Spawn

What might a planet need to spawn life?

Begone, wretched spawn of Hell's unholy bowels!

When do salmon spawn?

Millions of salmon return to this river to spawn.

Salmon and steelhead start their lives in freshwater streams and tributaries. They then migrate downstream, rearing and maturing, before they reach the ocean. They live in the ocean for 2 to 5 years, migrating thousands of miles, before beginning the journey upstream to their natal streams where they spawn to produce the next generation of fish.

Sometimes we inclined to conceive it as sheer Power, and symbolized it to ourselves by means of all the myriad power-deities of our many worlds. Sometimes we felt assured that it was pure Reason, and that the cosmos was but an exercise of the divine mathematician. Sometimes Love seemed to us its essential character, and we imagined it with the forms of all the Christs of all the worlds, the human Christs, the Echino-derm and Nautiloid Christs, the dual Christ of the Sym-biotics, the swarming Christ of the Insectoids. But equally it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness. This it might for a while foster with maternal solicitude, till in a sudden jealousy of the excellence of its own creature, it would destroy what it had made.

Pearl mullets, an endemic fish species found only in Lake Van in the east of Turkey, have once again embarked on their challenging journey against the tide of life, swimming upstream to get to freshwater to spawn their babies.

Salmon return to their original birthplace to spawn.

These fish swim to the shallows to spawn and feed.

Salmon swim upstream to spawn.