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

by Sabrina Imbler

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.