We've been mulling here in this space lately about forks in the road. By active choice or passive default, the trajectory of our lives takes a turn--an often tiny intentional or accidental nudge to the rudder of our lives. Over decades, that moment of choice or change sends us some great distance from the destination we would have otherwise never reached had we not moved in THAT direction at just THAT moment and for what we considered at the time to have been GOOD reasons.
I will come back this topic again, contemplating my own forks, fumbles and AHA moments of vocational or other insight or inspiration that seem to me to have been pivotal events. I will allow myself to speculate on how those moments lead to this one I call NOW. How did any of us get to NOW?
Both the arrival of spring AND a (temporary and partial) lull in Covid life-suppression seem to represent “turning point opportunities.” So which way will I turn?
But today, pressed for time due to upcoming travels, what bubbles up to the surface of the writing queue are unique living things whose stories I've come across over the last bit of time, and never told you about. Only one is about a vertebrate.
Now understand: I have a masters degree in vertebrate zoology. That was one of the choices I made that I look back on as a fork I found myself taking, without much deep thought. I knew at the time that my real interests were elsewhere, but I had ruled out genetics, parasitology, herpetology and a few others. I was forced to "pick a professor" and stay the course. As fate would have it, Vert Zoo shows up on my diploma.
So there you are: I tend to find the animals with backbones (and similar to humans) the least interesting when compared to fungi, vascular plants, and things barely visible, who live out life's functions as fully as we do, literally under our feet (and in our eyelashes and pores and…)
I feel better having confessed, and will now tell you what I intended to tell you before these initial paragraphs that are what generally come along while I'm warming up. I usually delete it all. But I digress. Imagine.
► TARDIGRADES IN SPACE
I heard this story from a reliable source--not a biology-type, but one who knows of my peculiar organismic interests. I wrote back and threw considerable shade on his claim, but it turned out he was right. We intend to send one of my favorite creatures into space using a laser.
Using LIGHT as the propellant, traveling on a "space wafer" (Star Chip) at 100 million miles an hour (way slower than light, somehow), tiny, barely visible Earthlings may soon be set off into the Final Frontier. Engage! I’m NOT making this up, as Andy Rooney used to day.
But wait. We propagate Earth life to other planets? Haven’t we despoiled every planet we’ve ever lived on?
See "directed panspermia" that proposes other sentient beings populated our planet with life in this intentional seeding of space. Carl Sagan and Francis Crick found merit in this possible explanation.
If it CAN be done, SHOULD it be done?
► ROTIFERS on ICE
Don't know rotifers? These barely macroscopic invertebrates of fresh and salt water are almost impossible to avoid, since they inhabit the film of water on any moss you see, let alone any roadside puddle or farm pond.
They have been found in ice core samples from 24k years ago. And they can “come back to life.”
And they are fantastic to watch.
► PLANKTON IN MOTION
PHYTOplankton are from the Plant Kingdom (vs plankton, which can be any “floaters” in the water column, fresh or marine.
At the microscopic level, it was fresh-water diatoms that fascinated me as a grad student, playing with the phase-contrast microscope to which I had three years of access. I asked if I could take one with me at graduation, but the request was denied. I have a simple compound microscope at arm’s length, and will attempt to show you some images one day.
The tool of time-lapse photography of the very small enhances our comprehension that stuff is happening beyond the reach of our vision and beneath our feet or below the boundary where air meets water.
► INDIGO SNAKES IN THE HEART OF DIXIE
In 1970 when I took herpetology at Auburn I literally dreamed of being the one to discover a colony of indigo snakes somewhere in the hilly sandy pine forests of southern Alabama.
Along with gopher tortoises, these very long, shiny black snakes were pushed to near-extinction by the manly sport of rattlesnake roundups, compounded by habitat loss. Both these creatures are considered "inguilins" who were often killed when tortoise burrows were "gassed" to force the co-habiting rattlesnakes to the open.
These snakes existed in living memory of my professors, considered as an "apex predator" of longleaf pine forests, a habitat once so common in the coastal plain before those native forests were terraformed into square mile monoculture "pine plantations" to be clearcut for one-use paper products. Sorry snakes, turtles and biodiversity in general.
Indigos (up to 8 feet long) still exist in small populations in Georgia and Florida.
This new discovery was made by "a graduate student from Auburn University." Coulda been me.
🕸️ And as it turns out at the end of this bit mostly about tiny creatures, a speck of a spider crawls across my monitor as I type. It is making choices, having dinner, breathing, digesting, exploring.
This spider, maybe an eighth of an inch, toe to toe, is finding and eating smaller invertebrates I cannot possibly see, who in turn, are eating smaller life-forms, yet. Interesting! Meanwhile, our vertebrate cat is dozing on my keyboard. Boring.