The nautilus inhabited the deep waters surrounding forest-clad Manus Island, an exclamation point at the northwestern end of Papua New Guinea’s Bismarck Archipelago.
It lived slowly and in near-complete darkness, its large eyes tuned to the blue wavelengths of bioluminescent bacteria that signalled a carcass to scavenge, and just sensitive enough to tell night from day 300 metres below the surface. Its 90 tentacles and superlative sense of smell aided its search for food along the sea floor. And as it grew, it added new chambers to its spiralling shell.
When the nautilus died — at perhaps 20 or 30 years of age - its soft, squid-like body rotted away. Its shell lost the neutral buoyancy that allowed it to cruise effortlessly at whatever depth it chose, and it floated to the surface.
Currents washed it into the mangroves, or onto one of Manus’s palm-fringed beaches, or perhaps onto a coral-ringed atoll group 4 km south east, called Ndrova. Wherever it landed, the shell’s elegant cream whorl with rust-brown stripes would have caught the woman’s eye and she took it home with her.
Manuai Matawai grewup watching his mother, like the other women in his fishing village, use the nautilus shell’s sealed outer chamber as a scoop for separating coconut oil from the fruit’s starch at the bottom of her cookpot. But like most in his coastal community, he had never seen one alive, because of its preference for the cold, dark depths.
Then, in 2015, researchers from Australia and the United States came to study the creature, and Matawai, then working for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), helped organise their expedition to Ndrova. Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington widely known as “Professor Nautilus”, had last visited in 1984, when he and a collaborator were among the first people to examine a live fuzzy nautilus, a species belonging to a new genus that they later named Allonautilus scrobiculatus.
Ward and his colleagues had come back to see if the fuzzy nautilus and the better-known chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilius) were still there, and to try some new research tools.
Only a handful of scientists study nautiluses, and many of the most basic questions about the creatures’ lives
