SYLVIA EARLE : Call Of The Sea

Her Deepness Welcomes Us Into Her World of Wonders

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On the swampy inlet of Elkhorn Slough, we putter about with Andrew De Vogelaere from the National Marine Sanctuary in Monterey. The wetland is home to lingcod, halibut and surfperch, a plate-shaped fish that looks like its own fossil. Clams hide in the algae, using a muscular "foot" for digging, and sticking their siphon "necks" out to the world overhead. Mud-flat crabs scuttle across the shoreline. In deeper water, anchovies swim in schools like clouds of silver. All live in the tense company of thousands of birds--avocets, curlews, Caspian terns, plover, brown pelicans, herons, sandpipers, killdeer. Dowitchers use their beaks to tweeze snails out of the mud. Otters are in otter heaven. One catches me admiring as it munches on a clam and registers its absurd annoyance before diving away.

About 200 harbor seals sleep in the slough in the daytime and dine in Monterey Bay at night. Sea lions bark with their Harpo's horns, and bask in the mud flats. They look like giant seedpods with innocent faces. De Vogelaere tells us that the enormous snub-trunked elephant seals are returning to Big Sur. Two were brought in at the start. Now there are 4,000.

"They've taken over Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco," he says.

"It's justice," Earle says with a smile. "They were here first."

The next day Earle, Joanne Flanders from the marine sanctuary, William Douros, superintendent of the sanctuary, and I go out five miles to Monterey Canyon. We catch sight of humpback whales, including a mother and baby, moving along like dark, partly surfaced subs and feeding on dense and frantic krill, tiny crustaceans. The humpback grows to a length of 45 ft. Its head is a flat shelf; two fins extend below the body at the eyes. One whale swims close to the boat and does a flamboyant in-your-face with its fluked tail before descending. When a whale goes under, it leaves a "print," a large oval of water on the surface, calm as cellophane.

Dolphins go by in motorcycle-gang formation at a distance from the boat. Three of them break away from the others to get a closer look at us, and find nothing worth seeing. Dolphins have individual signature whistles. Orcas click in distinctive dialects. The humpbacks we see make no sound for us, but their complex songs are said to cover the key range of a piano.

Out here in open waters are larvaceans that weave their mucous nets in the shape of human heads, comb jellies, barrel-shaped salps and 30-ft.-long siphonophores, close relatives of the Portuguese man-of-war. Without advanced nervous systems, brains, eyes, all these creatures are nonetheless resourceful and self-sufficient, able to hunt and defend themselves. Some exist in chains of organisms, their lines free yet connected, like Saul Steinberg drawings. They feed by using tentacles or their mucous nets and drift along in undreamed-of forms--now a bracelet of liquid diamonds, now a neon trapeze, now a clown's ruffle, now a bishop's hat that can collapse itself when it needs to kill.

Here too are the suckers, the cephalopods--chambered nautilus, cuttlefish, octopus and squid. They communicate with light and color, and they can make art of reproduction; the squids create egg cases in the shape of white translucent fingers.

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