Among the crustacean nations of the sea
Whose ancient story reached from far before
The Carboniferous age, lived one so free
In body-plan it split the others' lore:
For Malacos had given all his sons
A body counted in the sum of three:
The head, the thorax, and the abdomen runs
Together in a segmentation free
But organized—eight above the waist,
Six below, five more to thorax laid,
Nineteen segments in the body placed
With care by evolution's patient trade.
For Malacos gave to every son
The gift of stalked and movable compound eyes
That saw in every direction, never done
With scanning—a periscope that never lies
About what passes from any side—
And five pairs of walking legs to stride
Across the ocean floor with confident glide,
And swimmerets below for catching tide.
His four great children filled the ocean's halls:
First Decapos with his ten-legged might,
Then Euphausios in the water's calls,
Then Stomatos with his clubs of might,
And Isops who would dare to venture last
From salty sea to fresh to land above—
The pill bug of the garden, firm and fast
To roll into his defensive love.
Great Decapos was the master of the claw:
Ten legs with specialized design—
The front two modified for seize and gnaw
While eight behind for walking's steady line.
His children are the finest feast the sea
Has ever offered to the human kind:
The lobster scarlet in his boiling free,
The crab who walks sideways of any mind
That moves toward danger—cutting sideways-wise
To disappear from any head-on view,
A strategy of angles that implies
The forward charge is not the only true
Direction—sometimes sideways is the way
That brings you to your destination right.
The shrimp who swim in clouds of silver spray,
The crayfish of the freshwater's delight.
The hermit crab who borrows others' shells
And searches all the ocean floor to find
The perfect home—and when he outgrows, swells
Beyond the shell, he searches for a kind
That fits—and often in a chain of trade:
One leaves, another moves into the space,
A whole community of homeless made
Suddenly housed by one exchange of place.
Great Stomatos of the shallow reef
Is something beyond any creature known
For violence—his punch of staggering brief
Duration hits with force of cavitation's throne:
The water cavitates behind his strike
And sends a second shockwave past the first—
Two blows with every punch, nothing alike
In all the animal world—the worst
And best designed of weapons, club or spear,
To crack the shells of snails and crab and clam
With strike faster than the eye can see or hear—
A living bullet's program and exam.
Sixteen types of color-receptor bright
In his compound eyes compare to our
Mere three—he sees what we call light
Divided into spectrums of such power
That the colors we cannot name or see
Are Stomatos' ordinary view:
He lives in a chromatic world set free
From any limit of our visual cue.
Great Euphausios chose a different path—
No claw, no hammer, but the patient swim
Through midnight waters, suffering the wrath
Of cold and dark at ocean's midnight rim,
To filter-feed on plankton day and night
And build himself in numbers past all count:
The krill who feed the great whale with delight,
The base on which the ocean's mountains mount
Of life—for without krill there is no whale,
No penguin, seal, or seabird keeping warm
Through polar winter, nothing that would sail
The southern oceans in the freezing storm.
The smallest meal that feeds the largest mind
That swims the ocean—krill's abundant grace
Sustains the whale, and in that role we find
That smallness too can hold a sovereign place.
Isops was the bravest of them all
Who heard the call of land and answered it—
From sea to fresh, from fresh to land's great hall
He walked on many legs, a perfect fit
For everywhere he tried: the roly-poly,
The pill bug of the garden's underworld,
The woodlouse of the rotting log—the wholly
Terrestrial crustacean, unfurled
In garden and in forest, field and floor—
The only crustacean that breathes the air
Through modified gills that still adore
The moisture that reminds them water's there.
He rolls into a perfect sphere when touched—
Not to flee but to present the hardened
Outside of his armor—not too much
To ask of one who from the ocean gardened
Himself a life in places cold and damp
Beneath the stones and leaves where darkness keeps
Its own community: the pill bug's camp
Where isopods have claimed the rotting deeps.
So Malacos teaches us the way
Of specialization's many roads:
Not one way to live each single day
But nineteen segments bearing different loads
Of task and talent, each appendage bent
To specialized perfection by the years—
From filter-feeding to the punch well-sent,
From cracking shells to rolling to a sphere.
Honor the armored many who have claimed
Both sea and land and every depth between—
The lobster's patience cannot be ashamed,
The krill's abundance makes the ocean green.