Tales From the Sargasso Sea
Lines of sargassum in the Sargasso Sea. Photo: NOAA.
When we step into the music… creation can sing free.
— Murray Kyle
Growing up in Athens, Greece I remember vividly the fascination my high school classmates and I shared about “the Bermuda Triangle.” In hushed tones, we spoke about this mysterious remote region where ships and airplanes—if they made the grave error of wandering into or over it—would disappear. Rumor had it that they would disappear without a traceas though swallowed whole in some preternatural dimension. While we empathized with the awful fate of the people involved, we were morbidly fascinated that there was a place on Earth so forbidding and foreboding to enter.
It was not until decades later, when I read Rachel Carson’s The Sea All Around Us, that I learned about the Sargasso Sea. It took a little more delving into to connect the dots—that the Sargasso Sea was essentially none other than “the Bermuda Triangle.” It also turns out that the Sargasso was shrouded in lore centuries before inspiring the legendary Bermuda Triangle. At least since the voyage of Christopher Columbus seafarers told hair-raising stories about crews stranded in the windless swamp of the Sargasso Sea, trapped in its Tolkienesque snaky twine.
Ironically, what sailors feared back then was a golden seaweed forest, brimming with life, on the surface waters of the North Atlantic. The Sargasso Sea is a floating ecosystem composed of two species of golden brown Sargassum seaweed, one with delicate fine leaves, another with broader lanceolate leaves. The beauty of this seaweed symbiosis, we might conjecture, is that two species co-create a more intricately woven terrain than one alone would have composed. The seaweed platform forms the base of the Sargasso ecosystem, the functional equivalent (on land) of a soil-plus-plant composite.
An expanse of seaweed-laced rafts covering some 2 million square miles, it floats part over part sunken into the Atlantic, resembling a “drowned meadow” in the words of 19th-century ocean geographer Matthew Maury. A rich ensemble of lifeforms swirl around it—above it, on it, in it, below it, and underneath it in seamount and seabed depths. The Sargasso is permanent home for many species and critical crossroads for countless others to feed, breed, spawn, and find respite and protection.
Unlike all other seas, the Sargasso is not bound by land but by open seawater, and more specifically by four clockwise moving ocean currents that encircle it along the cardinal directions. It is named after its most pervasive lifeform, the free-floating Sargassum seaweeds. Its seaweed species are the only ones that are “holopelagic,” meaning they reproduce vegetatively on the high seas. (Seaweeds generally reproduce on the sea floor.) This peculiarity of the Sargassum is a first hint that the Sargasso Sea has been around for a long time—long enough for a new seaweed reproductive strategy to appear, be favored (by natural selection), and become established.
The Sargasso is a spectacular habitat with ten known endemic (found nowhere else) species—including crab, anemone, fish, slug, snail, and shrimp—plus many others that visit. It is nursing ground for fish, refuge of sea turtles, stopover for pelagic species like sharks, rays, tuna, swordfish, and marlin, destination of whales and dolphins, open water terrain for seabirds, and the main breeding ground of the endangered eels of North America, Europe, and Africa.
It is not only the eels who are endangered and mostly gone. It is also the sea turtles, seabirds, cetaceans, and fish of the global ocean. All marine biodiversity and habitats are depleted and degraded. The Sargasso eels, sea turtles, sharks and others are endangered by industrial fishing, plastic and PCB pollution, shipping, and now Sargassum “harvesting” (for fertilizer and cattle feed).
A hallmark of mass extinction events is multiple threats to species. The multiple threats impacting lifeforms in our time is both cause and indicator that a human-driven mass extinction is underway. The vast majority of endangered species today are subject to more than one threat. Conservation scientists call this the one-two (three-four) punch. The toughest fighters are brought down with that kind of beating. The healthiest and hardiest species in existence cannot withstand compounded hits.
“The Sargasso Sea,” wrote Carson, “is so different from any other place on Earth that it may be considered a definite geographical region.” The Sargasso is so stunning that it should be treasured, protected, and taught about as an Earth Heritage. Instead, we inhabit a so-called civilization that knows nothing about it and has turned it into a plastic-filled garbage patch. “Remote regions of the ocean,” writes marine biologist Callum Roberts, “like the Sargasso Sea and Northeast Pacific, have become slowly rotating graveyards of plastic junk, some of it decades old.” Adding insult to injury (another habit of modern civilization), the Sargasso is now being ogled for its “resources,” the seaweed it is made of and minable materials that lie in depths beneath.
The seaweed brocaded Sargasso Sea is a quintessential ecotone, meaning a liminal ecosystem composed by colliding, meshing ecologies. It comprises a unique autopoietic (self-making) ensemble of lifeforms while also maintaining a singular physical environment of temperature and salinity ranges. The Sargasso is a bricolage of earthy and watery elements, a bridge between terrestrial and marine lifeforms as well as between surface and deep-sea life. It is a gigantic self-creating dynamic weave of species, elements, and processes. Both horizontal and vertical ecotone, it offers permanent residence for some lifeforms and migratory corridor for others. The Sargasso bridges livelihoods of land and marine organisms while shedding nutrients for critters of the depths and hosting deep-sea species that ascend and descend in diurnal-nocturnal rhythms.
The Sargasso seaweed offers habitat for countless animals and the animals provide essential nutrients to the seaweed. Flying fish build their bubble nests among the Sargasso’s fronds in lovely mimicry of the seaweed “berries.” Juvenile sea turtles live out many years on this protective zone until they are old enough to venture into the open sea and back to shores they came from. Marlin spawn on the Sargasso. Pregnant sharks apparently frequent the Sargasso enough that scientists suspect it may be nursery for many shark species. Swordfish migrate vertically from ocean depths up into its free-floating “roots.” Thirty species of whales and dolphins have been spotted at the Sargasso Sea including the migratory Humpback Whale and the majestic Sperm Whale. Twenty-six species of seabirds have been identified foraging there.
Such rich biodiversity is still extant on this now polluted ecosystem. The still-living Sargasso Sea also floats upon a severely life-depleted ocean and is in imminent danger of being harvested, of the seamounts below it being trawled to smithereens, of the seabed under it being scoured by deep-sea mining. Yet still so much life is there, still there is time to honor it! We can only imagine what exuberance of life the Sargasso once was when sailors trembled at the thought of it, and even into the 1970s when in my teenage brain it loomed large as a paranormal swamp swallowing into nothingness those reckless enough to broach it.
Wherever we turn our eyes on this planet, perhaps most vividly in quixotic places like the Sargasso, we are haunted by the question: What will it take for humanity to awaken to the grandeur of our home in the universe? Do we imagine that a place such as “the Bermuda Triangle” is stranger, or a greater mystery, than the one-without-a-second—in the universe—Sargasso Sea?
The Sargasso is ancient enough that its Sargassum seaweeds evolved to reproduce upon the sea itself. It has been around long enough that numerous new species have evolved to inhabit its briny and warmish plateau. According to Carson, again, “Curious things happened to the animals,” who hailing from some distant shore “have ridden on the Sargassum weed to a new home.” Now, in the middle of the ocean stranded on a squishy raft, they face unprecedented challenges and an unknown world. Some of these originally earthbound species developed organs of attachment to the Sargasso, whether for their own bodies or for their eggs. Marine creatures also took advantage of this ecotone by evolving adaptations to it, like the aforementioned flying fish making nests for their eggs camouflaged in the seaweed.
What scientists call mimicry is a regular feature of the Sargasso. For example, its endemic sea slug, “a snail without a shell” writes Carson, is outfitted with a body shape and color that is virtually indistinguishable from the vegetation. The Sargassum Angler Fish, a carnivorous species, evolved an appearance well matched to seaweed fronds, berries, and color, and sports modified fins fit for steering amongst the leaves. With its stealth gear, the Angler Fish makes a fine meal of all but the most attentive.
It seems unquestionably true, as a blockbuster one-liner famously put it, that life finds a way. But when it comes to participating in the evolutionary game, life finds a way if it has grace of time.
Carson was enthralled by the forms of mimicry on the Sargasso, of camouflage and appendages that tipped the scales in favor of survival. “All these elaborate bits of mimicry,” she wrote, “are indications of the fierce internecine wars of the Sargasso jungles, which go on without quarter and without mercy for the weak and the unwary.”
The three-dimensional Sargasso ecotone is home, destination, and nutrient provider for life from land, air, ocean, and seabed. Plants and animals shorn off shorelines, who somehow survive (or survived) the ocean ride literally encounter an oasis if they reach the Sargasso Sea. “In the calm of the Sargasso,” Carson noted, “there is virtual immortality.” Plants, she specified, may live there “some for decades, others for centuries.” Writing in the mid-twentieth century Carson observed that seafarers coming upon the Sargasso might encounter the same plants that Columbus encountered when he stumbled on it centuries before.
Here, a question may have arisen in the reader’s mind as it did in mine: What best describes the Sargasso Sea—internecine wars or virtual immortality? Neither/nor? Both/and? The best description is what reads true for all life: It is an exquisite weave of co-arising interdependent coexistence. Inside that coexistence, “wars,” “immortality,” and uncountable other phenomena, encounters, and events transpire.
Indeed Sargasso’s biodiversity crossroads—including plants, mammals, seabirds, reptiles, fish, and invertebrates (not to say single-celled life)—belies the fatuous notion of nature red-in-tooth-and-claw. If a slogan for nature might suffice, it is nature rich-in-diversity-and-abundance. There is no war of all against all out there, nor (for crying aloud) does carnivory signal nature’s inherent “injustice.” It may or may not come as a surprise to you, reader, that certain transhumanists regard predation with horror, and they aspire to replace nature with a made-by-science-and-technology machinic world in which nature’s blatant “wrong-doings” will be superseded.
“Life is vicious,” transhumanist Zoltan Istvan tells us. “I don’t believe in evil, per se,” he continues, “but if there was such a thing, it would be nature—a monster of arbitrary living entities consuming and devouring each other simply to survive.” Then the digital cherry on the silicon cake: “It’s time to use science and technology to create something better than an environment of biological nature.” Transhumanists are apex human supremacists who believe that the pinnacle of existence (Mangod) is so supreme by comparison to all nature as to have minted the ideal of justice—an ideal now to be enforced by replacing predators and biological nature with lab engineered, “far more moral and humanitarian” simulacra. In their much anticipated (forever “on the verge” of emerging) technological utopia, transhumanists will also achieve, they keep telling themselves, their main objective: Immortality, in cyborgian bodies and in the Cloud. “Transhumanists,” says Istvan, “are outraged at the fact that their bodies age and are destined to die.” Biology is to blame—technology will show it.
It never seems to have occurred to the techno-evangelists of the immortal realm of the Human Reich that death is not so terrifying a thing when you turn to face the fear of it—instead of confabulating nonsense to defy it and hiding from the fear. As for the vilification of predation as unjust, this is unconscionable messaging in our time abounding with predator haters (on the one hand) and Woke liberators (on the other). Being reviled as a threat to livestock and also labelled unjust—that’s a one-two punch predators do not deserve. Let us be crystal clear: Predators are glorious, beautiful, and innocent, every single one. Predation has made world-Earth green and blue, it has perfected life by sharpening senses, tuning minds, and honing awareness, by building stealth, strength, and fleetingness of foot, fin, and wing, by dyeing the world in camouflage and warning colors (more colors than the human eye can see), by creating a planet brimming with beauty.
If existence were all about war and injustice, life (what was left of it) would display a centrifugal impulse, as cosmic dread and terror propelled lifeforms apart from one another. The opposite is the case: Life is centripetal in nature, critters are inveterately drawn to each other like proverbial bees to honey. On the Serengeti and other plains on Earth, carnivores and herbivores hang out well within range of each other’s senses and awareness. On topic, I remember footage in an animal documentary showing a bunch of seals swimming slowly (very cautiously) just behind their primary predator, a languidly moving Great White Shark. What a splendid image of the nature of life—brave but alert, wary yet audacious, always inquisitive.
Like everywhere on this planet, on the Sargasso life is attracted to life, electrified by curiosity, loving to feed life’s mirror neurons, ever in search of eating, mating, communicating, puttering around, resting, and playing. Among the sharks that visit the Sargasso are the porbeagle sharks. Porbeagles are distinguished among their kind for liking to play. Perhaps porbeagle sharks frequent the Sargasso because it’s the best playground in the Atlantic.
Even in Carson’s day it was known that the amount of Sargassum seaweed of the eponymous sea was so huge it must have taken “eons of time to accumulate.” Eons of time it must have been, because eons of time is what evolution needs, and evolution has been at work on this ecotone. The lesson of time—of luxury of time to grow ancient—is another Earth tale from the Sargasso. Left free to be what they are and become as they may, ecosystems such as forests, lakes, seamounts, and grasslands, such as the Sargasso Sea, can endure and evolve over long spans of time. Freedom to grow old has oft been a prerogative of beings and places on this planet. But human supremacy has cut nonhuman lifespans short, adding to its cumulative evil one more freedom it’s stolen from the world.
Sources
Barnosky, Anthony et al. (2011). Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived? Nature 471: 51-57.
Carson, Rachel (1951). The Sea All Around Us. Oxford University Press.
Ceballos, Gerardo, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich (2015). The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Istvan, Zoltan (2019). Environmentalists are Wrong: Nature Isn’t Sacred and we should Replace it. Medium. https://zoltanistvan.medium.com/environmentalists-are-wrong-nature-isnt-sacred-and-we-should-replace-it-b5a0de6444cb
Laffoley D.d’A (2011). The Protection and Management of the Sargasso Sea: The golden floating rainforest of the Atlantic Ocean. Summary Science and Supporting Evidence Case. Sargasso Sea Alliance. 44p. https://www.sargassoseacommission.org/storage/documents/Sargasso.Report.9.12.pdf
Pauly, Daniel (2019). Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries. Greystone Books.
Roberts, Callum (2012). The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. New York: Penguin Books.
Sargasso Sea Commission. https://www.sargassoseacommission.org/sargasso-sea
This essay first appeared on The Ecological Citizen.
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