by Sharona Muir
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.
IF 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
The 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 accident
al: it was because I had to make a choice.
The Golden Egg
THE 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.
The story begins at my home address.
A SHINING, FOUR-FOOT-DEEP ocean, mighty and pretty as Venus, lies across the continent. Corals flower in the place of cities, and all creatures live and die in sunbeams dusted with tiny crustaceans. The Golden Egg is flat, drifting along like scum on a pot of boiled beans. It isn’t much; with ambition, it might have been a sponge. But when a trilobite nibbles its edges, our drifter becomes a revolutionary—it rolls into a ball and spins away, sending ripples of frustration through the trim, fringed chitin of its foe. Now that they’re aware of each other, nothing is the same, and all the rest follows, all those irreversible changes that go forward on hunger and a touch (whatever it means, to whomever it is happening) within the balance of life; the changes that will make the Golden Egg the most fortunate of animals. Starting with a major extinction. The first land plant, inching up on its rootlet, dropping its seed, forms forests thirty meters deep whose roots, cracking rock, swell streams with minerals, the first fertilizers—until algae smothers the seas, and the surf falling on all shores is a pounding dirge for three quarters of marine species. That is the price of seeds. The trilobites are diminished; in their absence the Golden Egg dares to assume its present size, bobbling along more heartily, eating more, being eaten less . . . never to lie flat again, it becomes, like everything, the shape of a relationship. One that’s just getting started.
Meanwhile, our ancestors are beginning to make the meeting of a human hand and a Golden Egg possible, as six-foot dragonflies skim the scaled trees snaking up, from roots bedizened with mussels, into the torrential fronds of future coal reserves. Through the shrubbery troop our forebears, four-footed beasts who squat and dig like mad. If your ear was laid to that fat soil, you’d hear the champagne-cork popping of plopping eggs, the rubbery shot with which animals are conquering the land. The price of eggs will be paid in about 290 million years, with another major extinction—look around you! . . . But I digress.
In the saw-blade shade of dripping cycads, the Golden Egg makes progress too. It is still life’s simpleton, a mere sphere. Only now its soft skin contains a stony bubble, made by the bacteria that mineralize its wastes. Wrapped around its digested and crystallized experience, it has a tougher style, but must face, very soon, the contradictions lurking in self-containment. Meanwhile the earth, too, becomes hard-hearted. From her equator to her poles sprawls the super-continent, Pangea, with its overheated interior, dynastic droughts, burled deserts, and gravel gorges where half-ton creatures trudge along and wave their creaking dorsal sails. Our friend the Golden Egg sometimes gets carted around in a gizzard, waiting to be cracked—an extreme approach to the problem it has now, of being as hard, inside, as firebrick. When it feels sexy, it fertilizes its inner cavity (don’t ask) and a second Golden Egg begins forming. But until the parent membrane can be shed, its shell cracked, and its young freed, the two concentric beings suffer in limbo, unable to bring new out of old, rebirth out of fulfillment. A breakthrough is needed, so be grateful for genius in the world!
They have class—trilobites do. They are a class. An evolutionary elite, from the get-go they never resembled any other creature except their supremely successful selves, beginning as shiny ovals that curl up with a perfectly interlocking fringe. On this they riff. Barbed, smooth, blind, bugeyed, with legs like running mascara, with heads like scimitars, without heads. They go planktonic and float and have Zen; they go big as your arm and whack the hell out of their prey; and through it all, they lust after, cannot stay away from, cannot stop chasing the Golden Egg. Why does the genus Walliserops evolve a vicious trident atop its head? “For male display,” suggests a source, but I’m not so sure. Those tridents are Egg forks, the cutlery of the cultist, the maven, the devotee for whom a delicacy holds the very flavor of life. Against the Golden Egg’s slippery toughness, the trilobites surpass themselves: gnawing off the outer skin, they let the hard shell turn brittle and crack, and its inner progeny escape. Without their bravura gusto, the Egg has no future; without its toothsome sphere, the trilobites lack temptation. They’re made for each other!
But as these things happen, everything changes for the worst.
It cascades like the evil plot that it isn’t. Volcanoes spewing lava across Siberia are not foreknown as their basalt cools into black cobbles, the Via Appia of death. Dust clouds are not designed, nor acid rains that foam and pit whatever they touch. When the globe heats up, and methane steams from the seabed, heating the globe even more, and the seas suffocate (again) till the only survivors are sulphur-eating bacteria, so the biosphere can almost be smelled from space—a huge, blue, putrid egg holding a dying 99 percent of species (and for each, there is a last animal who wanders, calling and calling, and lies down by a bank of turf that, for all its strength to rise, may as well be on the moon)—well! None of that is ordained. Nothing can be concluded except the fact that changing the global climate leads to extinction as night speaks unto night.
Yes, I think of Penelope reweaving her web. But there is no going back to zero, there is no going back, period, even reverses and repetitions are forward momentum, life’s rhythm of and-because-and-because, the purest form of history.
And the trilobites, with three hundred million years of heritage, ten orders, one hundred and fifty families, five thousand genera, and twenty thousand species—have perished to the last
mouthpart. Prolific even in death, their species are still multiplying in the fossil record, being counted and classified by a strange beast with a skimpy past and uncertain future. The last trilobites are modest, shrunken, like the prints of fingertips. Requiescant.
Now the Golden Egg endures a time of supreme trial. It teeters, figuratively, on the narrow, wind-scooped ledge of evolution’s dead end. Its numbers plunge. How not, when instead of trilobites that gnawed just so, it has to rely on molar-wielding masticators to spit out its pitlike young, and on constipated sharks? At first, the Golden Egg does what most desperate organisms do: what it used to do. It adjusts the hardness of shells, the action of vents; it courts luck with better conditions for what used to work. With predictable failure. But in time, a mystery flowers: the Golden Egg finds its truth, a truth as unique and necessary as its fair foe, sweet scourge, and dearest dread, the lost trilobites. And not a moment too soon.