I’m taking a break from the crisis to talk about animals, that is, non-human animals.

Animals are like us in a lot of ways. As part of a tour I give as a volunteer docent, I point out that grey whales have a dominant pectoral fin, either right or left, just as we have a dominant hand, and that baleen is made of keratin, as are human hair and nails.

In most ways, animals are different from us. Marine invertebrates, for example, seem to live much longer than we do, so much longer that we really don’t know how long. When folks ask how long seastars live, we say 80 years, but it’s a guess. They might live twice as long. Anemones seem to live for hundreds of years. How would short-lived creatures like us ever figure it out?

Most–all?–trees live for hundreds of years, or at least they did before people were around. As documented in Hidden Life of Trees, trees play the long game, planning pollination cycles and controlling predators with respect to years-long environmental factors. Trees living near humans Die Young.

But even I do not think trees are animals, so let’s undigress. A raccoon who climbed a 25-story building had has Andy Warhol moment recently. Although that’s higher than usual for raccoons, or so we think, they are very good climbers, and this one was certainly in no danger of falling. People projected their own climbing skills and fear of heights onto this animal, possibly because we can’t seem to consider any topic without “ME” front and center.

People ask how marine mammals can “hold their breath” during long dives. It’s a reasonable question, but the answer is, they don’t. Their various strategies include emptying their lungs (to avoid “the bends”); storing excess oxygen in their muscles and their thick, viscous (compared to ours) blood; lowering their heart rates, some to as low as 4 beats per minute; and switching to anaerobic respiration, yet without the negative effects we get, which modern science can’t yet explain.

The most popular question for the wharf docents is, How do the sea lions get onto the planks under the wharf? The planks are a few feet above the water most of the time. When I’m off-duty, sometimes I answer questions if I hear them, but often I just listen. Sans authoritative input, most people conclude they wait for high tide. Often people say, That makes sense. But it doesn’t. Why would animals choose to live somewhere they can only access twice in 24 hours? Sea lions dive down a few feet then race up, arcing six or eight feet above the water, and landing, splat, on the crossbeams.

Back to trees. Thinking about how the coastal redwoods get nutrients from the fog, then return them to the sea in the form of leaf litter, I concluded, that seems like an ecosystem, or a piece of one. But then I wondered about the creatures and processes in the ocean that put the nutrients into the water, and the prevailing weather patterns that stir up the ocean surface, create the fog, and move it onto the shore. I know banana slugs are the main detritivores in the redwood forest; are they also part of this cycle? The ocean currents and the topology of the coast seem to play a role. There may be different sea creatures who break down the leaf litter. I know there are interactions among the different types of trees in the forest as well.

Where to draw the line? As a swarm of individuals, we want to reduce our observations to scale, a behavior, an understandable subset we can explain or diagram. It’s hard for us to perceive or even accept large systemic effects: Flying really is safer than driving! So maybe Earth is only one Ecosystem. Just as the human microbiome seems to explain most of the diseases plaguing mankind, all the holes we are ripping in Biome Earth could explain extinctions, weather extremes, and other planetwide disfunctions.

The topic didn’t turn out to be as light as I planned.