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

by Sabrina Imbler

In the 1960s, the land was zoned for single-family housing, and millions of cubic yards of sand and mud were dumped on the former tidelands so that buildings would not sink through the soft silt and into the ocean. The land was called reclaimed marshland, and the streets carved into the ground were named after the wild things that had been forced out: Oyster Court. Pompano Circle. Flying Fish Lane.

has become something of an origin myth, my designated fun fact. I have told the story so many times that the details of my original memory have become inaccessible, transformed from a real experience into a rote narrative. I don’t remember what I told my mom to get her to drive me there, or how I scrounged up the courage to be antagonistic with strangers when I could barely stand up to my middle-school bullies, whose bland, derivative cruelty still managed to make me hate myself.

had never heard the term “feeder” applied to a school before, only to tanks of goldfish and guppies—fish inexpensive and unremarkable enough that aquarists buy them as live prey for their larger, more valuable pets.

I remember that kids at schools near mine were killing themselves because of all the pressure, enough suicides for the CDC to deem the deaths a “cluster.” I remember that one student’s obituary included his ACT scores. Another student’s obituary listed her number of Facebook friends. I remember I spent late nights on AIM trying to talk my friend out of wanting to die.

I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.

We both had been expected to be daughters but turned out to be something else. We had shed our skins, not like snakes but insects—each of us a nymph outgrowing exoskeleton after exoskeleton, and morphing as we did. We didn’t know which molt would be our last, only that we might not be there yet, both of us rivers moving toward the sea. A few years after that night, they changed their name and pronouns; even later, I changed mine.

freeing the mother octopus to die.

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. What I mean to say is: I wanted to know if she ever regretted it.

So far removed from the light of the sun and the power of photosynthesis, deep-sea creatures depend upon the constant drizzle of marine snow—flakes of snot, poop, and disintegrated flesh from the world above them. Some flakes take weeks to reach the seafloor and grow as they fall, accumulating into white tufts. What is not eaten disintegrates into the ooze that carpets three-quarters of the deep ocean floor. At these depths, it is always marine snowing, always marine winter.

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.

I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants, and what I want of it.

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.

In Chinese mythology, there is a legend about carp that climbed a waterfall on a mountain of staggering height. An ancient hero cleaved the summit of the mountain in two, opening up a gateway so the river could careen off the cliffs. Each year many fish attempted to swim against the mighty current, and many failed. But a few fought against the surge of the river to take a final, breathtaking leap over the open gate at the head of the waterfall. Before their fins broke the surface of the water on the other side, the fish found their soft, plump bodies transformed into something slithering, and the slick mucus of their scales hardened into jeweled pebbles of skin. That is to say, they became dragons.

For hundreds of years, like the carp, Chinese sturgeon swam against the current of the Yangtze. 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? Many were injured, retreating to the sea with bruised and battered snouts, their unused ovaries shriveling up. Others died, their bodies sinking at the base of the dam, almost like an offering.

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.

Years later, after my grandmother had grown, she still woke up in the middle of the night, remembering the time her mother promised to kill her. It took her years to understand it was a promise filled with love.

“Necropsy,” the word, was invented to distinguish between the act of examining dead humans from that of examining dead animals. An autopsy would determine the cause of death of any animal, human or not, until the early 1800s, when a French doctor proposed “necropsy” for the nonhuman. All of us still die, but now we humans are autopsied and whales necropsied. Our exams involve the same process (opened up on the table) and end goal (to determine cause of death), but we are spared, at least etymologically, the suggestion of our corpsehood.

knew I had seen a whale, so it must have looked like one.

There is a way, the scientists realized, to study something to death. But scientists have to study whale death, to understand how and why we cause it—as we almost always do.

In 2018, a killer whale named Tahlequah, or J35, living off the coast of Seattle, Washington, carried the body of her calf, who lived for just half an hour, over one thousand miles. The calf’s death was no surprise. Like Nigel, Tahlequah belonged to the Southern Residents, one of the most imperiled populations of killer whales, which are some of the most contaminated marine mammals in the world. Although male killer whales carry their accumulated load of toxins for their entire lives, females can shed toxins in milk for their calves, poisoned mothers unwittingly poisoning their babies. The newly dead baby had been the first born in three years.

In some researchers’ eyes, Tahlequah grieved. She swam with her calf draped on her snout, its taut body eerily alive and white parts still glowing baby orange, eyespots glimmering in the moonlight. When the calf slipped away, she took six or seven breaths and dove, deeply, to retrieve it. She carried him this way for six days, continuously nudging him away from sinking until he no longer looked like a sleeping calf but a dead one, rigid animal form melting away. Eventually the other killer whales in her pod took turns keeping the dead baby afloat, nosing its body around like a beach vol...

They have names like bone-eating snot flower.

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. 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. One whale provides as much food as a thousand years’ worth of marine snow, the white flakes of organisms that died and disintegrated nearer the surface. In the historically whaled waters of the North Atlantic, about one-third of organisms that specialize on whale falls may have already gone extinct.

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.

I moved to Seattle in the fall of 2016, a few months before Trump was elected and the sun left for good.

I was trying to see my own experiences as if they had happened to someone else. I imagined this would help me judge, objectively, whether what happened to me was enough to count as assault, whether it was my fault or someone else’s. This is something I’ve been wondering, because I don’t tell this story at parties anymore.

He loves Trump.

Though prey can be caught off guard, can be surprised, can even be ambushed, prey is never truly unsuspecting. It has evolved the blueprint of its body in response to, or in anticipation of, trauma.

Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong.

This is the work we inherit as creatures with a complex brain, which comes with inexplicable joys, like love and sex and making out in cars, but also the duty of empathy, of understanding what it means when someone is stumbling. My experiences are not exceptional, in either their recurrence or their severity. But I want to imagine a world in which the men around me when I was younger could have acted as a safety net, could have seen a drunk girl stumbling on a sidewalk as a person, not an opportunity. I wish they could have seen me and alerted my friends, walked me home without touching me, or even just left me alone. Yes, I was fine, not in danger of choking on my vomit or passing out and hitting my head. I was fine until they found me, and then I wasn’t.

I read news stories about the discoveries of hybrids with charming names: strange narlugas, pizzly bears, sturddlefish. Yet these stories carry a warning. As we humans shape the world and scramble ecosystems and melt the Arctic and intermix animals that might otherwise never have met, hybrids are on the rise.

why must fields of science have fathers?—

In Linnaeus’s system, organisms were named as they were “discovered,” meaning, largely, by white men.

The next day, the city will erect barricades and garlands of cops to oversee the capital-P parade, the one first named after liberation and then later rebranded as Pride, the one sponsored by the city and Bank of America and Amazon and other institutions that do not care about us unless we become something to monetize. The next day, cops will roll in on side streets in terrible white cars with rainbow-striped decals of the NYPD logo to escort a behemoth of a float from Gilead, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures Truvada, a daily pill to prevent HIV, and charges $1,500 to $2,000 for a monthly dose that costs $6 to make.

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.

I understand: if something intelligent were ever given a second chance at life, it may never want to grow up.

It is not living forever but reliving forever.

I creature through the Midwest winters: hirsute, werequeer, warm and soft to the touch.