Reminders for Humans is a monthly series that explores a natural phenomena, and how I’m applying its wisdom to my own human life. I’m a scientist by training, and a gushy poet by nature. Expect both.
This is Part 2 of an ongoing series about my time volunteering at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. Read Part 1 here.
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things; I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
- Mary Oliver, “One or Two Things”
Reminders for Humans:
Maintenance and growth are opposites: to favor one is to forgo the other. If you need to grow in order to maintain, you are doing it wrong.
“Living fossil” species are our last enduring teachers for maintaining life without novelty.
The first animal I saw upon arrival to the sanctuary was Tapi. I vaguely remember him squeaking at me, but it’s hard to be positive.
I was unwell.
The taxi driver, Jesús, mercifully carried my bag as I followed him through a locked wooden gate, across a floating bridge over the river, through three more metal gates, and into the trees.
Bleary-eyed and delirious after 24+ hours without sleep, a 1am flight from Lima to La Paz that morning, combined with altitude sickness so rough Jesús pulled to the side of the switchbacked road three times so I could puke on the 3 hour drive to the sanctuary. There was dried vomit in my hair. The humid, hot air pressed on me. I was so obviously dehydrated the word may as well have been tattooed on my forehead. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t entering this experience at my prime. Each person we passed mumbled greetings to Jesús in Spanish, each with a different cadence and dialect I couldn’t grasp. As the seconds ticked by, I was becoming more and more convinced that I was in way over my head. Like, way over.
This grim realization, which in normal circumstances would throw me into a feverish, Zach Galafanakis in the Hangover doing mental math in the casino type problem-solving (nearest exit, closest town, book an airbnb and high-tail it) was instead met with the sheer exhaustion of my debilitated state. One single brain cell was all that remained online, bouncing around my empty skull like Pong. Stalemate.
My only option was to follow Jesus. Which I did, quietly and obediently, for the first time in my life.
The pathway was dirt, speckled with stones and rubble, weeds and plants growing everywhere they could. It was loud as hell, even at 8:30am, as if we’d arrived at a party already in full-swing: insects, birds, monkeys, more birds, more insects. All simultaneously humming, shouting, screeching, yelling, thrumming in cacophony.
We approached and entered a fully-enclosed chain-linked walkway, which ran throughout the sanctuary to every major area- as if the humans were the ones caged within defined boundaries, instead of the animals. Single Brain Cell clocked this with some flavor of virtue-signal: yeah, this is how we should do it. Humans should be the ones enclosed, instead of the animals.
I’d learn within a day that this was, instead, for our own safety. The surrounding forest was home to a troop of “free” spider monkeys that spent most of their time on the sanctuary grounds, where they ran and swung and jumped and sat atop the chain link tunnels. Fully grown and standing on two feet, they could be chest-height. Watching and waiting for an opportunity to snag food within grasp. Peeing and pooping above heads with reckless abandon; without discrimination.
When I adopted my dog as a fresh puppy, the rescue handed me a separate piece of paper that read in giant capital letters: I PROMISE I WILL WAIT ONE WEEK BEFORE RETURNING THIS PUPPY.
I signed it without thinking. Duh. Why would I go through the effort of adopting a puppy, readying my apartment and life for it, paying a rescue for said puppy - if I was just going to bring it right back? I’m not a quitter. I know what I signed up for.
However, it turns out that I did not know what I signed up for.
I knew the broad strokes of it, sure. New puppy, teething and nipping, early mornings, consistent training schedules, piddle pads, yada yada yada. But not the minutiae. Not the details. And the details are usually what break you. After one sleepless night with a shrieking inconsolable furry terrorist in your home; your spirit is fractured enough to say - fuck it! I’m not cut out for this! I’m taking this puppy back less than 24 hours after bringing it home! Someone else can be the hero!
But that one week promise. Damnit.
Please believe me when I say that if I hadn’t been shown and forced to sign that document, and more importantly, if I hadn’t been made explicitly, immediately privy to the fact that it can take up to one week for a new puppy to trust you and its new home and routine enough to stop ruining your every waking moment - I would not have my dog today. I would have given up, immediately.
Three Days Deep
They say modern society is only three days deep.
I read this somewhere, or heard it, and thank god. It was the prayer I told myself roughly once per second upon arriving. Cockroaches, everywhere. Animal shit, everywhere (in the kitchen, the dining hall, the bathrooms, every path to every part of the property, every enclosure- everywhere). Insects, everywhere. Raw meat and unfiltered water and no gloves and no masks, anywhere.
Only three days deep.
The hope of this phrase glowed like a lantern, strong in what it promised: in three days, I would become adapted. The comparison that lived in my brain between what I was actively witnessing, versus the autopilot of what my subconscious expected, would slim and then disappear to nothing. I would become something different. I would acclimate not only to the elevation, but to the reality I was living in: this reality filled with bad smells and hygienic sins and poop and only Spanish.
Let me stop here to say this. Not a lot of stuff gets to me. I would not call myself squeamish, afraid of bugs, or in possession of a weak stomach. I spend a lot of time outside, I grew up swimming in the bacteria-ridden waves of Lake Ontario, and summer camp in the woods was basically the happiest time of my life. Spiders, snakes, the mouse in my kitchen that I haven’t yet been able to catch: we’re cool. I drink out of the tap. I use the five second rule. I wait out my sicknesses. I would under no circumstances ever be considered a germaphobe.
And yet.
Despite knowing, logically and objectively, that I was in a place far outside my American norms, deep in the lush jungle, and three hours from the nearest major city- within the first 24 hours, several things forced me into a very serious kind of reckoning: How deeply will I let this affect me?
I know my anxiety well enough to realize its power, it’s all-consuming omnipotence over my mood. If I choose to believe that some things are very not okay, they will be very not okay in every cell of my being, forever. And, compared to the reality I had been used to, most of the things I saw could have fallen into the category of very not okay.
Some general rules and realities gathered on Day 1:
The water used throughout the sanctuary was diverted straight from the river, no filtration. The only water you should drink or use to brush your teeth was filtered and bottled, which you needed to purchase from the kitchen or walk to the nearest town (20 minutes up a dirt road) to buy in bulk. The water supply also went “out” once a day on average, for between 2 - 5 hours. During which time you could not cook, shower, flush a toilet, or clean anything unless you ventured down to the river with a bucket. It is still unclear to me why and how this happened since the river does not stop running for between 2-5 hours a day. Among the staff this seemed normal. No agua someone would say with a sorry grimace as you attempted to wash your hands of dirt or shit or food remnants. Who’s to say when it’ll come back on was not a rhetorical question. Nobody could say. Until it was back on.
Coffee was not included in the 3 meals provided every day. Yes, this is important enough to be number 2. It was a BYOC situation and I had not BYOC’d. Huge bummer.
The room I slept in was shared with three other women who worked there, none of whom spoke English. The bed I was pointed to laid bare on the floor: a box spring topped with a thick foam mattress pad, its cover ripped, exposing the orange crumbling foam within. I looked at it and laughed, remembering when only a few weeks before, my friend Kat and I stayed at a Hilton in Florida and she told me not to worry- because she had already checked the mattresses for bed bugs, and we were in the clear. (To check for bed bugs anywhere, let alone in a Hilton hotel, had never once occurred to me.) I would not be checking this bed for the bugs that were definitely, absolutely living inside of it.
There were two bedside tables meant for my things: one which stood lopsided with a hinge broken; the other covered in a thick layer of dirt. Hanging off both were dead insects strangled in cobwebs. Immediately outside the cracked bedroom door slept Ralph, the giant, three-hundred year old golden retriever who humped anything that moved and smelled like a horse with a bacterial infection.
All skin should be covered unless you are cool with the most horrifying mosquito, sand fly, and mystery-insect bites. One day while in the brush, I looked down at the sting suddenly radiating between my index and middle finger, to see a black ant at the scene of the crime. Not even a red ant. Not even a wasp, which was what it felt like. “Do black ants bite here?” I asked a staff member via Google Translate. She nodded. “It’s the jungle. Everything bites here.”
Cockroaches. Not a day passed without seeing at least four: on the floor of the dining hall, the bathroom, or the prep room where food for the animals was readied, anywhere really. In the pre-dawn hours of my first full day, I became vaguely aware of a tickling on my foot, calf, thigh; breathlessly I threw off the comforter to see a cockroach making its way up my body. I slapped it away without thinking. It landed across the room, recovered instantly, and scurried somewhere hidden. I did not go back to sleep.
Only cold showers.
The First Aid Kit in the main building appeared to be mostly empty.
Do not step on turtles ran like a television news scroll through my brain. In nearly every enclosure besides the big cats and bears, there were between one and ten giant tortoises: they were slow moving and well camouflaged and extremely easy to walk right into. And nothing makes you feel worse than accidentally kicking an endangered tortoise. They humped nonstop (it was mating season.)
And in some ways, the most very not okay of all was that nobody seemed to be charged with explaining any of these things to new arrivals. You figured them out by asking questions in broken Spanish, or from one of the volunteers who was already there and kind enough to explain what you should expect.
If I decided to freak out about one thing (and to be clear, it would have been the cockroach situation) the levy would burst. I would freak out about everything. I would ruin every waking moment of the next two weeks; spend it in fear and anticipation of the next freak-out moment; trying to shield myself from every hypothetical cockroach under the covers.
Instead, the reckoning silenced my anxiety with a ruthless efficiency previously unknown to me.
Some reptilian part of my brainstem must have realized that this constant worry would actually be quite dangerous and harmful to me. It sternly told anxiety it could return, with whatever it had to say, as soon as I left the sanctuary and no sooner. Now? There were bigger fish to fry.
Now, there were gates to shut and animals to beware of. Food to deliver, cages to clean. Clean water to find.
Being completely out of your element is a crossfit workout for the brain: forcing it to start making new connections, recognize and remember new patterns, sounds, language; ignite the usually-sleepy parts to absorb and analyze every new iota of information. Time warps in situations like these; it’s why I love to travel. By dinner, I’d remember the tasks of the morning and think - wasn’t that yesterday? Being at this heightened level of attention makes seconds seem like minutes; minutes like hours; days like weeks.
But this wasn’t ~explore a new European city and navigate to a cute restaurant for breakfast~ type of novelty. This was ego-stripping, confidence-breaking, what flavor of idiot are you, exactly? -type of paying attention.
This was hang on to every word you hear because one of them might be peligroso (dangerous) or cuidado (careful) or morder (bite.) This was make sure you close every gate immediately so the monkeys don’t get in. This was don’t accidentally wet your toothbrush with the sink water or else you’ll shit your brains out for a week.
I was contemplating hourly whether I should leave.
After the first shift of the day and gulping down breakfast, I stood waiting for my next assignment outside the capybara enclosure, dissociating. Did I really just use my last two weeks of PTO for this? The scope of my stupidity dawned on me. The absurdity of this choice; the insanity.
I had already spent two hours that morning with a broken push-broom, sweeping and scrubbing three enclosures’ rock pools with hard plastic bristles and elbow grease, pushing out the dead leaves and liquefied shit and stagnant water, then filling them back up with clean water. I was standing in borrowed rubber boots, three sizes too big with a hole in the toe and a wet wool sock. I’d sweat through the lightweight long-sleeve I’d been assigned. My hair was in a topknot, slicked with the forehead sweat and sunscreen I’d wiped back with whatever clean part of my shirt I could find. It was 10am.
Some people take two weeks of PTO for a honeymoon in Sicily, backpacking across Ireland, visiting Japan. Some people go to Hawaii and nap in the sun and get hot stone massages at spas. Some people respond to burnout by relaxing and by doing nothing at all, or by buying themselves a new jigsaw puzzle to complete.
Who let me do this? Who (me) booked this (me) for me (me), and thought it was a good idea (me)???
I contemplated my foolishness. Then alternated back to my new mantra, my new prayer. Three days deep.
I will wait one week before deciding to return this puppy.
I will spend three days here before deciding to leave.
Specials
I followed the ranger around from 8am to 6pm, moving almost constantly outside of our designated meal breaks. A day with the Especiales (miscellaneous, special animals) involved carrying giant trays of food and buckets of water to and from the enclosures to feed for three meals; after each meal, sweeping up the leftover food scraps; washing the food trays and readying them for the next meal; sweeping and washing the enclosures’ stone floors, feeding areas, slabs of concrete; emptying, scrubbing clean, and refilling the water fountains and pools in each; walking a mile up the river and into the forest to cut down and carry back 50 pounds of sugarcane to feed the capybara.
There were so many interesting animals in this area. Capybara, Andean deer, river turtles, giant tortoises, squirrel monkeys, foxes, a caiman, armadillos, toucans, and agoutis (which look like rats, but sort of handsome?)
And right outside my shared bungalow, just one measly fence away, was the belle of the ball: Tapi, the Tapir.
Tapirs are strange-looking and to match, they also make a very strange noise; difficult to name or replicate: a mix of a snort and an oink and a squeak. Kind of like an ooo-wEEkah. Kind of. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do it justice, phonetically, so please refer to video below.
Tapi had alternating energy: particularly at meal time, that of a stubborn pony. Hiding out in the brush and uninterested in the platter of fresh fruit and vegetables, prepared only minutes before, that awaited him (the meal that would be mercilessly stolen immediately by the free-roaming monkeys should he decide to stay parked.) But while eating or puttering, swimming in his pool, or trotting alongside you as you walked the path next to his territory, Tapi was jovial and friendly; responding when his ranger whistled and called for him like a neighborhood dog, if that dog looked like a warthog-pony with a mini elephant trunk and camel feet.
More than anything, though, Tapi was a friend. That much you knew upon greeting. And for the first few days at the sanctuary, he was my best friend. Hola, Tapi! I’d wave and call to him while passing his enclosure, practicing my infantile grasp of the Spanish language. oooo-wEEkah, Tapi would squeak back. He never left me hanging. Maybe he could sense how desperately I was searching for a semblance of normalcy, or maybe he was just hanging out; ready for another day, waiting to see how this one would turn out, greeting everyone he saw as the hours passed. Like the old guy who sits on his porch rocker all day long, nodding at passerby. Always sitting idly, somehow comfortable letting hours pass with only what’s in his head for company. That was Tapi. Just happy to be here.
His constitution, which looked like an amalgamation of at least four different animal taxonomies, did not make a lot of sense to the preconceived biology in my head. He was an herbivore, and in the wild, considered a forest gardener by how many seeds he dispersed through his daily eating and walking and pooping. His skin was thick and leathery, with a short zebra-like mane along his neck and head. He was an ungulate, the family of animals that includes horses and deer and other herd animals, yet lived alone quite happily, both at the sanctuary and in the wild. He had an extended nose that hung down in a curve, like a fun-sized elephant trunk, which worked like a hand: moving in all directions to smell, and eventually, grasp and grab whatever seemed appealing for tasting.
Tapi was a Dr. Seuss creation brought to life. He was not of this time. Yet here he was, oo-wEEkah’ing and trotting along the fence and swimming in his pool to rinse off the horse flies. Ready for another day of being Tapi.
Tapirs have existed for 50 million years, the “most primitive large mammals in the world” (1) having survived multiple mass extinctions. Consequently, they are called living fossils. They have survived not by adapting, changing, mutating; but instead by simply showing up day after day for life. By maintaining their aliveness.
I recognize that this sounds oversimplified. Certainly there is more detail to give for the specific circumstances, behaviors, and ecological principles which contribute to tapirs’ survival and success. But also certainly, much of it seems to be in their ancient consistency of showing up for another day of being themselves.
By the end of my first full day of work, I was exhausted. I had exactly enough energy to take a cold shower, change into clean clothes, and walk to the mess hall for dinner (rice with meat sauce) before immediately returning to my floor-bed and falling asleep.
Day 2 felt better. I didn’t wake up with a cockroach on me, so by those standards alone it was a major improvement. I had an idea of what to expect during the work day: carrying, moving, cleaning, scrubbing, filling, emptying, cleaning again, feeding again, cleaning again, feeding again. Chugging water to replace what I’d sweat out. Trying to translate Spanish in real time. At the end of the shift at 6pm, I was told I was also on Ralph duty and needed to give him a walk. I did that, too. Returned to the bungalow. Cold shower. Clean clothes. Dinner (rice with meat sauce) then the bungalow. Sleep, as soon as possible.
Day 3. Even better. The routine was solid now. The expectation of my day was accurate and specific: clean, feed, clean, feed, walk, lift, carry, sweat, sweat, sweat, drink as much water as possible. Walk Ralph. Cold shower. Clean clothes. Rice with meat sauce. Bungalow.
As I watched myself in the mirror, brushing my teeth with water-bottle water before bed, I noticed a new lightness in my energy. Or more accurately, I was acutely aware of the absence of the emotional fog that typically engulfed me after any regular day. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t anxious. I didn’t feel lingering resentments, guilt or shame about how much I’d accomplished that day; about what was still on my to-do list and what messages I didn’t respond to; no vague dread wondering how I would get everything done I hadn’t finished; no hopelessness about another project to tackle and finish this quarter; and no existential grief over doing this all again tomorrow.
Instead, there was a quiet. In my mind and in my body.
It’s hard to feel anxious when you have walked 5 miles and used your body to move and carry and fix and search and forage and find. When you are bone tired it’s hard to recognize depression as the same threat as it is when you’ve sat motionless in front of a screen all day, pondering other people’s opinions; trying to outsmart them or sell to them.
I didn’t even have things to be anxious about. I was already waking up with bugs on me. It was ridiculous to concoct an imaginary looming threat when threats were imminent and there was nothing to do but deal with them. Get up. Hit the cockroach off of you. Chase it out the door. Shake the bedding out. Go on with your day.
I stared at myself in the mirror; wet hair, teeth-brushing, the curves of my biceps starting to return. My eyes were tired, but bright. I was dirty, but clean. My prayer had worked.
I spit.
Bedtime.
Living Fossils
The Lowland Tapir first appeared during the middle Eocene Epoch (roughly 33 - 56 million years ago), the same period characterized by the oldest known mammal fossils in existence. While most modern Tapirs live in temperate forest regions, particularly in South America and Asia, throughout their species’ history they existed for millions of years in northern regions and modern-day North America, even throughout ice ages. In fact, in Gray Tennessee, fossils from over 100 tapirs have been found at the Gray Fossil Site (2) - the largest accumulation of tapir fossils in the world.
Interestingly, throughout this long history, there have never been more than a few distinct species of tapirs. They are categorized as morphologically conservative (4), meaning their rate of evolution is slow and they retain a similar body structure throughout their existence, which in this case, is roughly 50 million years.
Other species of “living fossils” are few and far between, and their prehistoric appearances and abilities illustrate just how unique their existence is: horseshoe crabs (445 million year old sea scorpions that have outlasted the dinosaurs); coelacanths (a prehistoric fish long thought to be extinct, native to the deep ocean that can grow up to 6 feet long and nearly 200 pounds); tuataras (an ancient lineage of reptile, now rare and native to New Zealand, that resembles a lizard but is not a lizard, which develops actively until it’s 35 years old and can live for up to 100 years); and nautiloids (a classification of marine cephalopods over 480 million years old, characterized by squid-like tendrils and mesmerizing spiral shells, whose rotation pattern is mathematically an almost-perfect logical spiral.)
Habitat destruction, changing climates, and poaching are the three biggest threats to the tapir (and most animals.) The irony, of course, is that their continued survival is most threatened by the species that wields compulsive evolution like a weapon.
Maintenance
Before this trip, I did not realize that two terms had become inextricably coupled together in my head: work and more.
My 9-5 work had come to represent more. Always more (siempre mas). It was not continuity work, it was not active recovery, or retaining a status quo. Instead, work was the mental effort of chasing moving targets: a new timeline to hit; a new project or program to launch; more research to do; new innovations; new products; growth by 20% every quarter, forever. Always focused on more, or new. Always focused on growth. Make a new thing, just to make another new thing. Sell a product, just to sell more of it. It was exhausting. When would it be enough? When could I enjoy and preserve what I had already achieved, instead of trading it for another goalpost?
There was no finish line in so much of the labor I was steeped in. There were always more customers to find and acquire. There was always more revenue to gain. Despite working under the umbrella of sustainable business, a purpose I supported wholeheartedly, my own sustainability had fallen to the wayside. Hence the desperation and depression that brought me to Bolivia in the first place.
As the days passed at the sanctuary, the pixelated equivocation between work and more came into focus clearly.
What a relief it was to do the same work each day. What a relief that it would never ask more of itself. What a relief that I could reach the finish line every single day, and be done with it completely until tomorrow. What a relief that my success was in service of maintaining the life of these animals:
You have to go feed the bears now. This isn’t a jog you can push off for another hour. This isn’t an email you can procrastinate sending until tomorrow. The bears need breakfast and now is the time. Go.
Maintenance was a key ingredient to life that I had forgotten to indulge.
To be clear, maintenance is not skin care or face masks or wellness supplements. Maintenance does not require us to reach outside of ourselves, chase something, purchase a new gadget or jacket or hair mask. More and new are fighting words to maintenance, which is much more ancient, much more ingrained in our cells, much kinder.
After all, for the vast majority of human history, novelty was rare. Today, novelty is our constant reality. There is always new content at our fingertips, more consumables created and marketed, a better diet to follow or disruptive self-help book published. Of course this is the case. The spine of our modern economy and culture, our main method of measurement, is gross domestic product.
But maintenance is: how do I stay alive, at this level, today. And then tomorrow. And then the next day. Maintenance is: how do I make my existence itself the ultimate measure of success?
Maintenance is not more, not 10x, not growth from today’s or yesterday’s numbers. I can’t 10x maintenance: because maintenance exists only in the timeframe of today, of now. I can’t front load feeding the bears this week by 7X’ing their meals today, so I can 10X the cats’ meals tomorrow, and achieve my annual return of 1.25X. I would not end the week with 1.25X more animals. Maintenance and growth are opposites. To favor one is to forgo the other.
Maintenance wipes the slate clean each morning. What happened yesterday is yesterday. Today we start again. Today we eat breakfast and lunch and a snack and dinner. Today we walk and move and find and hunt and gather. Today we clean ourselves and our spaces. Today we rest and commune with one another. Maintenance ends each day at 0.
I was taught, explicitly and silently, that a good life is characterized by progress, advancement, growth, promotion. My health may be good, but it could always be better. My car is reliable, but it could always be newer. I make enough money, but I could always make more. More cash, products, options, belongings, effort.
We are lulled by the philosophy that says: to thrive we should be in perpetual striving towards… something - and that something is always ahead of us, just out of reach. We are sold that thriving requires constant progress. That it requires constant more. I’m not sure how correct this is.
We sprint in the direction of more with the quiet belief that acquiring it, in whatever form it may take, will protect us from an imagined, future harm. We climb towards more with such conviction and dedication that we sacrifice our own sustainability. The pesky upkeep required by our bodies falls to the wayside, for when we have time for it, for outside of billable hours: groceries and full meals, exercise, sleep, doctor’s appointments, socialization. That is, until we reach crisis or illness or imbalance. Then those questions begin to matter. Are you sleeping well? What does your social support system look like? How much exercise do you get a week? When’s the last time you saw a doctor about this?
The truth is, if you need to grow in order to maintain, you are doing it wrong.
Do you know who is the best at maintenance? Nature. Living and nonliving organisms on this planet wake up each morning and the entire day is this: maintain equilibrium. Keep life alive. Find, hunt, eat, sleep.
In some ways, living fossil species are our last enduring teachers for maintaining life without novelty. For how to sustain and survive over millions of years, through mass extinctions, ice ages and climactic revolutions.
Tapirs and these fellow species are not what we often think of when we think of survival of the fittest, evolution, or natural selection. And yet, they prove to us that it is possible to survive and thrive without constantly evolving to meet the novelties of the present moment.
A planet-wide imbalance like climate change is what happens when we have forgotten how to simply maintain life at its most basic level. Climate change is more and more and more and production and progress and advancement and new products every season and 1.25x returns.
Nature famously has 1x returns. That’s all it needs.
Tomorrow, it will start over again.
Tomorrow, it will greet us at the fence and squeak good morning.
Next Up: Chapter 3
Sources:
All About the Terrific Tapir. Tapir Specialist Group
The Gray Fossil Site. East Tennessee State University.
Facts About Horseshoe Crabs and FAQ. Florida Fish and Wildlife
Conservation Commission
Tapiridae. American Museum of Natural History
Also. Look at these other species of living fossils. They’re so cool:
Horseshoe Crabs (special shoutout below, thanks for vaccinations, guys!)
Horseshoe crabs are over 445 million years old, outdating dinosaurs, and have existed mostly unchanged throughout that time. They have been studied closely by biologists and are critical to our modern biomedical industry and public health: their copper-based blue blood contains a compound called LAL that detects bacterial toxins; clues that are nearly impossible to detect through other means. Their blood is what allows us to protect our medical procedures from risk of bacterial infection: surgeries, injections, vaccinations (3). They frequent the beaches of Southeast Asia and the Atlantic-Gulf Coasts of North America.