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October 31, 2000
Nature at Close Range
A Frightful Frog
A woman wanders alongside a creek, stops to watch one creature destroy another, and wonders how there can be beauty in an act of violence. What turns an incident of nature into an event of great significance?
Annie Dillard is an astute observer of natural events. In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she describes a memorable encounter with a frog.
...At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn't jump.
He didn't jump; I crept closer.... Just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and dropped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water; it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.
What do you think happened to the frog? What appalled Dillard?
As it turns out, the frog was eaten by a giant water bug. Dillard goes on to describe how the bug manages to devour a victim larger than itself:
. ...Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organsall but the skinand through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice.
**YUCK!! Hope you don't have bad dreams because of this. It's actually pretty cool. I just never want to see another one!**
October 31, 2000
Nature at Close Range
A Frightful Frog
A woman wanders alongside a creek, stops to watch one creature destroy another, and wonders how there can be beauty in an act of violence. What turns an incident of nature into an event of great significance?
Annie Dillard is an astute observer of natural events. In her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she describes a memorable encounter with a frog.
...At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn't jump.
He didn't jump; I crept closer.... Just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and dropped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water; it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.
What do you think happened to the frog? What appalled Dillard?
As it turns out, the frog was eaten by a giant water bug. Dillard goes on to describe how the bug manages to devour a victim larger than itself:
. ...Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organsall but the skinand through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice.
**YUCK!! Hope you don't have bad dreams because of this. It's actually pretty cool. I just never want to see another one!**
