Plankton can assume the strangest forms. If you looked at photographs taken with an electron microscope, you would hardly believe your eyes. The plankton may look like snow crystals, moon landers, organ pipes, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, communication satellites, fireworks, images from a kaleidoscope, toothbrushes, empty grocery baskets, open waffle irons, wineglasses with ice cubes floating inside, champagne glasses lined with leopard skins, Grecian urns, Etruscan sculptures, bicycle racks, long-handled landing nets, carburetors, feathers, flowers, slime balls with apples inside, Bluetooth headphones, disco balls, melting church bells that are also transparent, flying carpets, lion’s teeth, fishing nets, top hats, vacuum cleaners, spermatozoa, brains, and fountain pens. Plankton can take the shape of almost anything that exists in the world, as well as so many unfamiliar forms that you could build a whole other world. Millions of these microorganisms can live in a bucket of clear, clean salt water—including a large number of flagellates, chalk-forming plankton covered with plates called coccoliths.
A billion years ago, choanoflagellates formed colonies and were possibly the origin of the first multicelled organisms.2 In that case, they are the ancestors of everything alive today. All of our ancestors by definition managed to propagate in one continuous chain over billions of years, ever since life arose in the sea. This may sound improbable, but that’s how it is. We just don’t usually view things from this perspective. And why should we?
Evolution is blind and runs like a river through time. It cares nothing for the losers that disappear along the way.
—
The sea has many colors. But what is the sound of the sea itself? Waves that trickle over a beach or pound against the cliffs and rocks of the weather-beaten coasts? Yes, that’s what the ocean sounds like from land. Underwater it’s a different story. There the sea has a unique sound, a deep humming that emanates from itself—the moaning of the Behemoths in heat.
For decades, people all over the world have discussed this sound, which only some can hear. It has been described as a diesel engine heard from a long distance; a trembling, low-frequency tone. Some people, even sensible Welshmen, have actually claimed the sound can cause nosebleeds, headaches, and insomnia. Many have tried to explain the phenomenon, theorizing it might be caused by everything from telephone poles, cables, submarines, communication equipment, tinnitus, and mating fish to UFOs. So many perfectly clear-headed people have insisted they can hear the sound that research has been done about it. Now French scientists at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique think they may have found the answer.3 Long sea swells create microscopic activity on the seafloor. Under certain conditions, long, heavy waves cause the ground to tremble, and the vibrations create deep sound waves, which certain people can hear loud and clear.
—
By the time the ferry arrives at Skrova from Bodø, it’s late at night, as usual. But after the darkness of winter the light has made a strong comeback, and for the next two months the sun will hardly set over Aasjord Station. The fall and winter turned out to be rather problematic seasons for two men hunting for a Greenland shark in a small boat. Now, in our fourth season, we’re determined to succeed.
As usual, Hugo has made good use of his time. He has done a lot of work on the Red House and installed two bathrooms in the main buildings, to be used for future events held there. He and Mette have also brought over their two Shetland ponies, Luna and Veslegloppa, from Steigen. Now the horses are grazing in a small green valley, several hundred yards in the direction of Hattvika. Hugo is going to clear out the premises of the cod-liver-oil mill, which is now filled with old oak barrels at the back of Aasjord Station, so he can turn the space into a stable for the winter. I’ve been wondering why they still keep these ponies, now that the children have moved away from home. But that’s not the way Hugo and Mette think. They would find it strange if I asked them.
Hugo has been out to have a look at the fin whale that washed ashore on the island of Gimsøy. He tosses two whale baleen onto the table. They’re lightweight and look as if they could be made of thin fiberglass. These long, stiff hairs, which hang inside the top of the whale’s mouth, catch krill and plankton when the seawater is filtered out. But the baleen are mere trivialities. Hugo wants to have the whale’s skull. He’s not sure how to make that happen, but he thinks he’ll need a freighter.
—
Upstairs, Hugo shows me several pieces he’s working on, using pencil on acid-free cardboard with glued-on pieces of recycled cotton paper from India. The paper has great texture, creating fine nuances in gray and black. Some recognizable objects are visible in the work, including zeppelins, which also look like floating whales. In another piece, what looks like a Greenland shark is depicted turning around in the water.
Hugo is also working on a painting that has the Steigen menhir, or standing stone, as its theme. The stone was northern Norway’s tallest menhir and had stood on Engeløya, several miles from Mette and Hugo’s house, for fifteen hundred years. Until the day a municipal edge trimmer came along and toppled the stone, breaking its base. Apparently it’s beyond repair, but Hugo thinks it can be fixed.
—
At dinner, which is a small fried halibut that Hugo caught with a pole in Steigen, he shows me a marvel of technological innovation. Mette has presented him with a gift of a deep-sea fishing pole and a powerful Japanese reel with gears. That’s what we’re going to try out now. I’ve brought a vest with belts and straps, the type of equipment that deep-sea fishermen use off Bermuda when they’re going to reel in sailfish and swordfish.
The line we’ve used so far—eleven hundred feet in length—weighs a lot and will only fit inside a deep tub if we carefully coil it up by hand. Now we’re going to attempt to pull up a Greenland shark weighing as much as two thousand pounds, using a line that’s hardly thicker than sewing thread. This is new technology, which supposedly has some of the same characteristics as a spider’s web. That may not sound reassuring. But, trust me, it is.
30
Next morning at the crack of dawn, a thick gray haze has settled over both land and sea. Aasjord Station is wrapped in near total silence. All sounds are muted by the fog, but whatever we do hear grabs our attention with extra clarity. Our sense of hearing becomes as acute as our sense of smell.
The sea looks as if it’s paralyzed beneath the blanket of fog, absorbing not only sounds but also silence. I hear a fan or a generator I haven’t noticed before, the sound coming from somewhere on the other side of the bay.
Three hours later the haze has lifted. Nimbostratus clouds hover in a low gray layer, glowing with a sickly yellow color. The sun will soon break through, so we get everything ready and race across a calm sea, out past the Skrova lighthouse and Flæsa. This time our bait is a real delicacy. Not since the Highland bull have we had anything of such high quality. The bucket of skrei livers from the winter has done its thing. Several gallons of pure oil have now formed on top. Hugo will use the oil to make paint. At the bottom of the bucket is the gleaming, stinking brown sludge called graks. The graks is almost pure fat, and it was this substance that fishermen, including Hugo’s grandfather, used in the olden days when they were hunting Greenland sharks. It has a rank smell, but the stench is more complex than the smell of the Highland bull carcass, which reeked only of death. We fill a paint can with graks. The smell will be our underwater siren song.
Again we’ve triangulated our position, using fixed points on land. We’ve also brought along a GPS, but it has so many settings that neither of us feels entirely confident about using it. Then I toss out the paint can. We’ve punched a lot of holes in the lid, which is fastened only with a rope so the contents will quickly seep out onto the seafloor. And reach the Greenland shark, where it’s waiting.
Is it possible to imagine the shark’s world? To picture what it feels like to be surrounded by water and darkness? The shark hardly notices, since that’s all it knows. Just as we don’t really register the air ar
ound our body; it’s something we take for granted. The dim, cold deep is the shark’s world. Down there it glides around, slowly and soundlessly, like a machine made of muscle. With poison in its blubber, blood, and liver. With lifeless blind eyes from which hang parasites, long larvae that pierce the shark’s eyeballs. All the shark wants is to maintain and continue its own existence. It’s unlikely to feel anything resembling joy or sorrow, maybe not even pain. Each time the shark devours a seal, or buries its snout in the rotting carcass of a whale, it must register some sort of automatic contentment, knowing that its existence is secured for another month or so. And that’s what the shark wants in the world; that’s its mission in life: to keep going until the next meal. The only living creatures the shark has contact with are the ones it eats, aside from the time when the female’s eggs are fertilized—a process that occurs without any recognizable sign of joy or tenderness. The offspring quickly develop big teeth and begin life as cannibalistic predators in the womb, where the strongest one devours its siblings and then enters the world alone.
When the small Greenland sharks are born, they’re able to glimpse a pale gray hue many hundreds of feet above, though they pay little attention to it. Then they start searching for something to eat in the black silence of the lonely cold. The shark does not ask why it happens to exist. All life is programmed with a will to survive. No animal commits suicide, no matter how bleak its Hades-like environs may be.
So that’s the inept attempt of a human being to put himself in the shark’s world. It may seem bleak and hopeless to us, but maybe the Greenland shark hears an entirely different music rushing through its blood vessels. It’s weightless, has no enemies, and floats in a universe to which it has become superbly adapted over tens of millions of years.
No, it’s impossible for us to imagine how it feels for a shark to be in the world.
—
You know the drill. We’ve tossed out the chum bait, but the actual fishing won’t start until the following day.
Hugo switches off the motor, and we let the boat drift. We keep drifting as we chat occasionally, or just sit in silence. The silence is never oppressive for the two of us when we’re together, and maybe that’s as good a definition of friendship as any other.
—
After only half an hour, we’ve drifted so far out that I think I can discern the end of the Lofoten archipelago. Beyond Lofoten Point is the Moskstraumen, the phenomenon whose very name has scared the shit out of seamen for thousands of years. For millennia the place has been viewed as the sea’s navel, the world’s well, the bottomless gullet, or as the entrance to the cosmic void of Ginnungagap in Norse mythology. According to some leading medieval minds, Moskstraumen was the point from which the ocean is sucked in and then spewed out in torrents. Maybe the water pops up somewhere else in the world after having passed through the earth’s underground circuits. Does the earth suck in the sea whenever it’s in need of nourishment? That’s what sharp minds claimed centuries ago. Could that be how the tides were regulated? By the water going in and out of the interior of the earth, from Moskstraumen—the place where all the winds meet and create chaos, or where the currents are so strong that they extinguish the winds?
Olaus Magnus called the Moskstraumen the “Horrenda Caribdis,” which will suck down anything that gets too close, crushing and swallowing ships, people, and animals. The Norwegian cleric and historian Jonas Rasmus (1649–1718), who was a native of Møre, believed that Odysseus himself actually came to Lofoten and encountered the Moskstraumen. Rasmus reported that the most terrifying and thundering waterfall could be heard between the cliffs; the whirlpools were so huge and powerful that any ship happening into them would be dragged to the bottom.4 In 1591, the Danish-born bailiff Erik Hansen Schønnebøl described the Moskstraumen as so turbulent and the roaring so mighty “that the Land and the Earth tremble, the houses shake.” On a map created in Hamburg in 1683, the “Moskoe-Strohm” is depicted as a calamitous area extending hundreds of sea miles. Author Edgar Allan Poe went even further in his story “A Descent into the Maelström,” published in 1841. The story describes how a boat full of local fishermen is sucked down into the whirlpools, which roar louder than Niagara Falls and make the mountains shake.5 Even Captain Nemo’s submarine, the technological wonder called the Nautilus, could not come to grips with “a vortex from which no ship has ever been able to escape,” where the churning vortex sends “not only ships but whales, and even polar bears” down to a certain death.6
31
Since the last time Hugo and I met, I’ve been in touch with one of the world’s foremost Greenland shark researchers, which may not say much, since hardly anyone can really lay claim to that title. His name is Christian Lydersen, and he works at the Norwegian Polar Institute. He has studied various aspects of the life cycle and biology of Greenland sharks. Hugo is interested in hearing what I learned, so I tell him everything I can remember, feeling like a conscientious diplomat delivering a report after a trip to a distant and troubled corner of the world.
Lydersen and the other scientists have done fieldwork off the west coast of Svalbard. After talking to experienced hunters, they set out a line with twenty-eight shark hooks from the research ship Lance. They used ordinary halibut line made of nylon, with wire as the leader, and they baited the hooks with blubber from a bearded seal. The line was lowered into declivities down to a depth of a thousand feet.
On the very first attempt, they had Greenland sharks snagged on every third hook. Soon they had caught forty-five sharks, more than they needed to find out what they wanted to know about the effects of diet, genetics, and pollution. Some of the sharks that were pulled up had only the head remaining. While they had hung defenseless on the line, their fellow sharks had eaten their entire body. In the stomachs of those that were still intact when they were hauled on board the ship, the scientists found ring seal, bearded seal, hooded seal, and the remains of minke whales, as well as cod, wolffish, haddock, and other types of fish. The Greenland sharks had swallowed whole cod weighing more than eight pounds, along with wolffish that weighed twice that.
It’s out of the question that Greenland sharks are able to kill whales, but Lydersen found the answer to where the minke whale blubber had come from. Genetic samples are taken from every minke whale caught by a Norwegian boat. There’s no market for the blubber, so it’s tossed overboard. And guess who gorges on the stuff on the seafloor?
So how does the Greenland shark catch seals? Lydersen and his colleagues discovered the answer to something Hugo already knew. The seal flesh couldn’t be merely carrion, because far too much of the seals have ended up in the sharks’ bellies. The seals must have been taken alive. But how? The scientists fastened sensors to some of the sharks and then released them. The measurements revealed that the sharks actually swim slower than seals and all other fish. There was nothing to indicate that they have the capacity to propel themselves in small, brief lurches. So they couldn’t possibly catch species that are much faster simply by using ordinary hunting techniques. The answer lies in the fact that ring seals, harbor seals, bearded seals, and hooded seals are highly evolved mammals. This gives them many advantages, but also one major weakness: they sleep much like we do, slumbering deeply, with their eyes closed, and with both hemispheres of their brain shut down (so-called bilateral symmetrical sleep).7 The seals lie on the seafloor, dreaming—maybe about shoals of fish, about mating and playing, about relatives, or…Well, it would be interesting to know exactly what seals do dream about. Those that sleep on top of the ice or on the surface of the water can sink into such deep REM sleep that you can almost pull up alongside them in a motorboat before they react. On the ice, polar bears are a constant threat. Maybe the seals feel safer on the seafloor, where they may sleep more lightly or for briefer periods. But not even there are they safe. A dark, cigar-shaped shadow glides slowly and silently along the bottom in search of food. Patiently and deliberately, with its ampullae like a sort of electromagnetic rada
r able to detect life. A sleeping seal must be easy prey.
The Greenland shark takes its time, attacking with its double rows of saw-edged teeth. By the time the seal abruptly awakens, it is already locked into the shark’s stinking jaw and about to be gnawed to death. Maybe the seal is paralyzed by shock and terror, having been yanked out of its dream world to experience this last, brief nightmare of its life. That makes me think of something the German filmmaker Werner Herzog once wrote: “Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”8
“Holy shit,” says Hugo, adding that you’d have to be pretty depressed to think of the ocean that way.
“But how do Greenland sharks catch fish?” I ask rhetorically.
By attaching advanced transmitters to the Greenland sharks, Lydersen and his colleagues learned a lot about their wanderings. The transmitters were attached in the western Svalbard area and were programmed to fall off after a maximum of two hundred days. Some showed up near Greenland, others in Russian waters in the south Barents Sea. Many were never found, presumably because the sharks who had them on their backs were under the ice when the transmitters came off. One shark had wandered six hundred miles in fifty-nine days—a surprising distance considering how slowly the Greenland shark swims. They stayed largely in relatively shallow water, between 150 and 650 feet deep. But one shark went as deep as the instruments were capable of measuring, which was 5,118 feet. And it probably went even deeper. Lydersen and the other scientists also discovered that some sharks may move between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific via the Bering Strait.
Shark Drunk Page 19