A Sea of Glass Page 2
In 1863 Leopold moved to Dresden, Germany, where the prince introduced him to Heinrich Gottlieb Ludwig Reichenbach, director of the Dresden Botanical Gardens and the Dresden Natural History Museum. This was the turning point in Blaschka’s career as a glassmaker. Reichenbach was exhibiting the startling tide pool anemone lithographs from naturalist Phillip Gosse’s Actinologia Britannica (1860). Each lithographed tide pool is packed full of an impossible number of brightly colored, spotted, and striped anemones (page 22). As Leopold transitioned from making orchids to crafting anemones, we can see that many of his first watercolors and glass anemones are almost exact matches in posture to the Gosse lithographs. Reichenbach commissioned glass anemones and displayed them in dry aquaria as a spatial paraphrase of Gosse’s lithographs, showing idealized groups of sea animals in a natural context.
Leopold’s next step marked the beginning of a period of innovation in which he would explore further branches on the tree of life. The 1872 Dresden Natural History Museum catalogue documents the transition from displaying anemones only to having forty-seven Blaschka squid models on display. The anemones and squid were the beginnings of the Blaschkas’ glass tree of life, from which would sprout a full spineless menagerie: jellyfish, sea slugs, octopuses, worms, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, and sea squirts.
Only five years later, the enterprise was established, with Leopold’s now twenty-year-old son, Rudolf, as a full-time partner. Letters in the Rakow Museum archives, translated from the Old German by Henri Reiling, reveal that in 1877, Leopold ordered alcohol-preserved animals from the Naples Zoological Station on the Italian Mediterranean coast. Leopold’s correspondence reveals that soon thereafter, tanks with seawater were installed in the Blaschkas’ studio and regular shipments of living sea creatures came from suppliers in Trieste, Italy, Kiel, Germany, and Weymouth, England. In 1879, Rudolf made a field trip to upper Italy and the Adriatic (Reiling 1998). Rudolf’s education would influence the direction in which their business developed. “I studied now very earnestly zoology and anatomy with teachers and with the help of the great Natural History library of the Imperial Academy Carol. Leopoldina which we had in Dresden that time,” we find in Henri Reiling’s translation of Rudolf’s diary.
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Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka shaped glass by lampworking. They heated glass in an open flame (the lamp) produced by burning paraffin that melted at a low temperature. They then transformed the glass using tweezers and tongs, bending flat plate glass into different forms. They made grooves and lines in the glass with small needles positioned in a holder. They labored at a lampworker’s table with bellows and a treadle below. High temperatures could be reached by using the bellows to supply extra oxygen to the burning process in the “lamp.” The true-to-life colors on each piece were created by a combination of mixing different colors of glass or painting the glass. A stunning, technically challenging aspect of their work is the impossibly thin glass they used to craft, for example, the bell of a jellyfish. Even the expert glassworkers at the Corning Museum of Glass contend that no one today is capable of such artistry.
Some part of the deeper motivation to create these masterpieces must have resided in the relationship between father and son; they shared an obsession with their work. Everyone who spent time with Leopold appears to have been charmed by him, and an afternoon of reading his correspondence reveals a kind, courtly gentleman and passionate student of natural history. He was so connected with the science of his day that he corresponded avidly with the giant of nineteenth-century marine natural history, Ernst Haeckel.
Haeckel, who was widely known for his detailed, lifelike, and artistic drawings and paintings, inspired Leopold to first capture his animals in watercolor. Like their glass animals, Leopold and Rudolf’s watercolors are mesmerizing. The Rakow Library has over 170 of them. The Blaschkas created the watercolors to get the pose, colors, and anatomy of each piece right before starting their work in glass. They range from simple pencil sketches, with parts crossed out and marked over, to finished works of art. The watercolors turn even lowly worms into objects of enchantment. Leopold’s watercolor of Spirorbis, a tiny feather duster worm no bigger than a ladybug, brings all the beauty and biology of the worm to light. It shows the worm pulled from its tube, revealing more than the brilliant tentacles and tiny hooks that hold it in place within the tube, and the eyespots that cue the tentacles to flicker in and out with changes in light. He shows also the eggs and the frilled, eyed larvae that are brooded by each mother worm inside her tube. I am impressed that he knew these details of this tiniest worm, holding close her brood of squirming larvae inside delicately sculpted porcelain tubes.
The Blaschkas in their Dresden garden, circa 1880–1891: Leopold (right) with his second wife, Carolina Riegel, and their son, Rudolf. Photo courtesy of the Rakow Research Library, Corning Museum of Glass, BIB ID: 98014.
Of course worms, even ones as brightly colored and diverse as these, aren’t for everyone. Many people are far more likely to be inspired by a startling red octopus with fierce eyes, its undulating tentacles stretched across the page, or by the possibility of one day spotting a live version of the Blaschkas’ watercolor Glaucus atlanticus, the exquisite blue-striped pelagic sea dragon (page 102), a nudibranch that feeds on the highly venomous Portuguese man-of-war. Despite the allure of these carefully crafted watercolors, you may still be unprepared for the impact of the actual glass masterpieces. To see a glass-spun jellyfish, like the Portuguese man-of-war, the prey of the sea dragon, even more vibrant in its colors and real in its form than what you could observe in nature—that is the secret of why these pieces have been cherished as art since the day they were made.
To paraphrase the great Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum, we are moved to conserve what we understand and love. My vision is that these masterpieces of glass art motivate wonder and appreciation for our ocean world. The conservation of our Blaschka glass collection is a perfect analogy for the conservation of our fragile, living marine biodiversity. Everyone knows that glass is easily broken. For the first twenty years of curating our collection, I was unwilling to touch a single piece, so aware was I of its age and fragility. But I have watched our glass conservator, Elizabeth Brill, patiently put hundreds of them back together. Now I move them around without fear. The glass piece that taught me the enduring lesson about our living biodiversity was that first favorite, the octopus, now shown on the cover of this book. It was so sad and grim, dusty, faded, and broken when I saw it twenty-seven years ago. Now it is restored, its tan and brown spots vibrant, its smooth, sinuous tentacles coiled, as if in wait for a crab upon which to pounce. Our glass octopus is at the same time fragile but resilient and proved capable of repair, despite the years of neglect.
Likewise, every marine habitat, filled with spectacular biodiversity, is both fragile and surprisingly resilient. As with a complex piece of art like a glass octopus, a coral reef has many fragile pieces that fit together to create a whole ecosystem. Unfortunately, throughout my career, I’ve watched the pieces be lost. On many coral reefs, for example, we have lost the fish that chomp back the algae that encroaches over the corals, or the ones that eat the snails and sea star that strip the coral’s skin. These worker bees are needed to dust off and clean the reef. We have also lost many integral upstream grass beds, which are like the lungs and kidneys of a bigger ecosystem, eliminating toxins before they reach the reef. Worse, I have watched climate warming kill over two-thirds of the species on a reef in a single week. Vastly worse, I have seen dynamite fishing level our most biodiverse of marine ecosystems, the reefs of the Coral Triangle near Indonesia. There are perhaps 3,000 species on these healthy reefs; how is it possible that in a single night, a single fisherman can shatter an entire ecosystem to bits? This is worse than if you collected all 569 of our glass Blaschka animals and smashed them to the ground. A devastating thought to me, because we cherish each one and have invested so much care to conserve and protect them. But if damaged, we woul
d restore them again. This is what we are now doing with marine habitats around the planet. Keep safe and resilient the healthy ones, and pick up and restore some function to the broken ones. We can never give up hope, even for the shattered places.
The educational value of the Blaschkas’ work has ebbed with time. This is why our collection lived dusty and unused for over a century. The collection was vital in its day, when the first president of Cornell ordered it for our students. Especially at an inland university, students could not easily travel to the coast, and the age of diving with Jacques Cousteau had not yet arrived. This was students’ only chance to appreciate the many branches (and even twigs) on this tree of life. By the mid-twentieth century, biological collecting houses like Ward’s and Carolina, as well as more specialized companies, were doing a big business in collecting and shipping live animals to universities. Who needed glass pieces when they could see the living creatures? Now, once again, we do need the Blaschka collection, both as a time capsule and as inspiration, because even with our ridiculous carbon-burning global mobility and sophisticated diving and photographic gear, many of these animals can’t be seen easily; the diversity in our oceans has declined and many of them are now rare.
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In 2011 I gave a Science Cabaret talk to a packed crowd at the Lost Dog Café in Ithaca, New York. This was my first attempt to tell the story of Cornell’s Blaschka glass animal collection and to address questions about whether I could ever find the living biodiversity that inspired it. I was surprised at the large audience and the fascination with a story I had long lived with. It would be several more years before I fully understood the key to how I held their interest: that art has enormous power to translate nature and shape our fascination in the natural world. James Prosek, a talented environmental artist, explained it to me: “To really relate emotionally to nature, many people need nature to be interpreted for them, through art or some experience of the juxtaposition of humans with art.” I realized that this is what our glass masterpieces do for many people who are unfamiliar with jellyfish, octopuses, or sea slugs.
After my talk, in the crowd clustered around the aquarium of live sea animals that my students had brought along, I saw David Brown, a videographer, waiting and smiling as I chatted with others. David, with his boundless energy and engaging smile, dressed in the usual rumpled sport coat and jeans of the Ithaca native, looked the part of a rugged adventurer who had filmed narwhals in the Arctic and fin whales in Indonesia as a member of the Cousteau Society team. I was pleased he had shown up and intrigued when he looked me in the eye and said, “I’m hooked on your story of the glass collection and marine biodiversity as a fragile legacy. Your video clips of the live animals reflect amazingly back on the glass masterpieces. It really is a time capsule of the oceans before the industrial age; we could make an entire film about it.” That chance meeting in a bar led to some rather crazy initial dives to find animals like octopus and cuttlefish that I never thought I’d see in the wild, and set me on a different course.
David and I then embarked on a series of shared underwater adventures that were by turns difficult, inspiring, and heartbreaking. We have searched and found many Blaschka lookalikes in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, and the Mediterranean, and in the warmer reefs of Hawaii and Indonesia. David’s vast experience in technical diving and underwater videography, coupled with his insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm for diving and ocean biodiversity, created the opportunity to bring the animals in our collection to life. On my own, as a research diver, I prefer the safer, well-lit waters of daytime reefs and would never have launched into nighttime black-water dives in the middle of the Pacific, or plunged across remote Indonesian reefs chasing octopuses, squid, and sea slugs in the dark.
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My growing passion for the quest to find the living matches to the Blaschka creatures, and my wonder at our experiences—sometimes hopeful, sometimes dispiriting—inspired me to write this book. The moment I came eye to eye with that octopus in Hawaii, I fell in love with this curious, surprisingly smart creature and felt the epic struggle it encounters in today’s oceans. In chapter 6 I talk more about encounters with its relatives, the squid and cuttlefish, and finish my story about why it’s so challenging to hold an eight-armed Houdini. The outcome was that I wanted to spend more time in the octopus’s garden and have others experience how it feels when art comes to life.
A Sea of Glass uses the Blaschka collection as a time capsule to focus on animals that were abundant 150 years ago. Each chapter shows the linkages between the animals that dominate our tree of life and the threats they face in our changing oceans. I’ve added an appendix with more scientific detail about invertebrate diversity within each taxon and newly discovered relationships among the groups. There I show the full range of the tree of life that the Blaschkas included in their masterpieces. The main chapters include anemones and corals; jellyfish; soft-bodied worms; sea slugs; octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish; and sea stars and sea cucumbers. The Blaschkas were very deliberate in their efforts to show not all invertebrates, but rather the soft-bodied ones that would not preserve well and that students and the public might never see in life. You won’t find sea urchins, shrimp, crabs, or even many sea stars in the Blaschka collection. Woven throughout are my experiences and research on how these animals survive in the ocean. Sharing our adventures to find them amidst the ecological threats they face is an essential part of bringing others along on this project: see what dives put us in danger, where we found beautiful surprises, and where we blundered upon brutal disappointment. And see what we know of the status of these creatures and the threats to their conservation. The final chapter of the book considers how the Blaschka tree of life will likely fare in a rapidly changing ocean.
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A Sea of Glass aims to reawaken the passion of the nineteenth century for natural history and ocean exploration. As it turned out, our quest to find all the animals proved impossible; even the experts studying each group have not seen all the species that the Blaschkas depict. In our quest to find each animal or its closest lookalike, we had to start at the beginning, with names. Fully a third of the names of the original Blaschka species have changed in 150 years, and some that were once considered a single species based on their appearance are now recognized as being several species based on their genetic code. The species depicted by the Blaschkas come from all over the globe and from habitats as varied as tide pools in Wales and the Mediterranean and regions deep in the oceans, like the mid-Atlantic. My lifetime as a biologist studying marine invertebrate biodiversity and climate change impacts in the oceans makes clear to me the urgency of this project, an urgency that stems from the accelerating change in our world’s oceans. Marine biodiversity is caught up in the relentless changes that modernization, over-fishing, warming waters, and ocean acidification are bringing to our shores. Every dive is a new experience combining risk and discovery. It is never clear at the start what I will find: unexpected down-sweeping ocean currents or a rare sea slug running along some deep rock wall; large predators that could eat me or bioluminescent squid glowing in a dark ocean. Discovering just how the different species beloved by the Blaschkas cope with both setback and opportunity in their homes, from tide pools to reefs to blue water, is a journey full of surprises. Join me in the voyage to discover who the winners are in our climate lottery, and who is the most fragile and threatened in today’s seas.
2.
ANEMONES AND CORALS
Rooted Lives of At-Risk Animals
Sea pansy (Renilla muelleri) in glass. The sea pansy is a collection of polyps; a single two-inch-long polyp makes up the base, which anchors it in the sand. The petals of the pansy are formed by large anemone-like feeding polyps. When touched, intense waves of light spread from polyp to polyp, organized by the pansy’s diffuse nerve net. The bioluminescence is caused by a chemical called green fluorescent protein (GFP). Photo by Gary Hodges.
ON ANY GIVEN DAY in the San Juan Islands, I can pick my way across the rocky shoreline and see half a dozen different species of anemone. Although a professor at Cornell University, I am fortunate enough to spend my summers teaching at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs. The San Juan Islands, north of Seattle, are located in the middle of the Salish Sea, an ocean waterway stretching from Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca north to the Strait of Georgia, with an unusual bounty of marine diversity. Though simple in their design, anemones come in a surprising variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. Our tide pools are carpeted with the olive green, pink-tipped elegant anemone (Anthopleura elegantissima), as common as a robin in a tree and a close match to the Blaschkas’ Anthopleura ballii. Their color comes from the combination of two solar cells (one tiny brown dinoflagellate or one bright green alga) that live within the anemone and fix carbon from the sun, much like plants do, converting it to energy. But unlike the corals, which have evolved a tight, necessary dependence on their solar cells, these anemones can opt to go without, appearing ghostly white, often in deep shady tide pools or beneath overhangs (below). But in between the earthy green and the white anemones exists a whole spectrum of color, shape, and form. I can easily get lost admiring their diversity, as it appears British artist Philip Henry Gosse did in his watercolors of the 1840s (Gosse 1860).