INK ARIA

THE MARVELS AND MYSTERIES OF SEA CREATURES AND MORE

Renee Gehman

Iwas never really interested in science at school. All I remember from my high school physics class is that each table was named for a Greek letter, and I sat at the Delta Table. Also, three of my friends and I nicknamed ourselves Force, Action, Reaction, and Acceleration, after factors in the law of inertia, for no reason except that there were four of us and four factors labeled in an illustration we were shown of the law.

This, of course, is a much more absurd and embarrassing memory than the Delta Table, so I will hereby cease reminiscing, lest anything more damaging to my reputation should come to mind. The point is: little of my science education is now accessible in my memory.

Yet when it comes to some of the intricacies of created things, I find that many organisms and behaviors and processes strike me as so incredible that my pondering of them becomes almost obsessive. And the more I ponder them, the more baffling they often become, until I am left stilled with awe, or restless with anxiety, or alternating between the two.

Take the venus fly trap: a plant that eats flies. Or the periodical cicada, some species of which hibernate seventeen years at a time between wakeful, year-long seasons of breeding. Or a plant for which I only know the Vietnamese name, which translates as "embarrassed plant"—a very small, feathery-looking type of fern that closes up into a straight line the second you touch it. (If you watch the movie "Rescue Dawn," about American prisoners in the Vietnam War, there is about a five-second segment toward the end where you can see one of the characters silently encounter this plant and its personal space issues.)

Then there are animal stories I hear in the news. Gana the gorilla in a German zoo, who for six days carried around the body of a three-month-old son who had died of heart failure in her arms. Or "Colin" the orphaned humpback whale in Australia who attempted to nurse from the bottoms of large boats. Or Owen, a baby hippo from Kenya who lost his family as a result of the December 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia, then adopted a 130-year-old loner of a tortoise named Mzee as the main parental figure and friend in his life.

Usually my experiences of amazement at creation unfold reasonably far apart, but I recently found myself bombarded with them as my classroom of three-year-olds and I discussed various creatures of the sea during our themed "Ocean Week." And as we talked about ocean inhabitants together, the children started to really express enthusiasm for the topic. I started to really wonder about what God could have had in mind with some of these creatures. . . .

There is the sponge, which is amazing to me simply for the fact that it qualifies as an animal, even without having any eyes, hands, feet, heart, or brain. There is the fascinating relationship of the sea anemone and the clown fish: The sea anemone has stinging tentacles it uses to catch fish for food, but clown fish are immune to these tentacles. So the clown fish can actually hide from predators among the sea anemone’s tentacles, and while in hiding, it returns the favor by cleaning the anemone’s tentacles for it.

There is the oyster. All it looks like to me is a shapeless blob in a shell, but it secretes a liquid when a grain of sand or other irritant gets into its shell. It secretes layer upon layer around the dirt, gradually reducing the irritation factor—until finally what remains is a single beautiful pearl.

Seahorses, which mate for life, are perhaps most intriguing for their gender role reversals. The female seahorse shoots her eggs into the male’s pouch, and it is the male who carries the fetuses to term, thus, in effect, giving birth to his own babies.

The mahi mahi, also known as the dolphin fish, is one of the most sought-after prizes of many fishing enthusiasts, largely because of the wonder of reeling one in. As it fights a losing battle for its life, the mahi mahi changes colors, switching from bright greens to blues to golds, showcasing its full glory not in the moment of greatest physical well-being, but rather as its very end is upon it.

The list goes on, but I have enough questions for just these examples. Why a sponge, for instance. Why a porous lump of something you can barely even observe as living that absorbs lots of water? Why an anemone with stinging tentacles, and why a fish that is immune to them? Why a beautiful pearl that results from the intrusion of an irritating piece of dirt? Why, when the female of other animals carry and bear their young, a male seahorse carrying his to term? And why a fish that gloriously changes colors as it dies?

"For as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so will my word be which goes forth from my mouth," Isaiah hears God saying, "it will not return to me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it" (Isa. 55: 10-11).

I cannot bring myself to accept that, having said this, God’s detail work in often seemingly insignificant organisms means nothing of great consequence. I prefer to think that maybe God speaks as much in an oyster’s process of producing a pearl as in a sermon or an act of kindness.

I offer no theoretical explanations for how God creates, or to what extent the process involves or excludes evolution. At this point it seems enough for me to marvel, and to ponder over the mysteries and meanings behind the marvelous. And I find that thoughtful consideration of the intricacies of God’s creation helps to deepen my reverence for the one who would think up these things.

—Renee Gehman, Souderton, Pennsylvania, is assistant editor, Dreamseeker Magazine, and a meditator on amazing creatures.