National Pride Month
Wildlife's always just so busy wildlife-ing around isn't it? It doesn't give a root 'n' toot how human beings vote, pray, identify, dress, or who we show our down-belows to. All it really cares about is whether you're danger or dinner - a philosophy we can hopefully all relate to.
But the wider natural world isn't immune to the concepts raised by National Pride Month - not one bit! In facts, nature plays around with gender identity, physical appearance, and gender roles all the time.
Take this little European Pearl Mussel as an example. She is born with hermaphroditic traits that she can call upon at will to literally change her gender. More crucially her species' very survival depends upon her ability to do it. She uses an intuitive blend of age, hormones, and water temperature to trigger the gender change, to positively impact her environmental and population requirements.
Every European pearl mussel starts out life as larvae, which is released into the river flow, to find a host fish (usually salmon or trout) to support it. Once attached to the gills, the larvae broods as it travels along the river, and once reaching maturity, looks for a suitably mussel-y place to call home. Here it will drop from the host fish and cling to the sand bed, where it filters nutrition from the water, reaches adulthood over about 20 years, and eventually begins the reproductive process. (The host fish is unharmed incidentally).
All good.
Except that this distribution method doesn't always drop them quite where or how they need to be. In smaller colonies for instance, where there might be a shortage of male-born mussels - or in larger populations where the majority of females are situated down-river or far away from the males - females are often too isolated to receive sperm on the river's flow. So they trigger hormonal releases that allow them to temporarily become hermaphrodites to both lay and self-fertilize their eggs.
Egg laying can actually be a very energy costly activity, and mussels reach sexual maturity very slowly (over around 18-20 years), so females will often adopt male physicality until they become older and larger, and therefore more physically able to safely undergo this part of the reproductive cycle.
Finally, changing water temperatures can negatively impact the gender balance in a mussel colony. Here the ability to change sex can mean populations have a sufficient number of males and females to reproduce. And in times of climate breakdown, we are seeing this more often, not only in mussels, but in other bivalve populations such as oysters.
Pollution has not been found to directly impact adult mussels in terms of gender change - but of course it can kill off juveniles - so the measures described above will no doubt be happening more and more frequently as we pollute and artificially warm the climate.
Sadly for the pearl mussel, only the born-females are able to hermaphrodise - which is possibly one of the reasons they now appear on the red list of endangered UK wildlife. In the case of oysters, the males have also been found to change gender when required - but changes in their environment caused by climate breakdown and intrusive fishing methods such as bottom-trawling (and indeed overfishing), are having devastating impacts on their populations.
For the time being, these little darlings are very lucky they're able to choose their gender at all - it has probably been one of the few factors keeping them in existence up until now.
A final word on Pride Month and Jewellery
The natural world is in real trouble right now. It needs you (yes you!) whoever you love, however you identify, and whatever you chose to wear today. It needs your kindness, your voice, your support, It needs your understanding.
I personally believe that true compassion comes without parameters. We cannot claim to care about the animal kingdom if we then choose to exclude certain animals from it - whether they are human animals or otherwise. My compassion is for every living being who needs it. And my jewellery is for anyone who wants to wear it. Because philosophically, there is no ethical difference between being kind to all living people and being kind to all living things. Only social conditioning convinces people otherwise.
Whilst I accept not everyone shares my exact viewpoint, (vive la difference!) I'd like to go on record and say that Barham Designs is and always will be a safe and inclusive space FOR EVERYONE.
I only ask one thing in return: for everyone to understand that there are other animals all over the world who routinely change gender, have same sex relationships, are sexually still finding their place, and who change the way they look...who really need us to be on their side. Now more than ever. If we all only get one shot at life, why not choose to make each and every life the very best, very safest - and most fun! - it can be.
Have a Happy National Pride Month.
With love, Fi