Dancing with Demons
Posted By Scott Cassell on 15 December 2005
As I enter the plankton cloud overhead the attacks lessen. The fact that Humboldt squid are visual predators can be a good thing in low vis! “HA! Can’t see me-cant get me!” I think to myself, realizing I have pain in my chest and wrist. Upon examination, blood leaks from my wetsuit, covering my wrist. The squid bit me through the chain mail between the fiberglass panels. Even though his beak couldn’t actually cut me, it was able to engulf half my wrist in its huge beak and crush-pinch the tissue like a vice.
The meeting of a lifetime that just occurred was not free. I obviously had to pay the toll.
But at 200 feet deep, I’m not safe yet.
LIGHT AND DARKNESS
After a slow ascent through the cloud, I enter clear water again but no light. The sun has gone down. As I reach my first decompression stop I enter a huge school of sardines, so I turn my lights off to watch the show. In the dark I can see each tiny fish create its own tube of blue-green bioluminescence as it moves through the water. The mass of sardines generates a cloud of light like nothing I have ever seen. My visibility range is about quarter that of a football field and it is full of this light cloud. Streaks of light follow each fish in pulses of blue-green, making complex patterns of unified beauty.
Only moments have passed when yet another life and death struggle ensues. The giant illuminated cloud of sardines is being stalked by a shoal of Humboldt squid. I can see the shoal rise from the deep. Making large disturbances of bioluminescence themselves, the squid are illuminated enough to clearly make out chromatophore changes. In the dim bio light their colors look different. Red is pitch black and white is the blue-green of the bio light. Visions from another world.
The great cephalopods charge into the school with precision and speed that no schooling fish could hope to escape. “Are these the same animals I just escaped from?” I wondered. “Did they follow me?” Again the squid’s behavior is completely different. Now they patrol the perimeter of the massive school of sardines now pulling tighter in defense. Suddenly, at the exact same instant several squid snap into stunning acceleration directly into the cloud and out of my sight. Each acceleration creates a light tube that was far brighter than the tiny sardines could stimulate. Seconds later the squid emerge with their arms fat with sardines, and hover around the perimeter, eating their entrapped prey. They completely ignore me except for the occasional slow pass.
Scientifically, this event is an autotrophic demonstration unlike any I have witnessed. Phytoplanktons utilize the nutrients in the water and harness the sun’s energy, zooplanktons consume them; sardines prey on zooplankton and the Humboldt squid prey on the sardines. A path of energy transferred from one life form to another.
Spiritually, what I saw was a performance of life art. The precious gift of life, taken by others for their own continuance. Stunning beauty, color, power and grace. An ancient dance of life and death to an ancient and otherworldly tempo, inaudible to human ears.
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