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Helen Sullivan

Helen Sullivan

The Guardian

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A hadeda: nothing can quite capture the sound of these birds, because it’s mainly just rude noise

A hadeda: nothing can quite capture the sound of these birds, because it’s mainly just rude noise
20.01.2025 10

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A cicada: ‘What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallised memory’

Of all the languages’ words for cicada, Croatian’s might be the best: cvrčak, pronounced: tvr-chak. The sound it makes is tvr-chi tvr-chi. I have a...

30.12.2024 1

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A sea anemone: I have pronounced their name incorrectly most of my life

In her book Theatres of Glass, Rebecca Stott writes about the Victorian craze for home aquariums – which swept London in the 1850s, with people...

16.12.2024 10

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A pufferfish: ‘probably nature’s greatest artist’

Pufferfish are cute, and most pufferfish are toxic. Like people, they spend their weeks moving between states of puffed up and deflated. Or,...

02.12.2024 6

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A kookaburra: ‘They think they are waking the world’

I walked out of my kitchen on an overcast morning last week, feeling depressed, trying to think my way around the US election result somehow...

18.11.2024 8

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

We are all leeches now, trying to work out what is walking towards us

Imagine if your Wikipedia page described you as a “segmented or parasitic worm” with “two head segments” and “suckers at both ends”. You...

04.11.2024 3

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A red-lipped batfish: is there anything creepier?

As you contemplate the wonders of evolution, and how a creature can be born with something weird and new, and that thing can either help it get...

14.10.2024 2

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng: she is all we want to look at

The thing to know about the pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng is that she is angry, but also she is sweet. In photographs, she is often blurry and...

19.09.2024 2

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

The nature of a starfish: ‘a disembodied head walking about on its lips’

The thing about starfish is that you tend to forget the -fish part. But when you think about that, a lot of things come into focus. For example,...

02.09.2024 7

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A clam: made of light and all the while afraid of the dark

A giant clam has hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes, which lie on the exposed flesh that lines the shell, and work like pinhole cameras. “They...

19.08.2024 1

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan

A naked mole rat: the world’s only ‘eusocial’ mammal has an endlessly pregnant queen

To read about the naked mole rat is to come across information that you wish you never knew – and then to look for more. The first thing to know...

05.08.2024 6

The Guardian

Helen Sullivan