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Electrotonic Decay in the Trophic Web
The squid, pale as lunar exhaust, curls backward through the inked strata
of a cooling reef shelf, its axons thick—giant-fiber bundles
optimized for speed, the evolutionary luxury of
escape.
But even these
long-voltage conduits suffer from electrotonic decay:
passive signal loss over distance,
attenuation by leak current,
as sodium channels grow sparse at branching nodes.
This is not metaphor,
but physics. The body forgets its own order
when length exceeds charge,
and signal becomes silence
in the limb that was meant to flee.
Somewhere higher in the column—
a gannet mistimes its dive
into a dead zone where herring should be,
a fox circles the shed where the last mouse
was caught weeks ago
and the wheel keeps spinning
in the abandoned live trap.
Synaptic vesicles do not fire
when the calcium gates stay shut—
and the estuary chokes
on nitrogen runoff from ghost soy.
This is how systems go quiet.
No catastrophe. Just:
less.
Until no one responds
to the predator’s shadow. Until even pain
fails
to register
in the axon’s stuttering reach.
I was taught
that the web is trophic, not poetic.
That energy moves downward
from sun to grass to ruminant to fang.
But that’s not the whole
of it. There are signals too—
neural, semiotic, microbial—
and those signals
die
first.
Before the lungs seize.
Before the mouth foams.
Before the keystone falls.
The signal
is already too far gone
to fire the final twitch
that might have warned
the whole
structure.
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