Ian Smith Crowell English 11 4/26/19 Deep The biggest living thing by mass on Earth today (and quite possibly ever) is the Blue whale. They can grow to 100 feet long, and weigh 200 tons. And just like everything else, they die. What happens to this massive creature’s body after its existence has ended? It floats at first, as most of its body mass is low density blubber. Low density, but high calorie. Soon after it dies, it will attract sharks from miles around. They will eat enough of the blubber until the whale sinks, at least in open ocean, deep enough that the sharks can no longer stand the pressure. But of course there is always someone who can. Hagfish and sixgill sharks will eat the rest of the whale carcass, picking the bones clean over weeks or months. Finally, worms of the genus osedax will eat the marrow inside those bones, and all that’s left of the whale will be calcium based dust. Now imagine the Titanic, or the Lusitania, or whatever oceanic disaster seems most tragic to you. In terms of our composition, humans are pretty similar to whales. It isn’t a good thought (and really it isn’t meant to be) to imagine one day being eaten by sharks and worms. But, really the worms will get you anyway, so adding the sharks really seems like a positive. No matter what, life is going to recycle you, but if you look at the whole picture, the ocean does it with significantly more style. In fact it does everything with more style.
If you swim above a coral reef along the coast of North America, one of the most common fish you see will be damselfish, of all colors, sullen and playful. These little guys are farmers; they find little patches of algae in the coral, and they nurture them. They also defend them. If you swim too close, they’ll rush you. These fish, that are smaller than your palm, will try to scare you off, because they know they need to defend their algae. And they have learned to do this, thanks to blue tangs, the bullies of the ocean. These fish are a beautiful vibrant blue, with a bright white or yellow spine near their tail, an appearance that certainly strikes fear into the hearts of damselfish. Blue tangs form small groups and overpower damselfish, stealing their algae. Even now, we are beginning to surpass the boundaries of the complexity of terrestrial ecosystems, and we have barely even started. Once these blue tangs go on their way, the number of ways for our poor damselfish to be avenged is staggeringly large. A moray eel could jump out of a rock and grab them. Simple, effective, but not so interesting. They could run into the tentacles of a jellyfish, and be paralyzed and slowly digested. Gruesome, but still lacking something. They could be chased into a hole in the coral by a grouper. They would consider themselves safe there, as the grouper couldn’t possibly fit. That’s when the octopus would grab them. The poetry here: the octopus and the grouper were working together all along. These two animals, almost as distantly related as two animals can be, have learned this mutually beneficial behavior. The tangs team up to get their food, their predators team up to make them food. All the life I’ve talked about so far runs on the same stuff, if you look back far enough. All of our energy was once potential energy stored as loose hydrogen atoms. Then, as more and more of these hydrogen atoms gathered, they began to heat up, and release that energy, sending a small portion of it our way. That is what all terrestrial life runs on. But down on the ocean floor, where there is so much water blocking the sun that eyes become a burden, where the pressure is so high the human body is crushed like a soda can, life has found new fuel. Deep within the earth, radioactive elements are constantly breaking down, and sending alpha and beta particles flying in all directions. These elements have locked away the energy of a supernova from billions of years ago, and they are slowly releasing it as heat to whoever wants a piece. Tubeworms growing on the ocean floor, and the animals that live among them, use this energy from the Earth to power their lives. They have a food chain with an entirely different starting point than anything else we know to exist. People have seen all of these animals and these ecosystems; they’ve caught it on video. But there is so much ocean that no one has ever seen. That certainly contains stuff, alive or not, that we simply cannot imagine. But you should try. Next time you’re on a boat, look down, and think about what could be just below you that no one has ever seen before. It could be something terrible, maybe it was seconds from eating you. Or it could be something so beautiful it would inspire artists and poets alike. Jump in. You might meet a dream, or a nightmare.