In the dander and under their breath, in the soil and in the water, on the leaves and the clothing of the dignitaries, lay creatures unknown to Hicks, microorganisms, insidiously moving from animals to humans, eating, multiplying, sharing, spreading, connecting.
Dr. Rona's creatures lay less than a mile way.
It is fair to say that while up to this point none of the amateur ichthyologists had really expected the fish to get up and walk, as Charlie the Tuna might have, some disappointment passed among them as the two creatures lay motionless in the mud, looking disconsolate and very aquatic.
But if there is a decline in the food plant species where the creatures lay their eggs, then caterpillar numbers may fall and result in a population crash during the following year.
snakes, fish, birds, turtles, lizards, and other creatures lay eggs, too.
He is abstemious – he once said that the last time he was drunk was in 1972 – enjoying, instead, chess, and fly-fishing, and, occasionally, writing poems: his gift to Paisley when he stepped down as first minister was a framed copy of a poem about disappearing sea-trout: "The lilac creature lay silent and unmoving / As the peaty water flowed over the last of the mohicans.
In another room, with a menagerie of afflicted creatures, Tapka lay in traction, connected to a blinking machine by a series of tubes.
"When I saw what it took for this huge creature to lay her eggs, then cover them up, then make a false nest, then slowly make her way back to the water, well, I was in awe".
The looks on their faces when they first lay eyes on the creature say it all, and one of the film's true earmarks is that it uses a real animal (Bart the Bear, who also starred in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Bear).
The pods were "burrowed banelings" — suicidal fluorescent creatures, lying in wait, like land mines.
Gods and worlds, creators and creatures, lie embedded in each other, forming an infinite regress in unbounded space.
