AMONG WHALES

On the recommendation of my new girlfriend K. I am now reding this excellent book, Among Whales , by Roger Payne. I would like to dig up a quote about how amniotic fluid in mammals is of the same constituency as the sea, where scientists figure life first emerged from. How humbling that each of us mammals emerges into life the same way. Whales, awesomely enough, emerge from the world of amniotic fluid into the sea itself which is much like an endless world of the same stuff.

Here is another quote from Payne's book which I find both marvellous and terrifying, from a passage in which he is describing the plants of Patagonia (which are some real tough customers):

There is even one species of grass (called "flecha" or arrow grass) which has a particularly cruel mechanism for dispersing its seeds. Each seed is tipped with an exquisitely sharp and multiply barbed point. When the seed gets picked up in a sheep's wool, every motion by the sheep causes adjacent wool fibers to slide back and forth a tiny bit along each other's length. This motion against the barbs on the arrow grass seeds moves the barb deeper into the pile of the fleece. When a sharp-tipped seed reaches the sheep's skin, it penetrates both skin and underlying body wall musculature. Once inside the sheep's body cavity, it penetrates the internal organs, eventually killing it - the sheep's decomposing body suffocating competing vegetation beneath it and also providing, I suppose, an excellent bed of fertilizer for the next generation of arrow grass.

Among Whales p.72