This week I have had a lot of fun designing a fabric for my Spoonflower collection. Each week, Spoonflower sets a contest design brief and the most recent was this:
“Inter-species animal friendships”
which got me thinking. I remembered from somewhere back in the past, that crocodiles have a symbiotic relationship with a certain bird. After a short internet search, up it came: the bird is the Egyptian Plover. Apparently crocodiles have ‘primitive teeth’ so they can only tear their food, and can’t chew it, so they get meat stuck in their teeth which can make their teeth go bad and give them toothache. So when they need their teeth cleaning the crocodiles open their mouths and the little plovers hop right in and do the job, getting a lunch for themselves at the same time.
I am fascinated by the fact that the crocodiles don’t clamp down their jaws and have a quick plover snack and that the birds are apparently unafraid to hop inside those terrible jaws. Surely there must be some other good food source around for them that would be less risky? So I called the design ‘The Crocodile and the Crazy Birds’. As to why I decided on this theme, well it may be because I have been several times to the dentist in the last couple of months…
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