Lost Woods (16 page)

To understand, then, how the adults come to live where they do, we must return to a study of those very early stages in the life of each member of the species, when clouds of young – the potential founders of new colonies – are launched into the sea with each spawning of the adults. Most of these larvae spend the early days – or, it may be, weeks – in the drifting community of the plankton, in the midst of diatoms, dinoflagellates, and other microscopic plants; in the company of minute crustaceans, worms, pteropods, and other permanent members of the plankton; and of hosts of other larvae, that, like themselves, are only temporary drifters and swimmers in the upper layers of the sea. Some of the larvae feed on the plant plankton, some on other larvae. Many are eaten by other members of the animal plankton, or are destroyed by cold or storms. Almost all are delicate, transparent, and minute, fragile as blown glass. Produced in astronomical numbers, they are destroyed with almost equal prodigality; seemingly the larvae are a tenuous link on which to base the security of the chain of existence.

But the larvae are not entirely without resources of their own, as we are discovering now from the work of Wilson and a few others. It seems that they have a fair amount of control over their own destinies, especially in that critical moment of life when they assume the form of the adult. Our early conception of this metamorphosis of the larva has been shown to be false for so many forms that there is some reason to believe we have been generally in error. We used to believe that this drastic change of form, from the larval to the adult stage, occurred at a certain moment in the life of the larva; and that it occurred at this moment whether or not the larva was at that time in surroundings suitable for taking up the adult existence. From these beliefs it would follow that a very large percentage of larvae would be lost because of being on unfavorable ground when the moment of metamorphosis arrived. However, thanks largely to the work of Wilson, we now have a new conception of this crisis in the life of the larva. In many forms, at least, we know that the larva has the ability to recognize the sands or muds of the type inhabited by its parents, that it may test out one area after another and may postpone its own metamorphosis for a considerable period of time, changing to the adult form only when a suitable substratum is found. A few sentences from one of Wilson’s reports, on the tube-building polychaete,
Owenia fusiformis
, make this clear:

When a month old it can change suddenly, in a few seconds, from an object of elegance and beauty into an ugly little worm [ … ] busily engaged in swallowing the remains of its [ … ] larval organs. But, and this is the point, it will rarely do so successfully unless it be provided with sand of a suitable sort. [ … ] There is a period of about a week at any time during which it will metamorphose in contact with the sand in which the adult lives. The quick reaction to contact with such sand is strongly reminiscent of a chemical experiment; to a clean dish containing swimming larvae, sand is added, and almost at once there is a precipitate of worms.

From Wilson’s experiments on this and other forms, we may visualize what happens when such a larva is ready for the choice of its adult home. Through its changing reactions to light it has perhaps already turned away from the surface waters and lives within the currents of water that flow over the sea bottom. Now and then it may drop down to the underlying bottom and enter the sand. But if the sand is found to be unsuitable – if it lacks the sought-for qualities – the larva emerges from it and enters again the slow drift of the currents, allowing itself to be carried on to new areas where, perchance, it will find that which it requires. When it does, the response is immediate; the larva settles down, and metamorphosis proceeds.

In learning this much, science has taken a long step forward. There are still many questions that recur. What is the link between the delicate larva and its specialized physical environment? To what quality in the environment does it respond? What is the external stimulus that sets in motion those processes within the larva, transforming and remolding its tissues into the likeness of the adult?

One by one, these questions are being posed in the form [of] imaginatively contrived experiments. Wilson at first tested the possibility that the larvae react to sand grains of a certain size and shape. He concluded that although the grade of sand has some influence, it is not decisive. Then he considered whether a substance, possibly of organic nature, might be given off into the water by the native-type sands, attracting the larvae toward it. But it soon became clear that the larvae do not react, either negatively or positively, until they come into contact with the sand. In his most recently reported work, Wilson favors the theory that some organic material present on the surface of the sand grains causes them to attract or to repel the larvae. Further work along these lines is being done. In the meantime, it is established beyond question that some – perhaps most – species of marine bottom invertebrates have an inherited ability to recognize their own habitat when, as larvae, they first come into contact with it.

This fascinating subject is related to another that is in the forefront of biological thinking today. This is the subject of the so-called “ectocrines” – the products of metabolism that are liberated into the sea water by marine organisms. As yet no conceptions and no conclusions in this field are final; the subject lies on the misty borderlands of advancing knowledge. And yet almost everything that in the past we have taken for granted, or labeled as [an] insoluble problem, bears renewed thinking about in the light of what we know, or what we think is probable, about these substances of far-reaching effect.

In the sea there are mysterious comings and goings, both in space and time: the movements of migratory species, the strange phenomenon of succession by which, in one and the same area, one species appears in profusion, flourishes for a time, and then dies out, only to have its place taken by another and then another, like actors in a pageant passing before our eyes. And there are other mysteries. The phenomenon of “red tides” has been known from early days, recurring again and again down to the present time – a phenomenon in which the sea becomes discolored because of the extraordinary multiplication of some minute form, often a dinoflagellate, and in which there are disastrous side effects in the shape of mass mortalities among fish and some of the invertebrates. Then there is the problem of curious and seemingly erratic movements of fish, into or away from certain areas, often with sharp economic consequences. When the so-called “Atlantic water” floods the south coast of England, herring become abundant within the range of the Plymouth fisheries, certain characteristic plankton animals occur in profusion, and certain species of invertebrates flourish in the intertidal zone. When, however, this water mass is replaced by Channel water, the cast of characters undergoes many changes.

In these and other phenomena, the question recurs, and, unanswered, recurs again: Why? Here and there we perceive the first faint glimmerings of what may be the truth.

It appears that some, at least, of these things may in some measure be explained as the effects of substances present in the sea water – substances produced by one kind of organism as a by-product of its own metabolism, but exerting a powerful influence on another. A somewhat analogous and better known effect is that of antibiotic substances on bacteria. Apparently the ectocrines of the sea may be either harmful or beneficial in their effects. Of this much, however, science now seems certain: The nature of any mass of water, and its possible influence for good or ill upon the creatures it surrounds, are strongly influenced by the metabolism of those forms that, at an earlier point in time, lived within this same water.

It is interesting to trace the growth of an idea – a voice here, another there, and finally someone begins to put it all together, invents a terminology, and a new field of research is recognized. Probably it is only within the past decade that there has been much talk among biologists about external metabolites or ectocrines; yet this, also, seems to be one of the new-old subjects, for we can identify its embryonic beginnings in the literature of at least 70 years ago. In 1885 Pearcey reported in a Scottish journal his observation that herring are scarce in waters inhabited by certain diatoms, and that animal plankton also are scarce in such waters. About a quarter of a century ago, Johnstone, Scott, and Chadwick expressed their opinion that plankton communities influence each other, and that “there are what we may call group symbioses on the great scale, so that the kind of plankton which we may expect to be present in a certain sea area must depend, to some extent, on the kind of plankton that was previously present.” Early in the thirties, Allee [W. C. Allee, animal ecologist at Woods Hole] made the significant statement that “aggregations of aquatic organisms condition the medium surrounding them by the addition of secretions and excreations, the nature of which forms one of the important problems of mass physiology.”

While the existence of such organic substances in the sea now is generally recognized, there is little direct evidence as to their chemical nature or their precise role in the life processes of marine animals. Certain lines of investigation lead us back to the inshore waters and to the attached marine algae that grow in the coastal zone. These may be a source of very important ectocrines. If the possibilities now dimly foreseen are confirmed, these substances produced in coastal waters may act as catalytic agents to set off whole cycles of life in the sea. These waters are the habitat of the brown meadows of rockweeds, the dusky forests of the kelps, and the more fragile algae of pale green hue and delicate texture. These attached plants can live only as deep as light can penetrate and so are excluded from most of the open ocean.

In recent reports from the Goteborg Laboratory in Sweden we find that where the rockweeds
Fucus
and
Ascophyllum
are growing, the water acquires a property that stimulates the growth of the sea lettuce,
Ulva
, and also of
Enteromorpha.
From other work we know that the sea lettuce itself produces a substance that apparently is needed for the growth of certain diatoms in artificial media.

This is a plant-to-plant relation, but the ectocrines of the algae seem also to be concerned in an animal-plant relationship. In Japan, Miyazaki found that he could stimulate the spawning of oysters with a substance extracted from sea lettuce. This leads to a fascinating field of speculation. If indeed it is confirmed that ectocrines released into the sea by coastal vegetation induce both the flowering of the diatoms and the spawning of certain marine animals, a very neatly fitting chain of circumstances would result. The larval stages of many invertebrates, including oysters, feed on diatoms. The eggs of most lamellibranchs develop into free-swimming plantonic larvae within a few days, so that one and the same stimulus could produce the young animals and the plants that will serve as their food.

A link between plant metabolites and animal reproduction is suggested by other observations. Rapidly maturing herring concentrate around the edges of patches of plant plankton, although the fully adult herring may avoid them. It has been suggested that “water-borne metabolites” influence the change of sex that regularly occurs in the mollusk
Crepidula.
The spawning adults, eggs, and young of some animals have been reported by Wimpenny [R. S. Wimpenny, a plankton expert] to occur more often in dense phytoplankton than in sparse patches. Others associate spawning of the copepod
Calanus
with dense phytoplankton. Recent research in the physiology of plant pigments seems significant in this connection, suggesting that the carotenoid pigments have a definite effect on sex and reproduction of animals.

So, even in the waters of the sea, we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself. The water is altered, in its chemical nature and in its capacity for inducing metabolic change, by the fact that certain organisms have lived within it and by so doing have transmitted to it new properties with powerful and far-reaching effects. This is a field for imaginative and creative studies of the highest order, for in it we are brought face to face with one of the great mysteries of the sea.

19

[1954]

The Real World Around Us

THE SORORITY OF WOMEN JOURNALISTS,
Theta Sigma Phi, invited Carson to speak about her experiences as a woman writer at its annual dinner in Columbus, Ohio, in the spring of 1954. With an audience of nearly a thousand women, Carson barely touched on the subject of her new book
, The Edge of the Sea.
Instead she spoke more autobiographically than she had ever dared before.

In the first part of her talk, Carson reflects on how she came to write about the sea, and her experiences sailing on it as a member of the crew of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife research vessel. The heart of her remarks, however, are devoted to her ideas about the meaning of life, particularly the crucial role natural beauty plays in the spiritual development of an individual or a society.

The audience, moved by the depth of Carson’s concern and obvious passion, gave her an enthusiastic ovation, many women reaching out to press her hand as she left the hall. Although Carson never gave another speech of quite the same warmth and candor, its reception encouraged her to adopt a more personal style.

[ … ]
I CAN REMEMBER NO TIME,
even in earliest childhood, when I didn’t assume I was going to be a writer. I have no idea why. There were no writers in the family. I read a great deal almost from infancy, and I suppose I must have realized someone wrote the books, and thought it would be fun to make up stories, too.

Also, I can remember no time when I wasn’t interested in the out-of-doors and the whole world of nature. Those interests, I know, I inherited from my mother and have always shared with her. I was rather a solitary child and spent a great deal of time in woods and beside streams, learning the birds and the insects and flowers.

There is another thing about my childhood that is interesting now, in the light of later happenings. I might have said, with Emily Dickinson:

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet know I how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

For I never saw the ocean until I went from college to the marine laboratories at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. Yet as a child I was fascinated by the thought of it. I dreamed about it and wondered what it would look like. I loved Swinburne and Masefield and all the other great sea poets.

I had my first prolonged contact with the sea at Woods Hole. I never tired of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole – that wonderful place of whirlpools and eddies and swiftly racing water. I loved to watch the waves breaking at Nobska Point after a storm. At Woods Hole, too, as a young biologist, I first discovered the rich scientific literature of the sea. But it is fair to say that my first impressions of the ocean were sensory and emotional, and that the intellectual response came leter.

Before that meeting with the sea had been accomplished, however, I had a great decision to make. At least, I thought I had. I told you that I had always planned to be a writer; when I went to college, I thought the way to accomplish that was to major in English composition. Up to that time, despite my love for the world of nature, I’d had no training in biology. As a college sophomore, I was exposed to a fine introductory course in biology, and my allegiance began to waver. Perhaps I wanted to be a scientist. A year later the decision for science was made; the writing courses were abandoned. I had given up writing forever, I thought. It never occurred to me that I was merely getting something to write about. What surprises me now is that apparently it didn’t occur to any of my advisors, either.

The merging of the two careers didn’t begin until several years after I had left Johns Hopkins, where I had gone to do graduate work in zoology. Those were depression and post-depression years, and after a period of part-time teaching jobs, I supplemented them with another part-time assignment. The Bureau of Fisheries in Washington had undertaken to do a series of radio broadcasts. They were looking for someone to take over writing the scripts – someone who knew marine biology and who also could write. I happened in one morning when the chief of the biology division was feeling rather desperate – I think at that point he was having to write the scripts himself. He talked to me a few minutes and then said: “I’ve never seen a written word of yours, but I’m going to take a sporting chance.”

That little job, which eventually led to a permanent appointment as a biologist, was in its way a turning point. One week I was told to produce something of a general sort about the sea. I set to work, but somehow the material rather took charge of the situation and turned into something that was, perhaps, unusual as a broadcast for the Commissioner of Fisheries. My chief read it and handed it back with a twinkle in his eye. “I don’t think it will do,” he said. “Better try again. But send this one to the
Atlantic.
” Eventually I did, and the
Atlantic
accepted it. Since then I have told my chief of those days that he was really my first literary agent.

From those four
Atlantic
pages, titled “Undersea,” everything else followed. Quincy Howe, then editor for Simon and Schuster, wrote to ask why I didn’t do a book. So did Hendrik Willem van Loon. My mail had never contained anything so exciting as his first letter. It arrived in an envelope splashed with the green waves of a sea through which van Loon sharks and whales were poking inquiring snouts.

That was only the beginning of a wonderful correspondence, for it seemed Hendrik van Loon had always wanted to know what lay undersea, and he was determined I should tell the world in a book or books. His typing was amazing but his handwritten letters were almost illegible. Often he substituted a picture for a word, and that helped. After a few weeks of such correspondence, I spent a few days with the van Loons in their Connecticut home, during which I was properly introduced to my future publisher.

To a young and very tentative writer, it was a stimulating and wonderful thing to have the interest of this great man, so overwhelming in his person and his personality, but whose heart was pure gold. Through him, I had glimpses of a world that seemed exciting and fabulous, and I am sure his encouragement had a great deal to do with the fact that my first book,
Under the Sea-Wind
, was eventually published.

When that happened, however, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the world received the event with superb indifference. The reviewers were kind, but that rush to the book store that is the author’s dream never materialized. There was a Braille edition, a German translation, and use of various chapters in anthologies. That was all. I was busy with war work, and when I thought at all about writing, it was in terms of magazine pieces; I doubted that I would ever write another book. But I did, and ten years after
Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us
was published.

The fifteen years that I spent in fishery and wildlife conservation work with the Government have taken me into certain places where few other women have been. Perhaps you would like to hear about some of those.

While I was doing information work for Fish and Wildlife, the Service acquired a research vessel for work at sea, specifically on the famous fishing ground known as Georges Bank, that lies some 200 miles east of Boston and south of Nova Scotia. Some of the valuable commercial fishes are becoming scarce on the Bank, and the Service is trying to find the reason. The
Albatross III
, as this converted fishing trawler was called, operated out of Woods Hole, making repeated trips to Georges. She was making a census of the fish population; this was done by fishing according to a systematic plan over a selected series of stations. Of course, various scientific data on water temperatures and other matters were collected, too.

It was decided finally – and I might have had something to do with originating the idea – that perhaps I could do a better job of handling publications about the
Albatross
if I had been out on her. But there was one great obstacle. No woman had ever been on the
Albatross.
Tradition is important in the Government, but fortunately I had conspirators who were willing to help me shatter precedent. But among my male colleagues who had to sign the papers, the thought of one woman on a ship with some fifty men was unthinkable. After much soul searching, it was decided that maybe
two
women would be all right, so I arranged with a friend, who was also a writer, to go with me. Marie [Rodell] thought she would write a piece about her experiences, and declared that her title would be: “I Was a Chaperone on a Fishing Boat.”

And so one July day we sailed from Woods Hole into ten days of unusual adventure. This is not the place to tell about the scientific work that was done – but there was a lighter side, especially for us who were mere observers, and there were unforgettable impressions of fishing scenes; of fog on Georges, where the cold water and the warm air from the Gulf Stream are perpetually at war at that season of the year; and of the unutterable loneliness of the sea at night as seen from a small vessel.

As to the lighter side – a fishing trawler is not exactly a luxury liner, and both of us were on our mettle to prove that a woman could take it without complaining. Hardly had the coast of Massachusetts disappeared astern when some of the ship’s officers began to give us a vivid picture of life aboard. The
Albatross
, they told us, was a very long and narrow ship and rolled like a canoe in a sea, so that everyone got violently seasick. They described some of the unpleasant accidents that sometimes occur in handling the heavy gear. They told us about the bad food. They made sure we understood that the fishing process went on night and day, and that it was very noisy.

Well – not all the things those Job’s comforters predicted came true, but a great many of them did. However, we learned in those ten days that one gets used to almost anything.

We learned about the fishing the very first night. After steaming out through Nantucket Channel late in the afternoon, we were to reach our first fishing station about midnight. Marie and I had gone to bed and were sound asleep when we heard a crash, presumably against the very wall of our cabin, that brought us both upright in our bunks. Surely we had been rammed by another vessel. Then a series of the most appalling bangs, clunks, and rumbles began directly over our heads, a rhythmic thundering of machinery that would put any boiler factory to shame. Finally it dawned upon us that this was fishing! It also dawned on us that this was what we had to endure for the next ten nights. If there had been any way to get off the
Albatross
then I’m sure we would have taken it.