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

by Sabrina Imbler

The truth is that I was asked to leave the Petco, but I told everyone I was banned.

If goldfish are doomed in a bowl, they are unstoppable in a river.

After the Gezhouba Dam was built, the great fish could be seen flinging themselves at the dam, attempting to cross. They hurled their bodies into the concrete and steel, again and again. How had a passage that was once open suddenly become a wall?

In his essay “Sturgeon Moon,” the fisher John Cronin asks us to consider the sheer magnitude of the animal’s heritage in new units. If we translate two hundred million years into a twenty-four-hour clock, we have taken less than one-tenth of a second in the last minute of the last hour to imperil every single subspecies of sturgeon on the planet.

Tahlequah carried the calf for seventeen days, watching what she loved become unrecognizable to her but seeing no other choice than to continue.

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. Hagfish, octopuses, sea snails, bristle and bone worms, adults and larvae, shuttling themselves along the great expanse of the deep sea and coming up with nothing: no whales, living or dead.

The crab waves its enormous claws, each porcupined with prickly setae, above its head. Their rhythm is slow but sure, claws swinging back and forth, shimmering almost like a mirage within the heat of the gases.

We queer beachgoers come and go, but the abandoned children’s tuberculosis hospital will always greet us when we return.

What does immortality mean when you can still be eaten by anything with a mouth?