SMALL BEGINNINGS

Without the egg, animals as we know them - including us – could not have evolved and flourished. This is the rise of the egg

-  JULES HOWARD BENEATH

BENEATH A WINKING fluorescent light in the corner of my childhood classroom was a fish tank within which floated something incredibly weird. It was a blob. A gooey, slimy mass, just below the surface. If you told me that aliens had snuck in overnight and put it there, I would have believed you.

It wasn’t aliens, of course - it was frogspawn. And it marked the start of my first egg obsession. In the weeks that followed, the tiny life forms that generated within the slime commanded almost all of my attention. The blob was like a fortress. Hungry snails and flatworms would cruise along its surface, as if testing for weak spots, while the embryos, merely dots of dividing cells, slept their dreamless sleep.

In a matter of days, the embryos would appear to wake. Almost overnight, they became long and thin. Complex, somehow. Tails would twitch. Some would slowly spin in their spheres. In a week or so, tiny tadpoles would begin to migrate through the jelly, collecting with their siblings in a depression on the upper surface of the frogspawn.

I remember this scene as if it was from a 1960s sci-fi film. But it wasn't. It was real life. Genuine, stirring real life. How could something so inert as a blob of slime produce hundreds of living things? Now, almost 40 years later, I still marvel at this question, even though I have come to understand in far greater detail the ways of the animal egg - one of the most diverse and arresting life-structures on our planet.