As a wildlife specimen, the gila monster is as off-putting as they come. This lizard’s head seems too big for its body, its legs are short, it’s slow and sluggish, and its venom is fatally toxic.
It’s hardly a poster child for National Wildlife Week, coming up April 5-9.
But wait – millions of human beings owe the gila monster a debt. Some years back, research revealed that its poisonous venom contains a hormone that slows digestion.
This was the foundation for the development of Ozempic, approved in 2017 for treatment of Type 2 diabetes and offering an attractive side effect: weight loss.
Ozempic, which mimics the hormone, quickly became a social media sensation in overweight America. How sensational? At one point it was being marketed online more frequently than Viagra.
In this wildlife case, beauty is clearly in the eye of the beholder, especially if the beholder is Dr. John Eng, an endocrinologist who did much of the gila monster research.
He once told an interviewer that this ungainly critter, which lives in the American Southwest and Mexico, “really is a beautiful lizard.”
And, he added, “The question is, what other animal has something to teach us that can be of future value? … We will never know their value if they are gone.”
So believed the late photographer Nancy Newhall, who wrote, “The wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”
Provocative thoughts as we approach the annual celebration of non-human (and sometimes homely) creatures sharing our good green Earth.
If you think the gila monster is ugly, you’ll cringe at the naked mole rat, a hairless, buck-toothed underground dweller in Africa. It does its share of good by aerating the soil as it burrows.
Research on the mole rat provokes scientific curiosity: Why is it resistant to cancer and diabetes, and why does it live way longer than other rodents?
A recent BBC program noted that while these wrinkled creatures are “not the most attractive animals on Earth,” they may hold the key to understanding a range of human conditions.
Reason enough for reflection on how our human activity threatens wildlife.
Animals can’t chide us for climate change, urban sprawl, pollution, and deforestation – except for one species.
That would be the vanishing aye-aye, an endangered African lemur that helps control insect populations, but has been hunted down to precarious levels.
Some say it’s as unattractive as the gila monster, with its saucer-eyed visage and other physical oddities – one of which could indeed make it a poster child for berating us without saying a word.
How so?
According to the Smithsonian magazine:
“At the end of each aye-aye’s small hands are six fingers, including a long and adroit middle finger.”
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
