The Extreme Life of the Sea

By Anthony R. Palumbi and Stephen R Palumbi

A thrilling tour of the sea's most extreme species, coauthored by one of the world's leading marine scientists

The ocean teems with life that thrives under difficult situations in unusual environments. The Extreme Life of the Sea takes readers to the absolute limits of the ocean world—the fastest and deepest, the hottest and oldest creatures of the oceans. It dives into the icy Arctic and boiling hydrothermal vents—and exposes the eternal darkness of the deepest undersea trenches—to show how marine life thrives against the odds. This thrilling book brings to life the sea's most extreme species, and tells their stories as characters in the drama of the oceans. Coauthored by Stephen Palumbi, one of today’s leading marine scientists, The Extreme Life of the Sea tells the unforgettable tales of some of the most marvelous life forms on Earth, and the challenges they overcome to survive. Modern science and a fluid narrative style give every reader a deep look at the lives of these species.

The Extreme Life of the Sea shows you the world’s oldest living species. It describes how flying fish strain to escape their predators, how predatory deep-sea fish use red searchlights only they can see to find and attack food, and how, at the end of her life, a mother octopus dedicates herself to raising her batch of young. This wide-ranging and highly accessible book also shows how ocean adaptations can inspire innovative commercial products—such as fan blades modeled on the flippers of humpback whales—and how future extremes created by human changes to the oceans might push some of these amazing species over the edge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691230191

Book preview

More Praise for

THE EXTREME LIFE OF THE SEA

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[A] landscape of strange creatures is brought to life by charming writing.

—CLARA MOSKOWITZ, Scientific American

A stimulating and enjoyable read.

—Diver

"The whole safari is conducted with a verve and joy that only comes from a deep love of the subject, a life-long dedication to its exploration and a true communicator’s sense of the mot juste.… [A] splendid book."

—ADRIAN BARNETT, New Scientist

Drawing on decades of scientific research as well as a knack for storytelling, the authors convey what happens at the ocean depths without sugarcoating it.… It doesn’t just shed light on some of the most mysterious workings of the sea; it does so with vivid prose while managing to convey scientists’ current understanding of how and why these phenomena operate. If that doesn’t make people more invested in preserving the ocean, it’s hard to know what will.

—JULIET EILPERIN, Washington Post

"Who doesn’t like reading about the fantastical creatures that stalk the inky depths of the world’s oceans? In The Extreme Life of the Sea, it’s the marine environment’s superlatives that are on display."

—The Scientist

[The Palumbis] are brilliant guides to this realm about which we as a species have been remarkably incurious.

—PETER FORBES, The Independent

The Palumbis give us the sense that although some parts of nature are more romantically wondrous than others—those sponges, giant squids doing epic battle with sperm whales— it is the variety that is wonderful.

—OWEN RICHARDSON, Sydney Morning Herald

Highlighting the strangest cases of marine life, the authors give us a hint of the ocean’s robust yet fragile ecosystems.… In their delightful, vivid description about the struggle for existence in the sea, the Palumbis do manage to communicate a vital message: even the extreme conditions in the deep sea are not immune from disruptive and destructive human greed.

—WAN LIXIN, Shanghai Daily

This book brims with fascinating tales of life in the sea, told with freshness, wit, and verve. Simply wonderful.

—CALLUM ROBERTS, author of The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea

"The Extreme Life of the Sea will reignite your fascination with how much life lives beneath the waves. This is extreme-ly good reading."

—RANDY OLSON, author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style

"What better way to learn about life in the ocean—and how we are changing it—than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea? The Extreme Life of the Sea is an insightful book that inspires awe and wonder about our ocean, and brilliantly shows us the immense possibilities of life on Earth."

—ENRIC SALA, explorer-in-residence, National Geographic

"The Extreme Life of the Sea is filled with wonder and appreciation for what lives in that most mysterious realm on Earth. We travel to the furthest points of the conceptual compass—the biggest, smallest, oldest, fastest, and hottest. By crisscrossing these polarities, we sense how far life has come and see the extremes to which life has gone. Pure pleasure."

—CARL SAFINA, author of The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

"The Extreme Life of the Sea reveals some of the amazing aspects of ocean life and why we should care. This accessible book will inspire a broad audience—and with any luck help to inspire change. The authors have done a superb job of communicating much of what is special about the ocean."

—PAUL V. R. SNELGROVE, author of Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life: Making Ocean Life Count

THE extreme life OF THE sea

THE extreme Life OF THE sea

STEPHEN R. PALUMBI and ANTHONY R. PALUMBI

With a new preface by the authors

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press

New preface by the authors, copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom:

Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Fourth printing, and first paperback printing, 2015

New paperback edition, 2021

New paperback ISBN 978-0-691-22923-2

LCCN 2021934436

eISBN 9780691230191 (ebook)

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

CONTENTS

Preface to the 2021 Edition vii

Preface and Acknowledgments: Guiltless Wonder xiii

PROLOGUEThe Epic Ocean1

1 The Earliest5

2 The Most Archaic19

3 The Smallest36

4 The Deepest46

5 The Shallowest65

6 The Oldest81

7 The Fastest Sprints and Longest Journeys94

8 The Hottest112

9 The Coldest125

10 The Strangest Family Lives141

11 Future Extremes158

Epilogue: A Grand Bargain175

Notes 179

Index 209

Figures follow page 84.

PREFACE TO THE 2021 EDITION

Deep in the sea, headlights flickered to life. Twin swiveling beacons pierced drifting clouds of tiny plankton, piercing the thicker plumes of sediments kicked up by the submarine’s propeller. Everything lay cold and gray and under the pressure of a mile of water. Every feature had lain in the dark for probably millions of years until the sub’s lamps illuminated it.

Robi wasn’t in the submarine—no one was. He commanded his usual remote seat in the command center, on a gently rocking ship nearly a mile above. His lanky frame slouched casually in the creaking seat, utterly relaxed for the hours-long mission the way a Twitch streamer might perch in her gaming chair. But his eyes darted continuously around the deep scene—arrowing across the large screen in front of him. He squinted as the headlights picked out rock pillars and crevices on the floor of Monterey Bay. With a flick, he ignited a second bank of lights and silently guided the sub into a familiar grotto of rock.

Come on, he impatiently urged, checking the navigation markers of the ponderous machine. Be there. Slowly, the image swung and centered on a boulder. Robi smiled. He was coming back to the same spot as last year. And the year before. And the year before. Robi peered into the headlight beams, squinting.

On a routine scouting mission driving a remote-operated submarine, he had been exploring the dark canyons of Monterey Bay three-quarters of a mile deep. The surface of the Bay was a typical roil of whales, seabirds, sharks, and sardines, but the deep sea was quieter, slower, with less food and slower lives. You had to look hard in the deep sea find treasures. In one of those discovery moments, Robi had paused his sub in front of an unexpected scene of domestic tranquility on the sea floor. An odd figure stared back at his cameras, guarding a clutch of eggs and refusing to move.

Female octopuses generally lay hundreds of eggs and fiercely guard their broods. Laying each egg into a gelatinous coat, they fill it with such a bounty of rich yolk that the developing eggs become irresistible snacks to predators. A mother’s job is to guard the snacks—never leaving them no matter how long it takes for them to hatch into slim tiny octopuses jetting off toward their own fates. She can’t take a break to feed herself—eyes are watching her, waiting—so hers is a solitary and exhausting duty. It is a duty she will not survive.

To work in science is to trade in uncertainty.

When we sat down to assemble the stories you are about to enjoy in The Extreme Life of the Sea, we drew on decades, even centuries of exploration and inquiry. It was a humbling experience, surveying a thousand odd and wonderful creatures paraded across books and research papers, all the more so when we consider the years of work that went into each article and study. The ocean’s mystery has long commanded popular imagination, so material abounded. Some of our subjects were literary, like Herman Melville’s infamous white whale. Some were accurately giant, like the megalodon sharks that lived thirty million years ago. Some were tiny jewels, like prismatic larvae of sea stars, catching the notice of just a few determined microscopists. Nature furnished more fascinating organisms than could possibly be compiled into one volume, so our toughest task was picking which topics fit with others well enough to make the cut.

And though we drew eagerly from this stash of wonder, now—seven years later—they have only multiplied. Discoveries roll out from labs all over the world each day of every month. Natural science is a global enterprise in the best sense of the term: decentralized, skeptical, and collaborative. It has also gotten progressively better at broadcasting its achievements to the public. Each month since we first wrote Extreme Life, new explorations have populated the pages of journals, newspapers, and websites. Nature documentaries are some of the world’s most popular video entertainment, and social media abounds with amazing wildlife footage. Since then, Science magazine has published several hundred new issues. The Journal of Molluscan Studies, to pick just one less popularly renowned source, has released an army of snails, clams, and sea slugs in the form of more than two hundred new papers. Some of that work directly contradicts what came before: so it goes; everyone learns and we all move forward. In science, as in life, no pronouncement is ever truly final.

Robi’s story was one we had heard about while finalizing Extreme Life. But the story was not ready, was not published, had not worked its way through the lengthy process of peer review. Skeptical inquiry does not have to be aggressive; it’s a collaborative, not adversarial, process that helps narrow the window of uncertainty in which we all live. Especially when something wonderful or unexpected seems to be happening, science works best when testing its own safest propositions.

Since our original edition, one-sided information has only grown more common in the public sphere, even as biological and environmental science have become daily topics of conversation. Whether we can respond effectively to the mounting crises facing our civilization depends very much on our capacity to harness and communicate important scientific facts. In this area we as a society are not doing very well, and greedy malefactors (while very real) are not entirely to blame. Much of the research our universities produce languishes behind paywalls and journal subscriptions that the typical media consumer will never be able to afford.

As the coauthors of a popular science book, we are frequently asked where to get true information—what can be trusted. Public sources tend to be most commonly found at museums, aquariums, some print newspapers that still employ careful editors, and the open access pages of scientific journals. Access to accurate, critical information has never been mechanically simpler, but distinguishing it from self-serving fantasy has gotten harder as accelerating crises amplify stakes and heighten emotions on all sides.

The hardest chapter to write of Extreme Life was the last—where our unashamed enthusiasm and crystalline vision of marine life crashed into a creeping pessimism about the future of the oceans. Climate change hangs over the oceans like a shroud, so completely and with such certainty that five times we started writing that chapter, only to become hopelessly tangled in it. Climate change can be solved, and we are closer in engineering terms to a world with zero-carbon emissions now than we were in 2014. But if solving climate change is the main challenge, then why does marine biology matter so much? Why isn’t this a single-issue problem?

Because the other skill set needed right now is saving as much as possible in the natural world so that when CO2 levels finally drop and the climate begins to heal, there is something—hopefully a lot of something—to grow back from. We need to reach zero carbon emissions, but we also need to rescue as many species and environments as we possibly can before they are lost forever.

That’s our job, as we see it—and in the past seven years, we have met hundreds of concerned people caught in the same corner we were—from professors and deans, to divers and dentists, to ninety-five-year-olds and elementary school students. They are struggling to reconcile their boisterous love of the natural world with the mounting certainty that it is in terrible danger. They want a sign of hope, a plan, and a mission. They want to know their passion for ocean life is not like collecting used, cancelled stamps.

And it isn’t—because cancelled stamps do not have any power to regenerate and regrow and repopulate. But the ocean does. Ocean life is generally extreme in its capacity to regenerate. Marine protected areas where fishing is not allowed show how ocean life can boom forth at rates of increase that can double population numbers in a few years. Sea otters numbered about seventy-five in 1936 when they were rediscovered along the California coast and protected. They had increased tenfold by 1963 when they entered Monterey Bay, and have tripled since then. Whales, sea turtles, and about a quarter of the heavily fished species in the United States are rebounding under protective rules.

So the answer to climate change in the oceans turns out to be: Support everyone pushing for the elimination of fossil fuels. And while politicians and financial minds and religious leaders and inventors are busy with that—and luckily they are busier every year—we will swim the seas looking for likely places to protect now, to nurture now, restore now, celebrate now. The planet Earth is the most powerful bio-engine in the known universe, and luckily it belongs to us. It is our home; we will never have, or need, another.

Four years.

Before Robi’s remote dive, no one knew how long deep sea octopus eggs took to hatch. The unrelenting cold of the canyon’s deep slows the pace of life down to a metabolic crawl, so it might very well have been quite long. Robi tracked the eggs with a predator’s determination, returning regularly in his blocky mechanical avatar. A total of eighteen dives showed him the same scene—an increasingly emaciated mother draped protectively over slowly growing embryos, staring with cold malice into the blue headlights, muscles coiled, one alien ready to give another everything she had.

Today, Robi got there to find the boulder abandoned. No sign of the mother. No hint of her fate—but the eggs had hatched. They had not been gobbled like bar snacks but instead stood empty, wafting in infinitesimal currents. Each empty egg case testified to the 160 new octopuses beginning to write 160 new stories in the Monterey canyon.

Their mother played her role in the extreme productivity of ocean life. She produced and protected her offspring in their hundreds. For more than a thousand black days and black nights she stood guard. She did her job protecting ocean life—gave herself to the ocean, knowing the ocean gives back. She secured a future she knew she would never see.

Our turn.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS GUILTLESS WONDER

This book emerged, as many things do, from a gap in the teeth of the established order. The sea is our world’s most fertile stage, populated by wonderfully colorful characters acting out their lives in a daily drama. But too often writing about the sea, or any natural habitat, follows this script: detail the native diversity, catalogue species to awe and amaze, and then toll the bell of doom as you explain the man-made calamities unfolding in these habitats. This is the gap in the established order. A gap in character development. And a gaping need for a simple sense of guiltless wonder about how wonderful the ocean’s life actually is.

Humans have done sufficient damage to every habitat that the bells can always be heard, but we seek to place emphasis elsewhere. How can an audience focus on a drama’s denouement until they’re invested in the players? Where they live? Who they live with? The conflict and beauty of their lives? Hence our focus on the characters in the oceans, the lives they lead, and the tactics they use to thrive. We have tried, in our chapters, to bring these characters to life by combining a novel’s narrative flair with the scientific accuracy that these subjects demand. And we chose the sea’s most extreme life to show what life is fully capable of.

We apologize for inaccuracies that may still be present: despite a worldwide network of friends and colleagues, a survey comprising more than 200 topics will never be perfectly accurate while research is ongoing and new results are arriving. Throughout, we used the scientific literature as the foundation of fact on which our narrative is built—but good storytellers also try to show their subjects in living color, in dynamic movement, and in life and death. And for these elements we sometimes constructed scenes that are fully consistent with the data but may not yet have been witnessed.

We have provided many sources for the material used, but we ran into an interesting problem during our research. Steve, as a Stanford University faculty member with full access to its libraries, enjoys unparalleled access to all the world’s published scientific papers. Tony does not. We tried originally to write this book with no more access to the literature than any other Internet user has, to see whether it could be done. But some of those sources are incomplete or inaccurate, and so we switched to relying on the published literature extensively. The difficulty of public access to published, accurate science was frustrating, but in the end we try to serve as that source for our readers and provide a tantalizing citation trail for the reader to follow if she chooses. We have presented online sources when they appear to be accurate, older works past copyright when they are still relevant, and open-source scientific papers where available.

The interface of novelist and scientist, in the end, proved much more interesting to both of us than any father-son dynamic. We hope such pairings may, in the future, render the world of environmental literature more attractive to readers and writers alike. Moreover, we hope you enjoy reading and thinking about the final product as much as we have enjoyed creating it.

The authors thank—for their support, advice, and guidance throughout this project—the wonderful family they are fortunate to share, particularly Mary Roberts and Lauren Palumbi. Lauren Palumbi did the drawings at the beginning of each chapter. We also thank Princeton University Press for their support, Peter Strupp of Princeton Editorial Associates for his relentlessly detailed management of the book’s production, and Alison Kalett at the Press for seeing this project’s potential when even we weren’t entirely sure about it.

We have been fortunate enough to have been helped along by a large number of colleagues, students, friends, and indulgent family members. These include Farook Azam, Scott Baker, Mark Bertness, Cheryl Butner, Greg Caillet, Penny Chisholm, Chris Chyba, Ann Cohen, Dan Costa, Larry Crowder, Mark Denny, Emmet Duffy, Rob Dunbar, Sylvia Earle, David Epel, Jim Estes, Jed Fuhrman, Bill Gilly, Steve Haddock, Roger Hanlon, Megan Jensen, Les Kaufman, Lisa Kerr, Burney Le Boeuf, Sarah Lewis, Jane Lubchenco, John McCosker, Robert Paine, Jon Payne, John Pearse, Dan Rittschof, Clay Roberts, Maggie Roberts, MaryAnne Roberts, Paul Roberts, Sherry Roberts, Carl Safina, Dave Siemens, George Somero, Danna Staaf, Jon Stillman, Dan Tchernov, Stuart Thompson, Cindy Van Dover, Charlotte Vick, Amanda Vincent, Bob Warner, and Craig Young. Each has contributed help, wisdom, warnings, and encouragement.

THE extreme life OF THE sea

PROLOGUE THE EPIC OCEAN

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. The most extreme thing about the ocean is its sheer, inconceivable size.

In that enormous volume—the biggest habitat on Earth—lives a kaleidoscope of animals, plants, microbes, and viruses. Indeed, the ocean nurtures the most fascinating and unique creatures in the natural world. They occupy many different habitats and deploy diverse survival strategies. None lead particularly easy lives. The ocean might seem bucolic from a beach house’s front deck, but it’s usually too hot or too cold, lousy with microbes, or piled with tier upon tier of predators.

But extreme life thrives in the oceans—whether through speed or guile or infrared vision, by dint of marvelous specialized adaptations. Walt Whitman wrote, I am large, I contain multitudes in his Song of Myself, but the famous line perfectly describes the sea.¹ Dark, deep, and filled with alien creatures, the ocean chills our bones as it stifles our breathing. Its psychological gravity pulls human imagination back to the oldest stories of man struggling against the squalling sea. Our goal in this book is to illuminate the species that have risen to the challenge of the oceans, in the most extreme environments and in the most familiar: the ones using the wildest survival tactics in the sea. We bring you the fastest, the deepest, the coldest, and the hottest, drawing in some of the smallest details of their lives but also painting the backdrop of their role in the oceans.

What lies beneath the sea is more intricate, compelling, and fascinating than the storm-whipped sails of literature or the sensational fearmongering of Shark Week television. Most sharks, after all, are not actually that extreme—excepting the few big ferocious ones. Look closely at any plot of water on Earth and a fascinating and awe-inspiring dance unfolds among the ocean’s wild denizens. Flying fish flash across the waves with lightning-fast mahi mahi in pursuit. Tropical reefs chatter with the sounds of distant firecrackers as tiny pistol-clawed shrimp fire off powerful sonic weapons. Black dragonfish use infrared vision to ambush hapless passers-by in the depths.² Life is a carousel of struggle and success, of beauty and beautiful ugliness.

Over the past few decades ocean science has drawn more eyes toward ocean life than ever before. It’s brought more answers to the surface, using an arsenal of scientific approaches and technological instruments to solve mysteries. In 1930, as famed scientist and explorer William Beebe climbed into his bathysphere and dropped into the warm Bermuda seas, he had only an electric searchlight to see in the darkness and a telephone line to describe to the surface what he saw. Today there are submarines, DNA sequencers, robot chemistry labs that skim the waves, and respiration chambers tiny enough to measure the breath of a barnacle. Since Beebe’s time we’ve accumulated more than 80 more years of basic scientific knowledge, without which hardly any serious biological mystery can be solved.

When splashing into the sea with a SCUBA tank and mask, it is hard to predict which of these tools might help you understand something as simple as a bleached coral head. But two things you are certain to need: a delighted sense of wonder at every mystery, and a spark of joy at each discovery, in every creature in creation. Our aim is to give you both.

The world’s biggest predator meets its most fearsome prey

It’s dark and cold and very deep. A sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) cruises through the ink, descending toward the floor of the world. He’s hunting: powerful muscles and hot blood collaborating to run down rare prey in the cold, oxygen-poor depths. Down and up, dive and ascent, each cycle punctuated with foul-smelling blowhole gasps at the surface. A long life and great bulk lend the bull patience, and he passes by trivial morsels in search of more substantial fare. His broad tail and heavy muscles produce a steady cruising speed. Tiny eyes little bigger than a cow’s peer through deepening blues, oriented to look down and not ahead. In the dark, that patience bears fruit: a mile down, the world’s biggest predator meets its most fearsome prey.³

The silver behemoths known as giant squid measure between 20 and 55 feet in length.⁴ Eight short arms are joined by two long, slender tentacles with paddles on the ends: like whips, they’re used for hauling prey toward a viciously sharp beak. A typical fish-market squid carries nothing but gentle suckers on its arms and tentacles, but the deep’s titans are far better armed. Some have swiveling hooks on the tips of their tentacles; others have serrated suckers like circular saws to rend flesh to ribbons.⁵ Prey, so preciously rare in the deep sea, can’t be allowed the slightest chance to escape.⁶

Our bull whale follows the same philosophy. Picture the scene: 40 tons of flesh and hot blood colliding with a 30-foot mother squid at 10 feet per second.⁷ Though she weighs only 1,000 pounds, much of that mass is pure muscle. The bull whale uses the prow of his skull as a battering ram, perhaps broadcasting a sonic boom forward from the powerful echolocation machinery in his huge head. The squid slows and deploys her arms, spreading them wide and rotating like a parasol in the dark. When they collide, the squid’s boneless body absorbs the impact. 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.

He feels her arms between his jaws and chomps down, severing two completely. Blue and red blood, from squid and whale, mingles in black water.⁸ One swipe of a club-like tentacle knocks out a tooth