An embroidered ode to a rat who has left the planet

Bramble Cay melomys, we hardly knew ye

Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat munching purslane, embroidery floss on cotton. 2022.

This little fellow is a Bramble Cay melomys, also known as the Bramble Cay mosiac-tailed rat. I first made his acquaintance when I began researching “endlings”—the last individuals of a species before it goes extinct. I planned to design and stitch a series of pieces to honor animals whose species are threatened due to anthropogenic climate change, writing a poem to accompany each piece.

The poems began inching into my notebook right away, but I quickly realized I was going to have to level up my thread-painting skills in order to create the embroidered pieces I was envisioning. After a feverish period of study and practice, I sketched an outline that became the embroidery you see above.

By then, sadly, my little rat was no longer an endling. His species had met its end.

The Bramble Cay melomys suffered severe habitat loss due to rising sea levels and was formally declared extinct by the Australian government in 2019. It was deemed to be the “first recorded mammalian extinction due to anthropogenic climate change.”

A study of purslane, also known as little hogweed

Bramble Cay is a tiny scrap of an island at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s an annual breeding ground for sea turtles and a landing pad for seabirds. Only about half of the sandy little cay sports vegetation, including the common purslane that was a mainstay of the Bramble Cay melomys’s diet.

In real life, the melomys was reddish brown. I made mine blue because I’m sad that he’s gone from the planet. I grew very fond of him while sketching and stitching, and ripping out stitches, and putting them back in. Here’s to a creature we chased off the planet, an endling who met his end.