Life is strange.  If they ever discover life on a distant planet, it won't be as weird and wonderful as life on Earth.  Pictured above is a siphon of a clam.  Actually, there are two siphons, one open and one closed, and I can't figure out if they belong to one clam or two.  Nature invented clams, seaweed, spiders, and humans using the same four base pairs of DNA.  A Douglas-fir tree 100 feet tall would seem to have little in common with the tiny mite living inside the lichen growing on its branches.They all started from strands of DNA.  The hundreds of species living in Eagle Landing Park are not so much distinct entities as they are components of the whole system, like the various organs of the human body.  If you examined each organ separately, in a stainless steel pan on the autopsy table, the human body would look alien enough.  Only when you get all those organs working in unison does a human sometimes appear to be a beautiful work of art.  The individual components of my forest often do look beautiful when photographed individually.  Still, a geoduck on the freeway or fir tree in your living room would seem out of place.  When the camera zooms in, evidence of the setting usually remains.