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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

The nature of ...

A column dedicated to interesting animals, insects, plants and natural phenomena. Is there an intriguing creature or particularly lively plant you think would delight our readers? Let us know on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com

15 July 2024

  • Helen Sullivan

    A hairy caterpillar: a ginger toupee, twitching cartoonishly

    Helen Sullivan
    When I was in school, for a few weeks every year, caterpillars were the most exciting thing happening

1 July 2024

  • Helen Sullivan

    A rat: ‘We can no longer live as rats: we know too much’

    Helen Sullivan
    Most rats, like most people, try to distinguish themselves

17 June 2024

  • Helen Sullivan

    A cat: ‘They smoked pipes, played dice’

    Helen Sullivan
    In more than one image from 1900s Japan, they look hungover

3 June 2024

  • Helen Sullivan

    An orchard: a place where you tame trees, or try to

    Helen Sullivan
    My grandmother’s orchard stopped me in my tracks, and I only have to read the word to feel the shade of those trees

22 January 2024

  • Helen Sullivan

    A piranha: it is boiling the water you’re swimming in and taking bites out of you

    Helen Sullivan
    They don’t chew: they bite, the meat goes straight into their stomach, and they bite again

8 January 2024

  • Helen Sullivan

    A cockatoo: they have so much fun because they are so clever

    Helen Sullivan
    They know how to get fed by people – like babies, you can’t ignore their squawks

12 December 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A robin: inside her small dark eye, a quantum entanglement

    Helen Sullivan
    A symbol of spring and rebirth, the robin is a favourite of gardeners and poets alike

27 November 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A nautilus: a mass extinction event survivor in a galaxy spiral shell

    Helen Sullivan
    How does a species survive hundreds of millions of years unfazed? You must live in a shell – and it must grow with you, chamber by chamber

14 November 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A crab: every bit of its armour is a container for a precious object

    Helen Sullivan
    It has a complicated face, like an intricate chest of drawers, or a jewellery box: press on this part and it opens to reveal a mouth, on that, and an eye pops out

30 October 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A jacaranda: making the blue summer sky even bluer

    Helen Sullivan
    Nobody experiences the purple light of the blossoms as totally as the bee inside her petal trumpet

16 October 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A cloud: ‘reading the earth with its blind shadow’

    Helen Sullivan
    We wake up and look outside, practising cloud divination

2 October 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A slug: there is but one external clue to the very, very strange things going on inside

    Helen Sullivan
    Behold the slug and you behold a teenager, in all of her magic and power

18 September 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A brontosaurus: we are willing to forgive this colossal dinosaur its tiny head

    Helen Sullivan
    Perhaps we introduce children to dinosaurs long before they understand evolution to teach them to imagine the past and to love doing so

4 September 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A sea urchin: they are method actors performing The Waste Land

    Helen Sullivan
    Their five jaws are arranged in a shape Aristotle described as a ‘lantern’ but should have called a ‘horrible beak’

21 August 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A horseshoe crab: it is only when you see the shell wet from the water, close up, that you know they are real

    Helen Sullivan
    They have milky blue blood that can detect toxins – and people in lab coats want it

7 August 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A giant oarfish: the mirrored harbinger of earthquakes

    Helen Sullivan
    Oarfish swim vertically, moving up and down and side to side like a cursor. It would be easier to believe they do not exist

25 July 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A tortoise: it does not live inside a shell, it is a shell

    Helen Sullivan
    Touching a tortoise’s shell is like touching someone’s hand through glass or putting your fingertip on a static electricity ball

10 July 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A deer: famous for their antlers but why not their tails?

    Helen Sullivan
    In Celtic mythology they’re known as “fairy cattle”

29 May 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    A skeleton: it’s a good thing bones don’t blush

    Helen Sullivan
    ‘He knew the anguish of the marrow’

15 May 2023

  • Helen Sullivan

    An egg: unfertilised, it is one giant cell

    Helen Sullivan
    Fertilised, it can hold things shaped as differently as: a snake, an auk, a platypus; an emu, a tortoise, a peacock
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