Nature is wild.
Jersey's Best|Summer 2024
He points to the luna moth, a green-winged insect that doesn't have a mouth and can't eat.
MAMADOU NDIAYE
Nature is wild.

"The only thing keeping them alive is the energy they store as caterpillars," he says in a YouTube video. "But once that runs out, so does their time."

Luna moths live for just a week, "long enough to reproduce and doom their children to the same fate of a nonconsensual hunger strike," Ndiaye says.

And the moths aren't alone.

Ndiaye gives a 14-minute rundown of what might be considered natural oddities - to humans, at least - in a 2021 video titled "Animals That Got the Middle Finger From Evolution." It's his most-watched entry on YouTube, with 16 million views.

In it, the New Jersey resident delves into the oh so many ways nature can be utterly unforgiving.

Consider the kiwi, New Zealand's small, flightless national bird.

"About as defenseless as the fruit that got named after it," he says. "Basically you're looking at a bird that can't bird." Then there's the matter of kiwi eggs, which seem way too big for their bodies. He likens the size disconnect to the average woman giving birth to a 35-pound baby.

"There's too many things wrong with them for me not to think nature had serious beef with this bird," Ndiaye says.

Don't even get him started on sloths. Ndiaye is a font of wildlife peculiarities, dangers and headlines, which he delivers in rapid-fire riffs, like a National Geographic special chased with a sped-up comedy show.

The approach has worked particularly well on TikTok, where Ndiaye, who posts as @mndiaye_97, has 16.1 million followers and a billion "likes."

From his home outside New Brunswick, he works daily on videos that he posts on TikTok, YouTube (3.3 million followers) Instagram (706,000 followers) and Facebook. For the past few years, it's how he's made a living.

This story is from the Summer 2024 edition of Jersey's Best.

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This story is from the Summer 2024 edition of Jersey's Best.

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