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.”
Today it sounds almost unimaginable: A 325,000 kilowatt nuclear plant looming upon majestic Bodega Head, within a quarter-mile of the restless San Andreas Fault. An emissions shaft belching steam. Heated water spewing into the Pacific. Electrical cables draped from steel towers along Doran Beach. Six decades ago this seemed the inevitable fate of Bodega Bay, then a remote fishing port with more seabirds than citizens. What stopped PG&E’s plan for an “Atomic Park” was an unlikely band of citizens-turned-activists who became known as the Hole in the Head Gang.
Thirty years ago, on assignment for a national women’s magazine, I visited Bodega Bay for the first time to interview the parents of Nicholas Green, a seven-year-old boy who became an international hero and unofficial patron saint of organ donation.
“Piccolo Nicola” (little Nicholas), as Italians call him, was killed by bandits’ gunfire as his family drove through southern Italy in the autumn of 1994. In their darkest hour, Reginald and Maggie Green donated his organs, saving or transforming the lives of seven Italians.
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.
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.
The beach attracts creatures of every sort: two-footed, four-pawed, finned, furry, feathered, scaly, slimy, slithering. With local animal trackers, I’ve trailed rabbits and raccoons, geese and gulls, deer and otters to observe how they “do beach.” But I never thought of looking at humans in the same way.
In The Blob, a 1958 horror movie, a gelatinous people-eating alien terrified a small town as it devoured residents and grew bigger, redder and more voracious. The film became a drive-in favorite and a sci-fi cult classic. More than half a century later the entire West Coast of North America faced a very real and even more dangerous Blob. In the winter of 2013/2014 a “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” of high pressure, as meteorologists described it, clamped over the north Pacific like a lid, stalling winds and blocking storms. Warmer-than-normal waters spread, eventually covering about 3.5 million square miles from Alaska to Mexico—an area larger than the contiguous United States.
Blame it on the Lewis’ moon snail. From my first training session with the Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods, veteran tidepoolers regaled me with evocative descriptions of a luminous, majestic sea snail, famed for its architectural wonder of a shell–and named for the famed explorer Meriwether Lewis (as in Lewis and Clark). Guided by a biological blueprint encoded in its genes, the largest of moon snails constructs spiral upon spiral of calcium carbonate and other organic compounds. At the center of these swirls, a dark apex gleams like an all-seeing eye.
