Tag Archives: aquarium

Diving in a Sea Grass Meadow








Seminars and Aquariums

As I came into the university seminar room and sat down, a young woman stood up and began her talk about jellyfish and other open-ocean animals that build transparent soft “jelly”-like bodies — who they are, what they eat, how they catch it, their impact on the world around them. The speaker was a graduate student and this was of one of a series of student talks on marine ecology.  The faculty members at the seminar led a discussion, intermingling knowledge from the published literature with their own personal experiences and insights  The professor directing the group had been my major professor years before.   He looked the same as ever, but I didn’t remember looking nearly so young as this group of graduate students.  Be that as it may….

The student ran some video footage of a salp, a creature with a more or less tadpole-shaped body that builds an envelope or house of jelly and then filters water through to capture microscopic food. An alien from space might look something like that, I mused, glittering, flashing, hanging suspended in space. What would it be like to live as one of these mid-water beings? A comb jelly, perhaps, floating, tentacles stretched out, waiting for some small creature to hit and be stuck then reeled in. Or one of the bioluminescent jellyfish in the blackness of the deep oceans. What is this universe that manifests itself in these eerie pulsing life forms anyway? WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS. All of our knowledge suddenly seemed like a tiny raft on a very big ocean indeed.

It was amazing — 18 people enthusiastically discussing the details of how a comb jelly traps its food, how it fits into the intricate web of interactions that make up this living planet. There aren’t very many people who care enough about that sort of thing to devote a career to it. Universities provide a place where they can find each other.

Public aquariums are another place where people like this find each other. I had an appointment early one morning with a scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. When we finished our business, I walked back out into the huge central display area. The aquarium hadn’t opened for the day but a new exhibit of cow nosed rays had just been completed and the press was there for a sneak preview that would hopefully get some visitor generating publicity.

About 30 people stood quietly around the huge shallow tank, eating bagels and muffins, half preoccupied with their own conversations and half watching the graceful soaring of several dozen rays as they circled and circled, slowly beating the tips of their flattened bodies, looking for all the world like kites come to life. As they passed, almost everybody reached out a hand to gently touch them or call them like a kitten. But they seemed unaware of anything other than their own slow flying reality.

Cutting through the soft murmur of conversation was an occasional shriek from the penguins in the adjacent large pool. Some stood on the artificial rock ledges and islands in their urban ocean while others floated at the surface, looking like ducks except that they paddled with their wings instead of their feet. They looked like birds in a way that evaporates when they stand upright. And when they dove they flew like falcons underwater, swerving and darting at high speed, until flight and swimming were one thing.

Sea turtles and sharks and tarpon and jacks, angelfish and mackerel swam endlessly in the 2 story tall circular center tank, moving forever in a counter clock wise waltz. They didn’t seem to notice how the stillness and the mystery of the place abruptly evaporated when the front doors opened and the first school field trip of the day poured in a flood through the entrance. Outside the big yellow buses were lined up 8 deep, waiting to unload. Where the adults had stood quietly in front of the ray exhibit, the kids squatted and jumped, running back and forth from one vantage point to the next. The air was solid with the loud shrieks and chatter of excited children who knew a good thing when they saw it.

It was easy to understand what these young fellow humans were thinking but the fish were tougher. Do fish think as they amble around? What would a fish think about anyway, what sort of fishy thoughts? What is the internal reality of a fish? Orthodox science emphatically asserts that they don’t, that only a few big brained mammals have even the possibility of awareness but in fact we really haven’t a clue one way or the other so why not wonder?

In smaller aquaria mounted in the walls rainbow colored small fish picked over their coral habitat, some looking for their own version of bagels and muffins, some just cruising about.  One tank had 3000 schooling silver menhaden, each only a few inches long. Their silver fluid movement glittered and flashed. The tank was solid fish, and it was the ultimate abundance, life coalescing out of water with intensity beyond comprehension.

The planet swarms and dances with life, in a multiplicity of forms that are nearly unknown on dry land. The graphic displays on the walls of the aquarium explained what little we know about camouflage and schooling and warning coloration and all that sort of thing but they didn’t come close to answering the real questions these living displays ask. An aquarium lays out the graceful and the bizarre, presents us with the ultimate Zen koan of biological  form and diversity, leaves us to wonder “What is this? What on earth does it really mean? How does it come to be?” and also like a Zen koan, leaves us to find that answer on our own.