Sunlight penetrates the surface of the ocean to a depth of about 150 meters. Below that point darkness intensifies. At extreme depths, more than 10,000 meters beneath the surface, utter lightlessness, crushing pressure, and what early oceanographer William Beebe called "cosmic cold" hold sway. Inhospitable as this abyss appears, it seethes with life. Virgil called the entrance to Avernus and the underworld "the birdless place," but the ocean deeps, where photosynthesis is impossible, are plantless places. This realm of pitch-black water, towering reefs, and submarine stalagmites is illumined only fitfully by the cool flashes of luminescence generated by its inhabitants, the most bizarre life-forms on our planet. It's a realm where fantastic beauty seems indistinguishable from dread.
Now, in Claire Nouvian's "The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss" ( University of Chicago, 256 pages, $45), the fanged and frilly denizens of primordial darkness are presented in their full splendor. Each squid, jellyfish, and deepsea worm is posed in all its baroque extravagance against a stark black background, occupying a full or double-page spread. The effect is startling, like a series of underwater mug shots crafted by Fabergé. Ms. Nouvian is a journalist and filmmaker who became entranced with abyssal life after a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She has enlisted 15 scientists from such research institutes as the Smithsonian, Woods Hole, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium itself, to contribute brief but lively reports on everything from "sharks of the dark" to methane seeps and hydrothermal vents. There is a handy depth chart keyed to each image, a glossary, a page of interesting oceanic statistics, and a good bibliography. Good as the texts and aids are, the images carry the book; they are simply spectacular.
Despite the gloom where they dwell, these creatures are not just gaudy but downright lurid. Neon blues clash with blast-furnace reds, carnation pinks line up with bruised purples; some, like the Cockatoo Squid, have jaunty polka dots which not only glow but pivot to confuse predators. Others sport pastel tufts of tentacles or brick-red arms barbed with rotating white hooks. Some, like the lovely black medusa jellyfish, are virtually invisible, though certain squid have developed polarized eyes to spot better the least glint of their translucency.
In the deep, the shape of creatures becomes as exaggerated as their coloration. Immense pressure flattens, elongates, and contorts fins and eyes and mouths. As one contributor remarks, "At 4000 m depth, the pressure exerted by water on a body is equivalent to a cow standing on one's thumbnail."
The black devil anglerfish, which waits for prey at 3,500 meters down, resembles a gape made visible, with needlelike teeth beneath a teasing lure and an abbreviated body trailing after like a crumpled caboose. This is the female of the species: The tiny male spends his life dangling from her belly, only to be eventually absorbed into her tissues. By contrast, the giant siphonophore, which, at 50 meters in length is "the largest invertebrate on the planet" (and longer than the blue whale), is little more than a tube studded with phosphorescence, like a runway. So far down, oxygen is scarce. One delightful squid — unfairly labeled "Vampyroteuthis infernalis" or "vampire squid from hell" by early oceanographers — has a special blood pigment which enables it to extract oxygen at depths where it's almost unavailable. With its sapphire-blue and unusually soulful eyes fringed with petal-like fringes and its crimson skin exquisitely patterned with small white dots, the vampire squid, on the evidence of its portrait here, should file for a name-change.
The Vampire Squid appears in several portraits in Ms. Nouvian's book; it's clearly a favorite, and rightly so. But the oceanic abyss, she tells us, where the greatest concentration of the biomass is to be found, may house as many as 30 million species, most as yet unknown. Life on dry land, our life, is but a fraction of that profusion. More sobering still, the deep is a world reversed. There darkness is the norm. Light is a subterfuge, used to decoy, entrap, and camouflage. We think of light as emblematic of truth and clarity but down there it serves to deceive or lure, and every abyssal creature has evolved some luminous stratagem for survival.
The array of these extravagant creatures challenges our preconceptions. They are beautiful and yet their beauty is blobby, gelatinous, and garish. In their extremes many not only defy the principle of bilateral symmetry but caricature it. The more fearsome prompt uneasy theological considerations as well. When God answered Job out of the whirlwind, He harangued him by asking, "Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?" It's probably just as well that Job hadn't searched the depths. An encounter with the fangtooth or the giant squid — all 18 scooting meters of it, caught in a stunning photo here — might have made him kvetch more mightily. A search of the deep could have convinced him that, as Herman Melville put it, however benign the cosmos may look, "the invisible spheres were formed in fright."
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