A lioness licking her cub. An elephant twining its truck around her calf. A polar bear nuzzling its pup. These heartwarming images remind us that wild animals can be doting mothers, much like us. But in coastal waters, where survival depends on timing, camouflage and luck, motherhood takes extraordinary forms.
Years ago I learned to sail by the wind on a 26-foot sloop in San Francisco Bay. After the initial terror, I came to relish the exhilaration of skimming across the water, rocketed by gusts and tugged by currents. At times I’d imagine endlessly drifting on the open sea with the sun and the stars as my only companions.
Velella velella (from the Latin for “veil”), commonly known as “by-the-wind sailors,” live this fantasy. Ancient mariners found in oceans around the world, they have no need for seaworthy vessels. They are shaped like exquisite toy sailboats.
“Do you know what whale breath smells like?”
Our captain doesn’t wait for a reply.
“Rotten broccoli!” he bellows as a humpback spouts a few yards from our boat.
Awed by its size and unexpected stench, I almost forget that these majestic giants are, like us, air-breathing, warm-blooded, baby-nursing mammals. But unlike us, some whales have bodies as long as two school buses, tongues that weigh as much as an elephant and hearts the size of a small car, with an aorta (main artery) wide enough for a human to slide through.
They appear like mirages in the dark of winter, burst into full-throated glory in Spring and fade away with the summer sun. Vernal ponds remind me of Brigadoon, the Scottish village in the classic musical that comes to life for one day every hundred years. The first time I came upon a gleaming pond in a field that had been dry just weeks before, I was as stunned as if a bag-pipe-playing Highlander had suddenly materialized.
As a little girl watching a Blue Planet video, Madeline Frey dreamed of becoming a scientist and discovering a never-before-known animal.
“I wanted to find what no one else had looked at before,” she recalls, “to study what no one else had.”a nice post-turkey-day surprise.
Frey didn’t expect to identify eleven new species by age 20 — nor did she imagine that they would be slippery, slimy, alien-looking ribbon worms at the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve on the Northern California coast.
Fire up your imagination, and buckle your seat belt. Archaeologist Breck Parkman is sweeping us back 18,000 years to the peak of the last Ice Age.
Deep winter had frozen so much ocean water into glaciers that sea levels dropped by 400 feet. The “California Serengeti,” as Parkman christened it, stretched from Monterey to Mendocino. This vast fertile plain, thatched with grasses and tree-lined streams, “was probably the most spectacular place in the world for wildlife. Think of thousands of animals moving together, living together, feeding together, sometimes feeding on each other. It would have blown our minds.”
Never mind spooky ghosts and goblins. Far scarier creatures are prowling along the Northern California coast. During Sharktober, a season that extends from September to November, great white sharks, the largest predatory fish on the planet, are on the hunt.
As I swerve along California’s Route 1, a small brown rodent darts across the road. Looking up, I hear a piercing shriek and see a broad-winged bird hurtling from on high. A few feet above my open-top convertible, the avian assassin, talons outstretched, tail fanned and beak gaping, brakes to a mid-air stop, flounces its feathers and jets back to the heavens. I watch, utterly enraptured.
They were the aquatic beauties of the Northern California coast: ochre sea stars in jewel-bright colors, web-winged bat stars and the spectacular sunflower sea star that reigned as the Beyoncé of the breed. Bigger, brighter, bolder and hungrier than other species, these voracious prowlers could unfurl as many as two dozen arms, rocket across the ocean floor and devour a purple sea urchin in a blink. As an apex predator, the Pycnopodia helianthoides–sometimes dubbed the Death Star– feared none and was feared by all.
“So you’re an ecologist?” a doctoral student on a field trip asks.
“No, I’m not a scientist,” I hastily reply. “I’m just trying to get to know my neighborhood.”
With a patient smile, she informs me that “ecology” comes from the Greek words for “study of” and “home” or “place to live.” By this simple definition, I qualify–as, at the least, an accidental ecologist.
