Animals Eating Animals

To pass the time at our house, we sometimes watch nature documentaries. One night we watched newly hatched marine iguanas racing for the seashore to escape an army of snakes. Some hatchlings made it and some were breakfast. Moving on up the evolutionary tree, another evening we watched wild mustang stallions biting and kicking to win the chance to father the next generation. 

Not nice! The snakes and horses should behave themselves. No biting or kicking, please. Dorothy prefers cooking contests and real estate shows to animals eating animals. On the other hand, human aggression can be entertaining. One of us here knows better, but I like 007, Jason Bourne and Die Hard.

Although we would rather look the other way when wild things are aggressive, we must admit that it isn't just love making the world go round. Iguanas can run really fast because the snakes get the slowpokes ensuring that the best runners parent the next generation. Stallions are aggressive and courageous because the winner gets to be protector and sire of the herd until another youngster kicks and bites harder. And then there's the world news, showing people bombing and shooting each other to get what they want. It seems that competition has made us what we are. Mayhem shaped our bones and remains in the marrow.

Besides all that, nature has another face. There is mutualistic symbiosis. An early example: the eukaryote cells from which all higher organisms have evolved originated as bacteria and archaea, one cell engulfing the other, each having unique structures and capabilities that they contributed to a partnership. Then again, lichens consist of green algae, fungus and bacteria all enriching the collective organism within which they coexist. We aren't so different. The human body is a symbiotic community of human cells and thousands of species of  microbes which cannot thrive independently and without which we do not survive. No me without us is a common theme in nature.  

It may appear that competition and mutualism are opposites. More correctly, they are complementary, mutualism emerging from competition and adding competitive advantage. At a deep level, the distinction vanishes as every species plays a mutual-competitive role in the development and regulation of the ecosystem. Neither iguanas nor snakes would exist as they are without the other. In the absence of the play between competition and mutualism, the biosphere would remain a homogeneous soup of lifeless molecules. It's bigger than that.

It is what is,
predator and prey,
dominance and submission,
victoriously satisfied or hungry and afraid
until the inner eye opens to mutual regard
and self-forgetful empathy,
my needs and yours and theirs becoming ours.
So befriend the stranger
and embrace the enemy
to become what we can be
together.