[ Conform | Rhinoceros | Human Evolution in a Nutshell | Beaver Damn | Oso Negro/Not So Black | Doggerel is Aard Vark | A Plague o' Both Your Porcupines | The Lonely Bull | Hippopotamus amphibius | Evolution of Auditory Ossicles | Sabu | Equivocus | The Baculum | Animal Love ]
I want to be scene,
Not herd, said a wayward
Young springbok, as it split.
Know your place, said
The lead, which is together,
And clubbed the errant back,
Giving it the Gesellschaft.
Hearing and pre-eminently smell
Make far better sense
To rhinoceros, which sees dimly
(And wears a nosehorn well).
This all but hairless hulk
So enarmored of thick skin with folds
As to lack nonhuman predators of consequence
Thunders toward extinction
Blindly bold to man in self-defense.
Preferentially it holds
Itself apart, hoofing through reeds
And high grass, browsing by dusk
And dawn, solitary in its
Territory save when it breeds.
Communication faintly whiffs absurd:
Movement is action
Movements speak louder than words
Territory marks are piled turds.
Once upon
The evolutionary stage
Of anthropoids
Dryopithecus
Was all the rage.
Although some pithy lines
Were later banned
The one that made
The Gorilla my dreams
Was merely Panned.
Meanwhile selected hominids
Foresaw the silver screen.
Australopithecus came close
But Homo stole the Holocene.
Let us
Dam
The stupid
Eager
Beaver who
Knowing not
His aspen
From a
Pole in the
Ground
Persists in
Barking
Up
The wrong
Tree.
The American black bear
Or oso negro
(Now Euarctos
Formerly an Ursus)
Lumbers through woods
Shredding logs allegro
And slumbers through cold
Dreaming of itself versus
Hordes of wild bees
Their fattening honey
Their stings of outrage ...
Some western "black bears"
Are cinnamon or grey-white or white
Which suggests a funny
Coat of many colors
That the species population shares.
A remarkable beast is the aardvark.
It speaks softly and not with a hard bark.
Some think its song sweeter
But no it ant-eater
The sticky tongue makes it a marred lark.
Dartmoor, 1969---Two
Porcupines escaped from a private zoo.
Dressed fit to quill they made a prick-
Ly pair, the {circle-arrow} up to Hystrix ...
Exponentially their numbers grew.
Devon, five years after---Trees and crops
Are being hit in a nightmare of copse
And robbers by an hysterical rodent plague
Costing residents thousands of dollars. Vague
Grumblings reach the Queen about applying stops.
Pedigreed,
Royally fed and stalled,
Cowed only by their succubus,
I have come to naught
But semen (first class).
Better a detested steer:
Why don't they just
Snatch both
Instead of extracting them
Mechanically
A little at a time?
Much more an enormous pig than a sort of horse,
Hippo lives, as a matter of course,
Both in water---still or running, fresh or salt---
And on adjacent land, where its Gestalt
Takes fifty pounds (dry weight) of grass per night.
In human cropland, which it freely samples,
Much of what it doesn't eat it tramples,
And signs point to a final interspecies fight.
The losing bull in an intraspecific bout
Hides wounded skin and pride in water, where,
With only eyes and nostrils out,
He surveys the scene and takes the air.
To save its skin from air as well as flood,
Hippo "sweats" thick, oily "blood".
With malleus
Aforethought
Mammals
Got an earful
Of their ancestors'
Jaw.
Sunstruck from the procreative rut
The sacked nuts of a male squirrel
Eerily retreat along the inguinal canal
To bury themselves above the body
Cavity in a regimen of atrophy.
In good time they recrudesce
And soon are dancing on the coelom
In anticipation of the plunge to
Dry sac, squirrelles, and roundelays.
This cycle is a classical sabu [*].
[*] An acronym (ascribed to
Down under army officers
In North Africa in World
War II) that stands for
Self-adjusting balls-up.
Because it has
The cheek to broadcast
Bands of black and white,
Zebra seems in hindsight
To be comme un âne
Like a wild ass.
An inarticulate lucky stiff between
Paired spongy corpora casanova,
The baculum (or penis bone) of mammals
Lends firm support to a hard job.
Present in all insectivores,
Bats, rodents, carnivores,
And most primates (but not man),
It comes in many shapes.
That of the walrus (winner of a grand prix)
Is very like a warped baseball bat
Some two feet long. As one old walrus put it,
"Speak softly and carry a big stick".
Hungering
For you
Dear body
Hugged
More lovingly
Than you
Can bear
I'll eat my
Venus, Hon.
[ To a Lonely Hermaphrodite | Lines to an Angler Fish | Flatfish Development | Competition and Catastrophe in Polliwogs | An Olé for Anolis | Snake Pit | The Hare and the Tortoise | The Great Tit Rip-off | Niche Splitting | Up the Food Chain | Lethal Yellowing | One Good Fern Deserves Another | Gutless Wonder ]
Know
Thyself.
Aloof and quasi-indestructible
For all the world like some religious sages
The angler ineluctable
Rests on its venter
And passeth for a piece of the rock of ages.
Casting for its bread upon the waters
The phony worm at the end of a dorsal ray
It robs the sea of sons and daughters
Converting, with a violent gulp,
Would-be predators to prey.
The bottom-dwelling flounder begins---
Like other fish---as a free-swimmer
With dorsum up, venter down
And left and right both lateral,
But starts revolving by degrees
(Circa ninety) on its long axis
Til sides are top and bottom.
Meantime the lower eye moves topside
Over the head where the once dorsal
Fin grows forward, and the down side blind side
Becomes a white side while the eyed side
Colors up with spots that have
The look of eyes all over the plaice.
In the clutch, frogs overload a temporary pond
Egging ever more offspring on to meta-
Morphosis and the best of both worlds.
Developing tads (who cannot know the dad
That amplexed mom, whoever she is)
Graze the indelicate bloom from a green alga
While the perimeter of their first world shrinks.
A mixed bag. The size of individuals
Creeps up, their numbers plunge, and
Proportions of species and frequencies of genes
Shift. Too soon this semi-selected microcosm
Dwindles to a viscous soup of writhing macrosperm---
A mammoth ejaculate going down the wrong tubes.
The male of an anole named garmani
Is subject to sexual selection
As he seeks an existence of harmony
And the chances to make a connection.
He maneuvers for adequate holdings
(O plot for becoming attractive!)
By resorting to dewlap unfoldings,
Being robust, and frightfully active.
He both acts the competitive wizard
And succeeds in enticing a friend
Who will mate him. But, being a lizard,
He does it by halves in the end.
Even in darkness
With only the data
From an obliquely forward-looking
Temperature-sensitive pit
Twixt nostril and eye
A toxic crotalid
Computes the course
Of a passing mouse
And makes the spectral leap
From infrared to ultraviolent
With double pinpoint precision.
We as much as the insufferable hare
Stared one to another in unuttered
Disbelief at the tortoise's dare.
Recovering his tongue, the hare served up
His scorching brand of mock turtle fare
As we prescribed a racing course
That ended where it began, there
At the trumpet vine.
They were off ...
Our short wait lengthened through glare
To dusk when we strained to see the winner
Coming tortoise. Fair and square
He had plodded through the smug sleep
Of the hairy braggart who, in a scare,
Now tore to second place, shouting
S.O.B. (or some other macronym),
And slunk away muttering Snafu
(An acrimonious anachronistic acronym).
Left on British doorsteps early in the day
Bottles of milk capped with foil or cardboard
Wait to be taken in and put away.
No one thought this quintessentially
Mammalian food was for the birds
But no one reckoned with the local Paridae:
Four species quickly learned to use the bill
To puncture, peel, or highly prize the caps---
Thus ultimately foiled---and swill.
This ethologic shift involving diet
Smacks (in hindesight) of the loosely preadaptive
Inasmuch as tit were the birds to try it.
Nuthatch
Works
A tree
Trunk
Down
Creeper
Does
It
Up
Brown
Things aren't always what they aposeme:
The model monarch as a caterpillar eats
Milkweeds, stores their hearty poisons,
and the butterfly defeats
Some portion of an avian predation team
By advertising---with show of color, lack of haste---
That those that dare to peck will find it in bad taste;
But the monarch straddles defence with another gimmick
When it feeds on milkweed species in which there are
No poisons and becomes an edible adult,
the so-called "automimic".
(Or is that a chrysomelid beetle that recalls
the German peoplescar?)
No oiled and beaten path connects
The harrowed groves of academia
With collapsing rows of macadamia
Or cocnuts. Tropical trees toppled
To earth by some intemperate pathogen
Attract few scientific bees
Hell-bent on conquering disease.
Workers are deterred by a monumental
Dearth of basic information
On anatomies and physiologies.
Crops such as palms have not been studied
Up and down like, say, wheat, whose attributes
Glut many a professional serial publication.
Is it any wonder, then, that Cocos
Planters of the Carribean bellow
When they see their acreage succumb
To lethan yellowing, "The grass
Is always greener on the other fellow"?
A tree may be a prologue when it has a hyper bole.
Prothallia of ferns are always haploid
Producing sperms and eggs that seize the procreative role
When, of a dampness, they unite to form a diploid.
Up springs the frondly sporophyte,
with rhizome, root, and rachis
And a meristem that's apical and tight.
It uncoils; but on a leaf that is preparing for meiosis
Sporangia in clusters make a very sori sight.
Though lacking skeletal strengths
Which we associate with most
Large forms, tapeworms go to great lengths
To take the measure of a host.
Monotonous body sections
In a limp mass-production line
Have nervous and excretory connections
And the means to sexually combine
And to coddle countless progeny
But no longer have the guts
To digest for themselves or live free
Or know a meal from soup to nuts.
[ Lake | Desert Range | Drosophila in Paradise | Fitness By Any Other Name Would Be As Loose | Rocky Intertidal Strife | Ontogeny and Phylogeny | Homage to P.J.Darlington, Jr. | Biomodels | The Last Rite of Sylvan Spring | Province of Biology | Elucidation Blues | In Temperate Spring ]
Between two states of matter
A line of symmetry:
Hemlocks dark above in spired reality
Are mocked below by colder forms
Disposed to flatter.
Three dimensions stripped of one
Become ideal.
Where crowding rhododendrons kneel
Soft white trusses flushed with pink and sun
Reflect on cool perfection.
Corollas tarnish, disengage and fall
Rippling an image
In a crowning show of futile homage.
Turning sodden brown, they sink through surface
Into not at all.
My faults are quiet now.
I rest in sprawling sunlight
And dusty devils try my dirty flanks
While I try to recollect the heightened
Spirits of my youth. How
If those angels saw my angles now
Bahada-bathed in soiled rock
Would they still sing? Could they
Do anything but mock?
For naturally I gave myself away
To fanfare, smiling at first as it caressed
My foot. But then
My fans arose and coalesced
To my own detriment. And still I must endure
This wearing slow return to ancient orogen.
Far east of the china plate
The earth brakes, leaks, and clots
And repeats ...
Fire into water; earth into air.
In the main the islands come and go
Forming an archipelago.
Endless emigrants from living land
Stream forth by sea and air to found
Or founder ...
A striking and attenuated few
Trickle their bits from a wealthy heritage
Into half-baked gene pools
About this insulated and eclectic range,
A patchwork world that naturally selects
In new directions its kaleidoscope
Of species in genetic revolution.
The hostage of ultrarapid evolution
Awaits the leading player.
Enter from afar the gravid female fly
Or a pair of dipterans that fly united
Ours is not to reason why
But here they are
With everything they could have wanted:
Baeucoup de Lebensraum
A steamy potpourri of plants.
(Although these flies berbivorous
Would rather phyte than switch,
In a future evolutionary hitch
Some will---to spider eggs!)
Inbred offspring swell the beachhead
Generate their own invading force
And penetrate erratically
A monolithic ecologic vacuum.
To some, put off by numbers,
Falls the vagrant lot;
An offbeat drifter takes another isle ...
With reproductive ties that bind
Dissolved by water in between,
The replicated colonies
Evolve in part in parallel
But mostly come to see
Sporadic interimmigrants
No longer as their kind.
So species in division multiply.
Among the shifty lava flows, the island flies
Continually colonize and differentiate,
Settling back from time to time to coexist.
Cycle after cycle amplifies
This rich endemic fauna to create
A matchless, if outlandish, marbled layer cake
Mushroomed out of all expected size and shape.
Though countless pieces have gone down
The lubricated gullet of extinction,
There are (by latest estimate)
In the Hawaiian Islands
Some seven hundred
Drosophilid
Species of
Distinc-
Tion.
A group inept
Might better opt
To be adept
And so adopt
Ways more apt
To wit, adapt.
Fighting the ups and downs
Of an ever-lavin'
Blue-dyed
Wateredge
The rocky intertidal
Lathers its interface
And from time to time
Appears
To hold the sea at bay
With a show of mussels.
This prime frontage
Zoned
For crowded uneasy living
Suppports a variably piled
Mat
Of animals and plants
Inclined to be exclusive.
I have heard green algal
Seaweeds such as Ulva say
"Like good producers, we eat
Light
But the goddam periwinkles
Littorally graze us---and Fucus---
In a catastrophic way".
In the beginning is the end;
But ends unfold, becoming strange.
Lives---and generations---suffer change.
The tested metabolic paths will tend
To last and shape the range
Of future evolution from the past.
Carabids are beetles of ground.
So spots where carabids are found
Are grounds for inferring
That there they're occurring.
This circular reasoning is round.
Without wings they're more apt to stay there.
But the winged may take to the air
Dispersing in myriads
Through Tertiary periods.
We know they all started, but where?
A model in its elegance
Is better than reality
Its graphical simplicity
Denotes a rare intelligence.
The simple graph incites the wrath
Of field men who, half undressed,
Go rushing out to start a test
Which culminates in aftermath.
Pink lady's-slippers
And nonrustic beer cans
Garnish the litter of leaves
A mere stone's Thoreau
From Walden Pond.
Though scientist and artist both create,
The latter makes the better loner.
That each is bound to be a goner
Is not a lively subject for debate.
Simpson said taxonomy is art as much as science.
By most biologists, the systematics is eschewed
And rarely swallowed; for some, a thoughty food
Involves a mix of math and life in an ethereal alliance
About as holy as a sieve. If all of life without and in shall
Not be readily reducible to quantitative theory,
It may be fair that a philosopher should query
"Is the science of biology provincial?"
With a plethora
Of words
The would-be
Explicator
Hides himself
Like a squid
In his own ink.
The air is distinctly out of focus;
Everywhere Forsythia.
Slopes a wash of Ceanothus;
Grassland with Eschscholtzia.
Cornus and azalea.
Arctostaphylos at Idria.
Like the Californian oak-moth
I'm a mindless Phryganidia.
[ Miscellaneous | Krishna Kunchithapadam ]
Last updated: Sun Jun 27 17:00:19 PDT 2004
URL: http://www.geocities.com/krishna_kunchith/misc/biograffiti.html