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Most beautiful and mysterious to me is the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from hell. Its body is salmon colored, its eyes blue--no ordinary blue, but blue that defines the color, the first blue, the blue open eye of the sea. Once thought extinct, it can turn inside out, and hide in a cloak of itself. If one doubts the range of nature's imagination--or sense of humor--picture a Vampyroteuthis staring into a self-created darkness, 3,000 ft. below the surface, while nearer shore, an otter snacks at the top.
"I want you to meet a fish," Earle says to me. Without a submersible handy, we take the easy way and visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, directed by marine biologist Julie Packard. Her Deepness takes to the place like a five-year-old. She leads me from exhibit to exhibit, dividing her attention between my education and anyone else staring at a fish. To a girl in pigtails eyeing a flounder she says, "See? He's looking at you too!" Earle is one of those dangerous people whose buoyant charm can make people do preposterous things. At a mere signal of her hand, I find myself on all fours, crawling through the toddler entrance to the exhibit for children.
"I brought my mom here before she died, to show her what kept me going to the ocean," she says. We come to a shovelnose guitarfish, named for obvious reasons. A grouper rows by, sculling with its pectorals. We take in the synchronized swimming of sardines and the pensive patrol of a leopard shark. She points out mackerel gleaming in the light. "I have been diving in shallows like these with the moon overhead," she says. Only half kidding, she adds, "I consider them all to be holy mackerel."
She is not always the easiest person to be with, especially at meals; one loses one's appetite for fish. She can rhapsodize about an Atlantic bluefin tuna until you not only regret every piece of bluefin sushi in your life; you also begin to see the tuna her way--as the lion of the deep. "They are perfectly adapted to their environment," she says. They can travel thousands of miles, sometimes at 60 m.p.h. And they are built for speed; their fins retract into slots in their sides. She notes they are also responsible citizens that, by producing "zillions of eggs," feed other animals. It is our species' feeding that she complains about. At Tokyo fish markets a single bluefin goes for as much as $75,000. The Western Atlantic population is down to 10% of its 1970 levels.
I ask her what the attraction of her life's work is. The scientist in her is drawn to "the place where the history of life actually can be found, not in fossils but in living creatures that represent life as it has been, perhaps, from the beginning of time." The privilege of her vocation is "like having a chance to dive into your own circulatory system and swim around and see how it all fits together."
The environmentalist in her cites the interdependency of sea and land. The redwoods in the region not only collect the moisture that comes to them as fog, but they also create a suitable habitat for other life. "Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss," she says. "If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you'll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city."