Read Online On a Farther Shore by William Souder - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: William Souder
Ads: Link
love with an animal she studied for the first time: the American eel.
Carson had an enormous aquarium in her lab that was filled with eels, and contemplating their dark undulations as they glided from one end of the tank to the other made her think. Eels are migratory and have a complex life history that Carson found beguiling. Born in the open ocean, larval eels drift on currents toward the continental shelf, where they metamorphose into elvers, finger-sized and serpentine and so transparent they appear to be made of glass. The elvers move up through estuaries and eventually into freshwater streams and ponds, where they undergo a maturation that takes many years. As adults they return to the ocean for the long journey back to their breeding areas in and around the Sargasso Sea in the middle Atlantic. Carson could not stop thinking about the story of the eel.
Migrations like that of the eel are one of nature’s most literal examples of the continuity of life.In the same lab where she studied her eels, Carson also kept some amoebas that caused her to think about this in a different context. As almost every student of biology comes to realize, amoebas—and indeed, all single-celled animals that reproduce by simply dividing in two—have a kind of eternal life. Although they can be killed, amoebas do not senesce and die, but rather divideand live on. So every amoeba is arguably not an individual with a singular identity, but is rather part of the first amoeba—and thus an organism whose life originated in the mists of time and that might exist for as long as there are amoebas.Carson thought another way to picture it was to imagine that within such species there must be “infinitesimally small molecular aggregates” that had been “alive” for millions of years and would be perpetuated indefinitely. Carson told all this to a friend, admitting that it was “a curious train of thought.”
Robert Carson collapsed and died one morning in the backyard at Stemmers Run in July 1935. He was seventy-one. Rachel, whose brother lived on his own in Baltimore, was now truly the head of the household at the age of twenty-eight. She had left the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins a year and a half earlier and continued with her several part-time academic jobs.At the urging of Mary Scott Skinker, who had completed her PhD and gone to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carson in early 1935 had taken and passed civil service examinations in parasitology, wildlife biology, and aquatic biology.In October she was hired as a field aide by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in their Baltimore office.Her job entailed “assembling information for public distribution on the natural history and conservation of the fishes of the Atlantic Coast.”These duties consisted mainly of writing short scripts for a radio program called
Romance Under the Waters
, which the bureau produced in partnership with the CBS Radio Network.The job was, as Carson later reported, “intermittent.” When she worked, Carson earned $6.50 a day. On a personnel form that asked her to list the number and ages of any dependents living with her, Carson stubbornly answered that she had “1 totally; 3 partially” and left it at that.
The Bureau of Fisheries had come into existence partly by accident. In the mid-1800s, commercial fishermen in New England noticed a decline in fish numbers in coastal waters. In response, Congress in 1871 created the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries—butdid not limit its charter tothe problems in the New England fishery. With no deadline to report on or resolve the issue, the commission became by default a permanent federal agency—the first one whose mission was the conservation of wildlife.
The commission initially made fishery surveys using navy vessels or revenue cutters borrowed from the Treasury Department, but by 1883 was operating two of its own ships, the first vessels ever designed for the purpose of marine research.
Carson had an enormous aquarium in her lab that was filled with eels, and contemplating their dark undulations as they glided from one end of the tank to the other made her think. Eels are migratory and have a complex life history that Carson found beguiling. Born in the open ocean, larval eels drift on currents toward the continental shelf, where they metamorphose into elvers, finger-sized and serpentine and so transparent they appear to be made of glass. The elvers move up through estuaries and eventually into freshwater streams and ponds, where they undergo a maturation that takes many years. As adults they return to the ocean for the long journey back to their breeding areas in and around the Sargasso Sea in the middle Atlantic. Carson could not stop thinking about the story of the eel.
Migrations like that of the eel are one of nature’s most literal examples of the continuity of life.In the same lab where she studied her eels, Carson also kept some amoebas that caused her to think about this in a different context. As almost every student of biology comes to realize, amoebas—and indeed, all single-celled animals that reproduce by simply dividing in two—have a kind of eternal life. Although they can be killed, amoebas do not senesce and die, but rather divideand live on. So every amoeba is arguably not an individual with a singular identity, but is rather part of the first amoeba—and thus an organism whose life originated in the mists of time and that might exist for as long as there are amoebas.Carson thought another way to picture it was to imagine that within such species there must be “infinitesimally small molecular aggregates” that had been “alive” for millions of years and would be perpetuated indefinitely. Carson told all this to a friend, admitting that it was “a curious train of thought.”
Robert Carson collapsed and died one morning in the backyard at Stemmers Run in July 1935. He was seventy-one. Rachel, whose brother lived on his own in Baltimore, was now truly the head of the household at the age of twenty-eight. She had left the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins a year and a half earlier and continued with her several part-time academic jobs.At the urging of Mary Scott Skinker, who had completed her PhD and gone to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carson in early 1935 had taken and passed civil service examinations in parasitology, wildlife biology, and aquatic biology.In October she was hired as a field aide by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in their Baltimore office.Her job entailed “assembling information for public distribution on the natural history and conservation of the fishes of the Atlantic Coast.”These duties consisted mainly of writing short scripts for a radio program called
Romance Under the Waters
, which the bureau produced in partnership with the CBS Radio Network.The job was, as Carson later reported, “intermittent.” When she worked, Carson earned $6.50 a day. On a personnel form that asked her to list the number and ages of any dependents living with her, Carson stubbornly answered that she had “1 totally; 3 partially” and left it at that.
The Bureau of Fisheries had come into existence partly by accident. In the mid-1800s, commercial fishermen in New England noticed a decline in fish numbers in coastal waters. In response, Congress in 1871 created the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries—butdid not limit its charter tothe problems in the New England fishery. With no deadline to report on or resolve the issue, the commission became by default a permanent federal agency—the first one whose mission was the conservation of wildlife.
The commission initially made fishery surveys using navy vessels or revenue cutters borrowed from the Treasury Department, but by 1883 was operating two of its own ships, the first vessels ever designed for the purpose of marine research.
Similar Books
