Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

My apologies to someone for not remembering what blog I saw this Russian diving forum linked from, but the deep sea fish that the tsunami has tossed onto the beaches (click for the real story) are pretty freaky, and they're just the common ones — this is “normal”, in relative terms.

You know how they say that the rainforest is full of hundreds of thousands of species of plant and animal that we haven't even identified yet? The deep ocean environment pushes that even farther — it contains entire classes of life that we've barely seen the tip of the iceberg of, everything from bizarre creatures that live on the volcanic vent ecosystems to immense beasts with unrecognizable anatomies lurking below — as Melville put it, “calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive.”

While I do watch with great excitement mankind's exploration of Titan, and am keeping my fingers crossed that in its methane oceans we find another world of gliding monsters, there are worlds of life on our own planet that we fragile and short-sighted land dwellers are blind to. Here where I live, on the Sea of Cortez, deep chasms of alien life extend into the bowels of the ocean, and storms, while rare, expel prehistoric eels thirty feet in length from caves miles below — to say nothing of the kraken, or as fishermen here call it, el Rojo Diablo. The Red Demon.

Photos: Scott Cassel

As large as seven hundred pounds in weight and three times as long as a man, they grab ahold of swimmers and divers with strength no human can overcome, dragging them into the depths, shredding them in seconds to bloody pulp with their twenty-five thousand teeth. Divers here often operate wearing armor and attached to their boats with steel cable to avoid this watery demise.

That said, it's better that than a safe, dead ocean. The whales will be alright.

"They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent."
                    - D.H. Lawrence, Whales Weep Not