If one looks deep enough into a topic, anything can be connected to anything else, even if it is in a general statement such as “they are from the same planet”, or the ever classic “they both exist”.
At first glance, a haiku by a famous Japanese ex-samurai-turned-poet and a drawing by a Nazi promoting German scientist that at one point in his life drew over 100 pages of accurate Artforms in Nature seem quite unrelated. However, it is evident, even after a few minutes of light research, that a picture of a diatom drawn by a German scientist named Ernest Haeckel and a haiku concerning the death of a cicada by Matsuo Basho, are indeed related.
The two creators of the chosen pieces of information are Ernest Haeckel and Matsuo Basho. Although both men lived in different times, countries, and even cultures, through their biographies, it is evident that the two had similarities.
The two men were both creative artists of some sort. Basho was a haiku writer in the 17th century while Haeckel was a scientific artist from the turn of the 20th century.
Next, both of these artists had previously left a field of study to pursue their passion in another. Basho was originally trained as a samurai and it was his decision to wander Japan for inspiration for his haiku’s the brought him fame. Similarly, Haeckel was trained as a physician but switched into comparative anatomy in 1859 after reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. Had Haeckel not have read that Darwin’s masterpiece, our society may still not have created a word for ecology yet!
Both Basho’s haiku and Haeckel’s drawing concern biological topics. Basho discusses the ‘cry’ of a cicada when it is about to die while Haeckel draws a microscopic organism called a diatom. One could state the obvious that they are both comprised primarily of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen and that they are all evolutionary masterpieces that have their beginnings in the Cambrian Explosion some 600 million years ago. However they would be missing the big picture of the fact that a cicada’s diet primarily consists of plant roots. Plant roots, although highly nutritious (and quite delicious) provide little else than water and amino acids.
The subject of Haeckel’s microscopic drawing is that of a diatom. A diatom is a single-celled marine algae are found in almost all aquatic environments on Earth, including ponds, oceans, and soils. Diatoms require water to exist due to the fact that they produce their own food using a process called carbon fixation “(transformation of carbon dioxide and water into sugars, using light energy)”.[1]
It is now safe to make connections between cicada’s and diatoms. Diatoms and cicada’s both require water to exist, both are living organisms, and both have the ability to reproduce sexually. The two also feed off of each other. In an ecosystem that includes a cicada and diatoms, cicadas produce carbon dioxide within the soil, which feeds the diatoms carbon fixation cycles. After which, the sugars produced by the diatoms will inevitably feed another organism, which will produce carbon dioxide, which will be consumed by the plant that the cicada is feeding off of, which will then feed the cicada.
In conclusion, although the two subjects are seemingly unrelated, if you look close enough at them, the creators and topics of the artworks are related in more ways then one.
Resources
http://www.uoregon.edu/~kohl/basho/life.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/haeckel.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7608369.stm
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Diatom
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/GeolSci/micropal/diatom.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/chromista/diatoms/diatomlh.html
http://www.glf.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/os/bysea-enmer/about-ausujet-e.php
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761575632/diatom.html