In the 1950s, at the age of five, I began visiting the seaside on annual vacations with my family. I bodysurfed the waves, worried about what might pinch or bite my toes underwater, sidestepped the jellyfish, lay in the sun and, in the evenings, rode on the amusement park rides and ate fast food and ice cream. The location was Atlantic City, New Jersey, but it could have been any number of ocean resorts on either side of the Atlantic or the Pacific.
More than anything else, the fresh salt-air smell of the Atlantic Ocean as my family neared the coast year after year, traveling several hundred miles from our inland home, led me to make a firm resolve that when I became an adult, I would never live farther than a fresh ocean breeze and a seagull’s cry from the coast. For nearly all of the 40 some years since I left home, I have kept that resolve, living variously along the east and west coasts of Canada and the United States and in Scotland and England. During this time, my relationship to the sea has deepened. When I wasn’t living and working in some coastal community, I was out on the sea on one of many expeditions to study whales and dolphins in Canada, Russia and Japan. There have been a variety of oceanography expeditions, such as an invigorating winter cruise of the Norwegian-Greenland Sea one March when, day after day, we had to break through meter-thick ice. I once calculated that I had happily endured a total of at least 30 months at sea since that first summer studying killer whales off northern Vancouver Island in my early 20s.
I have traveled far from my childhood days at the seaside when I would dodge the jellyfish and worry about pinching crabs or biting fish. Instead, I seek out the pinchers, the biters and, for that matter, the stingers—although, of course, most sea creatures pose no harm at all to humans. I do have my favorites, and I try not to judge them as bad or good on the basis of whether they are capable of causing nagging or severe pain to humans and even death. Causing harm to the environment is a different story. Jellyfish are diverse in their own little narrow planktonic world; they have their own supporters. In their own jellyfish way, they can be wildly exotic or gaudily beautiful. Lone jellyfish floating through the gloom of the mesopelagic or deep seas are beacons of light and life. But jellyfish in large numbers choking the sea are, more than any other group of marine animals, visible indications of problems—red warning flags of serious trouble.
One of my great pleasures these days is a pocket field guide to 20,000 known deep-sea species, which I carry with me everywhere. Containing the equivalent of thousands of pages, it is not a book but an off-line phone app called Deep Sea ID, developed by London’s Natural History Museum. It’s based on the World Register of Deep-Sea Species (WoRDSS), which is, in turn, part of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) built by the Census of Marine Life.
Deep Sea ID puts the deep sea in your pocket—a handy version of the Encyclopedia of Life that focuses on the deep. It is mainly a resource for researchers working in the field, lab workers who need fast access to taxonomic information and amateur enthusiasts, but anyone can use it. By its very nature, this free app will need constant updating, but even a dramatic expansion in the number of ocean species will still be accessible from a single app on a phone.
Looking more closely at the vast number of species represented in Deep Sea ID, I am astonished by how few have been photographed. At present, only 350 high-resolution photographs depict individual species. The 20,000 Deep Sea ID entries feature taxonomic information and are neatly classified in evolutionary trees, but many lack complete profiles—not only is there a dearth of photos or illustrations, but there are no common names or specific data that would enable deep-sea enthusiasts who are not also deep-sea specialists to appreciate what they are reading. Such is the adventure of living on the frontiers of knowledge!
Turning to the jellyfish pages of Deep Sea ID, I marvel at this creature’s delicate beauty, its diaphanous membrane, its elegant though sometimes deadly tentacles (that feature which can be deeply alluring to curious predators) and its passive yet ominous lie-in-wait hunting strategy. But I stop to reflect. The range of species included is not great in the totality of the deep sea; it’s a sliver of what’s on offer. But what if these were the only pages in my app? What if all the nonjellyfish pages simply said “Critically Endangered” or “Extinct” and were essentially of historical interest as records of an ocean that once was?
Researcher Lisa-ann Gershwin has spent a long time thinking and writing about jellyfish and the current state of the sea. As one of a handful of world jellyfish experts, she is in an unusual position: Gershwin is working with a marine species that is clearly in its ascendancy. Unlike a beaked whale specialist who must travel far out to sea for weeks or months at a time, exercising great patience in the hope that his species appears, or a colossal-squid authority who may never have seen her subject in the wild, Gershwin doesn’t have to look far when she goes to work. And she will never be out of work. But she doesn’t see just jellyfish. Every day in the field, Gershwin notes the evidence of human impact on the sea, from local overfishing to global warming at the largest scale. In her book Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, she paints a picture of wide expanses of the ocean “flipping” to a jellyfish-dominated ecosystem.