Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

The skies opened in Cape Town this week, marking the advent of the province’s legendary winter rains (hey, it wasn’t called the Cape of Storms for nothing). Intense as these rains may be, at least they’re relatively predictable. For example, if you're a recent semigrant who leaves home without a jacket, that's when it will rain.
But in the sweltering summer months of India, when the monsoon is fashionably late, some folks turn to a different solution: frog weddings (or Bhekuli Biya if you’re in Assam and feeling linguistically accurate), a time-honoured Hindu ritual designed to convince the rain gods to get on with it already. The logic is that frogs croak when they’re in the mood for romance, and that croaking is basically nature’s group chat alerting the clouds that it’s time to pour. Naturally, if you speed up the love story, the weather might take the hint.
Villagers catch a couple of unsuspecting frogs, clean them up, and then dress them in traditional Assamese wedding gear. We’re picturing tiny, damp couture. They’re then placed on a platform, tied together with a red thread, and married off by a priest who performs a full puja (prayer ceremony). Vermilion is applied to the bride frog’s forehead to seal the deal.
And yes, this does sound like something Disney, Dreamworks or Studio Ghibli was involved in. We can imagine the squeals of joy from toddlers in attendance.
After the ceremony, the newlyweds are released into a nearby pond to honeymoon in peace. If they stay close together, it’s considered a sign that the rain gods have RSVP'd yes. If not… well, it was worth a shot.
Sometimes, it works a little too well. Case in point: Madhya Pradesh, July 2019. Locals married two frogs to woo Indra, the rain god. The skies responded with enthusiasm, so much so that floods followed. In an emergency weather-control manoeuver that could only happen in this story, the frogs were summarily divorced. Since the original two frogs couldn’t be found, they were symbolically separated in Bhopal using two clay frogs. Clearly, that relationship had gotten too intense for the atmosphere to handle.
So next time your weather app lets you down, just remember: somewhere out there, a frog wedding might be in progress. Or a divorce, for that matter.
Frog weddings are probably a hit on social media, but the court of public opinion can become a nasty place for corporates that get it wrong. Here's the thing though: does it actually matter? How much online outrage translates into lost revenue? Using the examples of SeaWorld and Duolingo, Dominique Olivier takes a closer look in this excellent piece>>>
Read on for a tale of gardening gophers who tackled a post-eruption volcano (we don't make this stuff up, promise), as well as Dominique's Fast Facts about biases, phenomena and effects.
Have a great day!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

The court of public opinion: does it matter?

When the going gets tough, the tough get gophers

TL;DR: In the wake of the most destructive volcanic eruption in North American history, an unlikely team of rodent gardeners was called in for a mission unlike any other. Cue Mission Impossible theme song.
Back in 1980, Mount St. Helens decided it had had enough. After a magnitude-5.1 earthquake and an avalanche rudely yanked the lid off its magma chamber, the volcano exploded in a spectacular tantrum of lava, ash, and debris. It was the most destructive eruption in US history and left a sizable chunk of Washington state looking like a lunar training ground.
Once the smoke cleared and the ash settled, scientists showed up to do what scientists do best: stare at devastation and wonder: “Okay… now what?”
The landscape was about as fertile as a piece of toast, and by 1983, not much had bounced back. A helicopter flyover revealed a grand total of about a dozen plants trying their best to cling to life. Even seeds that had been optimistically dropped by birds were just kind of sitting there, not really getting the memo. So, in a bold move that sounds like it came straight out of a Pixar pitch meeting (much like the aforementioned froggy nuptials), the scientists assembled a team of specialist gardeners with exactly the right credentials for the job: northern pocket gophers.
These stocky little dirt architects have a reputation for tearing up lawns and generally not being invited to garden parties. In South Africa, we would probably compare them to moles, although they look very different. But on the slopes of a post-eruption Mount Helena, they were ecological VIPs. The idea was to airlift them into the barren wasteland and let them loose in demarcated areas for just one day. Scientists hoped that the gophers would do what nature designed them to do: burrow through the sterile pumice, bring buried soil to the surface, poop a bit for good measure, and unwittingly kickstart the underground economy of bacteria, fungi, and microbial life.
And it worked. Spectacularly.
Six years later, the areas where the gophers had spent their 24-hour staycation were bursting with around 40,000 thriving plants. Meanwhile, the untouched plots were still looking pretty dead. The secret weapon to the gophers’ success is Mycorrhizal fungi. These are microscopic soil dwellers that hook up with plant roots to share nutrients and fend off disease, kind of like the world's tiniest immune system support squad. By stirring up the soil and hauling old spores to the surface, the gophers gave these fungi their big comeback moment, which in turn kickstarted seeds into action.
So yes, the road to ecological recovery was once paved with gopher tunnels and fungal networking. What started as a “let’s try this weird thing for a day” experiment turned into a lesson in just how connected ecosystems are, and how sometimes, the unsung heroes of landscape recovery don’t wear lab coats.
They dig holes instead. And poop in them.

Dominique's Fast Facts: Biases, phenomena and effects

An assortment of facts that will only take you five minutes to read.

Mean world syndrome: a common cognitive bias that leads to people perceiving the world as more dangerous than it really is.

Blue-seven phenomenon: a social phenomenon in which the majority of people choose the colour blue and the number 7 when asked to think of a random colour and single-digit number.

False uniqueness effect: an attribution bias that describes how people tend to view their qualities, traits and talents as unique when in reality they are not.

Well-travelled road effect: a cognitive bias in which frequently travelled routes are assumed to be shorter than unfamiliar routes.

Curse of knowledge: also called the expert’s curse, this is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person with highly specialised knowledge incorrectly assumes that others share in that knowledge.

Compassion fade: the observed tendency in people to experience a decrease in empathy as the number of people in need of aid increases. The linked concept, compassion collapse, is the tendency to turn away from mass suffering.

Rhyme-as-reason effect: a cognitive bias in which sayings that rhyme are perceived as more accurate or truthful than those that don’t.

Bias blind spot: a cognitive bias in which a person recognises the impact of biases on the judgement of others while failing to see the impact of other biases on their own judgement.