The Chinese Zodiac is a yearly cycle of 12 animals who finished first in the Jade Emperor's Great Race.

Chinese New Year 2025 marks the start of the Year of the Snake, followed by the Year of the Horse in 2026, and so on through the 12 Chinese zodiac animals.

The Chinese lunar calendar is based on the cycles of the moon—lunisolar—meaning the New Year shifts slightly each year. Also known as the Spring Festival, the New Year marks the shift between Winter and Spring. It begins on the new moon that appears between 21 January and 20 February, typically falling between late January and mid-February. Celebrations continue until the Lantern Festival, 15 days later.

Chinese Zodiac Animals and Personality Traits

Each Chinese zodiac sign is thought to shape the personality of those born in that year. If you were born in the Year of the Rat, you might be quick-witted and charming, while those born in the Year of the Dragon are often confident and enthusiastic.

I always forget the full list of Chinese New Year animals—it's one of those things that's beyond 7 ± 2 and just won't stick in my head. So here it is, for future reference:

The Legend of the Great Race: Why These 12 Animals?

The Chinese zodiac animals are from an old legend: the Great Race. The Jade Emperor, Chinese mythology's ruler of all gods, hosted a great race across a river. The first 12 animals to finish would earn a place in the Chinese zodiac calendar.

Cat and Rat, who were friends, hitched a ride on the back of Ox, who slowly swam through the river's deep water. As they crossed, Rat moved, knocking Cat into the river, but it was too dangerous to go back. As Ox neared the other bank, Rat jumped off, swimming the final metres and winning first place. Meanwhile, Dragon, despite being powerful, stopped to help others and finished fifth. Cat was left behind and finished last with a new dislike for rats.

Not all countries use the exact same Chinese zodiac signs. Vietnam, for example, swaps out two animals:

Chinese New Year is full of traditions designed to bring good fortune:

Red envelopes (hóngbāo) – Given to children and unmarried adults, filled with money as a symbol of luck and prosperity.

Lanterns – Hung up or released into the sky, symbolizing brightness and good fortune.

Firecrackers – Set off to scare away evil spirits and welcome the Lunar New Year with a bang.

Red and gold – The most common colours in Chinese New Year decorations, representing happiness, wealth, and good luck.

washing your hair can wash out your luck for the year

giving oranges and tangerines to hosts as symbols of abundant happiness

sweeping and cleaning the house to sweep away ill fortune

decorating windows and doors with red paint, paper cutouts and banners

giving respect and honour to gods and ancestors.

Not sure of your animal or your child's? You can find yours in this list (unless you're over 80).

If your birthday is before the Chinese New Year in January, then your animal will belong to the year before (rather like for birthday creep).

The Chinese Zodiac: Animals, Years, and Meanings

Eat the Frog is a memorable, if rather gross, metaphor that means choosing the most important thing you must do today and doing that first.

It derives from a variant of a quote that Mark Twain never said, "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."
— Not Mark Twain

Another way to think about it is that if you first Eat the Frog, everything else will be easier for the rest of the day. And won't that feel nice?

The Eat the Frog time management technique was popularised in Brian Tracy's productivity book Eat That Frog! Get More of the Important Things Done - Today!

Many tools in Tracy's book are based on the general premise that there will always be more to do than you can do. So, find the things that will have the most impact and do those first. The others will drift on by.

I once saw someone ask for advice on getting motivated to clean the house. One person answered: "Write a book."

Sometimes, our most significant and impactful goals are those on which we so readily procrastinate. Often, these will be in the important, not urgent, bucket.

You have a lot of things that need to be done or that you want to do

One of the nice things about eating the frog first thing is that getting it done feels really good. It helps build momentum for the rest of the day with a nice endorphin rush of ticking off something significant.

Decide on your Most Important Task (MIT) to tackle, ideally the night before. If it's too big and you can't finish it in one sitting, divide it into manageable chunks. Then start on the first chunk and leave everything else.

And sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to start. So consider doing just 5 minutes. Once you've started, very often, keeping going becomes easy.

Questions that come up regularly in Tracy's book "Eat That Frog", including for the Eating the Frog principle, are variations of:

What is the most important thing you could be doing?

If you weren't already doing this, would you start doing this?

What skills will take you furthest in your career?

What are you able to do best that others can't?

It all looks pretty straightforward when I read questions like these. But I have found that answering them is usually much harder.

Our goals are often interrelated. For example, earning more may require you to increase your skills first. And getting clear on what your most important goals are first is a prerequisite and also not always straightforward.

Then, what activities are the most important or will have the most impact can be unclear. And, sometimes, small actions such as an unexpected event or connection may have out-sized benefits. Or neglecting a seemingly minor task could lead to losing a significant client. But does it still make sense to try to work on the most important task first thing in the morning? Yes.

Like a child leaving a brussel sprout at the side of the plate to get cold while they eat the roast, it's easy to leave our most impactful and daunting tasks until after the easier stuff is done. But it doesn't usually help to wait.

As the saying goes, if you have to eat a live frog, it doesn't pay to look at it for long.

Face it, you'll never get caught up, so perhaps think about Oliver Burkeman's Rivers not Buckets

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Eat the Frog is a fantastic example of putting the principles of making your idea Sticky into action

Another quote "from" Mark Twain appears in Big Ideas Little Pictures: "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

The always excellent Quote Investigator describes the source of the Eat the Frog family of quotes from the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, who said, more or less, that eating a toad first thing would help steel you against the rest of the day as nothing worse will happen to you.

Eat the frog

The Village Venus effect describes the experience of someone living in an isolated village and knowing the most beautiful person there. Because the person is the most attractive person they've ever seen, it's easy to think that no one could be more so. Yet, beyond the village is a whole world of people, many of whom could be more beautiful.

The Village Venus effect can remind us that we often think within context and constraints without realising or considering what may be outside them. In that way, it can nudge us to think bigger or look outside our sphere of familiarity.

Travel is always an eye-opener for me. I'm consistently surprised (I should probably get used to it now and stop being surprised) at how ideas or delicious foods from one country or region don't reach others. Sometimes, the simplest way to innovate is to learn what people already do elsewhere.

In design research projects, we deliberately went on inspiration trips to broaden our thinking and escape the Village Venus Effect, often looking at adjacent industries. For example, when working on a premium sports equipment project, you could visit premium food stores to see what makes a food premium. Working in the US, I consistently found Asian stores a great source of inspiration for thinking wider.

I remember each time I went to the next level of my education (primary, secondary, college, Masters, PhD) whether, even though I had achieved well at my current level, I would fit in with the next calibre of students.

The Village Venus effect is related to the challenge of local optimisation—not realising there may be a higher level elsewhere—and the Dunning-Kruger effect, where it's hard to evaluate your level before you know how good "the best" can be. It's also an example of something Daniel Kahneman called What You See Is All There Is—WYSIATI.

If you're hiring and you interview five candidates, should you hire the best of those you've seen, or could there be a set of candidates in a different pool who would all be a better fit than those you've spoken with?

How many builders should you meet with before you're confident you have one who'll do an excellent job for your project?

How often do we unintentionally limit our choices by only looking at the immediate options presented to us?

The Village Venus is a term from lateral thinking originator Edward De Bono.

For a funnier take on the Village Venus watch Flight of the Conchords, The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room.

Things get more complex before they get simple

Lateral thinking: increasing the breadth of options

Lateral thinking: you don't have to be right at every step

The Village Venus Effect

Chickens and pigs is a metaphor for who's got skin in the game. Or to leave metaphors behind, who's involved in a project vs who is fully committed.

Also known as the bacon and eggs principle, it's from the old joke (sometimes told as a short story), "In a bacon and eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed."

Many people may be interested in and share their opinions on a project or decision. But only some will be responsible for delivering the project and directly accountable for its success.

Everyone may be interested in a bet, but only some players have money to lose.

The chickens and pigs metaphor used to be part of the scrum guide for developing software but was removed. While it memorably distinguishes accountability in a project, there's a danger that it alienates or diminishes valuable input that might make a project successful.

For a more conventional grouping of stakeholders in a project, see RACI

Chickens and pigs

The frog boil metaphor illustrates how it's easy to miss small changes that build up over time until it's too late. The scenario, as told, is that of a poor frog who would leap away from hot water but, if put into cooler water that is gradually warmed, won't respond in time to getting boiled.

As a metaphor, it describes a powerful and pernicious shortcoming in how we perceive the world. A student kitchen that gets messy mug-by-mug, a business with gradually slowing sales, software that builds up with tech debt, a river that is slowly polluted, a road that gets busier each day, a bay that sees fewer fish each year, content that drifts, cancer that slowly spreads, a story or behaviour that becomes normal, a website that gets slower feature-by-feature, or a climate that slowly warms are all cases where we may not be happy where we end up, but we didn't notice how we got there.

It's hard to respond to gradual change, especially when it spans generations. Jared Diamond called it out as a potential fate of the Easter Islanders and how they could have cut down the last tree. One barnacle is nothing, but many barnacles can cause significant headaches for big ships.

Fortunately, there's a flip side. Many, many things are getting better without us realising. Small positive changes, such as in attitudes, education, or healthcare, add up over time—the Destiny Instinct can mislead us. Fast and slow layers make a system, like a forest, more robust. Getting one percent better each day leads to a 37x improvement in a year. And enough molehills can make a mountain.

What a frog does, in this case, is not, apparently, true—don't try it—it's much better as a metaphor, not an experiment.

The frog boil metaphor

I've always been fascinated by how a tiny spider can create a web spanning a gap where climbing and dragging a thread across the floor would be impossible, maybe between trees, from a building to a lamppost, or over a stream. How do they do that? Here's a common technique by many orb weaver spiders — known for building orb-shaped, or circular wheel-shaped webs — for bridging the gap and creating the web.

The spider stands on the edge and lets out a long thread. It waits for the breeze to blow the thread away from them. If the thread catches onto something it can form a bridge thread.

Once it catches, the spider may reinforce the thread and then put down other anchors. These then form the frame of the web into which it will add radial threads from the centre.

The spider may then put down an auxiliary thread that provides a non-sticky frame, together with the radial threads, for it to walk on while it lays down the final sticky capture spiral. It's then set to lie in wait.

Some spiders will eat their webs at the end of the night but leave a bridge thread in place — perhaps for you to walk into in the morning — ready to rebuild the next night.

There is a vast diversity of spiders and webs. This is a fairly common example, but even within orb spider webs, there are a ton of different strategies for capturing prey. But perhaps, the next time you spot a bridge thread spanning a seemingly impossible gap this will give you a thought as to how it might have been done.

Here's a common orb spider web as a static sketch

You can watch darwin's bark spider on the BBC creating a web spanning a remarkable 25 metres

A common orb spider web

A swan in Europe was a white swan. So, naturally, swans were thought of as only white by Europeans until news came from travelers to Australia in the late 1600s where black swans are in fact relatively common. Black swan events can turn a worldview upside down. They are unprecedented, unexpected, rare, and with a significant impact.

The infrequency of black swan events means prior data about them is too little to reliably guess the likelihood of one, and you may not even think to anticipate the event anyway. Except after the fact, when all of a sudden many people will claim to have predicted it — black swan events are prone to be rationalised in hindsight, believing that all the signs were there beforehand even if they weren't.

The idea of black swan events is from Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He writes:

"One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single black bird."

Examples Taleb gives include the September 11 terrorist attack, the 2008 financial crisis, World War I, or the rise of the Internet.

More Taleb sketches: on mistakes, the firehouse effect, and the Lucretius problem. Also, hindsight bias.

Black swan events

The chaos monkey is a smart piece of software and a brilliant idea from engineers at Netflix.

The chaos monkey deliberately switches off servers in live environments at random. It takes the pain of disappearing servers and brings that pain forward. By deliberately sabotaging their own systems it created strong alignment for the team to design-in redundancy and automation for the necessary resiliency and reliability in the face of random failures. Training for this randomness helps make stronger, more resilient and fault-tolerant systems and software and keeps your movie streaming so you can keep chilling without interruptions.

The chaos monkey is a great metaphor and trigger to actively work on what life could throw at your system before it happens.

More monkey inspiration for writing and for bananas.

Chaos monkey

Content drift is how a piece of linked content may change over time such that what was once linked may in fact now be very different.

An article you link to may be corrected, opinions may be changed, content may be expanded or removed, a paywall may be put in the way, and yet the link keeps steadfastly pointing. Content drift, along with link rot — pages being lost — is one of the ways that the information we have come to rely on on the internet can be gradually undermined.

Here's a thread on content drift and link rot from Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain — at least, it was a thread on it when I wrote this. Also see: The Internet is Rotting.

Content drift

Yak shaving describes how when setting out to do something, you found you had to first do something else, which needed you to finish this other thing, and so on until you found yourself shaving a yak, or equally unrelated activity, to do the first thing you set out to do.

It's pretty frequent in life — tidying your room? — and particularly resonates in software development, where when tackling one thing, you often find yourself fixing something else, which needs you to fix something else, and so on. Here's the ever brilliant xkcd on fixing problems.

Yak shaving features, lovingly polished, in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Here's a brilliant 40s clip of Hal changing a lightbulb from Malcolm in the Middle, classic yak shaving

Early yak shaving features in the song There's a Hole in My Bucket in which fixing a bucket requires straw, which requires a knife to cut it, but the knife needs sharpening, which needs a stone, which is too dry and needs wetting with water, which needs fetching...with a bucket

The first I found of yak shaving was a short article on productivity in the first issue of Make magazine by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann.

Yak in the style of Alison Green and Adam Stower's excellent children's book, What can you Stack on the Back of a Yak?

Yak shaving

How do you know which is a Bactrian or a Dromedary camel? Which camel has 1 hump and which camel has two? And how can you remember it?

After sharing my original camel identification sketch a reader shared with me a foolproof way to tell whether you're looking at a Bactrian camel or a Dromedary camel.

The Bactrian camel has 2 humps, just like a B on its side

The Dromedary camel has one hump just like a D on its side

The Bactrian camel is found in central Asia, for instance in the Gobi desert.

The Dromedary camel is generally found in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

You may also like: stalactites or stalagmites, tortoise or turtle, crocodile or alligator, dolphin or porpoise, how to tell a centipede from a millipede

More "what's the difference between" sketches for things that are easily confused.

Bactrian or dromedary camel? Never be confused again

The story goes something like this. Back in colonial India the top Brit in charge decided there were too many cobras around Delhi. To reduce the population they put in place a cash reward, or bounty, for anyone who brought in a dead cobra. The intention was clear. Legend has it that people did bring in the cobras reliably because some enterprising souls had started breeding cobras for the very purpose of getting the bounty. When the authorities realised this they scrapped the scheme, the cobra farms closed and the bred cobras were released into the wild significantly increasing the cobra population by a few orders of magnitude. Hence, the cobra effect: when a well-intentioned measure can have the opposite effect to that desired.

It’s not clear how true this story is, but the cobra effect has been demonstrated many times. The Freakonomics podcast on the cobra effect discusses some excellent examples (with references), including:

A bounty on rats in French colonial Hanoi — where the bounty was earned by bringing in a rat tail — which went the same way as the cobra story

Removing wild pigs at Fort Benning, Georgia, at $40 a pigs tail that didn’t make a dent. It could be the hunters would bait the pigs with all sorts of tempting scraps. Many pigs learned to avoid the hunters and instead bred like crazy while well-fed on scraps.

The capital of Colombia, Bogotá, tried to reduce traffic congestion by restricting each car from driving one day during the week. The result: people started buying more than 1 car and did more driving on weekends.

Publication of proposed areas of habitat to be protected for endangered species meant land developers responded by building in those areas before the land was protected.

People are smart. Incentives work—in the sense that you tend to get what you incentivise. So be careful what you are incentivising. As Charlie Munger said: "Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome."

The cobra effect

For almost all mammals, 1.5 billion heartbeats, more or less, is how much you’ve got. From the teeniest, tiniest shrew weighing just a few grams to the largest whale — passing through animals as diverse as robins, monkeys, sea lions, and giraffes — each mammal has broadly in the region of 1.5 billion heartbeats.

Beyond just heart rate, knowing a mammal’s weight can help predict several other fundamental aspects of its life. A tiny mammal will likely have a heart that goes like crazy, live only briefly, and reach maturity quickly. A large animal, in contrast, will have a slow heart rate, a long life, and take its time to adulthood.

The most significant outlier is us, mainly because, in recent years, we’ve significantly extended our lifetime from what would be expected from Nature.

This gem, and many other fascinating insights about size, scale, Nature and physics, from the book Scale by Geoffrey West.

1.5 billion heartbeats in a lifetime

Jared Diamond’s classic book Guns, Germs and Steel, proposes some remarkable hypotheses about how the pattern of history played out, notably trying to answer the question of why it was generally the Europeans that invaded much of the rest of the world rather than the other way around. One hypothesis, striking in its simplicity if you’ve ever looked at a world map, is the significant contribution of the general orientation of the major continents.

The Americas are largely lined up north–south, while Europe and Asia (Eurasia) are largely lined up east-west. An east-west alignment means the land generally has a more similar climate, day-length and seasonal variations. The general logic of the hypothesis is that the similar latitude of an east–west alignment means animals, crops, as well as travel and trade, more easily spread across the continents than across those with a north–south alignment — of the Americas and Africa — which naturally encounter more different climatic zones.

As a simplified example, horses and other large animals and crops spread throughout the shared temperate latitudes of Eurasia. In contrast, South America’s only large domesticated animal, the thick-coated llama (and related species like the alpaca), couldn’t easily spread to North America through the impassable tropical barrier of the isthmus of Panama. They just aren’t built for it.

There are a lot of viewpoints on the theory, and Diamond includes many more factors of geography and others — like never being able to domesticate the zebra — that go towards answering his question of why Spain invaded the Americas and not vice-versa. But ever since reading his simple hypothesis, available to anyone with a world map, I’ve found it hugely intriguing.

The continental axis hypothesis

Funny how it can take nearly 40 years to learn that something as commonplace as the stereotypical owl sound is made, not by one owl, but as a duet between the male and female tawny owls.

The classic twit-twoo is actually a duet

For years, I’ve wondered at how as a kid I found the monkey bars in a playground (often a jungle gym in the US) so much easier to swing on than I do as an adult. And I see our kids swinging around easily on them, while now it’s hard for me just to hang off them. The reason why is partly to do with the square-cube law.

The square-cube law is the deceptively simple observation that as you scale up dimensions — say, as you get taller — then area of the object increases proportional to the square of the length, while volume increases proportional to the cube of length. This fundamental relationship has enormous significance in the sizes and shapes of animals and the limits of how big trees can get and how big we can build our bridges and buildings.

Because the strength of our bones, muscles or wooden beams is proportional to their cross-sectional area, this means that while the strength of a larger object, assuming the same proportions as the smaller one, increases according to the square of a length, the weight (from the volume it takes up) increases according to the cube of a length. So, relative strength decreases as size increases.

Some corollaries are therefore that children’s small size relative to the area of their muscles and bones makes them relatively stronger than adults and so they can more easily support their weight as they swing on the monkey bars. In the same way, press ups are harder for bigger people than they are for smaller. And while an ant has tiny spindly legs, those legs could easily support 50 other ants of its size, whereas for an elephant to support its own weight it needs chunky legs — not spindly ones — and there’s no chance it could get close to carrying 50 other elephants on its back.

It’s also part of the reason short trees can be spindly, but big sequoias have relatively chunkier trunks, and we need increasingly strong materials to build bigger and bigger skyscrapers compared to the shed in your garden.

Galileo discussed this back in 1638, and it still requires some getting your head around today.

For this and other fascinating insights of scaling check out Scale, by Geoffrey West.

The Square-Cube law

Owls are famous for being able to turn their heads seemingly full circle. It turns out some owls can turn their necks an amazing 270 degrees whereas our necks turn a measly 180 or so — see if you can turn your chin along your shoulder on both sides.

However, it’s likely the cause for this amazing feat is that, unlike our eyes, theirs are set facing forward and don’t rotate. So rotating their head becomes a key skill. Biomechanically they are able to turn so far by having twice the neck vertebrae as we do. If each vertebrae turns a little then having more helps them twist much further than us.

And yet the real trick is turning your neck while maintaining blood supply to your head through the arteries that also run up your neck. Rotate too far and the arteries can twist, stretch or be impeded. Owls have evolved a number of nifty strategies to help them turn their necks while maintaining blood flow. These include having the large carotid arteries towards the centre where they twist less than ours do, which run up the sides of our vertebrae. They also have loads of space around the arteries that run up inside the vertebrae and an area that may pool with blood at the base of the skull to provide a kind of reservoir if flow gets restricted. And more. All kind of amazing.

How owls’ necks turn so far round

The browse line is a distinctive line below which you don’t tend to see leaves or branches in places with ground animals, like deer, that enjoy eating leaves or branches.

Browse lines are basically caused by animals eating as high as they can reach. When everything below has been eaten, what's left behind can be a strikingly flat line of leaves at the base of the foliage.

Except for where there are giraffes or elephants where trees don’t stand much of a chance, even spiky ones.

This drawing is based on the beautiful Richmond Park in South West London which has a large number of old oaks and large herds of deer that leave a uniform underline to the canopy across the park.

The browse line

Not the easiest switch to make but given that jellyfish and starfish are not at all fish there is a move to call them sea jelly and sea star. As long as we all work to help protect them clearly it doesn’t matter a whole lot, but I think the move to sea jellies and sea stars makes good sense alongside others like the sea horse, sea cucumber, sea lion, sea lily, sea gooseberry…well, actually the sea horse is a type of fish, but you get the idea.

Sea jelly, sea star

For a closer look next time you’re at the beach. Pay close attention to whether you find one with a dextral or sinistral aperture.

Gastropods are the largest class of molluscs which includes limpets, snails and sea slugs. For those who weren’t sure.

Info from the 1971 book, Discovering Sea Shells by Barry Charles

Typical gastropod anatomy

There’s a famous photo series by Eadweard Muybridge that shows, unequivocally, that while galloping all four of a horse’s legs leave the ground. I’d always heard that’s what they trying to find out at the time, but from what I’ve read it was more a question of at what points do a horse’s legs leave the ground. The photos show the somewhat surprising state of leaving the ground while the horse’s legs are tucked, not when they are outstretched. It’s a lovely example of what Edward Tufte calls small multiples.

Do horses legs leave the ground at a gallop?

What is the difference between venomous and poisonous?

Venomous animals inject venom through bites, stings and the like, though they often avoid it—think snakes, spiders, stingrays, wasps, etc.

Poisoning is when a poison is passively transferred to us through absorbing, consuming or inhaling it—think amphibians, plants, fungi, etc. It might be through touching the skin of a poisonous frog, eating a poisonous animal or breathing in poisonous spores.

Just a few animals manage to be both venomous and poisonous, such as some snakes that inject venom and also have toxic skin from eating poisonous toads.

And a third category you'll know to steer clear of is toxungenous animals that spray, fling or spit toxins toward potential threats. These include the skunk or the aptly named bombardier beetle that sprays acid from its rear.

Fortunately, our instincts are well-trained from centuries of evolution and experience to avoid anything venomous or poisonous, but one day, it may pay to know the difference.

This sketch features in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures

Venomous, poisonous - what’s the difference?

While our bodies will generally make light work of repairing a cut in our skin or even healing a bone, some animals are able to go much further.

Deer and moose antlers are grown and shed each year at significant cost—a moose may have antlers that spread six feet and weigh upward of 40 pounds.

An axolotl can regenerate entire limbs, and a lizard a whole tail.

A flatworm can survive being cut in two, with the back half even regrowing a head and brain.

And in one of the most striking examples, sea stars are able, in many cases, to regrow a lost limb, and in some species, a lost limb contains everything it needs to regenerate a new body.

This sketch appears in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures

Animals that regenerate

Bycatch is other stuff you caught when trying to catch something else. Bycatch makes me sad. Any fish or sea creatures can be caught unintentionally during fishing, and it also affects larger animals such as sharks, turtles and of course dolphins. When learning from a whale shark expert on the island of Utila in Honduras he told us one of the simplest ways to help is to give up eating prawns. As London’s Maritime Museum puts it:

“For every kilo of tropical prawns you buy, 15 kilos of unwanted sea-life may be thrown back dead as ‘by-catch’. Trawling for prawns can also trap turtles, unless a special device keeps them out of the nets. Farming prawns is often no better, since mangrove swamps may be destroyed to make room for prawn ponds.”

Prawns are particularly bad as they are often caught with bottom trawling. I once read a description of it as wanting to catch a cow, and choosing to drag a net by helicopter over the entire farm, and so also catch the tree in the garden, the dog, the pigs and the farmer’s wife in the process.

Check out the WWF bycatch page for more including a bottom trawler in action.

Bycatch

The length of your arms relative to your height. Typically:

Da Vinci’s classic Vitruvian man has an arm span equal to his height and therefore an ape index of 1. An ape index greater than 1 (arm span longer than height) seems to be helpful for rock climbers, swimmers (Michael Phelps = 1.06), boxers, professional basketball and goalkeeping.

It’s also known as the gorilla index though I couldn’t actually find a measure for gorillas remarkably. A quick calculation shows for an average male gorilla at 1.75m tall and arm span of 2.45m that the gorilla index for a real gorilla would be = 2.45 / 1.75 = 1.4. I’d definitely fancy the gorilla in rock-climbing and boxing…

It’s sometimes calculated as arm span minus height, that would give gorillas a ridiculous: +70

I have not been able to figure out if your ape index changes from a child to adult though it seems like it might.

Ape index

How do barnacles move? Well, the barnacles we see don’t move. But when they’re little, they do swim, and once they’ve found their spot they basically cement themselves in place.

They’re what’s known as sessile animals — ones that don’t move once settled, along with mussels and coral. Now that would be a different way of life.

How do barnacles move anyway?

And, let’s face it, most of us are more likely to encounter camels in the Middle East and Africa than trekking around the Gobi Desert. The wild bactrian camel is sadly on the critically endangered list.

And, there is this simpler way to remember the difference that a reader passed on to me: dromedary is one hump like a D on its side, and bactrian is two humps like a B on its side. Simples.

Camel identification: 1 hump dromedary, 2 humps bactrian

A centipede has 1 pair of legs on each body ring, and a millipede has two on most body segments. Hence millipedes will generally have plenty more legs to go round. As far as I know this is fairly foolproof. Though generally speaking there are more obvious ways to tell, such as millipedes looking more like long armoured nice round worms and usually moving slowly, and centipedes zipping around while generally seeming more long-legged and insecty, with longer antennae at the front and longer angled back legs, sometimes with hooks for defence.

If you were offered to pick one of them up, you’d probably pick the millipede.

Also, in case you were tempted to think they are insects, they’re not because insects have six legs. They are arthropods (loosely meaning jointed feet) along with insects, spiders, scorpions and crustaceans, but in their own subphylum of, aptly named, myriapoda (loosely meaning many legs).

Check out core insect anatomy for a sketchplanation insect refresher.

Animals sketches