Live Longer and Prosper - the entwined life spans of plants & animals

Okay, this is not exactly breaking news - though I bet the lifespans of animals in the article will come as news to most of you (it did me).  It is simply a beautifully written story I wanted to share - Tony

As reported at The Best Years in Life

Live Longer and Prosper

From minutes to centuries, the varied life spans of Earth’s plants and animals are inextricably entwined.

(Mother Earth News) Funny, how some seemingly trivial images stick in your head for decades. You can’t explain them, but there they are, stubborn memories that have no more apparent significance than countless others that have long since slipped away.

Among my own peculiarly steadfast recollections is one late-summer day on my grandparents’ dairy farm in western New York. I remember my cousin Bonnie and me, both of us 9 or 10 then, sprawled side-by-side and belly-down in cool green grass beneath one of the three old maples lined up like leafy-headed, one-legged sentinels in front of the big white farmhouse. The object of our fascination was a restless dinner-plate-size cluster of ladybugs — hundreds of them — at the foot of the tree. Not a hair’s width separated one ladybug from the other; they moved like a single red-shelled, black-spotted organism with 3,000 legs. With hands held sideways, karate-chop style, to form walls, we could steer them, nudge them forward or back, right or left, like cowpokes coaxing a miniature herd across valleys and over hills (the tree’s aboveground roots).

And that’s the entire memory — just that image, nothing more; no sense of how long we amused ourselves with those beetles, no recollection of the day’s events before or after.

I’m tempted to describe it as a moment frozen in time, but I know better.

For the rest of this wonderful story, click here.