Zoology for big people

There’s no way to start this post but to talk about what I’ve already seen in this world animal-wise. Because last night, I saw a creature that boggled my brain and I’ve encountered a few brain-boggling beasts in my very short life: swimming with schools of tiger sharks off the east coast of Malaysia, petting a fifty-pound long-snouted tapir at an animal reserve in Ecuador, riding a ten-foot high elephant named Sunshine on the island of Koh Chang. But none of this prepared me for my encounter with the Weedy Sea Dragon.

G and I bought tickets to the Academy of Sciences' weekly Night Life event, when the venue is exquisitely devoid of children and, as the publicity department raves, you can sip creative cocktails against a backdrop of live DJ music and let exotic animals transport you to equally exotic destinations around the world.

We arrive about 15 minutes before the doors open and the line is already around the block. Swarms of twenty-something’s huddle together against the cold – the knee-high boot and hipster hat are much in evidence. Forty-five years old suddenly feels conspicuously middle-aged.

The line begins to move and once inside the cavernous museum, we stand in the foyer for several minutes, taking it all in: a life-size giraffe in one corner, a neon-lit mini-bar at the opposite end, the bones of a whale hanging above, and Claude, the ten-foot albino alligator, perched atop a rocky crag in the middle of a huge indoor pond.

We wind our way up and around the spiral rainforest and move onto Africa; I’m unfortunately underwhelmed by the lackluster dioramas and stoically taxidermied safari tigers and wildebeests. They look realistic enough but they’re all in bucolically supine positions, as if nudged peacefully awake by some khaki-clad nanny in a pith helmet.

I have vivid childhood memories of going to the Natural History Museum in L.A., haunted for weeks afterwards by the enraged grizzly bear standing upright, front paws raised to the sky, lips bared, all tooth and claw. Or the mountain lion lying on its stomach, head up, eyes boring a hole straight through you, a lifeless rabbit hanging from its blood-streaked mouth.

Now those were dioramas that kept you up at night and captured the unrestrained brutality of the animal world. The Academy’s stuffed animals were ample in verisimilitude but lacking in ferocity.

But the highlight of the trip for me is the penguins; I’ve been talking about them all day and they’re slated to make a special appearance at 7pm that night. Well, someone obviously forgot to let the penguins know about their theatrical showcase, because at 7 o’clock they are all lying prostrate on their bellies, lazily fanning their thighs (do penguins have thighs?) with flippered wings. No wading, no waddling, no high jinks; I’m about to ask for my money back but G leads me downstairs to the aquarium.

The aquarium is now a tropical disco with music thumping against the glass enclosures and first dates pressing against each other while eyeing the phosphorescent fish. This floor is mesmerizing: interactive tide pools where we run our fingertips along spiny anemones and poke leathery starfish, day-glo jellyfish that float like slow-motion ghosts, a giant female octopus with python-sized tentacles. Her suction cups press against the glass as she moves herself across the windowpane, raising her diamond-shaped head colored crimson, two impossibly tiny eyes surveying the crowd.

We move among the exhibits, from the Royal Python to the Fire Bellied Toad to a school of thick-bodied groupers swimming overhead along the glass ceiling. And in the center of it all, we come to a standstill. Stopped dead in our tracks. Frozen smack dab in front of the home of the Weedy Sea Dragon.

I stopped writing just now to Google images for these psychedelic sea horses but, of course, it doesn’t do them justice. To see them “in the flesh” is mesmerizing, their plankton appendages, tubular snouts and electric-rainbow flesh. They float gracefully above the sea grass like miniature prehistoric ballerinas, hypnotizing us with their freaky beauty.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m prone to personification when it comes to the animal world, but these sea-creatures seem primordially wise, gliding zen-like beneath the water’s surface, their beady eyes mystically opaque.

People call their friends over to see, a huge crowd has gathered, the question on everyone’s lips: “What the hell are they?”

Found only around the southern coastline of Australia, they are slow-moving relatives of the seahorse and rely on their leafy protrusions to provide camouflage. The docent arrives and answers questions, one after the other. He ends with a mini-lecture: the story of the Dance of the Dragons, their mysterious mating ritual where the male sea dragon mirrors the movements of the female, a dreamy underwater waltz.

“The dance,” he says, leaning into the crowd and pausing for dramatic effect, “can sometimes last for hours.”