Category: Invertebrates

Ediacaran

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Life in the Ediacaran by John Sibbick

Ediacaran

The Victorians couldn’t have known, of course,
The abundance of life in the lifeless rocks –
The explosion before the trilobites,
With multicellular building blocks.
The fossils are rare, but they are there,
In Charnia and Kimberella.
What were they ?  We don’t quite know –
Foundation in the stony cellar.
Dickinsonia, Cyclomedusa,
You flourished, then you died away.
The Boring Billion birthed you all –
Our great ancestral stray.

Yet still the Paleozoic begins,
Long after the glories of Avalon.
That makes no sense, not now we know
What the Cambrian was built upon.
Dismissed as children’s stories,
We have had to wait a long long time –
Yet the Pre- was not so pre at all,
Its oceans teemed with some strange slime…
The end of the Cryogenian, that’s the border,
That’s when things got big –
Spriggina and Aspidella are waiting –
All we have to do is dig…

Limb-Slungs & Beam-Shanks

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This illustration seems to come from The Burke Museum, but alas I have no idea who drew it.

Limb-Slungs & Beam-Shanks

Some daddy-longlegs are spiders in cellars,
And some daddy-longlegs are leg-craning flies.
Some are strange scorpings who walk in the harvest,
But all have more leg than they should for their size.
Some daddy-longlegs are tip-toeing fellers,
And some daddy-longlegs are mummies-on-stilts.
Some have evolved from their cousins the farthest,
But all are as lanky as when they were built.

Turbo

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Turbo petholatus by Wikipedia

Turbo

I wonder if Carl Linnaeus smiled
As he coined a name for a water-snail
As if a windmill in a gale.
Perhaps the twist of its shell beguiled,
But given its lack of energy,
He must have seen the irony ?

Forever dubbed forever more
By a name befitting of cavaliers
To a bug with neither joints nor gears –
In the age of steam, as the turbines roar,
What did they think of their silent whirlwind,
Forever failing to twirl and spin ?

But maybe our Carl was being sublime ?
As cyclones on their well-greased heels,
Like plugholes, perhaps, or waterwheels,
But they did so in their own sweet time –
Forever in motion, the will that drives,
Revolving their shells throughout their lives.

Perhaps Carl was thinking of the popular hobby of snail racing ?

Frost Flitters

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Peocilocampa populi by Janet Graham

Frost Flitters

December moths are loyal to their name,
Defying Autumn’s dying –
Hugged in furs, as charcoal as the nights,
These moths keep flying –
And yet, they earn so little fame,
From folklores, who ignore them –
However much they circle fairy lights
With soft decorum.

They’re on the wing for Halloween,
Yet bats have all the glory,
And then they’re just too dark to stake a claim
For the robin’s story.
These spinners of the Winter slip between,
Ours fears and holy writ,
But touch on neither, failing at the game –
They just don’t seem to fit.

All the Summer, lappets gorge on oaks,
Unnoticed then as well –
Pupating into eggars with the acorns,
Till a colder spell.
They hatch as the dead are donning cloaks,
As if by frost released –
Then die at the time of the manger-born,
From fasting through the feast.

Pyrophiles

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The 3rd Element – Fire by John Rowe

Pyrophiles

Some plants only germinate through fire,
Waiting out the years
Until the tragedy appears.
They need the forest hotter, tinder dryer,
Even dropping oil
To make a tarpit of the soil.
But there hasn’t been a fire through here, I’m told,
In fifty years of cold –
I guess these trees are all the same-age-old.

Their life-cycle needs the flames be fanned,
They need to taste the char
Before they’ll shoot a single spar.
They need apocalypse to sweep the land
To birth their phoenix seeds,
To grow within the ash of weeds.
And there are even beetles who must birth
Within the hell-scorched earth,
(Though salamanders don’t, for what it’s worth).

Spiders, Plural

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Nesting Instinct by Natalie Featherston

Spiders, Plural

Spiders are only one-by-one,
Each web is a bachelor-pad –
We don’t see social types a ton,
Which might make the squeamish glad !
But how then does a spider dad
Make a brand new spider son ?
Some sexy-togetherness must be had
To see that the deed gets done !
So come the Autumn, see them run
On the carpet, ev’ry lad,
On the hunt for a lady, to have some fun,
When the urge to breed gets bad.
Usu’lly, company drives them mad –
Their perfect number is none !
But once a year, they get up and gad
From the loneliness they’ve spun.

Web-Slingers

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Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com

Web Slingers

Spiders are litterbugs,
Leaving their webbing just hanging around.
And yet, if one tugs,
Then a derelict ruin is all that is found.
Covered in dust,
And discarded skins, and husks of meals –
They raise our disgust
With the waist that their indolent lifestyle reveals.
Could something not eat this ?
It’s all made of protein and going for free.
Why do we dismiss
Such a feast of spaghetti and gristle for tea ?
Spiders are all blight
Who wontonly turn all our corners to slums –
But could not some dust mite
Come sweeping up after them, feeding on crumbs ?

Flore Pleno

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Photo by Cristhian Cabra on Pexels.com

Flore Pleno

Double roses are showy but barren,
Turning stamens into yet more petals,
Living the bachelor life.
Even if they still make pollen,
Bees can’t push through all those petals,
Leaving them with no midwife.
Yet these are the roses in bouquets,
To symbolise our multilayered love
Of loud and overdressed grooms.
But dog roses are where bees graze –
They’re wide-open with stamens full of love
And hips full of future blooms.

Bumble-Buffet

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Bumble Bee by Nigel Jones

Bumble-Buffet

I don’t know why the alkanet
Is only served by bumblebees,
But ev’ry time I see a patch,
Then bumbles are their only catch.
Their flowers are so dainty, yet,
The smaller sort don’t visit these –
Perhaps their pollen is too heavy
For the lighter bees to ferry ?
The plants spring up in shady wet,
Against the walls, beneath the trees –
Perhaps these factors coalesced
Where bumbles like to build their nest ?
I hear such bugs are under threat
But here they gather as they please –
Where beefy bees are bumbling by,
To drink the deep blue blossoms dry.