Mark Conlin
Strange Discovery
Phil Dustan was a young marine biologist when the world-famous explorer, the late Jacques Cousteau, invited him on a landmark expedition to film and document the coral reefs of the Caribbean. Phil’s task as “science guide” was to inspect the many reefs visited by the research vessel Calypso and help the ship’s camera crew document coral reef ecology. During the expedition, Phil dove along the Meso American barrier reef or Belizian barrier reef with the Cousteau team, making new friends and new discoveries. But as he discovered one evening as the ship anchored at a small atoll off the coast of Belize, even the Calypso occasionally had its off-days.
After a delicious dinner in the Calypso galley, the crew prepared to film a nighttime segment on a coral reef. The stern of the ship blazed with light as a dozen divers entered the water. “The idea was to have a very dramatic show, especially our descent,” Phil said. “We had four sets of lights—all connected topside by two hundred feet of cable to the Calypso’s generators. Falco, the chief diver, led the descent, with our cameraman, Joe Thompson, filming from below and Captain Cousteau filming from behind.”
Things went from bad to worse almost immediately. First, the crew found itself surrounded by swarms of stinging jellyfish that had been attracted by the bright lights. Next, as Calypso held steady over the reef in about sixty feet of water, a strong wind came up and yanked the light cables away from the camera crew as Calypso began to swing on her anchor. The divers became “leashed fish,” and the camera crew was forced to film wherever the lights went. “My job was to swim around looking scientific,” Phil said, “but we kept running out of cable. Every time this happened, Falco would tap me on the fin, and we’d have to turn around and go back.”
Then a great discovery was made. A crew member had located a strange new species of brain coral covered in small green spheres. The crew moved the lights in for a closer look. Phil studied the spheres carefully. Was the coral reproducing? Was it shedding eggs into the sea? Phil noticed that the eggs were wrapped in strange digestive filaments. He wracked his brain. He felt as if he had seen them somewhere before, but couldn’t figure out where.
The team arranged for a scientific shot. Lights and cameras were set up, and all the divers crowded around the coral. The strange new discovery would soon be documented for the entire world to see. But something still nagged at Phil. He studied the spheres again. Where had he seen them? Finally, with the cameras running, he picked up one of the eggs and squished it between his fingers. “That’s when it hit me,” he said. “It wasn’t a new undiscovered species. What we had ‘discovered’ were petits pois . . . the peas from dinner. The cook had thrown them overboard!”
Steve Creech
“It was a dark and stormy night . . .”
Reprinted by permission of Harley Schwadron.
Close Encounter of the Squid Kind
While shooting the footage for Creatures of Darkness and Venom! for PBS, Howard Hall, Bob Cranston and I were working in one of our all-time favorite places, Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. We were going to be filming for weeks, so our boat captain had put out the word to his friends to keep their eyes peeled for anything unusual.
One by one, local fishermen motored near our boat to tell us they were catching big squid at night. “Muy grande,” they said. We had filmed squid for many years in California, so my mental picture of “big” squid ranged from six inches to about a foot. One night, we followed the fishermen to try our luck at locating the squid. The fishermen’s “secret” to locating squid consisted of drifting in the middle of nowhere, over nothing in particular, in areas where the water was more than one thousand feet deep. While I loaded film in the camera, Howard and Bob lowered some bait over the side and set up the “squid” lights. These twelve-hundred-watt bulbs created a pool of light around the boat, turning night into day.
We turned on the lights and waited.
Our friend who joined us on the trip, Alex Kerstitch, was a Sea of Cortez expert. His local knowledge helped us film unusual animal behaviors we might have easily missed. Over the years, Alex had heard stories about the giant or Humboldt squid that lived in deep water. Fishermen had also told stories around the campfire, and a few specimens had actually washed up on the beach. Alex said he had dreamed of getting the chance to see a live specimen up close.
There is something about waiting—in the middle of the night—for something to swim up out of the depths that is just a little creepy. After a long time drifting, the squid started to appear below our boat, one at a time. Alex couldn’t contain himself a second longer and asked if he could jump in while we were making final preparations. Howard gave him the okay, and in about a minute, Alex was gone. Five minutes later, Alex got back on the boat and went straight to bed. Howard and I were busy getting ready and really didn’t think much of Alex’s quick return.
The squid we saw turned out to be Humboldt squid, five feet long and weighing between seventy-five and one hundred pounds. They were just as interested in us as we were in them, and they approached us cautiously, extending one tentacle to touch us. After making contact, they would withdraw a foot or two and wait. When we reached out to touch them, the squid stayed put, changing color from white to pink to red, then back again. It was like meeting a new species on Star Trek for the first time!
When we looked into the dark water below, we could see hundreds of huge squid. They were in tight groups, flashing colors back and forth. The squid seemed to be frantically trying to make sense of this bright interruption in their usually dark lives.
We found out the next morning that Alex had been “mugged.” Three squid had taken his collecting bags and bottles, his dive computer and the gold chain from around his neck. These squid had quarter-sized suckers, lined with teeth for tearing apart their prey, and Alex was left with a series of round, red marks circling his neck. Adding insult to injury, the squid had dragged him down very deep before letting him go.
We asked Alex if, next time, he could let us know this before we dove in.
Mark Conlin
“It says: All photographic-reproduction rights
reserved by National Geographic Society.”
© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Donald Reilly from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
Finding His Way Home
Charles Coghlan was born in a small village on Prince Edward Island in the maritime provinces of Canada in 1841. His family came from Ireland and struggled to survive with what little they produced on the land and from the sea. When he reached the age of fourteen, friends and neighbors donated what little money they could scrape together and sent him to England for a decent education. He graduated with honors and promptly angered his mother, who wanted him to join the British foreign service, by announcing that he was going on the stage as an actor.
Shortly after, when he began to have budding success on the London stage, a gypsy fortune-teller read his future and told him that he would die at the height of his fame in a southern state of America and that his body would have no rest until he returned to the home of his birth. Coghlan related the prediction to his fellow actors, which gave them a hearty laugh, but nonetheless disturbed him for the rest of his life.
In time Coghlan became a very respected actor, touring the continent and the United States where he received standing ovations. Then in 1898, he died on stage from a heart attack while playing Hamlet in Galveston, Texas, and was buried in the local cemetery.
Two years later, in September 1900, a horrendous hurricane struck Galveston. The sea swept over the low-lying land, carrying everything before it and killing more than five thousand people. The receding water uncovered and washed many of the coffins interred in the cemetery out to sea. Despite a sizable reward by his family and a lengthy search, Coghlan’s body never washed ashore and was not found.
Eight years later, in October 1908, fishermen pulling in their net off Prince Edward Island spotted a large box floating in the water cov
ered with sea growth and barnacles. They towed it ashore and caused a great deal of excitement in the local village, which waited in hushed anticipation to see the contents. When the slime was wiped away, it was discovered that the box was a coffin, mounting a silver plate with the body’s name. They were even more astonished to find that the coffin contained the body of their famous former resident, Charles Coghlan.
The coffin was reverently carried to the little church where Coghlan had been baptized as a child, and he was finally laid to rest in the chapel cemetery.
Charles Coghlan, after eight years of drifting thousands of miles across the sea, had finally come home for good.
Clive Cussler
Eyes in the Dark
[EDITORS’ NOTE: After crossing the Pacific Ocean in a light balsa raft, explorer Thor Heyerdahl recounted his adventure in his popular 1948 memoir Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. In this excerpt, Heyerdahl has a close encounter with mysterious sea creatures.]
When night had fallen and the stars were twinkling in the dark tropical sky, the phosphorescence flashed around us in rivalry with the stars, and single glowing plankton resembled round live coals so vividly that we involuntarily drew in our bare legs when the glowing pellets were washed up round our feet at the raft’s stern. When we caught them we saw that they were little brightly shining species of shrimp. On such nights we were sometimes scared when two round shining eyes suddenly rose out of the sea right alongside the raft and glared at us with an unblinking hypnotic stare. The visitors were often big squids, which came up and floated on the surface with their devilishly green eyes shining in the dark like phosphorus. But sometimes the shining eyes were those of deep-water fish that only came up at night and lay staring, fascinated by the glimmer of light before them. Several times, when the sea was calm, the black water round the raft was suddenly full of round heads two or three feet in diameter, lying motionless and staring at us with great glowing eyes. On other nights balls of light three feet and more in diameter would be visible down in the water, flashing at irregular intervals like electric lights turned on for a moment.
We gradually grew accustomed to having these subterranean or submarine creatures under the floor, but nevertheless we were just as surprised every time a new version appeared. About two o’clock on a cloudy night, when the man at the helm had difficulty in distinguishing black water from black sky, he caught sight of a faint illumination down in the water that slowly took the shape of a large animal. It was impossible to say whether it was plankton shining on its body, or whether the animal itself had a phosphorescent surface, but the glimmer down in the black water gave the ghostly creature obscure, wavering lines. Sometimes it was roundish, sometimes oval, or triangular, and suddenly it split into two parts, which swam to and fro under the raft independently of one another. Finally there were three of these large shining phantoms wandering round in slow circles under us.
These were real monsters, for the visible parts alone were some five fathoms long, and we all quickly collected on deck and followed the ghost dance. It went on for hour after hour, following the course of the raft. Mysterious and noiseless, our shining companions kept a good way beneath the surface, mostly on the starboard side where the light was, but often they were right under the raft or appeared on the port side. The glimmer of light on their backs revealed that the beasts were bigger than elephants but they were not whales, for they never came up to breathe. Were they giant ray fish which changed shape when they turned over on their sides? They took no notice at all if we held the light right down on the surface to lure them up, so that we might see what kind of creatures they were. And, like all proper goblins and ghosts, they had sunk into the depths when the dawn began to break.
Thor Heyerdahl
Excerpted from Kon-Tiki, 1948
The Specialist
For me . . . a dream came true in an experience shared with my three children . . . to fly underwater in the company of a wild, free dolphin. Breaking the usual rule of “school comes first,” I scooped up my small brood, ages sixteen, fourteen and eight, and enlisted their help for a week of diving and exploring reefs while working on a research project on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. I have wistfully watched thousands of dolphins during many years spent working in, on, around and under the sea, often reveling in their exquisite mastery of ocean elements, but I had never encountered one that was willing to stay around for more than a moment in the presence of divers. I was skeptical about the existence of a wild dolphin at San Salvador who would “come right up to you.” But my doubts went up in a puff of sea spray when a dark fin appeared in the distance, and a lone spotted dolphin, Stenella longirostris, locally known as Sandy, came straight for our boat. We stopped, looked and leaped in.
My son, Richie, making a polite overture, swam dolphinlike, undulating his whole body, holding his legs tightly together and thrusting upward with his flippers, which sent Sandy into spirals of apparent delight. The eldest, Elizabeth, blessed with a streaming mane of shining red-gold hair, was an irresistible lure. Approaching close and peppering her with rapid staccato sounds and soft, high weeps, the dolphin mouthed locks of her hair, then, eyes closed in a look of apparent bliss, gently let the strands flow through his teeth, as if trying to guess the nature of this intriguing, silky substance. Gale, an elfin eight-year-old, was the only one of us petite enough to hitch a ride. Looping her small fingers along the leading edge of Sandy’s dorsal fin, she allowed herself to be towed in a circle around us, propulsion provided by thrusts of the dolphin’s muscular tail. It was a living reenactment of the dolphins and cherubs depicted on ancient Roman coins and Greek mosaics.
Sandy could see clearly underwater as well as above, and so could we, using masks fitted with acrylic windows. Like all dolphins, Sandy inhaled air through a hole conveniently placed at the top of his head, and so did we, via snorkels. We also wore flippers to improve speed and maneuverability underwater. Fully outfitted with the best of modern snorkeling gear, though, we presented a pale, makeshift imitation of Sandy’s exquisite design, honed during millions of years of processes that perfected slopes, angles and surfaces, coupled with finely tuned musculature, energy and sensory systems. But specialization has a price. We could comfortably enter Sandy’s realm for a while, but it was hard to imagine him entering ours—to come on board and go ashore, visit a forest . . . climb a mountain . . . ride a bus. But who knows? Our great, great grandparents would have thought that flying to the moon or safely travelling to the ocean’s greatest depths would be impossible for humans. Maybe someday, with the right technologies, we can invite dolphins to put on land-suits and join us for a romp on the shore.
Dr. Sylvia A. Earle
Fred’s Big Adventure
There is no end to the wonders of the sea.
Wyland
People always ask me about the big critters. What is it like to swim with dolphins? Isn’t it scary to be so close to sharks? The answer I give never seems to satisfy anyone: At the end of a project, the animals I end up loving the most are usually not the big ones, but the little ones.
The creatures you really get to know are the ones you spend hours and days with. The animals that become your friends are the ones that get really tired of your noise and bubbles and lights, and allow you to become part of their daily lives.
My all-time favorite animal is an old sheep crab we found roaming among some brittle star gardens. He just seemed to be wandering slowly, pondering the complexities of crab life. The only problem was that he had a kelp forest growing on his shell.
When crabs are young, they molt their shells once a year. Molting discards a year’s worth of wear and tear and anything that has become attached over that time. After getting on in years, crabs stop molting, as was the case with this particular sheep crab. He was now wearing his last shell, called a “terminal” molt. Adding to his dilemma was the small kelp plant that had started to grow on his back.
The kelp was only a minor inconvenience, since the crab
walked slowly anyway, like an old man strolling through a park. The larger problem was that as the kelp continued to grow, it would begin to reach for the light of the surface. As kelp grows it produces gas bladders to keep it upright and growing toward the sun. As the plant gets bigger it creates more and more lift.
The old crab’s legs were only so strong, and soon the kelp’s buoyancy would overtake its ability to hold onto the bottom. Soon he would become the first-ever flying crab. His crab friends would say, “The last thing I saw was Fred being taken by the kelp aliens. It was beautiful; he just floated away.”
Floating along just below the surface, Fred would be at the mercy of the meandering currents. But Fred had one last bit of luck going for him. Over time, the kelp would die and break apart in the warm surface water. No longer the rare, one-of-a-kind, balloon crab, Fred’s weight would win out . . . and down he would go. As I left him, there was nothing to do but wish Fred luck—and hope he would enjoy his temporary corner of the kelp forest.
Mark Conlin