The year ahead

Truffles born of thunder, fairy rings you should never step inside, and the cold glow of foxfire: what people once believed about fungi, and what they turned out to be. Neither plant nor animal, and closer to animals than to plants.

Pliny’s octopus that crept out of the sea at Carteia to raid the salted fish, the kraken of Bishop Pontoppidan, and the giant squid that no one photographed alive until 2004. Three hearts, blue blood, and two thirds of an octopus’s nerve cells in its arms.

The halcyon days, when the sea was said to fall calm at midwinter so the kingfisher could nest on it; the dead kingfisher hung up to show which way the wind blew; and Richard Bowdler Sharpe, who began his great monograph at seventeen. And why many kingfishers never fish at all.

A triton-shell horn 18,000 years old, played again in 2021; the purple of emperors, drawn drop by drop from sea snails; the shell cabinets of Dutch collectors. And how a snail builds a house that grows with it.

Khepri, the scarab who rolled the sun across the sky; Pliny’s stag beetles hung round babies’ necks; the first Goliath beetle, found floating dead in an African river; and the young Darwin with a beetle in his mouth. One in every four known animal species is a beetle.

Victorian orchid fever: plants sold at auction in Cheapside, collectors who died abroad hunting them, and H. G. Wells’s blood-drinking orchid. Seed as fine as dust, the moth Darwin predicted before anyone had seen it, and the many orchids that trick their pollinators.