Twilight of the Nautilus
We were all very tired. My crew and I had been tracking nautiluses off tiny Ndrova Island in Papua New Guinea for close to a week. Every day we spent 16 hours on small dugout canoes and then got eight hours of fitful sleep on the deck of a Melanesian sea craft. Rice and fresh tuna for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. In the open boats, the sun, the wind, the rain, the dark, all seemed to merge. Time melted in fatigue.
A week before, we had fitted the nautiluses with acoustic transmitters that gave their position and depth. To track them, we had to stay within a kilometer as they bumped through a muddy habitat near the ocean bottom and climbed up the coral reefs lining the small islands here. We sat above them in small boats and canoes, dangling hydrophones over the side to pick up the faint acoustic signals.
It was 2015 and we were tracking the two different kinds of nautiliuses—Nautilus and its descendent, Allonautilus—found here and virtually nowhere else on Earth. Both varieties were going extinct from overfishing and changing ocean conditions. We wanted to know how they were managing to survive. Could they cross large bodies of water to find sufficient food?
In 1984, I had done this same kind of work, in
