by Susie Spikol
I have always admired nature’s mutineers: animals and plants that thwart the recognized system and do their own thing.
As a child I was the sole member of my own duck-billed platypus club, endeared to this creature with the bird-like bill, beaver-style tail, and shocking ability to lay eggs.
Other charming eccentrics: the tamarack, a conifer that loses its needles every winter; male seahorses that give birth to thousands of live babies; and the short-tailed shrew, a tiny mammal that uses a lizard-like venom to paralyze its prey. I met my latest renegade while cross-country skiing out my back door in Hancock, New Hampshire, on a sunny winter day. I had stopped to catch my breath when I noticed a dime-sized brown spider crawling on top of the snow.
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