Tuesday 3 December 2002

Pic of the day: We compare ourselves to the landscape ... (archive picture from late autumn).

How big we really are

We are used to looking at big things when we orient ourselves in nature: Mountains, forests, or houses. In everyday life, we navigate our houses and office buildings and drive along roads. When we think about animals, we usually think of cats and dogs or horses and cows, all of which are somewhere around our own size. We don't give much thought to the animals that are so small that traversing a bed is a lifetime of adventure.

Dust mites are common in homes, and they particularly love to breed in bed sheets and such. A flake of dried skin that falls off your body when you scratch an itch is so small that you probably wouldn't find it again if you searched for it. But it is an oasis for dust mites, where they can live happily ever after, or at least for a long time.

Mites are so small that you cannot get a good picture of them without a strong microscope. And yet these animals are not single-celled organisms or anything like it. They have legs and eyes and antennae, the whole packet. Admittedly they can dispense with the whole heart and blood thing, as oxygen reaches all the cells in the body by diffusion. On the other hand, they do have reproductive organs and use them.

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I'm not sure if there is a deeper meaning or if I even have a point. I just think it is strange that there are animals, real living animals, sailing away on a dust mote. Animals for which the human body is like a mountain. They see us, but they have no idea who or even what we are. We don't even see them, and we live our entire lives without being aware of them, unless we happen to have an allergy to them. That's how big we are. It is like a miracle that we can work as a single unit, that all our limbs can work in near perfect synchronization across these enormous distances. But then, life is always like a miracle.