Untold Stories: Animals

Caterpillars

The sun have just risen, a new day have started. The morning breeze swept the hills. The winter wind is being pushed away by the spring atmosphere. Plants have awoken from their sleep and regain their place as the spongy green organisms. Flowers of all colors blooms with pride, enjoying the long-awaited warmth of sunlight. The orchestra of birds welcomes the season joyfully. For the winter hath passed, greet the magnificent spring!

One by one, animals awoken from their long deep slumber. Those who had their life being paused were finally able to stretch their limbs while being bathed by the yellow sunlight. There are some who have just started life. A tiny dark egg crackles, crumbling down. A skinny soft caterpillar climbs out of it. This is the day one of James' life. His delicate abdomen crawls slowly, moving away from the birthing place. This fragile little fella doesn't know what awaits him in the future.

A three foot tall wild rasberry shrub in a deserted land, in a rural area at the rim of Great Britain, grows slowly day by day. That one young plant is randomly chosen out of the thousands of plants in the plain to be the thousands of plants in the plain to be the nursery place of some young caterpillars. James isn't the only one to live there. Several other caterpillars grows in that shrub, including his sibling Palin.

The sunlight breaches through the leaf with the help of tiny holes created by the grinding mouths of caterpillars. Most of the green leafs isn't in a regular shape anymore. The shrub is a lair of young larvas, nurturing them unwillingly. It has no self-defense protocol to fight back, helpless and done nothing about the pesky problem.

Day by day, week by week. The poor shrub is being deforestated. Its factory of nutrition is being wrecked one by one, reducing the chance of survival of the shrub. It is slowly growing weaker, dying from being a food source. Things are getting worse when a hungry rat chew on the brown roots. The rodent brings in some of it's fellows, demolishing the very foundation of the shrub's life. The entire structure crumbles to the ground, no longer being able to retain its shape.

The wind blows, sending off the poor caterpillars flying through the air. Some of them lands on the green short grass, a few founds a new bush as a home, and the rest got harsher place to rest upon. Poor little James helplessly land on a mini hill of fallen dry leaves. His sibling Palin was blown to the same area with some others unfortunate ones.

Fresh green leaves are scarce, battles are inevitable. It's not rare to find a leaf with two caterpillars chewing on it. Those with colourful abdomens unintentionally attract predators that ended their life. James, with Palin and few other ones, climbs up the bark of the old tree, the source of all of the dry leaves. Its dark body helped it to prevent unwanted eaters chomping on the flimsy body. There are some pricky little thorns popping out from the back. All of those aren't James to choose, but the randomness of nature. All for the purpose for being avoided from hungry eaters, shaped with the help of natural selection. Shape, colour, uniqueness, distictiveness, and abilities are all pre-determined by some chemical chain called DNA. James didn't choose to be a mere caterpillar, but its life just go on. The shurb that died didn't choose to be one, even more to be a thriving nursery of hungry young larvas. When Mother Nature throws her dice of life, nothing can be changed. All choices can't be easily reversed and changed. The process can't be intervene. Why did she choose this option? Why did she do that? No one really knows, no one will.

As Mother Nature designs the biosphere with randomness, the Homo sapiens tries to intervene the dice. By what they call "science" and "knowledge", they manipulate the process of heredity. They created their own "divine intervention" where the process of cutting and mixing the chains of DNA in their own special labs. As man created in the image of God, they have tried to imitate and roleplay as the one above all.