“It didn’t take long for researchers examining the tiny sea snails to see something amiss. The surface of some of their thin outer shells looked as if they had been etched by a solvent. Others were deeply pitted and pocked. These translucent sea butterflies known as pteropods, which provide food for salmon, herring and other fish, hadn’t been burned in some horrific lab accident. They were being eaten away by the Pacific Ocean. Scientists have documented that souring seas caused by carbon dioxide emissions are dissolving pteropods in the wild right now along the U.S. West Coast. That is damaging a potentially important link in the marine food web far sooner than expected.”
– Seattle Times, April, 2014:
http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2014/apr/30/pteropod-shells-dissolving
As long as us humans are ‘evolving’
so what if other ones are dissolving?
Generational abdication
by humans turned the crisp ocean
through acute acidification
into soup of toxic potion
The mollusk pteropod
in translucent shell
now by CO2 flawed
Chimes food chain’s death knell
No longer just a notion
effects ubiquitous
No longer mere slow motion
collapse precipitous
By humans running roughshod
the shells now pocked, softened
of the hapless Gastropod
Grandkids’ future coffined
By killing the pteropod
we’re denying Pterogod
+)
-gastropod = mollusk comprising the snails, whelks, slugs, etc.
-mollusk = a large group of animals (such as snails and clams) twho live in a shell
-pteropod = a small mollusk with winglike extensions for swimming
-‘Pterogod’ = (by license) that of God in Everyone and Everything