Death in the greenhouse

If you're the type to be struck by little things, poignant moments occasionally happen, even at national laboratories. Sometimes I'm that type.

I was feeling discouraged and distracted at work one day this past July and to try and get my mind back on science I did the usual and visited Greenhouse 1. Greenhouse 1 contains mesocosms full of Arabidopsis plants that are supposed to shed light on the problem of scaling, essentially how a change in one important gene can translate across multiple ecological hierarchies. I was not thinking about ecological hierarchies, though. I am a student intern and I don't get to worry about those things. I had a different problem: my plants were flowering too early, making collection of all sorts of important data pretty much impossible. I wandered in and out of each row and stared at my precociously flowering babies til I got to the last row, row 6. There's a door that goes outside just beyond row 6 and no one ever uses it. We all come into the greenhouses through the headhouse. I even didn't notice the door when I first started working here and I still forget about it a lot. That day I re-noticed it and while I was staring aimlessly at it I spotted a tiny skeleton on the floor in front of it. A little toad or frog had somehow got in and died there, crouched a foot or so away from the wall between it and freedom.

For some reason this struck me as a deeply poignant moment. I was having a super-rough day and that might be why it impressed me so much. Whatever the case, it was a moment and to keep a memento I carefully picked up the skeleton and took it back to my office. I keep it sitting on my desk, near my luxuriantly beautiful African violet. It is pretty well preserved, having dried up and the flesh decomposed by innumerable microorganisms, though some skin and membrane dried stretched across the tiny bones. It is so light, just 1.1774 g, and fragile but tough at the same time. It is a nice little specimen--more or less a complete skeleton I think--but I keep it more for the evoked emotion than as a curious scientist. If I were a poet, I might have written a poem about it because it seems to me that such a moment begs to be poetized about. But I only write "poems" when either a nice string of words occurs to me or I am so upset that no other emotional outlet seems possible.

Though no haiku is forthcoming, I did want to tell this story because whenever I think about it, I feel a sort of universal sadness. The little toad didn't know it couldn't survive in the big, cold, concrete-floored greenhouse. It wandered in somehow, perhaps through a hole or squeezed under that forgotten door. I clearly remember it was positioned facing towards me, away from the door, as if it had slipped in and found a quiet place to die. It dried up huddled in the same crouched position and remained there until I reached for it. I often pick it up off the desk and cup it in my palm, examining the intricacies of its figure. I think, in fact, that no poem is needed. The skeleton is so meaningful in itself.
















Image above: the lonely toad, photographed by Arabidopsisgirl