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

by Sabrina Imbler

What does the light want? More of its kind? Yes. Yes and a wish to disturb the dark.

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? What is it like for a creature with a three-month memory to live and die in a bubble the size of a dutch oven?

Scientists investigating this maternal death drive discovered the octopuses were simply obeying their optic gland, which runs between their eyes. In 1977, a psychologist removed the optic gland from fourteen female Caribbean two-spot octopuses, between the two iris-blue spots on either side of its head. When the glands were removed and the octopuses woke up after surgery, most of them abandoned their eggs. All of them began eating again, doubling their body weight from that shrunken, brooding state. Most of the mother octopuses doubled their life spans, living months after the moment the scientists had expected them to die.

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.

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.

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.

The Chinese sturgeon can accumulate more TPT in their livers than can other fish. These poisoned fish lay eggs that hatch into deformed fry. Their larvae have just one eye, or no eyes at all. They cannot see how the river they inhabit is not the same as the one their ancestors knew well. Their spines bend like used paper clips, arching in hard angles that make it impossible to swim.

It may seem surprising; surely a winding chain of individuals would move more efficiently if they sucked and clenched and spurted in perfect timing. After all, this is how a jellyfish moves, in rhythmic bursts of speed and stillness, waiting for the rest of its body to catch up. But salps allow each individual to jet at its own pace in the same general direction. It is not as fast as coordinated strokes, but it’s more sustainable long-term, each individual sucking and spurting as it pleases. Slow and steady, say the salps. It doesn’t matter how fast we go, only that we all get there in the end. We may all move at different paces, but we will only reach the horizon together.

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. Sepia has come to describe a color rather than a substance, and it is a color associated with the past, antique films and photographs all beige and discolored. When a cuttlefish’s ink is taken from its body, the resulting drawing or letter will always appear vintage and outdated, no matter how freshly drawn.