Seeing as it's still nature appreciation day, I thought I'd reflect on survival of the fishest. A favorite artist, Ray Troll, likes portraying the idea graphically. One of his T-shirt designs:

It shouldn't need much explanation, but there's a good one here. Even if they're thousands of miles away and ten years old, once the salmon's breeding instincts are triggered, they'll find their way half way around the world to the mouth of the river or tributary in which their parents laid their eggs. No one quite knows how this happens, and it is thought that the information is imprinted upon their developing brains shortly after they hatch. They start to disintegrate when they hit the fresh water, and after they've spawned, they're ready to die, which they do by the thousands. (This provides food and fertilizer, of course.)

I'll never forget the sight of exhausted salmon, many of them with eyes missing and fins shredded or missing. Some of them had no eyes at all and bones sticking out in place of the fins. Just swimming forward, forward, as they entered the gates of the fish hatchery where their parents spawned and died years before. The idea of fish managing to imprint on the exact location of water "fish ladders" flowing up to a building, and remembering that years later, this challenges conventional ideas of what is "natural." I'm too old to worry about natural morality in any sort of judgmental sense, but when I saw it I found it very moving and downright spooky.

Well, speaking of natural morality judgments, here's another design by Ray Troll (ridiculing the moral equivalency idea that women need fish like men need bicycles or something like that):

Very confusing.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Considering what's going on around here lately, I think this blog is haunted. And why not?