"All That's Left"
A poem published in Thomasonian Magazine
In my formative years as a budding scientist, I had the honor of working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a contractor. I was right out of college, and in retrospect, did not fully appreciate how cool the opportunity was. I worked alongside real-life scientists in the field of ecotoxicology. Some groups in the building focused on whales, others on algal blooms. We focused on fish (mostly salmon that traverse both salt and freshwater) and insects (which only live in freshwater).
One of the projects I worked on while I was there was sorting through *hundreds* of glass vials filled with insect samples. They were part of a big project looking at stormwater runoff, which is the water that comes off of roads when it rains. It can be a toxic soup! They needed someone to go through the samples and identify and tally all the insects in each vial. Guess who got this job??
Honestly, it was pretty cool. I learned to identify a bunch of aquatic insects (looking at you mayflies, caddisflies, and stoneflies) and moved the project from stagnant to ready-to-analyze. I cannot tell you how many hours I sat behind the microscope listening to This American Life and Snap Judgement during this project, but it was A LOT.
Maybe this isn’t obvious, but all the insects I looked at for this project were dead, preserved in ethanol. Some of the species take on a shrimp-like form in their position of death (cooked-shrimp, that is). I didn’t realize at the time how…unnatural they looked.
Later, in grad school, when I saw some of these same critters alive in water, I was stunned by how different they looked, how beautiful. I was struck by how much *knowledge* was lost by only seeing a dead, preserved version. The ethanol did them no justice. This experience triggered a feeling of climate disaster dread, because it is not hard to imagine some of these species threatened by climate change in the coming decades, leaving only the preserved versions behind. This experience also inspired a poem: “All That’s Left”, published in Issue 1 of Thomasonian Magazine.
Currently reading*: North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, by Ethan Rutherford
Recently finished: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
*please remember that book links going to Bookshop.org are my affiliate links to spread the love to indie bookstores 💜
Recent internet search of note: DIY Advent calendars
Political action recap:
Learned about a cool new app called Goods Unite Us (thanks, Mom!) that shows the political affiliation of companies/brands based on their political contributions. I plan to start using this app to inform my purchasing decisions (especially on bigger purchases) to ensure my spending is aligned with my beliefs as much as possible.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Thanksgiving to any and all of you who celebrate!