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

by Sabrina Imbler

But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph. I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself.

I hadn’t realized a small part of me was hoping the nutritionist would tell me that, actually, I was fine. That, actually, I could just exist in my current body, and the real work was to love it.

It seems a shame that an animal able to sense so much of the world occupies it so briefly, spends all of it at the bottom of the ocean, in darkness, at temperatures near freezing. But still, she lived.

How can you stage an intervention for your starving mother, especially when you worry you might still want to starve yourself?

Until relatively recently, scientists thought that all life was dependent on the light of the sun. They knew that plants, the anchor of our food chain, spun sugar from sunlight in photosynthesis, and every other living thing ate plants or ate something that ate plants. Our imagination was not vast enough to look beyond the surface, to conceive of another way of living on Earth.

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.

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. I want to know what kinds of transformation the cuttlefish is capable of when it is motivated not by fear but by community and sex, and I am not interested in calling it a disguise.

So I have to ask you again. How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?