Against the backdrop of the rest of nature, the big pink bird on the pillars sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll's imagination. And yet flamingos emerge from the laboratory of evolution, as surprising and inevitable as the neocortex, so impossibly exaggerated that their group is called flamboyance.
But the fire of flamingos does not come from within – it is found in the form of experience and the color of the history of life in a person. The story of how pink went from volcanoes to wings is the story of life on Earth, its beauty and confusion, defying eternity and shattering the categories we try to contain.
When Carl Linnaeus laid the foundation for biological nomenclature in 1735, he divided the living world into two categories: Regnum Animale (“the animal kingdom”) and Regnum Vegetable (“vegetable kingdom”). Although microscopes had been around for more than a century, he did not associate them with single-celled organisms, unsure of where to put them. (It is the nature of the human animal to reject and deny what we cannot distinguish.) More than a century later, the year he coined the word. the environmentGerman marine biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a third class of microorganisms, which he called Protista – “the kingdom of primitive forms.” (Haeckel was so confused by the abundance and complexity of fungi, which contradicted our basic ideas about life, that he kept moving between Plantae and Protista, finally settling on the latter; it would be another century until they were given their own kingdom or, according to the more representative term of the family scientist Giuliana Furci, “kingdom.”)
Underlying all these differences was the basic assumption that all living things are eukaryotes, from the unicellular paramecium to the great blue whale, or prokaryotes – bacteria and all the remaining small life forms.
However, in 1977, as Voyager entered space carrying the Golden Record intended to represent life in our Pale Blue Dot, microbiologist and biologist Carl Woese made a shocking discovery – micro-organisms found in volcanic hot springs, whose ribosomal DNA sequence he was investigating, turned out to be a microbial life-form-form-form-form-form that did little to eukayo. He called it Archaea. Soon, the tree of life had a third branch.
Born with gray feathers, flamingos spend the first years of their lives eating only aquatic shrimp – aquatic crustaceans that also feast on organic matter that contains the same carotenoid pigment that remains in autumn leaves when chlorophyll falls. Haloarchaea – extremophile Archaea that thrive in hypersaline environments – are the main source of this carotenoid in shrimp. (That's also why Himalayan salt is pink.) Unfazed by the constant sun exposure in open water, these tiny titans of survival protect their DNA from UV rays by synthesizing a red carotenoid that makes its way across the Rube Goldberg metabolic machine into flamingos' feathers.
It's not just that flamingos digest archaea, they digest them to turn their pigtails into the color of feathers – modern molecular analysis reveals that archaea are still alive in flamingo feathers, maybe the way we passed through us, living in us, has modern colors in the color of something deeper than memory, something that shines in my life.
