Perrin Ireland

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296 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Perrin Ireland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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How to Be a Better Human · Why should you care about animal sex? (w/ Perrin Ireland) · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

Today on Thirsty Science, the magical sea cucumber anus.

Sea cucumbers use their buttholes, number one, as a second mouth to filter feed on algae.

Number two, when they're reproducing and they need more oxygen because they're consuming a lot of energy, they use their butthole to breathe.

Number three, as a defense mechanism, they eject these sticky tubules out of their anuses to entangle predators.

And number four, sometimes they house a little friend in their butthole, the pearlfish, which for some reason doesn't activate their tubules and has more resistance to kind of their internal poison to invasions than other fish.

Pearlfish just kind of hang out inside the sea cucumber butthole.

Hi, I'm Perrin Roosevelt Ireland, an artist and environmentalist and author of Poking the Squid, What We Can Learn from Animal Sex.

Sure, I think I can.

show a little yeah yeah so i work in watercolor comics and the way that i learned my biology degree in undergraduate where we met is by drawing what i was finding in lab uh while i pretended i wanted to be a scientist when i actually just wanted to make art about science the whole time

And so it's exciting to hear you say that it's not like other science writing books because it is in serious conversation with what's happening inside the academy and feminist and queer theory.

But it's like coming inside my journals and my sketchbooks of how I learned my way through that, which is hand-drawn watercolor comics.

If something doesn't make sense to me, the problem is how it was explained.

It's not that I can't get difficult things, which is a wild way to go through the world.

I didn't really know that.

But for me, it's really about, I think, a combination of wanting to unpack things and understand how they work and also wanting to treasure them.

So I make really goofy work.

during a sixth mass extinction.

And so even though I am trying to be playful and I find a lot of nature to be an excellent practical joke on us, on deep time, on evolutionary time, on whatever, I also am making eulogies as I go.

And it feels urgent and important to be treasuring and documenting

And paying homage, which I am someone who happens to do with watercolor paint, each animal in this particular precipice that we're on.

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