Following this year’s World Oceans Day on June 8, readers may enjoy looking at the Thammasat University Libraries’ newly acquired book, The Extreme Life of the Sea. It is written by Dr. Stephen Palumbi, professor of biology and director of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and his son, Mr. Anthony Palumbi, a science writer. Their subject is life in the oceans at its limits. The most unusual, oldest, and tiniest forms of life are examined and described. Instead of the usual tone about books about sea life, which focus with reason on how it is being destroyed by man-made pollution, over-fishing, and other factors, the authors examine what remains to marvel at. For example, when whales die, their remains at the bottom of the ocean become what is termed whale falls, or places where smaller fish can find nourishment when swimming through areas where otherwise there is nothing to eat. The Extreme Life of the Sea compares these fish dining on what was once a whale to commuters at
the only open coffee shop at midnight at a giant airport.
Among those animals which benefit from this foodie experience are molluscs, worms, and crustaceans. These include an unusual species known as the zombie worm, which consists of only females (male zombie worms never emerge from the larval state) which live in the depths of the ocean where the dark and cold do not permit many other creatures to survive.
Ups and downs in the ocean.
Higher up and nearer the surface, the billfish finds food at very great speed. The Extreme Life of the Sea compare the velocity of this species with
driving at 40 mph on a busy street while trying to snatch a cup of coffee off the asphalt.
As a species, we’re not good at understanding water. Neither are we talented at traversing it. The fastest Olympian swimmers manage barely six miles per hour; a goldfish in your local pet store beats that easily! Whether speed is deployed for hunting, evasion or entertainment, the sea’s daily dramas play out much more quickly than we realize. The fastest fish in the world is the sailfish, part of a larger “billfish” family including swordfish and marlin. They’re fast, powerful predators clad in sheets of taut fast-twitch muscle under chrome scales. Like tuna and mahi (muscular predators make for good eating), sailfish zip through open-ocean waters at high speed looking for schools of small schooling fish. With tactical flashes of their proud sail-like fins, they gather their prey into roiling silver globes before lunging in with rigid bills. A single swipe stuns a small creature, knocking it senseless, rendering it helpless. Here the real challenge begins. The sailfish is likely traveling at nearly 60 miles per hour to hunt, though bursts of 60 miles per hour have been recorded. Eating at such high speed is tricky to say the least. The fish’s bill might be just two feet long, allowing a window of less than a tenth of a second in which to gulp the meal. Imagine driving to work in the morning, only instead of stopping at a stand for coffee you’ve got to reach out and snatch your steaming paper cup off the asphalt without braking. This is difficult even for sophisticated predators, and even more so when those predators are cold-blooded animals swimming in cold water! To keep their brains and eyes from growing sluggish in the chill, sailfish have evolved heating organs inside their skulls. Efficiently turning calories into warmth, they maintain top physical and mental performance at all times.
As they move rapidly, heat is generated in their bodies, allowing billfish to tolerate the cold temperatures at the lowest parts of the ocean. One species, the Indo-Pacific sailfish, was timed at 68 miles per hour, which is the fastest speed ever measured for a fish. By comparison, the cheetah, the fastest land animal, can run at from 68 to 75 mph, although without resistance from water. Billfish also have swim bladders to help them adjust to changes in pressure as they swim deeper in the ocean. They can also swim up to the surface quickly without experiencing what human divers call decompression sickness, divers’ disease, or the bends.
Deep sea fighting.
Although the authors explain that ocean life deserves to be protected and can be saved if enough people decide that it is important to do so, they also describe violent combat among undersea animals. For example, a bull whale and a giant mother squid decide to battle it out, with the result that
40 tons of flesh and hot blood collides [with the squid] at 10 feet per second. . . . She rolls with the blow, wrapping her arms around the attacker’s head and jaws. Hooks tear long gaping wounds in his skin, layering fresh damage on top of chalky white scars. He’s no stranger to this kind of fight.
Other creatures who were unable to compete in this survival of the fittest became extinct over the years. Opabinia regalis, a soft-bodied medium-sized animal had five eyes, a mouth located under the back of its head, facing backwards, and flexible long nose that brought food to its mouth the way elephants feed themselves using their trunks. Opabinia regalis lived in the mud on the sea floor. In 1975, when the species was first described fully, scientists at a conference laughed at the unusually poor design of the poor creature, not well adapted to survival. A more successful species, the shark, managed to grow a new set of sharp teeth every week or ten days. How they manage to do so is also described in The Extreme Life of the Sea.
Unseen marvels.
Many tiny creatures are too small to be seen by the naked eye, the Palumbis report:
At this very moment, there are 100 trillion bacteria on your seat. Don’t reach for the disinfectant spray—those multitudes of bacteria are inside you. The human body houses ten times more active microbes than its own living cells. It’s a visceral reminder that for all of life’s progress, Earth remains a microbial world.Microbes are single-celled organisms too small to see with the naked eye. The group includes bacteria, and a bacteria-like group called the Archaea that tend to live in extreme habitats, as well as some more advanced single-celled species.
Their book also notes that people familiar with sharks and swordfish cannot possibly see much else that is vital to oceans:
If you stand on a beach and stare out toward the horizon, perhaps squinting at the sunset or the vaporous plume of a distant whale, you can see about 3 miles out. If the weather is clear, you might be looking at 10–20 square miles of ocean surface—a fairly large habitat by most wildlife standards. But the global ocean is actually 10 million times the size of your view out to the horizon, and on average there are more than 2 miles of water under every square foot of surface.
Part of this surface is an area well known to all Thai people:
Thailand’s Andaman Sea heats like a skillet. There’s no stove below—rather, sunlight glares mercilessly above, broken up by eerie rock columns into wavering oblong shadows. Every crystalline morsel of water inhales the streams of solar energy, but a whole ocean is hard to heat. And once the surface temperature exceeds about 90° F (32° C), evaporation saps heat away almost as fast as the Sun adds it. As a result, the Sun rarely warms the ocean past human body temperature. Even the most torrid tropical seas fall far short of the temperature you’d prefer in the shower.
Thailand’s situation was described in an article on June 9 in The Nation, noting that about 50 tons of Thai garbage flows into sea every year. Less than two tons of it is collected later, according to Mr. Chonlatid Suraswadi, director general of the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources. The main sources of this trash are the tourism and fishing industries, resulting in polluted beaches and killing about 300 rare marine animals annually.
As part of World Oceans Day, the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources organized volunteer divers at Phuket’s Patong Beach to collect beach and undersea garbage. Recent studies have shown that protecting the oceans is economically sound, and for every baht spent preventing and cleaning up from pollution, the rewards are manifold. Yet in February, The Nation reported that Thailand ranks among the top 10 countries with over one million tons of plastic waste and debris allowed to sink to the bottom of the water along its coastlines each year. Although not yet as extreme an offender as China, the world’s top polluter with 8.82 million tons of plastic waste every year, Thailand ranks sixth in this worrisome trend, after Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. The plastic kills seabirds, marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals.
(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)