Say It Ain’t So, Olivia!

For the past couple of years, I’ve eagerly started off all my Wednesdays by reading Olivia Judson’s science blog at The New York Times. This morning, she informed readers that she’s going on sabbatical for a year. No one can begrudge her this breather. She’s been blogging about biology more or less relentlessly for the past two years, with only one break that I can remember (in her absence, she invited wonderful guests to blog for her as substitutes). Still, for admirers like me, this is a sad day.

Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is not merely a blogger. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College, London, and the author of the knowledgeable, award-winning and extremely comic, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex. She uses her blog to write lovingly and informatively about an enormous range of topics in biology—with a special love for the hilariously varied ways in which all the world’s various organisms reproduce—addressing an audience of science and nonscience people alike. Sometimes her passion leads her to the cusp of anthropomorphizing, but to me, this is merely her way of bringing alive in prose what is deeply alive in reality.  (The extensive notes at the end of each post refer readers to reputable science sources, acting as counterweights to any suggestion that she might be Disneyfying her subjects.)

Employing beautiful, limpid prose, Judson often seems more like a novelist than a science writer. She likes to talk about her subjects by revealing how she herself first experienced them—for example, she tells us about the parasitic nature of the cuckoo bird by slipping it into a tale that begins with her taking a stroll through the woods. Her writing combines the elegance of Proust with the precision of Flaubert and the liveliness of Austen; readers are educated almost as an aside. Consider this paragraph, selected from today’s final post, in which she reflects on the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (note how she doesn’t hesitate to insert the word “foolhardy” in describing the behavior of rats):

[The parasite] spends most of its time in rats and cats, and needs to get from one to the other. Infected rats, instead of avoiding places that smell of cat urine, show a foolhardy attraction to them—which presumably makes the rats more likely to be captured and eaten, thus allowing the parasite to return to the body of a cat. Since organisms that cause sexually transmitted diseases can only spread if those who are infected copulate with new partners, you might therefore expect they would evolve to enhance their host’s desire for new sexual encounters. Testing this in humans is problematic. But it could be looked at in other animals. Indeed, there is tentative evidence that insects are sometimes victims of such manipulation.

One of my all-time Judson favorites, “Tree-mendous,” was part of the author’s “life form of the month” series. In this particular post on trees, she starts off by looking out her window at a lovely, lone, big tree in the garden, moving from there to the very simple question (which turns out to have a very complex answer), “What is a tree?” Since reading this post, I can’t look at my own little 20-year-old bonsai tree without quietly whispering to it, “Tell me, you darling little thing you, are you truly a tree?”

Most bloggers thrive on complaining, whereas Judson lives off celebrating.  All you need in order to feel joy, she seems to say, is to come along with me while I wander around looking at the stunning variety of organisms that live on this earth. The good news in today’s post is that Judson says she’ll be back. In the meantime, all her posts are archived on the Times “Opinionator” We bsite, which we can peruse whenever we want.