Could You Write a Science Haiku?

I’ve decided to take foot to Dave Ng’s call for science+art writing.

What I’ve done is reached back through the 5 years of undergraduate science courses I have taken, and ‘randomly’ (not so randomly) taken words from my memory to form science-ladden Haiku. I may or may not have used the actual words, in which case they only served to inspire.

My word list:

• Coleopteran: pertaining to beetles (order Coleoptera)
• Detritivore: a heterotrophic organism (eats things to gain energy – like us, but unlike plants) that feeds on dead or decaying organisms
• Chemotaxis: a movement toward or away from a chemical stimulus
• Decarboxylation: a chemical reaction involving the removal of a carboxyl group as carbon dioxide
• Nanoflagellate: a generic term for a small, single celled flagellate (member of the overarching Kingdom Protista)

And the results (bear in mind – I’m not a Haiku master…yet):

Coleopteran
bites constitute a mighty
regurgitation
(I realise this isn’t in the form of a traditional Haiku, but starting and ending with one word – c’mon, fun!)

Nanoflagellate:
sit still, stop spinning, slowdown,
microbial rogue!
(when you watch these tiny cells under a microscope, they zoom past your field of vision – making it nearly impossible to identify exactly what you saw)

Vroom goes the car vroom,
Smash goes the wooden fence smash.
Dead cattle say nil.
(Inspired by: detritivore)

Chemophiles can kill:
coincidentally, so
can too much carbon
(Inspired by: chemotaxis and decarboxylation; NOTE: chemophile is not a real word, although I wish it were)