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

by Sabrina Imbler

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.

actually, I could just exist in my current body, and the real work was to love it.

When the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, the great fish survived. Some scientists call the sturgeon a living fossil. 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.

The Chinese sturgeon is dying out, and it is not alone. All but four of the world’s twenty-seven species in the family Acipenseridae hover close to extinction. 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.