Invisible Beasts (14 page)

We do not know how many are left alive. They've been overfished for centuries, thanks to their slowness, lack of aggression, and plethora of uses. We make basking sharks into leather, oil, shark's fin soup, and shark cartilage, a reputed aphrodisiac—ironically, since basking sharks swim in sex-segregated groups, like holy orders, and have been observed to inspect our boats from a distance, not sure, perhaps, if they've detected a potential mate, with all the awkwardness of habitual chastity. There are many things about them that we do not know. Here is a partial list:

       
1.
   
Why only the right ovary of the female appears fertile,

       
2.
   
At what age and season, exactly, mating occurs,

       
3.
   
How often they breed,

       
4.
   
Whether the gestation period is one, two, or three years,

       
5.
   
How many young are born to one mother,

       
6.
   
When they become mature.

What we do know is that basking sharks are creatures of peace. Twenty to forty feet long, they swim slowly, at two knots, their pectoral fins—the analogue of our arms—relaxed, their bodies insinuating a continuous
S
, with an occasional strong flick of a lunate tail. Their mouths gape to scoop up plankton blooms. Those yawning mouths are cavernous; torrents of water and small life stream through them, like crowds through the pillared portals of
medieval cathedrals, which, with the ribbing that soars up their inner cheeks to the vault of their upper jaws, they resemble. Viewed from below, their long-snouted, bulging heads look like shadowy onion domes; from above, their smooth heads are bordered with five gills, like flying buttresses, lined with baleen filters. In immense tranquility they swim, gripped by mighty, unending yawns, perhaps sleeping in motion, for they are very simple: they cannot pump water across their gills and must swim to keep breathing; they lack swim bladders too. They make do with little. They swim into a human imagination like the swelling unison and subsidence of monastic chants, and the devotions of silence.

These inoffensive creatures were officially declared a nuisance, and fished aggressively, by the United States and Canada from 1945 till 1970, but are now protected by several nations.

The Beanie Shark is not protected, though. It suffers from ocean acidification, the result of excess carbon dioxide, as everyone knows. I try not to blame my elected representatives for ignoring my e-mails about this, from my technical-with-bibliographies-attached ones, to my pithy-screaming-caps ones, to my most recent ones headed $&SX4U. I understand that my government is composed of real people, ordinary, real Americans, just like me—as they always insist on TV—so how can they, in their
echt
similarity to me, be expected to solve the very problems I cannot? Anyway!

The oceans are turning acidic, and because of it, creatures who make shells out of calcium carbonate are failing to make shells. Corals that once towered from the ocean floor like titanic conglomerations of rainbows are now dead and bleached. If the imperial corals succumb, what becomes of the humble Cap limpet?

The Cap, about the size of a steering wheel, sits atop the Beanie Shark's enormous head. When the shark rolls over or dives, the Cap stays on, and the monumental fish resembles a member of an old-fashioned lodge with funny headgear. The Cap is anchored by filaments of its digestive tract, which follow grooves in the shark's head leading to its mouth, where they skim off some of the captured plankton. It's an easy berth for the Cap, siphoning its meals from the Beanie Shark's mouth. Yet this limpet is no mere parasite. It helps its giant companion by performing two special tricks.

When plankton blooms run thin, the Cap performs the propeller trick. Attached in an upside-down position, it opens its lid and sticks its foot up in the water. The foot unfolds into four paddlelike limbs, called
parapodia
, that beat the water, creating a whirlpool to trap plankton and lead them toward the shark. Many gastropods that live in the sea have such parapodia: the sea butterfly's foot divides into two pretty, flapping lobes; the sea angel's parapodia look like rosy wings. While the Cap's propeller trick is within the norms of gastropod creativity, its second trick, the bubble wand, is more remarkable. For
this trick, the Cap also opens its lid and sticks up its foot, but instead of paddles, it ejects a long string of spherical sacs, made of thin mucus membranes, which puff up into clusters of bubbles. These assist the Beanie Shark in maintaining buoyancy as it swims, though I am not sure what trigger causes the limpet to blow bubbles. Mollusks have their little ways, as any pearl farmer will tell you. One way or another, the Beanie, a simple basking shark with no refinements of its own, knows that when pickings are slim, its symbiont will lend a helping foot.

The Cap has not gone unnoticed by humanity. It washes up on land, from time to time, so I am not surprised that Haeckel drew it—though he called it a “barnacle,” and drew dots and paisleys all over it, giving it the dandified appearance of a propeller beanie worn by Oscar Wilde.

I
F WE EVER HAD A CHANCE
to understand this intriguing pair, the visible limpet and the invisible shark, it is passing with the acidification of the oceans: the Caps are dying, unable to form their calcite shells. For tens of millions of years, this symbiont has tweaked the Beanie's genes, in embryo, ensuring that the shark will develop the limpet's comfortable seat on its head. The exact nature of that process will likely remain a mystery. At a wild guess, it may be connected to the malfunction of the female basking shark's left ovary. Possibly, the Cap influences the growth
of all basking sharks, but is only successful with the invisible kind. How can we know, how can we ever understand, when these deft symbionts are cruelly dissolved by the very water that used to nurture their whirling paddles, and their enigmatic, joyous bubbles?

As for the Beanies, well, sharks have been around for a long time and nothing much fazes them. I suppose the Beanies could evolve into a race of invisible basking sharks with slightly deformed heads, and slightly fewer advantages. Yet it's hard to believe that they will not in some fishy sense pine for their loss, when the plankton blooms run thin, or when they're tired and heavy on their fins. Habits favored and selected for, for millions of years, can hardly be shed in a few seasons.

I'm tempted to describe the post-limpet Beanies as lost souls, since they're invisible and have such a spiritual lifestyle. And because they're detached from the visible bodies of their Caps. But that comparison would miss the point. After years of studying invisible animals, I believe that there is no spiritual aspect of our life that is not, simultaneously, animal. And animality is symbiosis. Our bodies are “integrated colonies” of cells, says a renowned biologist; and beyond the mergers of lone cells into animal bodies are the partnerships between animals—the goby cohabiting with a blind shrimp that it assists, the wrasses cleaning parasites from a grouper's jaws. There are the mutual aid societies of all animals with their gut flora. And beyond animality lies the plant kingdom on
which animals depend for food, the kingdom of photosynthesis, which itself sprang from an ancient partnering of blue-green cyanobacteria and eukaryotic cells . . . The blooming gardens of earth and sea depend on symbiosis, the sharing-out of life's problems among many kinds of beings and their abilities.
^*

So if our bodies have invisible parts—call them souls—they would surely be animals. They would be the symbionts of a creature who sometimes claims to be the image of God, and in embryo resembles nothing so much as a shark.

*
    
“Human beings are integrated colonies of ameboid beings.” In
What Is Life?
by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 141.

5

T
he present, or Holocene, mass extinction is not the only one in life's history. It is the only one caused by a single organism capable of seeing the big picture, understanding its own destructive role, and changing that. But we don't see the big picture unless it's shown to us. Once, I had a moment of fortunate epiphany—a moment granted sometimes to naturalists—when the big picture comes overwhelmingly together, and you actually see the meaning of Lynn Margulis's apothegm: “Life is its own inimitable history.” If I saw the big picture, though, it wasn't accidental: it was because I had to make a choice
.

The Golden Egg

T
HE DAY COMES WHEN
I walk home through a waist-high meadow of panic grass, goldenrod, and lace saucers of wild carrot, and I see, as if I had startled it into being, a plane of green glittering moving leftward like a perturbed school of fish in the clearest of waters. I walk where those newly falling leaves drift by, and have to make up my mind whether a russet flutter in the grass is a monarch butterfly or a dead leaf—the last of its season, or the first? I've been visiting with my neighbor, a farmer, who has found a nest of dead, half-formed bluebirds inside shells so thin they burst at a touch. She's wondering what caused it—no pesticide she's aware of, but who knows, these days, what gets in the water? We both have wells. I've promised to check my birdhouses . . . but instead, lazily, I'm climbing down the side of the quarry, gray and cracked as shelves of unfired clay, lichen-rusted, blackened where my sunken pond has burned it with life. Sand curves between the rockface and a peeling carpet of water lilies. A little mite is headed up and down the edges of a lily's petals, so burning
white they're gray where a candle flame is blue. Hoof-prints in the mud show where a doe and her spotted fawn have stood, immersed to their hocks, chewing salad; dried lily stems litter the beach. In the water, my head is a brown shadow through which glide the grim torpedo shapes of the pond's top predators, the bass. Poison? When I look up, a crevice in the rock winks, an amber wink, and there is the Golden Egg, never seen before, yet recognizable as nothing else. Many animals live and have lived at my home address, but this one has no peer. In a waxy, ochre body the size of a lychee nut, it holds what the human race craves: riches and longevity.

The—my—Golden Egg is tightly wedged into its crack; I see where the rockwall flaked, a pale scab, to reveal its tawny inhabitant, which has likely sat there since the glacier melted. Should I pluck it out? Should I go get a screwdriver and pry it out? My hand reaches, unsure of its next move; knowing as much as anyone does about Golden Eggs, I'd guess this one needs help. But against the limestone sunned to pumice-gray, my raised hand reminds me of those red handprints in the most primitive cave paintings. I don't know much, do I? All around, crickets, katydids, and nameless summer bugs are raising a song like the spinning of bicycle chains, louder and louder. It feels as though the deep past is revolving over the face of the pond, a dazzling wheel, on which tiny images of creatures appear and disappear, bringing together a minute Golden Egg and a miniscule human hand for a fraction
of a sliver of a second. My spine hairs rise in the breeze; in a moment, the wheel will have turned. I will have done good or ill. In the meantime, it's a story wheel.