My vote for the agile mascot

Jan-16-2008

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

I think I may have found a great mascot for the agile movement. It may not be the most attractive mascot, but it definitely inspects and adapts in a pretty extreme way. It’s the mangrove killifish. In a recent discovery late last year, biologists in Florida have found that the mangrove killifish spends a few months every year living in trees. The fish normally lives in muddy ponds, but when these dry up, hundreds of killifish gather inside of rotten trees until rains fill their ponds again. To do so, they completely adapt their biology to breathe air instead of water. They actually alter their gills to retain nutrients and water and excrete waste nitrogen through their skin.

Besides the remarkable biological adaptation, they make a “cultural” adaptation as well. The killifish are normally aggressively territorial, but they curb their aggression to co-habitate inside of cramped tree trunks to survive. I’ve worked in a few places in my past that could have done well by employing this little trick! On a strange little note, they’re also the only known vertebrate that can reproduce without the need for a mate.

So, how’s that for an agile mascot!?!? Any votes out there for the killifish?

P.S. I promise a more useful post tomorrow…an interview with James Coplien, the father of Organizational Patterns.