When I was a kid I loved to eat bananas. I ate them all of the time. Unfortunately something happened to me right around the time I was in high school. I consumed a banana and got very sick. Like throat closing, can’t breathe, need to go to the ER kind of sick. Life was never the same after that.

I developed many more food allergies since—bell peppers, eggplant, strawberries, mango, kiwi—you get the idea. I also acquired a latex allergy due to fruit allergies. It’s funny how things can cross react like that.

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Emperor Penguins go through a death-defying mating ritual whereby they forgo food and shelter for months at a time. They waddle over 70 miles to the same patch of ice each time in order to mate and give birth and ostensibly to keep their young from harm’s way, though not always successfully. Sea turtles live for well up to, and sometimes beyond, 100 years, throughout which they travel thousands upon thousands of miles all over the world, from shore to shore to shore. And every time they nest, they return to the same space to within a hundred yards on the same beach on which they were born. When the queen ant of a colony dies, the worker ants quickly take a batch of the most recently hatched female eggs,to a separate enclosed “room” and when the larvae hatch, they receive a specially nutritious diet. The worker ants then seal the room and leave the developing larvae to devour one another, and whoever emerges the victor is hailed the new queen. These behaviors are, for the most part, completely baffling to us. And so we, as humans, have created a concept called “instinct” to help us understand the behavioral patterns of animals. “Instinct”, as defined by Webster’s Medical Dictionary is:

1 : a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason

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