How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

I know that my parents sent me to this school in part so that I could get into the best possible college, which they believed meant I would live the best possible life.

I had terrible insomnia back then, and I remember lying awake at night, trying to imagine the best possible version of my future, which always assumed a similar form. After college, a vaguely important job where I wore blazers and pencil skirts. A husband (ideally hot) after a respectable number of boyfriends. Finally, clear skin. But when I tried to fantasize about these rote and sensible futures, my mind always wandered to my death.

It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to die but that ceasing to exist (and being reverently mourned) felt more tangible to me than what I had been told I should want.

Maybe there is something universal about wanting to get out. I wonder if the goldfish have any sense of the ocean that lies ahead of them.

I filled every waking moment with a task; no one could say I hadn’t tried hard enough, worked hard enough, given everything I had to give. At least now I slept easily, short and dreamless nights that ended in a stack of alarms. I could no longer sense who I was, what “happy” might look like, because there was always something I had to think about.

Once we caught two baby leopard sharks and I learned how to hold one, my left hand wrapped around the tail and my right cupping the spot below its small, jagged mouth. The shark wriggled, snakelike, but I held it firm and fast until it was time to let it go. Because the bay is an estuary, we caught fish that could live in brackish water.

Deep in the bay, when the sky was clear, I felt like I could peer to the very curve of Earth, imagine it dipping. Like I could see into all of my possible futures.

But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph. I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself.

Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us. Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste. Salt, waves, hundred-pound sturgeon that could swallow us whole. Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up. Imagine showing up to your high school reunion, seeing everyone who once made you feel small, only now you’re a hundred times bigger than you once were. A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.

I realize now that my mother’s wish for me to be thin was, in its way, an act of love. She wanted me to be skinny so things would be easier. White, so things would be easier. Straight, so things would be easy, easy, easy. So that, unlike her, no one would ever question my right to be here, in America. I just wish I could tell her I’ve been okay without those things, that I’ve actually been better without them. I wish she would stop wanting those things too. There is no turning point, no clear moment when I started feeling good in my body. I know that when I started dating people who are not cis men, I learned to revel in queer bodies and the endless and inventive ways we crease into ourselves. When I desired these bodies and the people who inhabit them, I began to see how my own body could be desired, not just by others but also by me. Years later, in a wry twist of queerness, when I begin to wish my chest and hips were smaller, my old hatred burbles back to the surface at a different slant. This time the wish feels tacky, because I know an androgynous body can exist in different sizes, because I know narrow hips are not a universal end goal, and yet my childish envy still seeps out. I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants, and what I want of it.

On the internet, one species of yeti crab, Kiwa tyleri, became the subject of a popular meme. In it, a lone yeti crab perches on a craggy rock above the caption: “This creature has adapted to the crushing pressure and oppressive darkness.” When I first saw this meme, several days after Donald Trump was elected president, I felt a kinship with the crab. I made the meme my cover photo on Facebook, which felt much more biting at the time than it does now.

When I return to the meme years later, I see the cloudiness of the metaphor. Darkness has no moral value, and its omnipresence matters little to a crab with no functional eyes. And pressure is relative, depending on the body that moves against it; what crushes a human behooves a blobfish. Though the yeti crab’s environment seems inhospitable to us, it is nothing to be pitied. The pressure does not crush the crab, and the darkness does not oppress it. It is exactly suited to the life it leads, however strange or repulsive we might find it. What use is the sun to an eyeless crab? It already has everything it needs.

Hydrothermal vents revolutionized many of science’s core ideas about life, how and where it could exist. It is only logical that scientists assumed the strange creatures living on the seafloor would survive on the flecks of fish that died nearer the surface, the scraps of sun-touched society. But these animals eked out an alternative way of life. I prefer to think of it not as a last resort but as a radical act of choosing what nourishes you. As queer people, we get to choose our families. Vent bacteria, tube worms, and yeti crabs just take it one step further. They choose what nourishes them. They turn away from the sun and toward something more elemental, the inner heat and chemistry of Earth.

The oldest we know of lived four hundred million years ago in the Devonian age and grew to around 3 feet long, smaller than today’s largest sand strikers but still abnormally giant for its day. Scientists described this species of extinct worm solely based on its jaws, as no vestige of its soft body remains.

When the sand striker snatches a fish and begins to feast, it is not thinking of what the fish is feeling. It has no complex brain and no sense of morality, which means its intentions are never cruel. A worm cannot shirk a duty it does not know. But we can.

Scientists only took notice of them when they gathered in such great masses that they made themselves impossible to ignore. Perhaps you would not see salps if they did not form blooms. Many scientists consider salps a nuisance species, because, in swarms, they can take down a fishing net or stop a ship. In 2012, a swarm of salps clogged the water intake system of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, the last in California. It is amazing what salps can do in community.

Perhaps if I was not an individual organism but a species, able to prototype myself over millions of years, I might have faith that my body would one day become what it’s meant to be.

In China, a graduate student unwilling to part with a dead moon jellyfish, his companion for more than a year, collected fragments of its corpse and placed them in a new tank. More than two months later, he found a polyp with three tentacle nubs sprouting from the jellyfish corpse. More and more polyps unfurled in the following days, and the graduate student dutifully collected them and placed them in a new tank, where they settled in and fruited and bloomed into medusas. Moon jellyfish are also often invaders, blown by currents and rippling into vast blooms in the Atlantic and the Pacific. They are one of the best-studied jellyfish in the world, and yet no one noticed the moon jelly’s power of regeneration until someone gave it time and trust that it might grow into itself. Perhaps any jellyfish is capable of such transformation.

From above, the water might look filled with tapioca. All across the bay, as far as the eye can see: baby medusas, tender haloed fringe and translucent clovers, all rising like fallen blossoms reuniting with a tree. Summer, happening in reverse. All of us moving toward life. All of us refusing to die.