Nature Is Weird, and I Mean Genuinely, Structurally, Concerning-About-the-Universe Weird

The thing about the natural world is that most of us learned about it in school from a very limited set of textbooks, and the textbooks, by necessity, had to pick a small representative sample. The result is that the average adult walks around with maybe two hundred animals worth of biological knowledge, plus a handful of common plants, and the rest of the planet, all the millions of species we never got to, is treated as a kind of generic green-and-brown background. The funny nature memes that fill galleries like this are essentially the rest of the planet finally getting its moment.

What’s specifically interesting about this era of nature content is how much of it comes from amateur photographers, hobbyist biologists, and curious people who just happened to point a camera at something. A generation ago, the only nature you saw was the nature a major publisher decided was worth photographing. Now, somebody in a backyard can post a microscope shot of a beetle foot, and the entire internet can see that beetles have, apparently, been wearing tiny disco balls this entire time. The weird animals economy has democratized in a way that documentary television never quite managed.

There’s also a recurring pattern in these galleries where the weirdness is, on closer inspection, completely normal for the organism in question. The strange plants that look like monkeys are doing their normal thing. The blue volcano is just sulfur burning. Nature is not actually weird. Nature is, mostly, exactly what it has always been. We’re just finally getting better cameras.

The broader thing this whole genre captures, beyond the obvious delight of each individual photo, is a small ongoing correction to how disconnected most adults are from the actual texture of the natural world. The average person now lives in a city, works inside, and goes outside mostly to walk between buildings. The nature content showing up online is, in many cases, the closest some people get to the wider biosphere all year, and the wider biosphere is, it turns out, much stranger than anybody mentioned.

There’s also something quietly hopeful about how many people are still genuinely delighted by this stuff. The internet is, on most days, an exhausting place. But there’s a corner of it where the only content is somebody pointing at a sad rain frog and laughing about how its face looks, and the comments section is full of strangers agreeing that the frog is, in fact, having a hard time. The whole exchange is sweet in a way the rest of the platform mostly isn’t.

Nature is weird. Nature is going to keep being weird. We are going to keep being surprised, and the surprise, for once, is a good one.