Science Day Postscript
The following quotations are from Sarah Sekula’s outstanding article TURTLE POWER Endangered species spawn on Florida beaches, USA TODAY.
Sarasota county has the highest density of turtle nests on the Gulf Coast, with as many as 6,000 nests a year, while the east coast of Florida hosts as many as 40,000.
Seeing hatchlings emerge from the nest is an amazing experience. The sand begins to move up and down like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. Tiny heads and flippers break the surface by the dozens and quite suddenly there are loads of babies bumbling
about, each no bigger than a child’s palm. Within a few minutes to a few hours, one tenacious hatchling starts trucking it to the sea. The rest follow.
“You can’t even count them all as they pour from the nest and make their way to the ocean without a care in the world, just the instinct to follow the light,” says Kristen Mazzarella, a biologist with Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium.
If reason was all, reason
would not exist—the will
to reason accounts for it;
it’s not reason that chooses
the live; the seed doesn’t swell
in its husk by reason, but loves
itself, obeys light which is
its own thought and argues the leaf
in secret; love articulates
the choice of life in fact; life
chooses life because it is
alive; what lives didn’t begin dead,
nor sun’s fire commence in ember.
—anonymous
