Nature is full of surprises and astonishing details when you know how to look. Just see the difference in size between the small dassie (Rock hyrax) and the massive southern right whale (Eubalaena australis). Whilst whale watching, I happened to stumble upon a small dassie feeding on the local weeds and flowers. I wondered to myself: what would the dassie say to the whale?
The size cannot be compared. The whale weighs about 20 000 kg. The dassie is probably 5 kg. What would the conversation be?
"Hey mister," the dassie would say.
"Whaaat," the whale would wonder. Did a mouse speak?
"You are blocking the sun," the dassie would say running around looking for another flower to eat.
"Not so fast," the slow whale would respond without moving much.
Running around the whale three or four times, the dassie would jump up and down the whale like it was a rock.
The dassie was so friendly and did not mind me being so close to it. It kept on eating its meal, with the whales just around the corner. The fur on the dassie is beautiful, it looks like you want to touch it. But knowing this is a wild animal, I did not get too close to it. People are always bitten by them as people want to get close and touch them. This is very dangerous and I do not know why people always do it.
All of the yellow dandelion flowers are by now gone. The whale does not know what a dandelion is. The whole animal kingdom relies on the bigger one to eat the smaller one. But one moves up this ladder slowly and incrementally. Jumping from a dassie to a whale is skipping various steps. But it is always amazing to think about the vast difference in size and magnitude.
And this got me thinking again: the dassie eats all the yellow flowers so there is no seed left for new plants, and the whale eats all those fish in one swooping bite, how is it that life can still go on and generate new life? But this is where we humans come in with our own interference with life. We deplete land so there are fewer flowers and weeds, and we overfish the ocean so there are fewer resources for the whales to use.
I could sit for hours on end watching him/her go at it like a lawn mower. All the while in the background the whale is just chilling in the ocean.
It is almost like the whale greeted us. We are land dwellers. I and the dassie are both land dwellers and we cannot even fathom life in the ocean. But I can also not fathom the life of the dassie.
A philosopher once said that even if a lion could speak English we would not understand it. I think it was Wittgenstein. Another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, said we would not know what it was like to be a bat. But here I stand and all I want to know is how that flower tasted to the dassie.
Apparently, they eat flowers and leaves which most other animals find either unappealing or it is toxic to them. What a brilliant metaphor for the resilience of this beautiful animal on the coast of South Africa.
I hope you enjoyed the musings and photography. All of the images are my own, taken with my Nikon D300. The musings are also my own, albeit inspired by the small dassie that accompanied me whilst whale watching. Stay safe.
