We had a field trip to Mote Marine Lab and Aquarium on July 13th. So for our session, I thought it might be good to work starting with animals we saw there.
An animal that could have been at Mote but wasn’t got a feature article in “Wired” this week: snapping shrimp.
Here’s a page with the abstract noting that eusociality was observed in a species of snapping shrimp.
A literary reaction to the abundance of marine life is seen in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”:
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
This passage is the allusion that science writer Carl Zimmer intended for naming his blog, “The Loom”.