NaPoWriMo 6/30

Today's prompt is to write an animal poem. Being the Oregonian that I am, I decided to write on coho salmon. Consider this another work in progress! Oh, and the pictures here are all mine (all the pictures I post with the exception of my Outfits of the Week, are my own).


Oncorhynchus kisutch--Coho Salmon

Slick and silver
Time traveler, oceanic wanderer
The smell of your freshwater birthplace is calling you home.

Journey weary, hook-beaked warriors 
Build redds in the riffles 
Spawn on gravelly beds of ripples and current
And die.

Coho and Chinook Fry from Knowles Creek, Siuslaw Watershed

Salmon Smolt, Knowles Creek, Siuslaw Watershed

Spawned out salmon carcasses contribute nitrogen and other nutrients to forest-stream ecosystem

  I had the wonderful opportunity to work two seasons monitoring native fish species in a mid-coastal creek in Oregon where I developed a love of these sacred animals, which were a main source of food and currency for the  indigenous people of the area. Coho are anadromous, and spend part of their life in freshwater and part of their life in salt water. On average, coho spend 1-2 years in the stream of their birth, covered with speckles and parr marks that provides camouflage from predators, helping them hide among the stream detritus. As smolt, they "silver up" before heading out to sea, where being silver protects them from predation in the open ocean. Coho will spend one to three years at sea before they are driven to return home to their natal stream to spawn and die. Oncorhynchus literally means hooked nose, and refers to the fact that spawning male coho develop formidable looking hooked jaws. 

And now, a video I took of a spawning run at Fish Creek in the Siuslaw Watershed, Oregon, November of 2009. 

NaPoWriMo 3/30

The prompt for today, the third day of NaPoWriMo, is to write a poem in celebration of the wedding, which turns out has its own special word, of course, that even my scientifically oriented mouth had difficulty pronouncing. For this reason alone, and not because I dislike marriage, I am going on my own today and will instead be writing about the first topic or headline I stumble upon, which incidentally turns out to be Darwin's Legacy. In reality this is the title of a series of free lectures from Stanford available on youtube, click on the above link if you are interested checking it out. 

A recently discovered symbiotic relationship and a wonderful example of coevolution; green algae cells provide oxygen to developing salamander embryo. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-04/algae-live-inside-developing-salamanders-cells-scientists-find

  
And now without further procrastination, I present...a poem:

Darwin's Legacy

Thirteen species of finches 
Fly around in my head
Their beaks, 
Their beaks torment me 
In my sleep they are pecking and pinching
Pulling and plucking seeds of various sizes
From my cracks and crevices, 
My eyes and fingers burn with their guano
And would you believe I have been living for the last year 
Off  of  seaweed, pre-digested in the gut of a pink iguana?


Oh, the tangled bank is thick
So rife with hierarchical complexity 
And Darwin sailed on the Beagle straight through it
Plowing onwards through the origin of species
A single common ancestor, gone explode
Broken apart like Pangea over evolutionary time
The scatterings of diversity
Arising.