07-014
WHEN WALKING FROGS ATTACK
As a practical matter, I seldom
trouble myself with small things, except within these confines. Life is too abrupt to spend an inordinate
amount of effort examining trifles unless there's a handsome recompense in it. Otherwise, I turn my daily concerns to
grander designs, as if the world needed one less pundit avoiding the
inconsequential. Plus, I enjoy being
paid. It's always been the best
solution for keeping out of debt.
I'm referring, of course, to us (and
by us I mean "species.") Yes,
like it or not, we are only one of many roaming about making more and less of
ourselves. We're no more or less
important than our co-inhabitors, though our hostile actions against some of
them often belie this, and I wholly agree with the practice. The day I find myself feeling subordinate to
Golden Poison Dart Frogs (one of them could quickly dispatch 100 of us with a
single drop of their perspiration) is the day I'll approach them for counsel on
reducing my accounts payable.
Moreover, before I examined these
trivialities, I hadn't known that frogs sweat, poisonously or not. This gives them an unfair advantage over
us. Due to their placement in or near
watery habitats, one always expects them to be glistening. I wouldn't trust any arid-affected frog, and
I don't recall ever seeing one.
I only wish I could say the same for
our species. There was once a large,
amphibian-shaped woman at the community pool who always seemed to emerge dry
from the deep end. My support for The
Darwinian Theory, as well as my rebuking her advances toward me, probably began
there. It certainly confined me to the
kiddy-end shallows, and forever put me off using swimming as anything other
than a means for not drowning.
The 100-to-1 kill ratio, however, in
a worst case global scenario of killer frogs versus humans, should it ever come
to that, now demands that I elevate these comments from the merely informative
worthy of only an oblique browse of the op/ed Sunday supplements, to those we
would deem vital to our existence: Stop
reading here, and you might die.
Alright, then. Your continued presence tells me that of all
the things you'd rather avoid being today, snuffed out by a frog isn't the
least of them.
The researching chroniclers of our fellow
warrior-foe species: "phyllobates terribilis," fail to inform us on
the full scope & practice of its deadly toxin transmissions, though they do
allow that it's possible for you and me to succumb from "even touching a
paper towel that a Golden Poison Dart Frog has walked upon." This should've tipped them off.
A walking frog is never a good sign.
Still, I'm determined to leave you
something notable for its lack of noteworthiness. Know this:
Somewhere in the annals of comparative
species chronology, at least one of a hundred eager herpetologists was once
done-in by ignoring the obvious dangers of a suspect frog walking away from a
sweaty paper towel.
No small thing, but I want it to be.