Requiem Sharks and Other Alien Creatures
Can we care about the non-human organisms we don't know?
(No. 45, a ±06 minute read)
Our fates are inextricably entwined, whether we want to get it or not.
For decades I have descended beneath the surface of the ocean, subject to my limited human abilities — never more than 50 or 60 feet, tops — nor with a tank allowing me to forget momentarily my place in the hierarchy of the earth’s beasts. Sometimes the descent has been to hunt with a spear, or abalone iron. More often it’s been to reef-fly, unfettered by gravity, though gripped by the weight of atmospheres or chilled by an unaccommodating Northern Californian sea where temperatures fall precipitously into the 40ºs from relatively tolerable surface temperatures in the mid-50ºs.1
Here, below the superficial veneer most people know as the ocean, below wind chop and surface glare, a person can travel far abroad, seemingly to another celestial body entirely. Time changes, becomes urgency — a calculation. What is my conditioning, my depth; are there obstructions before the surface, how long from here to there and my filling a burning lung? Sentient inhabitants and and less animate life-forms become strange, but only to us, certainly not to those creatures of the wildernesses at the edges of our largest cities; New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, London. Offshore there be monsters to most; but not to the monsters.
Since I was very young I’ve wondered what it must be like to be a part of this world — to be possessed of the phenomenal privilege of breathing water. To be untroubled and untrammeled by fierce underwater surges. To understand the codes written by the colors of reef fish and their kin. To fear only what might truly be a threat, not what we air suckers merely misunderstand. Elementary school, for me, included dreams of submerging once, finally, to breath and swim the waters that another fish-obsessed friend and I haunted on weekends.
There is no future in such dreaming for me, I have seen its lack in the eyes of a harbor seal in La Jolla and a leatherback turtle off Waikīkī, both of whom took the time to closely regard my invasion into their domains. You poor, stupid person, what are you doing down here? Locking eyes with such freedom humbles. But still I visit, as I did this weekend, swimming the regular route close to home with my partner.
For me Sunday below the surface was urgent, I needed to be there, with the fish, flying through the architecture of a nearshore reef as surges funneled through pinched coral aisles and along rubbled canyon bottoms. And so it was Sunday that I soared, and spied on a world that isn’t mine, even as visiting it keeps my terrestrial sanity intact, sorely impacted as it is by virtue of my miserable lungs; unable to breath water and find the freedom that my childish mind was certain lived beneath the waves.
Sunday saw a big high tide, almost two and one-half feet with this week’s nearby full moon. It was a so-called “king tide,” one of the highest perigean spring tides, which occur three or four times annually. This surplus of water on the reef allowed us passage through parts of the reef ordinarily impassable due to exposed corals and breaking waves.
The water was cloudy Sunday, as it always is during a big tidal swing. This is a mixed bag for us agents of the terrestrial world seeking to snoop the sub-aqueous realm with our limited, earthly senses. That which makes the water cloudy is food, in part, and fish populations respond to the abundance — and so they did. There were large schools of serving platter sized nenue (a native chub) circling with their colors transmuting silver to black and back again, maninini (the convict tang with its crook-suit of five vertical black bars on white), and palani (a surgeonfish) darting about in relative formation. But the day’s murky feast kept visibility to no more than 15’ at best, often as limited as five.
In a reef system there are patterns and repeat visits tease these patterns out — zones of good visibility, who haunts where, and the like. And then big events occur like a king tide and surprises await we top-siders. My surprise Sunday was enormous schools of ma‘i‘i‘i, brown surgeonfish, a name that does not credit the purples, greens, and yellows that lurk within “brown.” Hundreds of ma‘i‘i‘i poured over the reef, fluid and unconcerned about my lurking, head above a benthic assemblage of dead and still living coral. A school of a hundred or more tangs flowed around my mask and dangling snorkel without so much as apparent concern rippling through their throng.
This sort of majesty in a superficially insignificant creature is among the reasons I return, over and over, still unable to breath down there after all these years. It is the sort of majesty that is difficult to convey to the uninitiated. What sort of person goes poking their heads beneath reef structures, into underwater caves, anyway? And why does any of this matter, this underwater stuff?
Of course there are the statistics, about the overwhelmingly large undersea biomass that is still smaller than that which lives terrestrially; our human reliance on sea proteins worldwide; the fact of the oceans’ providing about half the earth’s oxygen; or even that our simple, common ma‘i‘i‘i is host in its gut to the world’s largest bacteria — so large that scientists have been able insert probes into it to parse the machinations of the bacterial organism at large. (To sate your curiosity Epulopiscium fishelsoni are about “-” big and found in brown surgeons worldwide, albeit in geographically varied forms.)
But that is all hard to conceptualize in Des Moines for the Hawkeye that hasn’t dipped a toe outside the Great Plains. Who cares about throngs of unremarkable tangs outside of the places host to them — or even in those places? Shark Week shows us that the charasmatics are easier to lose an imagination to. There is danger, primitive intelligence, a monster that has haunted prey on earth for 450 million years. But even in the shark common reality is more benign.
We inadvertently aroused a whitetip reef shark this weekend. About four and one-half feet long it was sharing a snooze with a honu (Hawaiian green sea turtle) in a reef crevasse about a dozen or fifteen feet down. All grey sinew the cartilaginous monster is monstrous only to octopus, reef fish, and crabs — and after dark. And after a long day of rest at that; the whitetip is the only requiem shark (the etymology of the term is evocative but lost to time) to sleep while stationary thanks to an ability to pump water through pulsing gills, lost, or never developed, in other sharks.
Semi-cooperative hunters, agile in the confines of the reef, and probably the most common shark on Hawaiian reefs, they are gorgeous, even as they might swim at a person asserting their need to sleep free from prying eyes — the literature is clear that this is not a threat display, as whitetips are above such pronouncements. Known to take the catch off a spearfisher, this inclination shouldn’t be taken personally either as they are also kleptomaniacal when in the presence of a feeding Hawaiian monk seal. Don’t we all, sometimes, want someone else to do the hard work?
So this animal — four and one-half to seven feet of curious hunter clad in grey and white sandpaper and classed as Vulnerable — is this lithe, toothy meal bandit or its ilk a way in to initiating an oceanic conservationist impulse in the public at large, disconnected as they are from oceans and their residents? As a charismatic almost mega-fauna? Or is it all just so much popcorn shrimp out in the silvery sea to most?
I have reason to think the latter, having recently been told by an expert in these matters that the denizens of wealthy nations are hard-pressed to care about exploited human fishers while filling their plates with the frutti di mare, du jour. And then there’s my learning that Americans just don’t care about the poor, from another who would know. If we can’t find it in ourselves to care about the dispossessed and disinherited among our own; the oceans and their creatures?! A heavy lift.
And so it is — the challenge of mankind to care about something unknown; to stretch the limits of our tribalist nature to encompass other people and non-human organisms alike, as if our very being depended on it; which it does. Heavy lifts indeed. This is, in my pretty-small-in-the-scheme-of-things estimation, the critical problem of our age. Again. The key herein unlocks the problems of the crises of failing biodiversity, global warming, accelerating extinctions; situates mankind again with beast, happily.
I didn’t have to solve the problem of extra-species empathy for myself thanks to my having grown up in the waters and mountains of Honolulu (and, of course, thanks to some quirk of personality I possess that inclines me to gape at fish), so don’t ask me how to work out the problem. But we’d better get this one right, and soon — at least before I figure out how to breathe beneath the extraordinary ocean surrounding my island home.
For every 33’, or so, a diver sinks there is an atmosphere of pressure compressing them, their blood, and the oxygen and waste gasses they carry with them in descent.