While all these nations built their lives on land
And traded water's world for open air,
The waters still held under heaven's hand
A nation greater than all those who'd dare
To leave—for Actinus, son of bright
Osticthus, ruled the realm of water's flow
With fins of spine and membrane, each so right
For cutting through the current's ceaseless go.
His lung had turned to swim-bladder so light
It filled with gas to make him weightless there,
Suspended in the water day and night
As if the water were his form of air.
And Actinus and fair Andrea Lepis
Laid nine hundred eggs with patient care—
So many futures sown like seeds in this
One season, filling every water there.
His eldest sons were Bichiros the first,
Who kept the ancient body-plan most pure:
His scales like plates of bony stone hard-cursed
In fossil record—scales that would endure.
The bichirs of the deepest African streams
Still carry Bichiros' ancient form today—
They breathe both air and water, feeding on dreams
Of prey in mudflat shallows after day.
Their lobed pectoral fins push through the mud
In flood-season shallows, walking-like,
And when the dry-spell comes and waters flood
Recede, they breathe the air—a living spike
Between the ancient world and the world today,
A living bridge from one age to the next
Who shows that some find better than the way
Of change: the ancient form, forever blessed.
From Bichiros came Chondrosteos great:
The sturgeons in their bony-scuted lines
Who'd grow to massive length in every state
Of river, sea, and lake where water shines.
The sturgeon bears no ordinary scale
But rows of bony scutes along the side,
And searches with barbels that always trail
Along the muddy bottom for his guide
To food concealed beneath the river's floor—
A patient bottom-feeder of great age
Who's outlasted dynasties of yore
And writes his story on the oldest page.
His cousin Paddlos searches too
With paddle-shaped snout sensing what swims near,
Detecting fields of electricity through
The river's depth where prey cannot appear
To hide from those whose senses reach so wide
Beyond the water's murk and cold and deep—
The paddlefish whose ancient family's pride
Is sensing what the clearest eye can't keep.
From these would rise Holosteos' branch
Whose ganoid scales gleam like ancient mail—
The garfish of the river and the ranch
Of southern waters tells the oldest tale
Of those who've lived since dinosaurs have died
And kept the body-plan of ancient time,
The gar that lurks with ambush's deadly pride
Beneath the duckweed and the waterweed's rhyme.
The bowfin is another relic true
Of Holosteos' patient ancient line,
Who breathes both gill and lung when waters blue
Turn shallow, warm, and lacking in design
For normal breathing—then he gulps the air
And keeps alive through August's oxygen-thin
And stagnant summer pools beyond compare
In any modern fish's discipline.
But from Actinus' greatest gift would spring
At last the Teleosteos vast—
The total bony fish who'd come to bring
Their numbers to an empire unsurpassed.
Two jaws instead of one—the upper jaw
That could protrude beyond the mouth and reach
For prey with explosive speed, a flaw-
Less feeding mechanism none could teach
Who hadn't learned it through the ancient school
Of trial and error over countless years—
Teleosteos made this innovation's rule
The key to conquering all frontier.
From deep ocean trench to mountain lake,
From tropical reef to arctic sea of ice,
His children filled each niche for feeding's sake
And built their nations at whatever price
Evolution asked of them to pay
In form and function, color, size, and taste:
The salmon running home to die and lay,
The flying fish who leaps from ocean's face,
The anglerfish with glowing lure below,
The seahorse where the father bears the young,
The clownfish in his anemone's glow—
All Actinus' children, every one.
He shows us that the patient staying-in
When others choose to leave can be as wise:
Not every victory requires to win
By leaving—some are greatest where they rise
In numbers past what any land could hold,
In forms past what imagination dreams,
In every water under sun and cold:
The ones who stayed made more than what it seems.
Honor the ray-finned multitudes who fill
The rivers, lakes, and all the ocean's span—
The greatest vertebrate dynasty still,
Whose legacy outshines any other plan.
From Bichiros' ancient plate-scaled dignity
To Teleosteos' empire without end,
The ray-finned fish display to all and free
How staying in the water can transcend
The migrations of the ambitious who
Left water for the land in hopes of more—
For in the water there was always new
And unexplored and vast and ever shore.