Card carrying member of The Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers

A repost. Hey, it's my blog...

In Galway Bay, nestled on the west coast of Ireland, lives Fungi, a lone male dolphin who seeks the company of humans, as he has for over a quarter century now. He's a tourist attraction, and an enigma. No one knows why he sticks around—perhaps he was abandoned by his pod for some nefarious dolphin behavior during his wild youth, maybe he happens to like humans and their noise.

I once watched spearing, tiny fish with aluminum foil strips pasted on their sides, jumping over a piece of straw floating near the surf. One or two would jump over it, then circle back around, then jump over it again. The science teacher in me tries to equate this jumping over a piece of phragmites with evolutionary fitness. For all my training, though, I can't help myself—I see joy.

Our reference is human—it's all we have, really. We see trees as humans see them, smell the early morning mud flats as only humans, fear the humming of a bee as only humans can. (If you prefer a lonely nihilistic view, as only humans can, then imagine that you alone can know what you sense.)

There are certainly problems with anthropomorphizing, impugning motives on critters going about their business. I should not presume joy on the part of the silver-sided fish—no way to know—but we make a bigger mistake presuming the absence of shared motives. (Obviously the tiny fish had some motive.)

Science rests on models. A water molecule consists of 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, fused together by covalent bonds, which is to say they share electrons. The electrons spend a little bit more time on the oxygen side of the molecule than the hydrogen atoms, creating a slightly more negative charge there.

If I were to draw an electron in class, it would look like this:

I might even add a charge sign to it, like this:



The children will dutifully write it down, and the symbol becomes the electron. I suspect that's the act that makes us most human, the symbol. It is also, ironically, the one that separates us from the universe.

Obviously the “dot” is not an electron—it reflects a tiny part on the board where less light reflects back to the children's eyes that the rest of the board. The “dash,” a dose of negativity (which only makes sense when contrasted with a dose of positive), reflects another slash of less reflected light.

We teach this and children memorize it, and we pretend we know what charge means, a relative term that measures, um, attractiveness, much like the confusion we have when we are attracted to others, but not in that sort of way....

We are ascribing motive or behavior to the non-sentient, or rather to models of the non-sentient, since electrons are unknowable beyond the models we create, and in my very stern voice I will chastise the children for ascribing motive to the very same things. (These are the problems with trying to keep the universe in some neat mechanistic package.)

This becomes a sticking point for a lot of us teaching science—we carefully present models using words like “attract” and “repel” and then get our knickers in a twist when a student confuses attraction with desire.

And with that, we extinguish the tiny spark.

I was once a card carrying member of the AALRT (the Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers). There are plenty of reasons to join—baby robins don't smile and crickets don't sing.

I am still a member, though I may let my dues lapse this year. If adding emotion to a cute drawing of a couple of hydrogen atoms sharing their electrons with an oxygen atom starved for electron love holds my lambs' interest long enough to get them to glance at the concept of bonding (another loaded word), maybe I'll try it.

And who knows, maybe an incomplete orbital shell is more than just a metaphor for unrequited love.

The photos are ours, which I will gratuitously place in my posts, because I like them, and because they remind me that as much as the classroom matters, a few things matter more.

Blue moon blues

This is not science, no matter what NASA says.

This is about folks who miss regularly spectacular events such as the ever-changing moon phases getting excited because a "full moon" happens twice within an artificial division of time. Turns out we create even bigger, vaguer excitement if that month happens to mark the culturally designated new year.

The word "month" comes from menses, an old word from an older language. "Menses"comes from the same old word. Whether menstrual cycles were tied to the moon before artificial light changed our culture is not clear, though women may be more likely to ovulate during the full moon.

Many critters remain romantically tied to the moon: grunions, newts, and coral have kept their ancient pact with natural cycles.




Thomas Edison allowed us sever our ties to the moon; that we continue to do so is our choice.

Ultimately, what you do with the choices you have today, what you do with this moment, defines who you are. We have years, decades, centuries as constructs in our heads, but we can only act in the moment. This one.

It's all we ever had, despite our tongues that confuse what we create ("blue moons" and calendars) with what exists in the natural world, a huge chunk of matter revolving around the Earth, affecting our tides, and perhaps our bodies.

***

If you believe tonight's blue moon is news, you need to get reacquainted with our gravitational neighbor. You can pretend to do this by looking at the Farmer's Almanac, or go high tech and download a moon phase widget.

Or you can step outside and look up. Tomorrow night, do the same. A week from now, look up again. Two weeks from now, you'll need to look during the day if you hope to see the moon.

Do this for a month, for a year, for a lifetime, and you will learn, as Robert Frost knew, that time is "neither wrong nor right" for those of us "acquainted with the night."

Forget Happy New Year! Time is in our heads, and you only get a few dozen New Years in your adult life.

Start celebrating Happy New Moment!, an infinite string of "nows" celebrated by everything in the natural world.

The photo is by Tom King, taken October 2003 and lifted from the NASA website.
The Robert Frost lines were taken from his "Acquainted with the Night," New Hampshire, 1923.

Essential questions

A few of my goldfish made the annual pilgrimage from my backyard puddles to classroom aquariums.

The classrooms were empty as I cajoled bubblers and filters to return to life. Saturday classrooms feel like midnight cemeteries.

Each classroom has a list of essential questions defining the ultimate goals of a unit. Our district spend gobs of money getting Grant Wiggins to talk to us, and by golly, we're going to keep posting the questions.

I have no problem with essential questions. I have no problem with Genesis, either. If we're serious about either, you might want to think twice before using them in a public school.

Grant Wiggins, the father of Understanding by Design, says that essential questions are "broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable."

Indeed. I have only, alas, 48 minutes in a period.

My fish will intrigue a few students. My essential questions, which I love to develop, will not. I work with 15 year old man childs. Woman childs. Children lost in the magical thinking of brains seduced by sex hormones literally resetting their genomic activity, sex hormones that slide right past the phospholipid bilayers of their cell membranes, causing pieces of quiescent DNA to be transcribed, to wake up, to make proteins that will lead to bad decisions and dangerous behaviors that will usually result in another generation of human DNA.

Desire.

***

I watched my cockroach probe the edge of the Petri dish with its antennae, searching for a gap large enough to escape the scrutiny of young adult humans peering through the stereoscope. The same cockroach now sits in a bucket on my stoop on a wet, snowy night, waiting for me to figure out where to release it.

In science, we learn to avoid words like "want" and "desire," because we cannot assume that a, say, proton "wants" to be closer to an electron, though we can empirically see some sort of attraction. Everything made of stuff is attracted to everything else made of stuff--we call it gravity, and maybe it no longer amazes most folks, but it still amazes the poop out of me.

So when Doreen sees the cockroach clean its antenna by dragging it through its palps, I am supposed to correct her by explaining that cockroaches do not "want," they just "do."

I keep silent. This particular cockroach on this particular day clearly wanted to clean its antenna. I wasn't going to argue the point with a 15 year old H. sapiens, not when it took me two months to get her to trust her eyes over the words in a textbook.

***

And what is desire? What is attraction?

It is (perhaps) a uniquely human thing to imagine a better life, and work towards a long range goal. Immediate behaviors to attain long-term goals require either a fine imagination or the jackboot up the gluteus of instinct.

I remember very little about 15, but I remember this much--I wanted Desiree, desired her, was attracted to her, use whatever verb you care to use, beyond reason or imagination or sense.

I was like an electron trapped by a proton, and about as conscious.

If desire is reduced to seeking behaviors that reduce the ache of desire, then my cockroach is capable of desire. No surprise there, tautologous as it is. No, the surprise is recognizing that what I felt when I was 15, something I may have called "love" or "lust" or "friendship" was no more (or less) real than the need for the cockroach to escape its Petri prison.

Accepting that a cockroach may have desires is not elevating it to the hallowed plane of a Harvard professor searching her cerebral cortex for the phrase that will impress her suitor with her cleverness, her literateness, her, um, humanness.

And I do not mean to belittle the professor. But aren't there days when even the elite among us would like our desires to be as simple as the cockroach's.

(And here's the dirty little secret--on most days, they are.)

***

And what do we know of cockroach desire before the testosterone and estrogen warp us beyond our human nature?

We know thirst.

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a resident was letting a mother be a mother. Her baby was severely dehydrated, his salt concentrations dangerously imbalanced. Correcting the imbalances too quickly could lead to his death.

His mother let him drink. And drink. The baby boy sucked on the Pedialyte with all the urgency and need of Athena emerging from Zeus' head, the need electrons feel for protons, the need I felt for Desiree.

The baby seized. The baby, now in his twenties, may not be the same person he would have been had I thwarted his desires. I do not know how much brain damage was done.

Incomprehensible want, behaviors altered for unimagined (and unimaginable) ends, for no reason beyond the attraction of desire.

So when Doreen tells me the cockroach wants to clean itself, I do not correct her, because she is right.

***

My essential questions in class keep drifting back to matter and energy, and because I do not pretend to have a grasp of either, drift even further back to "why?"

I see essential questions like some see democracy--if either truly worked, they would be banned. Public schools cannot tolerate children seeking answers to essential questions. We expect them to sit (for 48 minutes, no more, no less) at a desk studying a subject they did not choose.

If I want to teach science, I need to go outside, and I need to be less vocal.

That I continue to teach inside, modulating my voice like an orator (or a clown), hoping to maintain their attention long enough to skewer them with the NJ Core Curriculum Standard 5.12.1.A3 or 5.12.4.B4, shows I am human, able to thwart real desires with imagined riches given to those who persevere.

And I am failing. I am a good teacher, but not a great one.

If I were a great one, a child (or two or three) would stand up on a beautiful day, and walk out into the sun and set herself by a pond or a tree and simply observe.

And if I were truly a science teacher, I would follow the children out the door.

On anthropomorphizing

In Galway Bay, nestled on the west coast of Ireland, lives Fungi, a lone male dolphin who seeks the company of humans, as he has for over a quarter century now. He's a tourist attraction, and an enigma. No one knows why he sticks around—perhaps he was abandoned by his pod for some nefarious dolphin behavior during his wild youth, maybe he happens to like humans and their noise.

I once watched spearing, tiny fish with aluminum foil strips pasted on their sides, jumping over a piece of straw floating near the surf. One or two would jump over it, then circle back around, then jump over it again. The science teacher in me tries to equate this jumping over a piece of phragmites with evolutionary fitness. For all my training, though, I can't help myself—I see joy.

Our reference is human—it's all we have, really. We see trees as humans see them, smell the early morning mud flats as only humans, fear the humming of a bee as only humans can. (If you prefer a lonely nihilistic view, as only humans can, then imagine that you alone can know what you sense.)

There are certainly problems with anthropomorphizing, impugning motives on critters going about their business. I should not presume joy on the part of the silver-sided fish—no way to know—but we make a bigger mistake presuming the absence of shared motives. (Obviously the tiny fish had some motive.)

Science rests on models. A water molecule consists of 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, fused together by covalent bonds, which is to say they share electrons. The electrons spend a little bit more time on the oxygen side of the molecule than the hydrogen atoms, creating a slightly more negative charge there.

If I were to draw an electron in class, it would look like this:

I might even add a charge sign to it, like this:



The children will dutifully write it down, and the symbol becomes the electron. I suspect that's the act that makes us most human, the symbol. It is also, ironically, the one that separates us from the universe.

Obviously the “dot” is not an electron—it reflects a tiny part on the board where less light reflects back to the children's eyes that the rest of the board. The “dash,” a dose of negativity (which only makes sense when contrasted with a dose of positive), reflects another slash of less reflected light.

We teach this and children memorize it, and we pretend we know what charge means, a relative term that measures, um, attractiveness, much like the confusion we have when we are attracted to others, but not in that sort of way....

We are ascribing motive or behavior to the non-sentient, or rather to models of the non-sentient, since electrons are unknowable beyond the models we create, and in my very stern voice I will chastise the children for ascribing motive to the very same things. (These are the problems with trying to keep the universe in some neat mechanistic package.)

This becomes a sticking point for a lot of us teaching science—we carefully present models using words like “attract” and “repel” and then get our knickers in a twist when a student confuses attraction with desire.

And with that, we extinguish the tiny spark.

I was once a card carrying member of the AALRT (the Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers). There are plenty of reasons to join—baby robins don't smile and crickets don't sing.

I am still a member, though I may let my dues lapse this year. If adding emotion to a cute drawing of a couple of hydrogen atoms sharing their electrons with an oxygen atom starved for electron love holds my lambs' interest long enough to get them to glance at the concept of bonding (another loaded word), maybe I'll try it.

And who knows, maybe an incomplete orbital shell is more than just a metaphor for unrequited love.

The photos are ours, which I will gratuitously place in my posts, because I like them, and because they remind me that as much as the classroom matters, a few things matter more.

Puddles

I am going away for a couple of weeks, to wander around the west coast of Ireland. Perhaps the journey will cure my delusions that my rants will have any effects on the US DOE. Should I decide to spend the rest of my life on the Aran Islands, I do not want my last post to be about Arne.

I am lifting this from something I wrote over 5 years ago, late June, 2004. I was still in medicine at the time.


Children gravitate to puddles.

Children see things before they are taught they do not exist.¹ With enough education, they learn to avoid puddles. They no longer waste time staring at the edge of a pond.

My daughter, now old enough to have children of her own, still whiles away time at the edge of water. Yesterday we wasted some time on a warm June evening staring into a 15 gallon bucket of pond water, kept by the garden for watering plants. She did this partly to keep me company, but mostly because she wanted to. On the days I am sure I screwed up as a parent, I need to remember this.

If you stare at the night sky long enough,more details emerge. A hundred stars turns into a thousand. If you hold a handful of pond water, you might not see anything at first. Look a little harder. Look for movement. It's there.

---

I shelled peas today, something I love to do. I split the impossibly green pod, then run my thumb inside, freeing the peas. Some bounce away onto the ground, looking to snuggle into the earth. I leave them be.

Shelling peas is supposed to be tedious--it's one reason Americans wanted to get off the farm, I suppose.

But just stop for a minute and think about what it means to live in a land where 95% of the people can be freed from, the drudgery of preparing their own food.

James E. Bostic, Jr
Assistant Secretary of [Agriculture] for Rural Development²

I enjoy shelling peas. My father, not much older than me, cannot shell peas anymore. Not sure he ever enjoyed it when he could, but he would today. He still enjoys eating them, though he turns blue now and again when eating things pea-sized. June is pea season. It is my father's last pea season.

Desire is a funny thing.

---

Our family microscope is a teaching scope--Kerry and I can look at another world together. When one wanders away from one's usual world, it's good to have company.

We stared into the same world together.

The critter peeked from under a duckweed leaf, saw an even tinier critter, and munched. It moved, well, gleefully.

I am, of course, anthropomorphizing....but gleeful is the right word. We can reduce it to the transfer of energy from one critter to another, but the subsequent burst of energy gave me a burst of energy--glee is contagious.

Turns out the critter was an ostracod. I never saw an ostracod before. I never thought about them when I used pond water to feed the garden. I knew that pond water made great fertilizer. I just never wondered why. "Glee" (or energy) gets transformed into plant growth. Which means ostracods die.

Ostracods have sex. Ostracods eat. Ostracods have baby ostracods.

Boy ostracods attract girl ostracods by using flashing lights. Boy ostracods use "a special long leg" to pass sperm into girl ostracods. I bet a boy ostracod enjoys his "special long leg."³

Watering my plants just got harder.

---

In the 17th century, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek made microscopes. Invented them, really. He saw things no one saw before.

I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort... had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort...oft-times spun round like a top...and these were far more in number.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek, in report to the Royal Society

I cannot imagine the wonder coursing through Leeuwenhoek's veins, but I know what I felt as I sat with my eldest on the stoop, seeing critters we never imagined. We did not know they were ostracods yet. We did not know much about them at all.

We knew this much, though--they got excited when they found something good to eat. We could see them munch on something else, then could see the "something else" in their bellies. Voyeurs, we were.

This is the world we live in. You have innumerable critters in your gut, in your nose, on your skin. You are surrounded by a cloud of bacteria. Every step you take destroys uncountable lives, but creates ground ripe for uncountable more.

We think we are special, and perhaps we are.

Yearning. Lust. Desire. I seek light, warmth, food, and love. So do animalcules. In June, with the infinite light of early summer, it makes sense.






¹When I was young, I believed what they taught me--at noon, the sun was supposed to be directly overhead. I spent years studying shadows at noon, years, before I realized that I had been fed a lie. In this part off the world, the sun is never directly overhead.

² From The Unsettling of America, in " The Body and the Earth," Wendell Berry, p. 96.

³Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/leeuwenhoek.html

The photomicrograph is by Anna33 via wikimedia, released under Creative Commons.

Acorns and oak trees and Arne Duncan

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. In 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, a bill in which Congress wanted to assure the "fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women …."

While scientists were busy developing phenomenal ideas that questioned pretty much everything (which is what scientists have always done, and often gets them in trouble), the Federal government confounded science with technology and took control on how certain monies were spent in education. (It threw in a loyalty oath for good measure.)

The division between science/technology and the other arts continues to dominate schooling. Lumping science and technology together reflects our pedagogical confusion and drives the science curriculum. I am required to "teach" kids who cannot connect an acorn to an oak tree how DNA technology works.

***

When I was in school, teachers cautioned me against anthropomorphizing. I would make an observation--"my dog smiles"--and get back a declaration--"that's anthropomorphizing, it's not really smiling." So I learned to change my language for the same observation.

"My dog pulls back its lips in a way that resembles human smiling." Only humans could feel, well, human.

I still say my dog smiled. Turns out I may have been right all along. Even mice recognize pain in other mice, and it influences their response to pain. It's even more pronounced if the mouse knows the other mouse experiencing the pain.

Don't call it empathy, call it "emotional contagion."

Two ways to take this--either humans are not as special as we thought, or maybe more things are special than just our branch of primates.

Meanwhile, I teach about DNA technology in class while the lunch ladies two stories below me lovingly slap slabs of mammal meat on bread made from the least nutritious part of wheat to serve to the same kids that don't know an acorn from an oak tree.

I recognize that knowing an acorn from an oak tree won't help my kids compete in the global market. I suspect it will help them lead happier lives.

What to do, what to do....

***

Two years ago I made a loaf of bread mixing a few wheat berries grown by the kids on a windowsill with the wheat berries I keep at home.

The bread was delicious, and most of my lambs enjoyed it. A few, however, were put off by the idea that their breath had anything to do with the bread they were now asked to share.

Communion took on a whole new angle.

Communion is an old word, and comes from communio--mutual participation. Communion is about sharing.

The lunch ladies love their charges. Josephine calls me Pumpkin, and I may even be a little bit in love with her.

Josephine does not know where the meat comes from. I don't expect that she should. She serves it with love, I eat it.

I know better, but I do it anyway.

***

Mr. Arne Duncan, our United States Secretary of Education, believes that we must prepare our children for a global economy. He speaks in tongues.

Yesterday he said:

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago working and living with young children of color. These kids were threatened every day. They lacked role models to protect them and guide them to a safe place where learning was valued and rewarded."

I get nervous with the "these kids" crowd. I get nervous with people who wave contact with people of color as some sort of credential. I get nervous about a lot of things.He didn't mention where he went to high school.

I especially got nervous about this:

Finally, I am very excited about a $15 billion "Race to the Top" fund approved by the House. The Senate version is somewhat smaller but it is still significant.

The President is deeply committed to this program because it will enable us to spur reform on a national scale—driving school systems to adopt college and career-ready, internationally benchmarked standards.

It will incent them to put in place state of the art data collection systems, assessments and curricula to meet these higher standards.

I am going to go on record here stating I do not believe internationally benchmarked standards are a good idea. We need locally benched standards (such as distinguishing an acorn from an oak tree) before throwing the rest of the universe in. I will gladly throw in eucalyptus trees once my lambs have a handle on acorns.

And please dear God please tell me he did not say "incent."

We don't need a race to the top. We need collaboration and cooperation and (dare I say it?) love.

(It doesn't help that Mr. Duncan chose to make these comments at my neices' high school--thankfully they are both thoughtful, independent thinkers, neither of whom use the word "incent." Hi Karlyn, Hi Claire!)

***

Arne Duncan was a professional basketball player. A bright (but not as bright as he thinks he is) athlete who never taught.

I never taught in public schools, either, before 2005. I have almost three more years teaching than Mr. Duncan. I have not taught enough to be any kind of administer in education (and for the record, have absolutely no interest in ever becoming administer), but I have taught more than the current Secretary of Education.

So here's the quandary. I want to teach our children about acorns and oak trees. I want them to know about the Second and Third Rivers in Bloomfield. (We, inexplicably, do not have a First River.)

I want my lambs to know that the beef they eat in the cafeteria has been expediently raised in circumstances less than stellar, and that there is a real possibility they sense things recently attributed to humans only.

I want my students to connect their breath to bread, to life, and back to bread again (because their breath is connected to bread and to life).

I want my Secretary of Education to use real words.

And he wants me to start using international standards.

You cannot know what matters until you know what is happening under your nose. Give me a year with my kids and they will at least know that much.

Give me a year teaching international standards before my kids know an acorn from an oak tree, however, and they will know nothing. No matter how employable they may be (should there be any jobs left for them to find).

The bread was made by Jessica Pierce--I owe her (yet) another horseshoe crab. She likes naughty words even more than I do, so click at your own risk.

DDE is public domain.

Yeast

When I pour the pints of flocculated yeast left in the bottom of my carboy down the sink, I feel a twinge of regret. As the scummy sludge burbles its way down the drain, I say a brief prayer, thanking the little guys for their work, hoping each bud survives its passage through the sewage system.

I am a home brewer, a yeast farmer. I have felt the cool release of carbon dioxide on my palm held above my airlock as it rhythmically clacks away, marking the work of millions upon millions of yeast, busy converting sunlight into alcohol.

I love the end result as much as anyone who breathes, but I cannot romanticize away the burden I put these critters through. So pour yourself an ale, let the foam caress your upper lip, and relax--it is time you know just how much that beer cost a fellow organism.

***

Yeast is a facultative anaerobe--that does not mean, however, that it does not appreciate a breath of oxygen now and then. As any decent home brewer will tell you (and I confess few of us rise to the category of "decent"), the wort (the lovely malt, hopped extract that feeds the yeast--fetal beer) should be aerated prior to pitching the yeast.

Despite the high falutin' language, "aerating" involves nothing more than sloshing the wort around, rolling the carboy on the kitchen floor for a few minutes. With good nutrients, and a dose of good air, the yeast go into an asexual frenzy, budding like there's no tomorrow, producing gazillions of fellow yeasts, so that soon each cc of wort contains 50 million yeasties.

But (and this is THE key point)--happy yeast with lots of nutrients and oxygen do not make ethanol. They (like you and me) breathe, respire, and convert carbohydrates into water and CO2. They screw like mad, play and live and (perhaps) whistle delightedly to themselves but (again I will repeat the take home message, as a teacher will), no ethanol. No hooch. No demon alcohol.

Making alcohol requires, ironically, stress. To make alcohol, the yeast must be put in an environment that has little oxygen.

So I torture them.

I put an airlock on my carboy, and the little critters consume the oxygen they have. In order to survive, they switch over to anaerobic metabolism--you and I, we'd take the easy way out and suffocate, but the yeasties are far more evolved than we are.

So they say:

"Ha, ha, ha, Mr. Doyle, despite your diabolical airlock, we can still screw with impunity in your carboy, happy, happy, happy critters we are, with our sophisticated facultative anaerobic metabolism, that will allow us to supercede humans when the atmosphere is nothing but charred CO2 and sulfur dust...."

This makes me sad. If I were power hungry, I suppose I might glean some glee from this, but I know this will end with me sharing bottles of ale with my obligatory aerobic friends. You see, as the yeasties play joyfully among themselves, they neglect a small problem. When they switch to anaerobic metabolism, they make alcohol.

And while the yeasties are more advanced than most humans, like most humans, they are susceptible to ethanol. Once the wort reaches a certain level of alcohol, the yeast pass out and sink to the bottom of the carboy, dazed but not quite dead.

And like the male of our species, a drunk yeastie can no more reproduce than a tonerless xerox machine.

So a toast to my finely evolved buddies, and an appreciation for the complex life cycles these little guys have gone through so that you may enjoy your ale.

I hope that an ale will never be just an ale to you, my friend, for knowing the struggle that went into that bottle can only make you more versed in the complexity and relatedness of this universe, too beautiful to comprehend.

Mr. Clam goes to BHS

I have a clam in room B360.

Every now and again it pokes it foot out. If you move the beaker, it pulls it right back in again.

The students are fascinated. A live clam in their class. Imagine that. While it's a little disheartening that a clam's foot can compete with my, um, well-crafted lesson plans, I put up with its insouciance.

Descent with modification led to this--a clam in a beaker with a strip of elodea, me with a laser pointer and a sometimes functioning SMART Board. Both of us are out of our elements. My hands are designed to pick basil seeds. The clam's foot is designed to pull itself deeper into the mud.

Descent with modification. To call it "evolution" presupposes I am more perfect than my shelled classroom buddy. Neither one of us is enhancing our reproductive strategies in B360. Neither one of us is particularly fit for our new environment.

In class we both lack purpose--no seeds to cull, no mud to muck in. Neither of us will last more than a lifetime. I was planning to eat the clam at the end of the school year.

I can't. Come next June Mr. Clam will be back in wild water, sowing his oats. I'll be back in my garden, sowing mine. And a few of my kids will remember the tentative foot of a clam during science class decades after memories of covalent bonds fade from their lives.

Bee

Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust its tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my tongue buried in my life's lust, I trust the bees will return the favor.

Tonight I found a bee clinging to a cluster of oregano flowerlets. Her head hung awkwardly over the cluster, missing the pollen and nectar of the flowers under her feet. I only saw it because I went to pick an oregano leaf.

The bee's middle leg occasionally moved, as though reaching for an itch. The wings trembled. It was dusk, the bee was, I thought, dying, or maybe, I said aloud to my wife, it was just resting.

I explained to Leslie, who has heard me explain too many ridiculous theories in our 31 years together (she listens intently, as though I might make some sense, and I speak intently, knowing she will listen, no matter how silly I am being--we love each other, after all), that perhaps the bee was only resting.

She challenged me, fairly. "How do you know it's only resting?"

Well, I saw a bumble resting on a marigold just last week, and in the morning, it was gone.

"Did you look on the ground," she asked, and I admitted that I had not, preferring to believe that my comatose bumble had been resurrected (a wonderful word). And at that moment, I suspected that my bumble had merely fallen off the marigold, dead.

Still, the idea of a bee dying on a cluster of flowerlets with her head hanging awkwardly off to the side bothered me enough to push another cluster of flowers towards her head. My wife watched. As I mentioned, she loves me, and she knew why I wanted to bury that bee's head in a flower, as crazy as the idea was. Because she knew my motive, she remained silent--not a skeptical silence, more a let's see where this goes silence, a silence of faith.

The bee buried its head into my offered flower. I figured that was it--she'll die there, and in the morning, when I see her carcass still on the flower, her head buried in nectar, I'll be glad to know I made her last moments a little better. Why not?

Still, we live in a wonderful universe and few things end as we predict. I was now in a peculiar position. The bee held her head in the clump of flowers I held; the bee's body, however, was still on the original bunch of flowerlets. Even in my most magnanimous moments, I do not envision holding a plant for an hour or two for dying insects. I am not a hospice for infirmed winged critters.

I gently tried to pry the flowers apart. The bee's body followed the bee's head, and I let go. She now rested comfortably with her head buried in an oregano flower. I have buried my own nose in oregano flowers. There are worse places to die.

Maybe it was the calories in the oregano nectar. Maybe it was the shimmying of the flowers. Maybe bees do in fact just rest at times (shhhh, don't tell the bee mythologists). She pulled her head out of the flower, then flew to a neighboring oregano plant, one where a human was less likely to interfere with her rest.

---

Seven weeks before my mother died, she danced. We had gathered at the Crab House in Cape May, where our family swarms annually. The Crab House is like so many other places down by the shore--plain brown paper table cloths, crab mallets, beer, and music.

Breast cancer had poked my mother's brain with nests of useless cells. Her bones ached. Her liver was swollen from metastases. When no one was looking, she moved like a marionette. Publicly, however, she moved slowly, gracefully.

In June of 1996, we danced. We knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. Others at the restaurant had no way of knowing, and they joined in our maniacal twirling, swinging, laughter. The others could not know she was dying, her energy so high, but we knew, and danced all that much harder. We knew she would not be back next year, we knew she was suffering, but the joy that night was real. We were celebrating life--not just hers, not just ours. Our joy was contagious, and the joint was hopping.

My mother taught her children to bury our heads in nectar the rare days we could find it. That nectar even at all exists boggles the mind. That it exists for us and for the bees, a miracle.

Another oldie.
The picture of the bee is from, of all places, Fermilab, a gummint site.
I figure the Crab House folks won't mind the plug--been a rough year for them.
Well worth the visit once they reopen.

How do you know the fishes are enjoying themselves?

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. "Look at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu, "They are really enjoying themselves."

"You are not a fish," replied the friend, "So you can't truly know that they are enjoying themselves."

"You are not me," said Chuang Tzu. "So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"

John Suler
Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors

I grew up close enough to the Jersey shore to have spent many hours submerged up to my nose in the Atlantic Ocean. If you tilt your head back underwater, you can see your reflection in the underside of the sea; a silvery, shimmery Neptune child gazes back.

I mostly bobbed up and down, nose sometimes in the water, sometimes out, pretending I was a salt-water crocodile. With eyes so close to the surface, the seaweed and broken reeds floating by loomed like large islands. When I turned away from the shore gazing eastward, I was the largest creature in the universe, not quite human anymore.

In New Jersey, what most of the world calls silversides or smelt, we call spearing. Menidia notata. They are mostly translucent, no bigger than a pinky. Each side has a silver band that looks like smooth tin foil. They have straight jawlines that make them look rather glum close-up, but since we mostly saw them when threading them on a hook, looking glum seemed appropriate.

Spearing travel in huge schools, almost invisible except for the occasional flash as the sun catches the silver. The surface sometimes erupted with them when a predator came underneath the school, but otherwise spearing had no particular reason to jump.

Or so the books will tell you.

One August afternoon, when I was 11 or 12ish, and I was busy conquering the seaworld, a piece of a phragmites reed drifted by. A tiny fish jumped over it. Odd.

I drifted closer to the reed, my eyes inches away. One fish, then another, their bands of tin flashing in the sun. I spotted the school just below the surface. I figured a few got too close to the reed, and jumped over it out of need. I continued to watch.

The fish jumping over the reed appeared to turn back. The school was mulling about in no particular direction. The fish were lining up to jump over the reed.

For the empiricists:

The individual subjects were observed approaching the reed at about 1 to 2 inches below the surface, then leaping about 1/2 inch before the reed, clearing it by no more than a 1/2 inch, then appeared to turn after reentering back into the water. The fish consistently approached the reed from the same side.

For the rest of you:

How do you know the fish are enjoying themselves? They jump for no apparent reason over a randomly floating object on a lovely day when (for the moment) no predators were interested in them, when the water was not cloudy with the milt of spawn, and when they forgot a crocodile sea god was watching.

---

I observed this more than once, or so I remembered. I am old enough now confuse imagination and memory. The tale above says as much as needs to be said contemplating joy in fish, and the tale reminded me of my jumping spearing.

Then the tao met Google.

Had anybody ever reported seeing fish jump over reeds for no apparent reason (or at least for any reason apparent to humans, who have an insatiable need for "reasons"). If you throw "fish" and "jumping" and "twig" together, you get a few hits. One of the hits is for an entry in Fish-Sci.

Fish-Sci is a listserv, a "scientific forum on fish and fisheries." On it fish biologists carry out long, serious conversations about, well, fish. You will find discussions on "otoliths in dolphinfish", "iron content in adult eel", and "fish biomass estimates for oligotrophic systems," all within the past 6 months.

The inquiry started innocently--Randy E. Edwards, Ph.D. and principal scientist for the Center for Coastal Geology needed to present a poster to International Symposium on Sturgeon in Oskosh, WI back in 2001. His question was simple: why do Gulf sturgeon jump? In his thoughtful letter, he listed numerous known reasons why fish jump.

A number of hypotheses have been brought forward to explain jumping behavior and include: parasite shedding, startle reflex, behavioral communication (to alert other individuals of their presence), to help shed eggs during spawning, nuptial behavior, and air gulping or swim bladder adjustment. .... Gulf sturgeon jumping is not temporally random, but instead is concentrated in the early morning and late afternoon. Why mullet jump (often in the same habitats as sturgeon) is not known.

The resulting discussion takes on a dance worthy of Albert the Alligator and company in Pogo. Fish apparently jump, at times, for no discernible reason.

Ivor Growns, a scientist with the Australian government, dodged the issue with an anecdote:

On a lighter note, I have heard of a member of the public sending a letter to their local parlimentarian asking why fish jumped. The minister asked for an explaination [sic] from the Fisheries department. The staff member sent back a reply saying "Because they are happy."

Another scientist, Glenn Crossin, a salmon specialist for Centre for Applied Conservation Biology in Vancouver, Canada, notes that sockeye salmon expend tremendous amounts of energy getting to their spawning grounds, yet when they get there, spend two weeks jumping and wasting energy.

Energetically one might think that this would be a risky behavior. Salmon typically expend most of thier [sic] fixed somatic energy reserves (mostly lipid) just reaching the spawning ground. Thus to expend limited energy unnecessarily, particularly when their one and only spawning opportunity lays ahead, seems risky.

When he asked his 9 year old nephew what he thought, the child answered "maybe they are just so happy to have made it there."

Ha-ha, kids are cute, let's get back to science.

Dr. Rodney Rountree is a scientist. He has a Ph.D., he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, he knows fish. He finally said what the others were skirting:

Fish likely jump for a lot of reasons, but I've often observed fishes jumping for no obvious reason (i.e., no predators or feeding behavior). I've often felt that the often cited purpose of jumping as an effort to dislodge external parasites (e.g., ocean sunfish) seemed inadequate. I even admit to thinking that some fish are just playing after on many different occasions watching Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia) jumping over floating twigs over and over again. It sure seemed like a game.... The jumping fish never made contact with the twig, which might be expected if they were trying to rub off a parasite or scratch an itch.

Spearing like to play. Or at least it's a reasonable hypothesis.

I wonder what else I taught myself to forget.

---

Sources: FISH-SCI archives, June, 2001, http://segate.sunet.se/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0106&L=fish-sci
Personal observations and a ragged memory

I wrote this somewhere else about four years ago, and I still like it. The top photo is from NOAA collection; the silversides drawing is by H. L. Todd back in the 1890s or so, so likely public domain, and ca be found here. The Pogo frame is from, of course, Walt Kelly, my favorite cartoonist ever, and I'm betting he'd be cool with the picture here, but it's too late to ask him. I found this frame here, but if Constantine von Hoffman objects, I have the original somewhere, and will scan it.