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

by Sabrina Imbler

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.

It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to die but that ceasing to exist (and being reverently mourned) felt more tangible to me than what I had been told I should want.

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.

The only way to kill the goldfish is to kill every fish along with them in the water, dumping gallons of rotenone, a biocide poisonous to fish, to ensure nothing can survive. But even this is only possible in ponds and lakes, water bodies with hard edges where the poison will not escape.

San Francisco Bay is often called a “highly invaded ecosystem,” one of the most invaded estuaries in the world.

Nothing fully lives in a bowl; it only learns to survive it.

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.

Caseous: resembling cheese. Cyamids: whale lice. Ectasis: a widening. Fusiform: spindle shaped. Stellate: arranged like a star. Tortuous: having many turns, winding or twisting. Peracute: very acute, violent.

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.

Though prey can be caught off guard, can be surprised, can even be ambushed, prey is never truly unsuspecting.

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 was fine until they found me, and then I wasn’t.

I realize I had written the essay not just for a white editor but also for a white audience. Like a dutiful little trash compactor, I had digested my messy heap of an identity into a manageable lesson for people who were not like me.

The first time I saw someone describe mixed-race people as “hybrids” and “half-breeds” was in middle school on a Neopets chat board. The racism seemed so removed from the life I led in ostensibly liberal suburbs, and almost comical against the yolk-yellow backdrop of a virtual pets website made for children.

Maybe complaining to someone who gets it is one of the purest comforts on Earth. Maybe it is less about our shared backgrounds than it is about our shared irritations, obsessions, grievances, fears, resentments.

I want all our soft bodies pressed together. I want all of us, teeming masses, swirling riot, heaped atop one another until we become something more than summer, more than life.

though it will always be dangerous, in a way, to live on this Earth.

When you are not fleeing, what will you become?

Reading a creature through its camouflage seems a misguided attempt to understand its true nature, its whole self. It would be like studying a zebra while it flees from a lion, or a mouse as it cowers in a hollow log. I want to know how cuttlefish morph when there are no sharks around, only other cuttlefish.

many cuttlefish scientists focused their research on the male cuttlefish—a historically common practice in many fields of science.

I got this tattoo to be desired, and I begin to wonder how much I have changed my body for me and how much I’ve changed it for others.

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

It’s an old trope now that many queer and trans people have a second adolescence. The first happens alongside everyone else’s, except you are not yourself. You feel as if you are the only person you can talk to. You live someone else’s truth.

Trauma is not just a catalyst to regeneration; it is the only catalyst.

If you do not give the jellyfish more than it can handle, it will not begin to regrow. If there is not enough cesium chloride in the petri dish, if there are not enough needles or there is too little heat, the jellyfish will remain adult, alive. So you have to ensure there is enough stress, enough trauma.