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

by Sabrina Imbler

You may think goldfish live for just a year, maybe two. But they can actually live much longer. Twenty years, if they’re lucky. Goldfish can survive a few years in a bowl because they are almost supernaturally hardy, capable of weathering conditions that would quickly kill most other fish. A bowl is a tiny, isolated environment starved of oxygen, which means even a slight change in the water chemistry can be lethal. I say this because goldfish pee with abandon. They unleash more ammonia than other aquarium fish, a toxin that would be diluted in a pond or a river but can kill a fish in a bowl. This is why, I would say to the woman, a bowl makes the conditions of living impossible. But when a goldfish manages to survive it, no one thinks of their feat as extraordinary. Lastly, I would tell her, you may have heard that goldfish have a three-second memory. But goldfish can remember that a colored paddle means food is coming, even months after the association is formed. Goldfish can perform complex tasks, such as escaping a net or navigating a maze. How can such a small fish hold on to the memory of the snaking path of a maze for three months? Could you do that?

Of course, it’s not their fault; goldfish would never have gotten into the river if we hadn’t thought of them as disposable. Wild goldfish have been found in every state but Alaska, and when they are unleashed in a water body, they ruin whatever balance life might have found before. Their riotous presence drives out native species. Goldfish love to dig, and they will uproot everything growing at the bottom of a lake in search of something to eat. When they devour opaque clouds of cyanobacteria, their intestines foment the bacteria’s growth, making them incubators of algal blooms. They may spawn as early as a year old, releasing hundreds of sticky eggs that cling to rocks and plants and anything that will hold them.

San Francisco Bay is often called a “highly invaded ecosystem,” one of the most invaded estuaries in the world. In certain habitats, these introduced species outnumber the native ones and outmass them with the sheer weight of their accumulated bodies.

What does it mean to survive in the wild? You can’t do it without going wild yourself. We are all capable of reverting to a wilder state.

We had shed our skins, not like snakes but insects—each of us a nymph outgrowing exoskeleton after exoskeleton, and morphing as we did.

Most mother octopuses lay a single set of eggs in a lifetime and die after their brood hatches. The scientists who observed the octopus called her four-and-a-half-year brooding period the longest on record for any animal. In other words, no other creature on Earth had held its eggs close to its body and protected them for as long as she did; a story in Reuters called her “mother of the year” in the animal kingdom. The previous octopus record holder, Bathypolypus arcticus, was observed in captivity brooding for fourteen months, which seemed shattering at the time.

More than anything I wanted to know why the octopus, with her big and alien brain, did not eat while she brooded her eggs. Surely she must have hungered. Did she have any inkling of the flurry of babies that might not make it if she strayed from her vigil to hunt or eat or stretch her limbs? I knew I was anthropomorphizing, and yet I couldn’t imagine how a creature with a consciousness would starve for four and a half years without something like hope.

Octopuses brood all over the sea. In shallow-water dens, giant Pacific octopuses lay tens of thousands of tiny eggs, strung from rock like dangling hyacinths. The purple octopus lays fewer, bigger eggs, each the size of a large blueberry. If you lay only 160 eggs, only 160 chances that your young will survive, you must watch over them as long as you can. You must pour as much of yourself into making them as strong as you possibly can. After she lays her eggs, the mother octopus bathes them in new waves of water, doused with oxygen and free of any silt or debris. Her eggs need to breathe, so these baths are unending, kept up until the moment the eggs hatch. The purple mother octopus in Monterey Bay chose to lay her eggs on a sheltered alcove on the canyon wall just a few feet above the seafloor. The scientists noted how the crown of a rocky shelf above her shielded her eggs from unwanted silt. The spot was perfect, it seemed, and she must have known it.

During one of its many visits, the sub offered the mother octopus small pieces of crab with its robotic hand, manipulated by scientists on a boat thousands of feet away at the surface. But the octopus refused, not even willing to taste. The one examination of a brooding Graneledone boreopacifica revealed an immaculately empty gut.

In the deep sea, everything starves. Space is depthless and barren here, life scarce, and meals few and far between. The water averages 40 degrees Fahrenheit, slowing metabolisms to a trickle and ensuring animals hold on to their fat as long as they can. The large creatures go weeks, even months, without eating in their aimless foraging. Giant isopods, lavender pill bugs the size of casserole dishes, can survive for two months between meals. The apple-sized white snail Neptunea amianta can last for three months. These stretches, not as grand as the purple octopus’s, are a way of life.

Past two and a half miles, minuscule creatures—crustaceans called copepods and single-celled foraminifera—dominate the abyss. Bacteria teem. Two researchers realized their entire collection of deep-sea gastropods from the western North Atlantic—a trove of more than twenty thousand shells—was so small that all twenty thousand could fit inside a whelk shell the size of a fist.

In the Monterey canyon, the black-eyed squid Gonatus onyx carries her thousands of eggs in her arms as she swims. The eggs cling together in an enormous cluster and twinkle like a disco ball. Every thirty seconds, the wine-colored squid extends her arms to flush water through the egg mass, refreshing her babies with oxygen. Black-eyed squids are agile on their own, able to jet quickly away from whales, elephant seals, and other deep-diving predators. But a mother squid’s shimmering mass of eggs weighs her down, makes her slow and bulky. She still carries her babies, for six to nine months before they hatch. When they do, the mother squid dies; like the purple octopus, she has not fed for months. Elsewhere in the deep, the giant red mysid Gnathophausia ingens, which resembles a shrimp, carries her eggs for approximately one and a half years. She, like the others, does not feed. She shrinks to a fraction of her size, losing body mass steadily as she drifts in the blackness. Her eggs require 61 percent of the energy she has accumulated over her lifetime, meaning she gives more of herself to her babies than she does to herself. When her eggs hatch and the larvae swim away, she dies.

The first sturgeon appeared around two hundred million years ago, an era when the seas around Pangea teemed with ammonites and the ground shook from the footsteps of 80-ton dinosaurs. When the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, the great fish survived. Some scientists call the sturgeon a living fossil. There are historical accounts of sturgeon as long as 16 feet and weighing half a ton. The fish do not grow that big anymore, not because they have changed but because the world has.

The Chinese sturgeon is dying out, and it is not alone. All but four of the world’s twenty-seven species in the family Acipenseridae hover close to extinction. So the sturgeon are dying, in lakes and rivers and oceans all over the world. These giant fish survived the asteroid and the Ice Age and so much more only to be wiped out by cosmically puny obstacles: our dams, our boats, our chemicals, our taste for caviar.

Today, there may be fewer than one hundred Chinese sturgeon capable of returning to the Yangtze each year to breed. Sometime in the next ten to twenty years, scientists predict, the Chinese sturgeon will go extinct in the wild.

To swim in the Yangtze now is to bathe in synthetic compounds. Industrial and agricultural pollutants unspool into the river, runoff from city drains and industrial sites. The most dangerous are compounds of triphenyltin, or TPT, a biocide that fishers use to coat their ship hulls and farmers spray in paddy fields to kill off golden apple snails. These chemicals have the power to reshape a fish.

When I am sitting on the floor before the sturgeon tank at the New York Aquarium, I cannot help but think of her. These sturgeon are from the Atlantic, specifically the Hudson River, brown facsimiles of the fish I really want to see. I imagine them growing old in this tank, their roe preserved and flesh unopened in exchange for years of their endless circling. I wonder if they remember the waters they came from.

Scientists estimate that we killed 360,000 blue whales in the first six decades of the twentieth century. I cannot begin to understand this loss—what a world with 360,000 blue whales looked like—just as I cannot understand the vastness of the blue whale, whose tongue weighs as much as an elephant, or how any human might believe themselves powerful enough to kill one.

In New York City, in the waters by the Rockaways, it is easy to see whales. I learned this last year on a whale-watching boat called American Princess. The trip was nearly four hours, so I bought a hot dog and seltzer (elsewhere on the boat, the real pros smuggled aboard a platter of shrimp cocktail and two bottles of sparkling wine). As we left port, a volunteer naturalist with Gotham Whale, the city’s marine mammal advocacy group, narrated the excursion. “There’s no guarantee we’ll see a whale,” she said, adding that this disclaimer had become necessary after an unlucky cruise left some would-be watchers asking for their money back. The American Princess did not control the whereabouts of the whales, she explained. When she told us that in the eighteenth century, before they were hunted to near extinction, New York’s waters teemed with whales—humpback whales, fin whales, sperm whales, and right whales—people around me gasped, muttered to one another, and looked around the waters as if the long-dead whales had left some sign of their past abundance.

In 1987, sonar on a routine submersible survey of barren seafloor in the Santa Catalina Basin picked up on something almost supernaturally large, 4,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. It was a whale skeleton, 65 feet long and sunken in the sand. Without the buoy of inflated lungs, a dead whale makes it to the seafloor relatively untouched, and then the scavengers come. This one had been dead for years, but its remains had become a teeming city in the mud, nourishing clams, mussels, limpets, and snails. This was scientists’ first encounter with a whale fall, the most benevolent kind of burial.

Entire ecosystems depend on these deaths, creatures whose lives revolve around chance windfalls of blubber, gut, and bone. Whale falls linger for decades, feeding scavengers in roughly three stages. The first invites mobile scavengers seeking flesh: sleeper sharks and bludgeon-headed rattails, hagfish and isopods. They swim from afar and congregate to strip the carcass to the bone, with sleeper sharks ripping off soft tissue in chunks and hagfish rasping at the flesh. These scavengers work fast, devouring the equivalent of a small person each day, but still it can take two years to strip all the flesh. The second stage attracts fewer species of scavengers but far greater numbers of them. Invertebrates reign here, with worms that resemble shag carpets and tiny crustaceans called comma shrimp feeding on the rich organic material left inside the bones and scattered in the surrounding sediment. The third stage of whale fall, called the sulfophilic stage, happens when the carcass is reduced to a skeleton. The creatures that arrive have specifically evolved to feast on the lipids locked inside the skeleton. Dense, glowing meadows of bacteria descend on the skeleton and feed on the fats and oils inside the bones. Feasting like this produces hydrogen sulfide, which sustains chemosynthetic clams and gutless, mouthless bone-eating worms. The worms root themselves in bones like blossoms and feast on the lipids.

The small, soft worms have the power to disappear a whale skeleton, scattering larvae into the current that will drift until they encounter bone. In the largest whales, this third stage can outlive many of us, lingering for as long as a century until all that is left is the mineral husk of bone. It even outlives the whale itself, surpassed only by the bowhead whale, which may live to be two hundred years old. If a whale’s life is a marvel, its death is its legacy.

According to the oceanographers who found the first whale fall, there are 690,000 skeletons of the nine largest whale species decaying on the seafloor at any given time. This is to say: when we killed 360,000 blue whales and hauled their bodies to land, we caused another, unimaginable ripple of death at the bottom of the ocean.

Scientists say there can be a fourth stage of whale fall. They call it the reef stage. The bones, sapped dry of all their fat, are reduced to mineral remains. The whale is no longer food but terrain. If the bones are not buried, they become a part of the landscape. The expanse of deep sea is dominated by soft mud and silt, and suspension feeders drift in the deep water in pursuit of hard fixtures like bone, onto which they latch and settle for the rest of their lives. Scientists have observed this final stage in a whale bone spotted in abyssal plains nearly three miles deep, somewhere between Hawai‘i and Mexico. The bone had become glazed with manganese, an element that precipitates out of seawater over thousands of years, suggesting the whale sank more than ten thousand years ago. A trio of anemones, clasped on the metallic fossil, unfurled their tentacles like fireworks to catch any food that drifted deep in the abyss. The anemones had found a home on the remains of a creature once so staggeringly alive that it inhaled metric tons of krill each day and fertilized entire food webs with its waste, its hundreds of pounds of heart beating through the water with no sense of what was to come.

At more than 7,000 feet below, where thousands of pounds of force are exerted on every square inch of surface, yeti crabs do just fine.

For many researchers who study the creatures clustered around the vents, the most prominent mystery is their resilience—how, exactly, they manage to persist over time and across disasters. It is no small feat to build a life near an active volcano. It could erupt in an instant and raze a community or burn out slowly, taking its life-giving warmth with it. Researchers do not understand how species of yeti crabs have found safe havens around the world separated by hundreds of thousands of miles of water so cold it slows the human heart. Even setting aside the frigid temperatures, the distance seems untraversable for a sightless crab.

But life always finds a place to begin anew, and communities in need will always find one another and invent new ways to glitter, together, in the dark.

It is unnerving to see a worm that is longer than a man. But this is how long the marine worm Eunice aphroditois, also called the sand striker, can grow.

The night I met my first girlfriend, we spent almost three hours talking in my room. They sat on an inflatable couch, me on the edge of my bed. I was so nervous my words tumbled out of me like marbles. I am sure what I said was incomprehensible, mistaking oversharing for flirting, but I marveled at the space they held for me, and how they listened.

Despite their dour name (no one ever looked at something beautiful and named it salp), salps are fantastical creatures. If you dive deep enough, some salps even glow. On shore, they look like beads of clear Jell-O. But in water, they exist in pulsating chains that can curve like a snake or coil like a snail’s shell. These chains are made up of hundreds of identical salps joined hip to jiggly hip. Each clone is a distinct, barrel-shaped individual, yet all together the colony of clones makes up a single salp, attached and moving as one. Many chains can grow as long as 20 feet, drifting through the ocean like giant quartzite bracelets. This is to say that individual identity is confusing for a salp, creatures for whom the notion of selfhood exists in the plural. For a salp, home is the rest of its salp.

It is Saturday, the day of the Dyke March, which any of us will remind you is a protest, not a parade.

The few permanent spectators are often men who’ve come to protest, holding banners saying something about Christ and sin and the promise of our eternal damnation, but there is always a group of us surrounding the man like a bubble, holding signs of our own: THIS GUY NEEDS A HOBBY! Half the joy comes from watching our own, turning around to see everyone who walks behind us. Many look like someone I might know or see at a party—youngish dykes in bowling shirts—but my eyes always drift to those I might not have encountered were it not for this day: silver-haired couples in matching blue Hawaiian shirts, steel-spiked butches on motorcycles, dykes carrying babies in slings and in strollers. One year, I see an older woman, short white hair, holding a sign. IT IS OK TO LIVE A LIFE OTHERS DON’T UNDERSTAND. She drifts at her own pace, slow and steady, as younger marchers weave around her. I feel overcome by the urge to go up and thank her. I want to march in service to her. I think about what she must have sacrificed to make it this far.

The poet Ross Gay asks if joining together all our sorrows—all our dead relatives and broken relationships, all the moments that make life seem impossible—if joining all these big and little griefs together, if that constitutes joy.

Cuttlefish have some of the most attuned polarization vision known to any animal. Scientists suggest cuttlefish may depend on polarization the way we depend on color to help us perceive our world.

The scientific name for cuttlefish is Sepia, and the cuttlefish gave the color its name, not the other way around. The ancient Greeks used cuttlefish ink to write with, stabbing their nibs in dead cuttlefish’s ink sacs, producing the distinctive, almost translucent brown hue.

In the ravenous ocean, very few immortal jellyfish live up to their name. They could, in theory, go on forever without dying, but most do not.

What does immortality mean when you can still be eaten by anything with a mouth? Most immortal jellyfish die in this thoroughly regular way: fortunate enough not to glitch into disease or senescence, unfortunate enough to disintegrate in stomach acid.

But when the immortal jellyfish’s body begins to fail, it ages backwards. Its ailing body sinks to the seafloor or some hard surface and rearranges itself into a silky lump, looking like an egg, or a cell, primordial, all potential. It seals itself in an envelope of chitin and shuffles around the meaning of its cells. And then it sprouts into a polyp and grows, into not one individual jellyfish but many clones. So the single damaged jellyfish becomes a host of younger, possible selves, each with the same power to regenerate. As far as we know, the jellyfish can do this over and over and over, as many times as they are damaged, into something like eternity. The scientists who originally described the peculiar regeneration did not choose to call the creature, also known as Turritopsis dohrnii, “immortal.” One scientist went so far as to write that he would never have used that word; he originally said the jellyfish was capable of “ontogeny reversal,” meaning reversing the direction of the ordinary life cycle. But “ontogeny reversal jellyfish” does not make headlines or earn grant funding, and so the creature became immortal.

Like millions of other mortal beings, when I learned about the immortal jellyfish, I envied the animal. It wasn’t the immortality itself that I coveted but its mechanism. Our traditional notions of immortality are so languorous and passive: Jesse Tuck, the everlasting teen, sips from a magic spring and stays seventeen for eternity, just like Edward Cullen from Twilight. I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever. When the immortal jellyfish ages in reverse, its body is not choosing eternity but rejecting death, which seem to me entirely different things. And the life it chooses is not young adulthood, forever a gangly seventeen, but childhood. It grows up again.

An immortal jellyfish can’t go back whenever it wants, only when it has no other choice. Healthy immortal jellyfish, presumably content with their tentacled curtain, cannot flip the chemical signal to age in reverse at any moment of their choosing. Trauma is not just a catalyst to regeneration; it is the only catalyst.

The truth is that many creatures are capable of renewing themselves. Newts can regrow their limbs, sea stars their arms. Zebra fish can regenerate their fins, their spinal cord, their retina, and most of their heart. This isn’t immortality but a second chance. Sometimes you don’t need to pull yourself apart to start over. Metamorphosis isn’t always a full-body thing. Since we first observed the immortal jellyfish’s capacity for resurrection in 1988, other jellyfish have revealed variations on this regenerative ability.

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. So I have to ask you again. How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?

All of us moving toward life. All of us refusing to die.