Panda, shmanda.
So we don't have a Tai Shan, the heart-meltingly adorable 6-month-old panda that is drawing unprecedented crowds to the National Zoo. Who needs cute, anyway? This is Baltimore, where cute has never held much sway. Cute is fleeting. Cute is shallow. And cute, it bears repeating, is sold out at least through January.
Avoid the "panda-monium," Baltimore, and take solace, if not pride, in the fact that, while Washington may have cornered the market on cute, our town - even with its zoo closed in January and February - boasts some of the strangest, quirkiest, dare we say ugliest, creatures on the planet.
It's subjective, of course - eye of the beholder and all that - but if you are weary of the cute and cuddly and long to gaze at beings whose appeal lies, shall we say, somewhere deeper, you don't have to go far.
Between the National Aquarium, the Maryland Science Center and area nature centers and wildlife preserves, one can view life forms every bit as repulsive (at first glance, anyway) as Tai Shan is endearing.
Take the shingleback skink.
Please.
This reptile, which stores its fat in its tail to survive the dry season, is unlikely to win any beauty contests; it resembles an internal human organ more than anything else. It doesn't exactly exude personality, either, preferring mostly to lie around. But who knows? With some good public relations, and maybe a "skink cam," it could capture the nation's heart the way Tai Shan has. Or at least its pancreas, which it more resembles.
"Perhaps they don't have the immediate appeal of the panda, but I wouldn't call them `ugly,' " said Hillary Bates, spokeswoman for the aquarium, where the skink is one of 1,800 creatures in the new exhibit Animal Planet Australia: Wild Extremes.
A better local candidate for stardom might be Bill, a 4-inch-long (twice that when he stretches out) banana slug who resides in a wine cooler at the Carrie Murray Nature Center in Leakin Park.
Sure, he's spineless (that's what makes him an invertebrate) and, yeah, he leaves behind a trail of sticky slime, and true, his eyes - poised at the end of retractable tentacles - aren't the kind we humans usually adore. Maybe he wouldn't pull in numbers like the panda, but there's no reason, with proper handling (gloves are recommended), he couldn't become a major draw.
"He's a classic specimen," Lloyd Tydings, curator of the insect zoo at the nature center, said of Bill, one of eight slugs originally in the collection.
