again. Next year, he may turn his attentions toward a more typical partner. 

For the moonbeast, solitary by nature, living with a mate is not a natural aspect of life. Yet having grown used to her strange visitor, she spends several days waiting for his arrival after he departs, staying up and peering around each dawn as if hoping for him to spring out of the leaves and appear before her as he used to, before she eventually falls asleep. Soon she too moves on and flies on to new hunting grounds for the winter. Next year, she will have forgotten him, and he her. Who knows how many silly little things happen in a world so wide as this one? Most, like this, leave no lasting impact, and simply come and go unseen. But whether or not they are ever observed, they demonstrate that life is more than just life and death struggles guided by natural selection's code. Animals are beings that ultimately exist for their own reasons, and sometimes their reasons may not be those we would expect.