A Sea of Glass Page 11
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Some of the other cephalopods fashioned by the Blaschkas are much smaller. The small sepiolid bobtail squid created by Leopold (page 118) is charming and was likely very common once in Italy. Indeed, my first encounter with it at the dinner table suggests it might still be quite abundant. I wanted to leave the table when I found an inch-long sepiolid nestled in the pasta on my dinner plate in Italy. I can see why it’s a delicacy, but I am now too in tune with the artistry and coolness of most cephalopods to eat them. The sepiolids of Hawaii, called the Hawaiian bobtail squid, perform what feel like miracles in their husbandry of bacteria and offer the animal kingdom’s most striking example of animal symbiosis with bacteria. Many squid are brightly lit with bioluminescence at night and it turns out that the light is provided by bacteria.
Margaret McFall-Ngai, professor at the University of Hawaii, has spent her career studying the regulation of this symbiosis as a model system and the details are almost too good to be true. The bacterium is Vibrio fischeri, and it lives within a bacterial commune in specialized pockets on the bottom side of the squid. The bacteria are bioluminescent and form bright light organs within the squid. The awesome biology to me is that every morning the bacteria are vented out and have to be recultured by the squid during the day in order to produce the nightly light show. McFall-Ngai speculates that the daily release prevents the bacteria from getting the upper hand in the symbiosis. Leopold Blaschka undoubtedly knew that these squid were bioluminescent, but he could not have known it was caused by a symbiosis with bacteria and required careful cultivation by the squid in a special light organ, with its own lens and reflective surface to focus the light. This is another cephalopod I have not seen in the wild.
I think again about the wonderful sessions the Blaschkas must have had with these creatures in the late 1800s. I imagine Rudolf Blaschka peering into tide pools and bringing back to his studio aquarium this bounty from the sea. I am mystified by the Blaschkas’ ability to so beautifully capture not only the correct anatomy of their subjects but also the nuances of their exact poses in glass. Leopold once said in praise of his son, “Tact increases with each generation.” How many artists describe their artistic endeavor as requiring tact? Leopold reminds us that they were doing more than simply trying to copy animals in nature; he thought about deeper issues in the way they created art, and he conveys this awareness in his description of Rudolf’s ability. I think about the meaning of tact: “adroitness and sensitivity in dealing with difficult issues.” The nuance in the Blaschkas’ work is what makes this collection of ocean life great, their tact in selecting the right animals and their sensitivity in bringing them to life. They chose soft-bodied invertebrates that are extravagantly beautiful but poorly known. They didn’t choose turtles or sea stars or even crabs. Viewing their art is a process of discovering the rare and beautiful in the ocean.
Cephalopods are the hardest group for me to characterize. These fascinating creatures are difficult to track down in the wild, and I am concerned for the future of both currently common and rare species. Observing their behavior, from their complex mating rituals to their feats of escape, we see that they are far more intelligent than we can define, and this invests me emotionally. These are not cold, slimy, spineless creatures to me. I feel transformed by each experience with them, as if contacted by a fifth dimension, an intelligence previously unknown to me, and one that is quantifiable: they can learn complex tasks, reason through problems, and have been observed engaging in “play behavior” (Kuba et al. 2006). For instance, aquarists have observed octopuses in tanks throwing plastic bottles into water jets and then catching them. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I was entranced when the giant pacific octopus reached across her tank to touch the spot where my finger rested on the glass and then traced from her side as I moved my finger along the glass. It is also interesting that they can recognize the faces of both the aquarists they like and the ones they don’t. While at the Monterey Bay Aquarium watching a common octopus, David and I saw firsthand as one changed color and retreated when a keeper she didn’t like appeared in the room.
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My attachment to some of these animals inevitably leads to disillusionment in our quest, as on one day in particular during a long trip to Indonesia. We had looked so hard for octopuses, of any species, on all our dives. After a total of twenty-nine dives in three weeks, I had not seen a single octopus. The reefs and rocky shallows should have been teeming with them, since this is the center of marine biodiversity and the region is home to countless cephalopod species, but we continued to come up short. Since octopus is a valuable source of food and is hunted heavily in Indonesia, it was clear octopus was being overharvested. Indeed, we watched cooler after cooler packed with hundreds of octopuses being shipped from some villages.
After five more days of looking, I decide to get smart and have the professionals help me. So I ask Jardeen, our divemaster, if he can help me find octopuses somewhere besides our reef dives. Though he doesn’t speak English, I understand that he wants me to come back in an hour and someone will take me to where the octopus are. Now we’re in business, I think, and go off to find a couple of plastic aquaria and nets. When I come back, there’s a fifteen-year-old girl on a moped waiting for me. She smiles and gestures for me to hop on behind. Hmp, I think, this is the octopus hunter? But I trust Jardeen, so I climb on and we zoom off through the coastal forest of Sulawesi. We start on a hard, one-track dirt road, but after about ten minutes it becomes a soft sand trail with overhanging branches that we duck under at high speed. The trail shifts again and becomes a dark, overgrown path that is so roughened by ruts and roots, we have to walk the moped in places. I’m feeling mildly unnerved and wonder where we’re going and what we’ll find when we arrive.
We finally emerge from the jungle to a stunning coastline, pristine white sand beach giving way to expansive, healthy seagrass beds rimmed with rocky intertidal and offshore reef. The girl speaks no English, so we splash along in silence, wading through the shallow seagrass toward our rocky intertidal destination. I finally remember a Bahasa phrase to ask her name, “Sieppa nama anda?” She laughs shyly, but I get a surprised look and she answers “Meeta.”
“Terrimah kasih, Meeta. Abba kabar?” Thank you Meeta, How are you?
She laughs, and answers, “Bik!” Fine! Well, a pathetic showing of all the Bahasa I know, but at least she thought I was funny and probably not dangerous. After about fifteen minutes of crossing the seagrass, we run into a woman harvesting sea cucumbers, snails, and urchins from under rocks in the seagrass bed. After a long exchange with Meeta, she joins us to look for octopus.
Her method is to look for small dens in overhangs, and then plunge a sharp metal pole into it, presumably to scare or drag the creature out. I don’t like this. After a few minutes of observing, I gesture for her to stop. Right then, another woman comes up excitedly, swinging an octopus from her hand. Apparently, word is out that the bule, the white foreigner, wants octopus. I am crushed. It’s clearly dead. I take the limp animal from her and splay it in a tide pool to gesture that it’s lifeless and I don’t want it. I hold out my aquarium to them, hoping to convey that I want a live, swimming octopus. We start back toward shore, and I feel both guilty and discouraged. Then the same woman comes back, this time with a gorgeous lively octopus, flashing green, brown, and maroon. Happy, I put it in my tank and admire it. It’s indeed vibrant and energetic, just what we need to confirm the species on film. I give the woman some rupiahs, since she had worked hard to help. It’s clear by the stunned and grateful look on her face that I have overpaid her. That’s fine with me; I like that the octopus is worth more alive than dead. It does not escape me that this transaction is a microcosm of all that is bad and good with how we commodify biodiversity. Sustainable harvesting or poaching, they’re simply two sides of the same coin, with the animal always losing.
I climb carefully on the back of the moped, balancing my treasure as we bounce back to the hote
l. When I return, David isn’t back from his dive. Over the course of the next hour, my lively octopus declines from bright, animated, and vibrant to dull, slow, and unhealthy. It is dying. I look more closely and can see now that the body had been pierced by the huntress’s spear. In some vain attempt to revive it, I release it onto the nearby reef, but I know better than to think it will survive.
For me, this was the low point in our entire project, the moment when I questioned every part of what we were doing. Coming to a foreign country to film their animals in some misguided idea that we could champion biodiversity conservation—who was I to think we could create a movie that would make any difference? And what in the world was I doing trying to be some kind of Indiana Jones of Indonesian invertebrates? I was no better than the people who killed octopuses; at least they did it for food. I felt I had personally injured this animal. What a mess Indonesia was anyway, from mining to dynamite fishing to massive coastal pollution; it was just going to get worse and there was nothing I could do to stop or slow globalization, blast fishing, and rampant coastal pollution. It was a bad day, and I had lost sight of my deeper intentions in embarking on this venture. When David eventually came back, I couldn’t even talk to him about it. I just sort of mumbled something about having to release an octopus we found. He so clearly knew how badly I felt that he never said anything about it again.
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Cephalopods were once one of the dominant life forms in the world’s oceans. Today we have a smaller diversity of about 800 living species of cephalopods. Our statistics regarding endangerment are very imperfect for this group, but our high-pressure top predators are caving under the stress of over-fishing, habitat destruction, and loss of prey. As I touched on earlier, cephalopods have the particular problem of being what biologists call “semelparous,” which means they only reproduce once in their lives. This is a very risky business. For a mother octopus or squid, it means she could lose it all if she has babies in a bad year or a bad place. Most animals reproduce multiple times and have a better chance of creating at least one future generation. One small change helping cephalopods along is the fact that the predatory fish and shark that eat them have been reduced by over-fishing. Sadly, it’s not a win-win. The intricate ecology of place needs all its species intact, even if the loss of one is the short-term gain of another. Maybe over-fishing of their predators is why cephalopods remain abundant enough to support a vibrant fishery in the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, this is not sustainable.
Although cephalopods make up only a small proportion of world fish landings (cephalopods make up approximately 3 percent of total fishery landings), there have been substantial increases during the past four decades, and total world harvests of cephalopods reached a peak of over four million tons in 2007 (Rodhouse 2014; FAO 2014). Most of the main species of commercial importance in the northeast Atlantic or the Mediterranean are represented in our Blaschka collection: octopus Octopus vulgaris and Eledone cirrhosa, cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, and squid Loligo forbesi, Loligo vulgaris, Todarodes sagittatus, and Illex coindetii (Sonderblohm et al. 2014; Regueira et al. 2014; Gamito et al. 2015). Making up the largest cephalopod component in 2012 world fisheries are the omastrephid squid, including the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) and the Japanese flying squid, Todarodes sagittatus (FAO 2014). Stocks of the Argentine shortfin squid Illex argentines are considered overfished. Blaschka match Todarodes sagittatus experienced a fishery collapse. Many other cephalopod fisheries have declined, but they are not well tracked and it’s difficult to separate natural cycles from the impacts of fishing (Rodhouse et al. 2014). Tracking is further complicated by the fact that the animals are short-lived and some squid have a migratory component to their life cycle (Hastie et al. 2009). Few cephalopod stocks are carefully managed, despite increasing pressure on them as finfish stocks decline and invertebrate fisheries become more prevalent (Rodhouse et al. 2014).
On a positive note, as soft-bodied animals with internal fertilization, this group may well fare better than most in the acidified conditions of the future ocean. Ocean acidification poses a huge threat to successful fertilization because for many animals, the meeting of eggs and sperm takes place in the open waters of the sea. For the argonaut, on the other hand, fertilization is protected, but the female’s paper shell is highly endangered by corrosion because it is already thin and close to its calcification threshold in some waters. There is also speculation that cephalopods such as squid might be particularly affected by increased oceanic carbon dioxide because they require high levels of oxygen in their blood to sustain the energy demand of swimming, and their blood pigment, hemocyanin, is very sensitive to changes in pH. Lower pH levels can impair oxygen supplies in these species; a pH decrease of only 0.25 units can reduce oxygen capacity by about 50 percent (Rosa and Seibel 2008).
In the ocean, the only invertebrate groups for which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is attempting to develop estimates of extinction risk are the cephalopods, lobsters, and reef-building corals. As discussed in chapter 8, the conclusion for corals is that one-third are at immediate risk of extinction. But even this hopeful case, where an assessment is under way, does not help us figure out how our Blaschka cephalopods are doing. As indicated in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, preliminary studies report that 24 percent of cuttlefish are classed as being of “least concern,” but a staggering 76 percent fall into the category of “data deficient,” meaning we cannot even assess their threat level or know if they have already disappeared. There is more information available for squid, with 57 percent classed as “least concern,” although the remaining 43 percent are again classed as “data deficient” (see www.iucnredlist.org). Assessments are ongoing.
The conservation status of less than 2.5 percent of the world’s described biodiversity is currently known. Clearly this limits our understanding of the impact of humans on biodiversity, and with it the ability to make informed decisions on conservation planning and action. One of the major challenges for the IUCN Red List is assessing the larger groups in the ocean that represent the majority of the world’s biodiversity. When you think of it, there are only 800 species of cephalopod; we should be able to do better than this in assessing their risk for extinction.
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The night of our last dive in Indonesia, I am only halfheartedly in it. I am filled with self-doubt and fatalism, surrounded by degraded reefs and my own questionable, if well-intentioned, actions. I feel like we’ve just lived through some fable, like the universe is holding up a dark mirror. I don’t like what I see. But I don my gear nonetheless and drop into the dark water off the jetty.
As expected, in this somewhat miserable, impacted caricature of a seascape, we come up empty. This is the same place, festooned with fishing line and grounded in garbage, where we earlier found some interesting nudibranchs. As we head back to the boat, however, I catch a slow, small flash of unexpected white out of the corner of my eye and stop for a closer look. What is this two-inch, round, bumbling critter levitating above the bottom? Nothing I have ever seen before, but suddenly I know from the way it hovers that it’s a wondrous find: a cuttlefish as small as a mouse, rather casually ambling and bumping around the reef edge, keeping a watchful eye on us. Who knows how long it has been along with us at the edge of our lights?
As David swims up with the camera, I gently herd this ambling critter, enchanted by the calm, adorable dwarf levitating between my palms. No attempt to jet—it hovers stoically above my hand, cool dark eyes measuring the level of threat and seemingly finding it low. Our dwarf hovers and maneuvers around like a slowmotion hummingbird. Meanwhile, David is muttering happily as he films, beside himself to have found his favorite critter. This was the priority animal for us, our primary reason to come to Indonesia, since the Blaschkas produced a lot of cephalopods in glass and cuttlefish are among the most endearing, with emotions tattooed in color on their surface. They are not only smart and display elaborate social rituals
, but they possess the ability to change into almost any shape or color. After a brief visit and display of colors and textures, the dwarf stumpy-spined cuttlefish rises out of my hands and jets off into the reef. After a tiring, dark dive, our team emerges heartened by the find.
7.
SEA STARS
Keystone Species in Glass
The common sea star (Asterias rubens) as a juvenile in glass. This is part of a sequence that the Blaschkas crafted showing the development of a sea star from planktonic larva to this newly settled juvenile. Asterias rubens is a species that was decimated in 2011 in the U.S. Atlantic by the sea star wasting disease. Photo by Guido Motofico, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Ireland.
THE REEFS OF Nusa Lembongan in Bali are home to some of the most dangerous currents in the world. Despite the sometimes treacherous down-rushing currents, the region draws scientists and conservationists from around the world because it houses the world’s highest marine biodiversity—including species from all the groups the Blaschkas spun into glass. While the fast currents here make for tough working conditions, they’re nirvana for feather stars, which I was hoping to see as I worked with scientists to survey the health of coral reefs throughout Indonesia. I was also on the hunt for my last group of Blaschka matches: echinoderms.
It was early in the trip, and our team was just getting the routine down. Our surveys required six two-person dive teams to identify and count every fish and coral species and evaluate the health of the corals, the living framework of the reef. Even as we dropped down at the beginning of this dive, the current was fast enough that we could not swim against it. Instead, we moved upstream by pulling ourselves hand-over-hand along the ocean floor. We had been warned that we had a narrow window of time in which to work and that the current would pick up at day’s end—which is also the best time to see feather stars. Working in such high currents is unpredictable, and I was worried most about the safety of my Indonesian colleague Adah, who is obligated to wear her bulky shawls and hijab under all public conditions, even while diving.