Ultraviolet Chimera

“Platypuses Glow Under Black Light. We Have No Idea Why” — Cara Giaimo (New York Times, November 13, 2020) In your genome lies the secret of your offshoot origin, the genetic trail that tracked you when your path & ours diverged— Hybrid hoax with reptile habits, though a mammal, more or less– Jurassic fugitive, descendant of the Mesozoic mess, did carnosaurs & theropods hunt you among the horsetails? Did you bask in ginkgo-shade then dive away when danger neared? Otter-furred & waterproof, defender of opposed positions, with a foothold in the future & a passport to the past— Are you a mammal? I’m not sure— You brood upon the eggs you lay but feed your young with mother’s milk: oddest merging of fur & scale. But how much stranger is it when you paddle, duckbill first, hunting down the moving target of a shrimp’s electric field? —Now we’re told you even glow when bathed in ultraviolet light, an aquatic aquamarine invisible to human vision . . . Good camouflage, perhaps, from predators stalking that hidden spectrum, or maybe some ancestral quirk our lucky forerunners once shared? I like to think that’s it: that all our forebears glowed blue-green, fluorescent in primordial wetlands among dragonflies & ferns, our distant kin a heady hodgepodge that defies taxonomy, the UV light against their fur kindling more beauty than we knew.